Journal of Omnifarious

05:46 - Persistent vegetative state often not so vegetative

Apparently many patients diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state are misdiagnosed. Most of the time such patients are not even subjected to well known and understood scans for brain activity.

So, maybe the Republicans were right so long ago, even if for all the wrong reasons. Maybe if even one of the grandstanding politicians from that one case so long ago had mentioned something like this instead of making it into a religion based moral argument things would've gone differently, people would've been educated and lives could've been saved.

Current Mood: contemplative

11:58 - This makes me sad

This is a really excellent article on why our birthrate has been falling: The Baby Boycott by Stephanie Mencimer.

Sadly, I think the article is pretty close to correct. I've been really sad to notice that women who are smart and capable (the ones I'd most like to have children with) are generally not very interested in having children.

One reason I've become interested in polyamory is that I feel it offers a partial way out of this problem by distributing some of the burden of raising children over more people. But it still is a real issue.

I'm not so much for all the government mandated stuff since I generally feel that lots of government mandated stuff is both inherently unfair and tends to backfire in unexpected ways. But I am interested in changing this situation in some way.

Current Mood: sad

17:22 - Good news politically!

I rarely post good news on the political front. But I felt after my exhortation earlier to call your representative about the telecom immunity thing that I should tell you all the result.

The House has rejected the concept completely in a number of strongly worded speeches given on the House floor representatives one-by-one stood up and told the administration that our country is ruled by law and not by presidential fiat. According to this article, the debate was rather impressive to see.

So people who bothered to call, you very likely did some good. Thank you. Everybody in the US should thank you.

Current Mood: pleased

09:20 - LJ got rid of basic accounts with no ads

I've thought about the demise of LJ for awhile. It's quite clear now from how the news wasn't mentioned in a news post, how it's being spun as 'making it easier for users to sign up' and various other things that LJ really doesn't care about it's users at all anymore. This was really quite predictable from the moment they started accepting advertising at all.

Brad Fitz, the person who started it all has a nice post in which he makes the most excellent observation that it's the users that create the whole reason people want to visit the site in the first place. This observation and a discussion of LJs legal status made me realize something.

The modern corporate structure is a wholly inadequate means of expressing the values and desires of the stakeholders in an organization where most of the value of that organization is created by what a corporation would think of as "its customers". Basically this legal framework has been shoehorned into serving a purpose it is wholly unsuited for because a corporation has only a very weak incentive to take the interests of all the people who create the stuff that enables its existence into account. Those users have made a huge investment into the site and that investment is almost completely ignored by the modern corporate structure and repeatedly leads to disaster when the corporation makes decisions at odds with its most important investors, the users of the site that it is a caretaker of.

User content sites need something other than a corporation, something where the organization is legally obligated to take the interests of those users into consideration as the most important factor in decisions made by the organization. I'm going to have to think for awhile to see if I can think of a structure that would work. It's tempting to think of some sort of trust or something quasi-governmental. I prefer structures that naturally and with very little oversight or intervention align the interests of all the participants.

Current Mood: contemplative

07:32 - Telecom Immunity up for vote again

Telecom immunity is up for a vote in the House of Representatives again today. Please call your representative and ask that they not grant immunity. The telecom immunity issue is all about making sure that we never actually find out the scope and extent to which we're spied on. If they really wanted to reward these companies for doing their patriotic today they'd indemnify them (basically promise to soak up any damage awards), not grant immunity which will shut down the court cases and the resultant discovery that has already revealed many interesting things.

Please call your representative right now. The House had a backbone a couple of weeks ago. Let your representative know how much that was appreciated and ask for the same level of spine again.

Current Mood: worried

08:58 - Good, solid reasons to support Obama over Clinton

Basically, if you look at their records it's clear who has a broader and deeper range of legislative interests and who is better at gathering political will. I Refuse to Buy into the Obama Hype (now a supporter)

As for myself, I've been an Obama supporter for awhile, mostly because I like his rhetoric. I've never liked Hillary. I think she's a political opportunist who always picks the most politically expedient choice. I think she's a business-as-usual candidate.

Obama sells himself as someone who isn't. His rhetoric and the talks he gives are consistent with this view. I saw a talk he gave at Google, and while I didn't necessarily agree with his solutions since he's a Democrat and I'm libertarianish, I really liked that he saw that there was a real problem that needed solving. Particularly with his ideas about open government and using the Internet to foster greater citizen participation in government. He presented a consistent, clear picture of himself as someone who was committed to making real changes for the better in how our government operated.

I think we need someone who is not a business-as-usual candidate. I think we need someone like that very badly.

