State Secrests eh?

When I checked my email this monrning I found this little missive about the fact that the Bush administration is attempting to block lawsuits regarding the NSA’s spying on U.S. citizens.

The Bush administration holds the current record for classifying more material and blocking more law suits than any other administration. And congress simply rolls over and lets them get away with it.

There needs to be a serious check on executive power. But the Bush administration has been crafty in bending and twisting law to support its positions.

Hopefully in six months it won’t matter anymore, if a new congress has the stones to impeach the bastard.

Sexually transmitted diseases running rampant

Only it’s not running rampant where you might think at first. Seems that a retirment community outside Orlando, FL is reporting increasing incidences of HPV and Herpes among other things. That a gynecologist considers it worse there than in Miami is surprising.

This doesn’t actually surprise me for a few reasons. Lets consider each of them and see if we agree:

First – there are more elderly women than men because on average women live a good 10 to 20 years longer than their husbands. So that means every surviving man has more than enough opportunity to get it on.

Second – The generation now entering retirement communities, and this includes my father, came of age in the tumultuous, free love sixties. As my fathers wives had passed away his dance card was NEVER empty in the interim.

Third – What else is there to do in a retirement community? Sex sure as hell beats shuffleboard. Lets face it, the women are post menopausal so you’re not exactly worried about pregnancy.

All this makes me wonder what my generation will do in our retirement years. We came of age during the AIDS crisis, global conflict, hatred, etc. I suspect we’ll be the shuffleboard types when we retire, that is if we ever retire.

Oh yes, just hide under a rock

Are the people in Utah crazy? I know, I know, lots of Morons (The angels name was in fact Moroni by the way.)

In any case it seems that the state AG and an education chief are being goaded into going after a high school student who writes sex positive articles in the school newspaper.

Of course Utah law says schools can’t talk about ANYTHING but abstinence. That’s just wrong. Sure, hiding under a rock addresses teen pregnancy and secually transmitted diseases just fine.

I’ve long railed on about corruption in government but this one leads me to ask whether requirements should be put in place before a candidate even announces. A requirement that they can actually read, a requirement that they not accept corporate money, a requirement that they form their own opinions free from religious bias.

Sure that would be utopia but it’s nice to wish for it sometimes.

Fred Rogers defending PBS in 1969

This is a must watch if you remember Mr. Rodgers. I sure as hell do. Unfortunately I couldn’t embedd it because they turned that off on the video.

But I remember being vaguely aware of LBJ’s Great Society, and PBS was part of that. I’ve loved PBS since I was a young child, and today I most often watch PBS programming because it seems to be the only original game in town. There are three organizations I donate to regularly, PBS, EFF and a local animal shelter.

This was also significant because of John O. Pastore, Senator from Rhode Island. The Rhode Island connection is obvious, as is the Italian connection, and the fact that he was a very effective senator for our tiny state.

But I do wish Congress would see PBS for the jewel that it is, and not cut its funding because it might represent a contrary opinion. After all, PBS brought the civil rights movement to the forefront, and they also brought the rights of gay and lesbians to the forefront too. But you could see the slide, remember that in the 80’s Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City” was broadcast on PBS. But right after that the neo-conservative set their sites on PBS. “More Tales of The City” was produced and broadcast by Showtime, a pay network.

The attack on the arts by neo-cons also bothers me. Art is supposed to challenge you – and in my opinion if it offends you that is good too because it make you think about your beliefs.

Neo-cons don’t want to think about their beliefs, in their view their beliefs are sacrosanct. They’ve given up thinking for themselves.

Dr. Rost posts another brilliant blog entry

You might recall Dr. Peter Rost – the man tossed out of Phizer for pointing out the dangers of certain drugs.

In any case, he’s gone and written a poignant one about how when busted, corporate leaders suddenly turn pious.

Just imagine the boon for churches if we actively investigated pretty much every company. Because if you did I’m certain you’d find more than just a few that were also cooking the books. And it spans the little companies to the mega companies.

For example, a small manufacturing and retail firm I worked for back in the 90’s was cooking the books. I know they were because they cycled through controllers like underwear. I also knew because every once in awhile they needed a sharp eye to find errors in the exports to their general ledger program and I saw some pretty interesting things when I did that.

They were also playing fast and loose with software licensing. Oh I reported them to the BSA because I was the technology director and knew what the company president was doing was wrong. But BSA flat out told me that the target didn’t have enough money to make it worth pursuing the case.

So now you know – if your company is on weak financial standing, go ahead and pirate software. It’s only when your bottom line is seriously in the black that they come after you.

