Socialist Sushi

My birthday is a busy day.

Watched Interview with the Vampire last week. Just saw this pic.

Is it just me, or does Blair have those vampire eyes going on?

Oregon Lawyer Speaks Out About His Ordeal

For the first time since his arrest, Brandon Mayfield spoke of the humiliation he underwent as he sat for two weeks in jail, falsely suspected of being involved in the Spain terrorist attacks.

“I’m just now starting to not shake,” said the 37-year-old Portland attorney. “My blood pressure has - you know - risen. My pulse has risen. My heart hurts.”

I don’t know the details of this, so I can’t really say if this was an honest mistake on the FBI’s part or not. What is certain is that they do indeed make mistakes. This is why it’s dangerous to give them too much power to act without oversight.

Teen suicides over exam message (May 24, 2004)

An Indian teenager killed herself after receiving a mobile phone text message saying she had failed her school leaving exams, although she had actually passed, a report said today.

Very sad.

Pressure from parents and peers on students to score high marks in the exams is immense and each year dozens across the country kill themselves when they find they have failed.

A new city law in Brunswick gives police the power to halt protests during the G-8 summit now that the governor has declared a pre-emptive state of emergency in coastal Georgia through June 20.

Police empowered to halt G8 protests under Georgia’s state of emergency, via FindLaw.

Couple of things about this. First, everyone keeps complaining about how many protesters may come to this thing. Well if it’s so horribly, why in the world did we agree to host it? The people renting out venues and hotels to the press and visitors aren’t complaining too much about th emoney.

Second, this article points out the same thing was done in 96 for the Olympics. Good thing they did, too, or we might have had a bomb go off or something. Oh, wait…

1. Don’t photograph yourselves torturing prisoners.
2. Don’t torture people who work for the press.

Guess they didn’t have enough training.

“I was just following orders.”

Mr. Bray has it write with his observations:

Scott McKenzie, 38, of Clearwater, Pa., a sergeant first class: “We never learned how to deal with a riot, what to do when we were being assaulted.” Here’s a hint: Don’t torture people.

Exactly. All this talk about not having enough training. Seriously now: Do you need training to know it’s wrong to hook wires to a guy’s genitals? Do you honestly need a class in that?

“Now remember, soldier, it may seem ok to you to strip these folks and pose them in sexual positions but, oddly enough, it’s wrong.”

“Really?”

“I kid you not, son. Oh, and leave the digital camera in your tent, alright?”

That’s the other thing: if you are going to torture people, please take note: Don’t take freakin pictures!

And I love the headlines at :”PHOTOS SHOW AMERICAN SOLDIERS HAVING SEX WITH ONE ANOTHER” We really are a nation of perverts.

I’ve been making comments about this for a while: Parallels between IT and construction.

He doesn’t mention what I’ve noticed, though, which is the trend toward outsourcing. Years ago you had professional carpenters who knew the process of building a home inside and out. Then people thought it would be more cost effective to hire less skilled people to do specific tasks.

For example, you’d have a wall crew that would raise the basic structure, then a roof crew would put up the rafters. Once their task was done they’d go on to the next job. Less skilled workers, but they would be well trained; what could go wrong?

Everything.

A lot of houses built now are crap, plain crap. There has been something of a trend in recent years toward getting skilled carpenters to oversee the entire process. Why? Because the specialization didn’t work too well, at least in the home market, and at least in this area (southeast United States).

So corporations are going to save money by outsourcing? Ok, go for it. There will certainly be costs to programmers in the short term, and in software quality in the short term. That is, of course, if the trend really does go as it did in the home construction market. Let’s face it: programmers are considered little more than unskilled labor, just as carpenters are. (I’m not talking of how we are talked about but how we are treated).

And so we shall see what happens.

This article describes why it’s a bad idea to have soldiers behaving as police:

“Police officers responded to a domestic dispute, accompanied by marines. They had just gone up to the door when two shotgun birdshot rounds were fired through the door, hitting the officers. One yelled `cover me!’ to the marines, who then laid down a heavy base of fire. . . . The police officer had not meant `shoot’ when he yelled `cover me’ to the marines. [He] meant . . . point your weapons and be prepared to respond if necessary. However, the marines responded instantly in the precise way they had been trained, where `cover me’ means provide me with cover using firepower. . . . over two hundred bullets [were] fired into that house.”

Of course it won’t stop politicians from using soldiers as they were never trained to be used. But they shouldn’t act shocked when it doesn’t go well.