Narciblog

Upstaged

2011-05-30T22:45:00.002-05:00

Did you know there was an event this Memorial Day to remember veterans, POWs, and MIAs?

If not, did you know that Sarah Palin made a big ruckus when she showed up at a biker event?

I knew about one of these things, but not the other. And that is what's wrong with our media.

Interesting blog synergy

2011-05-17T18:39:00.003-05:00

Oh yeah, I have a blog.

In just the past few days, there's been an interesting overlap in several of the blogs I read. It all started when Believe Out Loud, a Christian group that encourages churches to become "fully inclusive of all people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity" tried to place an innocuous ad on the Sojourners website (a large network of progressive Christians) and was refused. Here's the ad:

This prompted two posts over at slactivist, "My hope is built on nothing less" and "Jim Wallis and Believe Out Loud, Part 2" and over at Obsidian Wings, "Authoritarianism and the Slut Who Walks", which sort of a follow up to "The Women Men Don't See", which was a really interesting response to the Jewish newspaper that edited out Hillary Clinton and another female White House staffer out of a photo because of their (Stalinesque?) "respect" for women. The slactivist posts are more about the intersection of homosexuality and Christian identity, while the OW posts are more about authoritarianism and strict gender roles. Good posts all.

I was just struct at the quality of the points raised by Fred at slactivist as well as the civility (and coherence) of the commenters. I think Fred's main points can be summed up as:

For now let me just reiterate what I’ve said above about evangelical identity in America’s evangelical subculture. It is marked, above all else, by the proper “stance” on homosexuality and abortion. Those who meet that test are regarded as insiders with a voice that will be listened to. Those who fail that test are regarded as outsiders..

The point here is that there are many, many people besides Jim Wallis who inhabit the terrain that Tony Jones describes as "conservative on issues of human sexuality" while "theologically thoughtful and progressive on other biblical and social issues." I think that Tony is right that such a position is, in the long run, untenable.

I find his first point more interesting. Abortion and anti-gay-rights are, as raised by both slactivist and OW, shibboleths for right-wing Christians. In other words, those two beliefs are almost mandatory and universal markers for inclusion in that community, which also largely defines the modern GOP.

I've often said that (and bored both readers of this blog by saying so often), current politics is driven by identity as much as it is policy. More so for the Right; there are virtually no pro-gay, or pro-choice Republicans, but plenty anti-gay-marriage Democrats. For example, Barack Obama.

I don't really have a point, but many of the commenters at slacitivst do. Many of them are excellent and it's sad that they're going not going to get attention because they're comments in some guy's blog. So I'd like to highlight a few here:

Jessica_R:

[T]his is why evangelicals are losing numbers in droves. They've made it a zero sum game where you can either be a Christian or you can love your neighbor as yourself.

Semperfiona, on whether Jim Wallis's decision not to run the ad was a choice between "the lesser of two evils:"

It's hard to be charitable toward a choice that paints "respecting my civil rights" as the greater evil... it sounds an awful lot like "I'm not a bigot but my customers are, so your kind are not welcome here" which is just a mealy-mouthed species of bigotry and reinforces the opinions of other bigots, comforting the comfortable.

Amaryllis, on gender roles:

What bothers [fundamentalists] the most about gay couples is not what they may be doing in bed; it's much more about "who wears the pants" when both wear pants. Or skirts and heels.

Because, in their view, the entire basis of social relationships, from the most private to the nation as a whole, is based on Authority. And trying to ignore the "natural" or "God-given" hierarchy is just asking for trouble, for individuals and for society as whole.

And not to bury the lede, but these are the best of the bunch:

Morgan Guyton: (emphasis mine)

[T]he reason why "conservative" views of sexuality don't have long-term viability for a Christian who's serious about the Biblical perspective on poverty is because the primary function of sexual "conservativism" is to excuse middle-class Christians from being concerned about poverty since we can label it a moral failing of welfare mamas who need to learn how to close their legs.

bad Jim, on why a conservative (wide) stance on sexuality is such a shibboleth for evangelicals:

[A] focus on sexuality doesn't threaten things that really matter, like wealth and power. Preaching that looks benignly upon getting and spending is more likely to prosper, and the ideal of self-control lends itself nicely to material pursuits. If a display of virtue and self-denial is required, what better than to condemn sins to which one is not attracted or of which one is incapable, which for most men would include homosexuality and abortion.

How often...

2011-05-01T17:03:00.003-05:00

Out of curiosity, I was looking up how often Americans eat out, on average. Before I got that far, I found this:

Yeah, as a society, we're pretty much fucked.

Mayoral race speculation

2011-03-13T16:20:00.003-05:00

This may be a bit incoherent, but it's late and I want to get this down.

First, there may be some shennanigans going on in the Champaign mayoral race. I forget who originally pointed this out, possibly on Twitter, but Smile Politely has an article up, "Local officials mum on alleged Schweighart campaign violation" about Schweighart campaign work possibly being done on City time and by City employees. Naughty.

I've never worked for the City, but at the later years when I was at the University, we had to go through rather silly, yet mandatory, annual ethics training that made it pretty darn clear that things like this were not appropriate. Is that true of state and city employees as well? Anyway you'd think anyone involved with a political office would be doubly sensitive to it. And then someone involved with a political office and a political campaign would be triply sensitive to it. But, then again, perhaps it's the abuse of the vast purchasing powers and powerful influence grad students and postdocs hold that is the real ethical threat.

Secondly, I've heard speculation that, if elected, Mayor Schweighart may not serve out his entire four-year term, but instead, retire and some other Republican would be appointed to finish his term. On one hand, I don't think it's fair to judge the mayor's suitability for election solely on his age. On the other hand, he is, shall we say, of a certain age and (I hear) has had some fairly serious health problems in the past. And any appointee going into an election as an incumbent would have a pretty significant advantage.

The mayoral debate is Wednesday. I mused about the idea of livetweeting the debate, then someone heard about that, and now I've learned that People Have Been Told I will be doing that, so now there's all this pressure. People, don't get your hopes up. Also, don't assume I have any idea what I'm doing.

Also, the first mayoral debate in how many decades is two days away, and still, no clue about the format, who's going to be asking questions, whether the questions will be coming from the audience, or what. But, hey, at least it's being put together by a legitimate organization, right?

Craaaazy!

2011-03-09T19:00:00.001-06:00

Some time ago and I'm not sure how, I got put on an email list of local left-leaning bloggers and the like. It's low traffic. For example, there were a dozen messages or so about Rahm winning in Chicago, another few about anti-Wisconsin protests in Springfield the other week.

Then there's this one guy. He sends out about one email a week. It's not specific to this list, but includes around a hundred email addresses including those @foxnews.com, @sfchronicle.com. He's got a real hardon for the Dallas County News, because about half of the addresses are people there.

And these emails ... they're just nuts. Not Sarah-Palin-nuts, but a-few-Crayons-short-of-a-full-box nuts. So, of course I find them fascinating. Not working in the medical field, I don't have a lot of contact with schizophrenics, so this is very novel to me.

Here's one from December, with the formatting replicated as accurately as I can:

Loving Alphas, heaven on earth - the perfection of capitalism [the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment and innovative acts of love demonstrated are the new currencies of LIFE ] 1. Transparency a. Test b. Part 1 (Budget, etc.) c. Part 2 (Social Security, etc.) 2. three million dollarnaires club 2020 OBJECTIVES 1. Oprah Winfrey - $1 trillion personal net worth 2. Mr. Rupert Murdoch - $1 trillion personal net worth 3. 333 million three million dollarnaires 3. Lawsuit resolution 1. United States government facilitates resolution of personal injury lawsuit - President has power to pardon (healing) 2. $30 million settlement 3. pursuit of heaven on earth 4. Project Alpha - ???? [How much more powerful... Even more threatening... Let MANKIND substantiate...] - Are you smart enough and strong enough to be an Intellectual Marine? - What are WE doing to PRAXIS heaven on earth? 5. Hillary Clinton/Susan Rice 2012 vs. Condaleeza Rice/Liz Cheney 2012 - 44 male Presidents of the United States of America - 0 female Presidents of the United States of America - 0 female Vice Presidents of the United States of America 6. 2020 EMPOWERMENT initiative - 40% of global business owners, politicians, CEOs, directors, and producers are female Sarah Palin Global SELF-ESTEEM champion Keli Goff Strategic link to Africa Megyn Kelly Strategic link to Europe Soledad O'Brien Strategic link to Latin America Michelle Malkin Strategic link to Asia Fran Townsend Synergy maximization Michelle Obama Synergy maximization 7. Bill Gates/Warren Buffett giving challenge - $100 billion immediate strategic development fund [suggestion] - Link to 2020 EMPOWERMENT initiative 8. United States economic development recommendation - global interconnected impact - suggestion of additional analysis and recommendation of euro-inspired financial model for developing countries in Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Asia - Link to 2020 EMPOWERMENT initiative 9. Inheritance/healing initiative - Slavemaster offspring Family reunions - Link to 2020 EMPOWERMENT initiative 10. Cry - original collection of poetry - 2nd short story written by Tony Evans will be a ONE word eBook [ LOVE ] PhoenixRising - Global list of "slumlords" - Global list of [Intellectual contradictionS] - Link to 2020 EMPOWERMENT initiative Future LOVE "state" - merger of TV/Internet/TIVO/Visual Phone in ONE "application" Sincerely, [ name redacted, --Narc ] Ebony & Ivory PRAXIS - Up Where We Belong

The Internet: Enabling schizophrenics since giant lizard aliens gave it to us in 1996.

Some unofficial thoughts on Unofficial

2011-03-06T10:36:00.003-06:00

I'm back. Blog apathy strikes again. I'm sorry, it's nothing personal.

Unofficial was this past Friday. I don't really have much to say about that subject. Most of my experience with Unofficial involved riding a bus home after work that smelled like stale beer.

Gerry Schweighart, the mayor of Champaign, and therefore the city government, appear to very much disapprove of Unofficial. They ramp up alcohol enforcement before and during the event. The News-Gazette's front article today calls the ticketed students "scofflaws", Unofficial a "bacchanal" that is "the most dreaded annual event on the UI campus."

This year, however, a 21-year-old UIUC student was struck by two cars while crossing the street Friday night and remains in critical condition. I don't know if this was Unofficial-related or not, but for the sake of pontificating, I will assume so.

This is the second significant injury that's happened during Unofficial in my time here. In 2006, a student was killed after falling off the back of a motorcycle.

I think it's time this stopped. I don't mean Unofficial; I'm not sure how you could stop that without giving the mayor dictatorial control over the city. I mean, I think it's time the city embraced Unofficial and made it safer. There are plenty of other communities that host crazy events; maybe we should look into how they do it. There's South Padre Island during Spring Break, for one. I assure you that Unofficial is the pale shadow of Mardi Gras's little brother's second banana.

For starters, I think that Campustown and possibly the roads around the main quad should be closed to street traffic.

It's important to remember that Unofficial isn't a creation of University students. It's a creation of a Campustown bar owner. It's the goal of Unofficial to get students into the bars to drink. That being said, allowing 18 to 20-year olds into bars on this weekend is just stupid. Of course they're there to drink.

I'm less concerned with creating a moral hazard involving alcohol and more interested in creating an environment where students can be their stupid selves and not be killed doing it.

UPDATE: Someone over at today's N-G article suggested making it a parents weekend. I think that's a great idea. I think the presence of a lot of students' parents would tone down the no-holds-barred partying. (Not to mention the possible expectation that they'd have to be awake before noon the next day.)

7,884,326

2011-02-19T17:11:00.003-06:00

Posted without further comment...

My trip in billboards

2011-01-25T18:07:00.002-06:00

I went down south to visit the family over Christmas. Here's the summary of my trip as told by billboards I saw on the way:

Number of billboards...

calling President Obama a socialist: 1

asking if President Bush was missed (no, seriously): 1

against abortion: 2

advertising a feral hog hotline: 1

Stay classy, Tea Party. Oh, too late.

2011-01-08T16:11:00.004-06:00

I really wanted to avoid commenting on today's shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords for a day or so. It's too easy to quickly politicize these things, which are often perpetrated by lone nutjobs. Then, I saw that Illinois Review saw fit in their only post on the subject so far to quote this:

Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips condemned the attack on Giffords, but warned supporters that the Tea Party movement would be blamed by political opponents.

"While we need to take a moment to extend our sympathies to the families of those who died, we cannot allow the hard left to do what it tried to do in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing," he said.

Yeah, because clearly, the "hard left" really enjoys it when someone tries to assassinate one of their own.

Republicans have a culturetiger by the tail

2010-12-28T09:25:00.007-06:00

Ames makes an interesting point over at Submitted to a Candid World, about how Republican Rep. Steve King has proposed a "truce" on "culture war issues" in favor of productive governing and is gathering flak for it from his peers.

I simply don't think it's going to happen. The culture war is like an addictive drug, you may know it would be good for you in the long term to give it up, but not only does it just feel so damn good, it's so damn easy. You don't have to come up with ideas on how to fix the economy, just drop buzzwords like "anchor baby," "welfare queen,", and "the lazy unemployed," and, *bam*, you've got a campaign. You don't have to worry about complicated economic proposals -- those are for the intellectual "elites" -- just what sounds good as a soundbite on FOX News.

The GOP and their unholy spawn, the Tea Party, has successfully merged culture, religion and nationalism into one monolithic force. Sarah Palin's latest book is subtitled "Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag." (I shall leave the absence of the socialist, European Oxford comma without further remark.) Along with American exceptionalism, another touchstone of the Right, you've got a political philosophy that makes America synonomous with goodness and Truth.

You can't just get up one day to decide to abandon that. With the inclusion of religion in the mix, what Rep. King is asking Republicans to do is make a literal, not metaphorical, deal with the Devil. (There can be no truce with the Shadow.)

The Republicans have grabbed the tail a tiger made up of those three forces: culture, religion, and nationalism. Once you grab that tiger, you can't let go, or it will eat you. The really scary part is that, when that frenzy gets control of a nation, especially one already under economic stress, the results are usually catastrophic.

OMG so cute!

2010-12-18T19:00:00.000-06:00

I have no idea where I found this image, but squeeeeee!

Soylent Baby?

2010-12-15T19:00:00.000-06:00

Really, all I have to say is, "WTF, Amazon?"

The right wing wants a religious war

2010-12-04T13:03:00.003-06:00

My mother apparently gets a lot of emails sent to her from Texas redneck relatives/coworkers/acquaintances. Occasionally, she forwards them on to me, in what I assume is so far a futile attempt to make my head explode. (Kidding, Mom.) The latest one is an email purportedly by Jeff Foxworthy listing his opinions of Muslims. It's quite offensive, and quite racist. Highlights:

You have more wives than teeth.
You may be a Muslim [Or a Mormon.]

You wipe your butt with your bare hand, but consider bacon unclean.
You may be a Muslim

You think vests come in two styles: bullet-proof and suicide.
You may be a Muslim

... etc.

Not long after I got this, Snopes labeled it false. But here's what I find interesting:

This collection of one-liners is an updating of a earlier version of a list which is several years old (dating back at least as far as October 2007), was originally about the Taliban specifically (rather than Muslims in general), and was not in its original incarnation attributed to Jeff Foxworthy (or anyone else)..."

I've found the list in all sorts of places. It's on a community site for US Marines, a gun enthusiast forum, another gun enthusiast forum, and some weird discussion forum for some weird Christian combat-training company.

