Lance kicked ass today….
I have nothing more to say, other than I’m glad I spent the money ($180+) to catch a train to Paris tomorrow to see Lance Armstrong win his seventh consecutive Tour de France.
There it is, and there I’ll be.
…on the so-called “conservative agenda” can be found from, of all places, Bill Maher
Stop claiming it’s an agenda. It’s not an agenda. It’s a random collection of laws that your corporate donors paid you to pass.
This has always been my concern with the so-called “Republican agenda”, it is a list that is sponsored by corporations to the detriment of a truly conservative agenda that preserves the rights and liberties of individuals.
I would be happy to vote for any Republican who demonstrated he was not in favor of corporate interests at the expense of the individual.
Sadly, few Republicans have shown that true commitment to real conservatism, and all too often, as President George W. Bush and his posse led by Vice President Cheney have illustrated, corporate interests reign supreme.
Technorati Tags: commentary
…on the imaginary Grand Theft Auto imbroglio can be found here.
Don’t we have more important issues for GOVERNMENT to focus on, while our parents focus on PARENTING (gasp!!!).
What a concept…
Parents focused on PARENTING…
I know some single-mom parents who DO PAY ATTENTION.
What THE FUCK IS THE PROBLEM WITH THE REST OF YOU?
In other words, for those of you who do not get the message, if a single-mom parent can focus on this and pay attention, what the fucking Hell is your issue?
Other than your own irresponsibility, that is…
Technorati Tags: opinion
…this one courtesy of Ann Althouse.
Barber poles…
Barber shops, as in men-only, not “hair stylists”.
Memories of drug stores with real snack bars…
…and unfortunately, other, more unpleasant legacies of my childhood in the South, such as the “Whites Only” signs…
…legacies and heritage, some pleasant, some repulsive, some fondly remembered, some forgotten in a shame that is not recognized nor acknowledged.
All vanishing.
Time marches on, as it always has, and nostalgia triumphs over the shame, and the dark legacies forgotten in the comfortable, sentimental, and yet somehow lonely tinting of our past.
The South, where the air can be as thick as molasses even today, and the dust can hang as a shroud over events both commonplace and tragic.
A region where the word “gothic” has true meaning in the New World (see definition 5 of the adjective or definition 4 of the noun), despite the weight of age that the word carries.
Perhaps some things will never change.
Technorati Tags: personal
While I understand the fundamental principles that the ACLU is arguing in favor of when they state, “Random searches of people without the suspicion of wrongdoing are contrary to our most basic constitutional values,” I believe that, given the nature of terrorist attacks, certain formerly innocuous activity does indeed provide a suspicion of wrongdoing that can justify random searches without violating the principle espoused by Benjamin Franklin, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Since I keep that quote in my sidebar here, obviously I hold the principle behind it very dear.
We must be reasonable, however, as Benjamin Franklin taught us to be.
If a man in the street in Boston lit the fuse to a grenade with equivalent explosive power of today in the time when Franklin abided there, he would certainly view that man in a different light than an average man on the street.
Unfortunately for our freedoms, large explosives now come in compact packages with no need of flint and tinder to ignite the fuse, and the suspicion of wrongdoing is proportionately lowered because “essential liberty” does NOT include the ability to kill large numbers with ease.
The struggle is between liberty and safety, as it always has been, but now the struggle is waged in a society and culture that has valued the freedom of the individual at the expense of a larger social responsibility that was so ingrained in the culture of the founders that it literally went without saying in most of their writings.
Some of that sense of social responsibility still exists in cultures based upon freedom, such as the heightened awareness of the riders of the Tube in London in the wake of the bombings on 7 July 2005 and their willingness to act two weeks later, even if unsuccessfully, in detaining people who are obviously trying to perpetrate harm.
The struggle is between liberty and safety, as it always has been, but we must be sure that we balance the two imperatives and do not allow fears to rule the day as they all too often do.
Who is “we”?
It is all of us.
Yet, our responsibility does not end in a heightened awareness and a willingness to act when we see people throwing backpacks onto crowded trains or buses.
Our responsibility is also to keep our government from over-reaching in a quest that claims to be to “defeat the terrorists” but in reality limits the freedoms and liberties of us all for insufficient reason and completely inadequate results.
Terrorists are criminals, evil that is not to be trusted.
