Recent events

Hi Everybody (Hi Dr Nick!)

Recent news is sparse. However, biggest by far lately is that I got my Social Security number and Green Card, so I am now fully able to pursue work and do other stuff (like stay here without any trouble), so yay me! I am officially and completely a Permanent Resident, and I can prove it! I’ve been looking for work for a couple of weeks, and I have some good leads, including one job in particular that I really want and hope to get.

In other news, while taking out the trash one evening, my son and I found an adult men’s bike in the dumpster. It’s a Schwinn Caliente, with minor rust damage on the front and rear rims, spokes and a couple of other areas. It looks like it’s been sitting in someone’s garage for years, and it looks like it’s never been ridden. So the Boy and I will be fixing it up for summer, and as he’s nearly as tall as me now, we’ll share it.

Start Spreading The News

New York Allows Same-Sex Marriage, Becoming Largest State to Pass Law – NYTimes.com

ALBANY — Lawmakers voted late Friday to legalize same-sex marriage, making New York the largest state where gay and lesbian couples will be able to wed and giving the national gay-rights movement new momentum from the state where it was born.

The marriage bill, whose fate was uncertain until moments before the vote, was approved 33 to 29 in a packed but hushed Senate chamber. Four members of the Republican majority joined all but one Democrat in the Senate in supporting the measure after an intense and emotional campaign aimed at the handful of lawmakers wrestling with a decision that divided their friends, their constituents and sometimes their own homes.

With his position still undeclared, Senator Mark J. Grisanti, a Republican from Buffalo who had sought office promising to oppose same-sex marriage, told his colleagues he had agonized for months before concluding he had been wrong.

“I apologize for those who feel offended,” Mr. Grisanti said, adding, “I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife.”

Senate approval was the final hurdle for the same-sex marriage legislation, which was approved last week by the Assembly. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the measure at 11:55 p.m., and the law will go into effect in 30 days, meaning that same-sex couples could begin marrying in New York by late July.

Read the rest here.

What a great day for New York!

Rightbloggers on the Death of Osama Bin Laden: Eh, No Big Whoop. Thanks, President Bush!

Roy Edroso has a great round-up of the initial reactions from the wingnutosphere to the Big News.

Go and read it, it’s rather telling. It certainly gives a glimpse into the tortured tribalism of the wingnut mind – everything bad is Obama, everything good is Republican.

Osama bin Laden is dead, Obama announces

Big news:

Osama bin Laden, the criminal mastermind behind al-Qaida and the world’s most sought-after terrorist since the attacks of 11 September 2001, has been killed by a US operation, President Barack Obama has announced.

In an address to the nation, President Obama said Bin Laden was killed in a “targeted operation” in Abbottabad, a highland town north of Islamabad, last night.

The operation started with an intelligence lead last August, and culminated in an operation involving a “small team of Americans”. “After a firefight they killed bin Laden.”

None of the Americans was killed. Pakistani co-operation “helped to lead us to him” he said.

ETA: The reactions over at LGM are, as usual, generally measured and thoughtful.

ETA: The Roasters go a little bananas, but still coherent and making sense.

ETA: In a move which shocks nobody, the CorrenteWhiners (and Lambchop in particular) are acting like bratty kids who don’t know anything about, well, anything.

ETA: Blimey. Fox News is actually doing proper journalism about it.

ETA: Apparently some guy inadvertently live tweeted the raid without knowing it at the time. Wow, that’s weird. Via.

ETA: Barron’s reports an upswing on the Dow and dollar following the announcement.

ETA: Dubya being surprisingly gracious; perhaps he’s mellowed in retirement.

ETA: From LGM, it looks like OBL may have been executed. Slightly troubling in a way, although to be honest, even if he’d been captured, any trial would’ve been a farce. Even the most committed defender of the concept of rule of law would find it difficult to argue that one..

Best News Headline Ever

JOYRIDING BEAR LEAVES TEEN GRIZZLY

A bear got into a teenager’s car, honked the horn and then sent it rolling 125 feet into a thicket, a Colorado family has said.

Ben Story, 17, said he and his family were asleep in their home south of Denver when the bear managed to open the unlocked door of his 2008 Toyota Corolla and climbed inside.

