The Positivity of Absolute Value

Google, Microsoft and Cisco seem not to pay too much mind to the request from the Congressional Human Rights Caucas's call for attendance at an optional briefing tomorrow.

The meeting is concerned with the new Chinese market endeavors of the three companies, as well as Yahoo, who could not be reached.

Take a gander and wonder about what you think of agreed censorship for a permission slip to do business in a booming market.

According to Mr. Tom Regan's article in the CSM, 50,000 troops have been made to stay in active duty in Iraq up to six months longer than their initial one year service call.

Why? Frankly, I think it's because the military doesn't have the numbers to send these boys home on time.

President Bush seems to think that reducing the number of open seats in the national guard will alleviate some of this problem and create better balance between the different institutions.

I'm not sure that he is right, but I wonder if we will here anything about it in tonight's speech.

Mr. Reynolds at Instapundit tells it like it is and I don't think I could have put it better myself.
The senate will have no problem ushering Alito onto the bench within the new month.
This post reveals the underlying issue of the filibuster and the significance (or insignificance) that it holds in today's politics.
I think, maybe more hope, that a filibuster should, and could, mean something.
But it doesn't.
The dems in all of their misdirection believed they could champion a small enough army to prevent Alito from being a justice...
But the fact of the matter is, they can't even muster enough gumption to give their party a goal, let alone a leader, for the 08 elections.
Get off your rocker and give me something to vote on, and I will claim to be a democrat again.

In all of it's splendid medical glory, the face that defied science.
I have been following this for a while and have supported and believed in the doctors brave enough to perform the operation, and finally my faith has a face (no pun intended).

Here is the woman belonging to the world's first face transplant in all of her public glory.
A little reminiscent of Lennon if you want my opinion.

I retrieved this post from Instapundit in which Arnold Kling gives a practical model of what the blogosphere essentially does, in order to question the lasting value of weblogs.
He questions whether they are a trend, or simply another fad that will dissipate after they have worn out they're welcome.
Give it a read and ask yourself the same questions he is asking.

There is also a very interesting link in the same post on the pros and cons of e-books, and whether they carry enough practicality and convenience to become the next dominant technology in how we read.

How many times in his term is Gov. Schwarzenegger going to have to deal with this.
The ACLU and Starr plead yet again for the life of an execution case.

I think executing a man found guilty of his crimes and sentenced to death is fine.
Makes logical sense to me. You set up boundaries, people cross them and are punished according to the law.

The thing I don't necessarily agree with is that we try these people, find them guilty and sentence them to the death penalty that will carried out a quarter of a century later.
Isn't that kind of like aborting a second trimester fetus?

I love this post by wonkette.
Articulated here are a healthy chunk of my frustrations with the democratic party on the Sam Alito nomination. Just read the email that was received by Kerry and his cohorts as they try and filibuster Alito's confirmation.
All of the liberal propaganda that I have read on the issue has overtly implied that Alito is an extreme and radical ideologist who will do nothing if not push his political agenda on all the hot issues that have mattered to Americans for the last thirty years.
I watched every minute of those hearings, all week long.
I ate and smoked and went to the bathroom only when Arlen Specter said I could.
And as a moderate leaning a little to the right, I never got the impression that I and my civil rights had something to fear because of Alito's radicalism.
I am sure I have said this before, but he answered all four questions that he was asked over a week long hearing process very consistently and like any sound, reasoned, rational judge would.
And I think it is a long hard stretch to come up with some of the ball-brained things that are being said about Alito.

Here is the latest update from the WHO on the Avian situation in China.
This article should not necessarily petrify you, but make you aware of what this disease is capable of and what it can look like in it's earlier stages.

If you feel as though you are getting sick, even if you only have cold symptoms, go to the hospital. Your time will be running short.

Instapundit brings us an interesting article on one mans educated view on Wal-Mart's monopoly and what it is doing for the working class.
Something you never hear from all of the critics of big business.

The creators of Google continue to fight for the privacy of citizens, especially those in California,
But are they choosing their battles wisely?
After all Microsoft and Yahoo thought it wise to adhere to the federal subpoena for user information.
For us shareholders, we should hope that Brin knows the law, and what he's doing.

We'll see as the hearings proceed.

This has gotten to the point...
well it has gotten to the point that we all saw it coming to.
You want to steal and they don't want you to. That is the gist of it.
Still you steal and still they try and catch up...Pitiful fools.
I grew up in the eighties, and I have to say,
I never thought that the FBI warning, that is so annoying to the rest of us, would ever hold any validity at all. I really thought they were just trying to annoy us.
Turns out that they can put people behind bars with that.

Who would have thought?
I want my VCR back.

This decision, much like the Oregon assisted suicide decision, which I have posted on recently, only reaffirms my faith in the current Supreme Court bench.

Also, I recently ran into a real life person who had moderately followed the Alito hearings, and being a male under 25 hanging with a semi-normal crowd, that alone was pretty impressive.
She moderately leans to the left, by self-proclamation, and according to her interpretation of the hearings, Alito is a radical right wing who will not tilt the court to the right, but flat out beat it into a right wing bloody pulp with his rightness.

I am a moderate leaning to the right. I watched every single hour of the hearings. I only recessed when Specter recessed. I Slept and ate and smoked and lived by his schedule for four days. Never did I once feel like the answers that Alito was giving in any way presented him as anything more than a Judge.

