| RaceFail II: The Wrath Of Cohen |
[Feb. 11th, 2009|08:46 am] |
Let me speak only for myself to start with.
Over the Recent Race Kerfluffle, where it became abundantly clear that, among other things, things are messy, people have been living with pain unrecognized outside of their communities for their whole lives, and people often don't understand each other, one thing that was brought up was the idea of white people trying to claim non-white status, for whatever reason, and in whatever way.
Speaking for myself: I sat on my hands for that. And now am not.
Because it's totally true that I have White Privilege. And I don't want to diminish the challenges that people who don't have that, who ARE visible minorities, face, challenges that I don't face. I don't want to make it all about MEMEMEMEME!, because it's not. And the things I deal with are very different than people whose skin colors, face shapes, or speech patterns are different than the majority in the area that they live.
I have White Privilege, I consciously USE it, even. But I don't feel "white". I feel like "The Other". I just feel like I hide it.
Other Jews have been posting about things that RaceFail made them consider -- I don't think any of these people are saying, "We have the SAME experience as black people, or Asians, or whatever." In the United States, we're not legally discriminated against. Being Jewish doesn't block us from marrying whom we choose, unlike some other "invisible", or semi-visible, minorities. We're not generally blocked from education, or jobs, or public life.
Here are three of the posts of people poking around at how being Jewish interacts with the topics brought up during RaceFail:
http://rosefox.livejournal.com/1452657.html
http://abyssinia4077.livejournal.com/274444.html
http://fjm.livejournal.com/728228.html
And yet . . . we don't take our lack-of-significant-oppressedness for granted.
These past fifty years or so, in the United States, have been good. Like under Alexander, some of the times under the Roman Empire, a fair portion of the Caliphate.
But I think many of us consider this to be just part of the way the world goes. Right now is good. That doesn't mean that things will always be good. Hamas or other anti-Zionist organizations will, eventually, get enough friends that people will decide that the Jews don't have any right to Israel -- after all, the Jews killed the Canaanites to get the land, the Canaanites are the Phoenicians, and the Phoenicians are the Palestinians, so they get the right to the land, and the Jews should be kicked out. And, when that happens, the worldwide backlash will include more violence against Jews, and that may well happen within my lifetime, which is one of the reasons my wife and I can shoot, do everything we can to maintain friendly relationships with our neighbors, and think about having skills that are portable in case we have to run.
Because we have White Privilege. But privileges can be granted, and can be revoked. And history is NOT a smooth march toward equality. There are better times, and worse times. Worse times will come, and those who have ANY mark of difference must be prepared for them, even if "worse times" are not NOW.
Who is white? In the United States, right now, Jews, Irish, Italians, and Poles are all white.
But Italians are not white in North Linconshire in England right now. Their "whiteness" was revoked. "British jobs for British workers".
I've got people on my friendslist who can testify to just how tenuous the Irish hold on "whiteness" is in England.
I'm white. Right now. But I'm deeply aware that that could change with really no more than a few months' warning. And that affects how I look at the world. |
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| How about this for a rule: |
[Oct. 22nd, 2008|05:54 pm] |
If you display a Confederate flag, you're not allowed to call someone else un-American. |
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| About the Pentagon shooting down one of its own satellites |
[Feb. 16th, 2008|08:08 am] |
So, the Pentagon is preparing to shoot down one of its own spy satellites, prior to the satellite's orbit decay and fall to earth. They claim that the reason for this is to make sure that it breaks into enough pieces that none of it will survive re-entry, purely as a safety issue -- they don't want it to fall on anything important and hurt anyone.
Of course, when China shot down one of its own weather satellites on January 11, the US protested, pointing out that that action caused a lot of space debris and endangered other satellites, as well as it being a bad precedent for the militarization of space.
They've designed a special missile for this purpose.
A Pentagon official has stated that "this is not a test of an anti-satellite weapons system." I wish that we had a press corps with could have followed up with the obvious next question: "So, you're shooting down a satellite. If you're not using an anti-satellite weapons system, what ARE you using?" |
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| What's so bad about being a great orator? |
[Feb. 13th, 2008|01:21 pm] |
People campaigning against Barak Obama -- and, at this point, that means McCain as well as Clinton -- and commentators in the media are asking, "Well, sure, but what does he have BESIDES inspiring rhetoric?"
Let's pretend for a minute that he DIDN'T have anything other than a vision of what America could be, and inspiring rhetoric. Let's pretend that he didn't have a policy-wonky mind, or the ability to do backroom politics.
I'm beginning to think that a candidate who had a vision of America with which I agreed, and the ability to convince the dubious that such a vision was right, and to inspire the already convinced, and to shake the belief of those who opposed that vision -- and who had NO other abilities or qualifications whatsoever might still be a reasonably good choice for President.
I grew up hearing the argument: the main job of a President is to set direction and policy, and to inspire people to follow it, and he or she may delegate the details to others. I never quite believed it, and I am still not COMPLETELY convinced, and I'd RATHER have a candidate who can do ALL of the above -- but, y'know, I'm beginning to see the point. |
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| So, by now, you must have heard about the FBI's wiretapping problems |
[Jan. 12th, 2008|01:01 pm] |
They had a bunch of their wiretaps cut off, because they didn't pay their phone bills.
I'm serious.
But I'm not THAT surprised, because of a story that a friend told me in college. Those of you who were in RD House probably remember this one. . .
So, this friend came from a family that had been involved in activist causes for, well, forever. (Her mother was a hack writer -- that was the job description she gave. She wrote TRU-CRIME books, had had a column in "Soldier of Fortune", that sort of thing.) Anyway, they were pretty certain that their phone was tapped by the FBI. Partially because of the sort of double-click when they answered the phone, the tape-recorder kind of sound. . .
Anyway, they didn't mind too much, because they figured that, if there was a problem, they could just pick up the phone and get the FBI there in just a couple minutes.
Eventually, they decided that, if the FBI was using their phone line, the FBI should pay for it. They called the phone company and said that they were being charged private line rates for a party line.
The phone company agreed, and reduced their monthly phone bill. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 27th, 2007|10:11 am] |
Raise your hand if you don't think Pervez Musharraf was behind Benazir Bhutto's assassination.
Okay, it's possible, I suppose, that he didn't know about it beforehand, and I'm certain nothing could ever be traced to him. It's also possible that it was people working without his orders.
But, yeah.
We Yanks do a damn fine job of picking allies, don't we? |
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| One other thing that's been going through my mind |
[Dec. 22nd, 2007|12:33 am] |
So, I was thinking about that poster of Jesus washing the feet of various modern leader-type people -- including Osama bin Laden. And the controversy about it, and the things which people offended by it have been saying about what they believe about Jesus.
There was a comment that was made that many modern American Christians have all sorts of beliefs about Jesus, but lacking from their conception of Jesus is anything from Jesus's actual ministry.
And I was thinking about that. And it occurred to me how ironic it is that our dominionist folks in the United States are Christian. Because I couldn't really think of any religion in the world LESS suited to the message that the Christian Right tends to attempt to send.
I mean, their message is one of patriotism to the extreme of jingoism, strong leadership, admiration of the wealthy and powerful. And many other factors, too. Some of it is hard for me to verbalize, but I have a general feeling about what the Christian Right seems to want.
Now, I can think of religions throughout history that would dovetail perfectly with these -- the Roman state religion from the late Republic/early Empire period, for instance. Frankly, that's the religion that the Christian Right ACTUALLY wants. But you could twist Confucianism to fit these goals, without TOO much strain. There are historical forms of Judaism, and even some modern forms, that might be able to fit into this model, although the form and shape of Judaism that I practice wouldn't. The Norse religion, you could do it.
Taoism and Buddhism would be hard to shift into this mode, but there's nothing particularly in them that is AGAINST it. After all, the Samurai managed to find forms of Taoism and Buddhism that fit with their worldview, which isn't that far off from the worldview of the Christian Right.
But what of Christianity itself? That's the irony. How do you take a religion that was founded as a protest against a worldview, a religion that was designed to be a direct challenge to nationalism, earthly power, wealth, focus on crime and punishment, focus on sexual morality -- and use it to support a regime EXACTLY LIKE THE ONE IT WAS FOUNDED TO COMBAT?
I want to write an attack ad. "Jesus forgave a sinner. Jesus didn't support the war of freedom that his country was fighting. Jesus: soft on crime. Soft of defense." I bet, if I was Christian, I could actually pull that all together.
