Ruminations, Haunts, and Errors

Over the past couple months I’ve been keeping tabs on revelations surrounding the administration’s shady domestic surveillance efforts, and while I’m glad to see the story didn’t fade away under pressure from the right-wing noise machine and pop-culture fluff, I can’t help but be irritated that the establishment Fourth Estate hasn’t done it’s duty to call bullshit more forcefully on several aspects…

• Some like Laura Bush try the soft sell while cretins like Karl Rove take the road that anyone who opposes the program must hate America and want to aid the terrorists, but such sophistry can’t disguise that “It’s only aimed at the Bad Guys” is a canard and fallacious. Only an anarchist would argue that protecting the public from terrorists isn’t a legitimate government role, and only a far-fringe libertarian would argue that it’s impossible for the government to present probable cause for clandestine surveillance. But history has shown that governments can’t be trusted to keep it that way, hence our long, proud history of requiring agencies not just to know their suspicions are true but to prove to an independent authority that they are well-founded. That, more than anything about our flag or land or culture or whatever else a jingoist might want to claim, is what truly makes Us better than Them.
• Dubya and his minions keep talking about the ‘war’ we’re in, as if repetition will make it true and thus justify our ceding of various liberties in the name of The Cause. But is it true? Certainly there are factions out there that despise our government and society, and groups of them are working to cause us harm. But is that war or just an aspect of how humans have dealt with each other over the past several millenia? If it’s as different a struggle as they claim, then do they deserve the full set of ‘war powers’ designed to cope with previous types of wars? Maybe changes in communications, travel, and munitions technology have altered the risk equation enough so that the cumbersome machinations envisioned by the Framers need reexamination, but such debate is the prerogative of the Congress and people of the several states, not the edit of the President. Moreover, I think the principle will remain that in times of clear, specific, imminent danger the public does not abandon its collective liberties but instead grants (via ‘war powers’) a sort of pre-emptive pardon to those who cross the traditional lines of the state’s police powers in the course of good-faith efforts to protect the public–but such leeway is not without limits.

Perhaps the upcoming Senate hearings on these matters will help nudge the press into doing their jobs more forcefully, although I doubt it.

How does anyone buy a house without going insane? (Well, I was actually warned, but still…) I thought I had a pretty good handle on the house-buying process, but nothing I’d heard from friends or family was full preparation for the insanity of actually making an offer. Finding a place that made us say ‘yes!’ on a Saturday afternoon after two months of looking was enough, but then the madness began:

• 7pm Saturday: Agent calls to say offers have already been made and rejected. No dawdling!
• House dominates talk over martinis and Buca di Beppo. Do we really like house? Yep, but let’s sleep on it to be sure then take one last check to see if there’s a reason not to bid
• Sunday morning: drive around neighborhood again, still like house and environs. Norwood Park ain’t Lakeview, but no matter, let’s do it!
• Sunday afternoon: call agent to say we want to offer. Hurrah!
• What, there’s more right now? We have to meet? And sign stuff?
• Early evening at agent’s office. Wow, that’s a lot of stuff to initial.
• We need a big check? Right now?
• And a lawyer? By Friday?
• Drive back home, realize huge financial commitment to dominate our lives for a while. What have we done??
• Dinnertime: maybe this is it! Great place, the timing of everything will be perfect, the search process is over…
• 10pm: Outbid! Game over, after all that rushing about. Can’t decide yet whether it’s an opportunity missed…or a bullet dodged

Wow, what a 30-hour whirlwind. Is every offer like this, or just the first one? Hopefully it won’t take another two months to find out.

Early in the day I came across a nice rundown of the top ten most beautiful science experiments. An impressive list, albeit the beauty is perhaps of an esoteric nature (nifty animated graphics aside!).

It got better a little later, as over at the AAS meeting was revealed a new Hubble image of sidewalk-astronomy favorite M42 sure to impress the intelligentsia and masses alike:

Wow, stunning! Who needs absolute answers to everything when there’s stuff like that to enjoy…and explore!

With the Alito confirmation hearings in full swing this week, seems a good excuse to finally clear out some ruminations on the laws and judiciary of our fine republic…

• Over the past not-quite-year I think I’ve gained a better understanding of how the judiciary fits into the American system than I have at any time since learning the basics back in junior high school. From musings on the style and legacy of late Chief Justice Rehnquist to considerations of recent rulings to the circus created by not one but two open seats in the same year, what it means to interpret the law has become more clear. The courts must be active (yes, maybe even activist!) in trying to mediate among the interests of not only an ever-changing society but also statutes and treaties that, as the products of people (committees of people, at that!), inevitably end up with conflicts and ambiguities. In many ways the courts take whatever schemes the other two branches attempt to put on the public and try to make something sensible and workable out in the real world; their work is thus far more political and less clear-cut than that of haughty and remote arbiters of punishment and arcane legal technicalities presented in grade-school textbooks.

