My Thoughts on Changes

If I was religious, and for religious I mean dogmatic, churchgoing, smiling-backpatting-backstabber-handshaker, you know, one of those that give lip service to God while attending a social club with tax exemptions, and/or make a business of that lip service, I would really, really want to be Pat Robertson’s best friend. The man not only is a genius in marketing, he does have a direct phone line with the Highest… (By the way, I found his secret phone cabin but it is encoded with Pat’s retinal image… Damn!! -oops, sorry God…)

I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God; you just rejected him from your city. And don’t wonder why he hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for his help because he might not be there.

And no, I’m not a atheist.

A rose, by any other name, is still a rose… Right? And here we go back to the issue of “intent”. For the maker of this software the product is just a long–and marketable–spaghetti of code. The weight of “intent” (may I use the word “onus?”) is placed on the user. It is the user who is spying, not the maker of the software. The person being spied on may have an issue with this concept but I would place these kind of programs under the same umbrella as DVD decoders and other software used to copy copyrighted material. They are outlawed… Even though they argued that they don’t do the actual copying and the liable party is really the person doing it, the courts decided to snip the bud at the weakest link and that was the provider of the copying tools.
There is more ethical and moral weight in a person not wanting to be spied on than in the person wanting to spy on another.
I suggest the maker of “SpyMon” to keep their peace…
Spyware spat makes small print a big issue | Tech News on ZDNet

SpyMon logs keystrokes and takes screenshots. It sells for $26 and is advertised by RetroCoder as a tool to monitor kids, spouses or employees. Before downloading the application, RetroCoder asks customers to agree to a statement that forbids its use by a researcher for an antivirus or anti-spyware company, or business related to these.
The SpyMon download agreement continues with a legal condition: “If you do produce a program that will affect this software’s ability to perform its function, then you may have to prove in criminal court that you have not infringed this warning.”

Somebody in the administration will find a way to wriggle out of this one saying that ALL modern weapons are chemical based and therefore unavoidable their use in a war. Intent though is another matter. A kitchen knife could as easily be used to slice your tomatoes as it could be used to slice a living, breathing entity.
Did the US military use chemical weapons in Iraq? | csmonitor.com

“I heard the order being issued to be careful because white phosphorus was being used on Fallujah. In military slang this is known as Willy Pete. Phosphorus burns bodies, melting the flesh right down to the bone,” says one former US solider, interviewed by the documentary’s director, Sigfrido Ranucci.
“I saw the burned bodies of women and children. The phosophorous explodes and forms a plume. Who ever is within a 150 metre radius has no hope,” the former soldier adds.

“We’ll do it under the law”–of the country where the prison is…
“We do not torture”–but let them do it; we are there to record the information obtained…
Sometimes I think people in power believe everybody else outside that sphere are idiots (the rest of the time I just feel it…)
Bush Defends CIA’s Clandestine Prisons

Brushing aside international criticism of the CIA-run prisons set up in eight countries, Bush said that the nation is at war with an enemy “that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again. And so, you bet, we’ll aggressively pursue them, but we’ll do so under the law.” Bush, who spoke to reporters during a brief visit to the capital of Panama, also asserted, “We do not torture.”

…”What was he thinking?”, give him some credit. The man may be corrupt and Pinochet’s “Mini-Me” wannabe but that’s never a metaphor for stupidity. All bets are still open, but, if I were the president of Peru, I would do some soul searching among the military brass before extraditing Fujimori back into Peru.
Caveat lector. I hope I’m wrong and I don’t have to write a follow-up with a “I told you so…” as the title…
World News Article | Reuters.co.uk

Fujimori, who had been living in Japan as a fugitive since 2000, was arrested at the Marriott Hotel in Santiago. In a statement when he arrived on Sunday he said he had come to Chile on his way back to Peru to run for president next year.

Only the Royals are missing…. I could almost hear the countdown to Martial Law, State of Siege and curfews. Inevitable, if the curve of current events keeps climbing, I dare to say.
Now, talk about symbols and imagine THAT happening in the cradle of civil liberties… Scary, indeed.
World Opinion Roundup — Jefferson Morley’s Review of Opinions and Commentary on News Around the World – washingtonpost.com

“A country which prides itself as the fatherland of the humans right and the sanctuary of a generous social model shows, in the eyes of all, that it is incapable of ensuring dignified living conditions for young French people,” said the editors of Le Monde (in French).

Perhaps, the moment the U.S. drops the expectation of finding beady eyes, eager supplicants waiting for free handouts, of finding beggars knocking at their door, whereby all that is said from a higher-than-thou vantage point is accepted without question, perhaps then, the time to be surprised by these kind of outcomes will be over…
Learn to really treat people as equals, specially if “trade” is the keyword of the day, and then a real dialogue can be established.
Bush Departs Without a Deal

The United States has encountered increasing problems in selling its free-trade agenda in recent years, as many countries in the region have voiced objections to what they say is unilateral U.S. foreign policy.

Only problem is that, for most in Latin America, the only way to achieve access to “luxuries” like a refrigerator is to break away from the status quo and the only way to achieve that is through radical ideas. The opposite is conformity and acceptance of poverty. Look down, pull your pants down and bend over.
Heck!, at least the Hindus are honest and they’ve had a system of castes for millennia. They are very overt about it, even though change is blurring the lines. The hypocrisy of using a covert caste system in Occident is quite repugnant.
Bush, Chavez or Refrigerators?

As Marta Lagos, head of Latinobarometro put it, “people in Latin America are no longer interested in buying the dreams offered by extreme ideologies.'” Rather, she said, “they want to buy refrigerators.”

The day some of these assholes realize that a shoe that fits one person may not fit another perhaps that clean slate will open their collective minds to novel ideas. You cannot open one door to free trade (inward, into S.America) while closing the door to their output. In my book, that isn’t free trade, it is arrogance and big brother upper-handedness.
Those state run agencies that South America, collectively, gave away to multinationals backed-up by loan sharks like the IMF, should have never left state control. They were, yes, perhaps inefficient in many ways but they were a source of jobs for the people and the money earned was spent within those states thus lubricating the economy. It wasn’t perfect, never was, but it worked. Now the situation, in many places, is dire.
Herald.com | 11/03/2005 | Latin summit likely to be tough on Bush

Many in Latin America are suspicious of free-market reforms espoused by Bush. In the 1990s, governments lowered trade barriers and privatized state firms, with little to show for their efforts. Some economists and U.S. officials argue those reforms were patchily implemented.

…. Never play as they expect you. Now that you have the cow where you wanted it, milk it!
Harry Reid sparks a dramatic Senate standoff – Tom Curry – MSNBC.com

“The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all about, how this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions,” Reid said before making the motion which sent the Senate into a closed-door session.