Blackmoor Vituperative

For the first time in U.S. history, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that individual Americans have the right to own guns for personal use, and struck down a strict gun control law in the U.S. capital.

Supreme Court finds individual right to own guns (from Yahoo! News)

I am amazed at this decision. The Supreme Court actually upholding the Constitution? I am flabbergasted.

Maybe the murder rate in in our nation’s capital will drop a bit now that law-abiding people are able to own the tools to defend themselves. No guarantee of that, but it seems a reasonable outcome to expect, based on evidence from other municipalities.

Maybe this will make people take a look at the rest of the Bill Of Rights, and wonder what the heck happened to it. Maybe this will remind people what the USA is supposed to be: the land of the free.

I have not blogged anything on here in a while. I am burned out on role-playing, and I have become so jaded that posting politics seems a waste of time. However, this speech by Chris Dodd gives me, dare I say it, hope.

I do not know this Dodd fellow, and for all I know, he might be a crackpot of epic proportions (probably not, but he’s in Congress, so who knows?). But I like what he is saying here. Well, no, I don’t like it. I hate it, because I wish it did not need to be said. But I am glad that someone is saying it.

I am so sick of being treated like a criminal, being humiliated and having my most intimate personal life violated, every time I apply for a job. Twenty, or even ten, years ago, the employers who considered it their right to humiliate potential employees were the exception. I could, and did, tell them that no one with any self respect would consent to such treatment by their employer, and walked out. Today, it has become the norm. If you walk away from employers who demand to pry into your personal life, you don’t work.

This is an egregious violation of basic human rights — is not dignity and the sanctity of one’s person the most basic of all human rights? We are people, not farm animals to be poked and prodded and tested and forced to submit samples of our bodily fluids for absolutely no reason. If the standards of quality at ConHugeCo are so low that they can’t tell the drunk/high employees from the ones who are doing their jobs, then something is Seriously Wrong at ConHugeCo, and humiliating their employees will not fix that!

In the 1970s, a law was passed in the USA making it ILLEGAL for an employer to require a lie detector test, while now, 30 years later, it is simply taken for granted that employees will submit to the humiliation of drug testing before being allowed to work. How far we have fallen in such a short time!

Where is the outrage? Why am I the only person who looks at this monstrous trend and denounces it, while everyone else meekly submits or blithely makes excuses for it? This is a sad, sad statement on the “the land of the free”.

Please write to your Federal and state legislators, asking them to sponsor legislation to put an end to this gross abuse of employer power. Congress.org has a simple form that will automatically find and email your Federal and state representatives.

I am a little late with this, but the last few months have been very busy. Even so, it brightened my day to read about it.

On 24 October a district court in Moscow has confirmed the “no copyright infringement” verdict.

Earlier this year, on 15 August 2007 AllofMP3.com was acquitted of all charges brought up by IFPI. Consequently the Federation filed a protest on behalf of the labels. This protest was declined last week. This time IFPI promised to go as far as the Supreme Court.

This was yet another victory for AllofMP3.com in court.

(from Court confirms legality of AllofMP3.com ,AllofMP3.com)

The JMRI Defense fund is a worthwhile cause. Think about sending a few dollars their way.

Net neutrality is a complex issue, but here is the main thing you need to know about it in order to support it:

The Digital Rights Mafia is against it.

As if we needed more reasons to be annoyed at Christianity.

A runway fashion show in Viking times would have spotlighted women cloaked in imported colored-silk gowns adorned with metallic breast coverings and long trains.

This surprising claim is the result of a new analysis of remnants from a woman’s wardrobe discovered in a grave dating back to the 10th century in Russia, painting a picture of Viking panache before Christianity was established that runs counter to previous ideas about buttoned-up, prudish looking Norsewomen.

“Now we can say the pre-Christian dress code was very rich,” textiles researcher Annika Larsson of Uppsala University in Sweden told LiveScience. “When Christianity came, the dress was more like that of nuns. There was a big difference.”

(from Viking Women Dressed Provocatively, Yahoo! News)

Sounds to me like the costumes from Viking Women And The Sea Serpent were not so far off, after all.

GOF’s Legal Activities and Projects

Free Press and Public Knowledge filed a complaint with the FCC about Comcast’s squeezing of BitTorrent and other apps the cable company deemed to be too much of a strain on its network.

Comcast, you may recall, was playing a little game whereby it delayed outbound traffic by impersonating users and sending reset commands.

[…]

The groups want Comcast to pay $195,000 per affected user.

(from Comcast throttling deserves punishment, groups say, ZDNet)

I agree with these groups in principle, but $195,000 seems a little steep. Refunding the cost of my high-speed Internet service during the affected period seems a fairer punishment.

In case you needed more reasons to hate the media robber barons, the Digital Rights Mafia, and their government shills, here’s an article from Crave.