Random Access Memories

Yes, the bumbling deeply flawed teacher from Spiderman: Homecoming. That Harrington. Why you ask? I’ll tell you.

I’m sure most of you remember this scene:

[Michelle is standing alone with a book.]
Mr. Harrington: Taking it all in, Michelle?
Michelle: Oh, yeah, I just… um, I don’t really want to celebrate something that was built by slaves.
Mr. Harrington: Oh, I’m sure the Washington Monument wasn’t built by-
[Mr. Harrington looks up at the monument. A park ranger wobbles his hand as a confirmation to Michelle’s words. Mr. Harrington purses his lips and walks away.]
Mr. Harrington: Okay. Enjoy your book.
Michelle: Thanks.

While it’s a powerful scene for multiple reasons the thing I find most memorable is that Harrington has nothing more to say. There is no debate, no questions, not even questioning the security guard. He just drops it.

To me this is critical because it means that he is accepting her views regardless of his own, even tho it could be seen as a questionable situation. (Even the guard isn’t certain.) To see this in a movie reminds me how far things have come since I was a kid, and gives me a little more hope for the future.

For those of you curious if the Washington Monument was built by slaves, John Steele Gordon, premiere historian of the Washington Monument, concludes that they were probably used as labor in the construction of the monument.

Some people in my life act like politics is something distant, foreign, something we just shouldn’t care about. I just can’t be that way.

It appears the Supreme Court of the USA is headed to strike down Roe v. Wade this summer.

Now, I am a firm supporter of a woman’s right to do what she wants to do with her own body, let’s be clear about that. But Roe was always on shakey ground in my opinion. What we need is a firm right to body privacy enshrined in law. To make that happen it has to come from Congress. And to do that we need to have Democrats in office willing to make it happen. To do that we need a huge groundswell of angry Democrats, willing to pound their fists on the table for better representation. This is exactly what i hope happens this year. That the overturning of Roe activates enough anger that it solidifies a Democratic majority in Congress.

Let’s make the Republicans very unhappy to finally get what they have been wanting.

I wish this wasn’t true, but it is. By all means, prove me wrong.

It’s clearly obvious the WFP would never make this happen. So Elon can just spend 40 billion to buy Twitter and blame the WFP for letting people starve. He has enough money he wouldn’t need the WFP to end world hunger if he really cared. It’s all justification for being greedy.

So I get this alert on my cellphone abaout someone that hurt a Phoenix police officer.

I cannot help but think this is abuse of the notification network just because the police can do it.

There are a lot of alerts that I should be getting before hearing about a cop getting attacked when police have a lower approval rating than congress.

Native women missing and probably murdered? Nah, that’s no big deal, but a cop attacked! LET’S ALERT EVERYONE! OMG!

Lately I’ve been coming to a realization.

I’m in the middle of a war, with two clearly defined sides.

I didn’t choose to be part of this war, but i’ve been in the middle of it my whole life.

One side considers me the enemy. The cause of all their troubles in the world. I don’t “wear the uniform” or “sing the anthem”, but I’m still clearly labeled.

The other side views me as a traitor. I abandoned the cause. I was weak, didn’t do what they expected of me. I violated a code I never agreed to accept as my own. As such I’m labeled by them as well.

So I find myself walking in “no man’s land” between the two sides.

No “homeland” to return to unless I renounce my reason, no opposing lands to call my own because they refuse to accept me.

I’m tired of fighting.

So incredibly tired.

I just want to take off my armor and be done with it.

My only solution is to run away. Far away… I am finally in a position where I can leave the fighting. I can search for someplace there is no battle raging, no hatred shouting, no gunfire leaving blood on the ground.

Because the alternative has only ever been to lay down on the ground in no-man’s-land, and become one more casualty of the war.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/arecibo-telescope-collapses-ending-57-year-run

Arecibo collapsed today, but sadly the funding for science in the USA collapsed decades ago.

