Leaving Detroit on Friday, we pushed back from the gate and sat there for 10 or 15 minutes before the pilot said there was a minor mechanical problem (something with an air conditioning valve) and they would need to return to the gate. Before returning to the gate, a woman up front somewhere started having shortness of breath so they had to call out the paramedics too. After an hour, we finally got in the air headed to Minneapolis.
Quick Vacation Update
Just a very quick update for you (from the Detroit International Airport terminal at the end of the first of three legs to Alaska). Annual Conference was good, though tiring, and Melissa spent most of the time trying to get all the passport stuff worked out. Despite the relaxation of the rules, there are persistent (though scattered) reports of travelers running into problems. Melissa’s passport arrived, though below mine in the queue, and mine—supposedly—will arrive today or tomorrow. Lots of good that will do me. Se we embarked on our trip with Melissa’s passport, my alternative documentation, and hopes that all will go well!
Passport Madness, Government Reliability
Melissa and I are going on vacation. On Sunday we leave for the Virginia Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church in Roanoke, Virginia. We arrive back home next Thursday afternoon, then fly out early on Friday (the 15th) for Anchorage, Alaska to board a Holland America 7-day cruise that ends in Vancouver, British Columbia. This will be our second Alaska cruise, the first being our honeymoon two years ago. Two years ago, doing a cruise that went the opposite direction (from Vancouver to Anchorage), we didn’t need passports to enter Canada. With a birth certificate (proof of U.S. citizenship) and a government-issued ID card (like a driver’s license), the border was open for us to cross.
Beware the Bloggers’ Bile
Joe Klein is not a Republican. He is not a friend of the Bush Administration. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb here: He’s a liberal, and he’s almost definitely a Democrat. But in today’s political climate these facts do not matter, nor do similar facts about others on either side of the political spectrum. If you think, if you analyze, or if—God forbid—you disagree with one party or the other on a few issues, you will find yourself on the receiving end of incredible hatred even from your own ideological brethren. As Klein says in his Time Magazine piece, “the smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere.”
- Beware the Bloggers’ Bile (Time Magazine).
Court Tosses FCC Indecency Ruling
I am not a fan of the Federal Communications Commission’s power to limit television and radio broadcasts on the basis of ‘decency.’ Broadcast networks have a right to free speech (and the argument that broadcast airwaves are public property is spurious, since free speech applies to public property too). If you want to ‘protect’ your children from Janet Jackson’s nipple, use the V-Chip to lock out the channels you don’t approve of or make your children read books instead; that’s your job, not the government’s. But the FCC’s new regulations against even ‘fleeting’ expletives on live TV—desperately harmful words like f### and s### that have been staples of schoolyard conversation since I was in fifth grade—went too far, and thankfully the federal appeals court in New York agrees.
- Court Tosses FCC Indecency Ruling (AdWeek [no longer available]).
Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.