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September 23, 2006
Emergency Contraception: about morality or health?
This story from rural Ohio reminds us that even large swaths of our highly educated medical practicioners are more concerned about our morals than our health.
Posted by griffjon at 09:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 18, 2006
Diebold and Security
Honestly, how do we trust our Democracy's central tenet of voting rights to a company whose idea of securing their digital, no-paper-trail voting system employs a lock with a generic office key?
Hey, companies have all these rights as "individuals" - can an entire company also be charged with treason?
Posted by griffjon at 09:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 17, 2006
File this under...
... too little, too late:
what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn’t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
Posted by griffjon at 08:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 11, 2006
National Security
I wasn't intending to write a 9/11 blog, I'm sure there are lots of better entries out there, but I read via boingboing about Greg Palast, and had to pass it on. Five years after 9/11, we've managed to throw a county into outright civil war and give Al Queda a foothold into it, and are much more secure at airports, as long as would-be terrorists promise to limit their nefarious plans to shoe soles and toothpaste. I saw that someone was caught smuggling a knife in a book, and now I'm just waiting to see the pile of burning books next to the pile of discarded "liquids" at each security aisle.
Anyhow. Back to poor Greg:
On August 22, for LinkTV and Democracy Now! we videotaped the thousands of Katrina evacuees still held behind a barbed wire in a trailer park encampment a hundred miles from New Orleans. It’s been a year since the hurricane and 73,000 POW’s (Prisoners of W) are still in this aluminum ghetto in the middle of nowhere. One resident, Pamela Lewis said, “It is a prison set-up” — except there are no home furloughs for these inmates because they no longer have homes.Read the rest at GregPalast.comTo give a sense of the full flavor and smell of the place, we wanted to show that this human parking lot, with kids and elderly, is nearly adjacent to the Exxon Oil refinery, the nation’s second largest, a chemical-belching behemoth.
...
So now Matt and I have a “criminal complaint” lodged against us with the feds.
...
After I assured Detective Pananepinto, “I can swear to you that I’m not part of Al Qaeda,” he confirmed that, “Louisiana is still part of the United States,” subject to the first amendment and he was therefore required to divulge my accuser.
Not surprisingly, it was Exxon Corporation, one of a handful of companies not in love with my investigations.
So I rang America’s top petroleum pusher-men and asked their media relations honcho in Houston, Marc Boudreaux, a simple question. “Do you want us to go to jail or not? Is it Exxon’s position that reporters should go to jail?” Because, all my dumb-ass jokes aside, that is what’s at stake. And Exxon knew we were journalists because we showed our press credential to the Exxon guards at the refinery entrance.
The Exxon man was coy: “Well, we’ll see what we can find out… Obviously it’s important to national security that we have supplies from that refinery in the event of an emergency.”
Really? According to the documents our team uncovered from the offices of Exxon’s lawyer, Mr. James Baker, the oil industry is more than happy to see a limit on worldwide crude production. Indeed, the current squeeze has jacked the price of oil from $24 a barrel to $64 and refined products have jumped yet higher — resulting in a record-busting profit for Exxon of nearly $1 billion per week.
Posted by griffjon at 09:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 09, 2006
Ronald McHummer
The Ronald McHummer website lets you create your own McD's marquee in protest of their adding Hummers as HappyMeal toys.
(via boingboing)
Posted by griffjon at 08:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 08, 2006
Science
XKCD hits the nail on the head, once again.
Posted by griffjon at 08:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 05, 2006
Fixing (some of) my GWU problems
Task 1: Verify that GWU will not send my loan monies back due to the course snafu
Time on hold: 26 minutes
Time to verify: less than 1 minute
Task 2: Get GWU to update my enrollment status to my lender
Time on hold: about a minute
Time to fix: not fixed. I have to print a form from their website and fax or carry it in to their office (during normal office hours of course)
Task 2a: Check with my lender to see if they automatically did it on the first day of school.
Time on hold: 1 minute.
Time to fix: 2 minutes. GWU has in fact, contrary to what the office of the registrar said, automatically updated my enrollment status. This is the second call I've made to my lender, and they're batting 1000 with customer service thus far.
Task 3: Call Student Accounts and see why my ISTP award, listed as an award, has not been credited to my account. Student Accounts gets extra bonus points for having a huge scrolling marquee on their front page.
Time on hold: 10 minutes (more bonus points for the infinite loop of "please hold, your call will be answered in turn")
Time to fix: not fixed, they suggest checking with ISTP (though I don't think it's their problem)
Posted by griffjon at 08:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 03, 2006
More GWU hassle
Registering for fragging courses shouldn't be the most stressful part of grad school!
The saga continues. So, you might remember that I was somewhat forcibly removed from a Dev Econ class I really wanted to take, because I'm not in the Elliott School's Dev Studies program, I'm in the Elliott School tech policy program. It's not like it's the same school or anything.
As the paperwork for my independent study has not gotten through the digestive system of GWU's paper-loving bureacracy, this means I'm registered for all of 1 course. This has caused me a few difficulties since.
First, GWU hasn't listed me as enrolled AT ALL with my lending bank, so they sent me a bill. They were surprisingly helpful on the phone and mailed me a form to take to GWU to get my still-enrolled, damnit! deferment. That's a task for this coming week. Even then, I'm not enrolled full-time (yet), so I'm not sure what insanities this will cause with their computer systems.
Second, I get a letter Saturday postmarked and written on Sept 1st regarding my loan amount which was disbursed on Aug 30 to GWU. They can't give it to me because I'm not in their computer systems yet as being registered from at least 6 course credit hours (see above), and they are required to send it back to the Feds within 3 business days if that's not resolved. I'm really hoping that their computer systems recognize that Monday is not a business day. Nice of them to take 2 of those 3 business days to decide to mail me a letter - if it'd been a Monday, I would've received the letter when I got home after 5pm on the 3rd business day. It's the 21st goddamned century. Send me a heads-up email, or, for matters of thousands of dollars in student loans, maybe try calling me? I'm asking too much for a place I'm giving nearly $3k/credit hour in tuition to, plus a $750/semester student fee, I guess.
Grrr.
Posted by griffjon at 08:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack