BoomFlag

It’s official: Pluto is no longer a planet. It’s a “dwarf planet”, along with former asteroid Ceres and former planet contender Xena.

The backlash has been fairly predictable, as well as amusing. Consider this bumper sticker:

Or this billboard:

Or even this t-shirt (“Will all planets please step forward? … Not so fast, Pluto.”)

And, predictably, a milk carton:

Regardless, it’s fun to watch the solar system get re-defined, and wonder how our kids will perceive it as they’re taught these new definitions and theories in school.

Raed Jarrar is an Iraqi who lives in the United States and was waiting for his airplane flight home from Washington DC to California. He was approached by three law enforcement officers and an employee of JetBlue (the airline he was using) and asked to remove a t-shirt he was wearing.

The shirt said “We will not be silent” in Arabic:

He protested because he didn’t have another shirt to wear (it was in his checked baggage) and he felt it was his Constitutional right to wear a t-shirt with a slogan– even one in Arabic. The agents were unimpressed, refusing even to believe that’s what it said. The English translation is immediately below the Arabic script, but they argued that it could just as well say something threatening. They admitted they didn’t read Arabic, nor did they have a translator handy, so they simply assumed it was some dark, malicious saying.

Jarrar agreed to wear his shirt inside-out if they could prove to him that there’s a law prohibiting the wearing of shirts with Arabic sayings. Of course there is no such law, but the men persisted and eventually Jarrar agreed to wear a shirt that said “New York” from a nearby kiosk.

Adding this incident to other recent ones– like the man who was removed from a plane last week for saying an Islamic prayer, or the two Middle-Eastern men who were refused entrance to a plane because they “looked threatening”– and a very ugly picture is being drawn. People of Middle Eastern descent are being singled out and unfairly identified with terrorism.

Personally, I’m going to buy a shirt with Arabic on it.

“Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we’re terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists’ actions, and increase the effects of their terror.”

— Bruce Schneier

Chalk up another sleazy business practice: they send you a check (for three bucks?!) and if you cash it, you’ve automatically signed up for their idiotic service.

No thanks, chumps.

A friend of mine just called because he’s helping one of his clients with their web site, and their domain just vanished from the internet. Apparently it was registered with a company called 1DNI, and they’re not returning phone calls or e-mail. He’s very frustrated because he can’t do anything to help his client, and 1DNI is completely non-responsive.

Out of curiosity I checked their web site and was amused to see a little quote in their page header:

I guess they have a lot of customers who are angry at them, so they encourage you to remember the Bible and restrain that anger.

Bush speaks to Congress on March 19, 2003:

Bush speaks to reporters on August 21, 2006:

Which is it, Mr. President?

Two men with dark skin boarded a plane last Wednesday to fly to Manchester, England.

After some nervous shuffling and whispering, many of the passengers left their seats and returned to the boarding area, refusing to fly with the pair. Someone overheard the men speaking a foreign language that “sounded like Arabic”. The men were also apparently dressed in jackets (admittedly a bit unseasonable in August) and one woman said she heard “something that alarmed” her. The airline escorted the men off the plane, seized their passports, and prevented them from taking the flight.

They were interrogated for several hours, and then their passports were returned and they took a different flight (later in the week) to England. Apparently nothing was amiss.

It’s official. The terrorists have won.

If there’s any doubt whether we have gone completely and totally overboard with our “security procedures”, this example demonstrates admirably how absolutely fanatic some people have become. It’s not enough that the government act like idiots with their non-sensical screening procedures; now we have common citizens refusing to fly because someone else on the plane looks suspicious. And– horror of horrors– speaks a language that “sounded like Arabic”.

It no longer even matters if a terrorist group wants to attack us– they don’t need to do anything at all to ground a plane or close a building. They merely watch (in infinite amusement, I’m sure) as our government and its terrified citizens do the job for them. It’s tragic that we’ve come to this point: a point where the color of your skin, or the language you speak, is enough to condemn you as a terrorist.

For reasons Laralee and I still don’t really understand, the public schools in this area don’t teach multiplication tables to the kids. Instead of having the students memorize multiplication tables from one to ten– like I remember doing in Mrs. Schroer’s third grade class– they encourage “grouping”. That means when you’re multiplying, say, four by eight, you draw four groups of eight objects on the paper and count the total. It’s great if you’re just starting to learn the concept of multiplication, but it doesn’t make much sense if you understand how it works and just want to get 32 without drawing and counting.

