So, this happened tonight at the second night of the Democratic National Committee's convention in Charlotte, NC.
To put it all into context, there was a lot of hullaballoo about the fact that the DNC's platform, voted on and passed on the first night of the convention, differed greatly from the 2008 platform in leaving out "God" in a section where God was previously acknowledged and on the matter of Israel's security -- one of the U.S.'s strongest allies.
The language that was voted on included a declaration that Jerusalem "is and will remain the capital of Israel. The parties have agreed that Jerusalem is a matter for final status negotiations. It should remain an undivided city accessible to people of all faiths." Such language was in the 2008 platform, but the 2012 platform only made reference to a "commitment to Israel's security."
Also, it included a call for a government that "gives everyone willing to work hard the change to make the most of their God-given potential."
As you can see, they did not have their ducks in line when they took that vote. The change required 2/3 approval by all delegates. Anthony Villaraigosa (mayor of Los Angeles and convention chair) looked almost as if he was trying to convey a *hint, hint, wink, wink* to the crowd as he repeated his call for the votes not once, but twice before making a wholly indefensible decision that the "ayes" had it.
Reports coming in from Twitter suggested either that the "nos" were in the majority or that the vote was too close to call. Some delegates are even questioning whether a quorum was present to make the vote official.
Had the party any integrity, Villaraigosa would have admitted that it was too close to call and requested a roll call vote. Because the party's platform is meant to be represent the guiding principles under which all party members will campaign. What goes into that platform matters most to grassroots political organizations. The delegates who represent party politics on the local level are bound to defend that platform to the people they engage, for better or worse.
The message the Democrats sent tonight was not just about their views or contentions on foreign policy or religion, though they are...interesting, I suspect, to many. In fact, I would say those revelations are subservient to a greater issue.
No, the greater Voila! moment was the one where convention watchers across the country witnessed a political party's attitude toward the value of a vote.
Showing posts with label Very Bad Things. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Very Bad Things. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Friday, August 31, 2012
What fresh hell is this? The administrative subpoena.
Wired's Threat Level blog this week had a great article on the rise in the federal government's use of the administrative subpoena in prosecuting the wars on drugs and terror, two initiatives that have arguably expanded well beyond their initial mandate.
An administrative subpoena is kind of like a search warrant-lite. It is an official demand that the recipient produce information, records, data, etc. It does not require a judge's review or approval or a showing of probable cause, and it is not executed by law enforcement. A subpoena is free from the meatier restrictions of the Fourth Amendment, but it is subject to that amorphous legal standard of "reasonableness," which, despite precedent guidelines like "narrowly tailored" and "relevant," means little more than what the judge reviewing the challenge wants it to mean that day.
I won't rehash the Wired article because I think David Kravets did a fine job of reporting and contextualizing the facts, which are sufficiently disturbing with their depiction of government's Stretch Armstrong-like creeping reach. But I cannot emphasize enough how corrosive these practices have become to our Fourth Amendment rights and to the bulwarks of checks and balances.
There seems to be a domino effect of administrative subpoenas that allow the executive branch to go on fishing expeditions, which have historically been detested by courts for their intrusiveness into private lives, even at the risk of not prosecuting a guilty person. But that's the beauty of our system: a man is innocent until proven guilty. And it's a hard thing to prove. It should be a hard thing to prove; not because we want criminals to get away, but because we don't want innocent people socially rebuked or incarcerated.
Instead, we're seeing an odd willingness from courts to abdicate sole responsibility of defending the Constitution to Congress and the executive. I'm not advocating a rash of "activist judges," and I realize that under today's very hostile political climate that it is a fine line for the judiciary to walk, but I do expect the courts to have the fortitude to call a spade a spade.
However, the legislature takes the attitude that its job ends after the laws have been signed on this matter. And now that both courts and Congress have washed their hands of the matter, requiring only the illusion of accountability, the executive administrative and law enforcement agencies are left with carte blanche power. I'm not so cynical as to believe that every bureaucrat or police officer sets out with mustache-twirling intent. But it's not just a platitude that absolute power breeds absolute corruption.
From the perspective of a law-abiding citizen who enjoys her civil rights, this is going to get much worse. Have you ever tried to put a cat back into a bag?
House rules.
An administrative subpoena is kind of like a search warrant-lite. It is an official demand that the recipient produce information, records, data, etc. It does not require a judge's review or approval or a showing of probable cause, and it is not executed by law enforcement. A subpoena is free from the meatier restrictions of the Fourth Amendment, but it is subject to that amorphous legal standard of "reasonableness," which, despite precedent guidelines like "narrowly tailored" and "relevant," means little more than what the judge reviewing the challenge wants it to mean that day.
