and so well-rounded!

clipped from www.modthesims.info Mod The Sims > Wiki Game Help:Downloading for Fracking Geniuses

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how does one of my favorite sites further extend its awesome power?

clipped from www.modthesims.info “Downloading for Fracking Idiots”? Yeah, I know the name’s a bit strange. We had Downloading for Dummies and it just wasn’t simple enough, so… this is the rewritten version. Why fracking? Because the new Battlestar Galactica rules of course! Anyway, the title’s not meant to be offensive, just a bit silly.

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but now i’m hungry for something different

i should have started watching dexter earlier.

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i just never imagined it would be the prosecution that would break my heart

voir dire; to speak the truth. but as neutrally as possible if one wishes to survive the jury selection process. which i did, unlike 99% of the other potential jurors surrounding me these past few days. once i got selected for a panel, all my reservations about the waiting and boredom (from past experiences sitting around all day only not to be chosen for anything) flew out the window, and i was in ace attorney heaven. not only did i have something to do, period, but the case i was being considered for was a juicy one – of such a nature that about 50% of the initial pool immediately requested to be excused because they couldn’t promise to be impartial. criminal, two counts. a grand jury for a superior court – it just sounded so glamorous! of course, it was profoundly inefficient and frustrating, but still, i felt like i had a job to do, for fracking once. and i was paying attention to every word, and appropriately responding to all the ridiculous, leading hypotheticals.

as soon as i walked into the courtroom for the first time, i was a little amused because it was so easy to identify the prosecutor, the defense team, and the accused. obnoxious smirk (and subsequent asinine lines of questioning)? defense attorney. the only person in the room who looked at all uncomfortable? defendant. power heels and an air of *ahem* familiar superiority? your honor, i have identified the state prosecutor in the room. but i was a little less amused once the judge outlined the situation at hand. it was sad seeing so many people raise their numbered juror cards when the judge was asking if anyone in the room had had experience with related horrible things, or unrelated horrible things that would cloud their focus. i wish i could have told them how sorry i was. and how humbling it was to hear them all relate their greatest personal tragedies in front of a room of complete strangers, when we hadn’t even heard the same sordid details about the case at hand.

i exercised a huge amount of self-restraint when it came to withholding most of the smart-assed quips i had ready for nearly every question posed, and i also refrained from turning everything into a galactica reference, especially when i had the perfect opportunity to say “that’s not justice! not to me!” and there was this whole discussion about burdens (of proof) without one single attempt to ask if we couldn’t just lay them down. i tried not to identify too strongly with the prosecution, even though i did, because i really was trying to take in the whole ‘everybody deserves a fair trial; innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt’ thing, recalling how even adama voted not guilty when it came down to the wire on gaius baltar, because the defense made a better case, and as much as he would have loved to airlock gaius a bazillion times, he still perfomed his civic duty! (albeit with a certain flavor of nepotism, but let’s not talk about that part right now.)

it looked like she liked me; the prosecutor, that is. that she picked up on the fact that i instinctively leaned towards her side, that she appreciated how i very politely turned the defense attorney’s stupid jedi mind games around on him when he asked me to answer things that were ridiculous and impossible to answer, and asked why it had to be an oversimplified black and white issue ,rather than asking why he had to be such an insufferable skeezeball. she smiled at me with her eyes! by tyra’s definition, she liked me! however, after the end of the first day, i became really anxious that i’d said too much or shown too much personality, and so i made sure to try to at least appear more neutral and boring and possibly sympathetic to the defense’s case, when day two began.

i don’t know what i did wrong. if i showed bias at all, it would have been towards her side. so she would want me as a juror, right? i KNOW i couldn’t have been so convincing in my attempt to only think in general terms and offer only vague platitudes rather than actual opinions, when questioned by the defense, that she could have actually feared i would have been swayed to the other side, if she was, in fact, worried that she didn’t have the case in the bag? now, i know everything i’ve just said seems like i was a totally biased candidate, obviously partial to that which is good and rational and not evil, but as hard as it may be to believe, when i was sitting in those pews, i really was, in my mind, giving the defendant the benefit of the doubt. you know, i’ve been falsely accused of shit and had to endure permanent consequences because someone else had it out for me – so for that reason alone, i felt like i couldn’t just write the guy off without at least hearing the whole story. honestly. i honestly felt, and stated, that i believed i could be impartial when it came time for the jury to deliberate, and that i could absolutely follow the judge’s instructions not to hold certain things against the defendant. because at the end of the day, as much as i always think i’m right, something that ends up going hand in hand with that is that i *won’t* feel right if i’m not doing my job as instructed, especially if it’s under penalty of perjury, or at the behest of the judge, or because this is someone’s life we’re talking about, not just how i think lost sucks and everybody else is wrong when they say otherwise. because see, that’s the thing about the self-righteousness of the kates, the lee adamas, the brandon walshes of this world – yes, we definitely feel like there are certain truths that must be defended and blah blah blah, but to maintain that attitude, we have to stick to it ourselves, even if it’s not obvious to the rest of the world. i wouldn’t have felt good about myself, and ended up feeling like even more of a useless contributor to the world i live in than i already do. i wanted to give the man a fair chance, to the best of my ability.