He answered his questions consistently, with sophistication and reserve as any good judge would, and never gave me, a moderate who is an advocate of O'Connor and Kennedy, any reason to believe that I had to fear his future decisions on any civil rights case.

The entire time he seemed to be a rational human being who would approach every decision with the utmost open-mindedness. And frankly I admire his patience and perseverance. I would have blown up in the faces of all of the idiot democrats asking all of their idiotic democratic four questions over and over again.

Kudos to the wise.
Reverence for the Scientific.
Let Freedom Govern.

Glenn over at Instapundit links us to a very interesting interview between Hugh Hewitt and Jonathan Alter.

It's not too long and worth a gander, I will be getting myself more versed with the Federalist papers now I think.

Enjoy.

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, my internet connection was out of commission and we all know how pleasant over the phone tech support is.

Anywho, whether this is valid or not will remain to be seen.
But it is kind of a scary thought given the recent Iranian situation.
If the pot begins to boil, are we going to have the strength fight?

This has real potential, according to the statistics, and of course scientific evidence(which we all know is so widely accepted in the social circle of America).

The only question that I raise is, what vaccine are they using?
Because if it's this one then they are in for a big surprise.

Best of luck to you Scotland, I hope you know what you're doing.

Donations from the rich countries of the world, and even smaller donations from the not so well off, could potentially have a profound effect of the potency of the Flu pandemic, which is at this point closing in on inevitable.

Urge your congressmen to urge the administration.
This needs to happen.

In a 6 to 3 vote today the Supreme Court decided that the administration wrongly incurred it's interpretation of the law when it decided to ban the assisted suicide program in Oregon.

This is a State issue and should be left to the voters of said state, and thankfully the court thought the same thing.
Medically speaking, this is one of those issues that is no ones business but the patient's. If he or she decides that the best course for their life is ending it, that is their decision and should be protected under the freedom to pursue "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Kudos for the court and kudos for Oregon.
Perhaps now other states can hold the vote and let the people decide on this issue themselves.

Here are the numbers in numbers.
They are glorious.
And necessary.

Here are the latest statistics from the World Health Organization as far as the people who have been infected are concerned.

Staggering, yes.
But I must report that the numbers in Turkey are much more heartening than those in Southern Asia of late.

And with all of the massive fowl slaughtering happening perhaps we can overcome this thing yet.

Does this mean that the more whiskey I drink the more likely I am to remember the reason I started drinking in the first place?

Awesome!

Here is a little information from OSHA for those who are forced to be surrounded by the masses daily.

Read and be safe.

I can't understand why.

But I guess it's what any real christian would do.

This is an interesting and unique alternative to the shortage of human embryonic stem cells.

Perhaps we can create uber-intelligent rabbits who will take over the world...
Or maybe we can just create better resources for the scientists who are trying to rid the world of all the terrible diseases which traditional approaches have thus far failed to eradicate.

Here is the latest from the WHO and a quick re-cap of where the virus and some numbers.

Let's hope this meeting gets some results. We need them.

Here is an article from Der Spiegel, which if you don't know, is a German news source, and is quite fantastic in it's journalism. I am using a wonderful tool offered by Google which translates websites from any language into English for it's users. This is a marvelous thing because while my German is not non-existent, it is spotty around the edges.

And of course I had to comment on this because I am a member of the established and revered Starbuck's community, and have first hand experience with the media success that the company has undergone in the last year or so.

So courtesy of Google I am able to give you this, though as an American reader you may have difficulties in comprehending it at first.

Enjoy from Deutschland und viel spatz.

I am actually going to keep quiet on this one except to say that it is commented in the latter half of the article that Mr. Robertson "speaks for an ever diminishing group of people."

How diminishing this group of people is I have yet to see.

A little technical comfort for those who just don't want to believe this is happening to them.

With the senate hearings coming to a close very soon, it is difficult to imagine that Alito will not be confirmed, though I think the vote will be moderately close.

Judge Alito has at the same time consistently shown vagueness and professionalism as any good judge should. His answers have upset some democrats, but not enough to swing the vote I don't think.

I only hope that judge Alito adheres to the constitution and checks his personal baggage at the door of the supreme court as he has promised to do.

Outside of that, welcome.

Perhaps the Cardinal should realize that Catholicism has proven quite the failure in the past and at the very least acknowledge that he does not have the power, nor the respect, to condemn any other faith.

Even if were Satanism at this point.

Here is another Intelligent design issue, this time in the west.

I think that ID can be taught in public schools as long as it is not taught in any science class, or as any theory of scientific thought or as a finding of scientific observation; basically under any structure that would oppose science.

Teach it as a history or mythology, in all of it's imaginative splendor, while never calling into question Darwin or any of his theories, which are scientific in that they are tried and for the most part true; and whether any of them may be called into question or not is irrelevant because the only thing that concerns us here is that science would never say that we don't understand it, so it must have been made by someone or something that we can never comprehend. Science would say that we don't understand so we are going to explore and test forever until we do, and if we never do then we will simply never know. Science would never give a leg to the supernatural.

That is the difference between ID and science, and should be taught completely separately as such.

Listen here where npr.org is conducting live coverage of the Alito hearings.

Interesting stuff.