"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
Thomas Jefferson
Sept. 23, 1800
Yes, this is a real bill. It's funding for a technical campus, but they're naming it the Star Fleet Academy, because, well, because they're idiots. The Civitas institute mocks them nicely in
this video.From the Under the Dome blog:
Rep. Earl Jones's bill to provide funding for a technology research center on N.C. A&T State University's campus was a YouTube parody waiting to happen.
Fortunately for all of us, the conservative-leaning Civitas Institute accepted the challenge with a parody video.
Jones' bill would establish "The Star Fleet Academy Complex" on campus. Yes, THAT Star Fleet.
Jones, who co-sponsored the bill in May, said the campus approached him about the idea of creating a world-class technology research center that carried a recognizable brand name.
"Scientists and engineers and people like that, they're pretty straight-laced," Jones said. "It's something that brings attention to the center."
A quick Constitutional Law lecture from a veteran. I couldn't embed the video, so PLEASE follow
this linkImagine someone mentioning enumerated powers in this day and age.
It seems the east coast of the US has been experiencing higher than normal high tides this summer. It's a bit of a mystery to scientists, but what struck me about
this news story was that it specifically DID NOT blame global warming! Wow! Hats off to the Raleigh News and Observer. I added the boldface.
Since June, tides have been running from 6 inches to 2 feet above what would normally be expected, even considering seasonal and lunar fluctuations. While local tidal changes are not uncommon, researchers for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration aren't sure they have ever recorded an event like this one, which is showing up all the way from Maine to Florida. In North Carolina, tides have been about a foot above normal predictions.
"Right now we're trying to get a better understanding of what's the cause," said Mike Szabados, director of NOAA's tide and current program in Silver Spring, Md.
Global warming isn't to blame, scientists say, as the rise was too sudden. Possibly, Szabados said, the explanation lies in something called the North Atlantic oscillation, a disturbance in the atmospheric pressure in the area of the North Atlantic Ocean between the Icelandic Low and the Azores High.
It's a misnomer that there is such a thing as a single missing link. Any gap in the fossil record is a missing link, and there are lots of them. Here, though, is an important find that places a new species at the bottom of the primate family tree.
This is one cool website, too.
While Peggy
Noonan doesn't reference Orwell in
her excellent piece at the Wall Street Journal, she very well could have.
Noonan is noticing the increasing use of arcane and bizarre government-invented phraseology to explain important policies to the American people. As she points out, it has the effect of making the average citizen tune out the static and ignore something, like health-care reform, that could very well change his or her life. It's dangerous and anti-democratic. Here's the end of
Noonan's column:
Do members of the administration speak obscurely because they can't help themselves, or do they speak the way they speak because they really aren't all that keen to have people understand them? Maybe they calculate that lack of clarity ensures maximum ability to maneuver. But maybe they should think less about maneuvering. They're not helping the prevailing sense of national anxiety by speaking in a special lingo all their own. After all, it's not their health-care system they're reforming, it is America's. It would be nice if America were allowed to know what exactly the plan is, and how it would work, and who would pay, and how.
As for the Republicans, the administration is giving them an opening. There could be gain in becoming the party that speaks with concrete honesty, and in a known human language, on the great issues of the day. The GOP could become the party that doesn't make you translate, and doesn't leave you giving up. I wonder if the party right now, for all the battering it's experienced the past few years, is still quick enough to see an opening like this.
Looks like the human race started off on the right foot (or hand, or rib), competition-wise. French anthropologists think they may have solved the mystery of what caused humans to survive while Neanderthals died out. Apparently, Neanderthal tastes like chicken. From the
UK's Daily Mail Online:
The mysterious disappearance of Neanderthals about 30,000 years ago has baffled scientists for centuries. But now, according to a leading fossil expert, it seems the race may have met a rather grisly end. They were eaten by our ancestors, the modern humans.
The basis for the claim is the markings on a Neanderthal jawbone found in Les Rois, south-west France during a study conducted by the Journal of Anthropological Sciences.
