That Blogger flag

You'll notice a new button in the Blogger title bar up top. They've instituted a "Flag as Objectionble" option for all the splogs (spam logs) that are filling up Blogspot. The number of these damn things is incredible. Just click on "Next Blog" a few times and you'll see what I mean. Here's one dedicated to kitchen cabinets. I especially love how that one has been hit by a spammer in the comments.

Google is also instituting a captcha to stop spam comments. I've never had a problem with those here, so I have intention no turn it on.

Dealing with the splogs is a good idea. It's in Google's own best interest, of course, too. These things dilute the Blogger brand and poison their own search index.

This phenomenon is just another example of how a few spamming parasites can make life a little more difficult for everyone else.

When will I learn?

Somehow I need to get it through my thick skull that going grocery shopping on the Sunday of the weekend before classes start is not a good idea.

On a related note, it turns out that is possible to be more annoying that talking all the time on your cell phone in a public place: use your cell phone as a walkie talkie so everyone can hear both sides of your conversation.

We, the important people...

Dave over at Davenetics (formerly Electablog) points out:

We’ve seen how the Sheehan story has pushed Iraq back into the headlines and stirred up unanswered questions. But you have to wonder, how can we be in a war and not have really been that focused on it during the pre-Sheehan months?

Quick, name the top issues being debated when it comes to the Iraqi Constitution…

We’ve grown bored with what is supposedly the struggle of an era.

You would have a hard time disagreeing with him looking at the news. CNN, FOX News, and MSNBC all have as their top story right now the Northwest mechanics' strike.

There's an AP story this morning that says the US may be softening to the idea of enshrining in the forming Iraq constitution that the Koran as the final arbiter of their law. In other words, that Sharia or at best some form of Sharia-lite will be the law of the land.

I asked before, what will we do if the Iraqis elect another Taliban to power? What will we do if women become second class citizens and gay teens are executed in the public square? I fear all we will do is pat ourselves on the back and pull our troops out.

Yes, Virginia, the universe does behave rationally

I came across P. Z. Myers's excellent Pharyngula a while ago, but lost it. I remembered the name of his blog, but couldn't get the spelling right (even in the Google spell check), and so couldn't get back to it. Thanks to Squire for his post and the link.

Myers also links to an article by Kevin Drum that pretty much sums up the recent kerfluffle about Intelligent Design:

Look, this controversy isn't really about ID vs. evolution. It's about who gets to decide what's science and what isn't — and in that sense the radical Christian right understands the stakes better than much of the evolution crowd. After all, once you concede that the revealed wisdom of a millennia-old text is a legitimate substitute for empirically based science, creationism is only the start. The book of Genesis expresses opinions on much more than simply the creation of Adam and Eve.

That's why this issue is being debated at school board meetings and on newspaper editoral pages: creationists can not win the argument (and, in fact, lost it a long time ago) in the peer-reviewed pages of scientific journals.

Humanity began a new phase in its development with the Enlightenment. In some ways, creationists are trying to turn back that clock of Reason that began back in the 17th century and return us to the Dark Ages. We must rage against the dying of this light; as a people, a society, and a species, we can not afford not to.

Marines are such wusses

If you weren't paying attention to the political blogosphere, a week and a half ago there was a special election in Ohio. Paul Hackett was the Democrat running against Jean Schmidt in a district that tends to go heavily Republican (it went for Bush by 26 points in 2004). Hackett was a recently returned Iraqi veteran, and was actually criticized for it by his opponent. There was a big push of support for Hackett in the liberal blogs in the last week of the election, but it wasn't enough. The good news is that it was an astonishingly close margin of only 4%, which bodes well for 2006.

But what was most shocking was that Rush "Support the Troops or You're a Terrorist" Limbaugh treated him, an American veteran, with an astonishing degree of disrespect. Here is one exchange he had with a caller:

RUSH: He was in the Civilian Affairs Unit, and this is a Washington Post story (it says here) from July 30th. "A lawyer and a major in the Marine reserves, Hackett volunteered last year to serve in Iraq and spent seven months there in the civilian affairs job, including service around Ramadi and Fallujah...So he volunteered to serve, spent seven months in a civilian affairs job... Okay, call him a staff puke if that's what you want, but civilian affairs, staff puke.

