Skip to content

victory

I kept refreshing the news sites last night, certain that there would be some irregularity in the voting process that would install McCain as president in defiance of the national will. After I finally went to sleep, I actually had a nightmare about it.
So far, though, things are going pretty well.
I can’t help but be [...]

The Death of Posse Comitatus

Definition of Posse Comitatus:
The Act prohibits most members of the federal uniformed services from exercising nominally state law enforcement police or peace officer powers that maintain “law and order” on non-federal property.
However, the Army Times reports:
The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in [...]

Constitution. Amendment 1. “Congress shall make no law respecting … the right of the people peaceably to assemble”

Every once in a while I see yet another story about American authorities doing something clearly contrary to the ideals of the nation. At this point, all I can summon is a kind of tired rage that these things happen and nobody seems to care. Bush wants the US to remain on a war footing [...]

The Importance of Diversity

My little brother recently wrote about an article which argues that western culture has gone too far in accepting and promoting diversity, and the acceptance of other cultures.
On the one hand, I am forced to agree with this guy on some points: not all worldviews have equal merit, and some are simply better than others. [...]

Some Books I’ve Read Recently

(In reverse chronological order:)
Shogun, James Clavell. It’s not a bad story, really; it’s extremely detailed, and he does a good idea of giving an impression of 16th century Japan. I just couldn’t get past the fact that he absolutely butchered the Japanese language, which he scattered throughout for a well-intentioned but disastrous attempt at verisimilitude. [...]

Happy Headlines

I can’t help but like it when the news tends to support my positions, politically and otherwise.
Iraq’s politicians want a specific US withdrawal date before they’ll agree to any Status of Forces Agreement. I applaud this! We need such an agreement for the presence of US forces in Iraq to remain legal past the end [...]

Site Lines

I finally got around to tinkering a little bit more with this site. Real-time translations are back for a variety of languages; right now 30% of my traffic comes from outside the US, so it seems like a good service to provide. The buttons are at the bottom left, under the tag cloud.
The other [...]

Whence the fascination?

I’m really not sure why I’m so interested in Japan, or the Japanese language. It’s easy enough to find the point of entry of my interest; it was when I started to match sounds to subtitles in the anime I watched in college. However, that was little more than a passing fancy; it doesn’t explain [...]

The stories soldiers tell

We on hold are required to sit in place all day. We have no duties other than to be here, and perform miscellaneous tasks as assigned. In the last five weeks, we have received exactly one such task, which took us all of two hours. Some of us read, some play computer games, some watch [...]

No good will come of staying in Iraq

One of the worst things about living in a representative democracy is that when you become fed up with your representatives, it can take ages to actually change them out.
The citizens of the US have wanted for years to get out of Iraq. The citizens of Iraq want to know when we’ll leave. The war [...]