As if it were news, yes, the recession has hit Bermuda too. Big surprise. This, however, is about the point when it's really starting to pummel the island. As of late, the local industrial union has agreed to forego overtime pay for three months; meanwhile, there's been a heavily increased strain on a number of social assistance programs, pushing them far over budget, as people try to buy food and pay bills. Churches in Bermuda have stepped up support, but there's more help needed than available. The Food Bank, for example, has reported spending $80,000 on a budget of $23,000. That's not due to waste. There's just that many more people in need than usual.
As far as the analysts are concerned, Bermuda isn't getting out of it anytime soon. To put it bluntly, if you're Bermudian, this year is going to suck. And with Bermuda being a known tax haven, the rest of the world is more likely to kick them while they're down more than anything else.
We should probably end on some sort of up note here... let's see... that's bad... that's depressing... ick.. ick... ick...
Ooh. Here's something nice.
Hey. For all you know, those hamsters are in Bermuda.
(checks)
...no, wait, the person who posted that video is from Australia. Never mind.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Friday, January 14, 2011
It's The Humidity
We know what absolute zero is. It's 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit below 0. It's 273.15 degrees Celsius below zero. It's Kelvin zero. That's as cold as something can possibly get.
You would think that, with an absolute coldest temperature, one might also know what the absolute hottest temperature is.
Not so much.
You would think that, with an absolute coldest temperature, one might also know what the absolute hottest temperature is.
Not so much.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Hail The Glorious Estranged Motherland
Easing back into normal business, let's do a Wikileaks run. Don't imagine much attention's been paid to the more recent cable dumps since Tuscon.
*China has been complaining about "well-fed foreigners" pointing fingers at them.
*The US is concerned about the influence of the Mafia in southern Italy. Oh, yes. They still have some amount of pull in the US. They didn't go away with John Gotti.
*The Whale Wars people are a bunch of counterproductive idiots.
*If you think China is a problem for Tibet, you ought to hear them talk about climate change sometime. (The previous link handles this one too.)
*There is radioactive soil in Kazakhstan that needs securing.
*And here's a cable about negotiations over a region called Transdniester.
Transdniester, you ask? Is that a hockey player or something? Yeah, me too. Transdniester is a little strip along the eastern edge of Moldova, which itself is wedged between Ukraine and Romania. They consider themselves independent (the "capital" being Tiraspol) and in fact more Soviet than anything else- remember, Moldova was a part of the Soviet Union- greatly preferring the Russians to the Romanians, and holding firm on any negotiations due to the presence of Russian troops after the Soviet breakup. The rest of the world has refused to play along. They control a good chunk of Moldova's infrastructure, but then, Moldova controls a good chunk of Transdniester's too.
Transdneister has, however, adopted some elements of capitalism, resulting in what MSNBC described in 2009 as a "surreal" picture of someone eating a burger while talking on a cell phone in front of of pictures of Che Guevara, Vladimir Lenin, and the most productive workers in town.
The region deals largely in two things: organized crime, and poor people. The crime centers around trafficking of, well, whatever, really, but primarily, drugs, weapons, and people.
*China has been complaining about "well-fed foreigners" pointing fingers at them.
*The US is concerned about the influence of the Mafia in southern Italy. Oh, yes. They still have some amount of pull in the US. They didn't go away with John Gotti.
*The Whale Wars people are a bunch of counterproductive idiots.
*If you think China is a problem for Tibet, you ought to hear them talk about climate change sometime. (The previous link handles this one too.)
*There is radioactive soil in Kazakhstan that needs securing.
*And here's a cable about negotiations over a region called Transdniester.
Transdniester, you ask? Is that a hockey player or something? Yeah, me too. Transdniester is a little strip along the eastern edge of Moldova, which itself is wedged between Ukraine and Romania. They consider themselves independent (the "capital" being Tiraspol) and in fact more Soviet than anything else- remember, Moldova was a part of the Soviet Union- greatly preferring the Russians to the Romanians, and holding firm on any negotiations due to the presence of Russian troops after the Soviet breakup. The rest of the world has refused to play along. They control a good chunk of Moldova's infrastructure, but then, Moldova controls a good chunk of Transdniester's too.
Transdneister has, however, adopted some elements of capitalism, resulting in what MSNBC described in 2009 as a "surreal" picture of someone eating a burger while talking on a cell phone in front of of pictures of Che Guevara, Vladimir Lenin, and the most productive workers in town.
The region deals largely in two things: organized crime, and poor people. The crime centers around trafficking of, well, whatever, really, but primarily, drugs, weapons, and people.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Easy Answers Where None Exist
Okay.
I've had three days to get my head together. Let's take a run at this.
