New Email Hoax on the Loose

This one is claiming that due to the Patriot Act, your account is under suspicion and will lose FDIC insurance support (which is garbage -- the BANK is what's insured by FDIC, and in spite of the Patriot crap, the feds can't selectively decide to not insure individual accounts in a bank, and if they try, the courts will have a field day on it).

Please keep in mind that ANY email that asks for a bank number and checking account number is a hoax. Period. Whether its EBay, PayPal, some Nigerian, your own bank (they certainly don't need it), or the Feds. Nobody can ask for your bank number unless you intend to do a financial transaction with them (your work for direct deposit, or utilities and credit card companies for doing an e-check), and they'll ask for it in person or on the phone, with clear grounds for what is and isn't covered.

( Text of one version of the letter follows... )

hey, they're plowing! (ed: no they're not)

now lets see if the bury cyd's car in again like last time...

update, 30 seconds later

no, they're not plowing. he started, did some straight lines through the culdesac, then one sideways line that buried the fire hydrant (oh, the *one* thing one most doesn't want missing), and...left. he's gone. everything else is still buried in 5 inches, and he's left.

*sigh*

what was the damned point?

The loss of the Neighborhood Pub

On the loss of the local neighborhood tavern:

One of the main things I see that's changed everything is the Car.

In the old days, one walked to the neighborhood tavern, and (drunk or not) walked home. The neighborhood tavern/pub was part of the community, and the health (trans: noise and good vibes) of the pub reflected the health of the community. Today, however, the neighborhood tavern (public house in the UK) is a dying breed, mostly because people simply don't live near the old ones anymore, and many simply don't want to. Nobody lives within walking distance of their neighborhood pub anymore.

And enough people are vocal enough to not want a new neighborhood tavern near their suburbs, because they think (or at least act) like it can bring in some "subursive influence" on their children. [This leads me to another major problem with the level of denial America has with its absolutist (and i don't mean the vodka) policies -- if you aren't allowed to let your children drink under supervision and safety, you are guarenteeing that they'll drink without responsibility when they are without supervision].

Part of choosing where to drink is usually "can I park anywhere near the place". Then, of course, there's the "ok, who's driving to make sure we can all get home, or do we cut off at the 2-drink safe-limit" (hence the "we don't drink as much" as previous generations factor). It may be a loss of culture, but when its loss of culture v. loss of lives due to DUI, well, there's no contest.

The alternative of the taxi is simply too expensive, and turns the regular tavern visit into something that has to be budgetted and planned, an occasion that "deserves better" than the old-school blue-collar only-has-bud-on-draught locale...thus, the rise of the yuppie-joints like "wine gardens" and "microbreweries" that have great drinks, but all the character of a school building or a warehouse [and thus have to fall back on large food menus to keep customers in when the lack of character would make them want to leave within an hour].

God bless the Wharf Rat, great (original) beer and still retains a lot of old-school tavern character...well, to me anyways...

[update, second thoughts]

At least its not, say, San Francisco, where the prevailing approach from "family people" is to destroy the culture intentionally, more than just let it die its slow death. In SF, you can not even contemplate opening a new pub/tavern/bar/club/whatever. You can only buy an existing one to keep it alive, and even then you'll get a tremendous amount of resistence from a very vocal minority against any form of public drinking. Go check out the archives of The DNA Lounge.

Score one for the Good Guys!

A part of the Patriot Act has been declared Unconstitutional!

One round down, quite a few more to go, but its a start...

Poor Leadership -- Don't pass into law what you know is wrong...

Slashdot comment on the PATRIOT crapola

When the PATRIOT act was signed into law, I didn't like a lot of it, but I was one of the people saying "don't get your panties in a wad. Congress and the President are doing their best at legally stepping up enforcement, and due to the urgency they're doing so by re-treading RICO laws. Anything which turns out to be unconstitutional will get struck down by the courts, and life will go on."

Sure enough, some of those provisions of the new law are being tested against our constitutional rights via the court system. This is how our system of government is supposed to work. Bravo for American government!

My reply:

On the other hand, there's enough legal education and know-how in the system right now (most Senators and a sizeable # of Congressmen are either lawyers or have been in service for a number of years, and certainly ALL of them have a lawyer on their staff, especially in the committees, to help draft the legislation) to have been able to make the decision that its unconstitutional and not even bothered to vote for or sign it in the first place.

Passing something with so many bluntly unconstitutional clauses, just to say "we're doing *something* (even if for now its the wrong thing)" is just plain poor leadership.