For those of you not following the markets (overvalued), unemployment data (Unemployment is down), government policy changes (The odds of more fiscal stimulus is almost nil), or federal monetary policy (The Fed is raising interest rates). These are all indicators point to a coming recession in the next 1-3 years.

If you want more signs they will be things like a collapse in consumer spending, a drop in housing prices, rising unemployment, and an inverted yield curve. (You can learn about that here: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/05/inverted-yield-curve-predicting-coming-recession-commentary.html)

We have not seen these more “certain” signs yet, and I encourage you all to look out for them. (I would love to be proven wrong, lol) I think the odds are good enough to start “digging in”.

What does all this mean for us? Well, since we see some of the signs of a train coming at us down the tunnel we can at least plan a little.

Financially, this is a good time to save. Plan for possible coming unemployment. Plan for a drop in the stock market. (Divest your retirement, especially if you are over 45) Look for a job that doesn’t come and go at the whim of consumer spending. (Jobs people always need are more stable than jobs around things considered luxuries. Like eating out or buying a new car.)

Politically, it means that come 2020 we’re going to be looking at things getting worse, not better. Which means a change in party. (For those of you with aspirations of holding political office, heh.)

This is also a really good time to sell a house if you were at all planning to within the next five years. Better to rent for awhile and buy again than to be underwater later when you want to sell.

Me? I’m going to be saving, then investing those savings in the stock market after it looks like it’s hit a low point. Often stocks get badly undervalued when the bottom drops out.

I also think my home buying plans are on hold until the coming recession bottoms out. It will be a good point to buy, especially since the Spokane area where I am is in the midst of a bubble.

Curious as to what anyone else thinks would be good planning measures.

Thanks

Yes, you read that right, the next four years really do not scare me. They are certain to annoy me, but i’m not terrified of some long-term change in the USA.

Why? Well, because as Martin Luther King once said, “Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.”

Morality cannot be legislated. Laws can be passed, behavior controlled, but that won’t change morality. Yes, yes, the GOP hopes it will, but in the end it won’t. You only need to look at history for proof of that.

For example, during the Civil Rights struggle decades ago laws were passed to force civil rights on the population. They resisted, because the laws did not change what they saw as a correct morality. Instead it took decades of moral change to alter moral views. And what we have today is a world where racism is called out as shameful and only a minority still think it’s acceptable. I mean there would be a massive public outcry if a store dared to put up a “Whites only” sign in their window, regardless of how legal or illegal that action might be.

A more recent example was the Defense of Marriage Act. The conservatives attempted to pass a law to change the moral view of a subject, and failed miserably. Young people highly support gay marriage, and making a law against it has not changed their view of it.

So now we come to Trump and the GOP wildly trying to make laws and rules to change current morality on abortion, the environment, healthcare, etc. History has shown us that it takes time and a changing society to move those views, not just the law, so their efforts will be annoying, but they will hardly be permanent.

A few quotes I stumbled into. Needless to say he’s one of my heroes.

If this does not appeal to you sufficiently to recognize in me a discoverer of principles, do me, at least, the justice of calling me an “inventor of some beautiful pieces of electrical apparatus.

There is no conflict between the ideal of religion and the ideal of science, but science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without.

We build but to tear down. Most of our work and resource is squandered. Our onward march is marked by devastation. Everywhere there is an appalling loss of time, effort and life. A cheerless view, but true.

All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed – only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle. Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs, the future, for which I really worked, is mine.

So I was listening to NPR this morning. And they were talking about how Los Angeles is voting to raise it’s minimum wage to $15 per hour.

Of course they had the usual experts there talking about how jobs will be lost because the money has to come from somewhere.

And I call bullshit.

You have people at the top of business, in all sectors, taking home insanely massive paychecks. And as a society we allow that to be subsidized on the backs of the poorest workers while complaining that they can’t make money without slave wages.

Frankly, i’m sick of this shit. Rather than a minimum wage I propose a “maximum wage”. No person can be paid more than half a Million dollars per year in net pay, bonuses and stock.

