A US program to tap some phones without warrants is unconstitutional, and must be halted at once, a federal judge in Detroit has ruled.
The scheme, approved by President George W Bush in 2001, involves tapping conversations between some callers in the US and people in other countries.
Civil liberties campaigners brought the case against the program, which was uncovered by the US media.
The White House said the scheme was legal and it would seek an appeal.
Yah, sure – ya betcha… more… ➡
Things are getting incredibly busy here. We’re beginning to schedule our days out completely before we leave so that we’ll get all the 1000 and one details done on time. It’s not easy leaving a running business and a pile of animals for two weeks.
Interestingly, I think the big Guy in the sky has a great sense of humor. In the past few days, things have been breaking left and right just to test our composure and fortitude, I think. Sharon’s system has developed the Blue Screen of Death syndrome every 20 minutes or so after running solidly for two years. Our HP Laser Printer/Fax/Scanner and decided it can no long align the scanner and shuts off every few hours with the message, “Scanner Error – Power Off – Power On”. In other news, my motorcycle front forks have blown a seal, the front wheel of my pickup truck was in danger of falling off but we caught it in time, our house sitter cancelled. Sharon’s pulled a muscle in her foot, we couldn’t find our international voltage adapter equipment and had to buy some on the Internet in a rush last minute fashion, and my lower back it telling me that I was unwise with some of the stretches I did in aerobics recently. Ah yes, and then there’s the airline bombing scare in Britan and the resulting uncertainty about what can and cannot be taken on the plane (and us with three airlines, three jumps and 28 hours of travel between Seattle and putting our foot down on the earth in Christchurch, New Zealand).
On the good side, New Zealand has not sunk into the sea and western civilization is still holding together . So, it’ll all be alright – we hope.
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That our country is slipping towards becoming a backwards nation can’t be denied when one reads the following.
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In surveys conducted in 2005, people in the United States and 32 European countries were asked whether to respond true, false or not sure to this statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.”  The same question was posed to Japanese adults in 2001.The United States had the second-highest percentage of adults who said the statement was false and the second-lowest percentage who said the statement was true, researchers reported in the current issue of Science.
Only adults in Turkey expressed more doubts on evolution. In Iceland, 85 percent agreed with the statement.
More from this article… ➡
Here’s a chart of how the 32 countries ranked: ➡
Note: to read articles on the NY Times website, you’ll need an ID and Password. You can obtain these for free by going through their sign-up process once.
| By Imogen Foulkes BBC News, Geneva |
Rich countries face increasing water shortages, a report by conservation organisation WWF warns.
A combination of climate change and poor resource management is leading to water shortages in even the most developed countries, it says.
It urges water conservation on a global scale and asks rich states to set an example by repairing ageing water infrastructure and tackling pollution.
The report was released in Geneva just ahead of World Water Week.
The WWF says economic wealth does not automatically mean plenty of water.Its report reveals that some of the world’s wealthiest cities – such as Houston or Sydney – are using more water than can be replenished.
More… ➡
Rising temperatures will increase the risk of forest fires, droughts and flooding over the next two centuries, UK climate scientists have warned.
Even if harmful emissions were cut now, many parts of the world would face a greater risk of natural disasters, a team from Bristol University said.
The projections are based on data from more than 50 climate models looking at the impact of greenhouse gas emissions.
The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers gathered results from 52 computer simulations to calculate the risks from climate-induced changes to the world’s key ecosystems.
More… ➡
The casualty figures rose after rescuers found 28 more bodies in the coastal city of Fuding, China’s official news agency Xinhua said.
Typhoon Saomai has weakened to a tropical depression but more rain fell on Sunday in inland areas.
The storm has destroyed more than 50,000 homes and caused damage of at least $1.4bn (£760m), officials say.
More… ➡
…the fundamentalist mind, running in a single rut for fifty years, is now quite unable to comprehend dissent from its basic superstitions, or to grant any common honesty, or even any decency, to those who reject them.
HL Mencken
Neurons that fire together, wire together was a line I remember from the movie I saw recently.
In other words, you become good at thinking what you think. You become good at doing what you do.
The first time you think something, it is as if you roll a wheel across level ground.
The twentith time you think it, it has gotten easier. As if a rut has been worn into the ground of perception guiding the wheel on its way.
If we care about truth, then we naturally want to percieve reality accurately. Because accurate perception is true perception. Thus the Buddhists tell us that we cannot see a thing clearly unless we are indifferent to the thing we see.
So, what happens then when we take up a cause or adopt a belief?
Before we took the cause or belief up, we were indifferent to it. And at the moment we took it up, our previous indifference allowed still us to see it clearly and accurately – and thus to make a good judgement about it.
But later, having embraced it, we become deeply engaged with it.
Now it begins to be central to us and the more we work with it, the more important it seems.
What once seemed perhaps a bit difficult to grasp has been revealed and we see it all so easily now.
An example:
If we think the thoughts of an environmentalist, we then fire the neurons of environmentalist thought over and over again.
And as we fire them, we wire them together.
And what was before, for us, a level field of perception about environmentalism now begins to acquire the ruts of long use; the growing ease of habit. And thus, inevitably, our current thoughts become, more and more, guided by the ruts of the environmentalist thoughts that went before and less and less based on clear, unbiased and accurate perceptions.