However, despite any good intentions, expanding the power of government over the individual is also to eternally be regarded with extreme suspicion.
The best defense, a well-informed citizenry.
The worse defense, oppression by default.
Take the time to think.
—
Update: More can be found on the difficulties of the balance between Civil Liberties and apparent safety at The Christian Science Monitor.
Technorati Tags: commentary, opinion, politics
…along with Brazilians, Columbians, and the list goes on and on.
They are “Americans” too.
It is a peeve of mine (not quite to the level of a pet peeve, I reserve that for people insisting that I should eat yogurt instead of ice cream… I have a completely unreasonable opposition to ever eating yogurt… I plan to die never having eaten yogurt… but back to the topic) that we reserve the word “American” for a person from the United States.
Canadians are Americans, because they live in North America.
Columbians are Americans, because they live in South America.
Of course, what the heck do we call people from the United States of America?
Statesians?
Unis?
Usas?
Heck… I guess we have the balls to name ourselves after two continents.
Technorati Tags: humor
If this is the first use of the veto by President George W. Bush, his choice will speak volumes.
White House threatens veto on detainee policies
By Vicki Allen
Thu Jul 21, 7:45 PM ETThe White House on Thursday threatened to veto a massive Senate bill for $442 billion in next year’s defense programs if it moves to regulate the Pentagon’s treatment of detainees or sets up a commission to investigate operations at Guantanamo Bay prison and elsewhere.
The Bush administration, under fire for the indefinite detention of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and questions over whether its policies led to horrendous abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, put lawmakers on notice it did not want them legislating on the matter.
In a statement, the White House said such amendments would “interfere with the protection of Americans from terrorism by diverting resources from the war.”
“If legislation is presented that would restrict the president’s authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bring terrorists to justice,” the bill could be vetoed, the statement said.
Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), who endured torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, said after meeting at the Capitol with Vice President Dick Cheney that he still intended to offer amendments next week “on the standard of treatment of prisoners.”
He has called himself a “war President”. It appears to me he is a “no accountability for the executive branch President”.
There is so much more I could say, none of which would change the minds of anyone who is not willing to think beyond their own already settled conclusions.
Those who are willing to think will come to their own conclusions with no prompting from me.
In other words: Do the math, it’s easy if you try.
Technorati Tags: commentary, opinion, patterns in the white noise
…when much ado is made about a hidden part of a video game that requires both owning the game AND getting an unauthorized hack to unlock it?
As is pointed out by Alan Stewart Carl at The Yellow Line:
The outrage over all of this has bordered on absurd. Talk about a completely contrived issue. First of all, anyone who has the technical skills to download and install code from the Internet can easily access all manner of pornographic material that would make anything in Grand Theft Auto seem tame. Secondly, does anyone honestly think that graphic sex somehow turns this bloody, sadistic, vulgar game from a family title into an adult title? This is a game where you can blow people’s heads off, kill cops, pimp prostitutes and wage gang warfare. Really, how much more adult can it get?
Fact is, parents’ groups seized on this to perform one of their usual overreactions and demands for censorship while politicians like Hillary Rodham Clinton opportunistically jumped on board to shore up their pro-family credentials.
Read the rest of his post for his opinion of the game and what real message is hidden in the fabricated imbroglio.
Thanks to Sarah the Penguin at Because We Have Thumbs for the link.
Technorati Tags: commentary, recommended reading
If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.
-Catherine Aird
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
-George Bernard Shaw
Were one half of mankind brave and the other half cowards, the brave would be always beating the cowards. Were all brave they would lead an uneasy life; all would be continually fighting. But being all cowards we go on very well.
-Dr. Samuel Johnson
Technorati Tags: quotes
‘No man is an island-’ Much as we may fell and act as individuals, our race is a single organism, always growing and branching - which must be pruned regularly to be healthy. This necessity need not be argued; anyone with eyes can see that any organism which grows without limit always dies in its own poisons. The only rational question is whether pruning is best done before or after birth.
Being an incurable sentimentalist I favor the former of these methods - killing makes me queasy, even when it’s a case of ‘He’s dead and I’m alive and that’s the way I wanted it to be.’
But this may be a matter of taste. Some shamans think that it is better to be killed in a war, or to die in childbirth, or to starve in misery, than never to have lived at all. They may be right.
But I don’t have to like it - and I don’t.
—Lazarus Long
