Good Lord... the pains of the unenforceable

There are silly laws on the books, things which are no longer relevant, or which have no real purpose (it is, for example, a $50 dollar fine to drive 50, or more, sheep down Hollywood Boulevard... it's $25 to shoot rabbits from a streetcar, in Los Angeles).

Then there are laws which can't really be enforced, laws which, at best, can only be enforced with draconion intrusion, or caprice and inequality (sodomoy laws being the most egregious of these).

So finding out the Commerce Dept. wants to make it a crime to let foreigners use computer networks... well it's bothersome.

I first saw it here, at Nick Weaver's blog.Export License Needed to Log In Looking at the text, he's right. If you have enough computers, linked together, you could be in a world of hurt if someone born in a prohibited country uses them.

The relevant paragraph is here and reads: "The OIG recommended that BIS amend its policy to require U.S.
organizations to apply for a deemed export license for employees or
visitors who are foreign nationals and have access to dual-use
controlled technology if they were born in a country where the
technology transfer in question would require an export license,
regardless of their most recent citizenship or permanent residency."

I'll quote Mr. Weaver, "It's not too late to submit comments (mail to scook@bis.doc.gov, with "RIN 0694-AD29" in the subject line), as the comment period extends until May 27th."

Blogroll

Y'all might guess that I get around these here internets a bit.

I do. I am, basically, a house husband and it gives me more free time than not (for certain values of free time). My productivity is measured by getting dinner on the table and keeping up with the vaccuuming, Since the cable package we have stinks like a long dead whale in June, I don't have television to distract me I can read a fair bit.

Lots of that is LJ. I have too many people on my f-list and you all write a lot.

And I have a lot of outside reading too (not all of which I keep up with as much as I think I ought.

So I'm going to share the load.

First, the glory (and pain) of the medium means I get a lot of bouncing. So-and-so points to thus-and-such and I head off to who knows where. I can only hope the places I pop in, to spout off, and then wander away, aren't harmed by it.

And then, every couple of weeks, I do some Chain Links and you can see what caught my eye.

So, in no particular order (and apologies if get some of it wrong, the comments are my impressions).

nikkinewsnet and twistedchick are my local aggregators. A lot of what I link to I first saw from them. I don't know if they are more dedicated than I to scouring online newpapers, or just faster, but I've usually not seen more than half of what they are mentioning. I have to provide commentary to not feel a plagiarist when I use their links.

libertango He posts in fits and starts. His commentary on current events is usually to the point, his personal observations are touching (but I know him in life, and am biased) and he has Sarah, The Wonder Dog^TM, so that alone makes him worth your time.

bellatrys Left. Yes, Left. I am moderate (or used to be... these days I feel a right-radical). She is to my left. Her main focus is the rise of theocratic elements, and aspects of how they see themselves, and what they want for use. Lots of historical context. She knows the players. Not from the program, but many of them from life.

mactavish She knows everybody. Great stuff for birders and geographiles. She is an unabashed Californian, and that is enough for me (took me 15 years to decide this crazy state was home, and if it weren't for libertango and akirlu I might not have thought of leaving again).

jonquil Great posts about shopping. Her discussions of the farmer's market in SF (which is a great market, go if you can) were no small part of why I started writing about food. She gets much of the credit/blame (since some of you complain I make your lunches less enjoyable). When she talks about writing, well it's insightful, and often poetic.

matociquala Speaking of writers, she is. Lots of her posts are about her present book. Even if you don't care much for that, the rest of her commentary is worth reading. She also likes my stuff enough to point people to it. After my rantings in other journals that's probabaly the single greatest source of people wandering in here.

rm Life, and being an actor in New York. I was right, it probably wasn't the life for me. I thought about it, long enough to decide the odds scared me, and that was probably a recipe for failure. For those who ponder such things (and lord knows, I've taken up the camera again, so it isn't as though I'm really afraid of long odds) she has a lot to say. And she dances.

motel666 Strong woman. Not to everyone's taste (not always to mine). Been working the sex trade for a long time. Just moved to New Orleans from Seattle. Honest. No, I mean it, really honest. Scary honest. The sort of thing one can't fake. Wants to be an author. Working on it. Not for the fainthearted, prudish, or even the squeamish.