What I find so interesting is that the list was originally about the Taliban, but some clever conservative reworked it to apply to all Muslims and it started circulating. Google returns about ten times as many hits for the "You may be a Muslim" version than the "You may be a Taliban version". Making fun of the Taliban is certainly understandable; they basically are our enemy in at least one of the wars we're currently fighting. But the right wing has expanded the definition to include anyone any racial or religious characteristic with them.

Conservatives pundits and politicians in this country are now openly calling for racial profiling. Rep. Pete Hoekstra of the House Select Committee on Intelligence says that profiling "make sense." Sean Hannity and disgraced former-NPR bigot Juan Williams have also both called for racial profiling. In their minds, Muslim, Middle Eastern, and terrorist are all synonymous.

I'm told that one of the things to George W. Bush's credit is that he made it clear that the wars he started were not wars against religion, but against extremists. "The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam."

No longer are conservatives happy with that statement. It seems that once, we were at war against people that attacked us. But anger and bigotry need an enemy, and now that those wars are winding down (or at least no longer visible in the 24-hour news cycle), they are turning against anyone that shares even superficial characteristics with Middle Eastern terrorists.

The sort of thing that can ruin your whole day

2010-11-28T13:12:00.003-06:00

This summer there was a lot of road construction. The apparently happened about a block from my workplace.

Ouch.

A racial double standard at the News-Gazette

2010-11-10T21:08:00.003-06:00

OK, I don't mean to pick on the N-G and I don't want this blog to turn into a Gazoo bash-fest, but this has been rolling around in my head for a couple of weeks and wanted to get it down.

Remember way back when, like two months ago, before Sharia Law came to Oklahoma, when the Islamic community center in Manhattan was dominating the news cycle? The News-Gazette had this editorial about that time. The editorial, called "Right, not rights, is the real issue" tries to draw a false equivalence between that Florida pastors "Burn the Koran Day" and the building of the center. The editor admit that the Muslims living in New York have every right to build their community center but that, somehow, they are morally wrong to do so. It closes with:

The message sent to Muslims by burning the Quran is unmistakable to most, just as the message being sent by Muslims in building the mosque near the 9/11 ruins is equally unmistakable. One is a threat, as Jones freely conceded, while the other is a victory lap, as Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf disingenuously denies.

According to the News-Gazette, Muslims going about their lives in their hometown and building what is basically a church, is a "victory lap" celebrating the attacks 9/11.

But just a few weeks ago, the News-Gazette published this editorial about the recent racially-based (but possibly not, see below) attacks against white men in the Champaign-Urbana area. The editorial argues that cries for black community leaders to speak out against the attacks are unfair, saying:

[Leaders in the black community] didn't commit the attacks. They didn't encourage the attacks. They don't know the individuals who are committing the attacks. They are as disturbed by this senseless violence as everyone else...

Is the white president of the local chamber of commerce responsible when a white man robs a bank? If not, why would a black minister be called to account for the malicious criminality of a black assailant?

But that's the one of the dangers posed by this string of assaults. They tear at the community fiber and encourage tribal instincts. They make people forget we're all in this together, that as residents of this community we have far more that brings us together than sets us apart.

So let's get this straight: when attacks such as these are committed by black men, they are the responsibility solely of the perpetrators involved. When attacks are committed by Muslims, the worldwide Muslim community should be held collectively accountable, even nearly a decade later.

Am I the only one that sees a bit of a contradiction here?

(Like I said, this has been rolling around in my head for a couple of weeks now. I was inspired to get off my lazy ass and write this partly by Monday's article, Polar bear deconstruction by Joel Gillespie at Smile Politely.)

Is the News-Gazette ashamed of its readers?

2010-10-05T22:34:00.005-05:00

For those of you reading that aren't local (all three of you), there has been a spate of what appear to be unprovoked attacks on people in the C-U area. It's not clear if they're linked or if they're racially motivated, but they've all been by black teenagers with white victims. Robbery was involved in at least one of the attacks, but not all of them.

That being said, I just noticed that all the News-Gazette articles on the subject have had their comments closed. I can't find this trend on any other N-G topic. Just as examples:

That's not to say that these articles don't bring the crazies out of the woodwork. So far it seems that, on the articles that had open comments at one point, they largely consisted of:

See how racist black people are?
This wouldn't have happened if we had concealed carry in Illinois.
These teenagers should be given the death penalty/put in prison for the rest of their lives/beaten within an inch of their lives.
This is happening because black children don't have fathers because single motherhood is glorified in black culture.
If these were white teens beating up black people, there would be riots in the streets! (But I'm not racist.)

Does anyone know if Crazy Mayor Schweigart has weighed in on this? Maybe they're all socialists from Kenya or something.

Link dump

2010-09-20T17:35:00.003-05:00

My Dad commented the other day that I haven't blogged in a long time. Wow, it's been two months. Let's just say I took the summer off to go backpacking around Europe. Let's say that, anyway.

So rather than strain myself jumping back into marathon blogging, here's some stuff from my blogfodder folder that you might like:

This is an awesome poster.
Really, Illinois can be very pretty.
A New Hope
Vietnamese Coffee Jello. It's tasty and fun.
Now that David has discovered the funny that is Futurama, here's the X-Men reimagined as Futurama characters.

Is there any actual substance to Ken Howell's claims?

2010-07-15T19:45:00.004-05:00

This week's local kerfuffle is about an adjunct professor who's contract was not renewed by the University. He's now claiming anti-Catholic bias because a student complained about his anti-gay bias. The N-G articles are here and here. I'm getting in on this late, so there's not really much point, but what the hell.

Something about this whole thing smells funny. I just don't buy it. Both articles say that his contract was not renewed (he was not fired) "after" the anonymous student lodged his complaint. One thing that's conspicuously missing from the articles is that he was let go as a result of this complaint. His contract wasn't renewed after the Hundred Years War, either, but that doesn't mean one led to the other. The only suggestion that Howell's contract wasn't terminated because of anti-Catholic bias is coming from Howell himself.

My skepticism is driven largely by one point: undergraduates just don't have this kind of influence. It's not like university administrators sit around thinking "Oh woe is me, I must now lay of a highly skilled teacher because we have had a single anonymous complaint." It's not like they sit around rubbing their hands together, cackling evilly, and plotting a new Protestant schism, either.

Can I point out that the University is undergoing a major financial crisis at the moment? The entire freakin' staff had to take a 3% pay cut and now they're going to have to find a way to pay the new ~~CEO's~~ university president's 40% raise over his predecessor's salary. It really wouldn't surprise me if departments were looking for any way at all to save a few bucks. Cutting non-tenure track teaching staff might be a good way to reduce labor costs. I've asked a few people and they didn't know if other adjuncts are being let go or not.

I suspect there's more going on here than we know about. At most, I'd bet that this was just an excuse to get rid of someone that has been a nuisance or a problem in other ways. That a teacher is being gotten rid of because of one anonymous complaint just doesn't wash.

I'm also amused of the irony in the fact Howell claims "[Natural Moral Law] says that Morality must be a response to REALITY" while simultaneously claiming he was discriminated against because of his membership in a Church that also teaches that demonic possession is real.

A tale of two weddings

2010-07-04T14:26:00.001-05:00

In a weird synchronicity, last month I was invited to two weddings in as many weeks. Weddings are not exactly something I think about much. I guess I've just assumed all my life I'd never have one of my own and also I'm a guy, so I haven't been inundated with the bride-as-princess thing from shortly after birth. I've only been to two weddings other than these so I wasn't sure really what to expect. I just thought it was interesting to compare.

At L and T's wedding, there were save the date cards, formal invitations, RSVP cards, and possibly formal announcements for after the wedding (TBD). There were emergency store runs for ribbon, where I discovered more shades of teal than I had ever though possible, all of which were wrong. There were discussion about party favors and bands and locations. There was a groom that nearly lost it during the ceremony. The place cards arrived less than 24 hours before they were needed and it's good that they did arrive, so the 150ish guests knew which table to sit at.

At D and T's wedding (fortunately a different T, since it was the following week), there was torrential rain, a baseball game, baseball sushi, the judge that ruled gay marriage was legal in Iowa, a lot of beer, and a visit by Cubby Bear (who probably didn't realize how appropriate that was). There was another groom that nearly lost it during the ceremony. There was a woman in the hotel lobby in some sort of poofy white dress and a dragonfly tattoo that covered her entire back. There was even a trip to the largest truck stop in the world on the way back.

I wish I had some deep thought to make here, or some pithy comment to end with. But I don't, so I'll just leave you with a blurry picture that just sums up both events:

Hire me, not Michael Hogan

2010-05-19T21:13:00.006-05:00

After Joeseph White resigned in disgrace a few months ago, the University of Illinois is replacing its president with University of Connecticut's Michael Hogan. This is a big enough deal that the NY Times published a profile of Hogan earlier this week.

This is the part of the article I found striking:

On the other, he’ll make a base salary of $620,000, comparable to the pay at Connecticut and a $170,000 increase over his predecessor.

Let me just point out for my readers that are not Illini (Hi, Mom) that the U of I is in the middle of a massive budget crisis. The state government currently has no budget and is hundreds of millions of dollars behind in payments to the University. Faculty and staff have been required to take several unpaid furlough days off this year, for an effective salary cut of about 3% across the board. There have been rumors that the University will not be able to make payroll much longer.

But this guy gets a raise of 40% over his predecessor. When was the last time you got a raise of 40%? (Not to mention the fact that the cost of living difference between Storrs, CT and Urbana means he's already getting a 22% raise just by moving here.)

I'm becoming more and more of the opinion that at this level, people are compensated out of proportion to the benefit they bring an organization, company, or in this case, a university.

I don't know anything about Hogan and don't really even know what the president of a university does. I have a hard time believing, however, that he will be doing a 40% better job, will be doing 40% more work, or will in some way bring 40% more benefit to the university than Stanley Ikenberry (who I also really know nothing about).

That's why UIUC should hire me to be its president rather than Hogan. I hereby agree to do the job for merely the $170,000 raise they are giving Hogan over his predecessor.

I freely admit that I'm not nearly as qualified (or, really, qualified at all) compared to an experienced administrator like Hogan. But I will do the job for a metric fuckton less money.

A racist editorial from the News-Gazette

2010-05-10T21:30:00.004-05:00

My fears that the yokel series would have to be put on hiatus after the revamping of the News-Gazette website removed their Letters to the Editor have abated. I'm loathe to use the word, but I can't really find any alternative to calling last Wednesday's editorial, "Car bomb may be another sign of change in tactics," racist.

Apparently, the editors learned all they need to know about the world watching James Bond movies, where all the evildoings of the world are masterminded by Osama bin Laden while he strokes his white cat and complains about the absence of sharks with laser beams on their heads.

The editorial was obviously inspired by the recent near-bombing in Times Square. This sentence basically sums up the thesis of the editorial:

This is, of course, but another event in the long-running effort by Middle Eastern terrorists to attack this country and kill civilians. But it also reflective of an ominous change in strategy.

Wait, strategy? I'm sorry, do "Middle Eastern" terrorists all have a bi-weekly meeting in Dubai where they get together for falafel and bomb-making seminars? No, there is no such unified group as "Middle Eastern terrorists" so they can't even have an overall strategy let alone shift their tactics. (I feel a bit like Alice pointing out that she hasn't had any tea, so she can't take more.) Such childlike, simplistic analysis is like claiming a "shift in musical style by blonde artists" because Lady Gaga is not Madonna.

After mentioning 9/11 (which will probably define "terrorism" in the minds of Americans forevermore) and the USS Cole bombing, both nearly a decade old now, here's the N-G's rationale for claiming a "shift in tactics" on the part of "Middle Eastern terrorists":

But starting with the shooting of members of the U.S. military at Fort Hood, Texas, terrorists' efforts have been simpler – most certainly deadly but less spectacular.

The Ford Hood shooting spree was followed by the attempted Christmas Eve destruction of an airliner by a single passenger carrying a bomb in his underwear and the attempted car bombing in New York City.

So the editors claim these dastardly Middle Eastern terrorists have changed their tactics based on three incidents: the Fort Hood shooting, the underwear bomber, and the failed Times Square bomb. There's just one problem.

None of these terrorists are Middle Eastern.

Nidal Malik Hasan, the accused Fort Hood shooter was born in Virginia. He went to school, college, and worked in his family's restaurant in Virginia. Then he did his medical school residency 250 miles away in Washington DC. Then he went to Fort Hood, Texas. I can't find anything that suggests he's ever left the country, let alone qualifies as a "Middle Easterner." He also has no ties to terrorist groups. So what qualifies him as a "Middle Eastern terrorist" other than the color of his skin?

Even more blatantly wrong is the N-G's claim that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is a Middle Easterner. He's from Nigeria. Just to put that in perspective, it's 4500 miles from Kabul, Afghanistan to Lagos, Nigeria. It's only 3500 miles from Washington, DC to London, England.

Now, the Times Square bombing suspect is a naturalized American citizen from Pakistan. (I think Pakistan is generally considered South Asia rather than the Middle East, but it's close, so I won't quibble.) It's still a bit sketchy at this point, but there's no Al Queso link even alleged, and the involvement by the Pakistani Taliban is fairly unclear. But it doesn't look like Shahzad has any ties to any group that has attacked the US before. Yet, the N-G lumps him in with all the other "terrorists."

There's one thing I find notably missing from the editorial: not a single mention of the (alleged) terrorist cell recently arrested on US soil, the Hutaree. This was a group that the United States Attorney's Office says were planning to target agents of the US government for assassination using weapons of mass destruction. So why is this not a "change in tactics" on the part of terrorists? Could it have something to do with the fact that the Hutaree are a bunch of white Christians from Michigan?

I don't expect local newspaper editors to be experts in foreign policy. But I don't think it's unreasonable to expect people that claim to be journalists to at least know that two of the three bombers they're talking about were born half the world away from the Middle East.

It's symptomatic of what the right-wing does all the time. They oversimplify fairly complex matters into black and white, Us and Them, white people and Scary Brown Terrorists. Such easy-to-swallow media narratives do probably make for better copy, but not true understanding of our complex and increasingly international world.

Twit Tweet of the day

2010-05-10T21:15:00.004-05:00

This is just too good to pass up:

Didn't Schmambenek used to have a blog? What was it called again? Hmm...

Looks like Ryan is back in town

2010-04-27T23:11:00.001-05:00

Via Smile Politely, that there is this lecture being given on Thursday: Perverts in Paradise: Crime, Tourism, and the Homosexual Menace in Mexico, 1940-1975

Heh, you gotta love the title

Our mayor is crazy and why it matters

2010-04-21T20:21:00.003-05:00

I'm sure by now that everyone that reads my blog (with the possible exception of my mother) has heard about how Champaign Mayor Gerry Schweighart was caught on tape last Friday at a teabagger rally claiming that President Obama was not born in this country. In case you're local and have been living under a rock: the original You Tube video, Smile Politely, and the News-Gazette article. I'm coming a bit late to this rodeo, so I'll just get to my points.

The mayor was not stating an opinion. The mayor is trying to semi-backtrack from his statements, claiming they were only an "opinion." That's flatly false. The mayor was making a statement of fact, not expressing a subjective belief. That chocolate ice cream is better than strawberry is an opinion. That Obama was born in Hawaii and not Kenya, New Zealand, or on Mount Olympus is fact.

There is no First Amendment issue here. I first heard about Schweighart's boneheadedness on the radio on my way in to work Monday. Someone called into the show and stated that the mayor "has a right to express his opinion." No one is saying that the mayor didn't have the right to say what he said. No one is trying to arrest him or put him in prison for it. Similarly, the mayor is free to claim that Laurel Prussing is secretly Bigfoot, but that doesn't make it any less stupid.

