I had another dream, I had another life
Nathaniel 
I decided to write about sin again this morning for my post at Times And Seasons. And while I was looking for fun images to accompany the post, I stumbled upon a couple Calvin and Hobbes strips that did the trick.
Wow… Calvin and Hobbes makes everything better.
USA Today reports that as part of extensive war games during the 1980’s, the following speech was prepared for Queen Elizabeth to read in the event of nuclear war.
When I spoke to you less than three months ago we were all enjoying the warmth and fellowship of a family Christmas. Our thoughts were concentrated on the strong links that bind each generation to the ones that came before and those that will follow. The horrors of war could not have seemed more remote as my family and I shared our Christmas joy with the growing family of the Commonwealth.
Now this madness of war is once more spreading through the world and our brave country must again prepare itself to survive against great odds.
The Wall Street Journal ran an article called The Rise of the Warrior Cop on July 22 about the militarization of ordinary police forces. The problem–and it is a problem–has to do with the proliferation of SWAT-style police units:
The country’s first official SWAT team started in the late 1960s in Los Angeles. By 1975, there were approximately 500 such units. Today, there are thousands. According to surveys conducted by the criminologist Peter Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University, just 13% of towns between 25,000 and 50,000 people had a SWAT team in 1983. By 2005, the figure was up to 80%. The number of raids conducted by SWAT-like police units has grown accordingly. In the 1970s, there were just a few hundred a year; by the early 1980s, there were some 3,000 a year. In 2005 (the last year for which Dr. Kraska collected data), there were approximately 50,000 raids.
If you want an idea of how absurd this is consider that the Fish & Wildlife Service, NASA and the Department of the Interior each have their own SWAT-style unit. Why does NASA need a military-grade police unit?
I finished VALIS last week, but I didn’t get a chance to post my review. I gave it 4 out of 5 stars, but that doesn’t mean I necessarily think you will like it. Full review. Next up:
Here’s an Imgur gallery of 36 Things You Obviously Need In Your New Home. I have decided that, in several instances, they are correct.
Glass-encased basement pool? Yes, please.
Yesterday we had a semi-false alarm from a woman that merely Googling “pressure cooker” could get you a visit from jackbooted thugs. I say “semi-false” because the tip-off didn’t from from the NSA searching through the Google search records of private Americans. It came because Michele Catalano’s husband or son (unclear which) was using a work computer to Google “pressure cooker bomb” and this was discovered by the employer and they sent a tip to the police. So, having the cops show up because of an Internet search is slightly Orwellian, but the fact that it was just the company monitoring their own hardware is a lot different than some kind of all-encompassing NSA dragnet.
Only, at more or less the same time, we had the Guardian publish more docs (originally from Snowden) documenting how there is, in fact, some kind of all-encompassing NSA dragnet. It’s called XKeyscore.
The devil is always in the details with these things, but there are some alarming details. First, no court order is required for a search. Second, the database that is searched is near real-time.
As a general rule, I think that you basically have to choose one of two mindsets about these things:
I tend to fall into the second camp, and so these revelations are disconcerting (to put it mildly). I think that, in principle, the idea of keeping huge amounts of data on American citizens (or non-citizens) could be defended if there were some really, really robust transparency measures and checks and balances. But the really big problem is that these are all secrete programs we weren’t supposed to know about. And if we can’t know about them, then I have a hard time trusting that they won’t inevitably be abused.
I’ve heard lots about so-called “Obamaphones”, but this is the first article that really explained what’s going on.
The Federal Communications Commission oversees the so-called Lifeline program, created in 1984 to make sure impoverished Americans had telephone service available to call their moms, bosses, and 911. In 2008, the FCC expanded the program to offer subsidized cell-phone service…
The rest of the article is really easy to predict once you know just one simple fact: the companies are paid by the government for every cell phone plan they create. If you’ve got a company that’s supposed to only hand out one free cell phone per household, but they’re getting paid by the cell phone, what do you think will happen? Jillian Kay Melchoir (who wrote this piece) decided to find out. Although she doesn’t qualify for any phones and although she never lied on any of the applications, she ended up with a handful of free phones anyway. She got progressively sillier in her attempts to get new phones, culminating in a scene like this one:
The Daily Mail has an awesome article with tons of photos taken by Timothy O’Sullivan. Definitely worth taking a look.
I love watching partisan news stories play out. It’s fascinating to see the way everyone weaves as fast as they can so that each new fact can be nestled snugly into a pre-existing worldview before the next one. That’s one of the changes of the Internet-based news era, I guess. We all make our own spin now.
I’ll be honest, though, when the painful-to-watch Fox News interview of Reza Aslan hit my social networking feed, I thought this was a pretty cut-and-dry case of total cluelessness on Fox’s behalf. Here, you can spin up the video while you read the rest of the post if you like.
Melissa Langsam Braunstein thinks it’s time for ladies to raise their dating expectations. I agree. (Then again, I haven’t been on the dating scene for about a decade, so maybe that’s easy for me to say). The gist of Braunstein’s argument is that the hookup culture isn’t really giving (most) women what they want. For political reasons some feminists may disagree (acknowledging any difference between the sexes at all is bound to get you in trouble with at least one angry feminist somewhere), but I think this is by now sort of obvious for people without an ideological hill to defend.
What struck me as interesting, however, was her observation that when she went ahead and announced that she expected to be courted (to use an old phrase), she got results. She writes:
And the more I communicated that I expected to be treated like a lady, the more I found men eagerly rose to the occasion.
I’m going to go ahead and be stereotypical and say that Braunstein is on to something. Men like to accomplish things, but in a world that has thrown away the rules for courtship it’s increasingly hard for men to know what to accomplish. And the result is that too many quit trying.
Look, I’m not saying that women have an obligation to rescue men from the prison of their own low-expectations. Just that a little direction can be helpful, and that the more clear and widespread expectations for men are the more of them that will take it as an opportunity to rise to the occasion.