So where once, from the clarity of indifference, we saw a significant pattern called environmentalism and decided to engage it, now from the habit of long practice and interaction (the repetative firing and wiring), we now can’t help but see the pattern everywhere. And the more we see it, the more significant it seems to be to us and the more we feel called to engage it.
Where then lies truth when our very neurons can betray us like this?
It’s been stressful here the last day or two. We’re coming up on a very long plane ride to New Zealand and all of the preparation that entails and the current situation with air travel because of the plot uncovered in London has got the entire air travel world turned upside down. Should we pack carry-on, should we pack checked luggage, should we pack both? Yeech. We’ll be on three airlines before our feet finally touch the pavement in Christchurch very nearly on the other side of the world.
Our house sitter bailed on us. Too much incense in the house and it triggered her allergies and her throat closed and she actually had to go to the hospital – so you can’t blame her a bit. But, it does mean that care of our animals needs to be rethought out.
This is the time of the year when a nursery like ours need to put in its orders for the stock we’ll need next year and Sharon is deeply buried in that and no one else can do it but her so she has to grind through it and hopefully get it all sorted out before we fly because if we wait the extra two weeks, we might not get the stock we want and need.
We’re particularly careful not to take chances with getting colds and flus here because they are very tough on Sharon since her heart condition prevents here from taking anti-histamines. And being sick put an additional load on her heart as well. Long story short is that it’s a bummer when she gets one so we’re always cautious about what we touch if we’re around sick folks. Yesterday, in the afternoon, I started feeling like I might be coming down with something so we went into ‘isolation mode’ wherein we essentially divide the house so that we are not touching the same objects. It’s not easy but it has kept her from getting one of two colds I’ve been unwise enough to be caught by. So, at the moment, I’m feeling 100% but sometimes I do that and then relapse in a day or two so we’ll be on this protocol for several days. Not the most convenient thing with everything else we have going one.
I’ve been having a problem with more and more spam on this blog. What the spammers do is they add fake comments to your posts and embed advertisments in them. As soon as they show up, I delete them but they’re coming more and more frequently as they determine that I do not have automated protection. So, today, I installed a very nice anti-spam plug-in called spam-karma 2.0 from here: ➡. By the way, the fellow who created spam-karma 2.0 has a very interesting website/blog – one of the more interesting that I’ve seen in awhile.
We’ve got 11 days before we fly to New Zealand. I have the feeling that even though we’re working to get everything we can done in a timely fashion, that a lot is going to jam up on us just at the end. Truth is, until we’re in the air out of LAX bound for NZ, I don’t think we’ll relax.
Ah, I forgot a story I wanted to tell. I’ve fired up Skype and it seems to work great. The core product is free and you can grab a copy here: ➡.
It lets any two computers linked to the Internet communicate using VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol). basically, you have a free phone call over the Internet. I intend to use this daily to talk to Sharon when I’m down in NZ over the winter (Nov, Dec & Jan). For a small amount of money, you can extend its abilitys so that you can place calls from your computer to physical phones out in the world (called SkypeOut) or you can accept calls on your computer from physical phones out on the Internet (called SkypeIn). SkypeIn also comes with VoiceMail. It is all an extremely cool thing. Skype has a special mode called ‘Skype Me’ which means that you are open to receive a call from anyone out there. When I first fired this thing up, I looked to see who was in Skype Me mode and I ended up calling a fellow in Mumbai, India (must have been late at night there) and we talked for about five minutes and it worked fine. Just this evening, I’ve been talking to my friend Alan down in Eugene, Oregon via Skype. He was on a physical phone and I was on the Internet. He said there were a few drop outs but that it was better than the average cell phone conversation. Amazing stuff – and free.
Tomorrow’s Saturday and the nursery will probably be busy and I’ve got mid-month accounting and also the accounting that needs to be done ahead to cover the two weeks we’re gone. Busy, busy, busy….
Talked to another friend of mine, John, today, a staunch Republican, and while our basic ideas might be different, we both agreed that it isn’t likely that either the Republicans or the Democrats have any real likelihood of doing anything serious about Global Warming. His feeling was that it won’t be of concern though because something really ugly will be on the front burner by then via-a-vis this growing tension between Islamic Fundamentalists and the western world that will basically over-ride everything else. It’s the Perfect Storm idea again – if this one don’t get you, that one will.
It’s been suggested to the City Fathers here in my town of Monroe, Washington, that we should begin to incorporate ‘green’ ideas into our city planning. We’re still waiting to see if the idea catches on or if we’re still too backwards to see the wisdom of this approach yet.
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CHICAGO — On the scalding eighth-floor roof of the Chicago Cultural Center, workers dripped sweat as they planted row upon tidy row of hardy plants, the latest signal of one big-city government’s determination to be green.
On other downtown rooftops, tall, corkscrew-shaped turbines will harness the winds that race across the plains. A new roof on Chicago’s vast convention center will channel 55 million gallons of rainwater a year into Lake Michigan instead of into overburdened storm drains.
Skeptics snickered 17 years ago when Mayor Richard M. Daley added flowers and trees to the city’s to-do list. They scoffed at the apparent folly of beautifying a sprawling, gritty urban landscape. A few tulips, they figured, and that would be the end of it.
But the city-kid mayor raised on the rough-and-tumble South Side stuck with it. The greening project grew strong roots, giving Chicago a reputation as one of the nation’s most committed environmental cities of any size. The company it keeps is not Newark and Detroit, but Portland and Seattle.
More… ➡
research credit – thx Paul F.
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