This shows a glaring and fundamental lack of good judgment on the part of the mayor. Good judgment has got to be one of the most important characteristics of an elected official and for the mayor to give credence to not just a nutty conspiracy theory, but one that is of such importance to public policy -- the legitimacy of our President -- is distressing. The Champaign City Council appointed former IlliniPundit Gordy Hulten to, um, itself this week. Mark Shelden, the county clerk, has kept those untrustworthy electronic voting machines out of our community. Now, I disagree considerably with both these men on matters of policy, but they seem to be quite capable of exercising good and reasonable judgment in their jobs. (Unless Shelden is doesn't like the electronic machines because he thinks they're part of a UN conspiracy to take control of the government, seize all American farmland, and tattoo 666 on our foreheads, but I doubt that's the case.) But the mayor isn't exercising good judgment here; he's giving in to crazed and irrational conspiracy theories.

What if Schwighart suddenly decided that he was of the "opinion" that Urbana was actually 50 miles north of Champaign? Or that he was of the "opinion" that the city budget was actually one BILLION dollars </doctorevil>?

I don't want to belabor the point, but I don't think that the mayor's lack of judgment is a minor issue. As an extreme example, the Iraqi government has spend $85 million on completely non-working, supposedly-bomb-detecting, dowsing rods. Someone actually decided to spend an astronomical amount of money on a device that has one moving part, no electronics, no batteries, and does effectively nothing. That's a stunningly huge case of bad judgment.

And it turns out that our mayor is no smarter.

Ke$ha ... really?

2010-04-12T21:12:00.004-05:00

I listen to the radio a lot on my drive to and fro work, and one of the songs that's played incessantly these days is "Tik Tok" by Ke&ha (music video). I confess to a slight fondness for the song (don't judge me, it's got a nice beat and I can dance to it), except this verse is just wrong:

Ain't got a care in world, but got plenty of beer
Ain't got no money in my pocket, but I'm already here
And now, the dudes are lining up cause they hear we got swagger
But we kick em to the curb unless they look like Mick Jagger

Girl, rea ... ahem, excuse me ... girrrrrrrrrrrl, really? When you think "sexy," this is what pops in your head?

Key%ha, honey, you're young. You're skinny. You can do so much better.

It's not terrorism when white people do it

2010-03-29T20:17:00.004-05:00

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard about the weird synchronicity that happened today: two female suicide bombers killed dozens of people in Moscow, and a terrorist cell consisting of nine Muslims and having ties to Iraqi insurgents were arrested after planning an attack on US police.

Oh, except that the terrorist cell actually consisted of nine, white, Christianist militia members. Therefore they aren't terrorists.

The group used bomb plans based on those used by Iraqi insurgents. They were going to specifically target law enforcement officers and their families. Their goal was to incite nationwide violence that would bring down the US government. They planned to use weapons of mass destruction. Improvised explosive devices, even. They've actually been charged with sedition, for crying out loud. Why isn't this terrorism?

The NY Times article about the Moscow bombing uses the words "terror" or "terrorism" fourteen times. The article on the American terrorists? Exactly once, and then it's in reference to a government report from a year ago. This CNN article and this FOX News article don't use the word at all. Like the NY Times, CNN has no problem using the word eleven times in this article about the Moscow bombings.

So why is the American press so reluctant to refer to American terrorists as terrorists?

This isn't just an issue of semantics. Joe Lieberman and John McCain introduced just a few weeks ago the "Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act," that would allow the government to detain and indefinitely hold without trial anyone -- including American citizens within the US -- the President deems to be a "terrorist." Looking through the text of the bill, it fits these people perfectly. (h/t Glenzilla.)

I can think of no reason to refuse to refer to these militia members as "terrorists" other than a reluctance to use the word in anything other than in reference to Those People Over There With The Funny Skin Tone And That Wear Things On Their Heads. Am I wrong?

The GOPanties are all abunch

2010-03-24T21:14:00.003-05:00

Rush Limbaugh says he's going to move to Costa Rica if the health care bill passes.

Michele "Queen of the Crazies" Bachmann is telling Americans to refuse to pay their taxes because of the health care bill.

This teabagger says that passage of the health care bill will lead to civil war.

Even IlliniPundit says, "I've said that I think this is a bad bill that is more about controlling people than it is about expanding coverage, controlling costs, or improving the quality of care." (Gosh, I almost thought that was silly until Obama announced today the creation of the Colonoscopy Gestapo.)

Christ on a stick, when did Republicans all become such a big bunch of fucking drama queens?

The News Gazette screws the pooch

2010-02-13T16:53:00.006-06:00

The News-Gazette redid their website this week and all I can say is "Really? This is what you've been bragging about unveiling?" It's like the N-G staff decided they wanted to maximize their appeal to the MySpace demographic or something. The previous site wasn't great, but at least it did what it needed to do. Take a look at it yourself, from a year ago. However, the new design is ... bleah. Worst of all the site's usability is poor and in many ways is a downgrade from the previous one. Here's my take on the worst of the new elements

You can't get to articles. Go to one of the sections, say "Local News". You can scan (and scroll, and scroll, and scroll) the five articles on that page. Now try to go to the next page of articles. Oh wait, you can't. You get to see five articles and that's it. An article that was replaced with a more recent one today? Nope. Yesterday's? Nope.

The search engine is useless. Did you know there was an election this month? The News-Gazette doesn't. I tried searching for "Alexi Giannoulias election" (totally at random) and found articles from 2009, 2008, even one from 2006. Nothing about the recent election. The search engine just vomits your search results in a huge pile with no way to sort them by date, refine the search, or make it useful in any way.

Letters To The Editor are gone. Not by accident; they've actually said (via Twitter, of all places) that Letters will now only appear in the print edition. You have to be kidding me. Was there a meeting on this decision? Were there emails titled "How we can alienate and disrespect our readers"? Come on, you have people interested enough in an issue that they take the time to compose a letter and send it in, and you decide to hide these from your readers? Lord knows I've had enough chuckles poking fun at some of them, maybe the N-G has decided they're actually embarrassed about caliber of the people that write in.

The more I think about this, the more I think it's a stupid idea. I'm not aware of any online newspaper with an Opinions section that doesn't have their Letters online.

That freakin' Twitter feed. Get rid of it. Now. It's not that it doesn't add much to the front page, but it's animated. It's annoying. It distracts me by constantly flickering in the corner of my vision while I'm trying to read. It's not like it's a live feed, updating with new tweets as they come in. No, it just cycles through past tweets, from hours ago. I'm not sure Twitter users have an attention span of more than eleven minutes; what happened seven hours ago is ancient history to them.

Contrast the new N-G site with the Daily Illini (which I haven't looked at in a couple of years and has been totally redesigned since). That's a student-run paper and it looks much less bush-league than the N-G's.

In defense of Pat Robertson, pt. 2

2010-02-09T21:22:00.003-06:00

Geez, I really need to get off my lazy ass and blog more. After my previous posting about Pat Robertson and how people are shocked (shocked, I say!) to discover that he's such a douchebag, Gryphon77 posted it to Facebook, Glock to Smile Politely, and my mom even emailed me (rather than commenting here, hint, hint).

The moment has probably passed, so I won't belabor the point, but I find it interesting to note that people in both places rebuke Robertson by using his own tactics. Ryan Neaveill does it politely and just says that Robertson is using "bad theology," while one of the commenters on Gryphon's thread out and out says that Robertson is not a True Christian™

I am just amused at the irony of people calling out Robertson's comments about Haitians being heretics ... by saying he's a heretic.

Profiling!

2010-02-01T21:14:00.002-06:00

Today in Baghdad:

A female suicide bomber walking among Shiite pilgrims in Baghdad detonated an explosives belt Monday, killing at least 41 people and wounding more than 100, officials said.

Don't the Iraqi's know that if you racially profiled Middle Eastern looking men, these things wouldn't happen?

(h/t Atrios)

In defense of Pat Robertson

2010-01-20T18:26:00.007-06:00

(That's certainly not how I ever envisioned titling a blog post.) Anyway, the blogosphere is all a-twitter about Pat Robertson and his latest comments about the recent earthquake in Haiti and devil-worship. You've probably hear what he said, if not, it's at the link. I'm not going to summarize it here. Robertson was referring to the possibly-apocryphal Vodou ceremony in 1791 that kicked off the Haitian Revolution. Here's one description of it:

...the slaves held a large meeting to draw up a final plan for a general revolt.... Before they separated, they held amidst a violent rainstorm an impressive ceremony, so as to solemnize the undertakings they made. While the storm raged and lightning shot across the sky, a tall black woman appeared suddenly in the center of the gathering.... A black pig was then dragged in front of her and she split it open with her knife. The animal’s blood was collected in a wooden bowl and served still foaming to each delegate. At a signal from the priestess, they all threw themselves on their knees and swore blindly to obey the orders of Boukman, who had been proclaimed the supreme chief of the rebellion.

The blogosphere has erupted in condemnation of Robertson. Basically everyone (e.g. Al Sharpton) is calling him a horrible person and not a real Christian. There was this comment left on the Facebook status update of a former classmate of mine / now Presbyterian-minister:

(Aside: that's a tragic and horrible story, and I hope for the best.)

I can't help but be confused about the source of this outrage against Robertson, especially by people that claim to be Christians. Eight out of ten Americans believe in God. Roughly two-thirds believe in angels and the devil; I would assume a similar proportion believe in demons. Fully a third of American believe in witches. The Catholic Church has a category of priests that specialize in performing rituals to cast demonic spirits out of people. (The Church refuses to say how many exorcisms it performs each year.)

So why is it so hard to believe that a Haitian ritual that involved animal sacrifice and the drinking of blood wasn't demonic? If you want to believe in angels, there's a flip side to that coin, too.

All the people condemning Roberton seem to be of the mindset that God couldn't have been behind an even that has caused such suffering. Which makes me wonder: have these people even read the Bible? God sent a plague upon Egypt that killed the first born male child of every family in Egypt -- including the cattle -- so that Moses could lead the Jews out of Egypt into the wilderness. The number of people killed in the Haitian earthquake is probably a drop in the bucket compared to the number that died when God drowned every living person on Earth except for Noah's family. Turning to the New Testament, I'd like to point out that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, foretold in Revelation, are not named Kittens, Puppies, Flowers, and Candy. God is more than happy to slaughter people by the bucketload when it suits His mysterious ways.

Obviously, I'm not saying that the Haitian earthquake was a punishment from God. Angels were no more responsible for this earthquake than were the Aesir. Robertson's comments were heartless and cruel; the man's a pig, and I've been saying that for years. I'm just saying that there's nothing un-Christian about the notion that God sent a natural disaster to punish the wicked -- or even just innocent bystanders.

This is why Americans are stupid

2010-01-13T19:39:00.005-06:00

On my latest trip down South, I was listening to the radio one weekend morning, and found this rather depressing:

Radio stations with religious programming:	10
Radio stations with Weekend Edition or some other news:	0

This is why as recently as 2008 Sarah Palin still believed Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11

Quite possibly the cutest thing ever

2010-01-03T19:00:00.000-06:00

From the Daily Squee:

Turd Marriage

2010-01-01T19:00:00.000-06:00

Karl Rove just got divorced. Again. His first traditional marriage lasted three years. This divorce ends his second traditional marriage. Darth Rove is only an apprentice, though. The master being Newt Gingrich, who values traditional marriage so much that, not only has he had three of them, but marries the mistress with which he's cheating on his current wife. It's more efficient that way.

Rove is, of course, the mastermind behind using the spectre of gay marriage (ooh, scary) to motovate people to get out and vote Republican during Bush II's election campaigns. For actual commentary, I must simply yield to Glenzilla:

There's debate and dispute among various Christian theologians and sects over whether divorce and re-marriage are permissible and, if so, under what circumstances. But what is clear is that the attribute of permanence is every bit as much of a part of "traditional marriage" as the need for a man and a women -- hence, the vow before God of "till death do us part" and "that which God has brought together, let no man put asunder." The concept of "no-fault" divorce is certainly repugnant to most Christian and traditional understandings of marriage. Yet those like Rove who have devoted endless efforts to barring gay citizens from marrying on the ground that our laws must enshrine Christian concepts of "traditional marriage" continuously take advantage of laws that enable them to end their own marriages on a whim, and even enter new marriages with their so-called "second, third and fourth wives," which only seems to intensify their "traditional marriage" preaching.

I've long thought that the solution to the cheap, cost-free moralizing that leads very upstanding people like Karl Rove to want to ban same-sex marriages (which they don't want to enter into themselves, and thus cost them nothing) is to have those same "principles" apply consistently to all marriage laws. If Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and their friends and followers actually were required by law to stay married to their wives -- the way that "traditional marriage" was generally supposed to work -- the movement to have our secular laws conform to "traditional marriage" principles would almost certainly die a quick, quiet and well-deserved death.

Rove's spokesperson ended the announcement about the divorce with, "There will be no further comment and the family requests that its privacy be respected." There is some serious chutzpah in a man that made judging other people's personal lives a mainstay of right-wing politics demanding privacy for his own.

Curses, foiled again!

2009-12-30T10:13:00.002-06:00

Another year gone and it looks like the War On Christmas™ has failed again. No doubt that our Evil Atheist Overlords are hard at work plotting for the upcoming the War on Easter™.

This year's defeat can be attributed to HR 951, introduce by Henry Brown of South Carolina that "strongly disapproves of attempts to ban references to Christmas."

Isn't it great that things are going so well in our country that 74 Congressmen had nothing better to do with the taxpayers dime than to cosponsor a bill to defend the sanctity of Christmas? Because you know without that, it's just socialism all the way down.

Untwittered

2009-12-22T10:38:00.004-06:00

I think I'm giving up on Twitter. The technology is interesting and all, but there just isn't much benefit there for me. I can see why celebreties like it; it's a way for them to keep their fans engaged without actually having to interact with them. But for me, there's just not much Twitter can do that a Facebook status update can't. I really don't need multiple "micro-blogging" platforms.

So I may check in there every once in a while, but I don't think I'll be tweeting much.

Yap, yap, yap

2009-11-25T17:55:00.003-06:00

Via Ezra Klein, I found The Staggering Rise of the Filibuster, which has some interesting points about the Senate filibuster. Primarily that it's gone from being very-rarely used to being everyday business.

... there was an average of one filibuster per Congress during the 1950s. That number has grown steadily since and spiked in 2007 and 2008 (the 110th Congress), when there were 52 filibusters. More broadly, according to Sinclair, while 8 percent of major legislation in the 1960s was subject to "extended-debate-related problems" like filibusters, 70 percent of major bills were so targeted during the 110th Congress.

It's gotten so bad I've started hearing in news reports about how it takes 60 votes to pass a bill in the Senate. Which is wrong, of course; it takes 50. The other important point is that the Senate isn't really fillibustering anything. They're just threatening to fillibuster. I've long thought that it's high time the Democrats call the Republicans' bluff: make them actually fillibuster the bill rather than just say they're going to. We'd see lots fewer fillibusters if Republicans actually had to stand up and talk for 24-48 hours to block a bill or an appointment.

American Family Association calls for sectarian cleansing of the military

2009-11-11T20:45:00.004-06:00

Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association is calling for a sectarian cleansing of the military. In a hate-filled post on the AFA website titled No More Muslims in the U.S. Military, he says:

It's time we all got over the nonsense that all cultures and religions are equally valid or worthy. They most certainly are not. While Christianity is a religion of peace, founded by the Prince of Peace, Islam is a religion of war and violence, founded by a man who routinely chopped the heads off his enemies, had sex with nine-year old girls, and made his wealth plundering merchant caravans.

