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Saturday, October 11, 2008
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Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting For Obama
Current mood:  optimistic
Category: News and Politics
Christopher Buckley is the son of noted Conservative, William F. Buckley, Jr., who co-founded the Conservative magazine, National Review. Christopher Buckley, formerly the chief speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush, is a novelist.
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Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting For Obama
by Christopher Buckley
The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat.
Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It's a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They'd cut off my allowance.
Or would they? But let's get that part out of the way. The only reason my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone notices or cares, the headline will be: "William F. Buckley's Son Says He Is Pro-Obama." I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of "Ron Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention," but it'll have to do.
I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call "the bleeding obvious": namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She's not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin "a cancer on the Republican Party."
As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that's quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen's mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There's Socratic dialogue for you. Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, "You know, I've spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks." Well, the dear man did his best. At any rate, I don't have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he's no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground. So, you're reading it here first.
As to the particulars, assuming anyone gives a fig, here goes:
I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times—I'm beginning to sound like Paul Krugman, who cannot begin a column without saying, "As I warned the world in my last column..."—a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don't—still—doubt that McCain's instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.
McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were "jerks" (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam—his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, "The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor." Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.
A year ago, when everyone, including the man I'm about to endorse, was caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John McCain, practically alone, said no, no—bad move. Surge. It seemed a suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you don't see a whole lot of anymore.
But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, "We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us." This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget "by the end of my first term." Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?
All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.
As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a "first-class temperament," pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he's a Harvard man, though that's sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.
I've read Obama's books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. ..ion, gay marriage, et al, I'm libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O'Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.
But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren't going to get us out of this pit we've dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.
Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy "We are the people we have been waiting for" silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.
So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I'll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-10/the-conservative-case-for-obama
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Monday, September 01, 2008
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Did They Actually Vet Palin?
Current mood:  shocked
Category: News and Politics
You have to wonder...
Palin botched a deal when she was the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska that cost the city an extra $1.7 million.
href=" http://www.adn.com/matsu/story/474934.html "
And they are still paying that price today!
href=http://www.frontiersman.com/articles/2008/02/01/local_news/doc47a2c7bcdf210495927316.txt
While Governor, she leaned on Alaska's Public Safety Commissioner to fire a state trooper, who just happened to be going through a messy divorce with her sister!
href="http://www.adn.com/monegan/story/478090.html"
Surprisingly, she supported Obama's proposed energy plan:
href="http://gov.state.ak.us/archive-59841.html"
If she is supposed to appeal to Hillary voters, then perhaps she should not have been videotaped calling Hillary a whiner...
href=" http://www.newsweek.com/id/156190"
If she was the best qualified, how bad were the others?
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Do You Believe Me Now
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Jimmy Wayne
Release date: 2008-08-26
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11:26 PM
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Wednesday, June 25, 2008
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A Soldier Speaks Out
Current mood:  sad
A brave young PFC speaks out about the Army's policy of deploying soldiers with psychiatric problems, which had tragic results for his friend.
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'He Should Never Have Gone to Iraq'
More borderline troops are being sent to the front, sometimes with tragic results.
Dan Ephron
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 2:01 PM ET Jun 21, 2008
Pvt. David Dietrich had a history of cognitive problems. He struggled in boot camp at Fort Knox, Ky., striking at least one of his superiors as unfit for the military. Dietrich was so slow at processing new things, some fellow soldiers called him Forrest Gump. His squad leader, Pfc. Matthew Berg, says Dietrich couldn't hit targets on the rifle range and had trouble retaining information. "He was very strong physically, but mentally he wasn't really all there," Berg says. Recruited as a cavalry scout, one of the toughest specialties in the Army, Dietrich seemed to lack the essential skills for the job: concentration, decisiveness and the ability to move around without being noticed. He was sent for psychological evaluations at least twice, yet somehow Dietrich advanced—from Fort Knox to Germany and on to Iraq in November 2006. Eight weeks later, at 21, Dietrich was killed by a sniper while conducting reconnaissance from an abandoned building in Ramadi.
What was a guy like Dietrich doing in the military? At a time when an overstretched Army is sending into combat thousands of soldiers who once would have been considered mentally or physically unfit for duty, his story illuminates the complexities and human cost of the war—and shows how hard it is to find the line between tragic circumstances and military misconduct.
