blogging code of conduct

April 5, 2007 – 8:06 pm

In the wake of the debacle amongst the “A” listers in which a prominent female blogger is threatened with sexual abuse and death, I find that even the MSM (that’s mainstream media, not men having sex with men) ended up writing about it, specifically wondering whether or not we need a blogging code of conduct. Darleene muses about who would even enforce such a thing, but interestingly, we already have a code of conduct.

In the early days of the Internet, even before 1993 and the Eternal September, we had Netiquette, eventually codified in an actual RFC [What is an RFC?] by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the organization tasked with promoting Internet standards.

Netiquette is specifically covered by RFC 1855 [official plaintext version], which was formalized in October 1995, and like much of Internet planning, was intended to remain future-proof. So while it doesn’t specifically mention blogs (mostly because the term “blog” didn’t exist until around 1999), it does address one-to-many communication, which is essentially what a blog is useful for.

And enforcement will be performed exactly like enforcement was performed on Usenet or in IRC—by loud, vociferous debate, flaming and counter-flaming, and eventually by kicking and banning of select targets by those who have the power to do such things.

So you see, blogging has been and will continue to be subjected to the flame wars and pedantry that used to be confined to September, but which is now still eternal. Newbies, as always, lookout. It does remain to be seen what the next big one-to-many communication format will be.

By aswang | Posted in geekery, blogosphere | Comments (0)

aac

April 5, 2007 – 1:58 pm

On Slashdot, there is a post about Apple’s deal with EMI to release non-DRM’ed music in AAC format may change how music is distributed on-line. While the conclusions drawn by this article may be suspect, I think there are aspects that are worth considering.

First of all, AAC is a standardized format that was devised by multiple industry players such as Dolby, Fraunhofer, AT&T, Sony and Nokia, and so it’s not completely proprietary like Microsoft’s WMA format or Real Audio. Given the open standard, the creation of a GPL’ed encoder and decoder for AAC was less fraught with licensing issues than creating one for the MP3 format. (For a couple of years, the LAME project, now GPL’ed, was only a patch to the reference code from ISO, which had a restrictive license.)

Secondly, distribution of AACs does not require a licensing fee (although you do have to pay for distributing encoders and decoders)

Thirdly, there are some technical merits for adopting AAC. At lower bitrates (at which most music is encoded), AAC is definitely better than MP3, and at higher bitrates, they are pretty much on equal footing.

Fourthly, DRM-free AACs would allow third-parties to take advantage of the iPod’s dominance of the market.

I would love greater support for open formats like OGG and FLAC, too, but this is probably farther from the horizon.

By aswang | Posted in geekery, music | Comments (0)

eating disorders can kill

April 5, 2007 – 1:03 pm

I think that most people have at least some awareness of eating disorders, specifically bulimia and anorexia nervosa. Mostly because it’s pretty widespread. I’m sure that all of us know at least one person who is close to us who at one time in their life sufferred from one of these conditions. And I’m pretty sure that the reported incidence is far lower than the actual incidence.

My sister, a well-educated and intelligent woman, can now acknowledge that some of her behaviors with regards to food or to her body image have been unhealthy. Mostly, what woke her up was her roommate in freshman year in college, who purged on a regular basis. But even though she recognizes that American culture’s expectations about women’s appearances is pretty damaging to the cause of equal rights, it’s not an easy thing to buck.

Thankfully, people are starting to wake up a little. The starved, emaciated look is not very cute, and even the fashion industry is being forced to start noticing. But the disease burden is still pretty significant, and I don’t think I recognized the extent of this pandemic until I started seeing it every day.

Patients with anorexia nervosa and bulimia are among the sickest people I meet. I’ve seen a few who look worse than people suffering from AIDS or metastatic cancer. These patients (mostly women, but there are indeed a good number of men) aren’t just thin. Their muscle mass is atrophied. They have absolutely no subcutaneous fat. They really look like the wind could break them. But what is most appalling is the fact that they continue to claim that they’re OK, and even more heart-wrenching, some still think that they are too fat.

There is typically a degree of mental illness at work. While extrinsic forces such as cultural expectations and the fashion industry don’t help the situation, there is something intrinsic that cooperates, and perpetuates the behavior. People with eating disorders will band together. Some claim they are being discriminated against for being skinny and having a fast metabolism. There are even websites out there on how to fool your doctor into thinking you are getting better while still continuing to avoid food and/or binging-and-purging.

