McCain not "natural born" citizen after all

It seems that people have been querying the citizenship of both leading candidates for the US presidency -- Barack Obama's father was Kenyan, but he was born in the USA. John McCain, however, was not.

clipped from www.nytimes.com In the most detailed examination yet of Senator John McCain’s eligibility to be president, a law professor at the University of Arizona has concluded that neither Mr. McCain’s birth in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone nor the fact that his parents were American citizens is enough to satisfy the constitutional requirement that the president must be a “natural-born citizen.” The analysis, by Prof. Gabriel J. Chin, focused on a 1937 law that has been largely overlooked in the debate over Mr. McCain’s eligibility to be president. The law conferred citizenship on children of American parents born in the Canal Zone after 1904, and it made John McCain a citizen just before his first birthday. But the law came too late, Professor Chin argued, to make Mr. McCain a natural-born citizen. “It’s preposterous that a technicality like this can make a difference in an advanced democracy,” Professor Chin said. “But this is the constitutional text that we have.”

What's in a name?

Holy Whapping gives some snippets from the "Random Things the Orthodox Do So Much Better Than Us" File

Shrine of the Holy Whapping: June 2008:

They have a real knack for naming holy stuff. Witness St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco (known in life with the plain old name of John Maximovitch), John of Moscow the Fool-For-Christ, the Holy and Bodiless Powers (so much nicer than the plain-vanilla 'angels'), the Astoria, Queens institution called the Sacred Patriarchal and Stavropegial Monastery of St. Irene Chrysovalantou, and my new favorite miracle of all time, the Miracle of the Moose, ascribed to the equally baroquely-named Venerable Macarius of the Yellow Water Lake and the Unzha*, the Miracle Worker. The long and short of it is apparently it is possible to catch a moose by prayer, and then enjoy a nice venison dinner afterwards. This is my kind of miracle. Practical and yummy.

The only thing we really have to do now is having all those marvellous names, get signwriters to be able to spell them correctly. One of our institutions is described as "The Alexandrian Catechitical School of South Africa 'Petros VII'"

U.S. defends laptop searches at the border | csmonitor.com

People in the US seem to have a very swivel-eyed idea of privacy. They object to identity documents and the like, yet seem to put up with this sort of thing with hardly a squeak. To me this is real Gestapo/KGB stuff, and carrying an identity document is just part of normal life. It's funny how cultures differ.

U.S. defends laptop searches at the border | csmonitor.com:

Is a laptop searchable in the same way as a piece of luggage? The Department of Homeland Security believes it is.

For the past 18 months, immigration officials at border entries have been searching and seizing some citizens’ laptops, cellphones, and BlackBerry devices when they return from international trips.

In some cases, the officers go through the files while the traveler is standing there. In others, they take the device for several hours and download the hard drive’s content. After that, it’s unclear what happens to the data.

To me that kind of thing implies that the State owns you, body and soul, and can steal your ideas, your inventions, and your secrets with impunity and no accountability.

It's what used to happen in South Africa in the bad old days. A fellow called Martin West did a lot of research on African Independent Churches in Soweto. Some of it was published in a book called Bishops and prophets in a black city, but the rest was stored in the Christian Institute offices and seized in an SB raid. It has never reappeared. Months of research just vanished. And now the US is doing the same sort of thing.

Trolley buses

Real Estate Weekly:

After years of neglect and operational sabotage, city bean counters and Edmonton Transit administrators have finally succeeded in their obsessive quest to pull the plug on the city’s 70-year-old trolleybus system. Last month, they finally got a majority on council that was gullible enough to swallow the misinformation that trolleybuses are a technology of the past, not a way to a cleaner and greener future.

While municipalities around the world are expanding their electrically-powered public transit fleets, Edmonton city council voted seven-to-six to begin the process of dismantling the city’s trolleybus network by 2010. Instead, they’ll abandon proven trolley technology and buy 47 diesel hybrid buses that have an uncertain lifespan, burn more fossil fuels and spew more emissions at street level.

Gauteng municipalities made similar short-sighted decisions more than 30 years ago, and both Pretoria and Johannesburg lost their trolley buses.

Does Windows update block Internet access?

Last night my wife lost Internet access on her computer. We checked connections, rebooted, but it still didn't work. This morning I saw pending Windows updates on my laptop, installed them and went off to read a book waiting for it to reboot. And then I could no longer access the Internet.

Similar updates were waiting on my desktop computer, and I installed them, rebooted, and there was no Internet access.

I returned to the laptop, did a system restore, and Internet access was restored.

I wonder if there will be a massive shutdown right across the Internet, as Windows XP users are cut off.