Dietrich's problems did not surface on enlistment tests. In Iraq, it's unclear whether his cognitive issues had something to do with his death. Yet his superiors had serious misgivings about the troubled soldier. One of them says he worried that Dietrich would pose a danger to himself and others if he was sent to Iraq and pushed to have him processed out of the military—only to be rebuffed by higher-ups. In conversations with NEWSWEEK, he asked not to be named for fear of jeopardizing his Army career. Berg, the squad leader, says he is speaking publicly because he feels partially responsible for Dietrich's death. "The Army was under a lot of pressure to graduate scouts at the time, and even now … no matter how competent or incompetent," Berg says.
His observation appears to be borne out by the Pentagon's own data. According to records made available to NEWSWEEK, the attrition rate for GIs with health, performance or conduct problems in their first months of Army service has dropped by as much as 45 percent since 2004. In other words, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan strain the Army more and more, fewer problem soldiers are getting weeded out in basic training. An Army spokesman would not comment specifically about Dietrich's mental issues nor let NEWSWEEK see his medical file, citing confidentiality. But Col. David Hubner, commander of the 194th Armored Brigade, which trains Army scouts, said: "We feel confident in the soldiering skills of those who meet the standards of graduation."
Dietrich's problems started long before he enlisted. Abandoned as a child by his father and later by his mother, he lived with his grandfather in a cluttered trailer home for a time before entering the foster-care system, according to Craig and Jean Raisner of Marysville, Pa., where Dietrich grew up. Craig Raisner was Dietrich's troop leader in the Boy Scouts and he and his wife looked after the troubled youngster, although he never lived with them for more than a few weeks at a time. Both Raisners are professional educators and Jean's specialty is learning disabilities. She says Dietrich had a sunny smile and a tenderness about him that would sometimes give way to angry outbursts.
Jean says Dietrich was diagnosed at 16 as having severe processing problems. The determination was made by doctors at Philhaven, a facility in Pennsylvania for people with "significant mental health problems," according to its Web site. After a series of run-ins with his foster parents, Dietrich spent two months at Philhaven, then left the foster family and returned to Marysville, taking turns living in his car or with assorted friends. Despite the diagnosis, the Raisners say Dietrich's situation improved. He made it to school most days, and he completed enough coursework to graduate.
Dietrich pined to be a Marine—his grandfather had been one—but failed the aptitude test. He then contacted an Army recruiter and said he wanted to serve as a base fireman, having been a volunteer in Marysville's fire department. Somehow, at the Army's enlistment office, Dietrich managed to pass the same standardized military-recruitment test he'd failed in the Marine office. When he showed up alone to sign his contract, he was offered a $19,000 bonus to be a scout and to ship out within weeks, according to Army records.
The Raisners are careful not to badmouth the Army. Their own son is in Air Force ROTC, and they describe themselves as firmly pro-military. But the recruitment process troubled them. "I was angry because I knew he was not scout material," Jean says. When Dietrich came over that night and told them excitedly about the bonus, Craig replied: "What good will that do you if you die in Iraq?" Craig says the next morning he phoned the recruiter, who assured him he would look after Dietrich. But the Army was missing a key bit of information that Dietrich apparently withheld from his application. Frank Shaffery, the Army's deputy director of recruiting operations, says Dietrich never mentioned his mental-health problems, including his turn at Philhaven. "There is nothing here that would have disqualified him or would have caused us to ask for additional information," he said, thumbing through Dietrich's file during an interview at his office.
At boot camp, certainly, Dietrich's problems were out in the open. Berg says he was often getting himself and the men around him in trouble. Though he was given individual instruction at the rifle range and hundreds of extra rounds for practice, he still missed his targets. When the rest of the troop graduated in July 2006, Dietrich was kept back for more training. Jean Raisner says he phoned one day and talked about shooting himself in the foot if he wasn't allowed to go home. A month later, Dietrich passed his basic rifle marksmanship test, according to an Army spokesman, and was told he would be heading to Germany and on to Iraq.
