Tag Archives: law

Another weekend, another bunch of stuff to alleviate stress

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This entry is part [part not set] of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

Why, yes, you continue to get a proliferation of fluff in the feed. But it’s good fluff!

At least I think it is.

Creative. Witty. So wrong it’s awesome.

It’s the stuff that helps alleviate the stress that my life has been lately.

But have no fear! There are also some gems of real content in there.

Interesting bits of science. Some very insightful comments on items. Actual world happenings that we should all be aware of.

Check it out, enjoy what you can, maybe jump in and participate in a conversation (even if you’re coming across this months later… don’t hesitate to comment, I’ll see it and it may get things moving on that post again).

Here’s the feed.

Stupid Humans, Bounty Hunting, Bad Geography, and Aquaman

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This entry is part [part not set] of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

Another busy day at work, but some interesting things in the feed.

Some interesting interactions in the feed today.

A tragic story about some parents with some really poor judgement (which lead to them falling to their deaths in front of their children) stirred up some comment controversy. Two very different angles on humor and ways of dealing with tragedy among the friends and friends of friends who posted there. Not totally unexpected, knowing the people involved, but likely a bit confusing and disconcerting to those who don’t know everyone.

The much more unexpected and interesting thread is the one about Dog the Bounty Hunter going after MMA fighter War Machine (the latter of which is, officially, a fugitive from justice after beating his ex-girlfriend nearly to death). That little ditty was one of the “trending” stories on Facebook and, it seems, my post (likely because of the high amount of interaction I’ve engendered among my list) was showing up pretty high on the listing of people posting about it. This, of course, brought in a number of people with no discernible connection to anyone anywhere near my circle of friends.

Sometimes, I forget just how… different… those a few steps out of my various circles are from the people I interact with regularly.

A number of the comments were outright all-caps screaming about how awful one of the other main people in the story was. A number of Dog fans offered their (sometimes poorly spelled and grammatically challenged) support for the “hero” to go out and get the “bad guy.” Others lamented the lack of “good guys” in the story (with equally bad spelling and grammar).

I’m almost surprised there was no knock-down, drag-out fight in that thread.

It all subsided quickly enough as, no doubt, something else tabloid trashy caught the attention of the general population.

Ah, the Internet… you never cease to keep me entertained.

There are a number of other interesting news bits that didn’t garner anywhere near the attention they should (really, I think that Dog thread, one about suicide, and the casting of Aquaman for the Superman v Batman movie were the three most active threads today) down there that are definitely worth the read.

And with that, on with the feed…

Science, Aliens, Sexism, Stupid Application of the Law, and Buzz Aldrin

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This entry is part [part not set] of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

I’ve been fiddling with websites all day–first at the day job and then after I got home.

But, pretty much every site I have my fingers in is up to date now. So, that’s good.

Sadly, this is the only one of my own sites that gets regular content these days. (And, really, calling some of this intro text “content” is really a stretch… and the FB feed reposting doesn’t count at all.)

I have a plan for tomorrow’s feed… I should have pre-loaded everything, but I haven’t. So I’m just going to be winging it tomorrow between crunching through on projects. Y’know, just like normally do. But it’ll be more frustrating, because I do have a plan I’d like to carry out.

Ah, well, my own fault for not budgeting time better.

Onward with today’s (surprisingly short) feed… (I must have really been busy)…

Piercing the Corporate Veil, A Study in Bayhem, Bubbles, Box of Pox, and Suddenly Poor

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This entry is part [part not set] of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

The Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case creep and speculation continue.

Now there’s some rumblings among some who are supposedly more law-savvy than I am about this close bond between a corporation’s “religion” and the religion of the people who run it may be an exploitable tear in the corporate veil that protects those who run a corporation from certain financial and legal issues.

If that’s true, then that may be a semi-good thing to come from all of this.

But I’m not sure how that would all play out. It very well may end up being worse all around for everyone.

Of course, it may not matter all that much if the economy as a whole–on a global scale–pops all at once.

There are apparently some rumblings (again, from people who know a lot more about the issue at hand than I do) about how over-valued a lot of things out there in the financial and investment world are. And how little corporations (and actual people with lots of money) are investing in things. Real estate, stocks, bonds, each other… few are seeing a chance for a good return on their investment so they’re just holding on to their money.

And while that’s going on, the various central banks of various nations are, in one way or another, pumping more money into the economy… which is, of course, trickling up into these stockpiles. Because (and the article in today’s stream doesn’t touch on this idea, but it’s a pretty glaring omission) the vast majority of people don’t have investments like what they’re talking about, so all that money can only trickle up to the businesses that own and produce what the people at street level are buying.

With that money “stuck” in the cycle, it seems it’s leaving a bit of a vacuum for those who need it most while, yet again, the rich get richer. But if and when this massive series of bubbles pop, everyone’s going to lose big as everything plummets in value–including those vast storehouses of money.

Kind of terrifying.

About as terrifying as hearing that the CDC misplaced a box of smallpox sometime in the 50s. It’s okay, though… they found it. Sitting in a store room in a lab that’s been used by the FDA for the past 40 or so years.

That just leaves me wondering what the heck else has been misplaced over the decades and never missed.

Then there’s the newest revelations from the Snowden files. Seems the U.S. government did, indeed, have a whole lot of personal communications on hand that they probably shouldn’t have. How do we know? Because Snowden handed a bunch of it over to the Washing Post. So now all the officials who’ve been swearing up and down that their organizations never took and retained anything like these newly revealed documents are saying, effectively, “Okay, yeah, we had those, but they’re different! It was only a minimal violation of those people’s privacy! What Snowden’s doing with them is worse than what we did!”

Yeah, not buying the blame shifting, guys. You’re still the ones who collected it–and have been lying about it. Sure Snowden’s in the wrong, that’s not news. You’re still in more wrong overall.

Anyway, here’s the rest of the feed…

Short Short Stories, Green Fetish, Warp Speed, Color Capture, He Says He Didn’t Know, Russian Homophobia, and ER Perspective

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This entry is part [part not set] of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

Amid the slightly less hectic waves of work, I had the chance to read a couple of interesting–and infuriating–news articles today.

One of the big ones was about Archbishop Robert Carlson, one of the far too many higher-ups in the Catholic Church who were involved with the whole child sex abuse scandal. According to him, he doesn’t remember when he figured out having sex with kids was illegal.

As a friend of mine put it in their own stream: “Sex out of wedlock: SIN! Sex with someone of the same gender: MORTAL SIN! Sex with a kid: Gee, I just don’t know… could be okay, I guess, maybe.”

And then people wonder why I have no respect at all for the temporal body of The Church.

Thankfully, I know enough good Catholics–ones who actually live decent lives and are properly critical of their leaders–that I have yet to descend into the full-on hate of the religion itself.

One of the other big ones is about the institutionalized homophobia that’s now in place throughout Russia. Gay rights groups–really, any group in any way affiliated with the whole GLBT population–are being deemed “foreign agents.” That basically means, as far as the government is concerned, they are subversive, enemy organizations. The powers that be have taken to applying pressure to other agencies–banks, landlords, etc.–reminding them that dealing with foreign agents can get them on that list, too.

This has, of course, lead to the gay rights groups not being able to do things like renew their leases, maintain bank accounts, or, for those who are affiliated with the groups, hold down other jobs.

That right there is example enough to remind us all why we fight so hard for the equal rights under the law that we enjoy in this country. And why we need to keep fighting any time those rights are infringed upon.

It makes me sad that modern Russia seems well on its way to being the bundle of bad examples that the Soviet Union was when I was growing up, before the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Apparently, everything old is new again. Can’t say I like it.