Well, Burningbird has moved her weblog and is now using Movable Type. She isn’t the only one. Jonathon Delacour has done this also.. I probably would, but I’m too involved in other things right now and Blogger is working fine for me at this point. Once I get moved and established I might take the plunge.
I’ve been trying real hard to be objective over things going on in the Middle East. I know that the Palestinian refugees have some legitimate complaints about the way they are being treated by the Israelis. I’m finding it very difficult, though, to support any kind of Palestinian state. The latest reason comes not from the Palestinians, but from the Saudis.
My aversion to a Palestinian state stems from a problem I have endorsing the formation of any government that will treat women the way an Islamic theocracy will undoubtebly treat them. The Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah just reminded me of the fate of women under such a theocracy. I have no doubt in my mind that the New Palestine would be such a theocracy.
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah requested that no women air traffic controllers direct his flight on his way to visit President Bush at his Texas ranch earlier this week, according to regional and national aviation officials.
I hope this isn’t viewed as a condemnation, on my part, of Islam. It isn’t, it’s a condemnation of a theocracy based on Islam. I would have the same problem with a theocracy based on fundamental Christianity.
I’m going to have to think over this for a while. In order to obtain a search warrant law enforcement officers must submit an affadavit to the court spelling out the whys and wheres and other information they have that gives them the probable cause necessary for the court to issue a warrant to search property without the owner’s permission. This affadavit has always become public record upon the issuance of the search warrant unless specifically ordered otherwise by the judge. California wants to change this procedure in their state courts. The affadavit still has to be filed for the search warrant to be obtained but they want the affadavit to remain secret by default. The defendent still will have the right to challange the warrant but will not have access to the affadavit used to procure the warrant. On the surface it stinks to high heaven but I’m not sure that it actually violates the 4th Amendment. This will be something to watch.
Shelley relates an interesting experience with a prisoner she met while waiting in a doctor’s waiting room. She made an observation that I’d like to comment on:
Nice person, really. I figured he couldn’t be too bad if his “victim” was still alive…unless his victim’s dead and the guy is crazy as well as violent…
A lot of people who find themselves incarcerated are very nice people who just found themselves in bad situations caused by one small, seemingly insignificant, bad decision made at just the right time to roll them into disaster. This is something that a true Justice System would take into account and mitigate for. Our zeal for punishing the Evildoers® has brought us to the point that that is no longer possible. Legislators pass zero tolerance measures on everything which takes all the intelligence out of the way justice is handed out.
Shelley, your prisoner acquaintence may well have been a very nice guy who would normally never hurt a fly but was pushed just a little too far and pushed back. As bad as we might hate to admit it I think every one of us has a point that, once pushed over, we know we could turn into a very violent creature. Reasonable people have this point far beyond where it could normally be reached. Reasonable people stop pushing way before we see we are about to reach that point with someone. A reasonable justice system would take that into consideration when prosecuting an offender and hand out a reasonable sentance. Zero tolerance, whether dealing with violence or drugs, takes away reason.
The Boston Globe is reporting that workers’ compensation rose at it’s slowest pace in three years. I actually like this news. I’m not seeing a lot of my peers who are still employeed really hurting on the money they are making and most of them are actually thriving. I think that most of our economic woes are currently due to attitudes rather than anything substansive and this might be the news needed for hiring to start back up. This might also explain the following report, also in the referenced article:
For the work week ending April 20, new claims for jobless benefits fell by a sharp seasonally adjusted 31,000 to 421,000, the lowest level in a month, the department said in a second report.
Heather Hamilton is no longer updating dooce.com. For those of you who don’t know here, she’s the young lady who lost her job over the content of her weblog and launched a huge debate over the whole mess. I didn’t read her often but I enjoyed her writing when I did. I’ll miss that part. She says she will possibly reappear on another site posting anonymously. I hope she shows back up and I run into her writing again.
I’ve been showing you the houses that I’m buying and selling so I thought I might also show you where my roots are. This farmhouse is now used for storage but it was the home of a family with nine children once. One of those children was my mother. I spent a lot of time there when I was a child with my aunt and uncles. At the time they were still living in this house. I learned to milk cows and plow behind a mule there.
About thirty years ago they built a better house next to this one and then moved this one about a hundred yards away. The front porch was removed in the move and the stone chimneys were lost. As an adult looking back on the house I remember as a child it appears the house has shrunk a good deal also. 
Pointed out to me by ‘Da Worm’, Computer Geeks is offering a tachometer for your PC. No, this isn’t a software only tachometer that shows some little goofy graphic on your monitor, this is an actual analog dial tachometer that you mount somewhere on your computer or monitor and connects to your computer via a serial port. What geek could resist buying one?
I got an offer on my current house yesterday that I could accept. I was very pleased with it, in fact. The way the relocation works, though, is that I have to tell our relocation manager about the offer and that I want to accept it and then sign my house over to the relocation company. They give me my money and then sell the house to the buyer. It keeps me from having to attend closing and allows the relocation company more control over paying the closing costs.
The picture to the right is of the house that I currently live in and hope that I”ve just sold.
In case you’re wondering where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to, last week I was house hunting in Gwinnett County, Georgia. I bought this house in Lawrenceville. I’m not real happy with the yard, it sits on a hill, but the other amenities of the house and the neighborhood make up for that. I still like where I’m living now a whole lot better but it would be a long commute for my wife staying here.
I’m really curious about Vanilla Coke. I guess I could make my own and find out now instead of waiting a month, but I can’t imagine vanilla as enhancing the taste of a coke like a little cherry flavoring does.
A BBC News article on an ant supercolony in Europe has gotten me thinking about human coloialism and the similarities and differences between human colonies and this ant supercolony. Maybe these musings will make it onto paper (or into electrons) sometime soon.
I’m sorry about the lack of updates. I’ve been out of town looking at houses. We settled on one today. Now I’ve got to find the money to work the deal. Have I ever mentioned that relocation sucks. I’ll tell more this weekend. I think I’ll be pretty much tied up tomorrow.
That will teach me to ever think that a true ‘blogger can ever stop blogging. Shelley’s back. This makes me happy and I didn’t even notice it yesterday due to a tight schedule I was running on.
Cool, AdCritic.com may arise from the ashes. I really enjoyed this site. Along with being amused and entertained by the ads I learned a lot about advertising, a topic I never thought would be something that would interest me. I’ll be pulling for it’s future success.
