it has been one hell of a week here at mooseparty labs.

on the upside, there was a really good party friday night, full of friends from out of town and in at least one case out of the country who i hadn't thought i'd be seeing again for quite a while. (hi, jo!)

on the downside, that was pretty much the high point of the week, and the party was a wake for john m. ford. in other news, i had to call the plumber back to fix my basement drain *again* (although as of this morning, my basement floor hasn't been wet for a week).

and in other even less good news, probably the low point of the week, my uncle died on tuesday. we were hoping for four to six weeks; we got one week. i'm hanging in there okay, the rest of the family is hanging in there okay, i think, we're all sort of keeping busy. eventually there will be the part where we all run out of things to do and crash hard, but we'll get through that, too.

go scritch your favorite mammals, okay?

sorry not much writing recently. i've been busy with things, depressed as hell about politics (i miss habeas corpus, about which more below), and my uncle was just diagnosed with cancer and likely won't make christmas. i'm not hide in bed and cry depressed, but kind of logy and apathetic.

anyhow. habeas corpus; the right to obtain one of several common law writs issued to bring a party before a court or judge as a protection against illegal imprisonment.

The End of the US as a Civilized Nation:

...the recently passed Military Commissions Act removes the United States from the ranks of civilized nations. It codifies racial and political discrimination, legalizes kidnapping and torture of those the government deems its political enemies, and eliminates habeas corpus--the ancient precept that prevents the police from arresting and holding you without cause--a basic protection common to all (other) modern legal systems, and one that dates to the Magna Carta.

Ticking Bombast § Unqualified Offerings

Let’s say you’ve caught a suspect and you’re sure that he’s a terrorist, and you’re sure there’s a nuclear bomb planted somewhere in Manhattan, and you’re sure that he knows where the nuclear device has been planted in Manhattan and...

some more interesting thoughts on what our government ought to be able to do with terrorists.

go read.

oh, i'm sleepy!

went out for dinner with m. socks and her beloved. they took me out to la bodega tapas bar for my birthday. we had tapas, drinks, and dessert. quite reasonable pricing, actually! i mean, the drinks were wretchedly expensive, and the dessert was priced like it was dessert, but the individual tapas plates were quite reasonable, and i may end up going back there even when the bestest sister in the world isn't taking me out for my birthday.

which is in ummmm (i had a caprinha and then an electric lemonade so math is hard) 1 hour and forty one minutes.

happy birthday to me! shortly! but by then i hope to be asleep.

(p.s. yay for m. socks and a! woo! thank you for deener!)

betty rose, who i do not know but have friends in common with, writes in her livejournal about the recent shootings that have happened in schools.

the kid who went into the school in wisconsin and shot his principal is a different class of offender and it's a different class of offense than the adult male pedophiles who invaded schools recently because they knew that that was where there was an already rounded up supply of their favorite victims.

betty rose mentions in her post, and i feel the same way, i understood columbine. i thought it was sad and awful and wrong, and that it was a wonder that it hadn't happened sooner, and in more places, and i knew something about what had driven those two kids to do just that. (i do not mean to imply that high school was incredibly awful for me. because it wasn't. i could go on, but this isn't about me.)

these recent school invasions are gender based hate crimes. they are related to the montreal shooting so much more than to columbine.

dbubley: Recent Shootings in School NOT School Shootings

Oh, these poor, poor pedophiles, who probably don't realize that the statue of limitation has run out on their youth. Maybe they see themselves as Harris or Klebold and expect the world to view them as such. Not such a great view, really. Only it's a much uglier picture, and they've become much uglier men. School shootings my ass. They're grown men who prey on children, girls in these two cases. Girls most of the time. I'm not forgetting boys. I wonder if they would have ever been mislabeled "school shootings" if they'd gone in and rounded up and sexually molested boys?

(thanks to body impolitic for the pointer.)