If you need more than half a million dollars per year to maintain your “standard of living”, then fuck you for being a greedy pretentious prick. The excess will be taxed and a substantial share of it distributed to those at the bottom of the economic ladder.

It’s past time to keep paying the insane salaries of the feudal lords from the blood, sweat and tears of the peasant masses. The system is a sham. We need to break out the torches and pitchforks and take back equality.

So, we have learned this morning that the copilot of this flight intentionally crashed it.

Which would not have been possible if he had not been able to completely lock the pilot out of the cockpit.

Which is something that was enabled after 9/11.

So, do you feel safer now? I sure don’t.

Anyone know if this has a modern-day equivalent? I would love to get involved with it.

So, somehow I ended up on a mailing list for the Washington Times. Which is odd because I do not recall ever signing up for such a thing, and checking my back emails shows no signup confirmation.

The ad is titled: “Why is THIS Bible verse changing atheists’ minds?”

Now, maybe i’m asking a lot, but I don’t expect media outlets that I might be interested in readon news on to thump the bible. It’s apparently from this nutjob company called “Health Revelations” that claims there is a cure for cancer hidden in the bible.

And after a lengthy sales pitch explaining how you can cure your cancer it asks you to claim your “free gifts” by of course signing up to pay them money: “1-Year Subscription (12 issues) for just $74.00”

Now I know the Times is just looking for advertising revenue, but it strikes me as poor judgment when their ads are more likely to stop people from reading their site than to get them clicks and more readers. This is what I expect from Faux (Fox) News, not “real” news sources.

I’m finding that some people want to come here to critique my views, attitudes, etc. And yet there is no way for me to return the favor towards them. (IE. Trolls) Those people are now banned from posting here. Have a nice day.

Recently I applied for an opening I found on Craigslist. I received the following reply:

“Thank you for your interest in this position. It would appear yours skills are above the stated entry level for this position. We will keep your resume on file should any positions befitting of your skills open in the near future.”

I consistently hear from conservative minded folks that “There is always work out there if you want it bad enough, you just have to swallow your pride”. Well fucking guess what, sometimes there isn’t, even if you do swallow your pride.

What I also think is funny is this came from the “QA Manager” and contains a spelling error.

I give up, I really fucking give up.

It used to be that no matter how diverse people’s opinions were in matters you could always attempt to draw some measure of logical argument and try to come to something resembling compromise. Even within the last 20 years this seemed possible.

Not anymore.

Now it appears to be all about what team you’re on. And if you dare speak out against one team or the other you’re labeled a traitor and you might as well be speaking pig latin at that point because the side that has labeled you does not want to hear anything you have to say anymore regardless of how logical it is.

A lovely example of this can be found here: http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/world/52812832-68/story.csp

The short version of that story is that a prominent climate change skeptic crunched the numbers and found he was wrong. Did the other skeptics take note? Certainly, but only to scream and yell that he was a traitor to their cause. This is cultist thinking, not science.

For someone like me that is exceedingly logical it’s a pile of horseshit. You cannot run a nation with nepotism.

The Washington State government is whining that it won’t be able to find the money to back the proposed ballot initiative I-1163, which calls for better licensing and regulation of long-term care workers.

What is really funny is another version of this same ballot measure passed in 2008 (I-1029) with an overwhelming 72.53% of the vote and yet, they couldn’t find the money to pay for that one either.

They’ve been all about cuts and not nearly enough about increasing revenue (IE. raising taxes).

So, when is it time to say that democracy is more important than the local politicians that don’t dare to pass tax increases? The people have voted for this measure, the government should fund it, end of story.

So “New guidelines from the U.S. Department of Agriculture would eliminate potatoes altogether from school breakfasts and drastically reduce the amount of potatoes served in lunches.”

And of course politicians from potato-heavy states like Idaho and Maine are up in arms about this.