Did you know there was another mass shooting at a US military installation earlier this year? Back in May, Army Sgt. John M. Russell took a gun off another soldier in Iraq, drove to a clinic, and shot five people. It was, up to now, the most deadly soldier-on-soldier killing since the start of the Iraq War in 2003. Here's a picture of Russell.

Funny, I don't see the AFA calling for the removal of all the white, Christian (I'm assuming) guys from the military.

(I don't know if it's fitting or horrifying that I'm writing about this on Veteran's Day.)

How long?

2009-11-05T18:21:00.002-06:00

I assume you've heard that a thirteen people were killed and over thirty wounded after a gunman opened fire at Ft. Hood, TX today.

I groaned when I heard that the gunman has been identified as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan.

How long until the right-wing starts claiming this is more reason to believe Muslims are dangerous and Islam is a violent religion?

Why is the News Gazette violating it's own policy?

2009-10-18T16:28:00.002-05:00

The News-Gazette has a policy of not printing "letters published elsewhere". So why did they publish David Smith's noxious letter? I've found it published at least in part in at least five different locations:

the Illinois Review blog
the Freeport, IL Journal Standard
the St. Louis Suburban Journal
the Galesburg, IL Zephyr
this Family Research Council press release

David E. Smith: homophobic douche-yokel

2009-10-14T19:16:00.008-05:00

It's been a while since I've posted an entry in the yokel series, where I have a bit of fun poking fun at the ignorant nimrods that write in to the News Gazette. Normally, I'd jump at the chance to write about this woomeister that manages to create an entirely fact-free letter about the flu vaccine.

No, this time I feel compelled to write about a recent letter by David E. Smith of the Illinois Family Institute about Kevin Jennings, former teacher, founder of GLSEN, and currently Assistant Deputy Secretary at the Department of Education.

First a little background for those of you not familiar with the current right-wing witch hunt that's after Jennings. In 1987, as a 24-year-old teacher, Jennings had a conversation with a gay student, who told him he'd had sex with a man. Jennings later wrote in one of his books, "I listened, sympathized, and offered advice." He also told the student, "I hope you used a condom." Conservatives have jumped all over Jennings accusing him of condoning child molestation and even being a pedophile himself.

Except that none of it is true. At the time of the 1987 conversation, the student with whom Jennings had this conversation, was over the age of consent in Massachusetts. Furthermore, the student has recently come forward and said that he had sex with anyone at all! There's simply no scandal here.

Not that you'd know it from reading Smith's letter in the News-Gazette.

One of the most shocking pieces of news about Jennings is a story he told several times about a young student who came to him and confessed that he had sex with an older man he met in a bus station rest room.

This is the most damning part of Smith's possibly libelous letter. Notice how he says "a young student." That's a bit vague, especially (as we will see in a moment) Smith is implying that Jennings illegally supported and covered up child molestation. The student in question was 16 years old at the time. That's over the age of consent in Massachusetts. (The age of consent in Illinois is 17.) Therefore, there's simply no molestation issue. Whether or not it's wise for 16 year olds to be having sex is another matter entirely and separate from Smith's accusations of illegal conduct on the part of Jennings.

But what's most frustrating about this whole piece is that Smith knows this! He's completely aware of the age of the student at the time. In a June 17th, 2009 blog post at the IFI website, Smith says:

Not only did Jennings not report the sexual abuse as required by law, but in his book One Teacher in Ten, Jennings shared that he "listened, sympathized, and offered advice" to the 15-year-old student.

However, in a October 8, 2009 blog post, Smith tells a different story:

One of the most shocking pieces of news about Jennings is a story he's told himself ... about a 16 year old student who came to him and confessed that he was having sex with older men in a bus station restroom.

Notice the change: not only is Smith aware of the student's correct age, but now he's changed the story so that the student was picking up multiple men in this restroom.

So if Smith is aware of the student's age and that clearly puts the student over the age of consent, why does Smith's Letter leave it out and not clearly state the student's age? I can think of only one reasonable explanation: Smith is deliberately attempting to deceive his audience into thinking Jennings was complicit in covering up sexual abuse.

Smith's vile missive continues:

Instead of reporting the high-risk behavior to the boy's parents, school administrators or the police, Jennings' only response was, "I hope you knew to use a condom."

Except that's also a lie! As I pointed out above in his June blog post, even Smith acknowledges that Jennings "listened, sympathized, and offered advice." He did say that he hoped the student used a condom. Let me point out again that this conversation took place in 1987. This was the height of the AIDS crisis. Ronald Reagan wouldn't even mention AIDS in a major policy speech until October of 1987. Quite frankly, I think it would have been irresponsible if Jennings had not mentioned condoms in a conversation like this one.

Will someone please make this guy shut up?

Jennings showed a disregard for parental rights and for our children's well-being, yet he is the president's choice to keep our schools safe – safe for sexual predators it would seem.

If the president hand-picked Jennings to serve in educational leadership, the public has a right to know whether he violated reporting laws and covered up child sexual abuse.

As I think I've made very clear by this point, there were no sexual predators involved here, there was no violation of any reporting laws and there was no sexual abuse. Hell, there wasn't even any sex! It's also very clear that Smith knows all of this and it appears that the Letter was deliberately crafted to deceive the News-Gazette readers.

I think the public has a right to know whether David Smith of the Illinois Family Institute likes to fuck goats.

Is it really any wonder that the Illinois Family Institute is one of only twelve anti-gay hate groups identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center?

Let me also point out that this same Letter was also published nearly verbatim in the Freeport Journal-Standard and at the Illinois Review blog.

I've gotten a bit worked up with this post, because it pisses me the fuck off so much. Let me just close with a statement by the person best qualified to speak about the conversation that Jennings had twenty-two years ago -- the student himself:

Since I was of legal consent at the time, the fifteen-minute conversation I had with Mr. Jennings twenty-one years ago is of nobody's concern but his and mine. However, since the Republican noise machine is so concerned about my "well-being" and that of America's students, they'll be relieved to know that I was not "inducted" into homosexuality, assaulted, raped, or sold into sexual slavery.

In 1988, I had taken a bus home for the weekend, and on the return trip met someone who was also gay. The next day, I had a conversation with Mr. Jennings about it. I had no sexual contact with anybody at the time, though I was entirely legally free to do so. I was a sixteen year-old going through something most of us have experienced: adolescence. I find it regrettable that the people who have the compassion and integrity to protect our nation's students are themselves in need of protection from homophobic smear attacks. Were it not for Mr. Jennings' courage and concern for my well-being at that time in my life, I doubt I'd be the proud gay man that I am today.

Perspective

2009-10-03T09:46:00.001-05:00

Actual quote overheard on some Focus On The Family radio show:

George W. Bush was literally the most pro-life president the United States has ever had.

Iraqi mileage may vary.

Sometimes simple is best

2009-09-22T20:46:00.002-05:00

I have a list of article bookmarked that I want to blog about, but they're largely political. These days, mostly because the GOP is made of lies, thinking about politics makes that vein in my temple throb to bursting, so I'm not going to do that now.

Instead, you should watch this, learn from it, and go practice it until you're really good:

In a weird synchronicity, I saw that video a few weeks ago, tried it once or twice, then WILL showed several of her shows last weekend, including that one.

I could watch her all day long. Frankly, I'd much rather see ancient (even black and white!) reruns of her shows than brand new episodes of Ming Tsai talking about himself and plugging his restaurant on Simply Ming.

Plus, unlike Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, John Boehner, Roy Blunt, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, Dennis Hastert, Dick Armey, Tom Delay, John Ashcroft, Jeb Bush, or Karl Rove, she served her nation in a time of crisis. </snark>

It's Sept. 11, you know what that means

2009-09-11T20:56:00.000-05:00

Happy Birthday Billy! (Why, what did you think I meant?)

Was going to send a card, but didn't have your address, so I couldn't. So thought I'd embarrass you in public, instead.

Challenge me

2009-09-06T10:34:00.002-05:00

So I kind of want to cook something. I just can't decide what. I tend to have a few things I cook a lot and put them in rotation. But as much as I like a good stir fry, they all tend to be variations on a theme. So I want something new.

A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about doing a roast, but that's a lot of meat and three weeks worth of leftovers would get tiring after a while. On the other hand, you could do a lot with all of that.

So does anyone have any suggestions?

You just can't argue with stupid

2009-08-23T13:49:00.001-05:00

Presented without further comment.

The oldest blog profession

2009-08-16T12:12:00.004-05:00

I've been reluctant to endorse any product on this blog because I know what high esteem you have for my opinion, Gentle Reader. I did not wish to capitalize on the awesome power of my blog for something as common as filthy lucre. But I'm going to make an exception.

I really like cooking with fresh herbs, especially basil. It is just so fragrant and so essential to Italian cooking that the dried stuff is really just a pale echo of the fresh. Unfortunately, I can't really grow my own since it wants bright sunlight, which I don't have. I can't always find fresh bunches in the store, even at this time of year. Those little plastic tubs are expensive and somehow, even when I pick over them carefully, the leaves are brown and wilty even by the time I get the groceries home. Then I discovered this:

That's Gourmet Garden basil-in-a-tube. It's not the most attractive of delivery mechanisms, but it's really effective. I tried it once this winter for a recipe where I really couldn't omit the basil and none other could be found. I was expecting it to be bland and artificial, but it really wasn't. It smelled and tasted exactly like basil I'd just chopped fresh.

It's not the most attractive of presentations squeezed right out of the tube, but it's clearly finely chopped green basil in a paste. There are no particularly scary ingredients; no artificial preservatives, etc. I wouldn't use it where you really want recognizable basil leaves like on a pizza or added to Thai food, but for things like a tomato sauce or manicotti, it's really effective. Just add it toward the end of cooking, like you would fresh basil.

They've got some other products that I haven't tried, like cilantro, garlic, and parsley, but I think I will in the future. It's a bit pricey at about $3-4 a tube, but they last several months, and longer in the freezer, which is a lot more than the 24 hours or so I can get out of fresh herbs from the store.

I'm told that there's one local blogger that demands free swag from manufacturers in exchange for complementary blog posts. This is not such a blog post. I'm not that mercenary. Oh, who am I kidding, I just don't have enough clout to be that mercenary. If any major multinational would like me to be their corporate whore, the line starts on the left.

This thing is not like that thing

2009-08-10T21:07:00.003-05:00

Both Illinipundit and Glock21 have accused the Obama administration of astroturfing and that they are therefore no better than the right wing mobs currently shutting down town hall meetings across the country. These are excellent examples of the logical fallacy of false equivalence. Basically it goes like this: the right wing is inciting their base to be as disruptive as possible, the Obama administration is encouraging people to contact their local officials: see, they're both astroturfing!

Well, no. This is a great example of the false equivalence. The best definition I can find online is from the link above, as equating "an act by one party as being equally egregious to that of another without taking into account the underlying differences which may make the comparison patently invalid."

I don't like the idea of the Obama administration handing out talking points; I think talking points are the lazy way out and are for people who don't really have an argument. But if you look at the evil, evil document that Illinipundit posted, all it's really encouraging you to do is "have a quick conversation with the local staff, tell your personal story, or even just drop off a customized flyer and say that reform matters to you." And it offers to provide you with "the address, phone number, and open hours for the office, information about how the health care crisis affects your state for you to drop off (with the option of adding your personal story), and a step-by-step guide for your visit."

Really, that doesn't sound like much to me. I've never visited my Congressional office and I can definetly see how that might be a bit intimidating. I don't know the protocol or procedures involved. (Did you know letters to your Congressman are properly addressed to "The Honorable So-and-so?")

When you really get down to it, the Obama campaign is nothing more than asking people to politely contact their own, local representatives and make their wishes known.

The opposition is not.

In Tampa, Florida, a town hall meeting had to be cut short because of shouting in the meeting, after the mob of 1,000 people was banging on the windows, and after a violent fistfight broke out in the entryway.
The SEIU is getting death threats by phone and -- believe it or not -- Twitter.
Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) has said "the time for polite town halls is 'over.'"

I'm all for people talking to their reps and voicing their opinions, even if I disagree with them. But these tactics show that the right-wing is not attempting to participate in the health care discussion, they're attempting to disrupt it.

A married yokel

2009-07-19T12:28:00.004-05:00

I swear, these yokels are trying to be the death of me. It's like they get together after the weekly Ku Klux Jesus meeting and plot ways to make my blood pressure go up. And I keep falling for the bait. This week our yokel is Harold Miller of Urbana, who is obsessed with thinking about your penis. But not, you know, in a gay way or anything.

How can any intelligent person, using simple common sense, not realize the stupidity in calling homosexual behavior "marriage"?

Well, as an intelligent person, using simple common sense, I don't think anyone actually is calling homosexual behavior "marriage." Not anymore than anyone is calling heterosexual behavior "marriage." I think what people are saying is that gay people shouldn't be treated any differently from straight people.

In all of recorded history, genuine marriage has always been between a man and a woman, male and female, as was designed and intended.

Well, actually, no. In all of recorded history, genuine marriage has pretty much been between a man and a woman and a woman and a woman. Usually underage and usually with her consent being optional.

Even animals are smarter; did anyone ever see two bulls shacking up?

Really? Really? We're supposed to base human sexual behavior off the behavior of cattle? Perhaps Mr. Miller could give me an example of one bull and one cow "shacking up," because, to the best of my knowledge, ranchers generally keep one bull for quite a few cows. You know, like the Mormons used to do.

It's always ironic when people try to use animal behavior to prove that human homosexual behavior is "unnatural," seeing as there homosexual behavior in animals is widespread and well-documented. There are gay penguins in Manhattan, Germany, and China. The German penguins took in an egg that was abandoned by its Biblically heterosexual parents, hatched and raised it. The Chinese penguins were given were given an egg and became "the best parents in the whole zoo". One of the gay San Francisco penguins recently broke up with his boyfriend and moved in with a female penguin proved once and for all that Mother Nature has a sense of irony.

In vivid contrast, true marriage is natural, normal, beautiful and sacred.

Sure it is. Just ask Brittney Spears.

A patriotic yokel

2009-07-07T20:55:00.002-05:00

It's, well, no day in particular, but that means it's time for another in the Local Yokels series! Yes, where we learn all about the woefully ignorant, yet vocal residents of our society. They're like homeschooled yodelers.

This Local Yokel is Paul V. "Pete" Springer from Fisher, IL and the N-G titled his Letter "Country has drifted from biblical teaching". With a title like that, I think you know what you're in for, so let's get started.

In anticipation of experiencing another day commemorating our independence, I looked up the definition of patriotic. I found it as follows: "One who loves his country and jealously guards its welfare."

Yeah, because I know I anticipate the arrival of a holiday by sitting down for a nice session with the dictionary. A real patriot would have sat down with the Bible, not Mirriam-Webster. Obviously this is just another example of our country straying from its biblical roots.

Seriously, what is with people starting off an argument or a speech by giving the dictionary definition of a word? You see it all over the place. Is there some sort of crappy template these people are using?

I love our country and appreciate the many freedoms we enjoy, particularly our freedom to worship, and I am reminded that 52 of the 55 men who signed our Constitution were so claimed orthodox evangelical Christians.

That's an impressive reminder indeed, especially considering that 39 people signed the Constitution. Maybe he's using faith-based math. Obviously, Mr. Springer's love of his country is surpassed only by his ignorance of it.

When I think of how our country has drifted from the many biblical beliefs/teachings that were practiced at that time, I am dismayed.

Really? The many biblical teachings practiced at that time? Slavery, the subjugation of women, the execution of gays and lesbians, the persecution of Native Americans, what's not to love?