so i made eye contact with the defendant and even gave him and his attorney a small smile here and there. the courtroom was set up so that the lawyers and the defendant were facing us, the potential jurors, rather than the judge. so i looked right at him, and laughed when he laughed when random people would say funny things – so there was some genuine belief, on my part, that underneath it all we were still both human, so even if he was accused of some heinous shit, i couldn’t fundamentally declare him as “different,” “a monster.” i thought i did a good job, way better than a lot of people who either blatantly showed their bias, their insanity, or their inability to stay awake. but still, it seemed obvious to me that if i was going to be dismissed (and, with about thirty-something candidates left at the final point of selection, i had about a 2/3 chance of being eliminated by virtue of probability alone), it would be because the defense saw me as a potential problem. that made sense.

but what happened didn’t make sense, at least not to me. i was the next person to be called up to “the box” if either party dismissed any of the jurors on the current panel. but, the prosecution said they accepted the panel at this point, so i was prepared to just go home knowing there wasn’t room for me, or at least no room for the prosecution to risk losing a favorable panel in order to swing it so i got a seat. i would have understood that, too. but then! the glimmer! the defense didn’t accept the panel as-is, and i got to go up into seat number two to replace the person who had just been dismissed. since the state had accepted the panel before, and since the only change was a swap of one prosecution-leaning juror for another prosecution-leaning juror, i felt like i might make it! because if the prosecution said yes, then there still were probably people that the defense would have wanted to dismiss more than me. in fact, i think i may have successfully presented myself as an open-minded, thoughtful individual that the defense wouldn’t have minded having on the jury.

the next words were not, “the state accepts the panel at this time,” and there was no chance to cling to the edge of my seat, praying that the defense didn’t send me packing with overwhelming enthusiasm. because the next words out of the prosecutor’s mouth were, “the state, at this time, wishes to thank and dismiss juror number sixty-eight.” so as soon as i stepped into the box, i was out. and i didn’t understand. but i knew as soon as she started to say that she wasn’t going to accept the panel, that it was me that she was going to be kicking out, because she’d accepted the previous panel with the super-pro-prosecution girl in my seat, and i was the only thing that changed. and i know it’s stupid, and i know you can’t take these things personally, but i’m a SENSITIVE little self-righteous snot, dammit, and i take everything personally. i mean, i had to put forth a HUGE effort to keep the tears behind the sunglasses all the way out of the courthouse, throughout the wait for the bus and the ensuing ride home. but they definitely started flooding my vision and my everything beyond my control as soon as i got into the stairwell – that was the icing on the cake; the only elevator in the building had broken the night before, so i had to climb up all five flights, bawling like a little bitch, to even make it to the top floor, to get the key in the door, and crawl into bed with my beloved stuffed otter.

i just can’t figure out what i did wrong. i’m almost always very accurate in the way i think others perceive me – i think the last time (and perhaps the only time i can think of) i can remember where i thought someone liked me and i turned out to be wrong was about seven years ago. and i was just as shocked and heartbroken then, even though it wasn’t someone i particularly loved or anything, it was just the humiliation and disgrace of having someone you always seemed to get along with well tell you, out of the blue, “listen, i know you don’t like me and i know you know i don’t like you, so…” and i burst into tears like a little bitch then, too. i was hysterical. and it’s not even like if you had asked me, before, if i particularly valued her opinion of me, i would have said yes. it just hurt to think that i had actually made someone think that i HATED them when, for once, it was the farthest thing from the truth. so this was even stupider, because MOST jurors get dismissed and there doesn’t have to be a reason, and it’s not like i even thought the prosecutor was some sort of alternate-universe romo lampkin or anything… it’s just that i thought it was clear, at least to her, that i would be a good juror to have on her side.

it couldn’t have been that i was so compelling in my attempted neutrality that she could have actually worried i would be convinced to join team not guilty when presented with, what looked like, your typical weak ass passive defense that relied primarily on reiterating technicalities, cornering people into agreeing or disagreeing with irrelevant hypotheticals, and asking why a client should even have to HAVE a defense when he’s supposed to have the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, even though that’s the whole point of the job of “Defense Attorney,” and the crux of our entire judicial system, but whatever. i mean, we still knew nothing about the case except what the defendant was being charged with, so for all we knew, there COULD have been a total lack of evidence on the side of the prosecution, enough to worry her into dismissing anyone who wasn’t overtly saying the guy was already guilty in their eyes. the best guess i’ve come up with is sort of related to that potential scenario; maybe she was happy with the panel as it was with my seat’s predecessor because she was obviously on the side of the prosecution, and she wanted to dismiss me because there were other people left to choose from who were more like that person. or maybe it was some mathematical strategy – since it’s back and forth between the prosecution and defense saying whether or not they accept the panel or dismiss someone, she could have bet that the defense would have immediately dismissed me if she didn’t do it first, and maybe she looked ahead and figured out that she would have a better chance of ending up with either a favorable opportunity to dismiss someone who would eventually fill my place, or a better chance of paring the selection pool down to a point where the defense was forced to choose someone that she definitely knew would play on her team. i don’t know. i’ll never know. and i know it’s incredibly childish to have my feelings hurt by getting dismissed from what would end up being three weeks of uncomfortable, boring, disturbing trial proceedings… but still; i pout.