So, being the conscientious parents we are, we decided that if Alex and Kyra can memorize their tables (up to ten times ten, which is really all they need) we’ll give them a reward. We’ve been working on it during the summer, but admittedly we haven’t been very consistent about it. Thus, school will start in a few days and we feel like we need to finish this little project.

Thinking it would help if they had a way to test themselves, I looked around the web for some fun multiplication programs. To my surprise, there really aren’t any that are (1) simple, and (2) free. Schools buy software, sure, but it’s fairly complicated and of course costs money. I guess I expected to find all kinds of funny kids’ math programs for the taking, but it’s just not so.

Luckily I’m a programmer.

I just sat down for an hour and whipped out a terribly simple (and somewhat boring) little web application that picks twenty random multiplication questions, prompts for an answer, and shows a little history of their work. It’s nothing magical or special, but hopefully it’ll give them the practice they need.

La and I have been playing in the Grass Roots Ultimate league for seven years. For the first time, our team won the league tournament! Yesterday’s eight-hour ultimate marathon included wacky weather (constant drizzling rain in the morning, hot sun around noon, and more rain in the evening) but our playing was absolutely top-notch. We finished fourth in the regular season, but completely dominated in the tournament. None of our opponents scored even half as many points as we did.

(It actually reminded me of my UMR days, when I hosted one or two ultimate tournaments a year and my team absolutely crushed everyone else.)

It was a bucketload of fun to play with these guys the past few months, and certainly a blast to finish the season on top.

Today, the U.S. District Court handed down a ruling regarding the NSA wiretapping lawsuit– and in a nutshell, it categorically denied all facets of the Bush administration’s defense.

As near as I can tell, the court decision covers the following (and probably more):

1) It negated the administration’s invocation of “state secrets” to prevent evidence (and the lawsuit) from being brought to light. The court says all relevant information– including the knowledge that the wiretapping occurred– has been exposed, and thus there’s no reason to conceal it for national security reasons.

2) Warrantless wiretapping violates the Fourth Amendment. Period.

3) It also violates the First Amendment, apparently because it “chills” the expression of free speech since American citizens don’t know whether the government is listening to their conversations.

4) Since warrantless eavesdropping is unconstitutional (see #2 and #3), Congress cannot enact legislation to make it legal. This would effectively kill the Specter bill. I realize that Congress can make laws that *later* face challenges on constitutional grounds, but once something is declared unconstitutional, Congress cannot intentionally create laws to support it.

5) The President cannot act beyond the law or the Constitution, even in times of war, and even when dealing with vague “terrorist” threats to national security.

6) Perhaps most extraordinarily, the court issued an injunction preventing the administration– and the NSA– from continuing to perform warrantless wiretaps. For the reasons above, it declared that the NSA program directly violates FISA *and* the Constitution, and must be discontinued immediately.

Now, this doesn’t make the problem go away, since the administration can continue performing wiretaps at will… but under this court order, they must do it through the FISA court, which has been established as the proper mechanism for this sort of thing.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this, at least in my mind, is that with this decision it’s made clear that Bush, Gonzales, and various other leaders who initiated and directed the NSA program are apparently guilty of criminal activity. They broke the law– that much was clear before, although the administration quickly rattled off a list of reasons why it wasn’t really breaking the law. Now, the constitutionality (is that a word?) of their actions has been brought to question, and the court has ruled on it.

Quoting Glenn Greenwald:

What next? Of course the administration will appeal the decision, and I imagine it will float all the way to the top and end up on the Supreme Court docket soon. But with their earlier decision in Hamden v Rumsfeld, it’s clear that the Court is taking a dim view of the expansive executive powers being claimed by Bush.

I wonder if criminal charges will ever be brought. I doubt it, of course, but it begs the question: is the President above the law? As a “common citizen” of this country, I could hardly go around breaking a law, claiming I wasn’t *really* breaking the law, and waiting for legislation (as the Specter bill would have done) to magically make my activities legal. If I can’t do it, why can Bush? Gonzales?

I’m sure I’m oversimplifying the court’s findings, as I’m no lawyer, and I’m sure there’s some legal sleight-of-hand that will exonerate Bush and his gang. But this is certainly a major win for those (like me) who want an end to the endless power play of the executive branch.