In phone calls from Ramadi, Dietrich complained to the Raisners that for weeks all he did was fill sandbags at the base while others conducted missions. He also said that in Germany, doctors had given him antidepressants and medication for attention-deficit disorder. Jean and Craig thought his commanding officers did not want him on operations. But just before Christmas, Dietrich told them he'd been on his first mission outside the forward operating base. His second mission—the one on which he was killed—followed days later. Spc. Brendan Burkhardt says team members positioned themselves in an abandoned building and took turns watching the area furtively from open windows. Burkhardt said he thought Dietrich performed much like the other soldiers that day but with tragic results: he was shot dead a few minutes after starting his shift at one of the windows. Burkhardt said the men put him on a stretcher, ran with him for about a half mile and loaded him on a vehicle. By the time Dietrich reached the base, he was dead.
The Army promoted Dietrich to private first class after he was killed and gave him a bronze-star medal for meritorious service, praising his "duty, performance and selfless service." When Berg heard from a buddy about Dietrich's death, he felt ill. "There's a bit of guilt associated with what happened," he said by phone recently from Fort Hood, Texas, where he serves. "He should not have been a scout, should not have gone to Iraq, should not have been killed." On his arm, Berg had a tattoo made with Dietrich's name, the date and place he was shot and the letters KIA.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/142640
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Taylor Swift
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Taylor Swift
Release date: 2008-03-18
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Wednesday, May 28, 2008
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Immigrants Are Melting!
Current mood:  insubordinate
Category: News and Politics
This columnist counters many popular myths concerning immigrant assimilation. Of course, the last paragraph says it all...
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Commentary: Immigrants melting into the pot as usual
- Navarrette: Americans perceive new immigrants as not assimilating
- Americans think ancestors got off the boat waving the Stars and Stripes, he says
- That leads to resentment of current wave of immigrants, he says
- But a recent study says new immigrants are joining the mainstream
By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
Special to CNN
SAN DIEGO, California (CNN) -- On the question of whether recent immigrants assimilate as quickly as previous waves, many Americans exhibit short fuses -- and even shorter memories.
They have convinced themselves that, instead of adapting to the customs of this country, new arrivals -- most of whom come from Asia or Latin America -- expect the rest of us to accommodate them. They go ballistic over little things -- Mexican flags, taco trucks, libraries that offer bilingual story time, or having to "press one for English."
Yet, even as they look down on new immigrants, many Americans look back fondly upon their immigrant ancestors. Legend has it that when grandpa arrived from Ireland, Germany, Italy or Poland, he jumped off the boat, immediately draped himself in the American flag, ripped out his native tongue, and abandoned his culture -- all while singing "Yankee Doodle Dandy." Germans did not move to Milwaukee and make beer and cheese. The Irish did not settle in Boston and join organizations like the Hibernian Society to preserve their heritage and culture.
And even while Americans complain about how the current crop of immigrants aren't like their predecessors, they miss the irony: At the time, there were people who said the same thing about their ancestors; the Germans were thought to not be like the English, the Irish weren't like the Germans, the Italians weren't like the Irish etc. And the Chinese weren't like anyone who had come before them, and so they were labeled "unassimilable" by the Tom Tancredos of that era.
Some things never change. When I was growing up in Central California, which is home to a large population of immigrants from Southeast Asia, thousands would gather to celebrate Hmong New Year. The local newspaper would do a feature. And, in the days that followed, someone would write an angry letter to the editor complaining that these people weren't melting into the pot.
Yet, there is more melting going on than one might think, according to a new report from the Manhattan Institute. Billed as the first annual Index of Immigrant Assimilation, the study was written by Duke University Professor Jacob Vigdor. It measured three kinds of assimilation: economic (employment, education, homeownership, etc.); cultural (intermarriage, English proficiency, family size, etc.); and civic (citizenship, military service, political participation, etc.). Far from discovering that recent immigrants are ducking the assimilation process, the study found that "immigrants of the past quarter-century have assimilated more rapidly than their counterparts of a century ago, even though they are more distinct from the native population upon arrival."
Of course, individual groups still fall behind in some categories. Chinese and Indian immigrants have low levels of cultural assimilation. Mexican immigrants have low levels of economic assimilation. And Canadian and Indian immigrants have low levels of civic assimilation, since few of them become citizens.
But, overall, the news is good. After more than 200 years, America still does an excellent job of assimilating immigrants. Even if a particular group tried to resist the process, they wouldn't stand a chance. Assimilation happens, whether the immigrants are ready or not.
Those are the facts. Of course, fear doesn't listen to facts. That is something else that hasn't changed.
Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a member of the editorial board of the San Diego Union-Tribune and a nationally syndicated columnist.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/27/navarette.may.27/index.html?section=cnn_topstories&eref=yahoo
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Thursday, March 20, 2008
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Five Years Later...
Current mood:  angry
Category: News and Politics
9:02 PM
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Thursday, February 28, 2008
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Drudge Blows Prince Harry’s Cover in Afghanistan
Current mood:  irritated
Category: News and Politics
Matt Drudge jeopardized Prince Harry's life and his unit's mission by revealing that he was serving in a combat position in Afghanistan. It's funny that they actually refer the the Neo-Con hack as "foreign media"...
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Doubt over how much longer Prince Harry can stay in Afghanistan .. END HEADLINE -->
.. BEGIN STORY BODY -->
by Prashant Rao 9 minutes ago
There was doubt Friday over how much longer Prince Harry would stay in Afghanistan, after the defence ministry in London confirmed he has been there for more than two months fighting the Taliban.
The 23-year-old prince's deployment to the restive southern Afghan province of Helmand, where most of Britain's 7,700 troops are stationed, makes him the first British royal to be sent on active duty in more than a quarter-century.
It was unclear how much longer his tour there could last, however, with details of his posting having been released -- one newspaper declared that, now that his presence there was in the public domain, "security comes first."
His posting to the war-torn country was kept a tightly-guarded secret after the Ministry of Defence reached agreement on a news blackout with British media, to ensure details did not reach insurgents in the area.
That arrangement broke down, though, after news was leaked out on the US website, the Drudge Report, on Thursday.
As part of the deal, a group of journalists visited the royal in Helmand on condition that details would only be publicised once he was safely back in Britain.
The agreement was reached after Harry's planned tour to Iraq last year had to be shelved because of the security risk sparked by media publicity.
Those pre-prepared interviews were released in the aftermath of the revelation that he was in Afghanistan, in which the prince said he joked about his nickname -- "bullet magnet" -- with colleagues and thought his late mother, princess Diana, would have been proud of his deployment.
He also talked of life on the front line, including spending Christmas Day in a former Taliban madrassa peppered with bullet holes eating scrawny chickens slaughtered with the Gurkhas' fearsome kukri knives instead of festive turkey.
Of British public reaction, Harry said he hoped it would be positive and rounded on some commentators who branded him a coward for not going to Iraq, saying, "hopefully, they'll eat their words."
Harry acknowledged that his tour could make him a "top target" for extremists, adding that "every single person that supports them will be trying to slot me."
He even admitted that he often wished he was not a privileged, well-known royal, noting: "I think dressed in the same uniform as numerous other people, thousands of other people in Afghanistan will give me one of the best chances to be just a normal person."
Reaction, meanwhile, to his deployment was unanimous in praise, with Prime Minister Gordon Brown describing him as an "exemplary soldier (who) is serving with dedication in the finest tradition of our armed forces."
"The whole of Britain will be proud of the outstanding service he is giving," he added, in comments echoed by all the main political parties and Defence Secretary Des Browne.
The British press on Friday morning were similarly effusive in their praise, with The Sun tabloid, the country's best-read daily, describing the royal as "a man of outstanding courage who has risked having his head blown off by the Taliban so he can serve his country with his mates."
"The only disappointment is that Harry may have to come back because foreign media blew his cover," the paper said in its editorial.
The British Army's most senior officer, Chief of the General Staff Sir Richard Dannatt, described Harry as a "credit to the nation" but slammed the premature publication of news about the deployment.
"I am very disappointed that foreign websites have decided to run this story without consulting us," he said.
Dannatt said the last two months had shown it was "perfectly possible" for Prince Harry to serve in the same fashion as other army officers of his rank and experience.
He said he had decided to deploy Harry in Afghanistan because the news blackout agreement with the media had made the risk "manageable" but said no decision had yet been taken as to whether he would remain there.
The prince, who is third in line to the throne and had considered quitting the armed forces after the Iraq decision, retrained as a battlefield air controller, known as a JTAC (Joint Terminal Attack Controller), to go to Afghanistan.
He flew out on December 14 and spent several weeks working in Garmsir, in the far south of Helmand province, operating just 500 metres (yards) from front-line Taliban positions.
He has since left Garmsir to work in another part of Helmand, although the details cannot be reported for security reasons.