If all of y'all Christians want to write up a script for an anti-Jesus attack ad. . . I'm sure it's been done. |
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| Conversations Lis and I have. |
[Dec. 17th, 2007|09:23 pm] |
This morning, while I was driving Lis to work, she said, apropos of nothing, ". . . there's ANOTHER reason to hate Bud Selig."
IAN: What? What is?
LIS: Well, you know what George W. Bush's life ambition was, right?
IAN: To own the Texas Rangers?
LIS: No, he DID that. He wanted to be commissioner of baseball. If George W. Bush was commissioner of baseball, think how much less trouble the world would be in!
IAN: Lis, if George W. Bush was commissioner of baseball, Barry Bonds would have destroyed Tokyo by now. |
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| Alice's Restaurant is coming around on the gee-taur right now. |
[Nov. 22nd, 2007|12:24 pm] |
So, it's a New England tradition that many of the local radio stations play Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant on Thanksgiving. Because it's about a thanksgiving meal that can't be beat, and also about litterin', and about not participatin' in the mass-a-cree of innocent people in other countries just 'cause your gummint kinda wants you to.
Which is, unfortunately, relevant again.
But, see, I didn't start writin' this post to talk about the anti-mass-a-cree aspects of the song, important as those are. No, I wanted to talk about Officer Opie.
(You remember Officer Opie, don't you? He's in the song.)
See, now, do you know what Officer Opie looks like? I bet you do. Even if you didn't see the movie Alice's Restaurant, in which the role of Officer Opie is played by Officer Opie (his comment was "it's better to make myself look like a fool that watch someone else making me look like a fool) (Arlo Guthrie is played by Arlo Guthrie, the bind judge who oversees the case is played by the blind judge who oversaw the case, and Alice is played by Pat Quinn), you probably still know what he looks like.
( Read more... ) |
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| Woah. The US economy is in really bad shape |
[Nov. 7th, 2007|11:10 am] |
So, okay, a Canadian dollar is worth 1.10 US dollars, and it's not a spike -- that seems to be where it's sitting. It SPIKED to 1.34 US dollars, and the 1.10 seems to be its actual level.
So, for the heck of it, I looked at the London Gold fix, which is something I haven't done in a while. See, the price of gold, to this day, remains something of a "gold standard" for currency. Since all currencies are measured against each other, it can be hard to use that as an actual baseline -- the fact that the Loonie is higher than the greenback just means that Canada's economy is doing better than the United States', but doesn't really say much about the health of the US economy by itself.
The London gold fix -- the price that a bunch of bankers in London decide is The Official Price Of Gold for that day -- is far from a perfect baseline, but it's not THAT bad.
I'm used to gold being something like $535/oz. If the dollar was very strong, it'd be fewer dollars per ounce of gold -- maybe $300 per ounce. During Clinton's presidency, it rarely traded above $400/oz, and was often even in the high $200's.
When Bush took office, gold was trading at around $260-$280 an ounce.
Now?
Eight fucking hundred twenty three dollars.
Of course there are other measurements we can take -- but. . . fuck. In terms of gold, our dollar is worth one-third what it was when Bush took office. Every single person in the United States who gets their money in dollars has lost TWO-THIRDS of our money.
Now, you look at this historically, and, obviously, nothing happens before 1968 when Nixon takes the US off of the gold standard. I mean, there's a blip in 1928 with the Great Depression -- I can't remember my history too well, but I think that's when they switched to a bi-metallic standard -- gold AND silver -- in order to increase the amount of money in circulation. But you don't get actual massive volatility until the US stops being on any sort of commodity standard.
So when's the last time the United States had this kind of massive inflation?
January, 1980.
All of 1979 was something of a run-up, from $220 an ounce to $520 an ounce -- and then it EXPLODES in January 1980, going from $520 to $830. It very rapidly cools down to a still-high-but-vaguely-more-sane 700, then 600, then starts just bouncing all over the place from 400 to 600 all the time.
In other words -- gold is now at the price where it was during the Carter Recession.
For what it's worth -- during the gas crisis, in inflation-adjusted dollars, crude oil was about $95/barrel. Right around where we are now.
So -- as far as economic leadership goes, our current president is the equal of Jimmy Carter. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 5th, 2007|11:39 am] |
Lis and I were talking a while back that you could make the Gunpowder Plot into a pretty decent season of a historical version of 24. To fit into the format, you'd have to do some time-compression, fitting events that actually took place over several days into one day, and probably even sticking a couple of even earlier events into the time-line (although I'd start the season with the tunnel under the Houses of Parlament already finished, and having them finish loading the barrels of gunpowder in the first episode.
Also, I don't know what you'd name the main character.
However, "Bauer" is a German surname which seems to mean "peasant farmer" of a particular status. An English surname with approximately the same meaning is "Bond."
Just sayin'. |
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| I hurt today. But it's okay. |
[Oct. 31st, 2007|11:13 am] |
So, I WAS going to go to the radio drama thing two nights ago, but. . . um . . . I forgot. Then I had a job last night. So I'll go tonight, even though I HAD been planning on staying home for trick-or-treaters.
Anyway -- the job last night. I've not been working much the last couple weeks, by my own choice. But the agency called me up and mentioned that they were hurting for people Tuesday, aka, yesterday, and I took a job. They originally scheduled me for 2:30 at the Boston Conference Center at South Station, then called back a day or two later and asked me if I could do a job at 3:30 at the Harvard Law School, then told me that the location of the job had changed to a home in the Back Bay, and then the time changed to 3:00. But it all worked out and I got there just fine, although I traveled through the remnants of the Sox Victory Parade to get there.
So, yeah. It was a party at someone's home, one of those brownstones on Marlboro Street which was a dangerous slum when my parents were living there in college, but is now an exclusive neighborhood where only the wealthiest Bostonians live. It was a Halloween-themed fund-raiser for Al Franken's Minnesota Senate run.
( Read more... ) |
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| I can't imagine anyone nowadays giving Jim Henson OR Fred Rogers children's television programs |
[Aug. 16th, 2007|06:17 pm] |
They're both too suspicious of authority.
I mean, Mister Rogers is one of those people who tries to get people to think for themselves, and have empathy, which makes people tend to be a little worse at being Mindless Drones Of The Man, so that, alone, would keep folks from wanting his message to get out.
But Jim Henson . . . Henson was a deeply Suspicious Of The Man hippie.
I got the first two seasons of Fraggle Rock at Costco, and we've been watching them some. I'd never seen them when I was a kid because we didn't have . . . what channel was it on? HBO or something? Anyway, we didn't have it, so I never saw it.
The second episode, the lesson they're teaching kids? "Sometimes, 'slavery' feels like 'freedom'." So you have to be very careful NOT to let other people be authority figures. Because authority figures will make you feel like you belong, if you go along with their authority, but they are really just using you.
And the third episode. . . well, see, as far as the Gorgs know, whenever they go to the pump in the garden, like they do every day, they get water.
As far as the Fraggles know, at some point, every day, the pond drains out. But that's okay, because after that, the Pipe-Bangers come, and do the Pipe-Banging Ritual, and then the water flows and refills the pond.
And Doc, the human who lives in the house over where Fraggle Rock is? He's decided to fix the boiler so that the pipes stop banging. So he shuts off the water as he repairs the boiler.
The Pipe-Bangers are confused when their ritual doesn't work, so they get a NEW pipe-banging stick, by which time the water is turned back on, so the ritual works, and everybody is pleased with the Pipe-Bangers ritual.
What, exactly, is that saying about religion? |
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A comment I left in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) nancylebov's journal, about spying on foreigners |
[Aug. 7th, 2007|10:18 am] |
The problem is that we have an entire government which is unfamiliar with the principles upon which that government was founded.
Our government exists to protect rights. Said rights are inherent to being human -- they're not given to us by our government; they are inherent to us. The Bill of Rights is intended to be a few examples of the sorts of rights they're talking about; it's not intended to be an exhaustive list (and, in fact, Alexander Hamilton opposed the Bill of Rights because he feared that people WOULD take it as an exhaustive list, and ignore other rights. The rest of the Founding Fathers felt that that was ridiculous, and that NOBODY could be THAT stupid).
It is not the government's responsibility to protect the privacy rights of foreigners. Because the government exists to protect the rights of the people for whom that government is set up.
However, that does not make it okay for the government to breach those rights.
Obviously, rights are not, in a sense, absolute. We have a right to property, but we still have taxation. We have a right to liberty, but we can be jailed. We have a right to privacy, but we can have our houses searched with a warrant.
The thing is, we have specific procedures and oversight for HOW those rights are limited, and in what circumstances.