There are so very few similar diseases that occur in someone who is otherwise healthy, who is intelligent and has great potential, which can end up ruining their lives and/or even killing them. If you get leukemia or you are infected by HIV, you generally recognize that something is wrong with you, and you seek appropriate attention, and you can get cured, or at least controlled. But behavioral illnesses like substance abuse and depression do the same thing as eating disorders—they take some of the best and the brightest and stop them from ever contributing positively to society. We are starting to be able to control some depression, and there is a lot of money being pumped into trying to curb substance abuse (although results are variable), but eating disorders have yet to get the same amount of focus and attention.

I guess Alisa has it right. We health professionals aren’t being trained well enough to recognize this pervasive disease. I am somewhat disturbed by how few seemed to care about Alisa’s situation, and how many seemed to promote somewhat inaccurate information.

It is generally recognized that both anorexia nervosa and bulimia can cause electrolyte imbalances, the most rapidly fatal being hypokalemia—a deficiency in potassium—which can precipitate life-threatening arrhythmias—irregular heart beats that may require defibrillation. But starvation and binging/purging can also have permanent effects on the heart, leading to a persistent condition known as long QT syndrome where you are prone to developing life-threating arrhythmias. And in some cases (in particular with refeeding) you can end up with heart failure. There also seem to be permanent changes to the lungs at least on radiographic studies—changes that are akin to what you would get from smoking 4 packs of cigarettes a day (one cigarette every 20 minutes!) for 30 years. Why this happens is not well known, but if you’re throwing up all the time, it’s foreseeable that some of that vomit can end up going back down the wrong pipe and into your lungs, causing some damage.

And throwing up all the time will cause esophagitis. Esophagitis, left untreated, will cause Barrett’s esophagus. Barrett’s esophagus can lead to esophageal cancer, which is a disease with a pretty poor prognosis. If it can be removed (which is an option in only about 30-40% of patients with esophageal cancer), it would generally involve cutting out part of your esophagus and then reconnecting everything together so that you can eventually eat again. Generally, they would want to cut into your chest as well as your belly—it’s a big operation that is fraught with possible complications. And if you only get surgery, your chance of being alive in 5 years is about 5-20% percent. So generally, you would also get chemotherapy and radiation.

This is when the cancer is potentially curable. And a huge percentage of these patients eventually have recurrences. Meanwhile, the 60-70% of patients who have non-resectable disease are pretty much doomed, although they will do surgery/chemo/or radiation if you can’t swallow and/or breathe and are well enough to undergo some kind of procedure.

But esophagitis and even Barrett’s esophagus will regress—if you take your medications religiously and stop throwing up. So Barrett’s esophagus is not necessarily a death sentence.

But, yeah, we have yet to invent anything that will cure GERD. For many of us who have it, H2 blockers like Zantac and Pepcid or proton-pump inhibitors like Prilosec can make it bearable, and keep us from running into any of the horrific complications listed above, but it probably won’t ever go away. Some people who have it bad enough may opt to get a fundoplication—surgeons can take your stomach and wrap it around the esophagus so that stomach acid can’t reflux out, but these are not fool-proof and can fail, and you have to be extremely careful about eating. Sometimes they also do a vagotomy, where they cut one of the nerves that help control your gut, so that it doesn’t stimulate your stomach to produce acid. But this does have its side-effects.

GERD and esophagitis can cause horrific substernal chest pain that may be easily mistaken for a heart attack. What is even worse and quite possibly fatal is the possibility of esophageal rupture, which is something I would be concerned about if you told me you just ate a big meal, threw up, then heard a pop, and now you’ve got excruciating chest pain.

But recovering from an eating disorder is a long, hard road that requires a lot of support. And it’s something that can come back time and again. I hope that Alysa can find a health care professional that is well-trained with dealing with eating disorders.

By aswang | Posted in medicine | Comments (0)

the children of húrin and the curse of the golden flower

April 4, 2007 – 12:11 am

I just occurred to me the superficial similarities between the story of Túrin Turambar and the movie “The Curse of the Golden Flower“. The most obvious similarity is the incest (Crown Prince Wan isn’t just porking his sister, he’s also doing his stepmother!) but the idea of curses and of gold also resonates. In the movie, the golden chrysanthemum becomes the doomed standard of Prince Jai, while in the story, the golden hoard of Glaurung becomes a curse to Thingol, king of Doriath.

