Plans2Reality

Why Isn't Brett Kimberlin Still In Prison?

So this guy plants a bunch of bombs, one of which blows a man's leg off. He gets 50+ years in prison.

Why is he out, walking the streets, and causing trouble?

 

More later on the trouble he's currently causing, but if we can't just shoot him, can we at least revoke his parole?

So Much for Saving the Planet....

It seems we are not as serious about saving the planet as we like to claim. That's not really a surprise....

The US Government has slapped a 31% tax on solar panels, just when they were getting cheap enough that you could actually justify them.

It's said that the US imported abut $3bn worth of solar panels in 2011. At wholesale prices running around a dollar a watt, and most panels rated 200W or better, that's something in the range of 15 million panels. Installed in sunny locations, it's (very) roughly the equivalent of a 10 MW fossil fuel plant.

 

Oh well. Natural gas is clean and cheap. Keep on frackin'!

Gutting the First Amendment

OK, fairly blatant copyright borrow here, but this is worth spreading.... edited from Mr Will's column

Taking a scythe to the Bill of Rights

By George F. Will, Published: May 4

Now comes Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) with a contribution to the debate concerning government regulation of political speech. Joined by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), 26 other Democrats and one Republican, he proposes a constitutional amendment to radically contract First Amendment protections. His purpose is to vastly expand government’s power — i.e., the power of incumbent legislators — to write laws regulating, rationing or even proscribing speech in elections that determine the composition of the legislature and the rest of the government. McGovern’s proposal vindicates those who say that most campaign-finance “reforms” are incompatible with the First Amendment.

His “People’s Rights Amendment” declares that the Constitution protects only the rights of “natural persons,” not such persons organized in corporations, and that Congress can impose on corporations whatever restrictions Congress deems “reasonable.” His amendment says that it shall not be construed “to limit the people’s rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free exercise of religion, freedom of association and all such other rights of the people, which rights are inalienable.” But the amendment is explicitly designed to deny such rights to natural persons who, exercising their First Amendment right to freedom of association, come together in corporate entities to speak in concert.

McGovern stresses that his amendment decrees that “all corporate entities — for-profit and nonprofit alike” — have no constitutional rights. So Congress — and state legislatures and local governments — could regulate to the point of proscription political speech, or any other speech, by the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association, NARAL Pro-Choice America or any of the other tens of thousands of nonprofit corporate advocacy groups, including political parties and campaign committees.

Newspapers, magazines, broadcasting entities, online journalism operations — and most religious institutions — are corporate entities. McGovern’s amendment would strip them of all constitutional rights. By doing so, the amendment would empower the government to do much more than proscribe speech. Ilya Somin of George Mason University Law School, writing for the Volokh Conspiracy blog, notes that government, unleashed by McGovern’s amendment, could regulate religious practices at most houses of worship, conduct whatever searches it wants, reasonable or not, of corporate entities, and seize corporate-owned property for whatever it deems public uses — without paying compensation. Yes, McGovern’s scythe would mow down the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, as well as the First.

The proposed amendment is intended to reverse the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which affirmed the right of persons to associate in corporate entities for the purpose of unrestricted collective speech independent of candidates’ campaigns. The court’s decision was foreshadowed when, in oral argument, the government’s lawyer insisted that the government could ban a 500-page book that contained one sentence that said “vote for” a particular candidate. McGovern’s amendment would confer upon Congress the power to ban publishing corporations from producing books containing political advocacy, when Congress considers a ban reasonable — never mind the amendment’s rhetoric about the “inalienable” rights people enjoy until they band together to act in corporate entities.

A decade ago, then-Rep. Dick Gephardt said of George Soros’s spending in support of liberal causes: “It is not consistent with campaign reform, but it is consistent with what the Constitution says about freedom of speech.”

 

georgewill@washpost.com

 

Banished Word: "It's in our DNA"

It is not "in your DNA". You don't get to vote about what's "in your DNA." You certainly don't get to change, at the whim of the marketing department, what's "in your DNA".