A peanut butter sandwich left on the back seat is probably what attracted the bear, Ben said.

It is not unusual for bears to open unlocked doors to cars and houses in search of food, Tyler Baskfield, a spokesman for the Colorado Division of Wildlife said.

“It happens all the time,” he said. “They’re very smart.”

Once inside, the bear must have knocked the automatic transmission shift into neutral, sending the car rolling backwards down the inclined driveway and into the thicket, Ben said.

The door apparently slammed shut when the car jolted to a stop, he said, trapping the bear inside.

Neighbours had called emergency police dispatchers, and deputies freed the bear by opening the door with a rope from a distance. The bear then ran into the woods.

But Ben says he will need a new car because the bear trashed the inside trying to get out.

Cool Science News

No following comment, I just thought this was cool:

‘Printer’ designed to create made-to-measure human organs

It is hoped that the development could one day mean that patients in urgent need of new organs will no longer have to join transplant waiting lists.

A prototype machine developed by the California-based regenerative medicine company Organovo is already capable of growing new arteries.

They hope that the same techniques could be used to create new organs.

It is based on 3D laser printing technology used to create new machine parts for industry.

But instead of combining layers of plastic and metal, the “bioprinter” puts living tissue together.

Two laser-based printing heads are used to place living cells onto thin sheets of gel with microscopic precision.

Multiple layers are then laid on top of each other in a specially designed mould, or “scaffold” and the cells begin to fuse together.

“Ultimately the idea would be for surgeons to have tissue on demand for various uses,” said Keith Murphy the company’s chief executive.

“The best way to do that is get a number of bio-printers into the hands of researchers and give them the ability to make three dimensional tissues on demand.”

Source: Daily Telegraph

Random Snippets

A few random snippets of stuff I’ve been reading:

Taitz v. Obama – Dismissed
Ironically enough, Ms. Taitz could never establish such an injury because — as far as the Court is aware — she was not elected president nor could she be because she is not a natural born citizen herself.

I rofl’d. Well done, Justice Lamberth.

Tea Party Bears Beck’s Imprint
Wednesday’s NYT/CBS poll on the 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves with the tea-party movement was myth-busting in certain ways. Tea-partiers are wealthier and more educated than most Americans, the poll found. They are largely disinterested in the existence of a third party. And they don’t particularly care about social issues (three-fifths favor some form of legal recognition for same-sex couples).

Another stereotype, however, rings true: tea-partiers are disproportionately attached to, and perhaps influenced by, FOX News. And they are particularly enamored of Glenn Beck. Nationally, just 18 percent of people have a favorable opinion of Beck (the majority have no opinion whatsoever about him). But most tea-partiers do. Do the math, and you’ll find that 59 percent of those who do think highly of Beck consider themselves a part of the tea-party. This is, in fact, the single biggest differentiator of any of the items that the NYT asked about: not ideology, not any particular political belief, but whom they watch on television

Some good analysis from Nate Silver, although nothing particularly susprising to anyone who’s been watching the bagger phenomenon.

Just Lying About Everything
Remember that executive order in which Obama directed hospitals to allow patients to decide who can visit them, whether they be immediate family or not? But that patients are the ones who get to decide, not arcane and out of date hospital rules?

John Cole concisely eviscerates RedState and its Republican masters in just a few words.

I am still alive…

… contrary to any rumours.

I’ve moved house. It’s a much better place. Still shared accommodation, but in this one, the landlord lives in, and so has a vested interest in keeping the place nice. I don’t remember if I blogged about it, but in the the last house, a small drip in the bathroom resulted in the ceiling in the living room falling down. This was November, 2007; as of two weeks ago, new plasterboard was put in. Yeah, exactly.

Anyway, the room I have now is nicer and the house generally is in better shape – less cold, less run down, and the people seem much nicer and more together. Less likely to go bugshit nuts, in other words, which was a problem in the last place.

I don’t have any responsibility for the bills, beyond handing money to the landlord for them.

Altogether, it’s a much better place to be living.