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about these two cities:

Ramadi: Ramadi is considered to be the southwest point of Iraq's Sunni Triangle. It has been a focal point of resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. On April 6, 2004, at least 12 U.S. Marines were killed by guerilla forces in Ramadi, in an apparent effort to relieve the ongoing siege of nearby Fallujah.

Fallujah: Fallujah has become one of the most dangerous areas for coalition military troops during the occupation of Iraq. Since the occupation began, more than 200 Americans have died in Fallujah — more than any city except Baghdad.

Yeah, Hackett must really be a big pussy to hang around Ramadi and Fallujah.

Rush later accused him of going to Iraq with ulterior motives:

The big picture here is they got another liberal Democrat trying to hide behind a military uniform...And it appears that, you know, he goes to Iraq to pad the resume...

Can you just imagine the nuclear screaming hissy fit that Republicans would throw if anyone attacked a conservative Iraqi vet's service? There would be accusations of treason, hating our troops, and everything short of devil worship. Oh wait, that's pretty much standard fare.

It's is a testament to the power of the Right Wing Spin Machine that somehow Bush's minimal service during the Vietnam War became more heroic than Kerry's (which one took a bullet?), that it can effectively question the patriotism of Max Cleland after he lost three limbs in Vietnam, and that it can fearlessly call Paul Hackett a "puke." That last, mind you, coming from a man that didn't serve in Vietnam because he had a cyst on his ass. (It was later reclassified as his head.)

There have long been apocryphal stories of Vietnam vets getting spit on in airports as they returned from the war. (Those dirty hippie liberals, ya know.) I guess we know who's doing the spitting now.

He didn't mean *that* kind of terrorist

(This is a bit of a follow up to this post about Joe Scarborough advocating racial profiling in random bag searches.)

A guy was caught at an Oklahoma City airport today trying to sneak what looks to be a bomb onto an airplane. From his picture, it looks like he's as white as I am.

But something tells me we won't hear much call from the Right about racial profiling of white guys.

Freaky statistic

There's an article over at Yahoo (from PlanetOut) about people not necessarily supporting their loved ones taking part in HIV vaccine trials. I rather think the article makes a bigger deal out of the findings than is justified; just because I don't want someone I care about with cancer to get the placebo in a clinical trial doesn't mean I don't want there to be a cure for cancer.

But this has to be one of the freakier statistics I've ever seen in my life:

One of the most shocking discoveries for pollsters was that several people believe an HIV vaccine already exists and is being kept a secret. Out of those polled, 47 percent of African Americans, 26 percent of Hispanics and 13 percent of MSM said they believed in such a conspiracy theory.

Let's look at that again: HALF of all African Americans believe there exists a working HIV vaccine, but it's being kept secret.

Sometimes I wonder if I live on the same planet as the rest of the world.

Why won't gay.com do something about the spam bots?

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

A dozen red Turd Blossoms, please

When asked about Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove on Monday, Dubya said, "Karl's got my complete confidence. He's a valuable member of my team." Now, he's previously backtracked on his promise to fire any leaker in this case, refusing to comment because the investigation is ongoing. It seems almost a foregone conclusion that the investigation will reveal he was definetly at least one of the leakers. If that happens, the reluctance to fire him because the investigation is ongoing will turn into a reluctance to fire him because criminal charges haven't even been fire. If he's indicted by Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, that will then turn into a refusal to fire him because he's "innocent until proven guilty." I'm betting he would hold his office up until an actual conviction, at least, which would likely be after Bush leaves office.

