Blog Around
Still busy with “Real Life” but I have some drive-by things that interested me.
The UK is getting buried again under about 10 inches of snow. Some people are not to be trusted with snow.
Suzie at Echidne’s place has found a Guardian article that details a lot of the Swedish Assange case. I don’t expect this will change minds, but I now have confirmed most of what I gleaned from my meager ability to read Swedish.
Via Ellroon a neat Google tool if you have an interest in words. They have a data base of the all of the words in the books they have scanned, and you can trace the use of words over time. If I get some time I might trace spelling changes, like catalogue to catalog, to see when it occurred.
Noz has an interesting note on the DADT repeal. All that happened was the legislation that backed the DoD policy is being voided, but the policy remains. Without legislation that actually bans the policy, the next President can re-instate it by executive order, because Obama has to void it by executive order. A victory, but not the total victory that some assume.
Even intelligent people have blind spots as demonstrated by this excerpt from a Krugman post: “… you have even a liberal Democratic president believing that Social Security only covered widows and orphans at first, that Medicare started small, and that the Clinton-era productivity boom began under Reagan.”
The last liberal Democratic President died in 1973, his name was Lyndon Baines Johnson. Jimmy Carter was left of center, and Bill Clinton was in the center. Barack Obama is decidedly to the right of center and says these things because he believes them wholeheartedly.
20 comments
Depends on your definition of “center” I guess. I always regarded Carter as a conservative and Bill Clinton as a Republican dressed up as a Populist.
I don’t think this is Krugman’s only blind spot . Didn’t he make his bones as a Free Trader? True, he does seem to be having some second thoughts about that in the last few years. I think Krugman’s honest, but I doubt he became a highly paid, tenured professor by straying very far from conventional wisdom.
It’s interesting but also quite irritating that poor word usage seems to proliferate so widely and rapidly nowadays. To cite a couple of recent examples: “tow the line” or “the play really endeared me. Why do some of these usages suddenly become fashionable and just pop up all over the place? And if they are “viral”, then who is Patient Zero in this scenario?
Poor modern education is a perennial suspect when it comes to causation and then there’s Spellcheck and Grammarcheck, but I have a feeling that the phenomenon is also somehow an artifact of the internet. Possibly it has something to do with the fact that many internet posters are not native English speakers, but why do these bad usages seem to rapidly replace proper usage (again, like a virus)?
I don’t expect this will change minds,
sigh… yep, this changing minds stuff is a tough slog.
The not wife certainly does like her wily jokes!
and her willy jokes!
By the way, those incorrect-but-makes-some-kind-of-sense word usages like “tow the line” have been dubbed eggcorns. There is a growing collection of them at The Eggcorn Database.
PJ, Carter was considered a left-wing radical by Georgia standards, but he got things done and Atlanta boomed even with a very conservative state legislature. He was a very careful person and wanted to know everything before he made a decision. He insisted that the US foreign policy reflect our views and championed human rights. He was fiscally conservative but a social liberal. Clinton had many of the same attributes, but he wasn’t as socially conscious as Carter, and he definitely passed fiscally conservative into the voodoo economics realm of Reagan on deregulation. Both realized that taxes were necessary and useful.
On the words, many of the changes are the result of people having no connection to the words being used or the reasons behind their use. The separation from the farm and nature have a profound affect on people. I’ve seen a number of media stories that talked about “reigning in spending”. I assume it is because the authors have heard the term but don’t know anything about reins or horses. Additionally some of these things are the result of computer spelling and grammar checking which aren’t at the level necessary to tell people “I don’t think that means what you think it means.”
Well, Jams, it should certainly be the talk of the neighborhood, if anyone feels like braving the snow to walk about. That’s the sort of thing we would do on other people’s front yards. I do remember one guy who kept a pair of old boots [wellies] that he would stick in snow banks to scare the plow drivers into believing they had buried someone.
Hipparchia, I’m sorry I missed that one, and may cover the main issues here, now that I have a better idea of what happened. Just keep in mind that he is being extradited for missing a court date and essentially jumping bail, not on the sexual assault charges. The basis or validity of the charges have no bearing on his current trouble, and even if those charges were dropped, he could still be jailed for contempt of court. My understanding is that the court date was for the preliminary hearing. It is at the conclusion of that hearing that people are normally formally charged, or released.
My understanding is that the court date was for the preliminary hearing. It is at the conclusion of that hearing that people are normally formally charged, or released.
that was my understanding too, and yes also that the warrant [alert?] was because he skipped out on the hearing [from reading about it here on your blog].
i was originally posting and commenting on the misogyny that’s been on display in the interminable hair-splitting over rape/not-rape and consent/not-consent and the constant they waited several days/retracted their stories/wev, therefore they’re lying, scheming, vengeful bitches babel.
this expanded description of events has been available for several days, but it tickled my fancy to post the version that had been ‘leaked’.
but getting back to the swedish legal process [which i haven’t posted on] hugh’s comment at that particular post was typical not only for its misogyny, but also typical of the gazillions of i read something on the internets and now i’m an expert on the swedish legal system that i’ve seen.
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I’ve seen a number of media stories that talked about “reigning in spending”. I assume it is because the authors have heard the term but don’t know anything about reins or horses.
this one always drives me nuts.
and now the name Rove has been attached to the news coming out of Sweden
http://open.salon.com/blog/rogershuler/2010/12/14/is_karl_rove_driving_the_effort_to_prosecute_julian_assange
People are driving me to post on this. The only “politics” involved in this case are internal Swedish politics regarding the past practice of the police and prosecutors ignoring or downplaying rape charges for years.