So, the government can, with proper procedures, take actions which curtail our rights. However, the PRIMARY purpose of the government is to prevent OTHERS from curtailing those rights.
The government isn't responsible for making sure that the rights of people outside the country aren't curtailed. But it IS responsible for making sure that the rights of people INSIDE the country aren't curtailed, citizens or no. And it is not okay for the government to take actions which curtail ANYONE'S rights, citizen or no, inside or outside the United States, without proper procedures, oversight, and transparency. |
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| Things I learned on the trip: |
[Jul. 5th, 2007|07:54 am] |
2. How [at least the subset of] People [that I talked to] view Americans
I have friends and family who wear Canadian flags on their backpacks when they go through Europe, and I understand why. I think Europeans have plenty of reasons to be annoyed with Americans. But, Lis and I are Americans, and didn't try to hide it.
We do have the advantage of being from Massachusetts, so we're the ones who hate Bush as much as they do. . .
The folks we talked to don't blame us for Bush any more -- or less -- than they blame Italians for Berlusconi. It sucks, but every once in a while, a democracy manages to saddle itself with a dangerous moron. Okay, the United States is bigger, so the amount of damage Bush can do is more widespread than the damage Berlusconi tried to do, but the principle is the same. So long as we're trying to do something about limiting the damage our dangerous moron is doing -- and they do appear to perceive that we are at least trying to -- they don't hold it against us, personally. Lis and I are on the same side. Sure, as American liberals from perhaps the most liberal state in the United States, it does mean that we're more conservative than most of the people we were talking to, but still, we're not so far to the right that we're insane.
And, for what it's worth: there are Italians of a certain age who still consider Americans to be "the guys who helped us kick out the Nazis after we got rid of Mussolini". Sure, they're perfectly aware that, since that time, we have not always lived up to those ideals -- but they don't forget what it is that we are supposed to be, and they still love us for it. We, of course, have to do a better job of living up to that, but they wouldn't let us forget what it is that we are supposed to live up to. It's useful to have someone who actually holds you to standards.
Almost all the "anti-American" graffiti was actually anti-Bush and anti-war -- and there was less of that than there is in Boston. As is only right, of course -- it's more OUR responsibility to fix than theirs, so we should be more vocal about it. The ideological wars which were being fought in white spraypaint on the walls of Rome were largely anti-fascist rhetoric on one side, and anti-communist rhetoric on the other, and, in Trieste, were largely anti-immigration (sad, but not uncommon in border cities).
We did see one genuinely anti-American graffito, but it didn't bother us. We're Bostonians. We like graffiti that says, "Yankees Suck!" |
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| One weird political thought |
[Jun. 12th, 2007|10:20 am] |
So, does the extreme Fatah/Hamas violence make the Israeli occupation look better? I mean, Israel pulls out, and now Fatah and Hamas are using mortars, heavy machine gun emplacements, RPGs, APCs, and throwing each other off of buildings.
I mean, this isn't "skirmishing" or "sporadic fighting". This is a full-scale war effort on both sides.
I think fewer people were dying when Israel was occupying the territories. Does that suggest that Israel really couldn't have done all that much better than they actually did? |
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| I'd been telling Lis about this book. . . |
[May. 16th, 2007|08:20 am] |
Robert Altemeyer did a bunch of studies over the decades about authoritarian personalities. There are two kinds of personalities in this: people who want to be in charge of everything in a fascist manner, and people who want someone else to be in charge of everything. In some ways, the second group, the people who want someone to boss them around and take away their freedom, is the more interesting group, because, at least for me, they're harder to understand.
Dr Altemeyer summarized his decades of research in a breezy, easy-to-read book called "The Authoritarians", which he has now released for free, here:
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
I don't know if I learned much from it -- it largely confirms my prejudices about authoritarians. However, it, at least, is based on actual double-blind peer-reviewed research, instead of on my gut prejudices.
In any case, it's fascinating, and rather terrifying, reading. I've always assumed that my prejudiced gut feelings about authoritarians were somewhat more extreme than reality; in fact, authoritarians are even more like my prejudices than I guessed. |
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| Okay, how about THIS for a health care plan for the United States? |
[Mar. 14th, 2007|09:14 am] |
A five-part plan:
1) The government pays for really basic stuff. Basically, if you feel ashamed when you hear about someone dying from a lack of this, it's paid for. If it's cheap and does a hell of a lot of good, that's the stuff we're talking about. Basic checkups without significant tests, tooth cleanings, real basic stuff.
If I hear about someone dying because they couldn't get open heart surgery, that makes me sad, but not ashamed. I'm aware of how expensive that is. Or not getting a transplant -- again, sad, but not embarrassed. So those sorts of things wouldn't be covered.
This would just be a billing code. A hospital or doctor's office could just bill this stuff to the government, and it would be paid promptly.
2) People could form into negotiation blocs who could negotiate lower rates from drug companies, hospitals, doctors, and so forth. If you wanted to, you could sign up for whatever bloc or blocs you wanted to be in, for a small fee (which would basically cover administration and negotiators' salaries), and, if you were a doctor or hospital or whatever, you could sign up for the same bloc which would mean that you'd agree to the rates they negotiated. As a doctor, your benefit would be that there would be a group of people who would count you as a preferred doctor.
Actually, I don't know how necessary this part is. After all, if you were a doctor and WEREN'T part of the bloc, you could still agree to take whatever fee the bloc charged, in order to poach customers. Which would also be fine.
3) There would be health insurance. As in, you pay a monthly fee, and, if something bad happens, they pay whatever your insurance coverage pays for. It wouldn't pay for routine stuff, although the insurance plan could give lower rates for people who demonstrated that they did take care of the routine stuff routinely.
This insurance could be "we pay 80% of your charges, up to a limit, and you pay 20%", it could be, "we pay 100% after a deductible", y'know, whatever. These health insurance plans might be associated with negotiation blocs, but need not be. If they started to pay for routine stuff as well, you begin to run into exactly the same problems we have right now, but, well, if they WANTED to do exactly the things that we have now, sure, they could. Why not?
4) Drug patents would expire seven years after they were approved for sale. That number is somewhat negotiable, if drug companies could prove that they couldn't make a profit in seven years, but whoever was doing the negotiation should be DAMN skeptical.
I mean that we could argue that drug patents should expire ten years, or twelve years, or whatever, as the law. I'm not a financial analyst -- I don't KNOW that drug companies can make a profit, in general, in seven years. But I really, really suspect so. I DON"T mean that an individual drug could be patented longer. Because, if you did that, with negotiations all the time, the negotiators would be corrupt. It just would happen.
5) And the gaps would be filled by private charities. And doctors and hospitals doing pro-bono work. I don't think, in the United States, you could do it any other way. I don't think it would be possible for the government to pay for everything that really ought to be done, and I think that you'd need charity to fill in.
What do people think? |
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| Now that I've heard more details . . . |
[Feb. 1st, 2007|09:28 pm] |
I've got a lot more sympathy for the Boston Police Department.
Okay, so they find the Lite-Brite, send folks in to deal with it, and realize it's a Lite-Brite.
That, really, ought to have been it.
Except that, at 1 pm, someone ACTUALLY left a REAL bomb at one of the medical centers -- I'm forgetting which one -- Tufts or BU, I think. Probably Tufts, because I think it was in the Longwood Medical Area.
Once you've got someone ACTUALLY leaving bombs, okay, it's maybe a little more understandable to go back to your original false alarm and revisit the situation.
So I have more sympathy for the police.
I still think it was a shame to arraign the artists who put the things up.
I don't expect it will go to indictment, though. I mean, arresting them, I could see -- they were still trying to figure out what was going on. I guess I can understand the arraignment, although I think that, by the time the arraignment came around, they probably could have figured out that the artists had nothing to do with the ACTUAL bomb, which was an entirely separate and unrelated event.
I don't think the DA's stupid enough to try to proceed to an indictment, and I'd hope that even a grand jury would laugh at this.