But Bush's "complete confidence" doesn't wash. I can only come up with two possible interpretations of his statement:

• Bush doesn't think Karl was involved in the leak
• Bush actually approves of outing Plame's covert identity and the damage to our national security it caused

I just can't imagine any other way you can parse Bush's continuing "confidence" in Rove. The former possibility would be willfull blindness, at the very least, not to mention a striking lapse of judgement. The latter possibility, however, is almost frightening to contemplate. Is it even possible that Karl revealed her identity with the approval or possibly even under instruction from the President? Remember, this is an administration where even those involved in it have said it has absolutly no policy wing; everything is driven by political considerations.

The sidebar has a new blog, which I've been reading for a while, and I will quote Seeing the Forest where Dave Johnson said:

Rove outed a covert CIA agent working on keeping WMD out of the hands of terrorists. This "rolled up" her network of contacts, possibly getting some killed. And by exposing her he exposed her cover company, possibly causing damage to other agents and networks as well.

Rove did this at a time of war against terrorists. His act exposed all of us to increased danger of attack by those WMDs she was trying to keep away from terrorists.

Hook this, bitch

For some reason, I'm watching Hooking Up on ABC. It's a 5-part documentary about eleven women doing the Internet dating thing in New York City.

First of all, I don't understand why it's exclusively women. That's not true, I do. It's because women are the ones that are supposed to want a relationship, and men are the ones that are supposed to just want to go out and get laid. And we can't challenge that, can we?

But secondly, these women are absolutely horrible. I'm only half-watching it (and half playing Nethack), but I'm going to take it on faith that these women have any redeeming characteristics at all. One woman not only lied about her job, but lied about her name. Sure, don't give your home address to a guy you just emailed online, that's sensible. But not to trust him with your first name? That's just nutty. Another woman actually called a girlfriend from the bathroom to give her a call back with an "emergency" so she could get out of the date early. The guy wasn't exactly a winner, but I always thought this was the stuff that only ever happened on TV sitcoms. At some point, according to the previews, one woman is going to be complaining about being dumped via email, which is something that another of the women has just done to a guy while the camera watched.

It makes me glad I've given up on ever dating anyone.

Get me the hell out of Scarborough country

I caught Joe Scarborough on the Today show this morning defending racial profiling:

Oh, I don't have a problem with it for the same reason why I would have no problem with police chiefs in the south focusing on conservative Christian young males if there's another abortion clinic bombing... You look at abortion clinic bombings and unfortunately extremist Christian white males are the ones that have to be focused upon because they're the ones over the years that continue to commit these crimes.

You look at a situation like this, though, and whether it's on a subway or on a plane, and it makes absolutely no sense to fo--for the TSA to frisk my two-year-old baby daughter, which they do. It makes no sense for them to frisk my 72-year-old mother, which they do. We have limited resources, got a $400 billion debt--deficit right now, and the thing is we, you know, we aren't even protecting our ports or our rail lines because we get these limited resources. It seems to me we've got to focus on the people who, unfortunately, committed the 2001 terror attacks in the U--in the US; also USS Cole in 2000, Cobart Towers in '97...

The unspoken subtext in his statement is that "the people" that want to harm us are evil brown people. You can tell who they are just by looking at them. He's making the common (and very racist) assumption that Muslim equals Arab. Which is of course ridiculous. You can't identify anyone as a Muslim extremist by his appearance any more than you can identify a Klansman if he's not wearing a bedsheet.

His opponent was Hussein Ibish, of the Progressive Muslim Union of North America. As the blog I linked to above points out, Ibish wipes up the floor with Scarborough. Of the two, Ibish is the one with lighter skin, and could probably be taken as just any white guy on the street if you didn't know better, and if you didn't hear his accent.

Even if you accept Scarborough's claim that racial profiling will help, we'd have to search:

• Middle Easterners: OK, this one is a bit obvious. But, frankly, I'm not sure I could tell an Israeli from a Palistian from an Iraqi on sight.
• African Americans: One-third of American Muslims are black. Furthermore, the suspects in the British train bombings were East African, not Middle Eastern.
• Hispanics: Jose Padilla, the dirty bomb suspect currently held without charge in South Carolina, is Hispanic.
• Asians: This would include Indians, Pakistanis, and various other South Asians. People typically forget that the only chemical weapon terrorist attack on civilians in recent history happened in Japan in 1995.
• Brits: Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was born in South London. I had to put him in as a special section, because I honestly can't tell what ethnic group he belongs to. Go look at his picture over at Wikipedia. Honestly, can't tell if he is of Middle Eastern or Hispanic decent.