Almost as soon as the initial events in Tuscon had concluded, before the name of the gunman had been known, one of the very first things circulated online was the now-familiar crosshair map. 20 districts that Sarah Palin wanted for the Republicans, all with crosshairs over them. Gabrielle Giffords, of course, was one of those 20. This was merely the first salvo in what has become an all-out war, the object of which is for each side to pin Jared Loughner's political affiliation to the other side.
This is a fairly straightforward task if you happen to be a Democrat: after all, given the level of eliminationist rhetoric heard from the Republicans and Tea Party over the course of the past few years, crosshair map included, the fact that it was a Democrat that was indisputably the primary target, and the fact that among Loughner's favorite books was 'Main Kampf', thought to be a hallmark of only the furthest of far-right nuts, as well as favoring the libertarian-proposed gold standard, among other things, it would seem clear.
If you're a Republican, it's a tad more difficult, though you're not without ammo of your own. There has been the scattered rebuttal post of Democrats using violence-related rhetoric, though not nearly as eliminationist, along with eliminationist signs, albeit without the added element of someone actually turning that rhetoric into action. There is also a map of states Democrats were targeting to turn blue in the 2008 Presidential election with bullseyes over the most likely states, though it as well comes as less eliminationist and targets no individual in particular. Just as often, though, the tack taken here is that Loughner was simply a random nut who had no coherent political beliefs of any kind, that it is irresponsible to blame any one side, and that for the Democrats to blame the Republicans is nothing more than the exploitation of a tragedy.
That alternate view, that Loughner is simply crazy, is not without merit, though the Republican version of that argument comes with a fair amount of defensive self-interest attached, a suspicion deepened by the rapid excising of eliminationist rhetoric archived online, and one of Palin's staff rebranding the crosshairs on the map as "surveyor's marks". In addition, alongside Mein Kampf on Loughner's reading list is the Communist Manifesto, the equivalent left-wing nutball hallmark.
There is a Democratic he's-just-crazy argument as well, though this argument is largely concentrated in the most thoughtful corners of the party. This argument is steeped in a well-established history of mental illness among a large segment of assassins and attempted assassins. It largely comes without the stipulation that no one party should be blamed, replacing the area of concern with mental illnesses or gun control or, most commonly among all stripes of the party, the general tone of political discourse in America. It may not have led Loughner all the way down his path, but it might have pushed him over the edge.
That last sentiment is about where I fall. True. Loughner's hatred of Giffords began in 2007, when she failed to address to his satisfaction a very oddball question, and the spike in eliminationist rhetoric came in 2008. And all one need really do is look at his mugshot, gaze into his eyes, to see that we are dealing with a very disturbed individual. But at the same time, you can't really call him completely insane. Not legally, at least. An insane person needs, under current law, to not know the difference between right and wrong. The fact that, for example, Loughner is being uncooperative with police, is not saying a word to them while previously he was quite talkative, suggests that he doesn't want to give the cops something to use against him, or at the very least, the thought is going through his mind that this is a very different situation than normal and that he really shouldn't be talking about what he just did. That in turn suggests that even if he didn't think what he did was wrong, someone else would beg to differ. That's all it takes to be legally able to distinguish between right and wrong, which makes you sane and able to be charged as such.
I cannot, in any case, simply dismiss Loughner as an indecipherable nut and be done with it. The ENIGMA code was indecipherable too, until you cracked it. It took a lot of work, a lot of big brains working on a big problem, but the indecipherable became decipherable. Whatever ended up running through Loughner's head came from somewhere. We've already determined, for example, where his hatred for Giffords came from. If we've figured out one piece of the Loughner puzzle, we can figure out others.
Let's go back to that book list. In addition to Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto, there is also a variety of books from any and all parts of the political spectrum, as well as the apolitical. The list consists of: Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of Oz, Aesop's Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, The Phantom Tollbooth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Pulp, Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver's Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno.
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center does see a more generic anti-government theme running through the books, and I can concur with that assessment. That doesn't help or hurt any one side- remember, Congress is currently split- but merely says that he doesn't like 'the government'. It doesn't blame any one side in particular, but hurts everyone all the same. That may be reading too much into the list, but one must remember that answers aren't always easy. They're not always black and white. Sometimes the smoking gun simply does not exist, and truth must be found in a long, slow grind of piecing together bit after bit after bit, hoping, in the absence of any clearly-visible moment of completion, that all the bits will one day resemble something recognizable.