The Bible was considered to be God's Word and a guide for living, and was the basis for our laws.

And here we get to the real Christian chauvanism. The Bible has never been the "basis for our laws." The Constitution is the basis for our laws. It is a completely secular, non-religious document. Nowhere does it cite the Bible for support. I would challenge Yokel Springer to find me a bicameral legislature in the Bible. Or any elected body. Trial by jury? Copyright? Religious pluralism? In fact, it specifically states "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

Today the Bible is made fun of and is no longer taught to our children.

Really? I wasn't aware that churches no longer discussed the Bible in Sunday School in Fisher, IL.

Consequently our morals have deteriorated to such an extent that I think our country is in danger of self-destruction.

Is there something about religous people constantly thinking that the end is nigh? Does it have something to do with their belief that Judgement Day is all but upon us (and has been immanent for about 2000 years now)?

To name a few changes contrary to biblical teaching that we now seem to accept:

1. The taking of God's name in vain

I'll mention that to Zeus next time I see him. I'm sure he'd be happy to strike people with a few thunderbolts.

2. No longer setting aside a day of rest.

Funny, it's Saturday and I'm writing this from my own home. I'm not just having one day of rest, I plan to have another tomorrow, too. Thank you, union agitators, for the weekend!

3. Homosexuality.
4. Same sex marriages
5. Divorce.

Gosh, just what is the point in being a Christian if you can't regulate other people's sex lives? You can't even smack your wife around these days and expect her to stay with you anymore.

6. Abortion,

Exodus 21:22: "If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine." Clearly not the same thing as killing, no matter what the pro-life crowd says.

Honestly, our country is in pretty good shape. We're having some problems at the moment, but they're primarily financial, not moral. People are more likely now to be able to live productive, healthy happy lives than ever before. We even let women own property. Shocking

Unintentional humor

2009-07-02T19:00:00.001-05:00

You know all those Facebook applications where you can send things back and forth to each other? A little while ago, I got a warning from Archaeology Weapons that looked like this:

Kinda soft and squishy for a weapon, don't you think? Then again, if the diaper is loaded, it might count as a WMD.

I get email comments

2009-07-01T18:00:00.003-05:00

It's always seemed to me that you haven't hit the big leagues as a blogger until you start getting hate mail from kooky, weird people. If you're PZ Myers, you get death threats. While I'm no PZ, I guess I'm moving out of the pee-wee league and into the little leagues. This comment was left by "Mary" on a two and a half year old post I wrote as a reponse to another local blogger's misogynistic column in the Daily Illini. I shall not speak the name of that local blogger lest that summon him, but it rhymes with "Shmambenek." Anyway, here's the comment:

Wow, could you possibly be more of a gutter slut? If I had a billion dollars, I'd bet it all that you'll die of some ghastly STD by the time you're fifty. That's how it is with all you gutter whores.

You are beneath me and anyone else with a shred of morality. You are the bottom of the barrel...complete and utter scum. People like you are just one notch above murderers.

I am all for gender equality, or equity at least. Women are just as capable of doing things as well as a man could, and in many cases better. But we don't need to use our bodies to get ahead. We are smart and can use our BRAINS. Men don't have to use their bodies to get ahead. Why do we persist on using our bodies and not our brains?

I like classical feminism, but this new 'omg I want to have sex with fifteen billion guys and I want everyone to praise me for it' is complete and utter bullshit and I WILL call feminists prostitutes with no integrity because that's exactly what you are. As John Bambenek said, at least they can be honest about themselves and what they do. One couldn't say the same about gutter trash like you.

Wow. People who have sex are "one notch above murderers?" Unhinged, much? I must say, if Mary and Schmambenek are apparently the paragons of virtue, I shall wear the label of "gutter slut" with pride. Now, where are my fifteen billion men?

UPDATE: Speaking of internet trolls, there's a really interesting problem over with Wenalway, a persistent troll, over at IlliniPundit. Check out the July 3 Open Thread. It seems to me the persistence, scope, and narcissism of this one troll makes me wonder if this is less about Internet jerkitude and more about a mental illness of some sort.

Definitions. You haz them wrong.

2009-06-27T08:20:00.003-05:00

Tim Fernholz has a good post over at The Prospect about how Republicans and conservatives are calling every action taken by the Obama administration "socialist." It's simply not valid:

it's not fair to say that the Obama administration is socialist per se because socialism is an -ism, a system, a guiding philosophy, and it's clear that putting the government in charge of private production is not the Obama administration's guiding philosophy...

If the Obama administration had come into office without an economic emergency, they wouldn't be involved in these firms -- don't forget that the first big government takeovers came under George W. Bush and that the management and directors of the auto companies asked for government help. The current administration has made clear they don't intend to be in the auto making (or banking) business for very long, and voluntarily laid out various guidelines to keep politics out of business decisions. Obviously, lines will be fudged and there are plenty of opportunities for conflict, but this is clearly not an administration whose every answer is "seize the means of production"

Now, would someone please this to tell the yokels that keep writing into the News-Gazette?

(h/t Ezra Klein)

Why do bicycles have gender?

2009-06-14T14:20:00.005-05:00

For some reason even I'm not really clear on, I've been thinking about getting a bike lately. They're kind of intimidatingly expensive, so I've also been keeping an eye out on Craigslist for a used one. It's gradually started to bug me about why bicycles have gender; that is, why are there "men's bikes" and "women's bikes"? (Actually, if you look at the Schwinn website, you'll see there are "bicycles" and "women's bicycles.")

The only difference between them that I can tell, is the location of the crossbar that goes from just under the handlebars to the stem on which the seat sits. On men's bicycles it's high. On women's bikes, it's low. Really, that's all I can find. Pink tassels on the handlebars notwithstanding.

The standard explanation I've always heard (and this is from way back when) is that men and boys are more likely to treat their bike roughly, and so they need a more sturdy frame. So why not just make them all that way? Is it just "Oh, you're a lady and ladies need a more feminine, breakable bike"?

To be fair, I just looked around a bit, and the "sport" type bikes that are likely to be ridden offroad or by professional athletes all appear to have the higher crossbar, I assume because the frame is stronger.

Is there really some reason behind this, or is it just an unnecessary gender difference and marketing scam?

UPDATE: OK, based on the comments here, the comments on Facebook after Bryan posted a link to this, and my mother calling me the other night, the most reasonable explanation is that women's bikes have the crossbar where it is so women can wear dresses without getting them all rumply.

I can't imagine that's particularly important anymore, though. Unless you're a fundamentalist Mormon woman riding a bicycle around the compound (because no fundamentalist Mormon woman would ever need to ride a bicycle off of her husband's compound), the need to accommodate long skirts just doesn't seem all that important anymore. I haven't seen many women riding a bike in a tea-length gown lately, have you?

You decide

2009-06-12T23:21:00.000-05:00

From Matthew Yglesias comes this report of conditions under which prisoners are held:

[P]rolonged periods of exposure to the elements; humiliations such as public nakedness; confinement for up to several weeks in small ‘punishment cells’ in which prisoners were unable to stand upright or lie down; being forced to kneel or sit immobilized for long periods; being hung by the wrists; being forced to stand up and sit down to the point of collapse.

Quick. North Korea or American "enhanced interrogations"?

Paging Mr. Hitchcock

2009-06-07T22:03:00.007-05:00

My desk sits right next to a window. From the outside, the windows must be reflective, because birds keep coming up and attacking their reflections. Sparrows, cardinals, and one with a little orange head that I can't identify. They can't seem to see us, because they never react to our movements.

This week, we had a new visitor, a hawk. For some reason, this guy didn't attack his reflection. These aren't great pictures (they were taken from a cell phone), but I was literally 12 inches or so from this hawk, which was a pretty amazing experience. It's like our own little hunting blind.

I had to tilt the shades open so we could see him, and I think he could hear that. You can see in some of the pictures, he's fluffing his feathers. When we tried to lift the shades up out of the way, he squawked and flew off.

I think this is a red-tailed hawk. He's been there before, but never this close. I hope we'll see him again.

Shruken Head

2009-05-28T20:56:00.001-05:00

Some time back, David gave me this little plastic husband that grows and expands if you put it in water. A little while ago, I put it in some water to see what would actually happen. The cup of water I used, however, wasn't quite big enough and it wound up growing to the point where it pushed up out of the liquid, which meant those parts didn't get to soak up water and grow. This is the result.

So what I want to know is, is this a metaphor or an omen?

Some weekend lightness ... ow!

2009-05-24T13:10:00.002-05:00

Welcome our new bee overlords! A hive of bees shut down part of Union Square in New York:

Thousands of bees -- in a hive -- in a building between 4th Avenue and Irving Place -- and it was no joke to the employees here at GameStop. They were trapped inside their store. The sign in the window said, "temporarily closed, due to bee infestation."

"There's a hive...inside the walls...leading upward...they say somebody's on the way, but they're taking a long time to get here," bee watcher Herman Leath said.

In fact, it took two hours to get some help...and that was only after Eyewitness News called the police department...who said, call the fire department...who said, call 9-1-1...who said, call 3-1-1..who said, call the mayor's office.

And finally, at around 4 p.m. the NYPD's bee specialist arrived -- but removing the hive was no easy task...

"I'm probably gonna be relying on scent...the queen bee's scent...it could take a half hour&an hour...two hours...I don't know," NYPD bee expert Tony Planakis said.

And just in case you missed that, "...around 4 p.m. the NYPD's bee specialist arrived..." Who knew?

Hat-tip: The Consumerist, who suggests the bees may have been protesting for better game trade-in value.

Another one bites the dust

2009-05-13T21:06:00.003-05:00

IlliniPundit has again banned Regnad Kcin, née ewjohnson, from his site. I completely understand why he did it. Kcin was nothing if not offensive. (Not to mention a total kook: he's a Paultard and a 911 Troofer) But, frankly, he's not all that out of the Republican mainstream; just a bit more vocal about it. I realize that there are a few open minded Republicans out there, but purer-than-thou homophobia really is official Republican policy.

I posted this in response to Kcin's latest odious comment. I rather like it, if I do say so myself and have even gotten one complement on it, from a straight guy, no less. I figure next time there's an anti-gay yokel in the N-G, I'm gonna send something like it in as a Letter.

Since homosexual activity is a sexual hedonism demonstrably harmful to others and destructive to the framework of the society...

I would like to apologize on behalf of the smoking crater that used to be the LGBT community. If only we had known things like gay marriage and the lack government-regulated sexual activity would have led to turning this country into the post-apocalyptic hellhole it has become, we would not have been so strident in our demands. If only we had listened when we were told that Will & Grace was just the first step towards the food riots and race wars now sweeping this once great and entirely heterosexual nation. (Not to mention that everyone is now speaking French.) Obviously you were just begging gay men to marry your sisters and daughters and keep them in loveless, unfilling marriages for the greater good. Why, oh why, would we not listen?

An online community is still a community

2009-05-03T20:48:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to put this up for a while now, but keep not getting around to it. I realize the topic of this post may initially look a bit dorky, just bear with me, it's really not. Yes it involves Warcraft (David, I can already hear your eyes glazing over), but just ignore the game jargon and it's a really great story.

This story was posted in the Warcraft Europe forums a while ago and it's about this guy that comes across a newbie asking for help:

So off i went, with a lvl 34 Human Warrior, and helped this fella out with a few of his red quests.. We chatted a little whilst we played, and it came to my attention that this wasn't a very old player, as he kept on having to go "becuase dad neds 2 chek the emall" he also clearly had no idea how to play, kept on pointing at random objects and saying "coooooooooool!!", and by the state of his outfit, it looked like he hit mach 2 and collided with a Dorthy Perkins store.

A few weeks pass, they stay in touch now and then, but then he sees the kid again, this time getting cyber-bullied in-game.

Anyway, a few hours later, i get a message from this kid "i got kicked from my guild :(" i tried to cheer him up, but it wasn't happening.. And to be honest i couldnt be arsed trying, and i was tired and logged off.

So yesterday ... i see this kid sitting next to the mailbox, no guild tag, people bouncing around him having fun.. And theres him, all alone, no-one paying attention to a "noob".. Now i know human race facial expressions never change, but as far as avatars go, this one looked really depressed.

So i message him asking if hes cool, and he tells me hes thinking about quitting, becuase he gets bullied alot at school, and his ex guild mates all said really horrible things to him, and that he knew some of the kids in reality, becuase they go to his school, and are beggining to bully him in school about how he plays WoW etc. We all remember how it was.. I remember i used to get bullied in school for not having any toys, or having an old version of a toy.. Imagine it now, you get bullied about it at home AND school too.

So he decides to do a really nice thing

So what did i do? I took the kid shopping is what i did... Bought him his epic (ground) mount, a load of nice armour off AH, which i made sure was well colour co-ordinated AND gave him very nice stats for his level. Bought him 2 very nice rare axes (fotgotten the name) and got a guild mate to put +15 agility on each one.

I also bought him a host of accessories, fun stuff, like a mana wyrm, somedeviate delights, an Orb of deception.. yunno.. all the "coooooool" stuff.

OK I realize that may have gotten a little thick for anyone that doesn't play the game. He later says that he spent about 1600 gold on this little shopping trip. Just to put that in perspective, if you added all the gold up on all my characters across all the servers I've played on, you'd have about that much. This was months of work that this guy spent on the kid.

Then (and this is my favorite part), he gets a thank you letter. Not from the kid, but from the kid's father:

I want to thank you for helping my son in this game, he's been so excited for days about the new things you bought him, hes also been having a tough time in school latley, and we agreed we would get him this game as an escape, although latley its turned into nothing more than another source of bullying and abuse.

Thanks to you the little chaps smiling again.

Once again, lots of thanks!"

So yeah, maybe people think playing the game is a bit dorky, but this is the sort of story that restores my faith in the humanity of dorks.

I just realized that it's a very fitting coincidence it's currently Children's Week, when players can take an (in-game) orphan around, show him different parts of the world, and buy him treats and candy.

RIP, Bea

2009-04-26T17:44:00.004-05:00

Bea Arthur

(If any of the Pussycat Dolls are reading, I'd just like to point out that it really should be "Don't cha wish your girlfriend were hot like me?" Really, good grammar costs nothing.)

The Last Disappointment, Part 2

2009-04-17T19:00:00.000-05:00

This is the second post on this book that I wanted to make, and I'm still not out of the Preface. Feser's entire thesis in this book is that he can make a logical argument for the existence of God. Which is pretty amazing considering the diversity in beliefs, rituals, and claims about the religious supernatural. So here's how he gets around that:

...I should make it clear at the outset that this is not a defense of an amorphous ecumenical something called "religion," but only and specifically of the classical theism and traditional morality of Western civilization, which, I maintain, are superior -- rationally, morally, and socio-politically superior -- to absolutely every alternative on offer."

The amount of sheer arrogance in that statement is mind-boggling. Realize that when Feser is talking about the "classical theism of Western civilization", he's basically talking about conservative Christianity. Also realize that Feser bases his book almost entirely on two things: Platonic ideals and the Arisotelian final cause. The two are entirely unconnected.

Feser's argument is basically that you can logically prove God exists and that he is a being of pure Being. I may or may not deal with the absurdity of that statement in a later post, if I get around to it. But nothing in Feser's claim is exclusive to Jehovah. It applies to YHWH to about the same degree as Vishnu. But Feser disregards all the other possibilities out of hand because they're not Western enough. Ooooh, scary foreign philosophies.

