What the Hell? The police obviously don’t understand how Tor works or what it is for, in spite of now having some experience with Tor operators, and yet even after being proven wrong again and again they still harass the same guy for various content that supposedly “came from” him.

I don’t blame the guy for shutting down the node – it’s one thing to hang on to an important ideal, but there are only so many lawyers fees and investigations – and so many groundless arrests – one can take before deciding that personal interest is more important than “the greater good”. Of course, I suspect this is what the police intend – if you can’t beat anonymous p2p networks by actual analysis or even shutting them down across the board, you can just scare the crap out of the operators until they cry uncle out of concern for their lives and family.

I might expect this kind of ignorance from our guys over here, but I expected rather more from the Germans…

As any regular reader of my little corner of the blogosphere knows, I have an anterior placenta, which means that I feel the baby less often (and less strongly) than all the women whose placentas settle on the sides or back of the uterus. Practically speaking, what it really means is that I have to ignore all of the advice pregnancy books give you about how often your baby should move so as not to spend my life totally freaking out.

Since Small Monster has started moving regularly though, I have gotten used to his usual squirming times and frequency, and am happy to be surprised when it happens more often. And I am pretty good about not panicking when it happens less often. Because that, in my situation, is normal. He’s moving, but I can’t feel it, and the only way to deal with that appropriately is to not think about it too much.

But then there was yesterday – he was quiet most of the day (after I posted yesterday), and in the afternoon, I really didn’t feel anything I could definitively identify as him. I didn’t worry right off – didn’t start worrying until about 3 in the morning this morning, when I went to bed – but when I did start to worry, it was some serious worry, because I really hadn’t felt him in almost 18 hours by the time I was awakened by Christian’s alarm clock (at 6:00 am – grumble). I was groggy, grumpy, and very, very worried.

I quaffed some orange juice hoping to get him to kick my belly – no dice. I ate some granola – still nothing. Christian tried to soothe me, but I was too grumpy to be soothed, and finally we just snuggled for a bit before he left for work. He put his hand on top of my belly and – pop.

A little kick, maybe, I thought. Just as I was about to mention it, Christian said, “Hey, there was something there, but maybe it was a muscle or something?”

I shook my head. “Nope, that was him, but that was still pretty weak…” It was some relief, but I was still pretty concerned, because he goes all squirmy when I wake up in the morning usually. It’s typical, though, that the first time his papa is able to feel him – actually, not only feels him, but sees him move – it has to be because his mama is worried that something is wrong with him. Oh well, take it where you can get it, I guess.

He still wasn’t moving much though, and I was strangely sore all over my belly and lower back. So I was still freaked out. I decided to call my OB just to find out if it was ok to stay home and not worry, and the office said I should have called the night before, making me feel really guilty. Now, in truth, if I called every time I didn’t feel Small Monster 10 times in 2 hours, I would just have to live at Labor and Delivery, because until this morning at Labor and Delivery (natch), I’d never felt him 10 times in any two-hour period, not even when he’s doing those little Loch Ness Monster somersaults that make my belly wiggle. But I didn’t bother to explain because, well, I just wasn’t in the mood.

They had me come in to L&D, and so I called a cab (telling the cab company I’d be paying with credit, and so of course they send me a “cash only” driver, meaning I have to stop at an ATM on my dime because, let’s face it, I’m concerned about my baby, not really about arguing with a driver over an extra $2), and headed on in.

They were expecting me, and the nurse and midwife were totally nice, and totally awesome. They wanted to strap me up to fetal monitoring equipment for 20 minutes or so to see if the baby was moving and his heartbeat was ok (and if I was having contractions), and so I spent a while lying on a hospital bed with stuff strapped on to my belly. And what do you know, the second they strap stuff on, that kid starts to move. And I do mean move. As in Disco Monster. He does not, apparently, like having stuff pressing on his house (the nurse said it’s probably because he doesn’t like the sound of something being pushed hard/moved on the belly), and he was rolling all over, and kicking, and what not. He moved so much that they couldn’t even keep track of his heartbeat for more than about 3 minutes at a pop, but when they did… his heartbeat is awesome, doing just exactly what they want it to do – rise quickly when he moves, and drop quickly to its baseline when he stops.

And in the end, this meant I spent more like 40 minutes on the monitors, but I could even hear him move when I couldn’t feel it, and it was reassuring to know that he really does move a lot more than I can detect. The midwife was really pleased with his condition, and not too too worried about mine, although it was clear they were taking it seriously.