(Quick rundown on the American justice system, at least the way it's supposed to work: first, you arrest someone. You can hold them for a short period of time, like a day, before you charge them with a crime. Only a short period, though -- that's what "habeas corpus" means -- you have to be charged with some sort of crime before very long has passed. You are charged with a crime at an arraignment, which just basically gets the paperwork started. At that point, however, bail, or bond, is set -- an amount of money that is put up that is forfeit if the parties charged do not show up for further court things. Bail is intended to keep people from running away, and it does reasonably well at it. In certain cases, people may be denied bail after arraignment, but it's rare. After you are arraigned, the District Attorney, acting for the state, gets together a preliminary case. They eventually take this preliminary case to a "grand jury", which is a jury of ordinary citizens who determine if there's enough evidence to make it plausible that a crime has been committed, and the accused could potentially have done it. If there's a remote possibility that the folks are charged of something that it's reasonable to charge them for, they are "indicted". After that, things go forward, and you eventually get to a "trial", in which actual guilt or innocence is decided. In general, it is not difficult to get an indictment -- the grand jury process is there to simply screen out the most blatant and overbearing abuses of power, not to determine actual guilt. There is a saying that a competent DA ought to be able to get an indictment against a ham sandwich -- and a DA won't proceed to attempt to get an indictment if there's a reasonable chance that they'd fail. Let's face it -- an attorney who fails to get a suspect indicted would be a genuine laughingstock -- it would either mean that they were truly incompetent, or that they tried to indict someone who was patently innocent. Which would also be a mark of incompetence, actually.) |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 31st, 2007|04:10 pm] |
At this point, if I were a spokesperson for the Boston Police Department, I'd release a statement saying, "Well, yeah, but we just really hate Adult Swim. I mean, sure we knew what it was, but if you got a chance to blow up a Cartoon Network character, wouldn't you jump on it?"
(Background if you've missed it: the MBTA in Boston was shut down for a while because of "suspicious devices" found and blown up, which were actually pictures of a character from Adult Swim on Cartoon Network. Apparently, these have appeared in other cities, too, today, and Cartoon Network is soon to be releasing a movie including them. Boston appears to be the only city which has responded to viral marketing by blowing it up.)
Hey, yeah -- that would be another good thing approach for the spokesperson -- "Hey, wait until the first weekend grosses for 'Aqua Teen Hunger Force' are released. THEN you tell ME if we were wrong to call in the bomb squad." |
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| One of those things I think everyone should know. . . |
[Jan. 24th, 2007|01:44 pm] |
. . . but, apparently, some people in our government don't.
And I've heard other people talk like they weren't aware of this, either.
The Constitution doesn't grant any rights. Governments don't grant any rights.
You HAVE rights. You have rights that, if you believe in God, God gave you. And God gave all human beings. If you don't believe in God, that's okay -- you have rights simply by virtue of your being human.
They're inherent. They're inalienable.
They're not granted -- you have them.
If a right isn't mentioned in the Constitution, you still have it. If the Constitution doesn't mention specifically that a right also applies to people who aren't United States citizens, they still have that right, too. ALL human beings have rights. Governments don't grant them, constitutions don't grant them.
A government can't take away rights.
A government can fail to do its duty as a government, and fail to enforce and protect rights. But the rights are still there. It's just that the government isn't doing its job.
All prisoners in Guantanamo Bay have the right of habeas corpus. That means, "the right to be told why they are there." It's among the most basic and fundamental rights there are in a civilized culture. The United States government is not acting on this. That doesn't mean that those prisoners don't have that right -- it merely means that the United States government is failing to respect that right.
(Our Constitution says that, in extreme circumstances, you may arrest people and hold them for a while until things calm down enough to tell them exactly why you arrested them. There is no conceivable way in which that can be stretched to mean holding people for six years without even letting them know WHY they were arrested. At some point, they need to at least be told what the CHARGE is. The suspension of habeas corpus means that there are circumstances where a government can do a "sweep" and just arrest everyone in an area, and then, once things calm down a little, go through and see who they picked up, and charge the ones who ought to be charged and release the ones who ought to be released. It doesn't mean that you can do whatever the hell is going on in Guantanamo Bay.)
The government doesn't give us a right to free speech. We HAVE a right to free speech. The purpose of a government is to protect that right, along with other rights.
The government doesn't give us our rights -- we set up our government in order to protect our rights.
Any time when a government does anything which denies rights to anyone, it's failing in its duty as a government.
You will see people try to muddy this issue.
Don't let them. |
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| I generally make some variation of this comment every year |
[Jan. 15th, 2007|07:26 pm] |
The reason we have a Martin Luther King Jr. Day is because he saved the country.
The fact that he did so by working for justice and bringing fairness to many of our citizens -- that's gravy. But the reason why the country as a whole needs to honor him is because, without him, we wouldn't have a country.
Sunis, Shiites, Kurds. Serbs, Croats.
Negroes, Whites.
Why wasn't there a real armed insurrection in the United States? The Watts Riots are just considered the Watts Riots, not one of the earlier battles in the Second United States Civil War.
The LA riots are considered riots -- not battles. Why didn't the LA riots consist of rival militias?
Why are gangs in our urban areas gangs, and NOT militias?
Societally, all the ingredients were there. And they still are. We were right where you need to be to turn into a country torn by civil war, and massive internal urban combat.
Why haven't we?
Martin Luther King, Junior.
We still could go that route.
And that's why we need to honor him, his message, and his memory every year. To put a band-aid over the wounds for one more year. There's nothing wrong with band-aids -- if we can buy just one more year by honoring Dr. King, that gives us one more year to try to fix the problems.
So, we honor Dr. King this year. Because, with luck, by honoring him and remembering his message, we can hold off the chaos which is just beneath the surface of the United States for long enough to actually solve the problems. |
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| Some political thoughts |
[Jan. 1st, 2007|03:16 pm] |
First: this article sums up most of how I feel about the Hussein thing.
So.
What, specifically, was the crime for which Saddam Hussein was hanged?
Because I'm still not certain. I know the situation in general -- that a bunch of people from Dujail tried to kill him, so he killed them back, more.
Um.
Okay, yeah, that's bad.
But it was done under the aegis of law. It was brutal, unfair, and unjust law -- but, from what I can see, it should have been very difficult to prove that what was done was, in fact, illegal. It should have been easy to prove that it didn't follow the international norms of law -- but, of all the things Hussein did in his reign, this was probably one of the most defensible.
He was attacked. There was a three-hour firefight. He started investigations, and had a hundred and fifty people in Dujail executed for involvement.
Brutal? Yes. Were the trials of those hundred and fifty people fair? No, certainly not.
But -- what, specifically and precisely made this a hanging crime? The torture of the other Dujailis, who were innocent of wrongdoing? The fact that some of the executed Dujailis were certainly innocent of wrongdoing?
A fair trial would had shown that Hussein's actions were reprehensible and a mockery of justice -- but were not so horrifically outside the bounds of wartime conduct as to be a hanging crime.
We now have a precedent that, in Iraq, jailing and torturing innocent people, and then executing people after show trials is a hanging crime.
Okay. I guess I can live with that.
But. . . it really doesn't seem like a good precedent to set for our American involvement. |
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| I heard that the US Military has finally released a "How To Fight An Insurgency" guide |
[Dec. 15th, 2006|03:34 pm] |
They were talking about it. And I had to turn it off.
See, the manual says that you have to do things like "Not Piss People Off", "Not Kill Innocent People", and shit like that.
And that you have to be careful about this stuff, because it's paradoxical and non-intuitive.
The manual says everything that liberal bloggers have been saying about how this war should be fought. We have been right all along.
And it BAFFLES me that it's possible to NOT know these things. They're totally obvious. If you kill someone, then their family will be mad at you. That's not really THAT difficult a concept, is it? If people have jobs and a decent life and stuff, they'll be less likely to kill you. THIS is a paradoxical concept?
And I started to feel sick to my stomach as I began to really realize that this war has been fought by people who don't understand this.
And I began to feel guilty. For a number of reasons. One is that I'm an American, and I live in a representative democracy, and my representative democracy sent people who don't understand people to occupy a country. And that's my fault. Oh, maybe it's only 1/3,000,000th my fault, but if you figure that 100,000 people have died because of the war, as the Lancet figures, I'm still responsible for 1/30th of a death. Which is worth some guilt.
And another reason.
This shit is obvious to me. Apparently, I have a mindset that would have made this whole occupation less nasty and bloody and horrifying if people in charge of the occupation shared it.
And that means that I should be THERE.
I should have joined the military. I should have joined ROTC in college (although Brandeis didn't have one), and I should have become an officer, and I should have been in a position to help shape these policies so that we would have gone into the situation with this knowledge.
Or SOMETHING. I don't know. Maybe I was right not to join the military, maybe I wouldn't have been able to change things like that.
But. . . there has to be SOMETHING I could have done. How is it possible that ANYONE can't simply intuit almost all of the information that's in the new guide? I mean, the historical perspective is neat, and the classification of insurgency types is useful, but the "how to do it" section is all totally obvious. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 12th, 2006|01:06 pm] |
Lis has been after me, when I make a comment on other people's journals or in a community that might be of wider interest, to repost it to my journal.
