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Poll QUESTION

government gridlock is going to get worse in January 2011

The problem with a lot of questions done by pollsters is that the conclusion done by others is often fault. For instance, during the health care debate, a question might have been, “Do you support or oppose the President’s plan?” A majority would oppose at a given point, and his political opponents might conclude that the people felt that the plan was too “liberal” or “socialist”; the truth was some of the opponents might have thought it was not progressive enough.

So naturally, I’m going to ask the same type of question: do you think the United States is going in the right direction, and why? I say no. I fear a real push for a theocracy in this country by the Glenn Beck types. I think that the courts are not defending the rights of the underclass; yesterday, I could have talked about Miranda rights being chipped away. And government gridlock is going to get worse in January 2011.

How about you? And if you’re not from the US, feel free to add how you think YOUR country is doing as well.

The One Good Thing Is That We Learn About the US Constitution

There was a truly horrific ruling by the US Ninth Circuit Court in August 2010 allowing warrantless GPS tracking by law enforcement.


Hey, kids, it’s Constitution Day again! And boy, have we learned about the application of the foundation of the United States in the past year or so, or what?

Article I, Section 8. The Congress shall have Power
[8] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The notion of “limited” gets longer every revisiting of the Copyright law, contrary, in my opinion, to the original intent of the Founders.

Article II [5] No person except a natural born Citizen…shall be eligible to the Office of President

Yes, don’t hear as much about them lately, but the birthers, who claim President Obama is not eligible to be President, are still out there.

Amendment I Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

This, of course, is at the heart of the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” debate; the usual line about this is that they have a RIGHT to build the Islamic center but that they OUGHT NOT TO.

There are some other interesting sidelights, such as some politicians suggesting that they should investigate the financing of the facility. This is right and proper as long as they likewise check out the funding of every new church, synagogue, and temple, and existing ones, while they are at it.

Amendment I Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech

Interestingly, action has been defined as “speech”; e.g. flag burning. So the Koran-burning controversy falls here. Again, people used the RIGHT TO/OUGHT NOT to conversation.

Amendment II A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The Supreme Court’s ruling a couple of years ago protecting personal gun ownership, not just the militia part, has meant that jurisdiction after jurisdiction with gun control laws are having them challenged, forcing them to more narrowly define the restrictions on gun ownership, such as insanity of the would-be owner.

Amendment IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

There was a truly horrific ruling by the US Ninth Circuit Court in August 2010 allowing warrantless GPS tracking by law enforcement. Other courts have ruled otherwise, as this TIME magazine article notes. What’s REALLY irritating about the Ninth’s decision is this:

The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the “curtilage,” a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government’s intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.

The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno’s driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month’s decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people’s. The court’s ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.

Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan…

The conflicting rulings at the Circuit level make this almost a certain Supreme Court case in the future.

Amendment XIV – The Fourteenth Amendment was proposed on June 13, 1866, and ratified on July 9, 1868.
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

This WAS initially all about slavery. This IS, suddenly, about illegal immigrants coming to the United States and have their babies here, making the children U.S. citizens. How frequently this is happening is an open debate.

There have been other fun Constitutional issues, such as Arizona’s immigration law, in probable violation of Article I, Section 8, but this has gone on long enough. US citizens: go read your Constitution, while you still can.

Harold Gould; Edwin Newman

Edwin Newman had a detestation of pomposity, clichés, errors and jargon, especially from the powerful.

I am particularly fascinated with the story of Harold Gould, an actor with over 200 credits on his resume. He grew up in Schenectady, NY, near Albany, and went to State Teachers College, which is now UAlbany, belonging to the only Jewish fraternity available. His academics were interrupted by World War II, but he came back to Albany to get his degree in 1947. Eventually, taking the advice of his high school guidance counselor, he taught theater at Cornell. But eventually, the acting bug caught the teacher, and he became one of the best-known faces, if not names, in show business.

Here’s a 2003 interview with him.

He was in pilots to be the fathers of Ann Marie (Marlo Thomas) on That Girl and Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard) on the Love American Style that led to Happy Days, but a whole lot more, from the father of Rhoda Morganstern (Valerie Harper) on the Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda to the boyfriend of Rose Nyland (Betty White) on Golden Girls.

In 2007, he donated his papers to his alma mater, now UAlbany. “The Gould Collection includes 10,000 scripts, letters, photos, news clippings and interviews that document the popular actor’s career since its beginnings in the early 1960s.”

Here’s the Albany Times Union obit, and the one in the New York Times. He died this week of prostate cancer at the age of 86, the disease that killed my father.

I was a big fan of Edwin Newman, not just as a newsman on The Today Show, Meet the Press and a slew of other programs. While serious in demeanor, he had a dry wit. After he “retired” from NBC in 1984, he hosted Saturday Night Live, and often played himself in movies and television, including on David Letterman. He also wrote two best-sellers about the English language, Strictly Speaking: Will America be the Death of English? – his detestation of pomposity, clichés, errors, and jargon, especially from the powerful; and A Civil Tongue. He wasn’t pretty or bombastic or self-important; he was just good at informing the nation, even during its most trying times.