That being said, I was really pleased to read what I linked to above. Because despite all of Hillary Clinton's hype about having more experience, it's clear that Barack Obama both has a broader scope of legislative interests, and is more effective at implementing them than Hillary Clinton is. So the experience argument doesn't hold water.

Current Mood: hopeful

16:54 - Thoughts on tasers

I think that the police or security officers should on no account be allowed to use tasers, but the general public should be allowed to. I've come to this conclusion after a fair amount of thought, and it is a somewhat surprising one.

The reason is that use of a taser has way too few physical consequences. It's very hard to hold the police appropriately accountable for using them. It's hard enough to hold them accountable for shooting people or beating them up. But at least there you have physical evidence. With tasers the subject looks fine afterwards. Sure they may have just been tortured, but they don't have any scars or bruises to show for it.

In multiple videos I've seen over the past year I've seen instances of the police or security officer using a taser not because of any real immediate threat of any kind to anybody's safety, but because the person they tased wasn't doing what the security officer wanted them to do. It was used as a tool to silence and punish, a tool of torture, not a tool to make people safe or defuse a dangerous situation. In fact, in a couple of those situations the security officers came close to causing a riot. IMHO, they deserved to have the whole room of people surround them, put them in cuffs and call someone cart them off to jail. I hope the next time an incident like that happens in a crowd situation that someone has the presence of mind and ability to quickly get a group to do what they want to make that happen.

OTOH, ordinary citizens are not insulated from the consequences of indiscriminate taser use. And they don't have the position of authority to use to avoid being held accountable. For them, a taser is just fine. There are situations in which it's extremely useful for defusing a situation without costing someone their life or causing permanent injury.

Current Mood: contemplative

11:35 - Because I expect this post to disappear

I expect this post to be made friends-only and/or this comment on it to disappear. I'm tired of this sort of garbage so I've prepared this post as an eventuality.

In a post by mle292, she says this:

An epiphany!

---

It has recently been brought to my attention that it may be too over-simplifying to say that Libertarians are just Republicans who want to smoke weed.

Libertarians suck, but they do suck in their own unique and special ways.

F'rinstance: Libertarians genuinely believe that everything that's theirs is rightfully earned, and everything that belongs to someone else has been given, and is probably rightfully theirs.

Sort of like a six month old with voting rights.

My response which is, to put it bluntly, downright mean... But then again, I was de-friended over mentioning that Chez Guevera was a torturer and murderer (which are labels I also apply to George W. Bush) in a post she made about "The Motorcycle Diaries". Thereafter she has enacted a policy of selectively deleting responses of mine in her journal that she found objectionable because they had an opinion she didn't like. So I feel that I'm a bit entitled to be mean.

And, also unsurprisingly, I've been banned from commenting in her journal now, which is just par for the course for someone who wants to be able to spout of her opinions and vitriol without ever having to listen to any dissent.

Current Mood: angry

20:20 - Privelege meme

The list is based on an exercise developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. The exercise developers ask that if you participate in this blog game, you acknowledge their copyright.

If you post this in your blog, please leave a comment on this post. To participate in this blog game, copy and paste the above list into your blog, and bold the items that are true for you. If you don't have a blog, feel free to post your responses in the comments.

Current Mood: curious

20:15 - I said this in a previous post

But these people said it better, and put it in a YouTube video: Doing something about global warming is about risk management, not about which side of the debate is right. Enough people say the risk is real. I'd rather not run an experiment to find out until we have a control planet.

Current Mood: hopeful

09:51 - No 5th amendment protection for corporations

Not that I think there should be. But it just occurred to me that there isn't. Corporations are required to keep detailed records and produce them on demand. There are consequences if they aren't produced or if they're destroyed.

It's interesting that 1st amendment rights for corporations appear to be upheld by the courts, but not 5th.

Current Mood: contemplative

21:52 - Mixed political news

From Slashdot: Dodd's Filibuster Threat Stalls Wiretap Bill

So, the bill won't go through just now. The act has been tabled until January, to work out a 'compromise'. *sigh* I hope there isn't any sort of weakening of resolve on the two key issues involved, the immunity being the more important of the two, even though I think the other has more potential for huge long-term damage.

Current Mood: optimistic

14:51 - Warrantless domestic spying, and telecom immunity

Just in case any of you aren't on the ACLU watch list...

Today the senate is going to be looking at a couple of bills dealing with the whole warrantless spying issue.

Now, some of you might think that this just involves traffic analysis (i.e. who called whom, when and for how long) for calls starting or terminating in a foreign country, and so is in the not-so-illegal realm. You would be wrong in thinking this. One should always expect government to abuse any power it has, and this one is no exception. It has recently come to light that the NSA wanted Qwest to give them access to communications switches that dealt primarly in domestic calls. And they not only wanted call traffic data, they wanted the contents of the calls. Discussions surrounding this request included no mentions of any sort of limits confining data collected to international calls.