I won't rehash the Wired article because I think David Kravets did a fine job of reporting and contextualizing the facts, which are sufficiently disturbing with their depiction of government's Stretch Armstrong-like creeping reach. But I cannot emphasize enough how corrosive these practices have become to our Fourth Amendment rights and to the bulwarks of checks and balances.
There seems to be a domino effect of administrative subpoenas that allow the executive branch to go on fishing expeditions, which have historically been detested by courts for their intrusiveness into private lives, even at the risk of not prosecuting a guilty person. But that's the beauty of our system: a man is innocent until proven guilty. And it's a hard thing to prove. It should be a hard thing to prove; not because we want criminals to get away, but because we don't want innocent people socially rebuked or incarcerated.
Instead, we're seeing an odd willingness from courts to abdicate sole responsibility of defending the Constitution to Congress and the executive. I'm not advocating a rash of "activist judges," and I realize that under today's very hostile political climate that it is a fine line for the judiciary to walk, but I do expect the courts to have the fortitude to call a spade a spade.
However, the legislature takes the attitude that its job ends after the laws have been signed on this matter. And now that both courts and Congress have washed their hands of the matter, requiring only the illusion of accountability, the executive administrative and law enforcement agencies are left with carte blanche power. I'm not so cynical as to believe that every bureaucrat or police officer sets out with mustache-twirling intent. But it's not just a platitude that absolute power breeds absolute corruption.
From the perspective of a law-abiding citizen who enjoys her civil rights, this is going to get much worse. Have you ever tried to put a cat back into a bag?
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Anastasia Steele and the Bondage of Bad Writing
I had heard about E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey, a New York Times bestseller and perhaps, also a cultural phenomenon. But proponents and detractors lost me immediately at the tagline “Twilight fan fiction,” and I never felt a desire to read it. Then a good friend of mine bought me all three books for my birthday with the plea that she wanted someone to talk about them with.
So, I read Fifty Shades of Grey and its two sequels, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed. And I read them with an open mind, conscious of my friend’s desire to discuss them.
And I did not like them.
Perhaps it’s my own dark shadows from a past of emotional eating, but after I finished reading, I had the very same feeling of empty ickiness that always outweighs the fleeting satisfaction of pure consumption.
The writing and characters
For being main characters, you’d think
the words "penis" and/or “vagina” would pop up
at least once in any of the three books.
Nope.
The writing is bad. In fact, I would probably use terms like atrocious, cringe-worthy, and god-awful to describe it, which would be three synonyms more than the author could come up with than the words she used to describe Christian Grey’s personality.
E.L. James has woven her tale in a two-dimensional world in which her characters are “mercurial” and “infuriating” with smiles that “don’t reach [their] eyes” and pants that “hang on [their] hips” in a way that creates amazing sensations “…there.” The descriptions are insipid, the dialogue is uninspired, and the prose is clunky. It all makes for very poor character creations.
E.L. James has woven her tale in a two-dimensional world in which her characters are “mercurial” and “infuriating” with smiles that “don’t reach [their] eyes” and pants that “hang on [their] hips” in a way that creates amazing sensations “…there.” The descriptions are insipid, the dialogue is uninspired, and the prose is clunky. It all makes for very poor character creations.
Insisting your characters are intelligent and attractive is not the same as describing them thusly. Either the reader is lazy and just takes the author at her word, ignoring later events that might call that assertion into question, or the reader is continually frustrated by the inherent contradictions.
For example, we’re told that the female protagonist Anastasia Steele is self-assured, confident, and taking control of her sexual relationships, but her constant need for reassurance belies her complete insecurity about this sexual relationship and her value to her partner. You cannot paint your character as a duck and then set it to barking dismissing the contradiction as a merely “mercurial” trait. Contradiction alone does not make a character “complex” or “multi-faceted;” it makes the character malformed and exposes the writer as an amateur.
Also, I was left wondering if E.L. James has ever met a man. I say this only because it is painfully obvious that she cannot write men, and I often found myself picturing a bronze-haired butch lesbian when I was reading Christian's dialogue. Men and women do not inherently think alike or speak alike. Moreover, characters in a novel should each have a unique voice, so it was very distracting to re-read passages to determine who was speaking during those "emotional" discussions.
The relationship and the sex
Anastasia has a super-human ability to orgasm every time,
on command, often after a jack-hammering.
College would have been a lot more fun
had I been blessed with her wünder-snatch.
