Proof Positive the Left has left the Reason Reservation.
Thus begins what I hope will be a series of postings keeping you abreast of the lunacy of the incurably-correct.
Obama thinks it okay to steal the Presidential seal before the deal is sealed, replaces the U.S. flag-shield with an Obama campaign swash-shield and rips the legend from E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) to Vero Possumus (inaccurate official Obama rendition: Yes, we Can!). Many people are outraged to the point they are claiming the change is "illegal." Possibly, but the entertainment value of Obama recovering from yet another verbal gaffe should not be discounted. This guy says Obama translated it wrong and gives it as, "In truth, to be able." However, a quick visit to a Latin dictionary renders it (anyone here good at Latin?) "was able;" as in "no longer able." At minimum, it doesn’t translate the way Obama-maniacs say it does. So, what’s Obama really telling us? He can’t get it up anymore? Or, perhaps, "Verily, I wish we could." Not quite as uplifting as "Yes, We Can!" though, is it. Did Obama bother to consult a Latin expert (say a Catholic priest) before hanging his campaign on a badly translated soundbite? Or did one of his juvenile volunteers come up with this gem late one night cruising Babelfish and decided "who needs some dumb old expert when you got 80-gigabytes of RAM and a killer App?"
Wikipedia, the open-source (if opaque-minded) encyclopedia accuses the CIA, Vatican, and Diebold Company of systematic editorial-vandalism. The Vatican complaint is based on alleged reference and link deletions to stories accusing the current Sinn Fein President (and a sitting MP) of participation in a double political-murder, the CIA is guilty of one charge of appending a comment ("Wahhhhh!") right before Iranian President Ahmadinejad's agenda, and Diebold of deleting an uncomplimentary (libelous?) section regarding its SBS subsidiary. Predictably, Wikipedia is less concerned by multiple malicious tamperings of the Rush Limbaugh entry (both unapologetic and slow to correct). Apparently, Wikipedia has been spying on its contributors. Might this spell doom for open-source editing? How do you feel knowing Wiki-Brother is watching your every keystroke and ready to pounce?
Stop the presses (and corn-growers too)! In the rush to switch to bio-fuels (aka, ethanol & methane), so much forest has been cleared that some global-warming faithful are concerned there may be "unintended consequences." Oh drat! The article by climate-change Nazis essentially accuses bio-fuel Nazis of environmental incorrectness. Where will it end?! Will the species-extinction crowd now pile on to stop the evil arch-conservative ethanol lobby (funny how they magically morph into conservatives the moment they fall out of favor)? Will the Renewables-theocracy circle the wagons? Meanwhile poster-child glacier, "Franz Joseph," has turned traitor to the cause by growing rather than shrinking as commanded. Not to be upstaged by a glacier, North Pole spokesperson, non-scientist, and CBS Early Show co-host Maggie Rodriguez claims North Pole is having her first full-Monty meltdown (perhaps N.P. is accusing Greenhouse Gas of an overheated relationship). She may want to qualify that "first" qualifier, because this just makes the first time since people started peeking under N.P.’s icy sheets. The poles have been ice free most of their geological history (the caps, I mean, not Poland). She goes on to accuse her guest, Tony Blair, of not doing more to pressure Bush into signing the Kyoto protocols. Uh, actually, he did more than was seemly between heads of state. In any case, the pole melt is overstated hype mostly unconnected with greenhouse gas; which would take far longer to cause a polar meltdown. Stay tuned.
To those who accuse the Left of having no idea what constitutes national security, I invite your perusal of this item by National Review Online. Who says Democrats haven’t got their priorities (and agencies) straight? If you can’t scuttle an agency you dislike, then do the next best thing. Tie it up doing something totally inane and inappropriate.
In a rare moment of liberal sanity, the Canadian father of state-run healthcare has called for the semi-privatization of medical providers in a desperate bid at staving off system-wide collapse. Not that he’s repudiating his creation, just recalibrating it enough to prevent cardiac arrest. Will Band-Aiding be sufficient, or will Canada-care need full bypass surgery?
Think you should be able to tell an unelected local official, "Do your job or be replaced." Think again! When Marshall Pappert of Pennsylvania said as much, he was locked up for harassing a public official. Last I checked the bureaucrats work for us (at least, that’s the theory – but I could be wrong). I may not agree with all of Pappert’s complaints, but I do agree he has every right to complain; and should not be locked up for anything less than making threats that are physically injurious. Being a pest just doesn’t qualify.
Be careful lest you shoot the local trash cop. Residents of Melbourne Australia are concerned they might accidentally shoot their nocturnal recycle re-enforcers rummaging around in their bins more than they are the spectacle of ninja dumpster-diving cops and the absurdity of unelected bureaucrats escalating what began as a choice into a punishable offense when no one was looking. Doesn’t anyone challenge these Nazis?