Since of course everyone knows that politicians and farmers know what is truly healthy, not doctors and nutritionists.

I ran across a tidbit from back in 2009 on Cracked.

The list is as follows:

1. Power
2. Genius
3. Beauty
4. Wealth
5. Fame

What DOES make people happy?

Friendships, altruism and religious practices.

And the number of people killing themselves for wealth, power, fame, etc. that actually believe this information? Too infinitesimal to bother pondering.

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” – Stephen Colbert, White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, 4/29/2006

222,570, that’s my first number to think about. Almost one quarter of a million.

Now compare that number to 6,400.

The first number is the UN total on how many people were killed in the 2010 Haitian earthquake. The second is the death toll so far from the recent Japanese quake. That’s thirty five dead in Haiti for every one person dead in Japan.

4,672 Haitians have died just from the cholera outbreak after the quake alone.

Haiti has no running water, no sanitation, no insurance, no stable government, no infrastructure.

So some may find this callous, but seriously, which place should donations be going to at this point?

Recently I read a piece that described there being 45% more dogs than children in Seattle.

Some say it’s more educated population is putting off having children, but I think that’s only part of the equation. Let’s look deeper at some other commonly cited numbers shall we?

According to the Puget Sound Business Journal 75% of single apartment renters in Seattle own dogs.

Recent census data shows that just one in five Seattle households includes children under the age of 18, only San Francisco came out lower.

Also According to the 2000 census projection on 2004 Seattle has the fifth highest proportion of single-person households nationwide among cities of 100,000 or more residents, at 40.8 percent.

Yes, yes, all plenty of figures saying that Satellites don’t like kids and like dogs.

However, is it just kids? Let’s move onto the things that I don’t have facts and figures for.

Since I moved here 4 years ago I’ve found the great majority of Seattle residents to be very neighborly, helpful and kind. They will stop for a jaywalker and wave him across with a smile for example.

However what they won’t do is get to know people. In my opinion Seattle has an issue with “people connections”, be it the weather, be it status of hipster circles, be it the phases of the moon Seattle is not a “friends” town.

One interesting thing I noticed was that SeaTac Airport near Seattle does NOT get horribly crowded around the holidays (I’ve seen this firsthand) It gets busy during the summer months instead, meaning the family connections that people travel for during the holidays are not present here in such abundance.

Right now you’re probably asking yourself “So what? What’s this have to do with me?”, well, if you’re young and liberal (Which is likely 90% of the people reading this), everything.

Let’s think about it. Seattle is one of the most liberal places in the USA, boarding on Socialistic. They like to increase taxes, they like public programs, they like taking care of the environment, but the numbers on households and their general attitudes towards others seem to show that they don’t like connecting with other people. How can those things interact together in a healthy way?

“Yes, let’s make sure everyone is taken care of.. but I really don’t want to know any of those people, I just want to take care of them.” Please, tell me how that doesn’t seem empty and heartless.

What worries me is that this attitude is a spreading thing. Will the next generation have fleeting internet connections into their old age instead of just their myspace and facebook “friends” of today? I guess time will tell.

Likely news you have heard nothing about, but I found it very interesting.

In New Brunswick back in 2008 a young lady by the name of Erica Sparks was injured in a car accident. She attempted to sue the other driver for damages. The insurance company of the other driver fought the claim.

During the trial they decided they wanted to see Spark’s facebook photos to determine the level of her injuries.

The Judge (Fred Ferguson) decided she might try to delete her photos before being forced to hand them over, so he ordered her lawyer (James Crocco) to mislead her by hiring another lawyer to summon her to his office.

He was not allowed to tell her anything about the meeting at which she was under court order to login to facebook and provide the photos.

How exactly will things change if judges get an idea that they can hand down a court order to force a lawyer to do something against the client’s best interest?

So in the last few days I have gotten several notices from meetup.com.

They are all for “women only” meetup groups. For those of you that are unaware I am both male, and a strong advocate against sexism towards men.

