03 Apr 2006
Prosecution of Midwife Casts Light on Home Births

I doubt that this is the kind of national attention the current politico's in Indy would actively seek, yet they're ultimately the ones responsible. We Hoosiers can be such idiots at times: note that the midwife was not accused of causing the death, and that the parents of the deceased child aren't the one's pursuing the charges. And we're supposed to be "business friendly"? Ha! Check out the Indiana government licensing page for an idea of what kind of regulations businesses suffer under here - and yes, I do have an Egg License. I'm legal!

A baby's death prompted charges against a midwife in Indiana, one of 10 states with laws restricting midwifery.

(link) [New York Times]

23:00 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

The Lenovo smear: Grossly unfair on all levels

Uh, no, it's not.

Even Mr. Kay admits that Lenovo is 27% owned by the Government of the Peoples Republic of China. The actual percentage may be closer to 40%, but the practical percentage is nearly 82% - which leaves the 18% held by IBM alone. What I mean by "practical" in this sense is those shares that can be legally required to vote with the majority shareholder - which is the Chinese Communist Party.

People here are deluding themselves with the notion that China has "gone capitalist" - what they've done is switched from an outright collectivist nightmare to one of "state socialism with a stock market". Which is a classically "National Socialist" position: China's gone fascist, not capitalist.

It really gets my dander up when I constantly hear how American companies can't compete against foreign firms, when most of those "firms" are owned by a foreign government, with all of the protections and advantages available to it. Remember Japan, Inc. and the television and auto industries? Of course they can't compete in those circumstances: and our government should take measures to insure that they don't have to.

Endpoint Technologies president Roger L. Kay says xenophobia is factor in accusations against Chinese-founded PC maker.

(link) [CNET News.com]

23:00 /Politics | 3 comments | permanent link

Why I'm Opposed to Daylight Savings Time in Indiana

Look out! Here comes Dave Quixote, tilting at another windmill! Why is the idiot doing this, ignoring so simple a thing as a setting on a clock?

Observant readers will note a new graphic in the left hand column here, replacing the logo for StandardTime.com but maintaining the link. It shows the time the page was loaded in Eastern Standard Time - and I must confess it was quite interesting to get it working both locally and on the server (which is in San Diego, incidentally) and ignoring the now near ubiquitous DST. But I managed. None of the computer clocks here at Hammerstead have been reset, nor will they be. I've set up my own time server for this purpose - if you're intereted leave a writeback or drop me an email and I'll open it up.

What could compliance with this possibly hurt, and why will defiance help? Why don't I just shut up, or at least stop my grousing and get on with it? After all, when I've lived in other states I managed to change the clocks and get on with it, despite the unnatural interruption of sleep and the feeling for an entire season that my biological clocks had not quite been reset as easily as my digital ones.

Compliance would certainly help me keep appointments - not that I have that many. And, in point of fact, the wall clocks here probably will be set to DST - and the satellite already has done so automatically. Just my personal pocket watch, the computers and my coffee maker will stay standard along with my personal schedule.

Defiance, even to the limited degree I plan, will cause me some headaches. The possibility that I'll forget and miss an appointment, or get to the post office too late to mail an important document.

But defiance also adds one very important psychological dimension: it's a way of personally shouting out to the (Hoosier) world a simple statement, breathtaking in it's simplicity. And that statement is: Non serviam. I will not serve the State. The State is not divine in any sense, and they no longer have any claim on my loyalty or for my conformance. This is a quintessential act of passive revolt: they have crossed an invisible line, and lost the nominal cooperation of one man (me) who is finally outraged enough to say "No!".

The way in which the current Republican administration went about this is the real problem. Every poll showed Hoosiers either opposed to DST entirely or favoring a statewide move to Central Time. This was not only ignored by the Daniels Administration, it was openly mocked, as though those of us opposed to such a "progressive" measure were nothing but rude and uncultured hicks who were opposed to any sort of "progress". Insulting the people of the Hoosier State was the order of the day...

And when the vote came down to it, the arm twisting was nothing short of unbelievable: my State Representative, Mr. Jeff Thompson, a man I've always respected (even if he is still a Republican), admitted to me in a phone call that he voted for the measure, even though we, the voters in his district, were massively opposed to it. He did this simply to spare a representative from an "unsafe" Republican seat in northern Indiana from having to vote for it. In short, representative democracy fell on the sword of politics, and holding power was more important than expressing the views of his constituents. "Respect" is no longer a word I use when discussing elected officials at any level.

In a very real sense, the daylight savings time debate in Indiana last year and this, has pushed me back to my political roots in left libertarian anarchism: I no longer believe that the State can be reformed in any meaningful sense. We are slaving under the yoke of a bunch of megalomaniacs , and the yoke needs to be removed, not simply repositioned.

Thanks to changes the Bush Administration made to Federal tax and immigration policy, our programming jobs were shipped to India in 2002 and 2003. That same "small and limited government" Administration is attempting to put the farm out of business with it's onerous NAIS regulations. And now they want me to set my clocks ahead and back to "save daylight" - an absurdity on it's face, but a small thing as these things go.

But it's also the one thing that I can seize some control over - it's one area where I can defy the politicians seemingly limitless appetite for power. And I can do so with little physical risk, as they've neglected to make it a criminal offense to fail to move your clocks.

Perhaps it is just a pebble - but landslides that move mountains oft start with a single small stone. So: No! I will not serve! And by the way, fuck you, Mitch!

PS: I won't be driving the toll road, either. And for exactly the same reasons.

23:00 /Politics | 3 comments | permanent link