So this is a response to a comment on ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) b0st0n. The topic was Mayor Menino's plan to relocate Boston City Hall to the waterfront, and develop the land that it's currently sitting on.
Someone asked, "But, but, but... WHY?"
This was what I replied:
( Read more... ) |
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| A math problem about racism |
[Dec. 11th, 2006|10:57 am] |
I just had a math problem pop into my head, which, as I think about it, may explain something about racial profiling, prejudice, and that sort of thing.
Or it may not; I dunno.
Let's say that you have a city which is populated by two kinds of people -- polka-dotted people and plaid people. The plaid people are generally economically disadvantaged, and are a poor minority population, and are distrusted by the majority.
The plaids are only 10% of the population. But they have VASTLY more criminal behavior in their community.
In fact, 80% of Plaid people engage in criminal activity.
Only 20% of Polka-dotted people do.
So, a liquor store is robbed.
Knowing absolutely nothing else but this information, is it statistically more likely that a Polka-dotted person or a Plaid person did it? What are the odds either way?
If you pick up a random Plaid person off the street nearby, what are the odds that you can get SOME kind of dirt on them, whether or not they actually committed THIS crime? What if you pick up a random Polka-dotted person?
(Note that all percentages have been made up and the numbers are not intended to reflect any kind of actual reality -- the numbers are chosen just to make the math easy. In real life, the percentages between different populations are a lot closer, and closer still if our criminal justice system treated white-collar crime the same as "blue-collar-crime." But there are, nonetheless, statistical differences which can be examined.) |
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| Jokes and co-workers and being Jewish, and why it's fun |
[Dec. 8th, 2006|02:16 am] |
So, I'm totally not "in the closet" about being Jewish at work. I'm a function bartender, and when we function bartenders and waitstaff are talking and getting to know each other, one of the basic questions that we ask is, "So, what ELSE do you do?" 'Cause most of us have other jobs, or school, or something. A fair number of folks basically do waitstaff stuff, but twenty hours for this temp agency, and thirty hours for that hotel, and another ten or twenty hours made up of whatever they pick up.
(By the way, if you're a congresscritter who's bitching about having to work five days a week at, y'know, Congress, note that that adds up to sixty or seventy hours a week, and no benefits, like health care. Just think about that -- that's an entire class of Americans, and that's considered normal. Some of them make sure to take time off once a week to go to church. Many of them have children. Those children tend to have two parents who love them very much, and would be more involved with them and their schoolwork and stuff -- except BOTH parents are working -- one sixty or seventy hours a week, and one twenty to forty, with no benefits. At that, they can probably pay rent on a crappy apartment, deal with some emergencies, and get enough food for them and their children, but can't save for retirement or college for their kids, and can't really pay for health care. Just think about if that's what you want your country to be. But that's not the point of this. Sorry for getting diverted. It's just that it's IMPOSSIBLE to not be political when you deal with people. 'Cause, y'know, that's what "politics" means -- "people". There are lots of different opinions about how things could and should be changed, but the one thing that it's impossible to do is to have NO opinion when this is directly about your life, and the lives of your friends, family, and co-workers. Like, the main reason I'm against crackdowns on illegal immigrants? Because I have worked with them, and like them, and they're cool people, and great to work with, and I want them HERE in the USA, where I can work with them and where they make the country better. The political is always personal.)
Anyway, my point is that you have the conversations, about "what else do you do when you're not waiting tables/tending bar/whatever". Some folks are college students, some folks are parents and are the primary caregivers of their children, some folks have other jobs, some folks are college students and have children and have other jobs (they're the ones with the dark circles under their eyes that NEVER go away). Me, I tell folks that this is my main job, and I teach Hebrew school on Sundays. So everyone knows I'm Jewish. Which is cool.
So, today, I was hanging out in the kitchen of the MIT Sloan Center Faculty Club, and the dishwasher turns to me. He's, I guess, maybe forty, maybe fifty or so -- could be younger with a rough life, could be older and aged well, dunno. I think he's from Chile or somewhere in that area -- he looks like he's got a little Indian blood in him somewhere, as well as Hispanic, and there's something about his face that just says "Andes" to me. He speaks perfectly reasonable English, although his accent is thick enough that you have to listen.
So, he says, "Hey, Rabbi." I grin and say, "Yep?" "I got a joke, about a rabbi and a Catholic priest."
Turned out it was one I know, but it's one of my favorites, so I didn't have to fake a laugh.
You know the one. I'm going to tell it about the way he did. 'Cause I liked his delivery.
A rabbi and a priest are friends, and one day, they're talking. The priest says, "So, rabbi, your laws say you can't have pork, right?"
"Yes."
"Well, you ever, you know, once in a while, go and have some?"
(Here, he kind of looks around, over both shoulders like he's checking for anyone listening.)
"Well, yes, once in a while, nobody's around, I'm in another town, maybe I'll have some pork, some ham, something."
"It's good, yes?"
"Yes. Well, your rules say you can't, you know, have any business with a woman, right?"
"That's true, yes."
"So? Do you?"
(He looks around, just like before.)
"Well, every once in a while, maybe, yes."
"Better than ham, eh?"
Why do I like that joke so much?
Well, in this case, because it was a Latino/Indian Catholic telling it to an Anglo/European Jew, in the kitchen of a function hall, while we were killing time and working together. That's why. |
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| Kind of related to my last "Mitt Romney" post |
[Nov. 16th, 2006|10:52 pm] |
I feel kind of bad for Kerry Healy. Not bad enough to make me regret voting against her or anything -- I didn't want her to be governor, and, in fact, the guy I voted for won.
But still, Healy had a raw deal from the beginning.
For those of y'all not in Massachusetts:
Our current governor, until Deval Patrick is sworn in, is Mitt Romney. His first public-sector job was taking over the whole 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics mess. If you remember, Salt Lake City got the honor of holding the 2002 Olympics, and promptly got mired down in corruption, bad management, and all sorts of other crap. They eventually kicked out the people who got them into that mess, and brought Mitt in -- and he did brilliantly. Absolutely amazingly. Turned the whole thing around, got the mess out of debt, turned in a fine Olympics.
From there, he decided to run for governor of Massachusetts. I'm still not entirely clear on why he wanted to do that, and I'm even less clear on why he won. His running mate was a local politician named Kerry Healy.
After a very short period of time, Mitt started to realize the same thing that I realized -- that he had no clue why he wanted to be governor of Massachusetts. So he stopped.
He didn't leave office or anything -- he just stopped doing anything at all relevant to Massachusetts governance. Except to go around to Republican fundraisers and talk about how stupid Massachusetts is. And every once in a while, veto a bill, which the legislature would then override and pass. He very quickly made himself entirely irrelevant in Massachusetts politics.
Kerry Healy, however, was still in town, and was dealing with all the day-to-day crap that a governor deals with.
Whenever she managed to actually accomplish something, Mitt would come in and grab the credit. Whenever something blew up horrifically, well, nobody attached that to Healy, either, because nobody noticed her.
Mitt did his best to grind Massachusetts into the ground. Healy kept us going as well as she could. And, during the campaign, she could point to nothing she'd accomplished, because Mitt had grabbed all the glory for himself on the things she'd done, and everyone could point to all the things that had gone wrong under the Romney administration -- things which, in fairness, Healy had tried to mitigate.
Now, I didn't vote for Healy because I disagree with her on her platform -- she had a forty-point platform, and at least 35 of the points were things which I personally think are either bad ideas, or ones which are on a low-enough level that I can't see the State House being directly involved in them.
But most people didn't vote for Healy because they hate Mitt.
That put Healy in an untenable position from the start. If she wanted most voters to even THINK about voting for her, she would have had to distance herself from Romney. And Romney had been spending his entire governorship cozying up to the national Republican party, at the expense of his gubernatorial duties. So, dissing Mitt would be dissing the GOP. Diss the GOP, get no support from them.
So, her options were to be totally screwed over by her association with Mitt Romney, or to be totally screwed over by having no national support whatsoever. So she did her best without throwing Mitt to the wolves.
I feel bad for her. Like I said, not so bad that I'd have wanted her to beat Patrick, but she is a better person than her own campaign made her out to be. |
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| An open letter to the Southern Baptists that Mitt Romney is currently courting |
[Nov. 16th, 2006|09:17 pm] |
Hey guys. This is Massachusetts.
I know you don't want to hear this from us -- it's not like we agree on much. But I wanted to warn you guys.
Look -- I know he was fooling around with you while he was our governor, and I know what he's like then -- he's so adorable, he's so cute. That's what he's like when he's first after you. And he spent all that time badmouthing us -- "Oh, Massachusetts doesn't understand me, you're so much more in tune with me than they are . . . "
But here's the thing -- he did it to us, he'll do it to you. You KNOW that people like that are always like that. We kicked him out, so now he's free, he's casting around for the next cute thing to come around, and you Southern conservative voters? Yeah, he's been knocking around your door.
Fine. I mean, we KNEW he was sleeping with you guys even when he was OUR governor. But, you know what? You can have him. He's not worth it to us.
But here's the thing -- and I'm not saying this out of spite, I'm mad at him for betraying us, not you just because you happened to be the people he was betraying us with. If it wasn't you he wast screwing around with behind our backs, it would have been some other political movement. But here's the thing -- don't trust him. He's saying that, with you, it's different. THIS time, he'll be true to you. He's not going to go jumping after the next cute political demographic that catches his eye.
You know he's lying to you. He lied to us, he screwed us over. And he'll do the same thing to you. |
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| My thoughts on the Iraq mess and what the US ought to do |
[Nov. 9th, 2006|10:27 am] |
I was listening to the BBC World Report this morning, and they were interviewing Iraqis who were very worried about what the Democratic takeover of Congress meant to Iraq. In general, they were happy to see Rumsfeld go, but were a lot more worried about whether the Democratic takeover would mean that the US would go -- which they very much did NOT want to see.
I personally wish that we could just pack up and go home, but I don't feel that we ethically can do so. I find the "Pottery Barn Argument" unfortunately compelling. If you screw something up, you have a moral obligation to make it right again, even if it costs you. The Iraq War is costing us a hell of a lot of lives, and a vast amount of money, and yet, we can't go home, no matter how much we want to.
That said, there is a hell of a lot we can do better, and I want to see the Democrats pushing for those things. Fundamentally, our strategic goal remains the same, now that we actually HAVE one -- make Iraq stable enough that we can go home without the civil war expanding even further. But our tactics have sucked.
( Read more... ) |
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| Oddly, I was somewhat out of the election loop last night. |
[Nov. 8th, 2006|09:11 am] |
Yesterday afternoon, when I picked up our car from the mechanic, I was talking to Rick, at the desk, and mentioned that I (along with something like sixty-five other bartenders) was going to be working at Deval Patrick victory party that night. Then I corrected myself and said that I didn't technically know that it was going to be a victory party, but Rick said he was pretty sure it would be.
"And you know why? 'Cause we don't have electronic voting machines."
I mentioned that Galvin was trying out a couple in a couple towns, although always with a paper trail and with the option of not using them. Rick was reasonably horrified, and I wonder if he, like I, was one of the 18% of folks who voted for Jill Stein.
Anyway, ( on to the event itself: ) |
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| They didn't have the little stickers, but they did have brownies and fudge |
[Nov. 7th, 2006|12:48 pm] |
My polling place is in an apartment building for the elderly -- folks who are living on their own, but prefer to live in an elder community. They hold a bake sale every general election. They don't do it for the primaries, just the general ones. And it's not a fundraiser for anything -- they just like baking, so they pretty much charge for ingredients.
Buck twenty-five for a giant homemade cream puff. It was fantastic. It was slightly bigger than a McDonald's hamburger (y'know, not the quarter-pounder or anything -- the one on the dollar menu), and the filling tasted a bit like eggnog -- I think I detected a little brandy in there, and it was yellowish like it was made with real butter.
I was voter #382, according to the little counter on the ballot box, and I asked the poll worker how many voters there are in Ward 1, Precinct 2. There are something like 1060 or so, so, by noon, we had a third of the eligible voters turn out already. And the highest turnout is usually after work. She was expecting at least 65% or so, for a midterm election. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 1st, 2006|10:43 am] |
What do people know about Professor Michael Ian Shamos? I was just talking to Sec. Galvin's office, and they mentioned that Prof. Shamos is involved in their oversight and testing procedure. Looking up his papers, I see that he's got a lot of publications and experience with electronic voting and oversight, but, reading one of his papers, it seems. . . well, his writing doesn't really inspire me with confidence.
http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/people/faculty/mshamos/paper.htm
That's one of his papers. His arguments are things like, "Well, China manages to steal elections even without electronic voting, so why should we be worried about people stealing elections WITH electronic voting?" |
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| An open letter to Sec. Galvin: Registering my worry about Diebold voting machines |
[Nov. 1st, 2006|08:14 am] |
This is what I emailed to elections@sec.state.ma.us -- I'm not sure that that is the
right email address to use, so we'll see/
****
I'm a resident of Melrose, and I have heard that Sec. Galvin is considering using Diebold voting
machines on a trial basis in a few districts on Nov. 7th, with an eye to a larger use in the
future.
I am extremely uncomfortable with this.
The more we find out about Diebold voting machines, the more clear it becomes that they are not
designed appropriately for such an important task.
As a matter of fact, although it sounds paranoid, I'm starting to suspect that they are actually
deliberately designed to be "hackable".
They have many features that look good on paper, but, really, don't add any security.
One example of this is that the box they're in locks, because you obviously need to give some
physical security. And that looks good on paper.
But the lock they use is a standardized lock that you use on, for instance, hotel mini-bars,
and all the keys are interchangeable. So you can go to a hotel, take the mini-bar key, and
unlock any Diebold voting machine.
Their computerized security is basically the same, although it's more technical and therefore
harder to understand. But the machine is like that all the way through, from stem to stern,
so much so that I can't help but wonder if it was designed to be like that.
And now the Miami Herald is reporting that, in early voting from Florida, there are a number
of cases where people are trying to vote for Democrats and it is registering Republican.
In order for there to be a serious problem, you need two things: a system that can be dishonestly
manipulated, and dishonest people to manipulate it.
I am frankly not too worried that we have that many dishonest people in charge of elections in
Massachusetts, so I don't anticipate problems. But, still -- I think that elections are too
important to even have the possibility of fraud. And the Diebold system seems to be deliberately
designed to allow fraud.
I think that we in Massachusetts deserve a system of which we can be confident, a system that
is resistant to fraud. Our paper ballots with little ovals that we fill in with marker is
fraud-resistant, easy to use, simple, and robust. Touch-screen voting has many more things
that can go wrong, as is always the case with computers. As you can tell from the fact that
I'm emailing, I'm not against computers in principle -- I was a computer science major in
college. I didn't do very well, but I am still friends with everyone I met then -- and all
the professional computer programmers I know are deeply against Diebold touch-screen voting.
The more that someone knows about computers, the less confident they are with the Diebold machines.
They are too aware of how much can go wrong.
So I urge the Secretary to give up the plan to use Diebold machines. Even if nothing goes wrong
with the voting, I couldn't feel confident that the votes actually reflected the will of the
voters. The problems with Diebold are so pervasive that I deeply feel that they should not be
used in Massachusetts, at least not until the system is entirely redesigned to include true, robust,
and trustworthy security.
Thank you for your time;
- Ian Osmond
960 Main Street
Melrose, Massachusetts
cc: http://xiphias.livejournal.com |
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| Here in Massachusetts, we have something wonderful. |
[Oct. 19th, 2006|07:53 pm] |
Candidates.
Candidates for governor who can speak.
The gubernatorial debates are actually entertaining. And the reason why? Christy Mihos. He's basically out there shooting one-liners. In response to Kerry Healy's anti-Deval Patrick ad, which ended, "Do you really want one for your governor?" he says, "Woah. And I thought MY ad was offensive."
He's bright, articulate, has virtually no chance of winning, but is totally shaping the debate. He's not going to win, but whoever DOES win is going to have to take Mihos's ideas into account. |
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| What currently illegal things would you do if they were legal? |
[Oct. 16th, 2006|09:18 pm] |
A bunch of people hither and yon on LJ and elsewhere are discussing this question -- I saw it on nancylebov's LJ.
It's an interesting question. I mean, I can think of several things which are illegal which I would like to see legalized, either for the sake of friends of mine, or on general principles, but, for myself? What is there that I personally want to do that the law prevents me from doing?
Oh, and you're not allowed to say, "not pay taxes," because that's too easy.
I mean, I speed sometimes. So the law doesn't actually prevent me from doing that. So that doesn't count. I've got no desire to steal, murder, fight, or break any of those Big Laws.