however, i did end up finding some closure(?), or at least some sort of acceptance in the epilogue that unfolded after my real story ended. surprisingly, i was also very diligent in following the traditional juror instructions not to “do research” or discuss the case with anyone. now, we all know that “doing research” is pretty my middle name; everything and anything that strikes my interest, or makes me wonder in any way, about anything – it’s an instant response of Internet, I summon thee! and I just can’t help it, with so much information available, and for me to evaluate, oooh, it’s just so titillating to my god complex! and  tempted myself, i looked at the court website the night after the first day, i saw the links to where the information *could* be found, but there was no clicking. and i didn’t talk about the case to anyone, not to sid, not to my parents, not to kat in alaska or jessica in new york or miss andrea LSAT in michigan. so at the very least, after i was rejected, i would permit myself to Do Research.  so i did. and as it turned out, i was being waaaaay more open-minded than i even realized. i really HAD given this guy the benefit of the doubt, i had actively developed the ability to override my instinct and imagine that there could be more to the situation than i knew, so i should reserve my judgments for, you know, judging time.

and now i know that if i had made the jury, and these details had emerged as they inevitably would have, i would have had to sit through the entire trial without any illusions i may have previously had about his innocence or my impartiality. because as soon as i did the research, i’ll freely admit that in my mind, that guy instantly became guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. reflecting on the defense’s defense of… not having a defense… there’s no doubt in my mind that he was guilty, based on the prior convictions for similar charges, the numerous criminal court hearings, the mandatory presence on a public list that certain criminals find themselves on when they are determined to be an active risk to the safety of the community.

so now, i know. i’m glad i don’t know the details. i’m glad i didn’t hear excuses from the defense. i’m glad i don’t have a clear picture of what happened so i don’t have to imagine it, and feel horrible for the victim. obviously, it’s still there. but i think i would have been less gung-ho about my civic duty when it had turned into three weeks of exposing every horrible detail of the crime, and the even more horrible attempts to manipulate us into giving a not-guilty verdict – and this defense attorney was no lee adama – there wasn’t going to be any eloquent three-page monologue about forgiveness and justice and blah blah blah. it was just going to be a bunch of bullshit, and us having to sit there listening to it like it would somehow hypnotize us into ignoring every available fact and all of our most basic instincts.

but i keep coming back to the eyes.  i was trying to be a better person and not assume the worst about people and give everyone the same right to state their case and have the chance to be heard by someone whose decision hadn’t already been made. i felt good about it! and now i feel disgusting. i mean, i guess it’s like, the christian way or whatever, to be kind to everyone no matter what, and i guess that’s a good thing, as long as it doesn’t interfere with your own survival. it’s a nice idea, in theory. but if i had given the same guy the same benefit of the doubt OUTSIDE of the courtroom, if i walked passed him on the way home some night – i could have easily been on the other side of the case, the side we didn’t see. the “accuser,” the victim. so i keep thinking about how i looked into his eyes and gave him a little smile, and even if it was still a “good” thing to do, it still makes me feel violated and like a total idiot, and disgusting, because i hate what he did, period. but it’s not like i think the death penalty is a good solution or whatever, and i know that if i worked in a prison or a psych ward or some similar place full of people who’ve done things i hate, i would still have to treat everyone with basic respect and kindness, because it doesn’t help anyone to just respond to hateful acts with more hate. and now i sound like a hippie. so i’m conflicted; i chose love over hate and that makes me so fucking pious that i’ll just sleep like a wee little lamb tonight… but then, the eyes. i remember looking into his blue eyes, and then i wonder: how many other times have i looked into the eyes of a serial rapist, and not known it?

i guess i just said that even if i had known, my behavior still wouldn’t have changed, but my heart would have changed. you can try to treat people well no matter what, under the ideological framework that treating them the way you ACTUALLY feel they should be treated certainly won’t help anything, and will probably just promote bad behavior and bad feelings across the board. but my silly little naive girly heart, it’s hurt, it sort of feels like the first time when someone you know dies. you know it’s out there, you know it will happen, but it hurts when you see its face for the first time, and you let it see you.

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i always wondered what it looked like inside the little cylon’s room

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hi, space? this is barack calling. i was just wondering, can you see my house from up there?

clipped from www.upi.com WASHINGTON, May 21 (UPI) — U.S. President Barack Obama Wednesday congratulated the crew of the space shuttle Atlantis in a brief phone call to space from the Oval Office. “By allowing Hubble to continue on its journey, you’ve allowed us to continue on our journey,” Obama told the shuttle skipper, Cmdr. Scott Altman. Obama said one of his highest priorities was to appoint a new head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and also took some time for a little banter. “Did you guys see my house (in Chicago)? I need to know if the lawn is being mowed.”

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