We'd basically have to profile half the population. (And, what, there just can't be any white Muslims in the world?) And the best part is that it won't work. The goal of terrorists isn't to attack any particular location or building, but to wreck as much havoc as they possibly can. They will go where the weak spot is. First, they tried to blow up the airport. When that failed, they took box cutters and made a very successful, if low-tech attack. Notice that they didn't try to do that again. The next attack was a guy with a bomb in his shoe. Terrorists adapt. When Israel was searching young Palistinean men, they started sending young women to do their bombing.

Imagine that (God forbid) there was a truck bombing of a government building, killing hundreds. Well, that sounds like we should start racial profiling of Muslims when renting trucks. Oh, but wait, that was done by a white guy. OK, so what if there was a bombing of a big sporting event, instead? Oh, wait, that was a white guy, and a Christian to boot. So why aren't we profiling white guys? Because we -- "we" being the white surburban types Scarborough is playing to -- aren't afraid of young white guys. We're afraid of the weird brown people that talk funny and don't worship Jesus in the correct way.

Basing security on what we think dangerous people will look like is no security at all.

Update (11 Aug 2005): White guy caught trying to sneak a bomb onto an airplane. No word from the Right about racial profiling of white guys.

You mean it gets worse?

The entire civilized world was shocked at the release of the Abu Ghraib photos. (The entire civilized world except for Rush Limbaugh, who said that it was no worse than a fraternity hazing.) I knew that we had only seen a small fraction of the existing photos, and that even more were scheduled to be released this week. I'm sure we would have been shocked all over again at more of the humiliation and sexual degradation that our brave soldiers subjected captured Iraqis to.

I didn't realize it was as bad at it was, though. The rest of the world has been talking about this sort of thing for a while now, which explains why we are so beloved across the face of the globe. A blogger over at Kos, points out a passage from an article from 2004: (no that's not a typo)

The unreleased images show American soldiers beating one prisoner almost to death, apparently raping a female prisoner, acting inappropriately with a dead body, and taping Iraqi guards raping young boys, according to NBC News. [emphasis mine]

These things sound horribly unlikely on their face. But think, if we'd heard a couple of years ago that American soldiers would have been convicted for naked pyramids of prisoners or for threatening prisoners with attack dogs, how many of us would have believed it?

We know that prisoners at Gitmo were "subjected to strip-searches with no security value." (Presumably that means body cavities and everything.) We know that at least one prisoner was forcibly sodimized with a glowstick at Abu Ghraib. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller was sent from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib and told to "Gitmo-ize" it, where he told officers to "treat the prisoners like dogs." It's not clear whether that was meant literally or figuratively. It looks like the officers decided to do both.

Remember those additional pictures? The Bush administration is now refusing to obey a judge's order and release the photos. Why? We don't really know. The brief to the judge was sealed and even the ACLU, who brought the suit to gain access to the photos, doesn't know.

Sweet Serenity

Just to show up David, I'm letting you know that the international trailer for Serenity has been released. (Be warned, something about that file, and all the mirrors I can find online, locks my computer up 1:43 in, just when the Serenity logo comes onscreen. Still worth it.)

Even better, is this line I found on the IMDB trivia page:

According to an interview with Alan Tudyk, this is the first movie in a three-picture Firefly contract with Universal.

Three Firefly pictures? Excuse me, I'll be in my bunk.

Aloha, BBQ

I would have sworn I'd written a blog post about the closing of the Happy Wanderer "international cafe" on Green Street and the opening of some Hawaiian barbeque place, and how it probably wouldn't manage to stay open the rest of the week. I guess I was wrong, and only blogged it in my head.

