Category Archives: Daily Life

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

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This entry is part 60 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 59 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…

Just a Whole Lot of Stuff

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This entry is part 58 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

I meant to update Thursday… and even Friday… but… well… it was a holiday weekend and I figured I’d use it to catch up on things.

And by “things”, it turns out I meant all those games I bought during the Steam sale. Because I really didn’t do much else for most of that long weekend.

The feed from Thursday features a bunch of music (via YouTube) because I was in a classic rock kind of Throwback Thursday mood.

Then there were all sorts of questionable political things that went on (or kept going on, as the case may be), as well as some astounding (both in good ways and bad ways) social stuff.

So, this extra long rundown is a real mixed bag. Kind of like life.

Discrimination, Diversity, Voices and Images From Beyond, Living Above Venus, and the Impeccable Bad Piper

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This entry is part 57 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

This came through the feed late today:

“Without a robust religious exemption,” they wrote, “this expansion of hiring rights will come at an unreasonable cost to the common good, national unity and religious freedom.”

That’s the justification, in part, for a group of businesses (who claim to be religious) for asking that they be exempt from non-discrimination rules when it comes to those totally wrong, creepy, and detrimental GLBT “people.”

To me, that says “In order to be united, we must exclude this entire group of people. In order to be free, we must oppress these others who don’t fit our beliefs.”

This is a result, direct or in, of the Hobby Lobby decision from the Supreme Court yesterday. The one that people (who are happy with it) have been swearing up and down that it won’t lead to anything worse than some (skeevy whores) not getting their pass to free sex (“birth control”).

Well, there ya go. Not more than 48 hours later and this request has been made.

It makes me sick. It makes me disappointed in any genuine faith-based organization that would condone, let alone support, this kind of exclusion in this day and age. (And, yes, I am regularly disappointed in a number of faith-based organizations.)

The biggest problem with the Supreme Court decision is that it was based on other exemptions already on the books. I take issue with those, too.

There’s a difference between secular society and spiritual life. One is shared among people who don’t always agree on things. In order to be part of that secular world–especially as an incorporated business–you have to play by the same rules as everyone else. Exceptions to the rule of law should be few and far between and supported by a distinct need.

Thinking gay people are icky does not make eliminating them from your presence a need.

Opposing birth control is just fine. Don’t make use of it in your life. But how other people feel about that is out of your hands. Especially if you’re “just” in a titled position in a free-standing entity like a national chain of businesses. A secular entity. You want to be a faith-based organization? Fine, change your structure and all your other behavior to be one. Then you get to play by those rules and be as picky as you want.

This whole thing is an nasty mess waiting to explode.

And I don’t have a good, coherent solution to make it any better. Mainly because the existing laws are a mess. Partially because the way we’ve done business for more than a century is a bit of a mess.

Anyway… here’s the rest of the feed…

Bad Dice, Blackwater, Continued Hobby Lobby Hubbub, Nature, and a Little Fan Service

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This entry is part 56 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

The two big bits of news that were bouncing around today were the Supreme Court’s decision in the case for Hobby Lobby regarding whether it should have to pay for insurance plans that cover contraception and the recently released documents that show just how messed up the U.S. relationship with “freelance security” firm Blackwater was.

Both of these stories point toward different, yet similar, machinations that go on when powerful ideologies get involved and sensibility takes a back seat to making a point.

In the Hobby Lobby case, it seems the only reason they’ve suddenly started to care about what insurance their employees have is because they’re against the healthcare reform act that was passed. They’re needling their way into nooks and crannies that were left open in the law as part of the eviscerating “negotiations” that had to take place in order to get it moved through congress.

In the Blackwater case, it’s about a company given far too much power in a war zone and how that power was abused. Many Blackwater employees and management staff seem to have thought that they were above the law… and, it seems, some of them may have been right.

Both of these are playing games with the lives of people outside of the debate–Hobby Lobby’s employees (who are just trying to make a living and stay healthy) and the U.S. and Iraqi people who were harassed, threatened, and in some cases murdered by Blackwater.

Now, undoubtedly, the Blackwater situation was a lot more immediately serious, but the Supreme Court decision on the Hobby Lobby case opens up a more insidious can of worms. With Blackwater, you had a bunch of hooligan with guns doing as they please. Worst case scenario there is they end up on the other side of the list for the U.S. military–as targets instead of assistants. Pretty cut and dried when you really get down to it. The Supreme Court decision, though, seems to open the door to all sorts of denials of service based on an amorphously defined religious preference and privilege.  That’s the sort of thing that can quietly accrue bits of case law here and there for months or years before there’s someone with enough time and resources to challenge it… and in that time, it can touch thousands, if not tens of thousands of lives.

It’s going to be interesting (and, I’m suspecting, unpleasant) to watch both of these situations play out now that they’ve come to light and are on the table for discussion.