meta-roj

Father of Children of Chernobyl

your tax dollars at work (but only if you live in alabama)…

associated press

Ousted Chief Justice Roy Moore’s fight to keep a Ten Commandments monument in a courthouse rotunda will cost Alabama taxpayers nearly $550, 000, officials said Wednesday.

…or you could look at it as $104/pound.

now if only there were some way to keep this money from going toward law school tuition for the next generation….

i think this is the first time i’ve done this, but… i want this right up front for a little while at least.

about a month ago, we lost chuck niles. this morning, the meta-roj blog got a visit from eric l. wattree… and he left a comment. you should check it out.

i appreciate this sort of comment… the first-person accounts offered up to the world. perspectives and thoughts that are unique. and i’m very happy that this platform has attracted a great variety of such contributions since it began. so, thank you to eric, and all the rest of you that have found and contributed to my corner of the net…

a doctorate in chemistry 1926
a director with the manhattan project in 1945
selected as the oldest worker in 2002.
and the subject of a pbs documentary on centenarians… [with a video clip in several formats available]
but mostly a teacher

has retired from teaching at 104 years young, but has not retired from life.

Ray Crist

As with all people, you go into the past and whatever you might have done, any sum of it might be expressed in the minds and lives of other people, just as what they have done was part of your own personal expression.

Ray Crist

When you have a mission, you go after it, and I am still going after it.

an article on ray crist’s retirement from messiah college in pennsylvania follows.
(more…)

ars technica drops the dime (as it were) on a legislative initiative in california to put the brakes on the whole gmail thing.

ever since those ipo rumors got started, there have been some hints at the dark side of google. i picked it up here twice.

has google compromised itself and it’s famous “don’t be evil” philosophy yet?

Thank you, Mr. President. In the last campaign, you were asked a question about the biggest mistake you’d made in your life, and you used to like to joke that it was trading Sammy Sosa. You’ve looked back before 9/11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9/11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have you learned from it?

THE PRESIDENT: I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. (Laughter.) John, I’m sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could have done it better this way, or that way. You know, I just — I’m sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn’t yet.

I would have gone into Afghanistan the way we went into Afghanistan. Even knowing what I know today about the stockpiles of weapons, I still would have called upon the world to deal with Saddam Hussein. See, I happen to believe that we’ll find out the truth on the weapons. That’s why we’ve sent up the independent commission. I look forward to hearing the truth, exactly where they are. They could still be there. They could be hidden, like the 50 tons of mustard gas in a turkey farm.

One of the things that Charlie Duelfer talked about was that he was surprised at the level of intimidation he found amongst people who should know about weapons, and their fear of talking about them because they don’t want to be killed. There’s a terror still in the soul of some of the people in Iraq; they’re worried about getting killed, and, therefore, they’re not going to talk.

But it will all settle out, John. We’ll find out the truth about the weapons at some point in time. However, the fact that he had the capacity to make them bothers me today, just like it would have bothered me then. He’s a dangerous man. He’s a man who actually — not only had weapons of mass destruction — the reason I can say that with certainty is because he used them. And I have no doubt in my mind that he would like to have inflicted harm, or paid people to inflict harm, or trained people to inflict harm on America, because he hated us.

I hope I — I don’t want to sound like I’ve made no mistakes. I’m confident I have. I just haven’t — you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I’m not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.

i suppose it’s understandable to get stumped by a question like that…. could this be interpreted as having just too many biggest mistakes to pick from?

nawww….

anyway, if you want my opinion (and you certainly do, non?), it’s probably got something to do with nobody stepping up and taking responsibility. but that’s just my opinion.

this bothered me so much, i wrote about it, twice.

it also bothered some other people, showing up in an op-ed in the sf chronicle, oddly enough, titled not in this country. not quite “not my america” but close enough for editorial work :). slate also took a crack at it, and well… the news today (actually late yesterday) is odd…

Scalia Apologizes for Erasure Of Reporters’ Tapes of Speech, washington post [ registration may be required ]

In an April 9 letter to Lucy A. Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which had protested the incident, Scalia said he had written to the two reporters, Antoinette Konz of the Hattiesburg American and Denise Grones of the Associated Press, “extending my apology and undertaking to revise my policy so as to permit recording for use of the print media.”

Scalia called Dalglish’s concern “well justified” and said he had been “as upset as you were” to learn of the deputy marshal’s action, which, he said, “was not taken at my direction.”

i think i first got wind of this at the san jose mercury news, High court Justice Scalia apologizes to reporters for destruction of tapes.

going to the source…

the press release from The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the scalia letter [pdf] from their site.

derek wolcott

the result may be comical, but the process is serious

solider

this goes under business, since it’s the same level of ethics that brought us all the grand business scandals of recent years.

this broke at the missourian and in the columbia daily tribune. later reported by the associated press and picked up around the world.

christie key, the blood drive coordinator for the gamma phi beta sorority at the university of missouri sent an email to some 170 people…

christie key

I dont care if you got a tattoo last week LIE. I dont care if you have a cold. Suck it up. We all do. LIE. Recent peircings? LIE.

christie key

We’re not messing around. Punishment for not giving blood is going to be quite severe.

aside from the fact that this means the american red cross now has to do damage-control because people are concerned about the safety of the blood supply, this would seem to violate the university’s statement of values.

i’m sure it was worth winning. i hope guinness puts a stopper on this record-attempt. i probably can’t afford the kind of money it would take to buy christie a clue, so i guess we just have to hope that a title like ceo or president isn’t in her future.

will there be consequences?