The NBC obit. He died last month in England, but the information was released recently.

 

Wrong Premise, Right Outcome

“America has been a land of religious freedom. To many people, it seems impossible that this country could ever be anything but a defender of liberty in matters of faith.
That actually is a very dangerous view because it easily leads to complacency, assuming that what has been always will be…”


I’m not a big fan of Biblical apocalyptic writings. It’s less that I find them true or untrue and more that I see them as irrelevant. If Jesus is coming back, he said clearly that no one knows the day or time when he’ll reappear. Thus, all the speculation about this sign or that “proving” the Lord’s return, something that’s been going on for over 1900 years is, to my mind, pointless at best.

Still, there was this free magazine in one of those newspaper boxes called Signs of the Times®, which “encourages readers to lead joyful Christian lives as they await the soon return of Jesus.” The cover story of the September 2010 issue was Is the United States in Bible prophecy? by Marvin Moore.

The article concludes that the United States is the “land beast” mentioned in the books of Daniel and Revelation (read the article if you want to know what that means). The land beast is a global, end-time superpower and a Christian nation. I know others seem to think the land beast is the UN, BTW.

But here’s the stuff that piqued my interest:
if the land beast…is the United States, we can conclude that this nation’s historic separation between government and religion will end someday, because the land beast will enforce a particular form of worship…[it] will enforce its false worship with an iron fist. Anyone who refuses to receive the mark of the beast will be barred from carrying out any economic activity—he or she will not be allowed to buy or sell…
America has been a land of religious freedom. To many people, it seems impossible that this country could ever be anything but a defender of liberty in matters of faith.
That actually is a very dangerous view because it easily leads to complacency, assuming that what has been always will be… If we fail in our vigilance, the United States could very well turn on its historical principle of religious freedom.

Indeed, there is evidence that this is happening even now. I am frankly troubled by the profound hostility some Christians in America hold toward the principle of church-state separation, which is the foundation of religious freedom. Church-state separation simply means that government and religion operate in distinctive spheres, each recognizing the unique responsibilities of the other. They are separate in the sense that neither should ever control the other.

Should the United States ever abandon its commitment to the principle of church-state separation, persecution of dissenters will inevitably follow… we should defend, for as long as possible, the principle that government and religion operate in separate spheres, neither dictating the laws that govern the other.

So while I don’t necessarily subscribe to the apocalyptic premise of the piece, the conclusion that church-state separation is a good thing is a position with which I can firmly agree.
***
This is from The Onion, but I’d swear it’s true: God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule

 

I is for International System of Units

Those who claim the United States is slow off the metric ball are only partially right. “The key agreement is the Treaty of the Meter (Convention du Mètre), signed in Paris on May 20, 1875. 48 nations have now signed this treaty, including all the major industrialized countries.”


I blame Arthur. There’s this blogger/podcaster I’ve been following, AmeriNZ, an American expat now living in New Zealand. At some point in a recent podcast, he asked if anyone in his audience knew what one calls the United States system of measurement involving pounds, quarts, and feet, knowing, KNOWING that I would have to look it up; the scoundrel!

Since I could not find the answer anywhere online, I decided to contact the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and not just NIST but its Weights and Measures Division. And do you know what the woman on the phone told me? There IS no standard nomenclature for the collective U.S. weights and measurements!

Meanwhile, the system most people call “the metric system” is actually The International System of Units, Système International d’Unités, or SI for short.
At the heart of the SI is a shortlist of base units defined in an absolute way without referring to any other units… In all there are seven SI base units:
the meter for distance,
the kilogram for mass,
the second for time,
the ampere for electric current,
the kelvin for temperature,
the mole for amount of substance, and
the candela for intensity of light.
Other SI units, called SI derived units, are defined algebraically in terms of these fundamental units. Probably most used among them is degrees Celsius; absolute zero is zero degrees Kelvin, -273.16 C.

Those who claim the United States is slow off the metric ball are only partially right. “The key agreement is the Treaty of the Meter (Convention du Mètre), signed in Paris on May 20, 1875. 48 nations have now signed this treaty, including all the major industrialized countries. The United States is a charter member of this metric club, having signed the original document back in 1875.” All countries have adopted the metric system, including the U.S., and most countries (but not the U.S.) have taken steps to eliminate most uses of traditional measurements. In fact, most food items in the US are marked with dual designations. A brief history of the metric system in the US can be found HERE.

“Nearly all countries people still use traditional units sometimes, at least in colloquial expressions.” For instance, a miss is as good as a mile or a pinch for an inch.

Bookmark this! Online Conversion.com converts “just about anything to anything else.” There is also Convert.exe, a freeware program…found to be virus-free [which] uses the 1959 conversion factors for distance, [weight temperature and derived functions]. Ah, so these measurements get tweaked from time to time.

Arthur and others moving to or from the United States have suggested going “cold turkey” in learning the new measurement scheme, and virtually all of them find the temperature to be the most difficult to translate intellectually. If it helps – I read this somewhere, but also sussed it out myself, and these are approximations – 16C=61F, 28C=82F, 40C=104F.

ABC Wednesday – Round 7

Ramblin' with Roger
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