LOL Yeah! 😀
Did you know there is a movie already? 😉 Well, a WikiLeaqks documentary to be accurate… Can be d/l free. Haven’t watched it yet, too busy. Maybe later tonight. 😀
Wikileaks Documentary: Wiki Rebels (Link to movie included)
Heh… 😉 (I’ve also d/l the WikiLeaks *insurance* 1.4GB encrypted document cache). Will be interesting to see if it really contains anything of value, or is a bluff. Assange doesn’t strike me as much of a bluffer, but he would also know that AES encryption isn’t very secure (especially for the NSA) which many claim is the encryption used to secure the package. Curious… 😉 (I used to love these fun and games when I was in the biz! Kept me from getting bored with the more common *stupids* I had to deal with!)
I also see the USA has been harassing people who work for WikiLeaks for at least several months. The bullies are at it again! 😛 😉
Iz he is, or iz he ain’t? 😉
You can see the difference between Rudd & Gillard in these two articles, and they show part of the reason why I despise Gillard and prefer Rudd (with all his faults, at least he was sane and competent. It’s now obvious that his biggest fault was bad choice of staff & underlings, and too much loyalty where it wasn’t warranted.)
Rudd (who, IMHO, hit’s the nail squarely):
Wikileaks: Australia FM blames US, not Julian Assange
Gillard (who is apparently trying to be a bigger US ass-kisser than Howard. She also shows she hasn’t a clue and is way out of her tiny depth):
Gillard condemns WikiLeaks
The really annoying part about Assange’s fans is they think the CIA is competent enough to pull this off. Hell, they couldn’t pull off a kidnapping in Italy without getting two dozen of their agents convicted, and the average street dealer demonstrates better opsec than those clowns showed.
Now the Brits and the Russians could once pull off something like this supposed conspiracy, but they have fallen apart. The US has never managed to succeed at this sort of thing, and they sure can’t with the kind of people they have been recruiting for some time.
This administration is wasting time going after WikiLeaks when they should be fixing their system to prevent leaks from happening in the first place. They give approximately 3 million people access to the system and wonder why they have leaks? What the hell happened to need to know?
Beware, Kryten, Gillard is starting to act like Obama and caving to conservatives before being asked. She is going to set women back if she keeps it up.
LOL Sadly, all too true! 😉 😀
And, you mean like this CIA?
Lawsuit over Drones in Pakistan forces CIA Station Chief to Flee
It’s really interesting when you look at which International Governments are openly supporting WikiLeaks, and which are opposed. 😉
“I’ve seen a number of media stories that talked about ‘reigning in spending’.”
Elayne Riggs of Pen-Elayne once voiced the same complaint, adding that it didn’t seem to bother other people as much as it bothered her. I commented on that thread, “Hmm. The ‘reign-in’ pain stays mainly in Elayne.” But clearly that is no longer the case.
My favorite eggcorn is one that I’ve been told by med students is commonly used by patients: “very close veins.”
Kryten, the opinion of governments changes depending on who is taking the heat. As long as the target is on people you don’t like, it is “obviously” a good thing, but once you are in the cross hairs, your attitude shifts. All politicians like “good” publicity, but all “bad” publicity is a smear by “enemies of the state”. The Soviets would have awarded Assange at least two medals and possibly an order by now, just to drive the Republicans nuts and tie up US resources. It always worked, and was really embarrassing for field people trying to explain the tactic to their bosses.
That was terrible “Professor” Bates. Yes, I have heard “very close veins” and “prostrate cancer”. Actually “prostrate” is so common that Google brings up “prostate” results when you type it in. I attribute it to the change from reading to listening in most cases.
I have to say this, though: When the Vice President of the United States says you are close to being a “high tech terrorist,” there is no way in hell you can get a fair trial on any charge whatsoever, certainly in America and probably internationally. One does not have to be a fan of Assange to come to the conclusion that he is being persecuted.
Not for the first time, I wish Biden would simply shut his big mouth.
Steve, most of the world thinks the US is being silly about WikiLeaks, and the government of Sweden doesn’t want to face an election with the opposition calling it a tool of the US. It’s not like anyone outside of the US even knows who Joe Biden is. Hell, I’d be surprised if a majority of Americans knew who Joe Biden was.
Persecuted? He has to be one of the few people on the planet who can get bail on a fugitive warrant. You don’t give bail to someone who is wanted essentially for jumping bail. He won’t be offered bail in Sweden, and that has nothing to do with who he is, but what he did in Sweden. Depending on Swedish procedure, the judge who issued the bench warrant may be the same judge who hears the case. They don’t have jury trials in most of Europe, and I think that Sweden is one of the countries without juries.
They do have, however, judge-shopping in Sweden. After multiple attempts to prosecute the Pirate Bay ran aground on judges who refused to countenance the dubious notion that U.S. law should govern Sweden, the prosecutors kept shopping the case around until they finally found a judge willing to do so. But you are correct, jury trials aren’t done in Sweden. (Well, actually, Wikipedia mentions one exception to that, but it does not apply here).
If the prosecutors can choose, they will probably stay with the same judge. I would expect his attorney to protest [I certainly would], but local customs very a lot. I spent a lot of time bailing my people out of the lower court system in West Germany, and the advice I received from the guy I replaced on the duty was don’t annoy the judge. That advice works well in the US court system too. Judges have a lot of power in their court rooms, and you don’t test it unless you want to pay a heavy price.
Missing that hearing was one of the dumbest things that he could have done. Showing up would have almost guaranteed that he would have been allowed to post bail and return to the UK until the trial. Now he has shown himself to be a flight risk, and bail will be out of the question. Dumb, really really dumb.