Valleywag hasn't gone downhill, News has
I can’t believe anyone in the tech community is still covering the events at JavaOne, but sure enough, we-troll-for-hitsValleyWag was there to capture Neil Young’s appearance yesterday. Now, I remember when Douglas Adams showed up for the Keynote on the last day of the conference, and that made sense. It was the last day of the conference and everyone was fried –if they hadn’t left town already. Douglas, true to form, provided some great entertainment and geek cred to start off the last day push. But Neil Young is to Java as the Smurfs are to the Iraq War. Could Sun make a more profound statement about how JavaOne jumped the shark long ago than to have an aging rocker whose seminal moments occurred before Java was ever invented keynote on the second day of the event? Best quote from the whole experience goes to Dan Farber’s blog entry, where after carefully promoting BluRay, Java, the PS3, and most importantly his Archive project, we read: “…As an artist I try to remove myself from the business,” Young said. “I steer myself away from that…”.
The previous article captures how Mark Kirk has skillfully managed to create controversy in order to get media attention during an election year. “Online porn” doesn’t quite drag voters attention away from all the other election year theatrics, and “online child predator” is so yesterday’s news, but “rape rooms” is a sure fire hit. Is there any trick from Hussein’s regime that politicians won’t copy and/or trivialize?
California Proposition 85
Hey, it’s back to the future! Remember last year when we voted on proposition 73? Well, we didn’t vote right, so here is our chance to do it all over again: proposition 85. Once again, Roe v. Wade hangs in the balance….
The ongoing battle over parental consent for abortions continues. I’m tempted to vote no on this one just to get the message across that I don’t want every election to be about parental consent.
Of course, they knew that, so this time it’s about parental notification instead of parental consent. So this time around the proposition would require the doctor has to tell a parent about an abortion, but they don’t need to get their consent.
The straw man argument against this bill is the notion of an abusive home, where the parent may be the one who got the minor pregnant in the first place. I’m sorry, but if that really is the state of affairs, something needed to be done long before a pregnancy was involved, and bringing the courts in at this point in time may be a good idea.
The straw man argument for this bill is the notion of young girls getting pregnant by older boyfriends and their parents never finding out about it because the girls get secret abortions (they sound so much more menacing with the word “secret” in front of them). Again, I’m sorry, but the secret abortion is probably the least of the problems here. You probably have secret sex going on, without the proper use of secret birth control, not to mention the risk of secret STD’s.
Roe v. Wade may yet go down in history as the US’s biggest legal boondoggle, not so much for the legal decision itself but for all that followed. Much as I support a woman’s right to choose, it seems like the debate on abortions in this country has become so polarized and bitter that reason ceases to be a factor in what is ultimately a very important and difficult situation.
Here’s what I think most reasonable parents would want: I should be involved in my children’s medical treatment regardless of the nature of the treatment. I don’t care if it’s cosmetic surgery, prescriptions, some embarrassing rash in the wrong place, or an abortion. If the doctor and my child think I’m somehow responsible for the medical problem, they can elect to get sign off by some social worker who acts as a proxy guardian for my child.
Ultimately, a yes or no on prop 85 isn’t going to give that to me one way or another. A yes will mean special forms and processes just for abortions, and a no will mean the existing special exemptions for abortions will remain in place. I’m going to give this one a thumbs down on the grounds that being pregnant does place a new set of adult responsibilities on you, and so I’d rather my child have additional authority to go along with those responsibilities rather than less, but this is very much a lesser of two evils kind of call.