The cuts to the bone are similar to those left on those of deer and other animals butchered by humans in the Stone Age. It is believed that the flesh was eaten by humans and the teeth used to make a necklace.
I HATE snakes. So, i was happy to read this coming from the North Carolina General Assembly. From the News and Observer's
Under the Dome blog:
The Senate approved a bill to regulate snakes. Sen. Ed Jones sponsored the bill at the request of herpetologists to increase the penalties for pet owners who negligently release venomous snakes.
Senate Bill 307 would make it a Class I misdemeanor to improperly transport, let loose or otherwise expose the public to a creatures such as an African Rock Python, a Burmese Python or a Green Anaconda.
Senate Majority Leader Tony Rand wondered if the bill was tough enough.
"Is that sufficient penalty for turning a cobra loose on an innocent population?" he asked Jones.
Jones, a Halifax County Democrat, said that owners would have objected to tougher standards.
Rand, a Fayetteville Democrat, then asked a more personal question.
"If we get a cobra loose in Fayetteville, will you come down there and catch it?" he asked.
"Only if it looks like a worm," Jones replied.
The bill passed 46-0 and now heads to the House.
My previous post about Ashton Lundeby's arrest under the Patriot turns out to be very flawed. Not only was Ashton charged under long-standing law, he has had access to council and appeared before a judge several times. Mrs. Lundeby, Ashton's Mom, claimed her son was taken into custody under the patriot Act and denied his Constitutional rights. This is not the case.
There is a good Fox News article about the case here.
The USA Patriot Act has been used in North Carolina to hold a 16 year-old boy in federal prison without legal representation or habeus corpus. From
WRAL News:
Oxford, N.C. — Sixteen-year-old Ashton Lundeby's bedroom in his mother's Granville County home is nothing, if not patriotic. Images of American flags are everywhere – on the bed, on the floor, on the wall.
But according to the United States government, the tenth-grade home-schooler is being held on a criminal complaint that he made a bomb threat from his home on the night of Feb. 15.
Around 10 p.m. on March 5, Lundeby said, armed FBI agents along with three local law enforcement officers stormed her home looking for her son. They handcuffed him and presented her with a search warrant.
Ashton now sits in a juvenile facility in South Bend, Ind. His mother has had little access to him since his arrest. She has gone to her state representatives as well as attorneys, seeking assistance, but, she said, there is nothing she can do.
No one should be surprised that it has come to this. When a government is given power over individuals, it uses it. Always. The Patriot Act was passed in the days after the 9/11 terror attacks and very little heed was given to the damage it did to our Constitutional rights.
I found the saddest part of this story to be this comment from Mrs.
Lundeby:
"Never in my worst nightmare did I ever think that it would be my own government that I would have to protect my children from," Lundeby said. "This is the United States, and I feel like I live in a third world country now."
Mrs.
Lundeby, all governments are
necessary evils, even our own. You should have been taught this in school, but your government runs those. Sorry you had to find this out in such a hard way, but maybe your story will awaken some more people. Let's hope.
This not the first time Americans have faced these problems, and our forefathers told us how to fix them:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The crew of a ship trying to journey from England to the top of the Greenland ice cap on a non-carbon emitting boat had to be rescued by an oil tanker. From the BBC:
An expedition team which set sail from Plymouth on a 5,000-mile carbon emission-free trip to Greenland have been rescued by an oil tanker.
The team, which left Mount Batten Marina in Plymouth on 19 April in a boat named the Fleur, aimed to rely on sail, solar and man power on a 580-mile (933km/h) journey to and from the highest point of the Greenland ice cap.
The expedition was followed by up to 40 schools across the UK to promote climate change awareness.
But atrocious weather dogged their journey after 27 April, culminating with the rescue on 1 May after the boat was temporarily capsized three times by the wind.
In one incident Mr Stoddart hit his head and the wind generator and solar panels were ripped from the yacht.
This is proof that there is a God and He's got a sense of humor.