ginmar Also honest. Got a bit of fame when she wrote up a firefight. Some folks thought it was girly fantasy. Not by half. Feminist. Critical, at times bordering on vitriolic... ok, past bordering. Like bellatrys she has a cause. Deal with it. She will cut slack. She brooks disagreement, but she wants argument, not mere assertion. Honest differences of opinion are accepted, not always without heated words, but accepted.

susiebrightfeed An RSS feed for Susie Bright's blog. Nice commentary on sex, society, feminism and her life. Sometimes it isn't visually worksafe, usually it's borderline for verbal content.


I guess that covers the home team, for the moment.

The away team.

Geoff Arnold
We met from fondness for a minor musician. Minor in that he has only moderate fame, for which we are actually grateful, as it means we can see him in intimate venues and he actually knows our names (well, maybe not ours in specific, but our little slice of his fandom). Ex-pat Brit, computer geek, atheist, decent guy, comparator of his native Britain with the States, where he's lived for I don't know how long. I don't know how to sum him up, but I read his blog.

Orcinus Probably the most depressing, enlightening, and stimulating blog I read. He writes, largely, about the radical fringes of the Right Wing. The Aryan Nations, the Minutemen, the White Supremacists. He does this with clarity, detail and frightening insight as to how they are encroaching into the mainstream, as well as how the mainstream is trying to ride the whirlwind of the fringes, without having to pay the markers they are giving out. Something has to give.

The Slacktivist Fred Clark, Newspaper editor, Evangelical Christian and a better man than I. I read Goldberg's Bias to give it a fair treatment (a friend, self described as to the right of Ghengis Khan heard me fulminating over some of the intro and responded to it with... "what a load of crap". Said friend thinks the media is biased, and to the left, but that Goldberg is spouting moonshine), Fred is reading, and reviewing, in small chunks, Left Behind.

Schneier on Security Bruce Schneier, one of the best writers on security going. Not just computer (at which he makes no small part of his living) but general. I played along in the buying spree to make, Beyond Fear number one on Amazon (briefly). It wouldn't hurt to buy a copy, and keep it in print. Good stuff.

Steve Gilliard Commentary on news, politics, race and his life. I don't read it every day, rather I recall that it's been awhile then I gorge on catching up.

English Cut A Savile Row tailor (not a seamster/seamstress, but the one who makes the patterns and cuts the cloth). Someday I will have a Savile Row suit and I this tailor(who makes superb stuff, from looking at the pictures) has a philosophy I enjoy, and a manner I suspect I will like. He makes trips to New York. He just announced he will (because of his blog) be adding an annual trip to SF to do fittings. Anyone who wants to see me in sartorial splendor may feel free to send me money, I will open an account just for that.

Western Democrat A collective blog. Thinking about how the Wests populism and progressive nature can be turned back to a more liberal line of thought on the national stage. It's probably more likely than getting Georgia or Alabama.

Intel Dump Phil Carter. Lawyer, soldier, commentator. I don't always agree with him, but he's worth the read. It was from him I found out COL Hackworth died on Thursday. To drift a bit... I didn't always agree with Hack, but he was one of a rare breed... willing to stand up and be counted, damn the cost (and it cost him, he was forced to retire when he spoke out against Viet-nam, from Viet-nam). My first awareness of Hack was a column he wrote about the miserable lack of resignations on principle, after the Marine Barracks in Beiruit were bombed... Ave Atque Vales Frater) Carter does a lot of writing on how the law affects the army, and vice versa.

Bat Left, Throws Right This is what I would like my blog to grow up to be. Comments on the mortality of his cats, politics, food, drink

The Perfect Mint Julep

The keys to a perfect mint julep are careful preparation and quality ingredients:

Equipment: two four ounce bowls (silver is preferable), bar spoon, strainer.

Into the first bowl put several fresh mint sprigs, one teaspoon of sugar, and two tablespoons of spring water. In the other pour two ounces of Bourbon (Blanton's, if you prefer an ethereal smoothness; Booker Noe's for superior flavor). Crush the leaves with the spoon, then stir until the sugar is completely dissolved.