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Tuesday, December 11, 2007
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Internet Access on Flights?
Current mood:  awake
Category: Travel and Places
I'm not too sure I'd need internet access on a short flight, but I'd like to have it. It would certainly make a long flight more bearable! It would help keep kids entertained, too!
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In-flight Internet too tempting for some
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071211/ap_on_hi_te/business_of_life&printer=1;_ylt=AvvfbM44PyLcuyYatTRSNLxk24cA .. END HEADLINE -->
.. BEGIN STORY BODY -->
By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet WriterTue Dec 11, 1:20 PM ET
Warren Adelman's colleagues know him as "Thumbs": Like many executives, he is adept at checking e-mail on his BlackBerry and does it almost constantly.
Unable to do so during flights, Adelman welcomes business trips as "an opportunity to decompress a little bit from the constant flow of e-mail, perhaps catch up on a book."
"It's one of the few downtime environments you get in this day and age," said Adelman, president and chief operating officer of GoDaddy.com Inc., a registration company for Internet domain names.
An invasion of his sanctuary is imminent, though, as airlines around the world would make available in-flight Internet services.
On Tuesday, JetBlue Airways Corp. began offering e-mail and instant messaging on one aircraft. Broader high-speed services, including Web surfing, are to come next year on some flights of AMR Corp.'s American Airlines, Virgin America and Alaska Air Group Inc.'s Alaska Airlines.
And in-flight entertainment provider Panasonic Avionics Corp., a unit of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., has been testing Internet offerings with Australia's Qantas Airways Ltd. Other airlines are to join next year.
Airlines see airborne Internet access, which typically uses Wi-Fi technology deemed safe for flights, as producing both revenue and a competitive edge against one another and over trains, buses and automobiles.
Frequent fliers said the temptation to go online would be overwhelming, though they were divided over whether they would rejoice.
Jay Pease, a regional marketing director for Exstream Software LLC, said he needs to rest during trans-Atlantic flights for morning meetings in Europe. But he often has trouble sleeping, and he worried that "the temptation would be there to say, `I'll just log on and surf the Internet for a while.'"
Jon Carson, chief executive with online fundraising company cMarket Inc., said that between kids, meetings and electronic interruptions on the ground, "I get some of my best work done on the plane."
Good decisions and breakthroughs often arise from "the kind of deeper, reflecting thinking" not possible when new messages continually arrive, Carson said.
Adelman's colleague, GoDaddy General Counsel Christine Jones, disagreed.
"I would seriously turn cartwheels," said Jones, who admits to responding to e-mail while sitting in church. "The carriers that don't offer it will start hearing from their customers, your frequent fliers, `Hey guys, you have to get on board with it.'"
Peter Allen, chief marketing officer for the management consulting company TPI, said he already spends 80 percent of his flights on his laptop — often catching up on e-mail and waiting for an Internet connection upon landing to transmit those messages.
Robert Tas, chief executive of the online advertising company Active Athlete Media Inc., said he usually winds up reading printouts of articles, reports and other items he could read online. And if he had Web access he could dig deeper into items of interest.
"Reading time is still important," Tas said. "Having the Internet would allow me to do it more efficiently."
Frequent travelers said catching up with e-mail in the air frees up their time at their destination — in the hotel or back home with family.
"If I ended up feeling bad about it and resenting it, I would turn off my computer," said Andy Halliday, chief executive of the collaborative tribute site Tribbit.com. "It's still a choice. Right now you don't have that choice."
Jim Lanzone, chief executive of IAC/InterActiveCorp's search company Ask.com, spent Saturday's 10-hour flight from San Francisco to London reading magazines and Steve Martin's "Born Standing Up." He watched television shows on his iPod and has DVDs of "The Wire" ready for his return flight.
Lanzone doesn't mind that Internet access would cut into all that.
"If I had something on deadline, I'm not going to be able to relax anyway," he said. "I can enjoy DVDs, music and books more because I'll be able to get things off my mind."
But that's a false choice, said Deb Wenger, a Virginia Commonwealth University journalism professor who finished Martha Grimes' mystery novel "The Five Bells and Bladebone" during a recent trip to New York.
"The reality is that there's a certain luxury in being able, in a guilt-free way, to tell someone you're not available now. It will be, `I'm not making myself available to you,'" Wenger said. "It's a different message that sometimes employers don't want to hear."