Whatever Loughner's beliefs are, or however strong or weak his grip on reality, or however much or little violent rhetoric played a part or even who used more of it, it surely cannot have helped matters. I'm absolutely down with using this incident, this... 'opportunity', as it's been called in some circles (what a strange place to use that word), to do something about mental illness and gun control. These are both fields that really haven't gotten the attention they deserve, and in gun control particularly, everyone is simply too scared of the NRA to think anything is capable of being done, and so usually they don't even try. ('Usually' does not, however, apply here, as several pieces of gun control legislation have been introduced.)
Besides, even if it had absolutely nothing to do with the shooting, even if Loughner's head turns out to be telling him that his cheese is made of teeth, a national moment of reflection on the state of our political discourse is, I think, a good thing. If that is the ultimate lesson that America at large takes from this discussion- that maybe not using eliminationist rhetoric could prevent someone from actually committing eliminationist acts- I for one am willing to let that be the lesson. Does it really matter if it was actually the cause? We've been decrying the tone of discussion anyway.
If the lesson learned is about mental health issues, great. If the lesson learned is about gun control, great. If the lesson is about the tone of political rhetoric, that words have consequences, great. If the lesson learned is a combination of the three, outstanding.
But let there be a lesson learned. Let us not let the six people killed by this tragedy die for nothing.
I've had three days to get my head together. Let's take a run at this.
Almost as soon as the initial events in Tuscon had concluded, before the name of the gunman had been known, one of the very first things circulated online was the now-familiar crosshair map. 20 districts that Sarah Palin wanted for the Republicans, all with crosshairs over them. Gabrielle Giffords, of course, was one of those 20. This was merely the first salvo in what has become an all-out war, the object of which is for each side to pin Jared Loughner's political affiliation to the other side.
This is a fairly straightforward task if you happen to be a Democrat: after all, given the level of eliminationist rhetoric heard from the Republicans and Tea Party over the course of the past few years, crosshair map included, the fact that it was a Democrat that was indisputably the primary target, and the fact that among Loughner's favorite books was 'Main Kampf', thought to be a hallmark of only the furthest of far-right nuts, as well as favoring the libertarian-proposed gold standard, among other things, it would seem clear.
If you're a Republican, it's a tad more difficult, though you're not without ammo of your own. There has been the scattered rebuttal post of Democrats using violence-related rhetoric, though not nearly as eliminationist, along with eliminationist signs, albeit without the added element of someone actually turning that rhetoric into action. There is also a map of states Democrats were targeting to turn blue in the 2008 Presidential election with bullseyes over the most likely states, though it as well comes as less eliminationist and targets no individual in particular. Just as often, though, the tack taken here is that Loughner was simply a random nut who had no coherent political beliefs of any kind, that it is irresponsible to blame any one side, and that for the Democrats to blame the Republicans is nothing more than the exploitation of a tragedy.
That alternate view, that Loughner is simply crazy, is not without merit, though the Republican version of that argument comes with a fair amount of defensive self-interest attached, a suspicion deepened by the rapid excising of eliminationist rhetoric archived online, and one of Palin's staff rebranding the crosshairs on the map as "surveyor's marks". In addition, alongside Mein Kampf on Loughner's reading list is the Communist Manifesto, the equivalent left-wing nutball hallmark.
There is a Democratic he's-just-crazy argument as well, though this argument is largely concentrated in the most thoughtful corners of the party. This argument is steeped in a well-established history of mental illness among a large segment of assassins and attempted assassins. It largely comes without the stipulation that no one party should be blamed, replacing the area of concern with mental illnesses or gun control or, most commonly among all stripes of the party, the general tone of political discourse in America. It may not have led Loughner all the way down his path, but it might have pushed him over the edge.
That last sentiment is about where I fall. True. Loughner's hatred of Giffords began in 2007, when she failed to address to his satisfaction a very oddball question, and the spike in eliminationist rhetoric came in 2008. And all one need really do is look at his mugshot, gaze into his eyes, to see that we are dealing with a very disturbed individual. But at the same time, you can't really call him completely insane. Not legally, at least. An insane person needs, under current law, to not know the difference between right and wrong. The fact that, for example, Loughner is being uncooperative with police, is not saying a word to them while previously he was quite talkative, suggests that he doesn't want to give the cops something to use against him, or at the very least, the thought is going through his mind that this is a very different situation than normal and that he really shouldn't be talking about what he just did. That in turn suggests that even if he didn't think what he did was wrong, someone else would beg to differ. That's all it takes to be legally able to distinguish between right and wrong, which makes you sane and able to be charged as such.
I cannot, in any case, simply dismiss Loughner as an indecipherable nut and be done with it. The ENIGMA code was indecipherable too, until you cracked it. It took a lot of work, a lot of big brains working on a big problem, but the indecipherable became decipherable. Whatever ended up running through Loughner's head came from somewhere. We've already determined, for example, where his hatred for Giffords came from. If we've figured out one piece of the Loughner puzzle, we can figure out others.