Brits suffer from metal theft

For a long time South Africans have suffered from metal thieves. A few months ago we were without electricity for two days, not because of Eskom load shedding, but because of cable theft.

Twenty years ago the aluminium railings were nicked from a railway bridge down the road, over four separate nights, and no one heard a thing. Cell phones have mitigated the inconvenience of telephone cable theft, but it can still disrupt Internet access. And many have been late for work because of the theft of railway signal cables.

Now, it seems, the Brits are suffering from the same problem. Will it rile up even the phlegmatic Brits so much that they'll start burning railway carriages and stations when the trains are late?

clipped from news.sky.com Police have launched a nationwide crackdown on the soaring trend of metal theft which is said to cost the economy £360 million every year. It comes after five men were questioned in Plymouth over the theft of four bronze war memorial plaques. Theft of all metal has risen on average 150% in the last two years with signalling cable, bronze statues, drain hole covers and metal from church and school roofs targeted frequently. Assistant Chief Constable Paul Crowther, British Transport Police, said: "The increasing price of metal in overseas markets over the last four years has led to an increase in theft of metals in the UK for its scrap value. "This is far from being a victimless crime. Thousands of people have seen their community facilities stolen or damaged by thieves looking for a quick gain, or have suffered service disruption to railways and telecoms."

Iran war speculation and oil prices

Ron Paul, the US senator who was running for the Republican Party's presidential candidate has said that speculation about an Iran War is driving the oil price up.

Informed Comment: Paul: Iran and Energy Crisis:

Ron Paul on Iran and the energy crisis. He argues that speculation about a US or Israeli strike on Iran is driving some of the increase in oil prices.

The OPEC president should know a thing or two about what drives oil prices and he agrees.

The speculation has been going on a long time ago -- according to some, the war should have started two years ago or more, so it can't be the only thing that's driving the oil price up.

Hat-tip to Mard.

Body of 'balloon priest' found

Body of 'balloon priest' found | The Australian: "THE body a Brazilian priest who floated off tied to 1000 giant party balloons has been recovered about 100 km off the Brazilian coast, Deutsche Presse-Agentur reports .
Father Adelir de Carli went missing in April while attempting to fly with theparty balloons tied to a chair.

The body was recovered by a tugboat crew off Rio de Janeiro state, DPA reports .

Police said clothing, a rucksack and shoes left little doubt that the body was that of the priest but DNA tests would be conducted to provide final proof."

Cows Come Home Shock Horror

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a fundi on agricultural economics and marketing, but this piece in Bishop Alan's blog makes a lot of sense to me, and I suspect that the behaviour of supermarket chains in South Africa is not all that much different.

Bishop Alan’s Blog: Cows Come Home Shock Horror:

Let’s zoom in on the dirty truth about dairy. The Blue is the farm gate price [click on the link to Bishop Alan's blog to see the graphs]. The Purple is the distributor/ processor element. The Cream, in every sense, is Lord Tesco’s Cut. In 1995, the farmer got about 24 pence a litre, the distributors got about 18, and Lord Tesco and chums got 1 and a bit. That may sound low, but of course he sold many litres compared to the farmer, so he wasn’t exactly short of a few bob. Can you believe it, but these days the farmer gets a bit less, and the distributor much the same, whilst UK supermarkets are taking a huge cut — 10 times as much as back then! The argument for going local is to try and bring some of that margin back to the people who actually do the work. Otherwise some are actually being paid less than 10 years ago. Cut out supermarket Shareholders and for roughly the same price, the farmer gets a living wage.

There's been quite a bit of talk about land reform in South Africa, but with the example of Zimbabwe's utterly botched attempt (because its concern was not with the land or the people, but with the political fortunes of ZANU-PF and its leader, Mad Bob Mugabe) many people are understandably somewhat nervous about it. But it goes beyond land and agriculture and political gain, and Bishop Alan's comments seem to be applicable, mutatis mutandis, to our situation too.

WordPress versus Blogger

I have three general blogs on three different blogging platforms, and occasionally I compare them to see which is most popular.

The blogs are Notes from Underground on Blogger (this one), Khanya on WordPress, and my LiveJournal. The graph from Amatomu below shows that the oldest, the LiveJournal one, has the fewest readers, while the newest one, the WordPress one, seems to have the most readers. Is this because readers prefer WordPress to blogger?





Actually the comparison is not quite fair to LiveJournal. Most liveJournal posts are read by friends on feeds, and very few people read the actual blogs themselves. Nevertheless, it does seem to indicate a preference for WordPress on the part of blog readers, though as a blog writer I find it has several limitations, notably that it does not support Javascript, so all sorts of widgets and things just don't work.