Anyway, the Hawaiian barbecue place has now closed, too. No big surprise there. I just don't understand why businesses have such a problem on Green Street. I think the real estate must be horribly expensive. That, and no one actually wants to *go* there, so they rely on the captive student audience.

Which makes the fact that they're not just putting in a Noodles and Company at Green and Sixth a bad idea, but also that they're building a whole new building to put it in. There's also another building going up on Green around, oh, Fourth, I think. Passing by that one this afternoon, it struck me that it might be a parking structure. Which is good, because they took over pretty much the only parking lot in the area to put it up, whatever it is.

It's really amazing how fast those buildings go up. The old Wendy's went away in a day. They spent a long time once the building was gone, working on the foundation and, um, other building-type stuff. The metal superstructure went up in just a couple of days. Putting the brick front on the building seems to be taking a while, but that involves lots of hand-work, I guess. I just hope it will be a useful building once the Noodles goes out of business.

Faux News

For some reason (I was bored) I went to FOX News's website today. Fortunately I don't actually get the channel on my cable subscription, or I'd have popped a gasket. Here's what's running on Hannity & Colmes today:

Was Karl Rove set up?

The controversy over Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove continues to heat up... As the Democrats demand the resignation of the president's top aide, conservatives say this is becoming a political fist fight. Who's right? Is this nothing more than a "tempest in a teapot" as some have charged?

Yeah, because Karl Rove is such a political newbie that, when he outed the wife of an administration critic, endangering her life and ending her career as a spy, it was by accident.

Very Biblical...

It looks like the bigotry of the father is being visited upon the son. Just a couple of days ago, I blogged about Zach, sent to an ex-gay boot camp by his small minded family. It turns out that Zach is indeed real, and his last name is S-------.

And wow, is his family ever small minded. Zach's father is quoted on CBN (I won't link, so as not to increase their Google PageRank):

We felt very good about Zach coming here because… to let him see for himself the destructive lifestyle, what he has to face in the future, and to give him some options that society doesn't give him today,” S----- said. “Knowing that your son... statistics say that by the age of 30 he could either have AIDS or be dead.

Now, clearly, Mr. S is a pig. But I want to know what was left out in that bold ellipsis? CBN has already been ... shall we say "creative" with their editing.

Now I do think Mr. S is something of a bigoted nitwit, but it's hard not to think that he's doing what -- in his own mind -- is best for his son. After all, who wants their children to burn in hell for all eternity? But Mr. S has said that he put his kid in there so he wont "have AIDS or [be] dead" by the time he's 30. Why, then, would he put his son in the care of a man that says he'd rather see his "patients" dead rather than still gay at the end of the program?

Updated (27 Aug. 2005): I took out the last name. The kid's sixteen; doesn't seem right to list his full name on the public Web.

Candle blogging

IGI 941 container wax. The wick is 51-32-18 zinc core, which I think is too big. Wet spots like crazy, but I think that's expected for this wax.

Battlestar and Firefly

I think Sci-Fi's new remake of Battlestar Galactica was one of the more underappreciated TV shows of last season. Season two premiers tomorrow, and I have to say that I'm looking forward to it. I don't think it has the quirkyness or the personality of Firefly or Buffy, but it more than makes up for it in excellent acting, an engrossing plot, and a deep backstory (of which we have seen only a taste).

For the space footage, the show doesn't have the grand, sweeping, majestic cinematography that we came to expect from shows like Star Trek, but rather a shaky camera, rack-focus shots, and it just looks much more like you would expect from something a ship's crew running for their lives threw together. I kept being struck last season at how much the effects reminded me of those the much-lamented Firefly.

It turns out that there's a reason for that. The same shop that did much of the effects for Firefly, is now doing them for Battlestar. I'm glad to see they're getting work. And they have a bit of a sense of humor, too. Here's Serenity in the first episode of Battlestar:

(Pic shamlessly stolen from Fireflyfans.net.)

Space age Velveelon

I just used a leftover half-brick of Velveeta, then realized it had to be six months old if it was a day. Is this stuff cheese or plastic?