I’ll preface this by saying everyone has their kinks, and God bless ‘em. I have nothing against sexual relations between knowledgeable, consenting adults. I do internally wrestle with the psychology of what might be considered the harder side of BDSM – namely the sexual gratification got by inflicting serious pain or injury (e.g. semi-permanent to permanent marking, scarring and blood-letting) and subjugation based on embarrassment and humiliation – because I can’t seem to wrap my brain around how those acts stemming from purely negative emotion and motivation can be considered mentally or physically healthy. Aside: If you want to open a dialogue about this with me, I’m more than happy to listen and discuss. But, I’m not going to wag a finger at anyone for his or her selection of 31 flavours.
My revulsion to the relationship between Anastasia and Christian Grey is borne of the horror I have to Anastasia shrugging her shoulders at Christian’s darker side outside the bedroom, continually excusing his bad behaviour because she’d rather have a stalker now hoping he turns into a boyfriend later.
And lucky for her…oh yeah, he never really changes. At least, not in the way that would make this relationship an equal partnership in love. Christian is still very much the control freak, monitoring her comings and goings, her interactions with friends, and by the end of the third book, the reader is expected to relinquish their own autonomy along with the protagonist with a collective dreamy sigh of, “That’s my Fifty.”
More than anything, this is what made me stabby.
This is classic abused-woman syndrome, and it doesn’t touch any of the physical violence that happens in the playroom. The sexual sadism is gray, like the main character, and only goes truly black in one catalyzing moment. There, Anastasia accurately declares that it is “fucked up” and disappears from Christian’s life for a millisecond to rationalize his behaviour on her own before going back to him after he vaguely promises to “try” to give her “more.”
Thanks for that. Girl power fist pump.
The sex itself is not really that scandalous. It’s also not that titillating. The descriptions aim at artful, but land somewhere between technical and cheesy with the author’s limited vocabulary and her reliance on Shift+F7. There’s dominance, submission, bondage, spanking, flogging, and sensory deprivation, but they all get short shrift in way of detail. In fact, the reader either has to have an imagination already in high gear or must do a little Googling to build a fantasy around the sexual encounters, putting this book squarely into erotica-light, along with V.C. Andrews, according to my scale.
Bottom line
You want a quick and easy read heavily peppered with erections and panting? By all means, read Fifty Shades of Grey. If you want more from your summer reads – emotional power, rock-hard realism, whip-smart dialogue, intellectual tickling – find a new playroom.
Addendum: I just got a few texts from my friend that got me the books. I hope she knows I'm not angry about reading them. I like reading, and I love taking recommendations from friends, plowing through the pages even if I don't ultimately enjoy the story.
Addendum: I just got a few texts from my friend that got me the books. I hope she knows I'm not angry about reading them. I like reading, and I love taking recommendations from friends, plowing through the pages even if I don't ultimately enjoy the story.
There is certainly a long list of reasons why Fifty Shades sucks as an attempt at literature, but I don't mean to convey that this trilogy is completely devoid of value. For some, this book can be a satisfying form of escapism: a non-threatening, imaginative foray into previously untested sexual waters; a conversation centerpiece for a greater discussion about sex and relationships; a quickie thrill.
It's not créme brulée. It's Jell-O. Jell-O can never be créme brulée. But sometimes you just want Jell-O. Ain't nothin' wrong with that.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
No health insurance? No problem!
Living without health insurance is always a bit of an adventure. It's not pleasant, but I'm not on the bandwagon of demanding government-provided coverage because I am inherently mistrustful of the government and if this primary cycle has highlighted anything for me, it's that I definitely don't want my health (physical, mental, or sexual) being bandied about like a political football when only crazy people are playing the game.
The jokes just write themselves, folks.
But politics is not the point of my post.
No, I've been fighting an ailment that could quickly be cured by a $4 prescription if I had prescription coverage. But not having prescription coverage, I have to get more creative. More Asian.
So I was walking in my neighbourhood this week when I fortuitously ran into a woman who is an herbalist. She's also Chinese. I suspect she raises mogwai to sing to her, too, because in my fantasy, everyone lives up to their 80s movie stereotypes.
After some pleasantries about life, I told her my predicament and asked if she had any suggestions or remedies. In fact, she did and she sent me on my way with a recipe and some herbs and roots to make a magical panacea! I practically skipped home. Who needs insurance when you have the healing powers of mogwai?
Can't you see the ancient healing wisdom in these eyes?
I'm sure you know that phrase, "The cure is worse than the disease." I'm no linguistics expert, but I'm pretty sure the birth of that saying came from someone who turned to gremlin medicine when they couldn't afford their co-pay.
I noticed that the root powder had a certain aroma to it, but the smell became Sex Panther-esque after the whole thing came together.
That is the smell of health and wellness, my dear.
The taste is just as awful. Upon first sip, I promptly spit the contents into the sink, guzzled 32oz. of water, and resolved never to do that again.
And then it hit me: it's either this...or certain death.