Tim Winship, editor at large for the travel Web site Smarter Travel, predicted those stacks of magazines and books people save for long flights will start piling up again.
"The net effect of bringing Internet access on to airplanes is that there will be less reading accomplished," Winship said. "The question is how much."
Steve Jones, an Internet studies expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said unconnected time already has been shrinking because of cell phones and other handheld devices with Internet access. Soon, Jones said, people will get a break only during takeoffs and landings, as required by law.
Many frequent fliers, though, are looking forward to such continual access.
Henry Harteveldt, a Forrester Research analyst who follows the travel industry, flew to New York on Monday simply to take Tuesday's inaugural JetBlue flight with e-mail access.
"I find this to be a godsend," Harteveldt said via e-mail from Flight 641 to San Francisco. "The ability to stay in touch with my office and clients on a six-hour transcon flight is terrific. I hate that sense of dread when I turn on my BlackBerry after landing and get a flood of e-mail. Now I can manage real time."
Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
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Release date: 14 August, 2007
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Monday, November 26, 2007
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Study Finds Illegal Immigrants Not A Drain On U.S. Health Care Resources
Current mood:  hopeful
Category: News and Politics
Regardless of what immigration opponents say, a study by the University of California's School of Public Health found that on average, illegal latino immigrants used health care resources less than those born in the U.S.
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Illegal immigrants not U.S. health care burden: study --> -->--> END HEADLINE -->
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Illegal Latino immigrants do not cause a drag on the U.S. health care system as some critics have contended and in fact get less care than Latinos in the country legally, researchers said on Monday.
Such immigrants tend not to have a regular doctor or other health-care provider yet do not visit emergency rooms -- often a last resort in such cases -- with any more frequency than Latinos born in the United States, according to the report from the University of California's School of Public Health.
The finding from Alexander Ortega and colleagues at the school was based on a 2003 telephone survey of thousands of California residents, including 1,317 undocumented Mexicans, 2,851 citizens with Mexican immigrant parents, 271 undocumented Latinos from countries other than Mexico and 852 non-Mexican Latinos born in the United States.
About 8.4 million of the 10.3 million illegal aliens in the United States are Latino, of which 5.9 million are from Mexico, the report said.
"One recurrent theme in the debate over immigration has been the use of public services, including health care," Ortega's team wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
"Proponents of restrictive policies have argued that immigrants overuse services, placing an unreasonable burden on the public. Despite a scarcity of well-designed research ... use of resources continues to be a part of the public debate," they said.
The researchers said illegal Mexican immigrants had 1.6 fewer visits to doctors over the course of a year than people born in the country to Mexican immigrants. Other undocumented Latinos had 2.1 fewer physician visits than their U.S.-born counterparts, they said.
"Low rates of use of health-care services by Mexican immigrants and similar trends among other Latinos do not support public concern about immigrants' overuse of the health care system," the researchers wrote.
"Undocumented individuals demonstrate less use of health care than U.S.-born citizens and have more negative experiences with the health care that they have received," they said.
(Reporting by Michael Conlon; Editing by Maggie Fox and Bill Trott)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071126/us_nm/immigrants_health_dc
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The Dilemma
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Release date: June, 2005
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Friday, October 12, 2007
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Sex and Marriage With Robots?
Current mood:  contemplative
Okay, I can understand the attraction of sex with robots; they'd be ready, willing, disease-free and discrete. But marriage? What's the point of entering into marriage, a legally binding contract, with a non-sentient machine? If you get tired of your robot and want another, you would need only to "pull the plug" or trade it in on a newer model. Why complicate that process with lawyers? I'm quite fond of my laptop, and technically, I do spend more time with it than with my husband. But, I'll be ready to upgrade in a year or so and I'd hate to have to pay it alimony!
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Sex and marriage with robots? It could happen
Robots soon will become more human-like in appearance, researcher says
Humans could marry robots within the century. And consummate those vows.
"My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots," artificial intelligence researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands told LiveScience. Levy recently completed his Ph.D. work on the subject of human-robot relationships, covering many of the privileges and practices that generally come with marriage as well as outside of it.
At first, sex with robots might be considered geeky, "but once you have a story like 'I had sex with a robot, and it was great!' appear someplace like Cosmo magazine, I'd expect many people to jump on the bandwagon," Levy said.
The idea of romance between humanity and our artistic and/or mechanical creations dates back to ancient times, with the Greek myth of the sculptor Pygmalion falling in love with the ivory statue he made named Galatea, to which the goddess Venus eventually granted life.
This notion persists in modern times. Not only has science fiction explored this idea, but 40 years ago, scientists noticed that students at times became unusually attracted to ELIZA, a computer program designed to ask questions and mimic a psychotherapist.
"There's a trend of robots becoming more human-like in appearance and coming more in contact with humans," Levy said. "At first robots were used impersonally, in factories where they helped build automobiles, for instance. Then they were used in offices to deliver mail, or to show visitors around museums, or in homes as vacuum cleaners, such as with the Roomba. Now you have robot toys, like Sony's Aibo robot dog, or Tickle Me Elmos, or digital pets like Tamagotchis."
In his thesis, "Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners," Levy conjectures that robots will become so human-like in appearance, function and personality that many people will fall in love with them, have sex with them and even marry them.
"It may sound a little weird, but it isn't," Levy said. "Love and sex with robots are inevitable."
Sex with robots in 5 years
Levy argues that psychologists have identified roughly a dozen basic reasons why people fall in love, "and almost all of them could apply to human-robot relationships. For instance, one thing that prompts people to fall in love are similarities in personality and knowledge, and all of this is programmable. Another reason people are more likely to fall in love is if they know the other person likes them, and that's programmable too."
In 2006, Henrik Christensen, founder of the European Robotics Research Network, predicted that people will be having sex with robots within five years, and Levy thinks that's quite likely. There are companies that already sell realistic sex dolls, "and it's just a matter of adding some electronics to them to add some vibration," he said, or endowing the robots with a few audio responses. "That's fairly primitive in terms of robotics, but the technology is already there."
As software becomes more advanced and the relationship between humans and robots becomes more personal, marriage could result. "One hundred years ago, interracial marriage and same-sex marriages were illegal in the United States. Interracial marriage has been legal now for 50 years, and same-sex marriage is legal in some parts of the states," Levy said. "There has been this trend in marriage where each partner gets to make their own choice of who they want to be with."
"The question is not if this will happen, but when," Levy said. "I am convinced the answer is much earlier than you think."
When and where it'll happen
Levy predicts Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize human-robot marriage. "Massachusetts is more liberal than most other jurisdictions in the United States and has been at the forefront of same-sex marriage," Levy said. "There's also a lot of high-tech research there at places like MIT."
Although roboticist Ronald Arkin at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta does not think human-robot marriages will be legal anywhere by 2050, "anything's possible. And just because it's not legal doesn't mean people won't try it," he told LiveScience.
"Humans are very unusual creatures," Arkin said. "If you ask me if every human will want to marry a robot, my answer is probably not. But will there be a subset of people? There are people ready right now to marry sex toys."
The main benefit of human-robot marriage could be to make people who otherwise could not get married happier, "people who find it hard to form relationships, because they are extremely shy, or have psychological problems, or are just plain ugly or have unpleasant personalities," Levy said. "Of course, such people who completely give up the idea of forming relationships with other people are going to be few and far between, but they will be out there."
Ethical questions
The possibility of sex with robots could prove a mixed bag for humanity. For instance, robot sex could provide an outlet for criminal sexual urges. "If you have pedophiles and you let them use a robotic child, will that reduce the incidence of them abusing real children, or will it increase it?" Arkin asked. "I don't think anyone has the answers for that yet — that's where future research needs to be done."
Keeping a robot for sex could reduce human prostitution and the problems that come with it. However, "in a marriage or other relationship, one partner could be jealous or consider it infidelity if the other used a robot," Levy said. "But who knows, maybe some other relationships could welcome a robot. Instead of a woman saying, 'Darling, not tonight, I have a headache,' you could get 'Darling, I have a headache, why not use your robot?' "
Arkin noted that "if we allow robots to become a part of everyday life and bond with them, we'll have to ask questions about what's going to happen to our social fabric. How will they change humanity and civilization? I don't have any answers, but I think it's something we need to study. There's a real potential for intimacy here, where humans become psychologically and emotionally attached to these devices in ways we wouldn't to a vibrator."