There is also the idea of devotion to one’s mother. Many of the mishaps that befall Túrin are due to his desire to see his mother Morwen again, and Prince Jai’s failed rebellion is waged in an attempt to free his mother from the tyranny of his father. (I suppose echoes of Oedipus necessarily arise.)

There is unrequited love: the love of the elven princess Finduilas for Túrin compared to the Empress’ love of the Crown Prince.

And like all epic stories, there is treachery, suicide, and madness.

And in the end, the bad guys win. (Morgoth in The Children of Húrin, the Emperor in “The Curse of the Golden Flower” although he is not as clear-cut of an antagonist as Morgoth.) The key victims—Húrin, the Empress—get to live (and by key victim, I mean the person on which all the other tragedies in the story hinges)

But “The Curse of the Golden Flower” is not an original story, but is rather based on the play “Thunderstorm” by the acclaimed Chinese writer Cao Yu. The characters are not of imperial lineage, but rather are of the bourgoisie, but the essential plot is comparable, and the unintentional incest and resultant suicide is present.

By aswang | Posted in movies, fantasy-genre, literary-criticism | Comments (0)

great is the fall of gondolin

April 3, 2007 – 10:13 pm

I’m still slowly working my way through The Lost Tales by J.R.R. Tolkien and edited by his son Christopher. I found the story of the destruction of the great, hidden city of the Elves wonderfully moving—the story in The Lost Tales presents much more detail than the version in The Silmarillion and there are some interesting concepts that Tolkien later removed.

I’ve written about the fact that Tolkien wrote about airships in Middle Earth. In “The Fall of Gondolin”, it looks like the Dark Lord Melko used technology resembling familiar 20th/21st century war machines to attack the city of the Elves. There is a description of a contrivance that kind of sounds like a transport helicopter, disgorging battalions of Orcs from its belly. The dragons also sound kind of mechanical, radiating an unnatural, all-consuming heat, and I can’t help but wonder if the Japanese did not catch on to these details way back when, considering that manga and anime are replete with fantastic airships, and bizarre technologic creations that may never become reality. I immediately think of mecha, and transforming robots, and the like. In later drafts of these stories, dragons become organic creatures, and there are no allusions to things that may or may not be internal combustion engines.

Tolkien’s works can be read as a reaction against the dehumanization inherent in mass production and wholesale mechanized killing, which he witnessed first-hand during WWI, and which became even more magnified during WWII, what with Hitler’s systematic genocide that seems original to the industrial era, and the ferocity of his flying and crawling war machines. Better minds than mine have looked closely at how The Lord of the Rings has a lot to say about the evils of our mechanized exploitation of the environment.

Sadly, Tolkien may be a modern-day Cassandra or Laocoön, prophesying the fall of Western Civilization at the hands of the technology we created. (As much as he protests the allegorical reading of the Ring as a metaphor for nuclear power, this idea is nonetheless quite powerful, and as I am reminded by a bumper sticker, it seems that “Frodo failed. Bush has the Ring.”) The process invented by Henry Ford (who as you may know was a prominent Nazi sympathizer) is profoundly widespread, with mass production still successfully fueling the engines of capitalism, and we’ve even tried to apply these processes to service industries which were not long ago thought to be entirely the exclusive demesne of actual human beings. (When’s the last time you called customer service and didn’t have to deal with a machine?)

The advances in depersonalized mass killing have likewise been striking in the last hundred years. While the intercontinental ballistic missile is perhaps the most feared and most horrific piece of technology ever created thus far, the progress in other realms of wholesale slaughter is also impressive. Just like the invention of the transistor and then the microprocessor has allowed great strides in communication and information technology, so too has miniaturization revolutionized the ability for people to kill lots of other people. It is no longer considered surprising when a single person walks into a place of business with a very portable, very lethal piece of machinery that can easily kill nine or ten people before he/she runs out ammo and/or is killed by the SWAT team. Hand-held personal missile launchers are quite widespread and easy to get a hold of, as the current fiasco in Mesopotamia well demonstrates. And, God help us, the United States is trying to create tactical nukes so that a single soldier can go out into the field and create their own little mushroom clouds.

I say, never mind at looking at how we’re raping the environment—not that the environment isn’t important. But it sort of doesn’t matter if we succeed in wiping each other out via mutually-assured destruction. I can tell you that the environment will be the least of our worries if nuclear winter sets in.

But enough cheerfulness.