So I was curious, I searched for what groups where specifically “women only” and found quite a few near me.

Someone please tell me how this would be accepted if groups were listed as men only?

It wouldn’t, so how it is that it’s acceptable for groups to be listed for women only?

EDIT: Apparently meetup works on the “These are all independent private clubs, they can do whatever they want”, etc. Of course if someone started a “whites only” group I’m rather sure it would suddenly be removed even tho it was “private” since they would say it “offends people”.

Shot in the face today by a disturbed young man.

Blame now flying amongst the Liberals, “It was Sarah Palin’s Fault” some say, others scream “It’s all about the Tea Party! They wanted war!”.

And you know what the most important thing about these illogically quick judgments is? That they are directly from Sarah Palin’s Tea Party playbook itself.

Here we have a sudden cataclysmic event that is pulling together Liberals against what they are not seeing as a common enemy, even if no such enemy exists.

Which is exactly what the Tea Party has been doing.

So our “relatively new” Mayor in Seattle wants to raise downtown parking rates.

His budget proposes parking meter fees of $4 per hour. A sharp increase from the $2.50 per hour that is charged now. People are taking sides on the measure now with some downtown businesses saying it would be very bad for their bottom line.

My take on it as a North-Seattle resident with a car? It’s not enough. I say double the current rate to 5$ per hour.

I’ll happily explain why.

First and foremost I only own a car because I previously owned it before I moved to Seattle. Most things I need are within walking distance for me, and if I want to buy something big I could easily go rent a pay-by-the-hour car to pick it up. My car is old and I’ve been hesitant to replace it, because I really just don’t need a newer one. Moving out of Phoenix reduced my driving by over 95%. It’s much better to take the bus and let someone else do the driving. Having said all this if I want or need to drive downtown for something that requires a car I want to be able to find a parking space.

Downtown Seattle is notorious among residents for it’s lack of available street parking with a large number of the available curbside slots taken up by downtown workers that drive. They find the $20 parking fee for 8 hours curbside beats the average 25$ daily commercial garage fees and it’s hard to blame them.

This seems to indicate that a rise in parking fees would be beneficial rather than detrimental to downtown businesses allowing more customers parking spots for an hour or two since fewer workers are using them. I know I would pay more for this.

Also, one needs to look at what businesses there are downtown. The area is not filled with dolor stores, or big box stores, or huge furniture outlets, it’s primarily small retail establishments and high-end restaurants with a smattering of expensive furniture stores and art galleries where the customers are most likely happy to have things delivered and don’t care about the added expense.

The there is the amount of the increase, which would make us the second most expensive city to park in behind Chicago.

Again I say that’s a terrific idea. Seattle is tearing down the Alaskan Way Viaduct and building a multi-billion-dollar tunnel to route traffic past downtown in favor of pedestrian amenities on the surface. This was supported over cheaper projects that took a huge chunk out of the waterfrost area for an above-ground road.

In short we are simply not a “car-friendly” town and our parking rates should support the general attitude of the population to move towards public transit and pedestrian access and away from automobiles. There was no public outcry over previous parking increases, and I doubt there will be one now.

“If aliens were among us then it would be all over the papers and if it was being covered up by the Governments then they are doing a far better job of it than they have managed with anything else”

As you can easily see below the Federal Nutrition Recommendations do not match Federal Food Subsidies.

You can draw your own conclusions on why the 2 items vary so wildly.

So what’s come to the top of the pot in the US recently?

We’re found that both BP and the Government were grossly wrong about the flow rate of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (No shock there really, what company isn’t going to make it’s figures as low as possible when it’s impact on the environment is concerned).

We’re learned that Transocean who owns the rig has received 411 million dollars from it’s insurance company, but is trying to use a law written in 1851 to limit it’s liability to 21 million total.