Finally – A reasonable story about opioids.

I’m so glad that Maia Szalavitz wrote Media Myths About Drugs Harm, Kill.

I know for a fact that doctors are petrified of prescribing things like fentanyl when it could offer the greatest relief for those truly suffering. Luckily I know the criminal justice system quite well, having worked in it for a couple of years. Should I ever suffer a disease that leaves me wracked with pain I’ll be certain I pass that knowledge on to my doctor, that we he can defend himself against the asinine drug laws we have in this country.

But here’s another one for you to chew on. Why do people get hooked on drugs like heroin in the first place. There are two routes, one is for pleasure, one is for pain. Some people do the drugs because they enjoy the high. Others do them because of psychological and/or physical pain. Were I to venture a guess, I’d say the psychological pain users far outweigh the pleasure users.

I know this from family experience, that a kind and loving man tried to suppress the mental effects of physical abuse that he suffered at the hands of his father. He used drugs and alcohol, which ultimately took his life at the age of 42. That man was my uncle. And I found out then that my grandfather was a real son of a bitch. For 30 years of my life I thought my grandfather was a good man. Who could have known.

I’ve also watched my mother and my dad’s second wife suffer with cancer and finally die. While the disease was progressing they weren’t given the palliative care they needed, only in the final stages were they doped up beyond consciousness.

And in my fathers case his back is so screwed up that he’s in constant pain. That pain also impacts his psyche – they’ve got him on that little SSRI called Prozac among other things. Yet he’s voiced suicidal thoughts on several occasions. He’d be a good candidate for fentanyl but doctors would be loathe to give it to him. I bet with fentanyl he wouldn’t need the prozac but who the hell am I, I’m not a doctor just someone who gets it.

So we need real dialogue about drugs in this country but we can’t leave it up to the mainstream media or the politicians. We the people need to take control again.

Invisibility within 18 months

Both myself and a bunch of horny teenagers are probably excited as hell about this. I’m talking about an invisibility cloak.

No longer the stuff of science fiction or fantasy it looks like this will become a reality. What’s more interesting is that several months ago an asian group demonstrated a cloak that had both video receptors and a playback display on opposite sides of a garmnet. It gave the image of invisibility.

But what they’re talking about here is definitely FM (For those that don’t know, FM doesn’t stand for Frequency Modulation but is military slang for Fucking Magic.)

Curiously though when I plugged the expanded form of FM into Google search I found this link that I think is totally cool, even though I’m FCC licensed 8 ways from Sunday. Granted, it was the fourth link display, the rest were for Fucking Machines. Interesting concept, I wish I had thought of it.

What the hell is wrong with Dell

Dell plans to open a store with no inventory? What’s up with that?

Put it this way – My XPS M140 has screw open slots for HD, RAM, CPU and Wireless (Bluetooth and WiFi). The boot image is on the HD for cripe sakes and it’d take all of a minute or two to flash the image to the drive via Ghost or some like program.

Say a half hour per machine. 15 minutes to install options, 15 to flash the image and presto – here’s your computer. Take it home.

Not to mention that Dell’s desktops, particularly the Optiplex lines are either clamshell design or have an easily removed cover. Everything inside those desktops is snap in.

So the only thing stopping them is the fact that they’d need someone to put the machines together. Oh well.

NSA Mining of call data called into question

I theorized that the amount of calling that occurs on a daily basis might amass more data than the NSA could actually process in real time. Turns out I’m not the only one who though that way. Recently Government Computer News published an article stating that the size of the call data collected thus far is 900TB nearly a petabyte of data, might be too big to keep online for search and instead they have to keep some offline.

The article questions the ability to spot terrorist trends. So either the NSA has some serious computing horsepower, or they’re getting deluged with data on a regular basis.

And to the net monitors out there I say, I RAN across a Nu Clear where upon…. Parse that you sons of bitches.

Ha! Risk of lung cancer lower with pot!

Who knew! ONDCP has been trying every tactic to get people not to smoke a joint now and then but then things like this pop up.

Then of course in order to portray it as fair and balanced reporting, Reuters news had to present the opposing side to say that you get more tar, etc. because marijuana is packed less tightly and there isn’t any filtration. So tell me, has anyone studied the lung cancer rates of cigar smokers? Their overall amount of tar has to be up there.

For the umpteenth time, just legalize it and tax it. I can’t tell you how many people I know who perform better as human being when under the influence than when not. Granted, it is a slight CNS depressant so operating heavy machinery shouldn’t be done but that’s the standard warning with alcohol so why not extend those protections to marijuana?