It turns out that as far as they can tell, baby is great and nothing is wrong – he’s just still little enough that he can hide. They kept emphasizing that I did the right thing by coming in and that if it happened again to come right back, but all I can say is that I am relieved. I also feel a little bit dumb, in spite of the fact that they kept telling me that there was nothing to feel stupid about. But better me feeling dumb than Small Monster having some problem. My blood pressure was a little high, but in the grand scheme of things, if that’s the most terrible news they had for me today, I can totally live with it. I have a list of stuff to mention to my OB on Monday, but otherwise, it’s all ok.

I think Small Monster and I have, however, earned a nap. A nice, long, snuggly nap.

Clearly, though, this baby is a born troublemaker – a better indicator of who fathered him than any paternity test

As I mentioned in my last post, my husband and I decided that our language at home would be German. Now, it’s not like this was an arbitrary decision – my husband is German after all, and giving our children multiple languages is something we think is a wonderful gift, but it’s still quite something for me to get my head around, mainly because it’s my head that is going to be doing a lot of work to get itself around it (not the idea of it, but the actual doing of it).

Now, understand, I do speak passable German, particularly when I’m comfortable, but I haven’t been speaking it for all that long. In high school and college, I spoke pretty fluent Spanish, decent French, and a touch of German (though not showing up for class did manage to earn me a D in first semester German as well as a complete inability to actually communicate with anyone). I managed to retain, and occasionally use, Spanish and French right up to the point that I became an au pair in Holland.

When I went to Holland, I spoke absolutely no Dutch beyond a few stupid phrases in my “Teach Yourself Dutch” book (e.g. “Waar is de winkelstraat?”, meaning “Where is the shopping street?”- if you read my last post, you will understand exactly how often I used that phrase), and I didn’t really plan to learn Dutch. I’d wanted to go to Spain, but the program I went on had just switched their Spain exchange programs to “study only”, so I picked somewhere where one wasn’t required to have a preexisting knowledge of the language, and off I went.

And that turned out to be the most awesome thing ever. Because Noor and Thijs, the (then) 3 and 6-year-old children in the family, taught me to speak Dutch just by talking with me and playing and being totally awesome through the ins-and-outs of every day life. I admit that I never got really comfortable with adults, although I did start making myself speak with shopkeepers in Dutch, but I think in the end I had a relatively decent degree of fluency going. I certainly surprised the grandparents… Unfortunately, though, the interference of Dutch with all of the other languages I’d learned, since I could really think pretty well in Dutch due to the immersion, managed to pretty much obliterate my ability to speak the other languages. I can get by in Spanish all right if I’m in the right frame of mind, and I can certainly still understand people, but more often than not, when I speak Spanish now, a word will pop out in one of the other languages I know (for a long while it was Dutch – now it’s German), and the same thing tends to happen in Dutch (which I don’t really use anymore anyway, and this makes me sad). And French? I can read it, but I can barely understand it, and I certainly can’t say much of anything. As the old lady I am, I really screw up the vowels, even though I was pretty good with them at 18. Getting old sucks like that.

The upshot of this is that while I certainly “know” a lot of other languages (even if what I remember of Japanese and Old Norse/Icelandic don’t really count), I have a very hard time using any of them. And since I only really started studying German for real about 4 years ago (my semester in college and three weeks in high school certainly don’t count), and only really hardcore for maybe a total of a year of that time, if that, the idea of being the primary caregiver in that language is just a little daunting.

Now, I do give myself some credit. My husband and in-laws may be highly critical of my German (my parents-in-law are highly critical of everything, so this is nothing new), but I certainly speak well enough to get by in most situations, and I am not actually afraid of being a non-native speaker in front of my son. As long as he gets consistent native-speaker input (which he will from my husband), he’ll pick up correct forms, even if he hears incorrect ones from me. And while I do make mistakes, my German has improved a great deal in the last year. I find it extremely tiring to have adult conversations about politics and computer science in German (topics which, quite frankly, occupy a big part of the adult conversation in this house), but come on… those are tiring enough topics in English. I am sure Small Monster and I will get by just fine – but it is something that is going to take a lot of work on my part.

The linguist in me is looking forward to it, and the mama in me who wants to have the closeness being able to speak fluently with one’s child in one’s own tongue allows and to communicate the culture that goes along with it knows that since we’ve decided we’ll speak English outside the home (in the park, with friends, etc.), there is a pressure release valve for me too. If the German is too much for me one morning, a walk to the park will be just the thing. But I’ve always found that living in another language that you don’t speak extremely well is physically exhausting for a while, and it’s not like there won’t be enough to exhaust us then anyway.

