Cybrpnk's Rantings

Well, it's been a while. The trip to Japan was amazing. An incredible, and incredibly odd, country. A stunning mix of old and new. The trip was followed by the near-obligatory crash and low-grade cold that so often accompanies large changes in time zones and long flights. Now, back to some ranting.

I've been thinking lately about fairness, and about how little our society seems to value it. Most things seem to be set up to favor those who behave badly. Given the prevalent attitude in most professional sports these days, rules seem to be an inconvenience to be circumvented when they are in one's way, and invoked when the other side seems to be benifiting from ignoring them. Oddly, this seems to be pretty much what happens with corporations as well. Big corporations spend massive amounts of money paying lawyers to find loopholes in laws, lobbyists to change inconvenient laws, and PR flacks to whine about how government is intruding on their rights. I hope some day this country will wake up and decide that the rights of people should carry a lot more weight in law and government than the so-called rights of corporations.

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I realise that I haven't been doing a good job of keeping this up-to-date. Problem is that at the same time I was getting all of this set up I was also getting buried in work. My current project is writing some software for the soon-to-be-released I, Robot. And then, if that wasn't enough to keep me busy, I'm off to Japan on vacation tomorrow. I may try to do some updates from the road, but that may just not be doable.

In the meantime, things I've been thinking about writing about:

1) This Iraq torture thing. It's definitely not representative of the 135,000 American troops on the ground in Iraq. It is representative of the additional 100,000 plus troops we should have on the ground but don't. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and company should take the blame for this, because what happened is a direct result of their pathetically bad post-invasion planning.

2) The absurdity of those congressional hearings where people like Condi Rice avoid answering questions by rambling until certain people's time runs out. What's with that. Let's require that these people sit in the room until they've really answered all of the questions, or gone on the record as being unwilling to answer them.

3) Anyone else notice that our dramatic increases in jobs created is still below our monthly new filings for unemployment?

Saw the play Urinetown last night. Brilliant. Highly recommend it. Very quirky. Very funny. Don't be the bunny.

Is anyone else out there having a hard time figuring out how one can possibly reconcile a claim to being 'pro-life' with being opposed to strict environmental regulation of industry? I just don't get it. The so-called pro-life forces in Washington are proclaiming a great victory in pushing through a law making it a separate crime if a fetus is destroyed during commission of a violent federal crime. Note that key modifying word 'violent.' Apparently destroying fetuses which women want to bring to term during commission of non-violent federal crimes is okay. Pity. I was looking forward to the criminal actions against all of those chemical plants that have higher than normal miscarriage rates downstream. Not to mention the issues of air pollution.

There seem to be pretty seriously mixed messages here. It seems to me that if the conservatives were really pro-life, that would outweigh issues like corporate profits, wouldn't it? Sure, it's a classic liberal claim that the right cares more for money than human lives, but isn't this a stark vindication of that claim? It's one thing to take the traditional conservative position about the natural juxtaposition of high-polluting industries with low-income areas simply being a result of the land in such areas being cheap. It's another to defend the existence of toxic emission in populated areas at all.

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