Because my mind has been on improv all week, here is little improv hell for you and yours...
Try not to think about this in class..
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Because my mind has been on improv all week, here is little improv hell for you and yours...
Try not to think about this in class..
"If you preform, I don't care if you ever touch the sheets." -DPak
We all took at least one test that included the term habeas corpus. Latin for "you [should] have the body", otherwise known as the great writ. It guarantees that any person imprisoned has the right to go before the court for determination of whether that person is serving a lawful sentence and/or whether he or she should be released from custody. It is one of the pillars of a lawful sociaty. It was first granted used by King Edward I of Engalnd in the 1300’s. When our founding fathers wrote the consitution the writ was 300 years old.
Constitution Article I, Section 9:
The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.
Now bring us to modern time. Apparently we have out lived the great writ. It is no longer useful. In fact it is dangerous. This is according to our current executive branch of government.
The Attorney General Alberto Gonzales during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings yesterday:
Gonzales: I meant by that comment that the Constitution doesn't say that every individual in the United States or every citizen has or is assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn't say that. It simply says that the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended.
Yes, he is right Edward I granted. One has to read implication of what the consitution states in order to view the wirt as granted to everyone. So if one is reading the bible as long as the man’s wife you’re coventing does not actually live next door, it’s not a sin.
Think about the effect of no having habeas corpus. Anyone can be lockup without ever having a trial. No need for anyone to prove that you are guilty. No law need apply. That is what the Attorney General of the United States is being glib with.
There are those who don’t understand the power of a good graph. I try not to be one of them. Take for example this cool widget from google labs.
It is a cool web thingy (technical term) that displays several kinds of data, population, median income and life expectancy for each country over time.
The first time I looked at it I just saw all the moving things and thought ‘wow that is cool.’ However, being someone who likes graphs and data I looked for interesting trends in the data. Things like big shift in population size or income. Then my eye stuck during the movement on one little blue ball in about the middle of the graph. It goes up from about have the time then drops straight down. Hmmm… what is that?
The blue ball is South Africa and the axis is life expectancy. Life expectancy climbs till about 1992 when it hits 63 then drops to 43 by 2004. I watched the ball couple of time trying to figure out what happened before it hit me. The answer is AIDS. Similar drops can be seen in Rwanda and Zimbabwe. It did not take me long to confirm my guess.
To me it was always a more personal or political issue. I have close friends who are HIV positive and I have lost a couple of them to the disease. I know the faces of the campaigns and wore the ribbon. This is the first time I have seen the effect in a graph of normal everyday data. I see the clearly visible effect of the disease in data world population data. This is not data about a disease or a political point of view. It was just about statistics from around the world in a cool widget. The power of a good graph.
Two years ago to day I did the last thing I will do alone. From then on it has been us. Today, I celebrate the anniversary of us. She still amazes me. *breaks into a little dance*
Welcome to 2007. I spent a good deal of time in the past week thinking about this last year. My first thought was nothing really happened in 2006, it just seemed to fly by. However, when I though more it hit me that I started back to college, changed jobs, lost and gained 10 pounds and spent my first full year married. I can’t say thing have been bad or good. I would like to make things better next year, but that is always the case. I guess it comes down to this: I am happy with my accomplishments in 2006 and still feel like there are things I could do better. Not exactly Hallmark, but that is the way life is.