Digby puts it well

Digby was talking about the recent Supreme Court finding about medical marijuana when he said this, which I think describes the entire political climate these days:

The court is operating on the same basis that the political system operates. The liberals and moderates in the minority play by the rules thinking that consistency and intellectual integrity are important and that people will hold it against them if they deviate from their stated position. The shrinking number of real conservatives pay lip service to their belief system as long as it won't affect the outcome: they are subject to the same intimidation as the moderates and liberals if they don't. The right wing radicals just power their way through using any means necessary, willingly taking the help of liberals and moderates who perform the function of useful idiots with their fealty to process and institutional integrity in a time of pure power politics.

I think that basically sums up the politics of the Right these days. It's all about power, nothing more, nothing less. See, for example, how Sensenbrenner abruptly ended the recent debate on the reauthorization of the Patriot Act. Gee, throw a temper tantrum much?

Love In Action, my ass

David pointed me to the Zach's blog. Zach is a 16 year old boy currently enrolled against his will in an "ex-gay" camp by his parents. I'm not going to rant about the whole ex-gay nonsense, either you know that it's a bunch of fundamentalist Christian brainwashing or, well, you're an idiot. Read the rules of the camp, posted on his blog. They're quite odd. On the whole, they speak for themselves, but I would point out that the camp clearly associates being gay with a lack of appropriately masculine traits and clothing in men (e.g. the need for short hair) and overly masculine ones in women (e.g. the requirement to shave their legs). What I find very disturbing is the requirement for social isolation: "clients" are prohibited from having any contact with anyone outside the household, whether friends or family; no non-prior-approved media is allowed, including faggy non-Christian classical music such as Beethoven or Bach; and one of the applicable punishment for rule-breaking is "isolation from the group." It all sounds very cultlike.

The really frustrating part is that I want to say that the parents are completely within their rights to do this. In a pluralistic society such as ours it is necessary that we allow families to raise children as they see fit. I don't even doubt that Zach's parents are doing what they think is best for him, in their own small-minded, poisonous way. The reason I feel that way is simple: the alternative could have the Texas state government removing kids from their gay parents for exposing them to "unhealty" lifesyles or somesuch.

That is, I did think that. I thought that until I read this quote, attributed to the head of the program, John Smid:

I would rather you commit suicide than have you leave Love In Action wanting to return to the gay lifestyle. In a physical death you could still have a spiritual resurrection; whereas, returning to homosexuality you are yielding yourself to a spiritual death from which there is no recovery.

So we have an ex-gay camp that preaches to emotionally-vulnerable and probably emotionally-traumatized kids that they are better off dead than thinking they might be gay. That crosses the line from religious teachings and into abuse.

This is a common theme with religious groups. They are more interested in saving souls than saving lives. We see it every day with AIDS and prohibitions on teaching about condoms.

It's late and I don't want to write anymore, so I'll let stand what is probably a fairly incoherent rant. I just also want to say that I have some minor doubts about the legitimacy of Zach's blog. I am fairly sure, but not entirely convinced, that Zach is a real teenager. We will have to wait until after he gets out and see.

Oh, and we'll have to wait a bit longer than we thought to hear from Zach. His compulsory stay in the camp has just been extended from two weeks to eight.

Weird things you get in the mail

I feel so special. St. Matthew's Churches sent me a Bible faith handkerchief today. I'm supposed to open my Bible to Acts 19, place the Bible faith handkerchief on it, and send it back, and they will send me back a "wonderful, free, spiritual gift!" Wow. How could I possibly be so lucky?

OK, seriously, now. What really disappoints me is the testimonials -- everyone valid and really sent in by a lucky handkerchief recipient, I'm sure -- that are on the accompanying flier. There are eight, and five pertain to receiving some sort of financial "blessing." Because of all the problems in the world, Jesus's biggest priority is fixing up your house.

What really frosts this cake is that it appears to be a scam. They're trying to get people to send them money.