Now, a lot of families do what is called One Parent, One Language (OPOL). OPOL, as you might guess from the name, basically specifies that each parent speaks his native language with the child, and this system works very well for lots of families, so I’m totally not knocking it. But while OPOL is really appealing to the part of me that is scared to deal of trying to switch to another language with my husband when our relationship has always been in English, it would be really hard for us to pull this off in a majority English-speaking environment and still ensure our child got enough exposure to German. But since Christian and I speak English with each other almost exclusively and I will be the primary caregiver, we wanted to create an environment where our child would be able to hear conversation in both languages, not just input from one parent, and this for us means switching our language to German. (That’s the part I’m really scared of…) Since the outside world will give us English and English conversation, we’re basically responsible for German and German conversation, and since I’ll be home with the baby most of the day, it just seemed to make more sense to us to make sure the baby was hearing the minority language for most of that time, since when he gets older, most of his input will be in the majority language from everywhere else. So we’re doing what called is Minority Language at Home (ML@H), and we’re ok with that.

So this is why I bought a bunch of books of children’s music/games/rhymes in German today; I already knew that playrhymes and games have a function when children acquire a language, and I sort of felt like since singing Dutch children’s songs and playing games like that helped me, as an adult, pick up a language just from immersion, it made sense to have those in the bag before I was one of the people teaching my child German. Even if I occasionally screw up gender and case, pretty soon, I’m going to be living in German-world. And that’s both really cool and terribly mind-blowing.

Armes kleines Monster…

Ok, so it’s morbidly hilarious too.

May I present to you… the case against invading Iraq and bringing down Saddam Hussein – by Dick Cheney in 1994.

And may I just say that it’s hilarious that he uses the word “quagmire”.

I just love hypocrisy:

Click here to view the embedded video.

My husband’s question from last night really does make me wonder… why wasn’t this played repeatedly before the ill-fated invasion??

Apparently, we don’t even have the secret FISA courts to protect us now.

And let us not forget that the FISA court itself was considered a draconian breach of civil liberties. Even if they did decide that some of Bush’s wiretapping program was illegal.

So the Bush administration’s tack continues – when they get caught explicitly violating the law, they change it.

How, with this supposed Democratic majority, did a law which allows Fredo and company oversight on eavesdropping get passed??? Sure, it’s only supposed to apply to foreign calls “routed through the U.S.” (um… gee, define “routed”… and what do you want to bet that big telecom starts “routing” a whole lot more through the U.S.?), but with no one to check up on them, do you really think these guys are going to play by the rules?

Hell, I’m married to a foreign national. Does that mean that any call he makes is a “foreign call routed through the U.S.”?

Yes, I know, there’s always the “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about” argument, but folks, these are people who keep changing the definition of what is wrong.

We’re at high speed, ³/₄ of the way down the slippery slope, friends, and the speed bumps we elected to slow us down decided to grease themselves instead this weekend. Probably because Mr. Bush told them they wouldn’t be going on vacation if they didn’t give him the bill.

The rest of America is used to being forced to sacrifice vacations for their bosses, unfortunately – so why the Hell did these guys decide they didn’t owe us the same thing?

Check here for the roll call vote on the bill in the House. Then call your representative and tear him or her a new one, if he or she deserves it.

Don’t worry… they won’t be listening in because you’re not a foreign national, right?

Wonder what damage you can do in 150 minutes or so?

When I was a kid, I lived in two (different) fundamentalist communities. When I was really young, I lived in Salt Lake City, which is more dilute than it was 25-30 years ago – it was great fun *cough* for what the Mormons rather comically term “gentiles” at the time. As in “get beat up at school” and “have local teenagers flip the bird at your 7-year-old form on the way to school” kind of fun. We had our housed egged once or twice. It was the best display of wholesome family values ever.

(At least it gives me a good story to get the missionaries to back off with.)

Then we moved. Salvation, at last!

Well, not quite. We moved to rural South Carolina. And there, in the first week of class, my parents found out I was having to pray before lunch in the local public school. And my father, having grown up persecuted for not being a Mormon, was not about to let the local Southern Baptists make his daughter pray. He came to the school and mentioned “separation of church and state.” Let me tell you, those are words they just love down there, right along with “the Civil War is over – you lost.” I got to sit down while everyone else prayed in class after that, and as you might imagine, this made me wildly popular with both teachers and students. I distinctly recall, in 5th grade, Michael Grishaw telling a friend and I that his mother said we worshipped the devil because we didn’t want to take copies of the New Testament the Gideons had kindly brought in bulk to reading class.

Fine, upstanding members of society, these fundamentalist evangelical kids. Always giving the other kids a nice, Christian welcome. I wonder if their parents ever think, “hrm, I wonder… maybe telling my kids that these kids are scum and deserve scorn is not a way to win souls for Jesus.” Nah, wait, I don’t wonder. Clearly they don’t.

