SamuraiFrog was complaining about some burnt-out rocker claiming President Obama was behind the recent mass shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin so that he can get a gun ban bill passed. And it wasn’t even Ted Nugent, this time. Yeah, it might have bothered me if I had heard of this guy, other than by the stupid things he blathers.
I’m actually much more peeved with the British. Diplomats suggested that they could invoke a little-known law to strip Ecuador’s embassy of diplomatic privileges, meaning police would be free to move in and detain [Julian] Assange. Does this mean that if, say, Iran, decided to threaten to void the diplomatic immunity of some Western country, that would be OK? I am guessing not. Oh, the Brits were just discussing options? Then do it in private. Where’s the “diplomacy” here? And, off topic, but I love the headline of this article: Assange to break silence amid diplomatic stoush. No American media source would use the word stouch – yay, ABC News, i.e., the Aussie version.
Roger Ebert has a good piece about what Thomas Jefferson called a wall of separation between Church & State. He writes: “That’s why it’s alarming to see so many politicians proposing to tear down that wall. It’s most evident in the eagerness of states to permit the teaching of Creationism (in the guise of Intelligent Design) in public schools, despite the ruling of a Pennsylvania U. S. District Court that ‘the overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory.'”
Of course, the Republican candidate for US Senate from Missouri is so lame that the Republican Presidential and VP candidate had to distance themselves from him. “First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” said Todd Akin in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” This is actually a legitimate scientific theory…of the 18th century and before.
I’ve been following a discussion about the scoring in Olympic events. I must say that the yuckiest moment I saw was when some poor Romanian girl lost her bronze medal when the American coach was able to lodge a protest which went in the American gymnast’s favor. So many of the sports have these somewhat subjective, or at least somewhat mysterious, scoring system. I appreciate the effort by the diving folks, who throw out the highest and lowest scores. It’d be a dull (and short) Olympics if they only included the sports in which people ran the fastest, jumped the highest, threw the farthest, etc., and I am not advocating for this, but I do understand the sentiment.
This whole blog post, though, was really inspired by a trip Saturday to the Altamont Fair, the regional fair in the Albany, NY area. It’s a great event – we spent over six hours there. But on the rides were signs a bunch of rules, all of which made sense. Still, the necessity of the last two lines pained me:
DO NOT FORCE A CHILD TO RIDE IF HE OR SHE IS FRIGHTENED.
A SCARED CHILD ON THE GROUND MAY PANIC IN THE AIR.
The necessity of such a warning suggests that some parents are tools. sad.
So, to return to SamuraiFrog, let’s Dare to be Stupid.
The ‘little-known’ law isn’t so little-known in the UK. It was passed in 1987 after a Libyan gunman shot a policewoman from inside their embassy and then sought diplomatic immunity. It was intended to prevent people evading prosecution for serious crime through diplomatic privilege.
And that’s where it was a dumb move! Assange isn’t evading prosecution in the UK since he is wanted for trial in Sweden and the US. The whole business smacked of embarrassed authorities grasping at straws.
Democracy in a nutshell: http://wumocomicstrip.com/strip/2012/02/18/ (And if you wander around that comic site you’ll learn a little bit about the Danes and their opinions of the world. There’s parts of Danish culture I like and parts I don’t like, like xenophobia.)
With the ID/ “legitimate rape” thing: something I’ve been thinking about is that we have a pretty crappy definition of “What is science?”
Generally science is taken by the “testable” or “falsifiable” definition. “In theory, all scientific theories are falsifiable and can be proven to be untrue.”
However, that is a crappy definition. ID is just as falsifiable as evolution or gravity – or fairies and gremlins.
I think most sensible people have a “gut” definition of science that (rightly) includes evolution and gravity but does not include ID, fairies and gremlins.
By the way, I forgot to answer you, so I’ll just say that you really do figure out how to deal with the heat, even someone like me, who really hates it. Unlike some people, I’ve had to make a really conscious effort not to be annoyed by the temperature, but I’m getting better. The worst thing about this summer is that the monsoon has raised the humidity, so while it’s not as bad as it is back East, it feels higher than usual, so the weather feels even worse than usual. I’m just glad global warming is a myth or else things would get REALLY bad!
Yes, as a Missourian, I will agree that our Republican candidate is lame. I’m sure Claire is giddy with excitement going into this election. It’s too bad. I was looking forward to a decent contest this year. For the record, I didn’t vote for him.
When first I heard about the UK embassy standoff, the following went through my head:
1) The British storm the Ecuadorian embassy in London to grab Assange.
2) The Ecuadorians storm the British embassy in Quito in retaliation.
3) Britain declares war on Ecuador and attacks from the sea using US logistical help (as happened with the Falklands/Malvinas War in 1982 between the UK and Argentina.)
4) The invasion quickly turns into a nightmare as nearby countries such as Brazil, Venezuela and Argentina, no longer cowed by the gringos, come to the aid of Ecuador.
5) The conflict escalates until it draws in most of the world’s countries and corporations.
6) Civilization and perhaps the human species is destroyed, which makes all of the Middle Eastern countries feel left out of the termination process.
7) I think I need to get outside in the sunshine more often.