There's a good chance that what is in your DNA is as lovely as cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs's Disease, and sickle-cell anemia. Especially if you are a large organization.

So knock it off!

 

Banished Word: Seamless

Okay, folks, we have beaten this one to death. Your product? NOT seamless. Stop claiming otherwise.

Klein bottles are seamless. (Look it up). Lovely bolts of cloth from Britex are seamless. Your product is not seamless. It does not provide seamless coverage. It is not a seamless support experience.

Stop beating this perfectly innocent word to death!

The Lynching of John Derbyshire

In the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, several journalists have written about "the talk" - the talk black parents have with their kids about how to deal with racism, racist cops, profiling, etc. That problem is real, and the advice given is probably 99% correct. It ain't a perfect world.

John Derbyshire responded with the talk that non-black people have with their kids, and with foreigners visiting here, and such like. We all know what that talk is - what part of town is best to avoid, especially at night, what nightclubs and other places you might wish to pass on, etc.

John's taken it a little further - he has referenced some well-established if not terribly pleasant truths about the statistical distrubution of IQ as it is defined by certain standardized tests. But overall, most white people would have to agree, perhaps reluctantly, with his advice to his children, if not necessarily his rationale for why it is so. I'm not sure I agree with all of his rationale, either, but there is at least some truth in it.

But we are not allowed to admit, much less say such things. This is in part because in the past, various government policies that were based on the science of the day turned out not to be such good policies. In other words, eugenics hasn't worked well as a government policy. Nor should it have a role; we are all God's children, regardless of variations in our ability to score well on a test that measure, mostly, one's ability to handle certain types of abstract and symbolic thought.

The government's record of using the science of genetics to improve the human condition should serve as a cautionary tale when we consider having the government use other sciences to attempt to improve the human condition. I would not go so far as to say the government should _never_ do such a thing, but we do need to remember they get it wrong rather freqeuntly, particularly when the science is not well understood.

So, what can we conclude?

1. Have "the talk" with your kids - in whatever form works best for you.

2. Never admit you did.   ;-)

Teachers who don't teach, and...

Professor-types who don't teach, either:

The University of California system has been raising tuitions and cutting departments. But its San Diego campus found the money to create a new post of “vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion.”

The money for the new vice chancellorship could have supported two of the three cancer researchers that the campus lost to Rice University in Houston.

No wonder college costs more, yet kids seem to get less.....

Metro derailed by culture of complacence, incompetence -

Job protectionims hurts us all - sometimes literally.

First of three parts

via www.washingtontimes.com

Lumen Redundas

Sitting down all day is killing you • From The Register

A study of more than 220,000 people aged 45 or more has come to a startling conclusion: sitting down all day is killing you.

via www.theregister.co.uk

 

Of course, I read this article, and then blogged it, while sitting down.....

The Manufacturing Jobs We Lost.....

.....are we sure we want them back?

Sagira Ansari sits on a dusty sack outside her uneven brick home in this poor town in eastern India, her legs folded beneath her. She cracks her knuckles, then rubs charcoal ash between her palms.

With the unthinking swiftness of a movement performed countless times before, she slashes a naked razor blade into a square-cut leaf to trim off the veins. She drops in flakes of tobacco, packs them with her thumbs, rolls the leaf tightly between her fingers and ties it off with two twists of a red thread.

For eight hours a day, Sagira makes bidis — thin brown cigarettes that are as central to Indian life as chai and flat bread.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/03/18/international/i050341D73.DTL#ixzz1pWpZoqVU

 

(03-18) 05:03 PDT DHULIYAN, India (AP) --

via www.sfgate.com

 

Look, folks, we need to stop weeping over these jobs. Remember the Satanic mill of Charles Dickens? Sweatshops?

Actually physically making things is boring work at best. It's not as dangerous as it used to be, though repetitive work leads to repetitive strain injuries. But trying to bring these jobs "back" makes about as much sense as tryign to bring back dairy maids and scullery workers.

It's a knowledge economy. Better go learn something....