To top it off the last flight of the shuttle Atlantis is scheduled for this afternoon, and the final flight for all the shuttles is a November launch of Discovery. The replacement launch vehicle “Orion” has a scheduled launch date of 2015, anyone that seriously thinks that is going to be on target is fooling themselves.

The US has ignored the job of the Federal Government to push the envelope for the good of the nation and instead now has handed off such trivial things to private corporations. Those corporations are now almost completely running the show, able to do almost anything and ignore the consequences of their actions.

In the end tho isn’t it the people that need to do something about this? Given the great divide in US politics I don’t see that happening for more than 20 years.

So all we can really do now is keep fooling ourselves into thinking that we matter while of course remembering to bow to our corporate masters who demand our money and ruin our environment. Yeah, I am no more thrilled about this idea than you are.

Thanks to the Supreme Court corporate money can now flow into political campaigns with reckless abandon.

If money is now considered speech then those with more money have more right to speech.

So much for the average voter actually having a meaningful voice anymore.

To quote Mark Greenbaum of the Christian Science Monitor:

In a nation that is so diverse economically, culturally, and politically, a party that enforces a rigid litmus test for membership will not be able to remain viable.

If Republicans continue to move from the center in areas where adherence to conservative ideology is not palatable to a majority of voters, the GOP will not be able to regain Congress or the presidency anytime soon.

I think they’re dying, they just haven’t been buried yet. The sooner they realize this the sooner we can quit having “us or them” politics.

I’ve thrown my support behind the “New Atheist” movemtn.

“Intolerance of ignorance, myth and superstition; disregard for the tolerance of religion.
Indoctrination of logic, reason and the advancement of a naturalistic worldview.”

Right up my alley.

Roxanna Saberi was convicted of spying today in Iran following a one-day closed-door trial.

Can you say “sham”? Good, I knew you could.

I hope she realizes that many of us back in the USA are hoping for her safe return. Maybe at least when she gets back and all this is over it might make the memories a little less harsh to know she was not really “alone”.

Iran Convicts U.S. Journalist Of Spying

April 18, 2009

NPR.org, April 18, 2009 · An Iranian court has convicted U.S. Iranian journalist Roxana Saberi of spying and sentenced her to eight years in prison. Saberi, who has reported for NPR, only recently learned of the espionage charge.

Saberi’s lawyer was not allowed to ask the court about bail. She has been jailed at Evin Prison in Iran since Jan. 31.

The deputy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Robert Mahoney, says her sentence is too harsh.

“We believe that Roxana Saberi’s trial was not transparent,” he said. “And it does not seem that she has been treated fairly. We would call on the Iranian authorities to release her on bail pending appeal because we believe she should not be confined in Evin prison.”

NPR’s CEO Vivian Schiller says Saberi has already been held in for three months. Schiller has appealed to the Iranian government to show compassion and allow Saberi to return immediately to the United States.

Alot has been made lately of the possibly “protectionist” agenda of the Obama administration.

Supposedly if we do not allow completely free trade with countries like China then it will be bad for the USA.

But how exactly? The only people I see losing out are the ones making millions in CEO positions because they choose to ship manufacturing off to where there are no worker rights and where wages are paid in cents not dollars.

I hardly see the current trade situation as “free”, in previous times we called it “exploitation”.

The need to bring jobs back to the USA to make things for US use and export to other nations is a basis of a stable economy.

Now i’m not a big fan of everything the NRA stands for, but I am a believer in the principle behind the Second Amendment.

What I cannot fathom is the NRA “Special Offer” email I got today from their “Wine Club”.

I have to say it isn’t the most brilliant idea to pair a group of gun owners with alcohol (not to mention the fact that i’m sure 99% of them are beer drinkers with no interest in wine).

I stumbled onto this the other day, much of it was completely new information to me.

Johann Hari: You are being lied to about pirates

Some are clearly just gangsters. But others are trying to stop illegal dumping and trawling

Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labelling as “one of the great menaces of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell – and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” – from 1650 to 1730 – the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage Bluebeard that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often saved from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t? In his book Villains Of All Nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence.

