Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell – Where are we now?

Sounds like President Obama is solidly against the policy and has committed to ending it, but his sense of urgency is what people are questioning.  Representative Patrick Murphy is introducing a bill into the house that would, if signed into law, abolish DADT. He currently has about half the co-sponsors he needs and he continues to work toward the goal of getting this through the House.  Of course, it then needs to go through the Senate before ending up on the President's desk.  However, according to Congressman Murphy, President Obama has promised that if congress puts a bill on his desk to abolish DADT, he'll sign it into law.

Here's something I didn't expect to hear, but with which I think I agree.  Congressman Murphy was being interviewed by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC (On 7-8-09) and Rachel asked him if he thought it would be appropriate for President Obama to put forth an executive order putting a hold on implementation of DADT, effectively stopping the practice of kicking people out of the service for their sexual orientation.  To my surprise, the congressman said he would be opposed to such a move.

If we think about it, this makes sense.  Many, including me, have criticized President Bush for his prolific use of Signing Statements, essentially allowing a law to be passed but pushing a caveat that he doesn't intend to abide by this new law.  Don't Ask, Don't Tell is a law that was passed some 16 years ago, and until it's reversed by another act of Congress, it's still the law in the US.  If President Obama puts out an Executive Order that puts a hault to the practice of DADT, he would be doing exactly what President Bush is so roundly criticized for doing.

As ridiculous as I think DADT is, I think I agree with the logic of Congressman Murphy that the law should be enforced until Congress can get their act together and fix this mess.

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Global Warming summit and Climate Policy

I posted to my Friendfeed (here) about the commitment of various nations during the G8 Summit in Italy to reduce emissions by 80% by 2050 and expressed my concerns about the timeframe I said I hoped they were going to be setting some immediate milestones because 40 years is a long time to wait for measurable progress. (CNN Article here)

The authors of this Nature.com Blog seem to think we're moving in the wrong direction.  More specifically, we're taking steps that are not guaranteed to do what we're trying to accomplish.  Rather than creating a carbon market that allows the major polluters of the world to wiggle around regulations by buying up credits, they want to see immediate steps to reduce emissions and improve efficiencies of current technologies.  If implemented, this could have immediate benefits instead of requiring a 40 year timeline.

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Mozilla Electrolysis

My friend @Svartling posted this Ars Technica article about a new development effort by the folks at Mozilla.  It's called Electrolysis, and it's main focus is to bring multiprocess browsing to Firefox.  This is different from what Chrome was able to do.  Chrome has each tab of the browser render in a different process on the computer.  The effect is that if one tab crashes, the rest of the browser is unaffected.  The other benefit is that the tabs are effectively sandboxed.  Malicious code, theoretically, can't affect the content and processes on other tabs.  What Mozilla's Electrolosys project is doing is actually breaking up the rendering of any given tab into multiple processes.  One example they gave is that image rendering will be handled independently.  An overall benefit to this is that if a page fails completely, it can go down without bringing the browser down because the actual browser infrastructure is rendered separately from the content.  They can then implement a 'recover' button that will attempt to reload the page that failed without affecting the browser or any other tabs.

Here's what I find interesting.  They're using open source code from the Chromium project to leapfrog Chrome itself.  It's funny, when Google released Chrome, everyone questioned whether it would usurp Firefox, IE, Safari, etc., but what every analyst with an opinion agreed on is that Chrome would drive all the other companies into a development frenzy to keep up.  We've seen a major overhaul of the Javascript engine in all the major browsers and now this.  What's next, a browser OS?  Oh, wait, that's being done too.

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Twitter in the Wild

via friendfeed-media.com

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Atheist dealing with a family of believers.

On Facebook (and below), I posted a quote from Stephen Roberts: “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do.  When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

My sister, a Roman Catholic, said this: "You don't really want to start this family argument on FB do you ?? Mr Born, raised and had his kids baptised Catholic!"

I spent some time on the response and thought it turned out pretty well, so I thought I'd share it with you:

OK, first of all, it seems that you're suggesting I had some control over how I was born and raised. If you made a conscious choice at birth to be christian, I’d love to hear that story.  