It's also an unfair statement because the God in Feser's logical argument isn't the God of Western Civilization, i.e. Christianity. There really isn't a religion in the world that says God is a being of pure Being and stops there. No, they all carry the baggage of specific supernatural claims with them. God is triune, transubstaniation, demonic possession, an angel that wields a sword of fire that turns every which way. You can't have just a vague, hand-waving claim about God that you say proves how superior "Western civilization" is without also claiming all the supernatural baggage that comes with the dominant religion of Western Civ.

In other words Ed, Quetzalcoatl called while you were out and, man, is he ever pissed.

Be specific!

2009-04-15T18:48:00.002-05:00

I don't normally care for Andrew Sullivan, but he makes a good point about today's faux-grassroots teabagging parties:

But the substantive critique must remain the primary one. Protesting government spending is meaningless unless you say what you'd cut.

If you favor no bailouts, then say so. If you want to see the banking system collapse, then say so. If you think the recession demands no fiscal stimulus, then say so. If you favor big cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, social security and defense, then say so. I keep waiting for Reynolds to tell us what these protests are for; and he can only spin what they they are against.

All protests against spending that do not tell us how to reduce it are fatuous pieces of theater, not constructive acts of politics. And until the right is able to make a constructive and specific argument about how they intend to reduce spending and debt and borrowing, they deserve to be dismissed as performance artists in a desperate search for coherence in an age that has left them bewilderingly behind.

The Last Disappointment, Part 1

2009-03-28T18:46:00.003-05:00

Every once in a while, I try to read a book that's interesting or important or that will just be a change from the genre fiction I otherwise seem to read. So the other week, when I was in the library, I picked up The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism by Edward Feser. I'm not sure why it interested me; maybe I just thought it would be interesting to see what sort of arguments the other side has for their beliefs. I gotta say, if this is the best refutation anyone can come up with, the New Atheists (which would make a pretty good name for a band) don't have much to worry about.

Some quick background: over the past few years, there have been several books written by prominent atheists. Richard Dawkins wrote The God Delusion, Sam Harris wrote Letter to a Christian Nation, Christopher Hitchens wrote God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I think there have been a few others, as well. There's even a snazzy new logo. In interest of full disclosure, I'll say that I haven't read any of these books. They may be brilliant, they may be silly, I don't know.

One of the reasons I haven't blogged so much lately is that I sit down wanting to write a review of this book, and just think "Ugh." So I'm going to break it into more manageable and less frustrating parts.

The first thing that strikes me about this book is just how shamelessly political it is. There's not a whole lot of philosophy in it, and very little past the Humanities 101 level of things. But Feser is continuously harping on all the hot-button socially political issues of the day. This is the very first paragraph of the book:

At the time of this writing, exactly one week has passed since the Supreme Court of the State of California decreed that homosexuals have a "basic civil right" to marry someone of the same sex... Malcom Muggeridge famously said that "without God we are left with a choice of succumbing to megalomania or erotomania." The court's majority, in declaring by sheer judicial fiat the equal dignity under law of family and sodomy, would appear to have gone Muggeridge one better by succumbing to both at once."

Allow me to point out the subtle characterization of heterosexual sexual relationships as being wholesome and constructive (i.e. his use of "family"), while gay relationships are entirely driven by sinful lusts ("erotomania", "sodomy"). The subliminal implication he's trying to make is that gay people don't of course have real "families"; their children, their relationships, their support of each other is somehow less valid and legitimate than others. But remember that this isn't a book about gay marriage or politics.

Again, let me point out that this is the very first paragraph of the book. But it's not the last time he'll mention it. Gay marriage is something that Feser returns to again and again in his book, referencing it I think at least once in every chapter. He doesn't limit himself to the terrible influence of Teh Gay, either. There's Terry Schaivo, abortion, and lots and lots of sex. Well, just the kind of sex that Feser doesn't approve of.

As I was reading Superstition, I think I gradually came to the conclusion that Feser's book is not the philosophical treatise I was expecting, but more of the philisophical analog of Ann Coulter's writings. You don't come into this book to learn something or to get a well-reasoned argument. You come to a book like this to get your worldview reinforced and to learn exactly how wicked those unlike you, in this case the liberals and the atheists, truly are. Just like Coulter, that's the service that Feser provides.

Now all I need is a belfry

2009-03-19T18:48:00.004-05:00

So, the other night, I was lying in bed on my way to the Dreaming. There was a squirrel outside making some noise or another and I was looking up at the ceiling at the moving patterns the blinds made as a car went in or out of the parking lot. The squirrel must be in the tree right outside the window. Then another car drives through the parking lot making that pattern on the ceiling. Then again.

Wait. I didn't hear a car. At that point I'm really looking at the ceiling and see something go right across it. Oh, my God, there's a bird in here! So I jump out of bed and turn on the light and, yup, there's a bird circling around inside my bedroom. So I quickly remembered my glasses were in the bathroom and went to fetch them. I wonder how it got in, is there a window broken somewhere? I came back to the bedroom and stopped.

That's not a bird.

That's a bat.

THERE'S A MOTHERFUCKING BAT FLYING AROUND MY MOTHERFUCKING BEDROOM.*

Quickly, I closed the bedroom door and ran to the closet to get a bedsheet to catch it in. Well, OK, first I screamed like a woman in a 50s science-fiction B-movie, then ran to the closet to get a bedsheet. On my way back to my bat-filled bedroom, I also grabbed the broom. Why? I don't know. I guess bats are like spiders in that sense.

Back at the bedroom. Deep breath. Ready to open the door and throw the sheet over the bat and quickly catch it. Open the door. Cue dramatic music.

Nothing.

What? Where did it go? Walk over to the windows to see if one is broken. Nope. Check behind the blinds to make sure they're bat-free. OK, I'll open one so when I find the bat, I'll just shoo it out. Window's open. Screen's not. Screen won't open. Great, I have a rodent flying around my apartment and I can't even open a window to get rid of it.

Go back to the living room and open the patio door. Fortunately, the weather is warming up, so it's only about sixty outside. I can live with that.

I grab a flashlight and head back to the bedroom. I start looking around, under, inside, and through things. Nothing. No bat. Well, I *know* it's here. There's no other route out of the bedroom and I've kept the door closed every time I left. Keep looking.

I finally found it hiding behind the filing cabinet. Naturally, it had to decide to hide behind the heaviest thing I own. After moving the CD rack and the lamp, I've got enough room to grab the filing cabinet and pull it back. Yup, there it is, on the floor. I poke it with the broom enough to push it out from behind the filing cabinet. Grab a towel and run to the far side, at which point he decides to crawl back behind the cabinet. So I pull the cabinet out another six inches and throw the towel over the chirping thing.

Gently, I scooped it up in the towel and hightailed it outside. Putting the towel down, I shook it apart a bit and the bat chirped a few more times then lopsidely flew away to hide under the eaves of the building not far away.

Yeah, it was kind of icky. It was a bat after all. But you know, under different circumstances, he was enough like a little furry creature that it would have been kind of cute, too. But not flying around my bedroom at the wee hours of the morning.

At this point, it was pushing 1 am, I'd been running around the apartment, and moving furniture. Sleep was not quick in coming. So that explains why I'm a bit sleep deprived this week.

* With apologies to Samuel L. Jackson.

Does this mean I'm famous?

2009-03-12T22:46:00.002-05:00

I've been thinking it's awfully strange that people keep coming to the blog after having searched for "plain yogurt" on Google. Then I did the search myself and found that this post is on the first page of results.

I never thought I'd be on the first page of any of Google search results. How strange.

Hollywood, stop messing with my childhood! Part 2

2009-02-21T20:32:00.008-06:00

OK, so I promised you a blog post. The last one wound up being about how Hollywood was taking beloved stories from my childhood and turning them into movies that actually were pretty decent. This one delves into the "not so much" territory.

What gave me this whole idea was the adaptation of a book I very fondly, The Dark is Rising. This is the second book from Susan Cooper's five-book sequence (don't call it a series!) of the same name. The books are richly steeped in English and Welsh folkore and Arthurian legend. To sum up the story, 11-year-old Will discovers he's the last of the Old Ones, a group of immortal paladins that serve the Light and fight against the Dark. Will must discover the Six Signs (bronze, wood, iron, fire, water, stone) before it's too late.

That about sums up the similarities between the book and the movie. The movie was retitled only weeks before its release to The Seeker: The Dark is Rising giving it a wholly unnecessary Narnian colon and ruining what I've always thought was one of the most evocative book titles ever. Will is changed from 11 years old to 13 making him less a kid and more of an annoying teenager, but allowing them to add a completely unnecessary girl-related-subplot. The price of which was removing the character of The Watcher entirely. Merriman's foster son, who deserts the Light when Merriman was willing to let him die to protect a power magical artifact, then serves his penance by having to carry one of the Signs for 600 years before giving it to Will. Oh no, that character is booted to the curb so Will can get a funny feeling in his tummy when some girl looks at him sideways.

Need I mention the fact that they fabricated out of whole cloth a long-lost brother for Will (and he's got 5 already), who is kidnapped and captured by The Dark as a baby, which makes his father cold and distant, that Will must find out about and rescue? Or the fact that Will seems to be less of the last of a line of a group of the most powerful magical heros throughout history more the leader of a group of incompetent octagenarians?

Sigh. When I heard there would soon be a film version of TDIR, I checked out the books from the library and gave them a re-read. I did the same with John Carpenter's (no, not that John Carpenter) Tripods series when I heard The White Mountain is due to be released sometime in 2009. In interest of full disclosure, I never did read this trilogy as a kid, but rather saw the BBC miniseries, which only made it through the first two books and left the fans hanging. It's about what you would expect from 1980s British TV fare, but I'm of the opinion that it was pretty good for what it was. It's sort of War of the Worlds meets Mad Max meets The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I still think the intro is a bit eerie:

Information about the movie is scarce at best. The IMDB page is subscription-only, but I notice that it's listed there as being released in 2012 rather than 2009, so perhaps it was pushed back. Supposedly Gregor Jordan is on to direct.

I have a bad feeling about this movie. The first book is the story of three boys' travels through post-alien-invasion Europe as they travel from England to France. (All adult humans are brainwashed and mind-controlled by the aliens at the age of about 15.) I suspect that the setting will be moved out of Europe to the United States to avoid the association with that most Communist of nations, France. I also suspect the boys will be moved up in age from 14 to 17 or so. Lastly, the fact that they appear to be changing the name suggests that they will try to condense all three books into one movie. The BBC had twelve on-screen hours to tell the story of the first two books. Trying to shrink that, plus another book, all into one and a half hours is just a recipe for disaster.

And a longer trailer for season 1 (fan-made, I think):

I'm of two minds of the recent remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The new one is a bit less technocolor than the Gene Wilder version. Depp's performance as Willy Wonka is very fresh; as I think can be expected from Depp, he takes the role and really makes it his own. Wilder's Wonka seemed to like the kiddies in the movie a bit too much, if you know what I mean, while Depp's Wonka seems more likely just to have some in the freezer. But the last act of the movie just goes in a totally strange and unnecessary direction. It doesn't seem out of place to me to have fantastical elements in children's literature that don't really need to be explained. I don't need some Freudian backstory about why Wonka became a chocolatier, he just is. Wholly unnecessary and distracting from the main story.

Lastly, we're starting to see trailers for Race to Witch Mountain, the remake of 1975's Escape to Witch Mountain. I hesitate to include this one because, even though I have fond memories of it from when I was young, I haven't seen it since and suspect it is actually fairly hokey. Still, I liked it and one of the things I remember about it is that there was quite a bit of mystery about it: who are these kids, why can they do these things, what happened to them? And from the previews for the new one, it looks like all that is gone and these two weird kids are just superpowerful beings that hire a former-wrestler-cum-taxi-driver to drive them cross-country to get somewhere to stop the end of the world from arriving. Ugh. I mean, aliens that can smash cars with their minds, but can't figure out how to work a cell phone or take a plane somewhere?

You mean it gets even worse?

2009-02-15T16:27:00.004-06:00

Four and a half years ago, I wrote this blog post, about how frustrating it was that no one would be held accountable for what happened at Gitmo other than a few low-level functionaries.

Three and a half years ago, I wrote this blog post, about how much worse what actually happened at Abu Ghraib was than we all had thought.

A former Gitmo guard has now come forward and is talking about what is actually going on there.

Neely [the guard] discusses at some length the notion of IRF (initial reaction force), a technique devised to brutalize or physically beat a detainee under the pretense that he required being physically subdued. The IRF approach was devised to use a perceived legal loophole in the prohibition on torture. Neely’s testimony makes clear that IRF was understood by everyone, including the prison guards who applied it, as a subterfuge for beating and mistreating prisoners—and that it had nothing to do with the need to preserve discipline and order in the prison.

Honestly, that really doesn't shock me. Several prisoners were actually beaten to death at Abu Ghraib. I remember one quote from an Army doctor that examined the dead detainee, and how he described his injuries as resembling those of someone that had been hit by a bus. So finding out that physical abuse is not just regular, but encouraged, seems just par for the course.

But as shocking and saddening it is to hear about beatings like this, that's not the end of it: (emphasis mine)

He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgment that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes.

It's one thing (and implausible) to say that the Abu Ghraib abuse was the work of "a few bad apples." This obviously isn't. White House lawyers were aware of what was going on and actually fought to provide legal cover. You can't tell me that the awareness of these tactics stopped with those lawyers.

In other words, rape is now official government policy.

Hollywood, stop messing with my childhood! Part 1

2009-02-08T10:28:00.002-06:00

It seems that Hollywood is determined to ruin many of the fond memories I have of books from my childhood. They keep making movies and remaking things and doing a hatchet job on them.

That's not to say they haven't done a couple of things right lately. I'm actually a fan of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe. It's true to the books, it treats its source material with respect, and it's just a great story. It's a bit of a shame that the Religious Right adopted it in such a priggish manner, but maybe they'd read ahead and were trying to act like Eustace. Prince Caspian wasn't as good, but again, it was faithful to its source material; I just didn't like that book nearly as much. It also looks like they will be making The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, contrary to one rumor I heard. So I'm happy, since it is my favorite of the books.

SPOILER WARNING

I honestly doubt they'll go much past those three. The Silver Chair and A Horse and His Boy barely has the Pevinsies in it and The Magician's Nephew not at all. They have to get the movies made before the actors grow up too much to be believable, unless they do them out of order. The Last Battle seems doubtful to me. Would you really make a children's movie where the protagonists realize they're dead at the end of it? "Hey kids, lets go watch a movie where all the characters you grew up with actually die!"

HERE ENDETH THE SPOILERS

I have to say that I am a fan of the Harry Potter movies as well. Again, they dealt with the source material faithfully, insofar as is reasonable for two-hour adaptations of pretty big books. (David, I can hear you rolling your eyes.)

In dragged on a bit in later acts, but Sci-Fi's recent OZ miniseries wasn't half-bad. I'm not sure if that counts in this list, since I was first introduced to Oz via The Wizard of Oz, as I suspect most of us were, but I did read several of Baum's books. The miniseries really was more of a reimagining, like the recent Battlestar Galactica, rather than a retelling of the original story. It didn't surpass its source material like BSG, but I think it retained the sense of steampunk wackiness and actual danger that I remember from the books.

Wow, after checking Wikipedia, it looks like there have been a lot more books made into movies than I was aware of: How to Eat Fried Worms, A Ring of Endless Light (thought I didn't read the book), A Wrinkle in Time, The Westing Game, and there was even a Neverending Story III. It looks like most of those adaptations sucked.

Which brings me to the point of this blog post, but it's taken me so long to get here, it's going to have to wait for another day.

