News

In China, I discovered how their government let’s you hear only the news they want you to hear.

You may know these adages.

• It’s what you do, not what you say.
• Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
• Seek and ye shall find.
• Actions speak louder than words.
• Practice makes perfect.
• A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
• A thing begun is half done.
• Beggars can’t be choosers.
• Better to wear out than to rust out.

Fiction writers have a similar one.

The Fifth Estate includes social media, blogs, the internet in general, and all of us.

In Vancouver, a naked man displayed a sitar before switching to, aiming, and plucking his banjo at Police officers. Understandably, they “returned fire” with non-lethal ammunition.

I know ITAR, the International Trade Agreement Regulations.

No matter how many times I chase this around the bush, I come back to the same conclusions:

Here’s the time-line to keep in mind.

1. British citizens settled in the New World over a couple of centuries.
2. Britain’s King George, strapped for cash, taxed the colonies to help pay the country’s bills, but did so without consulting his citizenry in that New World – he effectively made them non-citizens.
3. The settlers rose up (1776), kicked the British out and created their own country under the terms of its first “Articles of Confederation” (ratified by the states in 1781).
4. That government failed (was deemed unworkable) on several fronts.
5. A “constitutional convention” then created what we know today as the Constitution of the United States (ratified by the states in 1789).
6. Fearful of the power of the government thusly created, however, that same “constitutional convention” immediately proposed twelve (12) Amendments for consideration by the states.
7. The first two (2) of those were rejected but the remaining ten (10) were approved by the states.
8. “Article the Fourth” in the original proposals, after taking out the two rejected proposals, therefore became the “Second Amendment”.
9. Because they list inherent rights, those ten amendments are known as the “Bill of Rights” – they state rights not granted by governments but, instead, which belong to everyone regardless.

Here is a copy of “Article the Fourth” in the original proposals – click for a larger version.

OK, this is going to be a fine line. The “link” included at the end of this post is to a publicly retrievable photograph on someone else’s web page, on Facebook to be precise. The photographer states (read it at the link) that the picture may not be posted so, therefore, I’m not posting it. Instead, I’m posting only the link to the otherwise downloadable image.

I’ve been using an app called “Reeder” by Readability on my iPad for some time to alert me to new posts on my favorite blogs via their RSS updates but since this app a merely a “client” (user) of Google Reader, it will cease to be of use when the Google service on which it relies goes away.