Mossy Little Waterfall: It’s a phenomenal picture, so inviting and soft, so beautiful and magical.
Be sure to visit the latest edition of Good Planets for a photographic celebration of Earth. There’s a varied selection of wonderful sites and interesting experiences to see.
Pardon me if I don’t look one bit surprised. “The FBI improperly and, in some cases, illegally used the USA Patriot Act to secretly obtain personal information about people in the United States, a Justice Department audit concluded Friday. And for three years the FBI has underreported to Congress how often it forced businesses to turn over the customer data, the audit found. FBI agents sometimes demanded the data without proper authorization, according to the 126-page audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine. At other times, the audit found, the FBI improperly obtained telephone records in non-emergency circumstances. […] Still, ‘we believe the improper or illegal uses we found involve serious misuses of national security letter authorities,’ the audit concludes.”
What makes this so troubling is that these letters cannot be discussed in any way under threat of severe penalties (including torture, given that it’s our government making the threats). You can never say you received one, you can never say what was requested or handed over, and you probably wouldn’t be able to challenge one in court without “disappearing.” That means abuse and misuse of this authority can only be discovered by the government itself—the very people who are violating our rights and the law. Again I’ll say it: The U.S. is now a police state. This is not the country where I grew up. We’re no longer a land of freedom and liberty; we’re a nation of spied upon citizens, torture, vanishing rights, and a constitutional crisis.
If you are affected by Daylight Saving Time, remember to set your clocks ahead this evening before you go to sleep. We move from Standard to Daylight Saving tomorrow morning at two.
And while I’m on the subject, let’s talk about whether it really saves energy. It seems it might not. “Now there’s one more reason for early risers to groan about Daylight Savings [sic] Time: It saves no energy, suggests a new study. Energy efficiency has long been the argument in favor of ‘springing ahead’ an hour every spring and pushing more daylight into the evening. But a study measuring actual energy use in Australia with and without Daylight Savings [sic] Time (DST) shows that any energy saved in the evenings was more than made up for by more energy needed in the darker early morning hours.” It goes on to say DST could actually increase energy use slightly. That’s what I’ve said all along. The practice should be abolished unless someone can provide inarguable proof to show it really saves energy, an assumption most studies seem to contradict.
Argh! I can’t believe Discovery called it “Daylight Savings Time”! It’s not ‘savings’ as in a bank account. It’s ‘saving’ as in protecting something from waste. It’s NEVER plural; always singular. The proper term is Daylight Saving Time. How pathetic for that organization to make one of the most common and preventable grammatical errors in the history of DST. The phrase refers to saving daylight, not savings daylight. Think of it this way: You discover your business is running out of money due to increased costs. Do you tell your employees it’s “money savings time” or it’s “money saving time”? I think I’ll write them a letter telling them to fire their editor and find someone who can actually read and speak English.