I remember, when I was a teenager, my mother (rebmommy) and I said that, if marijuana was legalized, we'd get baked together once. Just to have done it. But, since then, both she and I have developed allergies which, through extrapolation, would probably include cannabis. So that one's out.
The one thing that I think I'd do if it were legal would be to use the first floor of our house as a bar/private club. 'Course, right now, vonbeck is living there, so he'd have to find another apartment first, but, if it weren't for zoning laws, public accommodation laws, liquor licensing and serving laws, health code inspection regulations, and food service laws, I'd do that.
And, frankly, I'm generally in favor of all of those categories of ordinance and regulation.
How about you? |
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| I just experienced an example of "white privilege" |
[Sep. 18th, 2006|11:15 am] |
Like all examples of white privilege, this was an example of things going the way they should go, in an absolutely unremarkable way, and I didn't notice it as white privilege until afterward, when I thought about it.
So, I was outside in my front yard, attacking the weeds. Now, when I say, "attacking the weeds", I mean that I had a sword and a hatchet, and was trying to hack through the undergrowth. I'm basically trying to clear enough space to put up a sukkah in a couple weeks. I had a sword because I don't have a machete, but I was using it as a machete. Mostly, I like the weeds -- we have a meadow in our yard, but we will need to put up a sukkah, and we need a place to do so.
So, a police officer comes up and asks if I'm actually doing yard work with a sword, and I confirm that, yes, that is exactly what I'm doing, and show him the sword. He says that a couple people walking by were a little worried by that, and so asked him to check it out, and I say that, if I'm worrying people, I'll go do something else, and he says that that won't be necessary, he just wanted to make sure that I wasn't some psycho or something, and have a nice day and go ahead and continue to do yard work with a sword.
As in all examples of "white privilege", what happened was precisely what should happen. People saw a potential situation, the police checked out the potential situation, discovered that it wasn't a problem, and everything was cool. Everyone acted appropriately and reasonably.
But I started to wonder what would have happened if I was black, Latino, or Middle Eastern, for instance. If the police officer who came up recognized me, and knew that I lived in that house, I think that about the same thing would have happened. But if the officer didn't know me (as this officer didn't), there might have been more difficulty. But I was afforded the presumption that I belonged there, and the officer entered the scene expecting that I might be eccentric, but was not dangerous. The officer was entirely correct in this, and that's what "white privilege" means. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 11th, 2006|04:24 pm] |
querldox brought up an interesting question in his livejournal, here.. I had a response to a small part of it, which I'm reposting here.
And I'm still trying to figure out why there hasn't been a second attack of some sort on American soil.
Well, let's consider some possibilities:
1. There have been attempts, but competent law-enforcement/security/whatever has stopped them.
This is such an annoying hypothesis, because it's non-falsifiable. I mean, presumably, Bush knows if this is false, but he won't say. Virtually nobody else can know if this is false. If it's true, then there are people who know it's true -- the people planning them, the people directly stopping them -- but if it's false, it's impossible to determine that fact.
2. We're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here.
According to this hypothesis, people hostile to the United States would rather take their actions in Iraq and Afghanistan than in the United States. I have trouble believing this one, as people have managed to attack England, Spain, Jakarta, Bali, and so forth. But, perhaps the United States is genuinely far enough away from the rest of the world, in some practical sense, that it just isn't worth attacking here when you could attack somewhere else. But that seems . . . foolish somehow.
3. There's no point in attacking us, because we're already doing to ourselves every single bit of damage that terrorist action is supposed to provoke a country into doing.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but this is the one I like. |
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| You know what would be an interesting experiment to do in the United States? |
[Sep. 8th, 2006|10:47 am] |
I think it would be very interesting to have a polling firm do the following poll, throughout the United States. Two questions, but the second one would be a bit long:
1. With the caveat that you might be able to see exceptions in some cases, do you, on the whole, come closer to supporting or opposing the display of the Ten Commandments in public, not-overtly-religious buildings such as courthouses, town halls, or schools, and the like?
2. Please name as many of the Ten Commandments as you can.
Question 2 would be scored from 0 to, oh, about 14 or so, with half-points given for partial credit. The reason for going over 10 would be for people who could name multiple versions of commandments, including the "keep" and "remember" distinction in the commandment of the Sabbath, and between the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish versions. Actually, perhaps one would want to score from -1 to 14, to cover people who list things that aren't in the Ten Commandments, such as "Love thy neighbor".
I hypothesize that there would be no correlation between the "support" or "oppose" answer, and how many they could name. And that the average number would be somewhere around 2. |
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| Again -- it's our job to spread information in order to get people to pay attention |
[Aug. 30th, 2006|04:18 pm] |
A YouTube video made by a man who claims to be a defense contractor who worked for Lockheed-Martin, who is attempting to be a whistleblower explaining how they and the Coast Guard have made faulty security systems.
He claims that he's been going through channels, but that he's hitting brick walls, and figures that, if the story gets out, people will fix the problems faster. He says that he hopes that someone who can do something about will see the message.
Seems like it's worth watching. No idea if his claims have merit, but, if we spread it around, hopefully someone who can figure out whether this is true will see it. |
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| Standards of Proof |
[Aug. 30th, 2006|12:07 am] |
I can think of at least four different standards of proof:
1) Mathematical Proof: if you have proven something mathematically, it's true. At least, it's true under the framework of the starting conditions you are working from and the definition of the operators you are working with. But, within the defined framework, it is true, full stop. You gat get all sorts of interesting effects by changing the framework ("Given a line and a point not on the line, only one line can be drawn through the point parallel to the line." What happens if we assume that arbitrarily many lines can be drawn through the point parallel to the line? Hey! We've discovered Reimannian manifolds!), but, within the framework, that which is proven is true.
2) Scientific Proof: this is not as rigid as mathematical proof, because it is always open to reexamination and reinterpretation, but it's damned close. If you have an idea that you can make predictions with, and the predictions come true, then either your idea is true, or something really close to your idea is true, or something genuinely interesting is happening. By the time that a scientific idea gets enough evidence behind it to be called a theory, you can pretty much take it to the bank. Oh, you can certainly make new discoveries, and changes, and find more details and refinements, but, by the time it's called a "theory", it's within spitting distance of reality.
3) American Criminal Standard of Proof: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. This is a weird one. Because it contains at least one critical undefined -- and, frankly, undefinable -- term: "reasonable." Any definition of "reasonable doubt" that is, um, reasonable, gets uselessly circular immediately.
Still, we can make some assumptions about it. We discount alternative explanations that are vanishingly unlikely, such as "I didn't rob the bank, it was my evil twin," unless other evidence is presented which makes that explanation less unlikely -- such as if the person can present evidence that they actually HAVE an evil twin.
Something is proven to the American Criminal Standard of Proof if we can NOT construct an alternate explanation of the facts which we believe is at least vaguely plausible.
4) American Civil Standard of Proof: Preponderance of Evidence. In the American system, we've got completely different standards of proof for criminal and civil matters. For civil matters, the standard of proof is simply that "the thing we're trying to prove seems more likely than not." A 51% chance of being true is good enough for the civil standard of proof.
What standard of proof should we insist on for various sorts of things?
In general, I think that, if you're going to suggest that a public figure has done something wrong, you don't need to be able to manage a #3 standard of proof, but you ought to be able to manage better than #4.
However -- I think we're at the point where, if your thesis is, "The Bush administration is fucking with us, trying to manipulate the news media, trying to distract folks from their screwups, and give money to their buddies," I think it's fair, at this point, to go with definition #4. |
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| I just want to point out that I was right. |
[Aug. 29th, 2006|10:30 pm] |
So, of course, there is absolutely no case against, whassisname, John Mark Karr, who claimed to have killed whasserface . . . Jonbenet Ramsey or whatever, because he was just a pathetic guy who wanted to sound like a big shot, and everybody involved actually knew that.
I point out what I said a week and a half ago, when the story broke.
So, let's get the points out where we can see them all in a row:
1. The President's warrantless wiretapping program is declared both illegal and unconstitutional -- that is, it inherently violates constitutionally-protected due process, but it ALSO specifically breaks Federal laws. This is big, folks -- this is a court declaring that the President has committed a high crime, AND has violated his Oath to protect and defend the Constitution.
2. The Office of Homeland Security announces, entirely randomly, that they just happened to be in Thailand, and, hey, wouldn'tcha know it, here's the guy that killed JonBenet Ramsey ten years ago! It's not like we ever even suspected that the Department of Homeland Security was even LOOKING for JonBenet Ramsey's killer, but, see, apparently, there was this theory that Osama bin Laden has this thing for child beauty paegents. . .