If you became a merchant or navy sailor then – plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry – you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O’ Nine Tails. If you slacked often, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied – and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively, without torture. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls “one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century”.

They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed “quite clearly – and subversively – that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy.” This is why they were romantic heroes, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: “What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to live.” In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to “dispose” of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: “Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention.”

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: “If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters.”

This is the context in which the “pirates” have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a “tax” on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence”.

No, this doesn’t make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters – especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But in a telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali: “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas.” William Scott would understand.

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We won’t act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know “what he meant by keeping possession of the sea.” The pirate smiled, and responded: “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.” Once again, our great imperial fleets sail – but who is the robber?

j.hari@independent.co.uk

So Jennifer (still in Phoenix, AZ) and I were talking.

She said her boyfriend tried to buy some handgun ammo the other day, but couldn’t. Wal-mart, Big-5, Sports Authority were all completely sold out.

It’s obvious why, but what is interesting is it has not been mentioned in any news source anywhere.

Let’s take a moment to remember Charles Singleton.

He was convicted of murder by Arkansas in 1979 for stabbing store clerk Mary Lou York twice in the neck. He was executed by the state on January 6th, 2004.

While that was a terrible crime and he should have definitely been punished for it the part of this I want people to remember is how the state managed to kill him.

In 1986 the Supreme Court proclaimed it illegal to execute people unless they understood that they were being put to death and why.

An appeals court based in St Louis ruled in February 2003 that the constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment would not be violated if the authorities forcibly gave antipsychotic medication to the inmate, Charles Laverne Singleton. It was this decision that was upheld by the Supreme Court later that year.

So in short if you’re crazy we can still execute you by making you take medication so that we think you’re sane enough to execute, regardless of your mental state when you commited your crime.

If you don’t think this is a gross violation of people’s civil rights then you should not be reading this website.

I have no disagreement, the idea of training children in only abstinence is silly at best.

Abstinence-only sex education has totally failed the nation’s teens

Programs mandated to teach only “the social, psychological and health gains (of) abstaining from sexual activity” have been awarded failing grades for truth and effectiveness. The programs that work best combine honest information about sexuality, including contraception.

By Ellen Goodman

Syndicated Columnist

BOSTON — I hate to bring this up right now when the ink is barely dry on your New Year’s resolution. But if history is any guide, you are likely to fall off the assorted wagons to which you are currently lashed.

I don’t say this to disparage your willpower. Hang onto that celery stick for dear life. And even if you stop doing those stomach crunches and start sneaking out for a smoke, at least you can comfort yourself with fond memories of your moment of resolution.

Compare that to the statistic in the newest research about teens who pledge abstinence. The majority not only break the pledge, they forget they ever made it.

This study of teens and pledges comes from Johns Hopkins researcher Janet Rosenbaum, who took a rigorous look at nearly 1,000 students. She compared teens who took a pledge of abstinence with teens of similar backgrounds and beliefs who didn’t. She found absolutely no difference in their sexual behavior, or the age at which they began having sex, or the number of their partners.

In fact, the only difference was that the group that promised to remain abstinent was significantly less likely to use birth control, especially condoms, when they did have sex. The lesson many students seemed to retain from their abstinence-only program was a negative and inaccurate view of contraception.

This is not just a primer on the capacity for teenage denial or the inner workings of adolescent neurobiology. What makes this study important is simply this: “virginity pledges” are one of the ways that the government measures whether abstinence-only education is “working.” They count the pledges as proof that teens will abstain. It turns out that this is like counting New Year’s resolutions as proof that you lost 10 pounds.

We have been here before. And before that. And before that.

When he was running for president, George W. Bush promised, “My administration will elevate abstinence education from an afterthought to an urgent goal.” Over the past eight years, a cottage industry of “abstinence-only-until-marriage” purveyors became a McMansion industry. Funding increased from $73 million a year in 2001 to $204 million in 2008. That’s a grand total of $1.5 billion in federal money for an ideology in search of a methodology. And half the states refused funds to pay for sex mis-education.

