Are we at war with Canada now?

Presidents have a history of leaving messes for following presidents to clean up if they're not of the same political party, but this takes the cake:

In his final days in power, President George W. Bush asserted U.S. military "sea power" over the oil-rich Arctic Monday, in another forceful rebuttal of Canada's claims of sovereignty over the Northwest Passage. . . . The Bush directive reiterates that the Northwest Passage is an international waterway -- a rebuttal of Canada's claim of sovereignty over what is emerging as a major global shipping route because of the shrinking polar ice cap -- and it highlights the boundary dispute in the resource-rich Beaufort Sea.

So in his last two weeks before leaving office, Bush claims Canada's territory as its own.

For the love of god, is he going to leave us at war?

Did Microsoft buy out Google?

Or vice versa, perhaps?

If you look at the image to the right, you'll see the new Google favicon. If you're thinking it looks mightily familiar, you're right: look at your Start button. It's the four colors of the Windows logo, rotated 90 degrees and with the Google lowercase 'g' superimposed thereupon.

Scientology: "We had no role in Travolta's death"

Amazingly enough, before I even heard the news about Jett Travolta dying, I heard about the denial from the Church of Scientology describing how they did not cause his death.

But with their quick assertion of innocence, though... well, as in so many cases, XKCD says it best.

The Year of Science

We've got some amazing anniversaries this year -- the 400-year anniversary of Galileo, and the 200-year anniversary of Charles Darwin. This has caused the International Astronomy Union to declare 2009 the Year of Astronomy, and the Coalition on Public Understanding of Science to declare 2009 the Year of Science.

I think that's a wonderful theme to carry through the year.

Java

Today I came across a dinosaur of the World Wide Web: a site that required Java to run. And not a personal site, either -- this company actually required people to pay money to use their service, a mistake you can be sure I will not be making.

Most people will remember Java fondly as bloatware, along with such horrors as RealPlayer and Quicktime. What it proposed was a true object-oriented language running in small 'applets' in your browser: like miniature programs! People imagined entire office suites.

Except... Java sucked. Java was slow to develop, and even slower to run, with the Java Virtual Machine growing to expand any available process time or memory that the users had. If you were using a Java applet, you would not be able to do anything else while that thing clunked away. And when you were done, the Java VM stayed in memory, keeping your computer choked.

Even more unfortunately for website coders, there was a better Java than Java, which already existed -- JavaScript. Javascript, the key to Web 2.0 buzzword 'AJAX', ran much faster and with much less trouble than waiting for the Java VM to load and run each time.

Java has been succeeded by Flash and Javascript for 99% of uses, with the remaining 1% has been replaced by the free Silverlight (for the 1% of users who can't afford Flash but have the ethics not to download it somewhere).

Nowadays, requiring Java to view a page is like requiring the <blink> tag, or VRML -- a sign of the web designers working there having learned nothing since the 90s.

Speaking of the 90s, writing this blog post has made me feel old. I think I'll go hunt for my VHS tapes of Eek! The Cat and Power Rangers and study my old Algebra 2 homework.

The Registry: It starts with suicide

This piece has hit the national news due to the tragedy of the suicide, but looking a little deeper reveals some harder issues.

First, let's look at what our system of education has done to the girl. The girl (who is unnamed due to the fact that she was 14 at the time) was found to have a 'sex diary', describing her various conquests. In a later interview, she declared:

Yes, I'm a victim. I was a victim who was deceived by my own emotions and ignorance, of misplaced confidence, a victim of my own fantasies . . . Yes, predator for I chase people who themselves were victims of misplaced confidence."

So, she's a victim because she consented to sex... but she's also a predator because she consented to sex? Typical of our our American legal system treats sex... consent is not defined by someone's wishes, but by what the legal system declares. Not to mention what having our system declare her both predator and victom must have done to her.

The boy, who was eighteen, pled guilty to 'seduction,' a very old charge; this was an admission of guilt that did not require jail time or registration (likely due to a Romeo-and-Juliet law). Now, let's go forwards five years in time to 2007:

But changes last year require those who pleaded guilty to seduction to appear on the list, said the county's Chief Deputy Prosecutor Deborah Carley.

Under most civilized jurisdictions, that's double jeopardy. He's already paid for his crime (a very public outing and a long probation), but now the system was going back to give him a permanant black mark that would ruin his life.

The tragedy is not that the boy committed suicide; the tragedy is that our system drove him to it.

And so ends my backlog of blog entries. I apologize for being slow with them, but I had the misfortune of being given Fallout 3 for Christmas, thus destroying my free time.

Religion and evolution: co-dependent?

Two news stories by two different groups have come out that are surprisingly amusing in their synergy.

First, we have news that religion evolved:

Self-control is critical for success in life, and a new study by University of Miami professor of Psychology Michael McCullough finds that religious people have more self-control than do their less religious counterparts. These findings imply that religious people may be better at pursuing and achieving long-term goals that are important to them and their religious groups.

And to go with it, we have this opinion piece that an understanding of evolution strengthens faith:

In my opinion the Darwinian worldview is not just compatible with religious faith but deepens it and makes aspects of it more intelligible.

Religion and evolution: Two great tastes that, apparently, taste great together.

Sarah Palin: Boy, did we dodge a bullet there

In the no-news category, we have news from a Christian site that Sarah Palin was even scarier than we thought:

"I believe in warfare. We were given an assignment in Alaska... we had the very liberal candidates running for governor, and we began to pray for God to give us a Christian ", declared Mary Glazier. At a three day religious conference held in Everett, Washington last summer, on June 13, 2008, Glazier described how, nearly two decades ago, her movement helped propel Alaska Independence Party candidate Walter J. Hickel, in an upset write-in campaign, into the Alaska governor's office: Glazier's new prayer group member, a 24 year old woman named Sarah Palin, would later follow.

Good thing she can't sanctify the US against us durn libruls.

Good wins for now, but we need to be careful of any other instances in which religions conspire against citizens to buy votes and subvert elections.