Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

One final CSPAN-related thought before I shut my eyes:

After complaining about the quality of public speaking in general in my last entry, it did occur to me that I should mention two counterexamples, people I found to be very effective speakers in the brief bits I've caught on the radio lately. Karl Beezelb... Rove, and John Kerry.

Howso' great their clamour, whatso'er their claim,
Suffer not the old King under any name!
He shall mark our goings, question whence we came,
Set his guards about us, as in Freedom's name.

Here is naught unproven--here is naught to learn,
It is written what shall fall if the King return.
He shall take a tribute; toll of all our ware;
He shall change our gold for arms--arms we may not bear.

He shall break his Judges if they cross his word;
He shall rule above the Law calling on the Lord.
He shall peep and mutter; and the night shall bring
Watchers 'neath our windows, lest we mock the King--

Hate and all divisions; hosts of hurrying spies;
Money poured in secret; carrion breeding flies.
Strangers of his counsel, hirelings of his pay,
These shall deal our Justice: sell--deny--delay.

[I'm handing this off to the 'at' daemon, so here's hoping I haven't screwed up the HTML somewhere... I've I have, I'll fix it after I wake up.]

• Porn Fonts -- need I actually need to say more? (Okay, I'll say this much: a few are readable fonts with recognizeable letters, and the rest are more just Dingbats-like collections of small graphics -- or as one wag referred to them, "dongbats".)
  


• The 'Wrathful Dispersion' controversy, by q_pheevr
  


• Anyone's cell phone records available for a fee: "Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts. Criminals can use such records to expose a government informant who regularly calls a law enforcement official. Suspicious spouses can see if their husband or wife is calling a certain someone a bit too often. And employers can check whether a worker is regularly calling a psychologist -- or a competing company."
  


• The Idiotarod, a race across NYC on the 28th of this month: "The Iditarod is the famous long-distance race in which yelping dogs tow a sled across Alaska. Our Idiotarod is pretty much the same thing, except that instead of dogs, it's people, instead of sleds, it's shopping carts, and instead of Alaska it's New York City." They say they swiped the idea from folks in San Fransisco. The cost to enter is "Dignity. Plus, there is a $5 per person entry fee." (by way of That Mailing List)
  


• The History of BASIC and a companion piece, the History of the C language family (again from That Mailing List). Be prepared for Major Snarkitude.
  


• The Advertising Slogan Generator, a silly little CGI script, which I spotted on a mailing list under the heading "Sloganize your name" ... and the output of which I expect to start seeing pop up on folks journals any minute now ... Though I found the slogan it came up with for me unsettling: "You'll Never Put A Better Bit Of Glenn On Your Knife." [Come to think of it, the next name I put in also produced a result that conjured ... interesting images: "I Can't Believe I Ate The Whole The Homespun Ceilidh Band."] Oooh, on the same site they've got Sheep Poetry, very much like a pair of ideas I had a long time ago and never got around to implementing! (I was tempted to spraypaint words on the sides of a herd of cattle some night, and enjoy the self-rearranging "refrigerator magnet poetry" they would produce the next day when they woke up ... I decided that programming virtual cows in a screensaver or something would be less likely to lead to my arrest -- or being gored or trampled -- but I never got around to that either.) It needs more words, and the sheep need to move, but it's a start...
  


• I haven't sat down to try to read this yet (I plan to, but I think I'd do better with a copy of Larousse de Poche in my lap than constantly flipping over to Babelfish when I try to get through it with my rusty French), but "Tintin en Irak" (a new Tintin story usng recycled Tintin art and new words) looks like it might be interesting. [Though goodness knows there are plenty of authentic Tintin tales -- already translated even -- that I haven't read yet, which I'd like to get my hands on some day. And some stories I read parts of in magazines where they were serialized and never found the ends of.]
  


• The Episcopal Diocese of Washington reacts to NBC's television series, The Book of Daniel, in The Blog of Daniel. I've only skimmed so far, but it looks a lot more interesting (not to mention more positive) than the howls of outrage from the religious far-right fundamentalists, (who started talking about how wrong the show before anyone had even seen it). For folks unaware of why the Episcopal reaction would be especially relevant: the title character is an Episcopal priest. I've got a bunch of thoughts of my own about the first three episodes, to write up ... well I hope to get around to that sometime this week.
  