  The political nature is most apparent at the Supreme Court. A number of commentators have noted that the Framers, probably deliberately, put the staffing of the Court in the hands of the two more overtly political branches. However, the Court’s political nature is more inherent; cases easily decided by clear facts and existing law are handled at the district court level, and the appellate level catches the major errors, so the Supreme Court is left with cases that involve areas where the law is conflicting, vague, or nonexistent. Hence, the justices must make decisions with little more than their own ideas on the nature of society and government…politics in a nutshell.

• Perhaps we’d be a lot better off if we just openly admitted the political nature of SCOTUS, rather than continuing the public farce of senators pretending that such concerns aren’t germane to confirmation (kinda sad when the extreme activists on both sides are more honest about the situation than the great political Center). One good way would be to amend the Consitution to place term limits on justices. Eighteen years would be good, as it would allow justices the security to take the long view yet also ensure that every president gets at least two chances per term to tussle with the Senate over the Court’s makeup. Such measured turnover would keep the justiced buffered from short-term politics but still keep the court responsive to generational shift. Yet I think the greatest benefit might simply be that eliminating the fate-of-a-generation political theatrics would spare the nation some angst.
• From patent and IP laws divorced from a realistic sense of how people develop and use ideas to
  security laws and regulations nowhere near as effective as they are intrusive, the U.S. government is proving right the many pundits who are fond of pointing out that stupid laws aren’t necessarily unconstitutional. How about we remedy that? Let’s add an amendment that allows a court to deem unenforcable any statute or regulation that can be shown to be trivial to circumvent by other legal means, strongly unlikely to achieve any practical benefit, or just generally ludicrous. This amendment would also slyly establish judicial review as a part of the Constitituion rather than merely a super-duper precedent.

The prospect of moving in the next few months has made apparent just how much five years’ worth of life in one apartment has led to overflows in our closets and storage spaces. My list of links has gotten the same way. In both cases, rather than categorizing and sorting into the major areas, the easiest place to start is to examine the little trinkets that have little connections other than my own sense of Hmm or Ooh or Heh…

• The Edge Annual Question 2006: What is your dangerous idea?
• New Scientist SPACE - Features - 13 things that do not make sense
• Breakthrough of the Year 2005: Science Online Special Collection
• Seed: The Other I.D. (Incompetent design)
• SkepticWiki - The Encyclopedia of Science and Critical Thinking
• Cosmic Calling Card?

Actually, I suppose those last few are related. What advocates of intelligent design, pseudosciences, and fundamentalist religious views seem to lack is the sense of wonder and excitement of ‘gaps’–it seems they are terrified by the prospect of not having a definite answer for everything right now. Real scientists and thinkers know better: the root of understanding is not knowledge but questions and analysis.

• Universe Today - What’s Up 2006 - Download it Free
• National Atlas home page
• IVR Cheat Sheet by Paul English (Interactive Voice Response telephone systems)
• Services Guide for Windows XP (Hopefully Vista will turn more off by default.)
• FairVote - Home
• Penguin Warehouse, Inc. - Buy a Pet Penguin Today After the sensation of March of the Penguins, they’re everywhere! Liz is adamant that she was vehemently pro-penguin long before they became trendy. I wonder what the next fashionable critter for advertizers will be.
• Top 100 Wines 2005
• Error Message Generator
• 25 Mindnumbingly Stupid Quotes of 2005
• What Makes a Good Web Font
• Kids vie for coveted preschools House-hunting begets considerations of school systems, kinda nice to see that at least some Chicago public schools are getting good again.
• Yahoo Email + RSS Integrates Blogs Recent improvements in the mail-reader paradigm seem to make it a natural fit for newsfeeds, far better than some of the aggregators I’ve seen (at least the free or low-cost ones).
• Human Space Flight requirements for Crew and Space Flight Participants Ordinary people going into space used to be the stuff of escape and adventure. Now it’s the subject of FAA regulations covering 123 pages. Reality isn’t nearly as fun as sci-fi.
• Ramp creates power as cars pass

At last the holidays have finished and it was time for the decorations to come down…and remove the tree before it becomes nothing but kindling. Good thing that Christmas trees are so light (especially when dry weather has made them thinner) when one must navigate a narrow winding stairwell to the alley; that I no longer cared if branches were crushed or broken also helped. What didn’t help was spending ten minutes lashing the tree to the car roof only to discover that my handywork resulted in my tying all four car doors shut! Brilliant, eh? Fortunately no one was around to document my stupidity as I climbed into the car through the driver’s side window.

Kudos to the city for adjusting the assortment of tree-recycling locations, as I was happy to avoid a repeat of last year. After a traffic snarl on Roscoe at Lincoln, it was amazingly quick and easy, as the new location in the DeVry Institute parking lot resulted in no line of cars and no backups onto a busy street. And of course, being Chicago, the Streets and San people handing out the blue bags were some political minions reminding everyone that this service was brought to us in part by Ald. Gene Shulter. Ah, well.

(Okay, with the holidays complete and things officially back to normal, it’s about time I tackled that big list of links I’ve meant to expound upon…)