What I’m finding interesting about the Lost Tales and the entire History of Middle Earth series is that it creates a distinctly postmodern canon of Tolkien’s work. Despite the fact that Christopher Tolkien explicitly delineates what he considers canon and what he consider apocrypha, the very fact that these alternative drafts are published make them a sort of quasi-canon. Like real history, and real ethnography, the whole body of Tolkien’s published work (the History of Middle Earth included) has inconsistancies and contradictions. Mythologies—like the Bible or the Iliad, for example—frequently have alternative depictions, some in agreement, but others at variance. Even the simple fairy tales that we hear as children have conflicting provenances and contradictory themes, and Walt Disney’s reinterpretations are only one of several. This quality actually makes Middle Earth even more immersive. Reality varies according to what you read.

Which tangentially brings me back to this interesting quote that Kagro X brought up again in a post on the Daily Kos (this context of the post is not necessarily relevant to why it struck me today):

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
—Ron Suskind “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush” New York Times 2004 Oct 17

This is now my impression of post-modernism and post-colonialism. The most pervasive cultural products of our time are basically remixes. After all, look at all the Tolkien knock-offs and homages sitting in the Fantasy section of your book store. We’ve gotten to the point where we can remix reality in real-time and have it stick and carry scholarly wait. It used to be you had to wait until you were dead before people starting adding their own isogeses while deconstructing you and/or your work.

It’s not so much that we keep revising history. This has happened since history existed, because we all know that the winners write all the books. it’s the fact that no only can we re-write history as it’s happening, but we can, in fact, pre-write history.

Which is, as a matter of fact, kind of what Tolkien actually tried to set out in do.

By aswang | Posted in american-history, politics, fantasy-genre, quotes, literary-criticism, tech | Comments (0)

the old dilemma: legacy support vs the bleeding edge

April 2, 2007 – 8:24 pm

OK, so maybe I’m just a touch melodramatic when I say that Windows’ reliance on the 8.3 naming convention makes me sad. And, yes, I do subscribe to the “worse is better” school of software design, so I agree that you shouldn’t futz around and break something that already works pretty well 95% of the time.

But I do find it quaint that vestiges of CP/M still survive to the present day. It’s as if we’ve never left the 8-bit era of computing (those were the golden ages, I tell you.)

What I do find disturbing is the fact that you can’t safely abandon the 8.3 filename convention. Say I want to use only long filenames. Thanks to poor third-party developer practices, it’s never going to happen. As oldnewthing points out, there is a lot of crappy code out there that hard codes 8.3 filenames into their installers. And then there’s the thing with how the dynamic loader almost makes name collisions inevitable by allowing you to call the same library by both its short name and its long name as if they were different libraries, resulting in two copies of the library taking up space in memory, and possibly leading to some rather hard-to-detect bugs. This gives me the heebie-jeebies.

There’s nothing you can really do about the third-party developers. The only way would be if their code happens to be open-source, then you could fix it yourself by removing the hard-coded filenames and recompiling. But I think that, in this day and age, it should probably be the standard practice to just call libraries by their long file name and ditch the 8.3 filename convention altogether in any new code you’re writing. After all, most newbie end-users booting up XP on a clean install should have their hard drive formatted as NTFS, and anyone demented enough to still use FAT32 will have to take their own chances.

I think the reason why the 8.3 filename convention grates on me so much is the fact that I started off on an OS that allowed me to save files with descriptive names—as I mentioned before, CBM-DOS allowed 16 character names, which was plenty enough for me at the time. To be reduced to goobledygook like FVQURPMX.DOC didn’t sit too well with me in those days when I was still running MS-DOS 5 and Windows 3.11. It certainly made searching for old documents an adventure. I remember long filenames being one of the huge features that made Windows 95 a must-have for me. Hell, long filenames were one of the reasons why I braved the sources of the Linux 1.x kernel in the early ‘90’s.

Oh, I know that long filenames aren’t too nice if you’re stuck with using COMMAND.COM as your shell, but if you have something sane like Bash which allows tab-completion, or if you—horror of horrors—actually use the GUI, then it doesn’t matter at all. And sure, even now, the UNIX convention is to use program and directory names that are as short as possible. Look at the FHS. All the key directories still consist of only three characters. But it doesn’t hamper you from using longer directory names if you want to. Look at Mac OS X, for example, which uses verbose directory names like “Library” or “Applications”, all without significantly breaking compatibility with its BSD roots.