Additionally, other documents and sources reveal that all this data is being used in run-of-the-mill drug cases, not just for terrorism as we were originally assured.

The bills that are before the Senate right now grant the telecommunications companies immunity to liability for having granted the NSA the access they requested in violation of the law. They also grant the power to the government to continue this behavior indefinitely. They must be stopped.

Please look up your Senators and call them to tell them that you do not want these bills passed. The website I pointed at will give you a helpful script to use. The main issues are granting retroactive immunity and legislatively permitting the behavior to continue.

Current Mood: worried

21:14 - Harmful effects of religion

From this post of classics_cat's.

Children are targets of Nigerian witch hunt

I'm not an atheist. But I'm not not an atheist either. I don't believe in mysticism or the supernatural of any sort. I firmly believe that all the answers to the events and causes of the world we perceive with our senses can be found by science. But people have a need for connection and to participate in some greater dimly perceived whole. I think that is where religion and philosophy belong.

But I think that religion as currently practiced by most people in the world is very harmful. Mostly because they do not follow the rule that it cannot give them any useful answers about the things that happen in the world of our senses. They don't look to it for defining some sort of over-arching framework for their lives and actions. They look to it to explain why they're sick, or why the rain did or didn't happen, or any number of other things that it is utterly useless for.

I think the biggest problem we have in the world today is religion. And the article above is just one in a list of many, many sad examples of why.

Current Mood: angry

21:00 - Amazon's new Kindle e-book reader is evil and dangerous

The essay The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) lays it all out.

For those of you who haven't read it, I highly recommend Richard Stallman's A Right to Read.

And for those of you who think that your convenience is worth any price... *shrug* I have nothing to say to you other than that we have no common ground, and in this we are bitter enemies.

Current Mood: worried

23:32 - Re-instate HUAC, now there's a good idea!

From wealhtheow, we have this post in which she links to an article about how a US House Democrat from CA wants to re-instate HUAC. Though she of course doesn't say that directly as HUAC has a very deservedly bad name.

Current Mood: disappointed

10:16 - Two political links

I am hopeful that posting these links may do some good for someone.

• It is possible that funding for abstinence-only sex education might be gutted. I think this is a good thing, and joreth has a post explaining how you can help.
• An excellent quote provides a good introduction to this article: This is not a movement of Resistance so much as a movement of Existence. Because when everyone wants to kill you, staying alive is the most radical form of resistance possible.

Current Mood: hopeful

19:56 - Slightly edited reposting - I am so sick of fundamentalists

I'm mostly copying this excellent post by meowse. But I'm editing it slightly because I never use profanity. :-) You may be amused by my edits, but I do hope they don't dilute the original intent.

I am so sick of fundamentalists of any stripe. Any religion. Get off my planet, you sick, twisted monsters.

Fundamentalist religious nutbars (of, in this case, the Jewish variety) burn down a crematorium in Israel.

You know my standard for detecting fundamentalists, nowadays? People who think that their beliefs give them rights.

Hello, you unconscionable fools. Beliefs do not give you rights. Beliefs give you funny little ideas in your heads that you walk around intellectually masturbating to. Beliefs give you things to talk about at cocktail parties, and have shouting matches with other fundamentalists about when they differ.

But they do not give you rights.

• They don't give you the right to shoot abortionists.
• They don't give you the right to crash airplanes into buildings.
• They don't give you the right to burn down crematoria.
• They don't give you the right to teach your mythology to my child.
• They don't give you the right to lock schoolgirls inside burning buildings because they aren't wearing veils.
• They don't give you the right to stab peaceful gay pride parade marchers.

They don't give you any rights.

You can believe whatever foolish things you want to believe. You can talk about your beliefs to any adult you can persuade to give you the time of day. You can even, because I haven't figured out a way to stop you yet that isn't a cure worse than the disease, indoctrinate your own poor children into believing the same damned things.

But you don't get any special rights for believing them.

Think you do?

Then you're a fundamentalist.

And you are sorely testing my patience and ability to leave you to live your lives in peace.

Current Mood: angry

14:50 - Excellent bumper sticker idea

I found it here.

Current Mood: amused

16:10 - 9/11 hooplah

I was talking with daisykitten about all the stuff surrounding 9/11, and I started thinking about it. Hardly anybody cares anymore about the people who lost their lives. All they really care about is what kind of political hay they or others can make of it.

Personally, I don't care about any of it. Or rather I do, but 9/11 isn't the time for it.

2000+ innocent people lost their lives needlessly and senselessly. That should be remembered, and I don't care who did it or what we should do about it. That fact remains.

Current Mood: sad