Now carefully strain the contents of the first bowl into the sink, and drink the second.


Disclaimer: Mr. Riley did not receive any free product from either Blanton's or Booker Noe's in exchange for his endorsement, but he's not totally averse to the idea.

That, is a perfect Mint Julep. I can't even quibble with his selection of bourbons.

Read and Enjoy.

That noise, it was the sound of my head exploding.

I used to be a journalist. In some ways I still am (it's kind of like being an actor, or a soldier, it never really leaves you. The tricks, tools and ways of looking at the world are engrained).

I have a couple of friends who write for publication, they've been known to ask for advice. I've been known to give it. Maia, Alexa and everyone else I've lived with in the past 20 years (which is not quite how long it's been since my first byline) has had to hear my odd noises of croggled ire when I read some bit of terrible journalism (the most recent being a cutline [i.e. the text beneath a picture] which implied the horse in question had benefitted from a low-carb diet. Never mind that 1: the text above said the actual cause of belly loss was reduced bulk from the horse being taken off pasturage, and 2: the diet in question was beet-pulp heavy, which is (for a horse) a high carb diet, esp. when compared to forage).

There were a few rules I learned/had pounded into my skull.

Get it right.

Get all sides.

Be objective (this did not mean accept any drivel the other side spews as fact. This mattered because we had a huge fight going on at my school about land use. One that started before I got there, and was still going after I left... that alone covers some five years. While I was on staff [thankfully not an editor] our complacence at the ongoing feuds led to some complaisance and we published a libel. OOOooooh! I watched a whole lot of people sweating bullets for days as we waited for the fallout. We managed to get out from under. When I was made Opinion Editor I thought my $250,000 libel insurance was a bit small, but I digress).

You control the story.

This last is probably the most important. You might get it wrong. It might be edited in such a way as to give a false/poor impression (I lost some friends when this happened to a piece I wrote, part of it was my fault, I could have structured it better, more of it was the copy-editor's fault. She ought to have seen the tag couldn't be safely cut), but if the source gets control of the story, it will be skewed to make them smell like roses, no matter what fermented crap they've been scuba-diving in.

Why do I bring this up? Because Nightline, of all places, seems to think journalists have some duty to get stories vetted by the subject.

There was some flap a few months back about an inane law, proposed in Virginia requiring all miscarriages be reported. A local politiblogger Democracy for Virgina (with a very good blog. For anyone interested in local activism Right Left or Sideways, this place has some chops) posted about it.

She was accurate, and linked to the relevant texts and sources.

It was honest journalism.

John Cosgrove, author of the bill; a member of the legislature, took exception. And Nightline found this worthy of attention.

From the Nightline transcript:

JOHN COSGROVE

The big problem I have with what happened there -and it's that that person, again, never contacted me.

MORA [sic] KUEHNE

I don't think that any citizen should have to wait for a legislator's permission to share her concerns about legislation. I mean, it's - once you introduce a bill into the legislature, it's part of the public record.

JOHN COSGROVE

I've dealt with newspapers and radio stations and television media. And I have yet to have one reporter just run a story without running it by me.

Forget that Nightline seems to have commited what my school would have called a GFE (Gross Factual Error, costing 50 pts in the grading of a paper. The papers started with 100 pts. Thankfully zero was as low as the grade could get) in misspelling her name, no the worst part is this.

JOHN DONVAN

(Off Camera) Well, Kuehne did send Cosgrove one e-mail. The one he explained he didn't see for several days. But beyond that, there is something of an ethical question. Kuehne is, as she says, a private citizen whose blog never attracted more than a few hundred readers on any regular basis. But if she has the power to be read around the world, as this episode proves she has, is she still just some private citizen? Does she have an obligation to tell someone she's writing about that she has an audience?


There are two problems with this. 1: Nightline didn't challenge Cosgrove on the asinine assertion that he's never had an thing written about him without it being, "run by him," and two, implying she has an obligation to tell someone in the public eye, that she is writing about something in the public record.

Thankfully, to date, the law doesn't agree with either Nightline, nor Cosgrove, about this.