No report on Absurdistan is complete without checking in on the New York Times.
Friday’s NYT health section reports new HIV infection among gay-men, especially black gays, is still rising. Inexplicably, the article avoids all mention of possible social factors (sexual practices, incarceration, etc.) other than data gathering inefficiencies and blaming "abstinence-only education." Needless to say (or maybe it needs saying), the Bush educational message is abstinence-also – not abstinence-only. And, if there is any lack of teaching the strong correlation between gay sex and HIV, just maybe it is due to political-correctness. Nah! It couldn’t be that.
"Landmark Ruling Enshrines Right to Own Guns" has NYT editor Linda Greenhouse parroting Justice Stevens that Thursday’s 2nd Amendment ruling creates a whole "new" individual right to arms that never before existed. Never before existed? How can a Supreme Court Justice be that deliberately obtuse regarding our founding and large body of discourse both before and immediately following the Constitutional conventions? Those gentlemen were perfectly frank that they meant the 2nd Amendment as both an individual right and as a bulwark against tyranny. The phrase "A well-regulated militia being necessary to a free state" was recognition that when resistance came, rebellion would be headed by (though not limited by) the states resisting federal encroachment (as happened more than once), that an encroachment on the rights of a state’s citizens automatically encroached on the sovereignty of states; and that few individuals would succeed in resisting on their own (think Ruby Ridge). It further ignores the first draft of the amendment began, "For their protection and for purposes of having a well-trained militia," which makes clear the more fundamental right of the two is one of personal self-preservation. The founders simply could not see this more fundamental right would ever be challenged, thinking that by putting it in invited challenge, and, so, decided leaving it out would be the safer course. The idea that the National Guard is our militia is similarly absurd ("I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials." – George Mason, Debates in Virginia Convention on Ratification of the Constitution, 1788); the opposite of a federally disciplined force. Clearly, Madison under-estimated the government’s capacity to distort principle to serve its own purpose.
That was the week in Absurdistan. Hope the news where you are makes better sense.
rstapler@aceweb.com
Read more articles by Bob Stapler
BTW - Wikipedia doesn't "spy" on contributors, it simply logs the IP addresses of people who edit pages. And it makes those logs public. Anyone, not just Wikipedia itself, can check those… and do: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/14/1453223
And they even do other interesting things with that information: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/31/0259224
Comment by Raymond Ingles | June 30, 2008
Raymond,
If that was all there was, then no argument. However, if you read the links, it clearly says Wikipedia "accuses" and posted specific warnings to these three corporate entities (CIA, Diebold, & Vatican). The Vatican and CIA are both suggesting someone at Wikipedia accused each of tampering. How they recieved these warnings, beyond simple posting, is unclear (do the Vatican and CIA have people dedicated to scanning Wikipedia for references to themselves?). There is no argument Wikipedia also posts editorial IP addresses for all and sundry, and that those were cited in the article. The point here is Wikipedia went over the top accusing whole organizations of activities properly belonging to just a few employees. How many people do you suppose both post to and read from Wikipedia's pages each day via computers not strickly their own and without their employer's knowledge? Wikipedia, of all organizations, ought to allow for (and appreciate) this blurring of the lines between ultimate and proximate ownership and authorship; and complain accordingly. Either that, or the owner-operators of Wikipedia really think the Vatican, CIA, and SBS sponsor these activities and have conspired to silence Wikipedia. Whichever way Wikipedia believes, it behaved as if it believes the latter.
The second point, one likely to affect all of us regardless which side we favor, is the chilling effect this has on open-source. Will a spate of lawsuits start a movement to restrict open-source and blogger content? Might an Internet wide battle over poster-rights result in employers curtailing employee extracurricular web use? Might Wikipedia gradually be forced to change its own rules, effectively killing the open-source format. However this falls out, we all lose.
Hey, however much I knock the Wiki liberal-bias, I like the open-source concept and wish them well. I refer to Wikipedia often and would be sorry to see them gone (or frozen shut). I'm just pointing out bias and correctness, like so much else, have sometimes unintended consequences. If you want open-source, you must risk some counter-bias. We've talked, here at IC, about the insularity and lack of openness to ideas on the left. Wikipedia is the rare exception to this rule. Sooner or later, open-source results in vandalism, and over-reaction results in restriction. I just hope Wiki can stand the diversity a bit longer.
Comment by Bob Stapler | June 30, 2008
Mr. Stapler - The Wikipedia editors can't look at their own IP logs? I can't see that as "spying", considering that they make the same data available to everyone else, too. As to whether Wikipedia went "over the top" on their accusations… well, exactly the same kind of evidence has been used to accuse the Democratic Party of tweaking Rush Limbaugh's Wikipedia page: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6947532.stm
Comment by Raymond Ingles | July 1, 2008