Let's go back to that book list. In addition to Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto, there is also a variety of books from any and all parts of the political spectrum, as well as the apolitical. The list consists of: Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of Oz, Aesop's Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, The Phantom Tollbooth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Pulp, Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver's Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno.
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center does see a more generic anti-government theme running through the books, and I can concur with that assessment. That doesn't help or hurt any one side- remember, Congress is currently split- but merely says that he doesn't like 'the government'. It doesn't blame any one side in particular, but hurts everyone all the same. That may be reading too much into the list, but one must remember that answers aren't always easy. They're not always black and white. Sometimes the smoking gun simply does not exist, and truth must be found in a long, slow grind of piecing together bit after bit after bit, hoping, in the absence of any clearly-visible moment of completion, that all the bits will one day resemble something recognizable.
Whatever Loughner's beliefs are, or however strong or weak his grip on reality, or however much or little violent rhetoric played a part or even who used more of it, it surely cannot have helped matters. I'm absolutely down with using this incident, this... 'opportunity', as it's been called in some circles (what a strange place to use that word), to do something about mental illness and gun control. These are both fields that really haven't gotten the attention they deserve, and in gun control particularly, everyone is simply too scared of the NRA to think anything is capable of being done, and so usually they don't even try. ('Usually' does not, however, apply here, as several pieces of gun control legislation have been introduced.)
Besides, even if it had absolutely nothing to do with the shooting, even if Loughner's head turns out to be telling him that his cheese is made of teeth, a national moment of reflection on the state of our political discourse is, I think, a good thing. If that is the ultimate lesson that America at large takes from this discussion- that maybe not using eliminationist rhetoric could prevent someone from actually committing eliminationist acts- I for one am willing to let that be the lesson. Does it really matter if it was actually the cause? We've been decrying the tone of discussion anyway.
If the lesson learned is about mental health issues, great. If the lesson learned is about gun control, great. If the lesson is about the tone of political rhetoric, that words have consequences, great. If the lesson learned is a combination of the three, outstanding.
But let there be a lesson learned. Let us not let the six people killed by this tragedy die for nothing.
A Distraction
I, like a lot of people, am still trying to work through the Tuscon shootings emotionally. And I know I'm not alone in the fact that I've thought some things over the past few days that are for me completely out of character. I've almost said them out loud before stopping myself. I might have actually said them out loud. I've seen some very nice, very respectful people say things they under anything resembling normal circumstances, even during other shooting massacres, would never, ever find themselves saying. If you find yourself in this situation, know you're not alone. Try not to take some of what other people you know to be generally decent say too personally. They may be having a hard time dealing with it all as well.
That's why nothing was posted yesterday, largely. Partly, I'm still in my own little world of mourning, but also, I didn't want to say something I'd regret later. Right now, the thing I need, the thing a lot of us need, is some sort of silly little distraction. Something light to keep us going so we can better get through this.
So here's Jeremy Clarkson trying to drive a three-wheeled car called a Reliant Robin.
That's why nothing was posted yesterday, largely. Partly, I'm still in my own little world of mourning, but also, I didn't want to say something I'd regret later. Right now, the thing I need, the thing a lot of us need, is some sort of silly little distraction. Something light to keep us going so we can better get through this.
So here's Jeremy Clarkson trying to drive a three-wheeled car called a Reliant Robin.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Pray
I'm still too consumed by a mixture of shock and despair and outrage to get anything of substance out today. It's as if the events of yesterday in Tuscon had been handwritten by some celestial scriptwriter to generate as much grief as humanly possible: a member of Congress who had just survived (survived... such a loaded word) a highly contentious election against half-crazed opposition shot in the head at point-blank range; the member of Congress married to an astronaut; one of her aides dead, a federal judge dead, a 9-year-old girl born on 9/11 and active in student government dead; the shooter having a reading list that includes the Communist Manifesto and Main Kampf. The fact that it happened at a town-hall meeting. The fact that, when the House read the Constitution on the floor, she was given the First Amendment, the part that addresses peaceable assembly and redress of grievances. The fact that Giffords actually appears on her way to recovering from a bullet to the brain. It's an overwhelming amount of emotional angst, topped with the most tragic of miracles.
In lieu of anything more substantial, here is a profile of the victims of the shooting.
It's Sunday. A good time to do some praying.
In lieu of anything more substantial, here is a profile of the victims of the shooting.
It's Sunday. A good time to do some praying.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
They Came Armed This Time
Gabrielle Giffords, a Democratic member of Congress from Arizona, has been shot in the head at a town hall meeting in Tuscon. Five other people were killed. According to local police, she remains alive but in "grave" condition.
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