It was such a relief to move to Milwaukee, I tell you. It was the first time in my life where the question “What are you?” was reserved for charades rather than used as a question about what religion you were. Since then, I’ve managed to avoid insular communities where every day is like Jesus Camp, but movies like this are a reminder that it’s all still out there. It’s nothing new. And it sends chills up my spine.

And dear God, these poor kids. When they finally get to the age where they have to figure out who they are, it’s going to be a rough ride.

N.B.: As part of my 30 in 30 rules, I said I’d admit to whatever I was listening to when I wrote the posts. Right now, it’s nothing but the laptop fan.

The Johns Hopkins researchers used statistical estimates to come up with that figure, which considerably exceeds the Bush administration’s estimate of 30,000. Because finding out the actual number of deaths is difficult both due to the security situation and the fact that journalists and other third-party sources are not able to access much outside of the Green Zone in Baghdad, counting bodies doesn’t really do much. And in case some of this is news to you, let me repeat part of that again – journalists and other third-party sources are not able to access much outside of the Green Zone in Baghdad. So just as the U.S. government has prevented us from seeing dead servicemen returning home, draped in flags, they’re making it very difficult for any accurate reporting of what is going on in Iraq to occur. And they figure they can just say “eh, 30,000″, and no one will be the wiser.

First off, can I just say that 30,000 people is a lot of &*!#ing dead people? 30,000 people is not OK. But that’s assuming the administration is either not lying or is actually aware of what’s going on. You can take your pick of which you choose to disbelieve – personally, I think they’ve lied so much to themselves that they actually believe whatever comes out of their spin machine (leaving those of us in the “reality-based world” to toss our cookies in disbelief) , allowing at least some of them to remain unaware of what is going on – but it doesn’t really matter. Our Glorious Leader Mr. Bush’s response on the JHU estimate was typical – their approach as been “pretty well discredited” and the estimate itself is “just not credible.” Me, I’ll take 655,000 for the win, Alex. Or for the horrible, horrible loss. Or for something approaching the truth, at any rate.

Tell me, Mr. Bush – you got through Yale with C’s and your daddy’s backing. Since when do you – or most of your administration – have the knowledge to discredit peer-reviewed material published in a respected academic journal? Oh, right – you guys are the guys who still think global warming is up for debate (despite peer-reviewed science to the contrary), and your vice-president still thinks we found WMD in Iraq. And those in your administration who are smart enough to know better – ahem, Dr. Rice – are true believers, pimping the party line for the party’s good and the rights of the upper class.

Let me tell you something about how the rest of the world sees us, Mr. Bush – a couple of years ago, two Arab classmates of mine in Germany were absolutely shocked to find out that I, an American, openly disapprove of your administration. One of them took me aside and very quietly told me with significant disdain that in his community, they see you as the reincarnation of another murderous despot from about 7 decades back. I wouldn’t make that particular comparison; it’s a charged accusation to make, and it does a disservice to the memory of the 11 million brutally and deliberately murdered in the Holocaust. Your swath of human destruction has been ruthlessly careless – ruthlessly and intentionally ignorant and stupid – rather than ruthlessly and deliberately calculated. But with more than half-a-million Iraqis dead, more dying every day, our complete mishandling of any issue in the Middle East, our game of nuclear chicken with Iran (and a strike group of ships whose deployment was moved up so that they’ll arrive off Iran’s western coast around October 21st – October surprise, anyone?), and a constant stream of lies coming out of the White House about all of it, I don’t think it’s hard to see why those in the Middle East would see it that way.

Half-a-million people, Mr. Bush. Given the choice between you – who has stifled press freedoms, trampled the Constitution, castrated the Legislative Branch, skewed the Judicial Branch, brought us into completely unnecessary war, ignored urgent warnings from the intelligence community, destroyed our educational system, and lied, lied, lied – or a group of respected and respectable researchers, I think it’s you who has been pretty well discredited.

I’m not a statistician, and I’m well aware of the ways statistics are used and abused in science. I’m afraid, though, that the Bush administration is going to have to do better than “pretty well discredited” this time. And as long as they keep third-parties and journalists from being able to accurately report on the situation, statistical estimates are about the best we can do. And the real point is this – none of these people had to die in the first place.

Via raincoaster:

Foley’s disgusting hypocrisy on tape:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Listen for the last sentence, as he tells John Walsh how he’d feel “if [he] were one of these sickos…”

This isn’t about sexual preference, this is about pedophilia. It’s disgusting. I don’t care about the politics of it – if the coverup had happened under Democratic leadership, I’d be just as ill, but in point of fact, it didn’t.

It was the party of “family values” (which never did have a monopoly on America’s values) keeping this under wraps, and it’s just disgusting. These are kids, folks. Kids.

Is nothing sacred?

*shiver*