World News Korner

Courtesy of The Washington Post:

An Alaska initiative to legalize recreational marijuana qualified Wednesday for the August primary ballot after gathering more than 36,000 valid signatures.

Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell signed off on the petition after the Alaska Division of Elections found that the campaign had reached 36,030 signatures, nearly 6,000 more than required.

If approved by voters in the Aug. 19 primary, the legalization initiative would make Alaska the third state to allow retail pot sales for adults 21 and over. Colorado and Washington voters passed similar measures in November 2012.

“A bipartisan tidal wave of public support for regulating marijuana like alcohol in Alaska has pushed this initiative onto the ballot, and we will be running an aggressive campaign designed to build on that momentum,” said Taylor Bickford, spokesman for the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol in Alaska.

A Public Policy Polling survey released Feb. 5 found that 55 percent of Alaskans surveyed in favor of legalizing marijuana for recreational use, with 39 percent against.

I think this is it.

I think after this vote that we will have marijuana sold out of storefronts downtown just like they do in Colorado.

I don't smoke pot, and have not been high for more than forty years now, but I have to tell you that I am kind of curious about the pot brownies and marijuana lollipops.

Once its legal I might give those a try.

You know, for science.

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From the You Tube page:

President Obama had some fun during a White House manufacturing innovation event.

Okay that may seem kind of silly to some people, or beneath the office of the President, but let me just tell you that to thirteen year olds and comic book and movie geeks everywhere this man just jumped to top of their list of favorite Presidents of all time. (I, by the way, have been both.)


Okay now I want an Iron Man suit.

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Courtesy of Brancy's blog:

Do you guys watch Patricia Heaton’s great show The Middle?

Well, she’s one of the only Hollywood stars who has the guts to speak out against abortion.

Last week, Heaton shared a National Review article about how more black babies are aborted than born in New York City. Alec Torres writes:

In 2012, black women in New York City aborted over 6,500 more children than they gave birth to. Data from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene shows that, among non-hispanic black women, there were 31,328 “induced terminations” to 24,758 live births, according to a CNS News report.

Heaton tweeted this article, by adding: “Margaret Sanger gets her wish.” Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood and actually believed in ethnic cleansing.

I’m so proud of Patricia for having the courage to speak out against the evils of abortion!

Ah yes, the old Margaret Sanger was a racist, therefore Planned Parenthood hates black people approach. I thought after Herman Cain got shamed for using this that the conservatives might leave it alone.

Here is the quote, in context, that allows conservatives to use this line of attack:

Sanger, who was arrested several times in her efforts to bring birth control to women in the United States, set up her first clinic in Brooklyn in 1916. In the late 1930s, she sought to bring clinics to black women in the South, in an effort that was called the "Negro Project." Sanger wrote in 1939 letters to colleague Clarence James Gamble that she believed the project needed a black physician and black minister to gain the trust of the community.

Sanger says that a minister could debunk the notion, if it arose, that the clinics aimed to "exterminate the Negro population." She didn't say that she wanted to "exterminate" the black population. The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University says that this quote has "gone viral on the Internet," normally out of context, and it "doesn't reflect the fact that Sanger recognized elements within the black community might mistakenly associate the Negro Project with racist sterilization campaigns in the Jim Crow south, unless clergy and other community leaders spread the word that the Project had a humanitarian aim."

In other words, while Sanger was trying to deliver control of the female reproduction system to women, regardless of ethnicity or social standing, she was cognizant of the fact that she as a white woman could be seen as encouraging genocide among the black community.

Funny how seeing things in context pretty much changes everything about what the Right wants you to believe about them, don't you think?

Here's what else I find interesting about the conservative's love for this attempt to smear Planned Parenthood.

On the one hand they want to vilify Planned Parenthood for killing black babies, but then on the other hand they want to condemn black mothers for having so many babies in order to defraud Federal welfare programs out of millions of dollars, the so-called "Welfare Queen" scenario that Ronald Reagan made popular.

You would think that you could not argue one side while also arguing the other, but of course that's because you are not a Right Wing lunatic.

Speaking of lunatics, everybody's favorite terrible mother has been helping Levi with his court case, first by posting this video of Tripp laughing hysterically at the use of some mildly inappropriate language.