By now, there’s an archive of research showing that the binge was a bust. Programs mandated to teach only “the social, psychological and health gains (of) abstaining from sexual activity” and to warn of the dangers of having sex have been awarded failing grades for truth and effectiveness. As Rosenbaum says, “Abstinence-only education is required to give inaccurate information. Teens are savvy consumers of information and know what they are getting.”

Our national investment in abstinence-only may not be a scam on the scale of Bernie Madoff. But this industry has had standards for truth as loose as some mortgage lenders. It manufactures a product as ill-suited to the environment as the SUV. All in all, abstinence-only education has become emblematic of the rule of ideology over science.

The sorry part is that sex education got caught in the culture wars. It has been framed, says Bill Albert of The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, as a battle between “those who wanted virginity pledges and those who wanted to hand out condoms to 14-year-olds.”

Meanwhile, six in 10 teens have sex before they leave high school and 730,000 teenage girls will get pregnant this year. We see them everywhere from “Juno” to Juneau — or to be more accurate, Anchorage, where Sarah Palin, advocate of abstinence-only education, just became an unplanned grandparent.

The overwhelming majority of protective parents don’t want a political battle. They want teens to delay sex and to have honest information about sexuality, including contraception. The programs that work best combine those lessons.

Soon Congress and the new administration will be asked to ante up again for abstinence-only programs. As Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood says, abstinence-only education was “an experiment gone awry. We spent $1.5 billion and can’t point to a single study that says this helps. If it doesn’t help, why fund it?”

Teens are not the only masters of denial. But we are finally stepping back from the culture wars. We are, with luck, returning to something that used to be redundant — evidence-based science. That’s a pledge worth signing … and remembering.

Ellen Goodman’s column appears Friday on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is ellengoodman@globe.com

I’m tired of tit-for-tat violence, anywhere, by anyone.

Everyone loses, especially the innocent.

(Click it for a larger image)

I keep hearing how Bush’s policies have saved the USA from terrorism. But when anyone asks how we have been saved we get something akin to “We can’t tell you, then the terrorists would know we know”.

To me this sounds like the old joke:

A: Why are you blowing that whistle?
B: To keep away elephants.
A: There are no elephants around here.
B: See, it’s working.

If we don’t have any evidence of how a policy is working we cannot just take no information as proof that a policy is required.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for 24 hours you know that Barack Obama is now the President-elect of the USA, and will be our 44th President

As a staunch liberal it’s thrilling that we’ve cast off any vestige of the last 8 years of incompetence and stupidity. (Except perhaps for Alaska, which seems set to re-elect a convicted felon to the Senate)

Hopefully we can move forward from here and be part of the global dialog, rather than trying to control that dialog.

I feel that Madelyn Dunham is one of the most important names in current US politics.

I know, I can hear the responses now, “Who?”, “She’s not even running”, “She’s just an old woman”, etc.

But what is truly amazing and different, is that this woman who turns 86 tomorrow has for two days become the single most important thing in the mind of Barack Obama.

2 weeks before election day, in the middle of a close presidential race, Obama is dropping out of his campaign and flying home to be with his sick grandmother that raised him.

Show me something that shows more “Family Values” than that.

It’s uncertain if it will cost him the election (some polls show the race extremely tight, some show it 10 points in Obama’s favor) and i’m sure some will say it’s a calculated ploy, but we have to stand and appreciate the fact that he’s doing it.

If I had to make a choice between a ploy to get votes of smearing my opponent or visiting a sick family member there would be no debate, i’d go do the visit. I feel people have a responsibility to live the values they try and tell others about, not just talk the talk.

I hope at some later day a politician looks back on this move by Obama and says, “Let’s be more friendly, more positive”, because our country badly needs that restraint.