Mmmmmmaybe that's a little dramatic.
But being branded one of America's uninsured millions, all of whom according to the modern media are surely doomed to lose limbs, expire yards from the ER, or be crippled under the weight of enormous debt (HA! Jokes on you, health care industry, law school beat you to that one!), I began to weigh my options.
So, now I'm voluntarily water-boarding myself with putrid Chinese herb tea twice daily. I throw back my head, open my throat and pour, praying to ALLTHEDEITIES that nothing hits my taste buds. Then I shudder, let a primal scream escape, take a breath, and do it all over again until the concoction is gone.
I think I'm already feeling some relief. Score one for Eastern medicine, I suppose. But honestly, I wouldn't be shocked if my cure emerges as a product of sheer willpower at this point; the drive not to give in and scrape together an extra $100 for an urgent care visit and the overwhelming desire to put myself through this tea ceremony from hell as few times as possible.
I'm going to stick with the nasty for a few more days to see if it works.
Because it's either this...or certain death.
Monday, June 6, 2011
America's Yo-Yo Diet
This economy is rebounding like a champ.
Half of last month's new jobs came from a single employer:
Thursday, June 2, 2011
pen·al·ty • noun /ˈpenltē/
President Obama's Solicitor General finally spoke truth this week about the administration's healthcare reform law when he suggested that people who wanted to avoid the mandate could do so by choosing to earn less money.
Let that sink in for a moment.
"It’s a penalty on earning a certain amount of income and self insuring."
Just so we're clear, the government's STATED aim here is to discourage people from helping themselves as they would by seeking higher education and well-paying jobs, and choosing insurance plans that fit their needs and the needs of their families.
Are you pissed off yet?
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Topsy Turvy World
Dear Westboro Baptist "Church":
What does it say about your organization when the KKK has the moral high ground?"It's the soldier that fought and died and gave them that right to free speech," said Dennis LaBonte, the self-described "Imperial Wizard" of the KKK group that he said he formed several years ago.
Who needs a drink?
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Friday Round-Up
This has been a week from hell, which is why The Daily Special suddenly was not so daily nor special. So, I bring to you my Friday Round-Up -- a bunch of things I might have posted had I been joyfully assing around in class rather than making my school earn every penny of its outrageous tuition. Enjoy!
- Head over to The Top 13 Albums Project and submit your nominations for the top 13 albums of the decade. I will be posting my list here soon for you all to consider and copy. DEADLINE is October 2!
- I have a naughty habit of going to great lengths to get TinySpecialFriend (she loves little people/midgets, whichever you prefer) to crack up in our Evidence class. The effort came back to bite me in the ass this week when I found this little DIY gadget on the interwebz and we both had our heads on the desks crying with silent laughter, trying not to get caught. It's what you get for the guy who has everything...including foreskin.
- For anyone looking to stock up on unique deadly weapons, I direct you to a list of 7 items you won't believe are actually legal.
- Emails From Crazy People is a great site, but I just came across this gem of a "Not A Stalker" letter, and it reminds me a little of Dimitri, the perfect guy and his phone message. These guys know how to charm a lady.
- This Durex commercial was banned in Europe. I just love the squeaky sound effects.
Friday, September 4, 2009
The Daily Special 9.4.09
Happy Friday, everyone!
- Congratulations to "Paul" who swam from Catalina to Palos Verdes overnight! I admire this guy because I've wanted to get into marathon swimming for a while.
- I'd been seeing this mentioned a lot, so my curiosity took over and I was thoroughly squicked. Uhm...yay for the environment, but no. Just...no.
- Speaking of idiotic products...I now know just what to get that special guy for his birthday.
- Give it up for the Sunset Strip! Who's with me for the StripCrawl on Tuesday night?
- Aaaand, this is what I'll be watching all weekend. Love me some Ari Gold.
Monday, August 31, 2009
The Daily Special 8.31.09
OK, gonna try to get back to the daily routine here. Fun tidbits below. Enjoy!
- Since when are English muffins considered junk food? And P.S., taxing breakfast is not going to make me skinny.
- The ultimate recycling: illegal home conversion.
- This is why the terrorists hate us. Ugh...even I hate us after reading that headline.
- Look ma! My internet obsession is actually good for me!
- Who doesn't love a foreign prankster?
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Power Tripping
I don't trust our government to efficiently screw in a light bulb, so I certainly don't think it should have anything to do with policing the internet. But that's just what Congress wants to allow the president to do.
The President. One man. With the power to control our access to information and communication. Think it'll never happen?
First and foremost, I want to know exactly what constitutes a "cybersecurity emergency." I can not think of a single doomsday scenario that would justify turning any region of the United States into Burma, even temporarily.
This is bad news.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
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