Foundation

Europeans may be angry because Sony is not only not releasing the Playstation 3 in Europe this year, but in fact is threatening to attack anyone who imports a Playstation 3 into Europe this year.

Hey, that’s their concern, but I’m just glad to see that the Playstation 3 will apparently shipo with the same old Dual Shock-shaped controllers, rather than the boomerang-like monsters that were shown off when the PS3 design was first released.

Very strange sights during my morning walk. I saw four, yes four, meteors streaking. All four were going pretty much straight down. One was to my southeast, the rest were to the north or northeast. I don’t recall seeing ONE before, and now I watch four in one morning. Very strange.

I said this about the Lieberman/Lamont/Schlesinger race, in reply to a Lamont supporter sometime before the Democratic primary:

Hypothetical though:

Among the 54% who went for Kerry [in Connecticut in 2004], Lamont beats Lieberman 67/33. Among the 44% who went for Bush, Lieberman wins 67/33 thanks to the party nominating an anti-war candidate. The result goes like this:

• Lieberman 47
• Lamont 36
• Republican 17

What do you win even if your guy wins?

It turns out that the answer is to raise so little money, that Lamont must give millions of his own money… just to fall even further behind than I predicted. I had an 11 point advantage, but Lieberman is up 17 according to Quinnipac. The poll also shows Schlesinger, the Republican, drawing only 5 instead of 17, so that suggests to me Lieberman’s drawing more Republican support than I dared hope before the primary.

So I guess to score myself, I’ll look to see how close Lamont lands on that 36%.

Here’s a clear cut case of legislative interpretation where the original intent doesn’t cut it, and the modern meaning of the words has started to shift out from under us:

A Corona woman accused of exposing herself to a 14-year-old boy will not be tried for indecent exposure because the law against such behavior applies only to men, a visiting judge in Riverside County has ruled.

…on Monday, Superior Court Judge Robert W. Armstrong dismissed the charge just before a jury was to be picked, saying the law under which she was charged uses only the male pronoun.

“Every person who willfully and lewdly, either one, exposes his person … in any public place,” he read into the hearing’s transcript.

“It’s gender specific,” Armstrong said.

My guess is that while the original intent only envisioned men being a problem here, as men are traditionally seen as more of a threat for sexual misconduct of all sorts, the language as it existed when the law was written clearly saw the male third person pronoun able to refer back to ‘every person’ in a gender-neutral manner.

Before radical feminists mimicked Orwell’s villains and started rewriting the English language, this wouldn’t have been an issue. And it’s only under the language as it exists today, that there would be any doubt of whether the law as quoted by Judge Armstrong would apply to women.

So here’s exhibit A for textualism over other kinds of legal interpretation: shifts of popular language use should not change the meaning of a law so radically, that it excludes half the human race from its reach.

Some whiny losers are going to stay home instead of voting this year, in the belief that NOT VOTING will make earning their votes a more attractive option for Republican strategists.

I don’t know why they’d think that, since a likely voter is much more valuable to a campaign than an occasional voter or a non-voter. And for a party, if they can’t count on you to show up, then you certainly can’t be counted as part of the base.

Do these whiny stay at home losers WANT the Linc Chafees and Arlen Specters of the party to replace them at the table?

Via Rob, says the BBC:

The US has adopted a tough new policy aimed at protecting its interests in space and deny “adversaries” access there for hostile purposes.

The document – signed by President Bush – also says “freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power”.

The document rejects any proposals to ban space weapons.

Bring on the orbital lasers!

Again not taking advantage of the secret ballot, I discuss how I voted just now, before I stick my ballot in the envelope and send it in:

• Governor: Art Olivier, Libertarian. I thought this choice would be tough, but it became an easy call once I found out that Mayor Olivier deviates from the party line to be tough on illegal immigration. I love this chart from his website, summarizing state spending growth:
• Lieutenant Governor: Tom McClintock, conservative Republican. The man who would have and should have been at the top of the ticket this time, except that the recall messed everything up.
• Secretary of State: Bruce McPherson, Republican. He’s the incumbent, having been appointed by Governor Schwarzenegger to fill the void left by the Democrat Kevin Shelley, who resigned in a cloud of corruption and scandal.
• Controller: Tony Strickland, Republican. It’s all Republican by default down ticket here.
• Treasurer: Claude Parrish, Republican.
• Attorney General: Chuck Poochigan, Republican under intense attacks from Mayor Moonbeam, whose return to statewide politics is unfortunate.
• Insurance Commissioner: Steve Poizner, Republican who might win if his attacks on corrupt Cruz Bustamante can stick, and the Governor can have any coattails, though I haven’t looked up any polls to know.
• US Senator: Dick Mountjoy, Republican. Easy call to vote for the only pro-War on Terror party. Not that Feinstein is going to lose…
• US Representative, CD 45: Mary Bono, incumbent Republican. Hey, I didn’t vote for her when she ran unopposed in the primary, but again, this is wartime, NAM gives her a great rating, and besides, my only other choice is a Democrat.
• State Assembly, District 64: John J. Benoit, incumbent Republican. Keep them putting taxes on the ballot, since they can’t get them through the legislature! Keep California’s Republicans strong!
• Skipping some really minor offices, that I’m voting straight Republican on, as well as a long list of judges, whom I’m voting No on all the way down, because my guess is there’s plenty of activists appointed by Gray Davis.
• Proposition 1A: Budget mandate for transportation, further limiting legislative flexibility to cut spending. NO. This kind of junk is part of why we have a huge deficit to begin with.
• Proposition 1B: $20 billion Schwarzenegger-backed transportation bond. NO. No more borrowing!
• Proposition 1C: $3 billion ‘Emergency shelter trust fund’ bond. NO. No more borrowing!
• Proposition 1D: $10 billion education bond. NO. No more borrowing to pay Democratic unions to fund more propositions!
• Proposition 1E: $4 billion ‘disaster preparedness’ bond. NO. No more borrowing!

  Note that the legislature has stopped even pretending to put its ballot measures in with the rest put on by the people, number and order-wise.

• Proposition 83: Place a jillion restrictions on ‘sex offenders’ instead of just ending that useless distinction, and giving the death penality to honest-to-goodness child rapists. Net effect will be to drive the pedophiles off the urban coast and into the suburban and rural interior. NO.
• Proposition 84: $5.3 billion ‘water quality’ bond. NO. NO MORE BORROWING!.
• Proposition 85: Waiting period and parental notification for minors having abortions. YES. Keep parents informed before their children have major surgery? Isn’t that obvious?
• Proposition 86: Another new cigarette tax. NO. We have too much socialism already.
• Proposition 87: Big new tax on oil companies that pretends it won’t raise gas prices. NO.
• Proposition 88: Property tax hike for ‘education’. NO. Don’t the unions get enough money?
• Proposition 89: Public financing of political campaigns. NO. If I wanted money to go to Democrats I’d give it to them now.
• Proposition 90: Anti-Kelo Constitutional amendment. YES. Enough said.

Whew. Long ballot. Not as long as the recall ballot, if I recall, but at least there I only had two choices to make: Yes on Recall, No on Bustamante.

There, after snagging all three coins in World 8 Castle, taking the last three coins in the game, I saved the princess, then spent all the coins in World 1.

Unless I missed something, a three-star winner is all I can get. I know one-star just means you saved the princess, because that’s all my brother got. I jumped straight to two stars by getting my first win with all coins. Spending it all got me the third star.

Nice game. Not disappointing, though not so hard if you’re a Mario veteran like I am.

Starslip Crisis is off the list of comics I read every day. I gave it a try, and sometimes it was fun, but I increasingly get the feel from it that I get from PvP. That is, it’s a chore to get through all the blah blah blah I don’t like, to see an occasional strip I enjoy.

In the case of SSC, it was a lot more fun when it was like Futurama, instead of now when it’s this boring plot where you’re told half of everything, and shown nothing. Oh, and this idea that suddenly the Fuseli is a combat warship, with the pilot made the captain, just isn’t enjoyable to me.

So I’m running out of comics fast. With Mac Hall on hiatus at best, SSC off the list, Life on Forbez looking like it’s about to die, and Real Life sputtering as Greg takes on new responsbilities outside of the comic, I need some more fun stuff to read.

Hopefully this will pressure the PRC to pressure the DPRK. Says the Japan Times:

Japan needs to discuss whether it should go nuclear in response to North Korea’s declared nuclear test, the policy chief of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party said Sunday.

Shoichi Nakagawa, chairman of the LDP’s Policy Research Council, made the contentious comment on a TV Asahi talk show, saying the Constitution does not rule out the option of possessing nuclear arms.

Of course, the Prime Minister and everyone else came out saying the obligatory lines about sticking with the NPT and a rejection of nuclear weapons, but the more Japan talks, the more the PRC needs to be worried.