Cinco de Mayo

First off, Cinco de Mayo!

For those unaware, Cinco de Mayo celebrates the Mexican victory over France at the Battle of Puebla. It’s kind of ironic that so many outside of Mexico celebrate the holiday even if some only do so as homage to Hispanic culture when the holiday is more a regional event in Mexico proper.

I’m disturbed by the nominee for Legal Adviser to State appears to be advocating registering gun owners in this country as well as favoring global efforts to repress gun rights. A guy advocating usurping the U.S. Constitution and sovereignty through treaties is hardly one you want giving legal advice to our nation’s international face. He sounds more akin to the idiot lawyers in the Bush administration that essentially said things like water boarding were not torture. Look how well that turned out. /sarcasm

So Justice David Souter is stepping down soon from the Supreme Court. Some lefties are having kittens. I could care less about who Obama picks so long as they have a thorough knowledge, understanding, and unbiased view of the Constitution and have no propensity or agenda for trying to destroy the parts of the Constitution they don’t feel are “relevant” any more. Would it be nice for a woman or another minority to become the replacement Justice? Sure, so long as they get it on merit, experience and qualifications, not political leanings or some form of gender or racial parity or equity to make up for historical injustices.

The Arizona Legislature is still wrangling (in their usual BS partisan way) over the budget. Everything needs to be pared back but even I think the Republican dominated Leg is suspiciously partisan in what areas of government are getting cuts. But then the Democratic Party has done the same thing in the past. Neither party has the best interests of Arizona at heart, only their respective National Party bosses’ corrupt agendas.

The Associated Press: NRA convention venue seeks OK for alcohol, weapons An interesting conundrum but obviously necessary to keep the  Convention Center in line with the laws of Arizona. Hopefully the Department of Liquor Licenses and Control will allow a waiver for the event so as to avoid any legal issues or future challenges.

High court’s ID-theft ruling is unlikely to affect Arizona Not surprising since the lawyers and legal expert who drafted Arizona’s law tried to eliminate any and all loopholes for illegals and other criminals to exploit when it comes to identity theft. There are going to be some left winger, illegal supporters out there that will challenge the lawn of course. I do have to wonder how much better off illegal aliens would be in this country if their “advocates” spent more time getting immigration laws changed to allow more immigrants to come here rather than wasting time and effort in covering for the crimes the illegals actually commit.

Obama’s Border Czar Alan Bersin is Taking on Drug Gangs and Illegal Immigrants – US News and World Report So the administration brings back a guy who completely and utterly failed in his previous round og “border czar”. How many people will die this time because of the guy’s ignorance? He’s already bought into the Obama administration’s inane notion that all the border problems are America’s fault.

Chris Simcox wants to dethrone McCain – David Catanese – POLITICO.com I think this one covers all the reasons why I doubt Simcox will be much of a challenge to Sen. McCain. Too narrow on his issues. National politics, like those of a Senator, require a broader, national view and perspective while maintaining the focus to do what is needed for not just your state but your nation as well on a multitude of issues. That requires compromise, negotiation, and patience.

The radical right can hate McCain all they want but they don’t control the Arizona GOP voting public. Or the voters in general for that matter. The right wing radicals of the AZ GOP are jus that- radicals. They’ve sold out to either the religious statists or corporate hegemonies and have no interest in representing Arizonans. They’re just lapdogs to their chosen masters intent on imposing their “vision” of America on the populace whether the populace likes it or not.

What people really need to remember is neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have the American people’s best interest at heart anymore. Perhaps they never did. What has become clear over the past two decades (if not longer) is both are out to pillage the country as they play their political games, dividing and duping the public while they pillage the nation’s financial institutes and industries leaving a swath of destruction behind them in the form of unemployment, homelessness, outrageous healthcare costs, slashed wages, rising food prices, and outmoded and overburdened tax systems. In the past, the parties were able to hide their motives. Not so now, as we see the supposed party of the poor and downtrodden (the Dems) pillaging the poor and middle class, the unions, et. al. at the behest of their wealthy benefactors and the party of the rich (the GOP) pretend to be the champions of the middle class yet happily pillage alongside their political opponents.

Interesting

Just a useless post. I was bored and unable to sleep so decided to check out the blog stats to get a laugh at how low the stats should be. I don’t really care about numbers of views, clicks, et. al., given the blogs more about throwing out my opinions and half formed thoughts. Still it was interesting, a a little surprising, to see the numbers. Not surprisingly the height of the Presidential election season was also the largest spike in the stats.

Anyway, I think I’ll get back to writing more about space, science, tech and stuff.

The Ten Cannots

Found while tag surfing From fashionfinacier’s blog post on Obama’s address to Congress:

The Ten Cannots (attributed to Lincoln, written by a minister)

1) You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
2) You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
3) You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
4) You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
5) You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.
6) You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
7) You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
8)You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
9) You cannot build character and courage by taking away men’s initiative and independence.
10) You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

Just a link of personal interest

This is more of a reminder for myself than anything but this one post sums up my feelings on the issue quite nicely.

Bad Methodist: What’s really incompatible with Christian Teaching?

Note to commenters…

Please be sure to use standard character encoding when posting your text. I simply can’t bring myself to approve replies that look like gobbledygook no matter what encoding I use to try and read them.

Theme change

Got bored with the old theme for the blog, so changed to this one. Once my hand is better I’ll likely come up with my own unique header image. This one is pretty good, but obviously generic. I’ll have to finish a header for a biz partner first.

Sucks having the dominant hand, in essence, out of commission but at least I can do stuff with the other even if it is a little slower. Makes me glad that I taught myself to be as ambidextrous as possible when I was younger. Typing is still slow though. Playing GW offhanded is interesting as well.

Missing Posts?

Hmm. I seem to missing my posts about the Olympics. I’m going to need to check what’s going on since none of the posts are private nor mention any spoilers for Americans on what’s going on there nor do they contain anything even remotely pro- or anti-China. Maybe it’s Scribefire messing up, but it seems suspicious that posts about the Russian-Georgian war went through but not the Olympics.

ETA 1: OK figured out why one post isn’t showing. I forgot to remove the 24 hour delay I have set up for most Olympic posts. Still doesn’t explain the missing post about the Opening Ceremonies and another post I found about Solar Windows.

ETA 2: OK . Found the issue. Default setting got changed, probably during one of the Scribefire updates, since some posts were unaffected but others were. Guess I’ll just to have to double check site after posting, even though that was why I started using Scribefire, so I could post without actually going to the blog’s site.

ScribeFire Test

This is just a test post of ScribeFire to WordPress. Seems to work adequately.

ScribeFire seems like a nice enough Firefox add-on. Reasonably small and compact but containing the features I would personally expect for a browser add-on for blogging. Haven’t tried to attach any images or video yet, but seems to be pretty nice and easy for adding tags, categories, and so on.

So, let’s light this candle.

I Roar

I generally don’t consider myself a feminist or one to go on feminist like rants. I simply believe one should be allowed to pursue whatever profession they desire and are capable of achieving. However, there are things just set me off at times, particularly things that are discriminatory in nature or summarily dismiss the efforts and achievements of others as being exceptions to the “established” rule without any context or perspective.

Such was the case when I ran across this Washington Post opinion piece (which I dearly hope is a farce or ironic or somesuch but sadly think is all too serious),We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get, via Monikamagdalena’s blog. On the surface it’s a commentary on women who support Mr. Obama, particularly those who generally make much ado about the man. Underneath is a ill concealed decidedly anti-woman tone that makes me cringe. What crazy excuse does the author comes up with for explaining men who support Mr. Obama? None. And that in and of itself is somewhat telling of the amount of thought that went into the opinion piece.

The post honestly left me speechless at first, then more than a little pissed. Mostly it left me sad if the author genuinely believes the tripe she writes in the piece. Worse is she trots out all the pseudo-science and centuries of half-truths about women’s biologic inferiority as the excuse for the supposed lack of intelligence and drive in women rather than the actual reasons and influence of religious and socio-ecoomic oppression and suppression of females through out world history.

The clincher is she just dismisses all women, including herself, as “dim” and therefor in essence all women were nothing more than baby making machines who should stay home and waste their lives away doing nothing. If she and others want to be stay at home mothers, more power to them. But to simply dismiss all women and the accomplishments and strides that have been made disgusts me to no end.

I shouldn’t let her words disturb me so but the fact is such disingenuous writing has been used through history to justify continued stereotypes and discrimination. Look at those who are quick to lambaste all Muslims for the terrorism, those who say all black people are either criminals or sport figures, how only whites are the only racists in America, or those who say all Mexicans are lazy. It’s just too easy to remain quiet and allow this behavior to perpetuate. Everyone has done so at some point, but that doesn’t mean we can’t change. So I chose not to remain silent, preferring instead to try, at least for myself, to break from the past.

Learning experiences

I decided to brush up on my Russian so I’ve started digging out my old Russian language books and looking for websites. The only real problem is there aren’t a lot of local Russian speakers with whom to practice. Looking at Russian language websites did lead to some amusement when I realized some of the websites were wrong on spelling, pronunciation, and even sentence structure on some pretty common and simple words and phrases. I sent those sites some e-mails noting the errors and then moved on without bookmarking them. I’ve also been thinking on learning Chinese since the local college has classes.

I also decided to learn Visual C++. I probably should have gone for Visual Basic since I already know Basic but C++ is pretty common in my field and Vis C++ has been a breeze to learn so far.