That said, yes I know Unix itself is pretty ancient. But its heterogeneity makes the development environment a lot more stringent. You’d never get away with doing non-portable things like hard-coding which directories you expect to exist on the filesystem. If your code relies on legacy things that have long since been thrown away, it’s just not going to compile, and you’re going to have to fix it if you want anyone to use your software.

By aswang | Posted in geekery, filesystems | Comments (0)

windows: trapped in the 1970’s

April 2, 2007 – 8:58 am

I stumbled upon this blog entry on The Old New Thing which discusses the 8.3 filename convention on MS-DOS and Windows up to and including XP, which limits a filename to 8 characters with a 3 character extension.

Now I haven’t run Windows since 1998, although I’m forced to used it at work. While the filename limitation was effectively eliminated by Windows 95 and the introduction of VFAT for most casual users, as oldnewthing points out, it still has ramifications to programmers.

I find this sad.

My very first computer, a Commodore 64 purchased in the ‘80’s, could use up to 16 characters in the filename. The original incarnation of the filesystem for UNIX (now commonly referred to as s5fs) which existed in the ‘70’s could have 14 characters in the filename. The original Macintoshes with the Macintosh File System could have 255 characters (although this was in practice limited to 31 characters because of the limitations of the Finder)

And here we are in 2007, with programmers still having to deal with 8.3. Hah!

By aswang | Posted in geekery, filesystems | Comments (3)

euphemisms and ridiculous tangents

April 2, 2007 – 1:24 am

None of my own inner demons have anything directly to do with Nic’s blog post about how nice guys finish last, but the opening quote reminded me of the dead-end lifestyle I’ve been leading for the last decade or so.

Now that I’ve grown delirious with sleep, the thoughts that have spun through my head today have pretty much mellowed out, and I kind of don’t care anymore.

But I can’t help think about the probability that when a woman tells me I’m too nice, it’s just code for you’re too ugly and fat for me.

Whatever. There are more things to life than mere love, companionship, and good sex that you didn’t have to pay for.

I did find myself wallowing in loneliness today. Just a smidge. I’ve been trying to limit how many hours I spend mired in self-pity these days, and the medications help a little bit, so it’s not the big massive emotional sinkhole that it used to be.

Still, I can’t help but wonder why a certain someone never returns my calls.

You know things are bad when you aren’t even in the Friend Zone™ anymore.

It does kind of get me down that the only people who call me and leave voice messages are my mother and the credit card companies who are clamoring for my soul.

No one ever e-mails me anymore, either.

I’m just friendless, freakish, and hopeless.

OK, OK, things are not as bad as I make them out to be.

As most people understand, the name of the game is “you give a little, you get a little.” Ain’t no one gonna come knocking on my door if I don’t at least make some small gesture of welcome.

To put it another way, I can put much of the blame for ending up a hermit squarely on myself.

To paraphrase a former Secretary of War, the only way to make someone trustworthy is trust them, and I’m clearly not going to make any new friends if I expect everyone to betray me eventually.

It’s hard to ignore my motto which serves me incredibly well when I’m at work: “Hope for the best, but expect the worst.”

As Chuck Palahniuk once wrote, “If you worry about disaster all the time, that’s what you’re going to get….”

Ultimately, we end up back at square one. The existential question for the day becomes this: what exactly do I have to offer to anyone? As a friend, as an acquaintance, as an employee. Just as a person in general. For the longest time, I’ve told myself, deep in my heart, that I’ve got a lot to offer, it’s just that there’s this depression and this fear of betrayal that’s always getting in my way.

No matter how sad and pathetic I would be, in the inner sanctum of my soul, I would hang on to the hope that somewhere deep inside this morass of sadness and despair, there was actually a person who was worthwhile, and who would be fun to hang around with.

Well, as time goes by, and as my bad habits harden, I’m starting to give up on this hope. Eventually, what you do becomes who you are, no matter what the philosophers say, and I’m getting to the point where I will become this awful, useless person who does nothing but mope all day, who lacks the most rudimentary of social skills, who trusts absolutely no one, and who will remain friendless for all the rest of my days.

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

The easy way out is to blame all of this on the malicious actions of people in my past.

But I know better.

The universe didn’t dick me. I dicked myself.

(In the off-chance that maybe one or two of my actual friends are reading this, none of this diatribe applies to you. I know that you’re busy, and that you’re not ignoring me, and I know that if I wasn’t such a lazy and thoughtless bastard, I could just give you a call maybe once in a while instead of whining about how no one ever calls me. But you know me, always looking at the dark side of life, and never the one to do anything about it.)