I have also come late to the game and started using Skype for calling the missus; I have the Unlimited World package, meaning that I can make up to 10,000 minutes of calls monthly for £7.99, which is significantly less than what I was previously paying…

It’s a much better situation all round for me right now, and I’m happy to be here 🙂

I’m working Monday to Wednesday in the coming week; not because I couldn’t get time off, but because I didn’t want it. I’ll have Christmas Day and Boxing, because they’re Bank Holidays, but there’s not really much I can do about that. I dislike Christmas generally, and not only for the whole religious side of it; there’s the atmosphere of forced jollity and the requirement that you be seen to be enjoying yourself. I got called “Scrooge” by a couple of people in (partial) jest, and I responded by challenging them to call me when they start celebrating Ramadan or Rosh Hashanah or Diwali, which seems to have done the trick…

In other news, I’ve also moved back to Opera-based browsing, and boy, is it an improvement! I was using Firefox for a while, because anything beats Internet Exploder, but that was really only because I wanted to use StumbleUpon. It was just cranky and kept crashing on me, so I decided to come back to Opera, and what a blissful browsing experience it is. I can recommend 9.6 to everyone.

That’s about it for now, really.

SCOTUS denies election stay

Following the dismissal of Donofrio’s spurious lawsuit, the Wrotnowski suit has also been denied cert.

Via Ed Darrell, from the AP:

Court won’t review Obama’s eligibility to serve

6 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has turned down another appeal arguing Barack Obama is ineligible to be president because of his citizenship.

The challenge by Cort Wrotnowski of Greenwich, Conn., was denied Monday without comment.

Wrotnowski argued that Obama was a British subject at birth and therefore cannot meet the requirement for becoming president.

He wanted the high court to halt presidential electors from meeting to formally elect Obama as president.

Echoing an appeal that was rejected by justices last week, Wrotnowski said that since Obama had dual nationality at birth — his mother was American, his Kenyan father was a British subject — he cannot possibly be a “natural born citizen.”

The sad thing is that this only seems to be spurring the wingnuts on further, as in here, here, and here (for more, visit the Obama and Birth Certificate tags).

Apparently all of their ranting, raving and nonsense about natural-born citizens and the increasingly finer and finer shades of the “true” meaning of the term have failed to impress anyone; the claim is not only dead in the water, but floating belly up.

Not that this’ll mean anything to them, as I said; these are the same people who think Clinton killed Vince Foster, after all. Facts and reason have never exactly been their strong suits before, so this is unlikely to change any minds. Many of them seem to have sensed defeat and are refocusing their efforts on the Blagojevich non-scandal, especially WingNut-in-Chief, Pam Geller, of the Google-hating paranoia-fest known as Atlas Scrubs Shrugs.

We’ll see what happens; personally, I don’t think these people can be reasoned with, and that they’ll remain at a low simmer of lunatic resentment until 2012, when they will resurface in support of Palin and promptly be told to fuck off with their old, discredited stories already.

Lehman’s UK staff may not be paid

UK staff of collapsed investment bank Lehman Brothers face the prospect of not being paid this week, administrators have warned.

The bank’s main UK operation – which employs around 4,500 people – was placed into administration shortly after its US parent filed for bankruptcy protection.

Administrator PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) said picking over the firm’s UK business was an “extraordinarily complex” task and would take a “significant” amount of time. Staff numbers will also be “downsized”, the firm added.

PWC partner Tony Lomas, who indicated the forthcoming wage bill was 75 million dollars (£42 million), said: “(The administration) is a period of stress and distress for the people.

“We started the day with no certainty that we would have cash available to make payment due at the end of this week. We still don’t know what the position is.

“There’s a huge number of transactions here of vast values. It’s going to take quiet some significant time to unravel all the affairs of this company.”

The collapse of Lehman Brothers – whose history dates back to 1850 – caused meltdown in global financial markets.

London’s leading share index slumped more than 5% at one point before losses eased to less than 4%. There were also hefty stock market losses in New York and around Europe.

Via Yahoo! News

I can tell you that the sentence should read “Lehman’s UK staff will not be paid”. The daughter of one of our managers works used to work for Lehman’s. She lost her job over the weekend, and they have all been told now that they won’t be paid this week or for last week, even. Given that the relevant people live in London, they’re more or less screwed.