• The Nation has published its Dictionary of Republicanisms, including such entries as: "compassionate conservatism (n): Poignant concern for the very wealthy" and "simplify (v): To cut the taxes of Republican donors"
  


• realinterrobang has some observations regarding how gendered occupational stereotypes are perpetuated (and to a meaningful extent, enforced), as well as a followup survey asking for other folks' (gut-level / socially-conditioned) impressions of which jobs have default genders attached (free-response, not an LJ-poll).

We all know how slippery shower thoughts can get, right? Well last night, after sufficient soap was applied and the miracle of modern plumbing was delivering a pleasant stream of warm water to my skin, my brain somehow went from the lyrics of "Black Powder And Alcohol" to wondering how well a cinderblock igloo would work and how long one would take to build. (Waterproofing a computer so I can access Google in the shower would actually be a very bad idea unless I also installed one of those "no tank, just flash-heat the water as it zips past" water heaters in the bathroom to enable arbitrarily long showers.)

I left off my observations & commentary regarding Alito ten days ago and haven't gotten around to writing up my impressions of what I've heard and read since. Some of this has gotten stale in my brain, but let's see how much I can still make sense with.

When I last wrote about Alito, I said he didn't seem like the scariest person in the room at his hearing. That opinion still stands, but isn't exactly an endorsement. While there are bits of his past that cause raised eyebrows and questions, I don't think we're going to get any useful answers to those questions this year, and as almeda observed, some of the attempts to force satisfactory answers devolved into the "accusation masquerading as a question" zone, but that's not where I see the biggest problems anyhow. (Yeah, it's uncomfortable stuff if true; yeah, the evasiveness troubles me; it's not a smoking gun, and it's possible he was that sort of ass and then grew up. Too many unknowns.)

What tipped the balance for me was the testimony from the ... ah, ex-president? ... of NARAL, who made clear not only what the stakes are regarding certain kinds of restrictions on abortion, but also how a judge can make a ruling technically completely within the context of a law based on one party's rights while overlooking the rights/personhood/standing of the other party and their conflicting rights, with the result being a ruling that's hard to point to as "judicial activism" or "driven by ideology" but is still unfair, unjust, and harmful. She basically accused Alito not of being an ideologue, but of having a dangerous blind spot.

Her pointing out how adult women have been subjected to being treated, by the law, as though they were children ... was chillingly effective.

That, coupled with things Alito said about giving a certain amount of deferrence to the legislature and the executive, and what other people have written about patterns in his judicial record, was what made up my mind. I worry that Alito would be bad for our country, our Constitution, and our rights after all. I worry that laws infringing civil liberties would be okay by him as long as they were subtle enough that he could manage to overlook the individuals harmed by them. I worry that he'd not see certain classes of petitioners as being important enough, or "people enough", for their rights to matter. And I worry that he won't vigorously oppose maneuvers by the executive branch to upset the balance of powers that has been such an important part of the success of our nation's great experiment with democracy these past two-and-a-quarter centuries.

I'm not predicting the End Of The World ifwhen he gets confirmed, nor am I saying that he's the Worst Possible Choice ... only that as someone who cares about the Constitution and fairness and the continued political health of my homeland, I don't see his ascent to the Supreme Court as a good thing.

Others have pointed out that it's notoriously difficult to predict how Supreme Court judges will act on the bench, before they're there. Maybe Alito will surprise me. Maybe enough of the others will compensate for him. I don't know. But given what I know now, and what I have good reason to believe, I have to say it looks like most of us (by which I mean most of the citizens of, and visitors to, the United States) would have better odds of holding on to our rights if Alito were to be turned down. Again, it's not that I think he's part of some Evil Fascist Plot, or driven to flout the law by cleverly-hidden bigotry; just that I think he has a dangerous blind spot, and that's more than bad enough.

Basically, I get the impression that he sees corporations and the other branches of government more clearly, and hears their arguments more sharply, than he does "the little guy". The big players already have a lot of power; it's precisely "the little guy" who needs help having his rights protected. Not that the small player is always right, but the underdog must at least be heard.