Category: Uncategorized

The Texas CPS isn’t the only kidnapping gang:

There’s an empty highchair sitting in the kitchen of the Arlington home of Nancy Hey and Christopher Slitor. It’s their daughter Sabrina’s highchair. But it’s been empty for two years because thieves disguised as Arlington County social workers and judges took her from her parents. She was stolen with no public scrutiny or accountability. Arlington County social workers used unproven allegations of neglect in April 2005 to justify removing then-3-week-old Sabrina from her parent’s home. Her parents were accused – anonymously – of starving Sabrina. And they were deemed unable to care properly for their daughter, even with the frequent help of Nancy Hey’s mother and a full-time nanny. After more than two years of legal wrangling with the county’s Child Protective Services (CPS), Arlington Circuit Court Judge James Almand terminated the couple’s parental rights in June 2007.

But nine months earlier, Sabrina’s parents were completely exonerated by Virginia CPS hearing officer George Walton, who noted in his official report that, despite the baby’s worrisome 10-ounce weight loss soon after her birth by Caesarian section, nothing in the her medical record indicated she had ever been in danger…. Judge Almand later used the baby’s inappropriate removal to justify making the separation permanent, saying it would be too “traumatic” to return Sabrina to her natural parents.

You’ll forgive me, I’m sure, if I possess a certain pessimism about the rule of law in the USA these days. Things should get particularly interesting once the economy plunges into the depths of the recession that officially isn’t happening.

Verdict: guilty on all counts. That is all.

No doubt flags would look rather like these.

If the Champenois and the Reggianese got away with it, why shouldn’t the Lesbians?

Residents on the Greek island of Lesbos have declared that they alone have the right to call themselves lesbians, and yesterday launched a legal action against the Greek Gay and Lesbian Union (Olke) designed to wrest back control of the word from aficionados of Sapphic luuurv.

As you can probably see, the wildly popular “comments on the main page” are gone. The post page is now operative and later in the week the window option will be as well. Is there interest in being able to collapse and reverse order the post page comments or do you think that should be reserved for the window? (The window is actually a frame, to be precise.)

Note that clicking on the number of comments in the post page will refresh the post page. There isn’t an alert that new comments have appeared yet, but there will be. If you have any ideas on this score, this would be the time to mention them. On a stylistic note, while it’s nice that the comments integrate with the blog’s color scheme so well, the dark blue namebars tend to look a bit overwhelming. If you think you’ve got a better color scheme in mind, please make specific suggestions complete with the HTML color references.

The Fed attempts to expand its reach:

The Federal Reserve could use proposed new regulatory powers to try to stop credit and asset market excesses from reaching the point where they threaten economic stability, the US Treasury said on Tuesday. David Nason, assistant secretary for financial institutions, said the Fed could even use its proposed “macro-prudential” authority to order banks, hedge funds and other entities to curtail strategies that put financial stability at risk.

Interesting. Because they created the credit and asset market excesses that threaten economic stability with their inflationary monetary policies, the Fed’s prescription is to give it… yet more power. That’s going to work about as well as injecting cobra venom as an antidote for a coral snake bite.

Than the one being painted by the media of late. Obviously, the situation is not something that I have any interest in discussing here, but the Responsible Puppet’s recent encounter with mortality has him contemplating our shared past. Of course, I would be deeply remiss if I did not point out that while losing one dad is a tragedy, losing two smacks of carelessness….

Rich Lowry is unimpressed by the Magic Negro:

What’s been most disturbing about this entire episode is how dishonest Obama has been, from his pretense that he didn’t know about Wright’s radicalism to his excuse now that Wright has somehow become a different person. How insulting that he thinks we’d buy any of this.

As I mentioned previously, the magic is gone. And no, I would not put it past Team Clinton to have slipped a few pieces of silver to encourage the good Rev. Wright to sell out a man who was trying to gently slide him under the bus. If this isn’t enough to relegate Obama to the vice-presidency, look for more “surprises”.

It is becoming abundantly clear that many, if not most college students and their families are wasting a tremendous amount of money on a non-asset:

Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from a study cited by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Yet four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!

Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education.

It will be interesting to see what those of you who have taken a collegiate history course think about the Thucydides study that we’re doing here. It may not be as good as a college class on Greek history, on the other hand, it’s infinitely less expensive. As Mr. Nemko makes clear, a college education may be one of the most fraudulently advertised products available in America today.

Spacebunny pointed out that I may have not been clear enough that this is a work in progress. It’s not a beta test, because the product isn’t even in beta yet. And no, the idea of messing around with it on a little test blog isn’t an option; that’s already been done and the whole point is to shake out the issues on a blog with sufficient comment traffic to generate the problems that stem from such traffic and reap the benefits of iterative development. Fortunately, there happens to be one such blog run by an early adopter who likes playing around with design issues and doesn’t happen to give a damn what anyone else thinks.

Now, what you might want to consider is that for once you actually have the option of putting your two cents in and having them listened to for a change, so I suggest that might be the more useful thing to do instead of pointless and repetitive bitching about a minor bug that twelve other people have already pointed out. Do you really think I don’t remember all the complaints about Haloscan? Do you really think I’m incapable of simply clicking the checkbox that turns on Blogger Comments?

It tends to remind me of playing a rough mix for non-musicians back in my Psykosonik days. “What do you think?” “Well, I think the drums should be louder, you can barely hear them.” Well, thank you, Sherlock, how would we EVER have figured that one out!

Anyhow, we’re currently leaning towards a system that gives you – yes, you – the option of choosing between a separate comment window and a separate post page with all the comments. So, here’s the question… if it’s a separate post page, would you prefer to start with all the comments expanded or not?