But knowing which one readers prefer also affects the way I write. I now tend to be more careful about what I wrote on the Khanya blog, knowing that more people will probably read it. Notes from underground tends to get used for quick 'n dirty posts, and the LiveJournal even more so, or even just for pointers to posts on one of the others, if I think some of my LiveJournal friends might be interested, and I hope that some of them may comment.

Decimating moral values

Christian Conservatives Uniting Behind McCain - Swampland - TIME:

At a meeting Tuesday in Denver, about 100 conservative Christian leaders from around the country agreed to unite behind the candidacy of John McCain, a politician they have long distrusted, marking the latest in a string of movements that bode well for McCain's general election prospects among the Republican base.

'Collectively we feel that he will support and advance those moral values that we hold much greater than Obama, who in our view will decimate moral values,' said Mat Staver, the chairman of Liberty Counsel, a legal advocacy group, who previously supported Mike Huckabee's candidacy.

Hat-tip to Richard Catto for this one. Richard comments:

Hahahahahaha!!! Obama is going to DECIMATE moral values, is he? He’s going to kill every tenth one, or one in every ten, is he?

Really? Wow! Secretly, I am hoping it’s the 6th one (do not commit adultery).

And of course the same charge could be levelled against John McCain, and could already have been levelled against George Bush, who has already decimated moral values: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's oil.

I wonder if Mat Staver could be more specific about which one he thinks Barack Obama is intending to knock off, and what evidence that he has that John McCain will not do the same.

Who's more evil than "Mad Bob" Mugabe?

Others have noted the speed with which vote counting in Zimbabwe changed when the "right" result was available. But though Mad Bob may be baddie of the week, he isn't a patch on Teodoro Obiang Nguema.

Tracey Barnett: Dr Evil beats Mugabe every time - 02 Jul 2008 - NZ Herald: World / International News:

Mugabe may win for the best baddie this week, but nobody says a peep about the bundle of joy who truly deserves the title of Africa's worst leader, hands down.

Meet Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the resident dictator of Equatorial Guinea.

His credentials? Obiang seized power in 1979 by killing his own uncle, a man who was even creepier than the current 'democratically elected' despot. Uncle Francisco Macias Nguema broke away from Spain and declared independence in 1968.

Leaving Plaxo

I just had the enormously frustrating experience of trying to update a friend's address on Plaxo.

I joined Plaxo a few years ago -- it seemed like a good idea at the time. It promised to keep your address book up to date by automatically updating your address book whenever your friends updated theirs, if they were members of Plaxo.

But they have just revamped their operation to make it enormously difficult to navigate and use the system, and I spent a frustrating half hour with my friend's new e-mail address on my clipboard trying to reach a place where I could enter it. I was asked to update my status. I was asked to approve connections with six other people I'd never heard of in my life before. When, after about half an hour, I finally found the address book and could click on the thing to edit his address, I couldn't find the field to enter his new address. The only editable field was "Category" and I could not scroll the screen left, right, up or down to find any more fields. They've obviously designed their interface for monitors much bigger than mine, and until I can afford a new monitor, Plaxo is altogether useless to me.

Why is it that when these web outfits do one thing and one thing well, they suddenly leave their core business and try to become a shoddy imitation of Facebook? And in doing so, stop doing the one thing they did well, that makes them worth joining? I'm already on Facebook, I don't need another version. I'm already on Linked-In. I don't need Plaxo Pulse as well. And since they've made it impossible to do the thing I joined them for, I'm leaving. If they'll let me, that is.

I Just Love Irony

Notes from a Common-place Book: I Just Love Irony:

Today I read where Dr. James Dobson took issue with Barack Obama, here. I particularly noted one quote:

'I think he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology,' Dobson said, adding that Obama is 'dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.'

Maybe the word 'traditional' has a different meaning to Dr. Dobson. But of course, he should be an expert when it comes to 'confused theology.'

Like I say, I just love irony.

What more can one say?

Technorati tags and the penal substitution atonement

There seems to have been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about the penal substitution theory of the atonement recently, so I thought I would throw in my 2c worth, when discussion on other topics seemed to turn to that.

The trouble was that for more than a week I couldn't remember the "p" word -- my memory was turning into a forgettory, and I thought of "praeterist atonement" "praeternatural atonement", and "preeminent atonement" but the phrase penal substitution seemed to have slipped my mind entirely.

Then someone made a comment that triggered my rusty synapses, and I posted it on my Khanya blog here. It's an Orthodox theological response to the penal substitution theory of the atonement.

Then I thought I'd look on Technorati to see what others had been saying about it, and Technorati responded:

There are no posts in English tagged penal substitution”

So it seems that penal substitution didn't only slip out of my memory for a week or two, it slipped out of Technorati, and maybe out of the blogosphere generally, and maybe out of the universe!

Now there's a thought!