Levy is currently writing a paper on the ethical treatment of robots. When it comes to sex and love with robots, "the ethical issues on how to treat them are something we'll have to consider very seriously, and they're very complicated issues," Levy said.
Levy successfully defended his thesis Oct. 11.
© 2007 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21271545/
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Tuesday, October 09, 2007
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Bush Administration Compromises Major Al-Qaeda Intelligence Source
Current mood:  enraged
Category: News and Politics
And of course, since the Bush Administration vaules political gain over national security, I'm sure no one will face any consequences for this grave act of treason!
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Leak Severed a Link to Al-Qaeda's Secrets
Firm Says Administration's Handling of Video Ruined Its Spying Efforts
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 9, 2007; A01
A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.
Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.
The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.
"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.
The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz's version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government's ability to anticipate attacks.
While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. "We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies," said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
But privately, some intelligence officials called the incident regrettable, and one official said SITE had been "tremendously helpful" in ferreting out al-Qaeda secrets over time.
The al-Qaeda video aired on Sept. 7 attracted international attention as the first new video message from the group's leader in three years. In it, a dark-bearded bin Laden urges Americans to convert to Islam and predicts failure for the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan. The video was aired on hundreds of Western news Web sites nearly a full day before its release by a distribution company linked to al-Qaeda.
Computer logs and records reviewed by The Washington Post support SITE's claim that it snatched the video from al-Qaeda days beforehand. Katz requested that the precise date and details of the acquisition not be made public, saying such disclosures could reveal sensitive details about the company's methods.
SITE -- an acronym for the Search for International Terrorist Entities -- was established in 2002 with the stated goal of tracking and exposing terrorist groups, according to the company's Web site. Katz, an Iraqi-born Israeli citizen whose father was executed by Saddam Hussein in the 1960s, has made the investigation of terrorist groups a passionate quest.
"We were able to establish sources that provided us with unique and important information into al-Qaeda's hidden world," Katz said. Her company's income is drawn from subscriber fees and contracts.
Katz said she decided to offer an advance copy of the bin Laden video to the White House without charge so officials there could prepare for its eventual release.
She spoke first with White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, whom she had previously met, and then with Joel Bagnal, deputy assistant to the president for homeland security. Both expressed interest in obtaining a copy, and Bagnal suggested that she send a copy to Michael Leiter, who holds the No. 2 job at the National Counterterrorism Center.
Administration and intelligence officials would not comment on whether they had obtained the video separately. Katz said Fielding and Bagnal made it clear to her that the White House did not possess a copy at the time she offered hers.
Around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, Katz sent both Leiter and Fielding an e-mail with a link to a private SITE Web page containing the video and an English transcript. "Please understand the necessity for secrecy," Katz wrote in her e-mail. "We ask you not to distribute . . . [as] it could harm our investigations."
Fielding replied with an e-mail expressing gratitude to Katz. "It is you who deserves the thanks," he wrote, according to a copy of the message. There was no record of a response from Leiter or the national intelligence director's office.
Exactly what happened next is unclear. But within minutes of Katz's e-mail to the White House, government-registered computers began downloading the video from SITE's server, according to a log of file transfers. The records show dozens of downloads over the next three hours from computers with addresses registered to defense and intelligence agencies.
By midafternoon, several television news networks reported obtaining copies of the transcript. A copy posted around 3 p.m. on Fox News's Web site referred to SITE and included page markers identical to those used by the group. "This confirms that the U.S. government was responsible for the leak of this document," Katz wrote in an e-mail to Leiter at 5 p.m.
Al-Qaeda supporters, now alerted to the intrusion into their secret network, put up new obstacles that prevented SITE from gaining the kind of access it had obtained in the past, according to Katz.
A small number of private intelligence companies compete with SITE in scouring terrorists' networks for information and messages, and some have questioned the company's motives and methods, including the claim that its access to al-Qaeda's network was unique. One competitor, Ben Venzke, founder of IntelCenter, said he questions SITE's decision -- as described by Katz -- to offer the video to White House policymakers rather than quietly share it with intelligence analysts.
"It is not just about getting the video first," Venzke said. "It is about having the proper methods and procedures in place to make sure that the appropriate intelligence gets to where it needs to go in the intelligence community and elsewhere in order to support ongoing counterterrorism operations."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/08/AR2007100801817.html?hpid=topnews
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