CallieV's blog

Here we are, the beginning of September.  Summer is either finally over for the vast majority of students in the USA or gasping for it's last dredging breaths before the lucky few who are not yet in school find themselves trading in board shorts for jeans and bicycles for backpacks.  Those of us in highschool have once again been submersed in the world of cliques that acts as an 'educational babysitter' and those of us going to college are once again incurring debt at a rate that seems ungodly--maybe that's why our numbers are dwindling so...

The old man sits quietly in bed.  The light colored blankets tucked around him, the room is clean, white and seems sterile in a way that only rooms that play host to those who suffer from illness beyond hope can be.  He’s propped up slightly, and if you ignore the breathing tube and series of IV’s that snake their way innocuously from his arms and up towards the bags of saline solution that serve as his only nutrients, then you might imagine that he can hear the television humming in the background.  Doctor’s say that every day that passes his chances of waking are reduced.  The news ticker running continuously in Hebrew, spitting news out into an empty room seems then, pointless, irrelevant and at the least, useless.  The comatose man can no longer know or care what befalls the nation that was once his entire life. 

I'm back, now that the madness of blogging for money is gone (although I doubt anyone cares I just decided I'd say that I'm back).  I like many here on Progressive U, am a competitive debater.  Parliamentary is my style and I can think of no more thought provoking way to spend a weekend than eating stale tortilla chips out of a zip-lock baggy in the corner of some college cafeteria for five or ten minutes every hour while waiting to rush off to an empty class room to argue with two complete strangers for forty five minutes (repeat process six to eight times).  It's addicting, it's fun--and last year it seemd that those cafeteria corners were buzzing with discussion, debate and conversation.  Now the buzz is gone, replaced instead by the distant hum created by a hundred i-pods playing a hundred different songs.  My generation is 'plugged in' as it were, and while the i-pod may be the optimum tool of choice for watching videos on airplanes, jogging to music, disagreeing with podcasters or even simply collecting media, Apple, as a company has been watching it's competitors turn green with envy.  And now, one of those competitors is gearing up to attempt the impossible--compete directly with the i=pod.  My queston is this:  Can Microsoft really pull this off?

The Brandon Mayfield case of Portland Oregon presented the American people with some serious questions.  Brandon Mayfield was a muslim convert.  A lawyer. with a wife, a few children and a home in a relatively nice neighborhood.  He had a good reputation, both as a lawyer and as a neighbor--but two weeks after the Madrid train bombings his life was turned upside down.  Arrested suddenly and held for two weeks without access to a  lawyer or even a phone call to his family the lawyer was one of the first US citizens arrested under the Patriot Act.  He was suspected of having ties to the terrorists who pulled off the Madrid train bombings.  The FBI claimed that they had found one of his fingerprints on a backpack found on one of the destroyed trains.  He was later proved innocent--the fingerprint wasn't his and he'd never been to Spain.  He is currently pressing charges agains the US federal government.  He is questioning the legalitly of the patriot act and challenging the secret searches and raids that the FBI carried out on his property.  Yet even as his case winds through the court system, the US supreme court ruled yesterday on the case of Booker Hudson from detroit.  The importance of this ruling?  Police no longer need to wait after knocking to enter a house for search and seizure--even if that means breaking down a door to get in.

Nepal, known best in the western world for it's tie to Mount Everest, is a nation that has been at war for the last ten years.  It's history is unique.  In the 1950's the Nepalese monarch reformed the government, chanigng it from a traditional monarchy to a cabinet.  In 1990 this evolution was completed as the nation became a constitiutional monarchy.  A government headed by a prime minister and cabinet with an elected parliament.  This system of government seemed to work for over forty years, then in 1996 it started to break down as violence erupted across the country with the start of a Maoist insurgency, it seemed for years, as though nothing could be done to bring the war torn nation to peace.  Rebellion going on, members of the royal family killing themselves and the rest of the world looking on in distress, seemingly unable to help--yet for the past year or so the Nepalese government has been trying to come to terms with the Nepalese rebels, and yet another round of talks has begun.  The prime minister of Nepal is meeting with the chief of the rebel faction. 

Iraq's fledgling government seems to be perpetually on the edge of collapse.  The only stabilizing force in the nation, the US presence, polarizes the population--even as civil war has un-officially broken out between the Shiites and the Suuni's, the Kurds taking a back seat (but not very far back) to the main conflict.  And in a bid to secure some limited peace, a plan has been presented by the Shiite led government that presents the option of giving full pardons to those who have killed US troops.

Google may have refused govornment offifcials the right to view roughly one million search queries, but today it seems that Google and the feds are getting along quite nicely.  In fact Google's newest service--usgove.google.com--is catered primarily to govornment empoyees.  Google is making it easier than ever to search every govornment online database that is accessible to the public, and as with every thing else that Google does, it looks as though this newest service will be bigger and better than any other service available.

Guantanamo Bay.  Of the roughly four hundred and sixty prisoners held there, only ten have ever been charged with crimes.  The rest are considred international criminals, and are held (often for months or years at a time) with no charges being leveled against them and no chance to legally pursue their release.  In the past year over seventy five prisoners have gone on hunger strikes, forty one have attempted suicide and three have succeeded.  International humans rights organizations, such as Amnesty International' have decried the treatment that prisoners recieve at the hands of US soldiers and European leaders have pressured the US govornment to provide the prisoners with some legal recourse.  Yet now when the US supreme court seems on the verge of making a ruling regarding Guantanamo, Bush comes out with a statement saying he'd like to close the prison.