I can't help that I was raised in a climate of naive and irrational thinking as it relates to religion. There’s nothing wrong with parents passing their beliefs on to their kids, but there comes a point, when a child grows up (whether that be 13 or 30), when he has to look inward and decide if everything pushed on him throughout his life still makes sense.  Just because I decided to look critically on religion and decided that nothing about it made sense, doesn’t make it wrong.  It’s different from your view, (which I know in your eyes makes it wrong by definition), but that doesn’t make it wrong.

I don’t hold any of this against Mom and Dad, or you, or anyone else. You’re all victims of the same machine, and it takes a special mindset to question the dogma.  It’s been going on for centuries, and I suspect, unfortunately, that it will continue for years to come.  But it has to start somewhere and this is where I take my stand.  My kids learn to think for themselves instead of accepting blindly the beliefs of others.  If they decide to turn back to religion at some later date, I’ll respect that as long as they can give me some good reasons. Of course, this is more than I ever got from any of you.

As far as my kids’ baptism, it’s the only sacrament they’ve had and they have no concept of its meaning.  We only had them baptized (not to mention our church wedding) to keep peace in the family.  This was before I realized how ridiculous it was to fake something that was clearly so important to both us and all of you.

This is going to sound condescending, but I don’t mean it that way.  I realize that being Atheist is not for everyone and it would serve no purpose to try to push it on others.  Despite how ridiculous I think religious beliefs are, it’s that belief system that makes you what you are.  Removing such a construct, artificial though it may be, from the psyche of someone who is so heavily dependent on it would be destructive and counter-productive to the cause.

I’ll have this debate with anyone who steps up.  I’m not embarrassed.  I’m not shy. I have common sense on my side.  So, to answer your question…bring it.

BTW, did you follow the link and read the whole quote?

“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do.  When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

So ask yourself this question.  Do you believe in the gods Zeus, or Apollo, or Dionysus?  Why or why not?  Would you have the courage to ask the same question about the Christian God?  If you say ‘that’s different,’ why? And before you say ‘cause the bible says so,’ consider that the bible was written thousands of years ago by a bunch of old me who advocate murder, rape, polygamy and a host of other acts that “Moral Christians” would never admit to.

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I contend that we are all Atheist

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Religious Montage Real Time with Bill Maher

I may pay for HBO just to watch this show.  He's hysterical

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Palin resigning and not running for reelection

OK, so <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shannyn-moore/sarah-palin-resigns-as-al_b_225515.htmlhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/shannyn-moore/sarah-palin-resigns-as-al_b_225515.html“>Sarah Palin is not going to run for re-election as Governor of Alaska.  That's no surprise to anyone.  We all expected her to start a bid for President at some point and this is one of the steps in the process.  Question is, why is she resigning within the next three weeks?  As far as I know, there's no reason for her to do that in order to begin the 2012 track.  After all, President Obama didn't resign his seat in the Senate until after he won the general election.

A source for this article is quoted as saying, "She thinks she has accomplished goals she has set forward. She sees what a positive influence she has had on people's lives from traveling the country in the last year." 

So, what's going on here?  If she still plans to run for President in 2012, doesn't this move actually look bad for her?  After all, she made a commitment to serve the people of Alaska and is now just wasking away from that obligation. What will she do if elected President and decides she's no longer interested in that job? I don't think this looks good for her at all and even she's got to see that.  I think she's out of the running at this point.

I think what's more likely is that something scandalous has just been uncovered and is about to hit the media and she's trying to preempt some of the pain by being out of office before it hits.  What could that be?  Who knows.  But we'll probably be hearing about it sometime relatively soon.

Lastly, here's an interesting observation made by a friend (@nagrommit): What's crazy about this Palin thing is that it's not being carried live, and she's running it on a Friday–in fact, the Friday of a Holiday weekend.  This was clearly orchestrated very carefully.  Why?

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My kids bought a cool mug for me today

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David Sipress : “Last tweet?”

via cartoonbank.com

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