3. The news channels react in a way that I'm having trouble coming up with a suitably biting and sarcastic metaphor for. Something like Pavlov, or shambling zombies chanting "LACK OF BRAINNNNZZZZ", or scampering after a shiny object, or "Hey, that dog has a poofy tail!" I'm really failing to come up with anything that expresses how pathetic and easily manipulated the news channels are. Nobody at the press conference appears to think of asking, "Um, by the way, Department of Homeland Security person? What are you actually DOING here?" which, to MY mind, would have been the INTERESTING story.
In any case, they dig up all their ten-year-old file photos of a tarted-up little girl and chatter on for a while.
4. There's no evidence there, and they don't even indict the guy, and drop all charges.
Do I have any PROOF that the White House manipulated the news cycle, dragged a guy's name through the dirt, fucked with a murder investigation, and used Justice Department and DHS resources to simply distract the media for a week or so until they could be distracted by something else?
No, of course I don't have proof.
But I'm not a moron, and neither are you, and I think that what happened here is pretty damned obvious.
And the thing is that it's up to US, bartenders and students and writers and programmers and exterminators and cooks and homemakers and unemployed people and the rest of us -- us folks with blogs and livejournals, just sitting here typing to put these things together. And if enough of us pathetic little nobodies sit around here in front of our pathetic little computers and keep typing away at these things which sound like pathetic conspiracy theories -- eventually the REAL media will do a story that will be like, "Oh, look at these pathetic little paranoid wankers who keep thinking that we here in the REAL media were totally duped by the White House because we went haring off to Thailand because the DHS said that they had a break in a ten year old sensationalist murder case that turned out to be totally made up, when at the same time the President was found to have been breaking the law, and we reported the made-up thing instead of the real thing, and now they say we were duped and aren't those paranoid wankers so pathetic for . . . hunh . . . wait a minute. . ."
Hey. Here's the truth. WE'RE the Fourth Estate -- you and me. Big Media? No. And really, they never were. People making lots of money from media have always been part of the power structure. But the whole "freedom of speech, freedom of the press" thing? That was always to protect you and me. If the Empire is in dire risk of catching pneumonia, it's OUR job to point out that the Emperor has no clothes -- not TimeWarner's, not CNN's, not the Wall Street Journal's.
You and me, if we pick up something interesting, like, for instance, "someone working for the President is clearly fucking with the JonBenet Ramsey case to distract us," and we start talking about it, those other guys, they'll catch on sooner or later, and they'll talk about it, and more people will hear about it.
But the fact is that it's never been the big guy who's made it his job to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." "Speaking truth to power" is done by those who have truth, never by those who have power.
Yeah. The media dropped the ball on this one. That's because it's not their fucking JOB to carry the ball -- it's ours. It's our ball, and if we want them to carry it, we have to make them WANT to carry it. And we make them WANT to carry it by talking about it. The more this shiny, shiny ball moves around, the more likely they are to go after it. "The President manipulated you, screwed you over by using a pretty little girl murder victim to distract you." That's shiny.
Catch. |
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| My sister's fiance is being reactivated. |
[Aug. 28th, 2006|11:39 am] |
He's 42. But he was in the Special Forces, so he has useful skills, and is therefore being called up.
I was just talking to Sibling, and we were commenting that, in all honesty, his brain is far more useful right now than his ability to be shot at, so we're really, really hoping that he's stationed, ideally, stateside as command-and-control, codebreaking, or training, or at least nowhere near the front lines. We thought about how we could get this message to someone, and I pointed out that at least ONE of us has to have our phones tapped.
"Yeah!" she said, "and I'm on a cell phone anyway, so they're definitely listening: his name is XXX XXX XXX, and he's stationed out of XXX XXX XXX, and he's really going to be more useful in a training or control role, so that's what you should do -- it would be a waste to put him on the front lines. Plus, he's got many years of experience as a police officer, so he can help set up that sort of thing, too. See? This is the good part of illegal wiretapping!"
He's 42, engaged to my sister, and has a teenage daughter. He's got a number of years in various police departments, and a postgraduate degree in theology. If they ask him to carry a gun and be shot at, he'll go and do that, and won't even complain about it any more than average, but I hope, for his sake, for my sister's sake, and for the country's sake, that they have a better idea in mind. |
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| I just put this together. . . |
[Aug. 18th, 2006|06:12 pm] |
From the Chicago Trib:
Karr has apparently been living abroad since being released from a California jail in 2001 after an arrest on child pornography charges. He is being brought to Colorado, where he will face charges of first-degree murder, kidnapping and child sexual assault, Ann Hurt, an official with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said in Thailand.
Like most sane people, my reaction was "WTF? Why the hell is the Department of Homeland Security involved in this, let alone in freakin' THAILAND?"
The 24-hour news channels are all abuzz with the potential confession of some random guy in Thailand who says that he killed Jon-Binet Ramsey, or however you spell it.
They're NOT all abuzz with the fact that President's warrantless wiretapping program has been found BOTH illegal AND unconstitutional.
Just sayin'. |
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| I had a dream a couple nights ago |
[Aug. 15th, 2006|12:32 pm] |
I dreamed that it was Shavuot (which is actually in the late spring, not late summer/early fall), and Cherie and Everett (my rabbi growing up and her husband), and Mom and Dad were with Lis and me at Temple B'nai Brith for services. Mom, Everett, Cherie, and Phil (the darshan for TBB) were all leading different parts of the service.
Anyway, at one point, one of them was giving a sermon about the importance in Jewish thought of community vs. individualism. See, Shavuot commemorates the giving of the Torah on Mt Sinai, and how it was given to ALL the people as a group. And the sermon was about how, in Judaism, the community is the central thing, rather than the individual, as it is in American culture.
Then there was a disruption. 'Cause Sen. Lieberman was there for services, and he took this PERSONALLY. He thought that this was directly directed at him, and was saying that he was being selfish and self-centered by considering an independent run after losing his primary. Which was, in fact, a lesson that could reasonably be drawn from the sermon, but was NOT what the person giving the sermon had had in mind, since he or she (I can't remember if Phil or Cherie was giving the sermon, since, in real life, I've heard them both give lectures on this theme) had written the sermon long before the whole election thing, and, in any case, didn't particularly consider Joe any more, or less, than any other community member.
Anyway, Joe Lieberman was nearly in tears, and stormed out. My father followed him to talk to him and listen to how he was feeling, and they had a long talk. At the end of it, Lieberman had really started to examine his own motives, and was starting to think that, yeah, if he wanted to be the kind of person he wanted to be, he should support Ned Lamont. He was still unhappy and hurt, but Dad had really helped him out by listening to him. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 13th, 2006|10:29 pm] |
If the TSA was going to ban an entire phase of matter from the cabins of their planes, couldn't they have started with plasmas? I mean, not allowing passengers to bring plasmas onto a plane would be a reasonable security measure in my opinion. |
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| "Are you concerned that your little boy is going to grow up to be an unbelievable dork?" |
[Jun. 16th, 2006|07:34 pm] |
I have no idea how long this link will work.
Three-year-old insists on a "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer"-themed birthday party.
It's ADORABLE. According to his father, "Outside of six to seven o'clock every weekday night, he's very normal."
He recognizes the anchors and reporters, and calls out their names when they come on screen. His mother shows off his current events knowledge:
"Who's the President?"
"Bush!"
"Who's the Vice-President?"
"Teiny!"
"Who's the Secretary of State?"
"Coni!"
"And who's the Secretary of Defense?"
"Rumfeld!"
He's three. He has better current events knowledge than, like, 80% of voters. |
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| Some thoughts on the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution |
[Jun. 16th, 2006|10:53 am] |
So, reading this post on bradhicks's LJ, especially the comment from the Aussie, got me thinking about the Constitution. And I figured I'd post my thoughts on the Second Amendment, one of those parts of American law, government, and culture which is most baffling and maybe disturbing to non-Americans. This is really just my rambling, and not going to resolve anything or answer any questions about it. . .
( Read more... ) |
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| This inspires me with. . . um. . . no confidence whatsoever. |
[Jun. 12th, 2006|07:40 am] |
As much as I'm disgusted with the Bush administration, I'm more disgusted with our press. Politicians lie, cheat, and steal -- not all of them, but it happens -- and it's the press's job to be skeptical, to ask tough questions, and to kind of point out, "Hey, this is totally divorced from reality," when something is totally divorced from reality.
( Read more... ) |
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