And then with this montage that Joey Junker put up of Tripp and Bristol playing house with the latest trial daddy.

The caption said "Miss my little fam just a few more weeks."

Now these on their own would not be a big deal, but placed alongside footage of Tripp using inappropriate language on the reality show, and Bristol kicking Gino Paoletti out of her car while assuring Tripp she would get him a new daddy, it certainly doesn't help.

I mean yes of course it DOES help, but it's certainly not her that it helps.

P.S. By the way Patricia Heaton is the reason I can't watch reruns of "Everybody Loves Raymond" anymore.

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Courtesy of the New York Post:

China’s military hackers are back, more brazen than ever. You can thank Edward Snowden.

A year ago, the Internet security firm Mandiant went public with what cyber-war watchers had known for some time: Unit 61398, a secret branch of the Chinese military, had been behind more than 1,000 cyber attacks on Western targets since 2006. Employing thousands of trained cyber warriors housed in a 12-story building in Shanghai — and backed by an enormous militia of part-time hackers — Unit 61398 had been waging a constant war on foreign banks, infrastructure, defense firms and government agencies, including one spectacular 2007 raid on the Pentagon that shut down 1,500 different Defense Department networks.

The resulting international sensation forced a reluctant President Obama to confront the Chinese premier on the issue. Beijing issued its usual furious denial — but the attacks stopped and Unit 61398 fell from the headlines.

But now we know they didn’t stop for long — and the West and the Obama administration are looking as ill-prepared and impotent as ever in dealing with the threat. China’s usual attacks on banks, weapons manufacturers and other juicy targets are now back to almost daily.

The first big attack came as early as late May, when Chinese hackers raided networks at top US defense firms, swiping information on more than two dozen weapons systems.  

In October, they hit the Federal Electoral Commission, suggesting the People’s Liberation Army is looking at ways to interfere in the US electoral process.

In December, they launched a series of attacks on the foreign ministries of five countries ahead of the G-20 summit, using an infected e-mail attachment that was supposed to provide updates on the Syria crisis. (Not as clever as Unit 61398’s similar 2011 attack, which used an e-mail promising nude photos of then French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s wife, Carla Bruni.)  

The latest outrage came Feb. 11, when evidence revealed Chinese cyber warriors had cracked open the Veterans of Foreign Wars computer system — itself not an obvious security threat, but part of what experts believe was a much broader attack on US military personnel records and files, both past and current.

Most striking is how bold the attacks have grown. The Chinese are apparently so confident we can’t (or won’t) stop them that they’ve gotten sloppy. Examining hacker codes left behind on US military and commercial networks, Internet-security engineers have been finding bits of code identical to Chinese commercial software sold for export by companies with contracts with the People’s Liberation Army.

What has emboldened the Chinese military hackers?

Well that would be Edward Snowden.

The Snowden defection back in June was a double gift for China’s hackers (as well as for Russian ones — the State Department even issued a warning that any cellphone or laptop brought to the Sochi Olympics would almost certainly be hacked there, and its passwords stolen).

The data Snowden brought with him to Hong Kong included a wealth of information about how our intelligence agencies fight and trace hackers, as well as on the NSA’s own hacking efforts in China.

Not only has the information that Snowden carried into China given them the blueprint for how our data gathering system work, but the fact that we have data gathering systems has allowed China, who hacks into American businesses to sell the information to Chinese businesses, to play the moral equivalency game.

If the US does it, how can they point the finger at us?

Here is more from a Newsweek article from November:

"Snowden couldn't have played better into China's strategy for protecting its cyber activities if he had been doing it on purpose,'' one American intelligence official says.

Snowden's revelations quickly veered away from what he called the NSA's "domestic surveillance state" to overseas espionage by the United States. After fleeing to Hong Kong, he provided local reporters with NSA documents and told them the United States was hacking major Chinese telecommunications companies, a Beijing university and the corporate owner of the region's most extensive fiber-optic submarine cable network. That information, government officials and industry experts say, is now used by the Chinese to deflect criticisms of their hacking, both in meetings with the administration and at cyber security conferences.

The activities of the two sides, however, are vastly different in scope and intent. The United States engages in widespread electronic espionage, but that classified information cannot legally be handed over to private industry. China is using its surveillance to steal trade secrets, harm international competitors and undermine American businesses.