Wacky things on the radio

2009-02-03T19:31:00.005-06:00

When I travel, like I was doing over the past weekend, I listen to the radio a lot. Sometimes, I listen to talk radio, which means listening to conservative and Christian talk radio. This past trip, I had the dubious pleasure of coming across a series of interviews done with people at the Creation Museum. The one that I managed to catch most of was with Jason Lisle, head astrophysicist at the Museum.

Wait a minute. An astrophysicist that thinks the universe is only a few thousand years old? Isn't that like going to the infectious disease department at a hospital to find a doctor that thinks viruses and bacteria can't make you sick?

OMG, Lost!

2009-01-21T23:01:00.001-06:00

... but enough of that.

This weekend, I came across a recipe that said, if you didn't have any pimentos, you could substitute maraschino cherries.

I didn't even know my brain had a gag reflex.

Stealing Yglesias

2008-12-24T22:12:00.000-06:00

Because it's so good, I'm just going to quote Matthew Yglesias's entire post:

Ed Gillespie’s RealClearPolitics article on “Myths and Facts About the Real Bush Record” is about as stupid and dishonest as you’d expect. But after “debunking” five perfectly accurate alleged myths, Gillespie gets into the whopper that really gets my goat:

And one last fact: Our homeland has not suffered another terrorist attack since September 11, 2001. That, too, is part of the real Bush record.

This is like saying that except for the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover had a good economic record. The vast majority of Americans to have ever been killed by foreign terrorists were killed under George W. Bush’s watch. As Gillespie says, whether or not a president succeeds in preventing foreign terrorists from murdering thousands of American citizens is an important part of that president’s record. And Bush took office on January 20, 2001. Nine or so months later by far the largest terrorist attack on American soil was perpetrated. That’s a fantastically enormous failing. If you only look at Bush’s final seven years, you’ll see that he was as good as every other president at preventing terrorist attacks. And if you include his entire presidency, you’ll see that he was by far the worst.

Not suffered another terrorist attack since 9/11?

One word: Anthrax.

Remember, kids, it's only terrorism if it's done by a Muslim!

And from the comments:

...the conservatives never give Bill Clinton any love for preventing another terrorist attack after the first World Trade Center bombing that took place six weeks after his inauguration. You know, the one whose perpetrators are all in jail. Instead, they sneer at him for trating terrorism as a “law enforcement issue.”

Rick Warren: Bigoted Dumbass

2008-12-23T18:13:00.002-06:00

Liberals everywhere are rather pissed off that Obama has chosen the odious Rick Warren to give his inauguration speech. David has a good post on the subject. One of the reasons Warren fought against Prop. 8 is that he claimed it would mean preachers that spoke out against gay marriage would go to jail since that would be hate speech, an out-and-out lie.

W.A. Criswell was a Southern Baptist preacher who Warren once described as "the greatest American pastor of the 20th Century." This is a quote from Criswell:

Don't force me by law, by statute, by Supreme Court decision ... to cross over in those intimate things where I don't want to go. Let me build my life. Let me have my church. Let me have my school. Let me have my friends. Let me have my home. Let me have my family

That sounds like pretty boilerplate text you could expect from any conservative Christian when it comes to the gay marriage issue, no? I really wouldn't bat an eye if I heard Warren or Pat Robertson say something like that. (One of the more ludicrous objections gay rights opponents come up with is that gay marriage would somehow hurt their marriages, though they never say exactly how.

But Criswell wasn't talking about gay marriage. He was supporting segregation.

That arguments for segregation seem so applicable to gay marriage opponents seems telling to me, somehow.

Math. It matters.

2008-12-16T19:38:00.002-06:00

From a letter in today's News-Gazette

The reason that the Big 3 cannot compete is executive salaries. The math once again proves how wrong Kruse is for blaming the autoworkers. The top two General Motors executives combined salaries were over $22 million in 2007. Divide that by 3.8 million cars sold by GM in 2007, and you find that these two salaries added over $5,800 to the price of every car GM sold in America last year.

Yes, please. Divide $22 million by 3.8 million. Did you get 5,800?

Yokel gets his magical Mormon panties all in a bunch

2008-12-09T21:32:00.003-06:00

Sigh. The yokels just keep writing. The literate ones, anyway. This week's yokel is Robert Dunn, who will be familiar with anyone that spends too much time on IlliniPundit. This particular letter to the editor of the N-G has got to be the biggest, most hysterical overreaction I've seen in ages. Mr. Dunn is all a lather about the uppity homosexuals not letting him persecute them like a good Christian should be able to.

I am appalled at the treatment that my church has received at the hands of radical homosexual groups

Well, that's fair. I'm appalled that your church would decide to poke it's nose into California politics that are really none of its business. Single-handedly hurting thousands of California families so you can feel all self-righteous is pretty appalling. I can only wonder how many hungry people could have been fed with the $20 million Mr. Dunn's church spent on it's campaign of lies and deceit.

Seriouly, Mr. Dunn is "appalled" at protests and demonstrations? The threshold for appall-dom is set pretty low these days. Personally, I'm more appalled at sick people dying alone while their loved ones are not allowed to be at their deathbeds because they're not "real family."

Notice how it's always "radical" homosexuals? The only non-radicals being the good little queers that just quietly bend over and let the Mormon Church give them the shaft, if you'll pardon the metaphor. The only way Dunn could have made that more of a cliche would have been to call them "radical homosexual activists." Now that's scary!

Now that conservatives are back in the wilderness, it is the time for all conservative Christians to unite beyond denominational and theological distinctions to defend our right to speak out on important moral issues.

Conservatives are back in the wilderness? I'm sorry, did FOX News go off the air while I wasn't looking? Did Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Newt Gingrich, World Net Daily, freerepublic.com, and even IlliniPundit suddenly get up and evaporate while I wasn't looking?

With liberal Democrats ... our First Amendment rights are in jeopardy.

Wait, whaaaaat? Liberal Democrats, the most free-speech political group you can think of are a threat to the First Amendment? Which party ran a candidate that wanted to get Harry Potter banned from the library? Which party is trying to ban the Kite Runner in local schools now?

With the possible implementation of the Fairness Doctrine, religious broadcasting is threatened.

Ohhh. Now it makes sense. The Fairness Doctrine is that ridiculous thing that Rush Limbaugh uses to frighten his listeners. It's a dead deal. No one is talking about bringing the Fairness Doctrine back. No one. Except Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, trying to scare their Dittoheads into being all mouth-frothy.

...we are one Supreme Court justice away from having an anti-life, anti-free speech, anti-traditional values majority in the nation's highest court.

Why do I think that, when the next piece of controversial religious art comes along, Dunn's new-found support of the First Amendment will evaporate like Ted Haggard's pants? An anti-life Supreme Court? What, would they suck the life force out of the lawyers arguing before them? I, for one, welcome our new black-robed, vampiric judicial overlords.

This is a call to unity among all of those who believe that our nation was founded as a Christian nation conceived in liberty.

Geez, all this "Christian nation" nonsense just chafes my butt. People like Dunn seem to think that, because their Christian God is the font of all goodness, and because America is by definition good, America must be Christian. That's poppycock and the founding fathers like Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and the like knew it. In fact, they specificially rejected Christianity as the basis for our government.

Now here is the piece de resistance, where Dunn completely jumps the shark:

If we do not stand as one, we could be looking in the future when a letter like this is deemed a "hate crime" and the author is thrown in prison in our new Orwellian moment of "change and unity" under Obama.

Wow. Paranoid delusions much? Name me one public figure that has said that writing a ridiculous letter like Dunn's would be a hate crime. Find me one hate crimes statute that would classify Dunn's bigoted little rant as a hate crime. You can't, because they don't.

But these fundies hate having their bigotry called out as such. And anyone pointing it out is "persecuting them because they're Christians." We live in a country where religous conservatives regularly blame gays for everything from California wildfires to the current economic crisis. They're free to predict Gay Day at Disney would lead to meteor strikes. The Republican Party of Texas still has as part of its platform that gays should be put in prison. So get down off the cross, Mr. Dunn. Soylent Mormon is quite a ways off.

False economy

2008-12-02T20:50:00.002-06:00

One of the sillier things about the proposed auto manufacturer bailout is the noise that was made at the last hearing about the fact that the company CEOs took the company jets from Detroit to Washington, DC. In fact, I'm pretty sure I heard more about that fact than about what actually happened at the hearing. (Amusing fact. When Ford's CEO was asked if he would take a pay cut of his $2 million salary to a symbolic $1, his response was "I'm think I'm OK where I am." Uh, duh.)

Because of the bad PR last time, it's been announced that the Ford CEO will actually be driving to Washington, DC later this week. That has got to be the dumbest economic move ever. According to Google Maps, that's about a 9 hour drive. Let's say he's got an iron bladder like Dr. Fig (don't ask), and will make only the minimum of stops. So let's say it's a 10 hour drive, door-to-door.

Ford's CEO make a $2 million salary, but his total compensation package is $22 million. That means he gets paid $11,000 per hour. Nice work if you can get it, but that means just the time it will take to make this drive will cost Ford $110,000.

But there are even more costs to consider. Mulally is making this trip to ask Congress for the money that might mean the difference between staying in business and going under. (And Ford is probably in the best shape of the Big Three.) So if for some reason, he misses all or part of the hearings, the very future of Ford would be jeopardized. Makes the stakes of having a flat tire seem a lot higher, no? For want of a spare tire...

To get to DC, Mulally will have to drive through Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. In December. What are the odds that there might be several inches of snow just like we got in Illinois on Sunday somewhere in that 500 miles? Maybe one percent? And if that snow had a 50/50 chance of stopping the CEO to get to the hearing to beg for his company's future? That's a 1 in 200 chance that we'd lose a company worth $18 billion, even taking into account the recent troubles in the stock market. Alleviating that risk might be worth the price of a private jet.

Flying commercial isn't much better, either. It will take several more hours that flying in a private jet. (I'm guessing, never having flown in a Lear.) Remember that $11,000 an hour? Again, you have all the risk of being delayed because of weather, an oversold plane, mechanical problems, etc.

I'm not saying that the CEO getting to take the company jet on a weekend shopping trip to Rodeo Drive isn't extravagant and unnecessary. I'm just saying that sometimes spending money to save the time of an extremely valuable employee or in an incredibly high-risk situation is sometimes a sensible expense.

What's with salted butter?

2008-12-02T17:10:00.000-06:00

Meijer had butter on sale the other day, so I was going to get a pound to stick in the freezer. I don't go in for any of that fancy gourmet butter, so I was just looking for my usual, 1-pound box of unsalted butter quarters. For some reason it seemed to me the section for salted butter was enormous compared to the one for unsalted butter. Why?

People put salt in butter before the days of refrigeration so it wouldn't spoil as fast. These days, it seems everyone has access to both a refrigerator and electricity; some people even have indoor plumbing. So the need to add salt to butter to stop if from spoiling is rather unnecessary. So why is there such a demand for salted butter?

Google just "gets it"

2008-11-29T07:54:00.000-06:00

I don't have a home laptop, so when I travel, I'm pretty much either without Internet connectivity unless I can borrow a computer. It's not that I'm a luddite or anything, I'm just a cheap bastard. So, when my sister gave me her hand-me-down PDA to replace my old Palm, I thought it was just neat that it had built in wi-fi. I could check my email anywhere, even in a hotel while traveling. Now that wi-fi is available in the iTouch and probably state-of-the art toasters these days, that doesn't sound like much, but it was new to me.

I originally got a Yahoo email account many years ago because it was difficult for me to check my ISP email while traveling. Their web-based interface was accessible anywhere. Then I got a Gmail account becuase it was the new and shiny thing and I wanted to give it a try. So I check both now and then.

Or at least, I tried to. On the PDA, Google's apps load up very well. There's a mobile version of the search page and of the mail application. At my ISPs webmail interface it doesn't work quite as seamlessly, there's a lot of scrolling up and down and linebreaks are a bit screwy, but hey, it works.

Then I went to Yahoo. Did I get a poorly-laid out, but functional, page? Nope. I got a "Sorry, but you can't use this browser with Yahoo Mail" message and nothing else. It wouldn't even let me in.

This week, I got to sit in on a web and telephone based conference with someone at Google about cloud computing. In it, they talk about all the different ways people are accessing the Internet and what they're doing with it. It's very clear that Google is a company that just "gets it" when it comes to next-generation computing applications.

Honestly, I think that most people don't need the mega-functionality of Microsoft Office. I started using Google Docs when I was job-hunting and needed access to my documents both at home and at work. It's incredibly easy to use and the ability to have immediate access to your documents from anywhere can be invaluable. It would probably be perfect for most home users and even small businesses. Come on, when was the last time you needed to use the Mail Merge function of Word or inserted a Table of Authorities?

You mean you can use a computer for other things?

2008-11-26T19:00:00.002-06:00

Or, why I can never buy a Mac.

Computer woes

2008-11-21T18:13:00.004-06:00

Well, this is frustrating. My computer has just recently taken to spontaneously shutting down for no apparent reason. No warning or anything, just in the middle of whatever I'm doing ... pfffft. I'm reasonably sure it just needs the power supply replaced, which is about a $100-150 fix.

But it's just over 3 years old and I had been thinking about replacing it this January. Replacing the power supply is a good 10-20% of the cost of a new computer. The idea of being without a computer for a protracted period strikes fear into my heart, so it seems reasonable to replace it early.

I haven't bought a computer in three years, so I've fallen behind in what's good, what's not, and what former players in the market are a shadow of themselves. I'm thinking about either going with a mail-order configurator like Cyberpower, but I've also considered getting a premade system at Circuit City or Best Buy and dropping in a decent graphics card. I'm avoiding Dell. I think their quality has improved over what it once was, but I think they're overpriced. Does anyone have any suggestions as to a vendor or experiences they'd like to share?

And just to stave off the inevitable, no a Mac is not an option.

UPDATE: No boot for me! It looks like the turning-off-unexpectedly problem has turned into a wont-even-boot problem. Nuts. Thank goodness for work laptops you can take home. Posting may be light for the next couple of weeks. Fortunately, I don't think I lost any data. Since this is probably a power supply problem, it should all be intact on the hard drive. When I get a new computer, I'll get an external drive encloser and drop my old hard drive into that. That way I'll have all my old data and a backup drive, too!

Hey, if you do mostly desktop applications, word processing, email and the like, a Mac is probably a good choice. On the other hand, you can get a decent PC suitable for doing all those things for a third of the price. Wow, it looks like you can even get an ultra-portable from Dell for $350. Admittedly that's probably not good for much other than web browsing and email, but damn, you can spend more than that on a PDA.

Get thee to IlliniPundit

2008-11-10T20:20:00.002-06:00

I was going to put up a link to Glock21's post about Prop 8, in which he is both more verbose and more eloquent than me when it comes to the issue. But it looks like he cross-posted it to IlliniPundit, where there is a surprisingly long comment thread. Unfortunately, the anti-marriage crowd is fairly vocal and self-righteous. So, I encourage everyone to visit and chime in with their $0.02. Just please be civil.

Why do conservatives hate history?

2008-11-09T09:16:00.004-06:00

Via Pharyngula, I found this conservative nitwit complaining that the Left is being discriminatory because ... they're opposed to discrimination:

Do the Left not understand that the majority of Californians want to keep the definition of marriage as it has been since the beginning of time?

From the Only True Bible(TM), 1 Kings 11:

And [Solomon] had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart.

"Beginning of time" does not mean what you think it means, dumbass.

My last thoughts on politics for a while

2008-11-05T21:38:00.001-06:00

One, it's good for it to be over, finally.