By aswang | Posted in whining | Comments (0)

the slow diffusion of information across fields

April 1, 2007 – 4:08 pm

Joanne brings up a disturbing story concerning May Yuen, a Chinese American who joined the Army, who ended up killing herself.

The model-minority angle which emphasizes the extreme difficulty of many Asian Americans with countenancing failure is definitely important, and does definitely contribute to the reasons why Asian Americans commit suicide, and in some extreme cases, murder-suicides. I am immediately reminded about the tragically synchronous string of killings that struck the Korean American community in Los Angeles a year ago. There is a disturbing current involving cultures that tolerate physical and psychological abuse intertwined with the effects of experiencing racism, even if not overt.

The fear of failure, and the cultural pressure to achieve was most apparent to me in medical school, where many of the Asian Americans I knew were exactly in this kind of bind. A good enough number of them were not actually particularly interested in practicing medicine, but the drive to achieve pushed them along this pathway, and as many survivors of medical school and residency can attest, medicine is in someways akin to the Mafia—once you get in, you pretty much stay in.

The idea of having to do a job that gives you absolutely no pleasure for at least 10-15 years in order to repay your debts makes me physically ill, but this is in fact where some people seem to find themselves. In some ways, it seems to be the American Way™—everyone seems to pretty much hate their job. (Naturally, I am reminded of a Homer Simpson quote: “Kill my boss? Dare I live out the American Dream?”)

There is a part of me that is a little scornful—if one could only be true to one’s self, and fuck other people and their expectations, then you wouldn’t have to deal with this—but I suppose not everyone is that strong-willed and/or lucky. (And who am I to talk, considering I did go down the path of medicine, the key difference being that I actually like doing what I’m doing, and it is questionable whether I would have been good enough to do anything else.)

That being said, I am incredibly skeptical of anything coming out of the military’s PR department. After all, despite what the actual soldiers in Iraq are saying, the brass continue to claim that everything is all sunshine and roses, and that day by day we’re winning the War on Terror™, this despite the fact that the number of people dying in Iraq in a month increased in March.

The incidence of male soldiers raping female soldiers is sadly underreported, although Gary Trudeau does bring it up in Doonesbury. Given the military’s PR department’s disgraceful handling of Pat Tillman’s death, I can’t help but wonder if the military is not covering something up here.

And lastly, there is the disturbing fact that May Yuen likely had exercise-induced or maybe even mild, intermittent asthma, and that it sounds like her superiors didn’t give a rat’s ass and didn’t bother referring her to see an M.D. It is a sad fact that in this day and age—mostly because some old school M.D.s continue to foment outdated knowledge—people can needlessly die from an asthma exacerbation simply because they aren’t carrying albuterol with them.

Now I have had a brief exposure to health care system that takes care of the active military as well as the health care system that takes care of the veterans, and while I have seen some things that the private sector could learn a lesson from, there are other things that made the whole Walter Reed scandal not all that surprising. If you’re a spouse or dependent, it’s actually pretty decent access—far better than some of the private sector mechanisms that I’ve seen and/or have been subjected to—but if you’re active duty, you’ve got to jump through quite a few hoops to get evaluated by an M.D. Now how messed up would that be if that’s what killed May Yuen?

By aswang | Posted in medicine, oif, asian-american-experience | Comments (0)

you don’t need no stinkin’ rights

April 1, 2007 – 12:03 pm

Wow. Just, wow.

Both Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, the two leading Republican candidates for President in 2008 don’t believe in the Magna Carta, and think that a king an executive should be able to do whatever they want to.

Never mind that the Magna Carta and the writ of habeas corpus have been cornerstones of Western Civilization™ since 1215.

We’re going all the way back to the Dark Ages, baby. Burning witches at the stake. Stoning heretics. Serfs. Slaves. The Black Plague. It’s on.

The thing that is most entertaining about this is that during the Dark Ages, it was the Arabs kept the intellectual and philosophical legacies of the Greeks and the Romans from mouldering in the grass, without whom Europe would’ve remained nothing but a howling wasteland populated by naked, illiterate savages. In such a world, the U.S. would’ve never have existed.

Which is essentially what Giuliani and Romney are saying. You take away habeas corpus and you’ve destroyed the Constitution, and without the Constitution, the U.S. doesn’t exist.

Why do the Republicans hate America?

By aswang | Posted in american-history, politics | Comments (0)