In Snowden's zeal to be the next Daniel Ellsberg he has instead become perhaps the worst American traitor since Aldrich Ames.

If Snowden had released his information to journalists here in the country, and kept the stolen data within American borders, he could rightfully be called a hero.

But taking such sensitive material out of the country, and reporting on our data gathering process to nations with an adversarial relationship with America, Snowden has not only placed our state secrets in jeopardy, he has also irrevocably damaged out ability to deal with cyber attacks, or hold those who do them accountable.

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Courtesy of the Chicago Tribune:

As it continues to modify strict disciplinary policies in an effort to keep students in the classroom, Chicago Public Schools on Tuesday released data showing privately run charter schools expel students at a vastly higher rate than the rest of the district.

The data reveal that during the last school year, 307 students were kicked out of charter schools, which have a total enrollment of about 50,000. In district-run schools, there were 182 kids expelled out of a student body of more than 353,000.

That means charters expelled 61 of every 10,000 students while the district-run schools expelled just 5 of every 10,000 students.

It's the first time the district has released student suspension data for every school and also the first time it has released data on expulsions for charters. For charter critics, the numbers will buttress long-standing complaints that the privately run operations push out troubled students, allowing their schools to record stronger academic performances.

Sure must be easy to keep those test scores high when you can kick all of the disruptive or academically challenged kids to the curb whenever they threaten to bring them down.

In public schools expelling children is the last resort, and there are all kinds of modifications made to a struggling students education plan, or behavioral plan to help them to be successful.

I know I have helped to develop these, and implement these.

To put it bluntly, if I had been a student in a charter school it is highly likely that I would have been expelled in the tenth grade. If not before.

Instead I graduated with honors, and was considered a leader in my school.

You cannot turn behaviors around, and help make successful those who are a challenge, if your bottom line is a dollar sign.

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I am kind of a big fan of Seth Rogen's and have laughed long and hard at many of his movies.

However I was struck by how seriously he takes this topic.

As do I as I myself am a prime candidate for Alzheimer's and worry about it with some regularity.

I had my IQ tested when I was a young man and the number was rather embarrassingly high, however my ability to utilize it to do classwork or problem solve is greatly undermined by my terrible memory. Even as a young man I often dropped names, forgot dates, and had trouble remembering the sequence of events. Of course that has only grown worse with the passage of time.

So someday I may well benefit from the research done today concerning Alzheimer's disease and applaud Seth Rogen's commitment to the cause.

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Courtesy of Yahoo News:

A federal judge has struck down Texas' ban on gay marriage, but is leaving it in place pending a ruling by an appeals court later this year.

Judge Orlando Garcia issued a preliminary injunction on the ban Wednesday, then suspended his ruling. Two gay couples had challenged the state's constitutional amendment and a longstanding law banning gay marriage.

Under federal court rules, a judge may suspend a law if he or she believes the plaintiffs have a strong case and will suffer if the law is enforced.

Garcia said his injunction against Texas enforcing its ban will take effect once an appeals court has a chance to rule on the issue.

I think the tea leaves are indicating that the issue of gay marriage is headed to the Supreme Court.

I am not sure if we should view that as a good thing, or a terrible thing.

In my mind the Court would have no choice but to strike down a ban on gay marriage as unconstitutional, but then again my mind is not cluttered with the likes of Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, or Samuel Alito.

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Courtesy of Public Religion:

Among Americans who left their childhood religion and are now religiously unaffiliated, about one-quarter say negative teachings about or treatment of gay and lesbian people was a somewhat important (14%) or very important (10%) factor in their decision to disaffiliate. Among Millennials who no longer identify with their childhood religion, nearly one-third say that negative teachings about, or treatment of, gay and lesbian people was either a somewhat important (17%) or very important (14%) factor in their disaffiliation from religion.

And yet many Right Wing conservatives continue to believe that denying marriage rights to the LGBT community is going to benefit them in future elections, and Fundamentalists continue to stubbornly cling to an outdated view of morality simply because some desert dweller wrote about it in the Bible.

You know it is not often that you can actually watch the last desperate gasps of a prejudicial mindset playing out in real time.

And yet at this moment in time, that is exactly what we are witnessing.

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