Two, to the GOP: neener, neener, neener.

Peeking behind the curtain of "voter fraud"

2008-11-02T12:58:00.002-06:00

Basically, what Ezra said:

All the evidence suggests that the actual threats to the "fabric of our democracy" come from disenfranchisement: Voter purges using programs with crude name-matching algorithms, insufficient voter machines in heavily populated urban centers, partisan challenges of individual voters when they attempt to vote. The literature leaves no doubt that huge numbers of legitimate voters lose the ability to weigh in on election day. By contrast, there's no empirical support for the idea that voter registration fraud is a significant factor in elections ("The only way Mickey Mouse could vote is if he shows up with a federally approved form of ID. And if they wanted to affect the election, they'd have to have multiple addresses and do it an incredible amount of times."). But by making noise about the rare instances of fraud rather than the constant instances of disenfranchisement, Republicans are able to frame the conversation around further restricting the ability to vote. The idea of expanding the franchise -- making it easier to vote and harder to be wrongfully purged -- is far from the conversation. And that's the point.

And again, I'm ashamed to be a Texan

2008-10-30T22:45:00.002-05:00

23% of Texans believe that Texans think Obama is a Muslim. For fuck's sake...

Why are so many Republicans delusional?

2008-10-28T18:34:00.003-05:00

I was watching Washington Journal on C-SPAN yesterday (sorry, their video server is down, so no link), when one of the callers said he could never vote for Obama because "he's convinced that there's Muslim money behind him." This seems to refer to some vague notion that he's a Manchurian Muslim or in the pocket of a conspiracy run by some sinister, shadowy ~~Jews~~ Muslims. It's similar, of course, to the claim that was being pushed by FOX News and the Republican Party a few months ago that Obama was himself a Muslim. My mother works with a guy that's also convinced Arabs have been plotting to put Obama in office for years.

You'll find conservatives are pushing the line that Obama isn't even African-American, he's really Arab-American. I guess being black isn't Muslim-scary enough. Here we see it at GOPUSA:

[Obama] is the illegitimate son of a Kenyan Arab; not of an American Black (so we don’t owe him apologies for slavery); and stepson of an Indonesian Moslem. Obama was a Moslem studying the Koran in a Madrassa when he was 10 and listed as a Moslem in his Catholic school later on.

Here is The Conservative Voice:

Does Arab ancestry explain Obama's Palestinian sympathy and opposition to deposing Saddam Hussein by force? ...

The Senator's background is: Caucasian from his mother [and] Arab African from his father. Before all the Obamiacs jump on the answer, the Kenyan Obamas are listed in the Kenyan census as Arab African not as Tribal 'Black' African. His father's great great grandmother was a Tribal African.

"Therefore by ethnic lines the Senator is 50% Caucasian, 43.75% Arab, and 6.25% Black African (from where the Senator gets his skin pigmentation).

Here's a picture of Obama with his "non-black" father:

Here's one blogger of some renown again claiming Obama is of Arab descent. Here's a commentator at World Net Daily (color me surprised) insinuating, as recently as September, that Obama really is a Muslim.

These people are clearly delusional. This stuff is so easily debunked, and has been so thoroughly debunked that their claims fall apart under even the most trivial of examination. So why is it so persistent?

But my larger question is why is this sort of lunacy particularly a Republican phenomenon? You don't see influential forces on the Democratic side speculating about whether McCain was turned by the Viet Cong during his capture and that he really is a Manchurian candidate. You don't see people suggesting that Sarah Palin's having spent her life within sight of Russia has made her into a Communist, her socialist redistribution of Alaskan oil monies notwithstanding. Honestly, I don't have an answer, why is it that this kind of foolishness is a purely Republican phenomenon?

How does this crap stay on the air?

2008-10-19T21:33:00.002-05:00

Last week I had the pleasure of driving cross-country, which meant a lot of listening to the radio. I came across one radio show, which turned out to be The Glenn Beck Program. As most right-wing news broadcasters do, Beck has a radio show where he spouts off crap with no one to challenge him, usually telling us how smart he is in the process. It's the same with Limbaugh, Hannity, and O'Reilly.

But I was amazed at what he was saying. He was talking about Obama's economic plan, and allowing 401(k) withdrawals:

...he wants to make penalty-free withdrawals from retirement accounts up to $10,000. We should not be doing anything that encourages people to take money out of their 401(k). If you're in an emergency, I get it. If you are going to lose your house, I get it. If your spouse has died and buried them, you have to do it, I get it. But not to pay off your credit card bills. Why would you do that? Quite frankly it's not to help people. It's to enslave people. Because the more you can deplete your 401(k) to pay off things that are not dire emergencies like death or losing your home, you deplete your savings.

The right-wing complains about so-called liberal media bias all the time. At most, you'll find someone like Olbermann accusing Bush of being incompetent. I can't think of a single case, and I challenge someone to find me an example, of a supposedly liberally-biased news person accusing a Republican of actual malice in his policies.

And not just malice, but lily-white Beck saying that Obama, an African-American, wants to "enslave" America? That's just beyond tasteless. It's like accusing Joe Lieberman of wanting to start another Holocaust.

This week it was announced that Beck's show will be leaving CNN Headline News and moving to ... wait for it ... FOX News. Color me surprised.

My thoughts on Palin

2008-10-06T12:02:00.004-05:00

Fig asks what I thought of the VP debate. I didn't want to bury my thoughts in the comments on a non-top-post, so I'm putting them here. Both she and David seem to have been traumatized by the debate.

Personally, it was about what I expected. I think by now it's pretty clear that Palin follows in Bush's intellectual footsteps: poorly informed, incurious, and ideological rigid. After the famous Couric interview Palin's main objective for this debate must have been not to embarrass her.

On the other hand, her comment that "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also" pretty much shows that she had nothing but contempt for the debate process. The debate wasn't so she could let the American people know about her track record, that's what the Internet is for. And newspapers. Which she should know, since she reads them all.

Palin's job in this interview was to not do anything embarrassing and repeat the campaign's talking points, which she did ad infinitum. Notice that whenever she was talking she never gave any specifics, just aw shucks, gee whiz, gosh darn, say-it-aint-so-joe soundbites intended to appeal to the so called "low information" voters, and I think that succeeded.

Fortunately, it looks like recent polling data shows she has turned off the voters that look for a bit more in their candidates than whether or not they would be a good person to have a beer with.

UPDATE: This piece by Radley Balko basically sums up what really bothers me about Republicans:

This growing anti-intellectualism on the right is alarming. It isn’t that Palin is dumb. I don’t think she is. It’s that she has no interest in learning, no interest in reading or experiencing anything that might challenge what she already knows she believes. She thinks with her gut, as Steven Colbert might put it. She’s a female W. And they seem to love her for it. The GOP has gone populist. Knowledge, worldliness, and learning are to be shunned, swept aside as East Coast elitism. It’s all about insularity, earthy values, and simpleness. Remember the beating John Kerry took in 2004 for daring to use the word “nuance?” There’s no room for complexity on the right anymore. It’s good and evil. Black and white. Us and them.

Drill, baby, drill

2008-10-02T22:03:00.004-05:00

Sarah Palin wants energy independence. She wants more offshore drilling and Alaskan drilling. Here's her version on energy independence:

Energy independence simply isn't possible while we're dependent on petroleum. Alaskan production would be approximately the same size as the yellow areas.

Hat tip: Ezra Klein

Should I watch the debate?

2008-10-02T19:43:00.000-05:00

I'm torn. It won't change who I vote for. On the other hand, if the Couric interview and the following, now-infamous SNL skit is anything to judge by, there is some possibility that it will be entertaining.

Why won't the press cover this?

2008-09-28T18:37:00.003-05:00

In this election season, we've seen expose after expose on Obama's church, Reverend White's teachings, Sarah Palin's daughter's pregnancy, John Edwards's affair, and so on. But virtually nothing about policy. Ezra Klein has an interesting piece about how John McCain's health care plan will massively raise taxes on everyone, result in 20 million Americans losing their health insurance, and basically end employer-based health insurance.

The individual insurance market is not the same as the employer-based insurance market. It sacrifices the bargaining powers of numbers for the cost-effectiveness of comparison shopping. It is fractured. It has higher administrative costs. Insurers can discriminate on the basis of preexisting conditions, geography, age, gender, and even simple whim. The risk pools are smaller. The deductibles are higher, as are the co-pays, and the spending caps are lower. And the individual insurance market is much more expensive: Buchmueller, Glied, Royalty, and Swartz estimate that "for a typical family that moves from group to individual coverage...the move to nongroup insurance will raise premiums for an identical policy by more than $2,000 per year." That increase alone chews up 40% of the family tax credit, and that's simply so the family does not lose ground. In addition, the tax credit is not indexed to health spending, and will sharply decline in value with each passing year. In sum, individuals will be in a costlier market, where insurers have more power to set prices and conditions, and McCain's tax credit will do less to help them with every passing year.

Yet, mark my words, the media narrative for this election will be that Obama is in favor of higher taxes.

Putting things in perspective, the graphical version

2008-09-22T22:06:00.004-05:00

I put together this little chart because I think it shows the impact of this bailout better than yesterday's post.

Crap, that's a lot of money.

Just putting things in perspective

2008-09-21T18:04:00.004-05:00

I feel like I should write a blog post about the financial bailout that was announced this week. I find it difficult, however, because I barely understand enough economics to balance my checkbook at the end of the month. I sort of get the impression that it's a Big Deal and, therefore, I should care about it, but I'm not entirely clear on what's going on, how we got here, and what's been proposed to do about it.

So I'm not going to talk about that. I just wanted to try to get an idea of the scale of the $700 billion bailout. Seven hundred billion dollars is a LOT of money. It's a bit enough number that I have difficulty wrapping my brain around it.

This bailout is the size of the cumulative cost of the Iraq war to date, plus 50%. David has a neat little widget that displays the cost of the Iraq War at any given instant, presumabely to show how fast the number is growing. This bailout is even bigger.
The bailout is four times larger than the cumulative cost of the War in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom, source). That's the war that we went into after, you know, a little thing called 9/11.
This is roughly fifty times larger than the airline bailout after 9/11. That's 5000%, mind you.
Remember the savings and loan crisis of the late 80s? (I don't, really. I was in high school and wasn't really paying attention.) That was about $125 billion. This is roughly six times larger than that.
The bailout alone will add an additional 7% to our national debt.

So the cost of this thing is staggering. And it's not limited to American banks, either. It turns out we will be bailing out lots of foreign-owned banks as well, as long as they have "significant operations" in the US. Excuse me, but when was the financial well-being of Swiss banks an American problem? Why isn't the Swiss government doing their part of the bailout?

All the decisions about who will be bailed out and for how much is left up to one, unelected guy. As Glenn Greenwald points out:

"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." Put another way, this authorizes Hank Paulson to transfer $700 billion of taxpayer money to private industry in his sole discretion, and nobody has the right or ability to review or challenge any decision he makes.

So who thinks we should privatize Social Security next?

Something's wrong with these numbers

2008-09-16T22:16:00.000-05:00

OK, So I'm kinda confused about something. The hurricane warning I saw for Ike insisted that Galveston residents faced "CERTAIN DEATH."* Somewhere between 20-50% of Galveston residents did not evacuate, or between 10,000 and 30,000 people. Rescuers have searched about 90% of Galveston and evacuated about another 1,500 people. The official death toll varies a bit, but is on the order of a dozen people.

So what happened to the other 8,500 - 28,500 people? Either I'm missing something, or these numbers just don't match up.

[*] Actually, the warning I saw said that residents "MAY FACE CERTAIN DEATH," which leaves open the possibility that they may not, making me wonder about what definition of "certain" was being used. Imminent natural disaster is no excuse for bad grammar.

Things I never thought I'd hear a Senator say

2008-09-11T14:39:00.000-05:00

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse at the hearings on the politicization of the Justice Department:

When it comes to politics, this is an administration that has no gag reflex.

(Oops, wrote this a while back but forgot to publish it.)

How the RNC should have ended

2008-09-07T21:40:00.002-05:00

This is just great. I really have no other words.

Via Pam's House Blend.

Congratulations to people I've never met!

2008-09-06T10:12:00.000-05:00

It appears that moon-grrl and Jonathan have gotten married. I'm assuming to each other. Congratulations!

Remember, shiny side out

2008-09-03T21:16:00.003-05:00

IlliniPundit really has descended into tinfoil hat territory. He's now complaining about what is, apparently, a media conspiracy to win Obama the election.

I doubt Palin, or the overblown and transparent media bloviation surrounding her, will seriously impact the dynamics of the race ... But I wonder, as I have for a while, if at some point the public tide will turn on this obvious and over-the-top media worship of Obama ... But I wonder, as I have for a while, if at some point the public tide will turn on this obvious and over-the-top media worship of Obama.

We've had to deal with non-stop allegations that ohmygod Barack Obama is a Muslim, he's not a US citizen, he's a Marxist, he's a socialist, he wasn't born in the United States, his wife hates whitey, his wife hates America, he doesn't say the Pledge, etc. This is apparently "media worship." For Odin's sake, major news outlets are having debates about whether Obama is actually the fucking Anti-christ.

Seriously, what did you expect would happen when McCain nominated, lets face it, a basically-unheard-of state governor for the second most powerful political position in the world, especially considering she's the first woman that Republicans have nominated to this level and that McCain passed over his own preferred candidate for her sake? That everyone would just ignore her?

I'm sorry, but the fact that her unmarried, minor daughter is pregnant is indeed news, particularly in light of her anti-sex-education and anti-teenage-mother policies. The fact that her husband hates America and wants to secede from the United Stats is news. The fact that she abused the power of her office to settle a family vendetta is news. The fact that she has been part of an anti-Semitic church for most of her adult life is news. Does Gordy really expect us to ignore all of these things?

Yeah, I'll grant that she's not a member of Alaska Independence Party and that early reports were mistaken. But her husband was.

That's the great thing about the myth of the "liberal media." It insulates Republicans from any criticism. It allows the faithful, when they are confronted by anything they find unpleasant, to simply avert their eyes and chant "media bias." And the media is so paralyzed with fear of accusations of being "liberal" from the likes of Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity that they bend over backwards to accommodate them.

Behold the power of the comma

2008-08-31T20:52:00.000-05:00

I was asked to fill out a job application web form the other day. Right below the title of the form was this:

Do not answer questions, which may be contrary to existing laws or regulations.

(I guess it's not just the comma, but the fact that whoever wrote this used "which" when he meant "that.")

By their headlines, shall ye know them

2008-08-27T21:31:00.002-05:00

IlliniPundit over at, um, IlliniPundit has on several occasions, claimed that Democrats are being overly-sensitive when it comes to race in this election. (Example.)

That's the advantage of privilege, isn't it? Whether is white privilege, heterosexual privilege, or male privilege, one of the benefits is that you don't even have to realize it's there. A corollary to that is that you don't have to wonder about those borderline cases. Until I'd read a few feminist blogs, I'd never actually noticed that paper towel commercials always show a smiling woman mopping up some mess or another, either made by a child or while some hapless male looks on in bewilderment. I'd never even thought about how our society often makes jokes that imply that rape is a complement.

So maybe it's easy for the (I assume) white IlliniPundit to pooh-pooh the racism that may be inherent in political ads this season. But think about this: Ann Coulter's August 20th column was titled "Constitutional Scholar Obama Questions Legality Of Slavery Ban."

Really. One of the most visible and most syndicated conservative writers in our country just wrote a column suggesting that a black Presidential candidate might approve of slavery.

No, race won't be a factor in this election. Not at all.