Prayer by Letters

Preying on the Prayerful

And yet there are people naiive/stupid enough to fall for this crap.

Deeper Throat

It's rumored that on tomrrow's McLaughlin group, Karl Rove will be outed as the person that leaked Valerie Plame's name to the press. You know, when he gave out the name of a covert CIA operative in retaliation for her husband's anti-administration actions?

My guess is that, within the hour, FOX News or another right-wing media outlet will have someone comparing him to Deep Throat, and lauding him for the danger he put his career in to keep the American public informed.

These days, only blowjobs get you impeached.

Queer eye for the straight homeowner

What is with the house on Springfield with the 8-foot-high fence? The one between Mattis and Prospect. It's very tall, and completely unpainted raw wood. It's not fencing anything in, because it's open to the driveway. Nor is it so you can't see the road, because the slats are so far apart you can see right through them.

I'm not saying fences are bad. A number of people in that neighborhood have small 3-4 foot high ones, painted white that can be rather attractive. This one is just freakin' ugly.

I didn't get the newsletter

This past weekend was, apparently, Pride. I didn't even know. Bad queer, no biscuit.

My experience with my Panasonic CT-27HL14

This is the review I just posted over at Amazon for my crappy TV. Here's hoping it gets picked up by a few search engines.

To make a long story short, this TV died on me in less than a year. It turns out that something is wrong inside the picture tube, and it must be replaced. Looking here, this seems to be a common problem. The tube itself is under warranty, but the authorized repair shop is so far away, and the labor costs are so high, that repairing it is not cost-effective and it's a giant paperweight after only eleven months of ownership.

The only authorized repair place is fifty miles away, and there's is no way I can transport this on my own. After spending about $200 on a diagnostic and travel for the repair technician, I find out that the total repair cost to fix the TV will be $450, about the replacement cost.

Panasonic customer support is *horrible.* I spent weeks trying to get someone there to help me. Three times I was told that my issue had to be forwarded to a "field service technician," and that he would be contact me within 24 to 48 hours. No one ever did. Only two months later was I finally able to get someone to help me. Panasonic has an "unsatisfactory" rating at the Better Business Bureau.

So now I'm going to go buy a Sony. I'm sure it and I will be very happy together.

The frustrating part is that I strongly suspect Panasonic knows there is a flaw with this model. Of the ten reviews posted at Amazon, six of them describe almost this exact same problem. Now I realize that only people really happy or really unhappy are going to go to the trouble of reviewing something, but the fact that there are so many, nearly-identical problems reported is suspicious at best. And the first review tech I spoke to said that they've been seeing a lot of problems with Panasonic picture tubes.

UPDATE: Are you coming here because you've had a problem with this same TV model? Leave a comment, please.

Sorry, not Christ-centered enough

Just in case you didn't think the right-wing was trying to turn this country into a theocracy, a judge has banned a family from sharing their religion with their son:

An Indianapolis father is appealing a Marion County judge's unusual order that prohibits him and his ex-wife from exposing their child to "non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals."

The parents practice Wicca, a contemporary pagan religion that emphasizes a balance in nature and reverence for the earth.

Cale J. Bradford, chief judge of the Marion Superior Court, kept the unusual provision in the couple's divorce decree last year over their fierce objections, court records show. The order does not define a mainstream religion.

So obviously unconstitutional. Yet so very predictable.

NY Times article on gay marriage

There's a long article on gay marriage and the Christian moralists that oppose it in today's NY Times. It's long, but I recommend reading it.

This paragraph toward the end I think sums it up best:

But, of course, the Christian activists aren't vague in their opposition [to gay marriage]. For them, the issue isn't one of civil rights, because the term implies something inherent in the individual -- being black, say, or a woman -- and they deny that homosexuality is inherent. It can't be, because that would mean God had created some people who are damned from birth, morally blackened. This really is the inescapable root of the whole issue...

The author is right, of course. It seems to all come down to whether being gay is inborn or a developed characteristic. If it's developed, it can't really be immoral, can it? And that's why all these "ex-gay" programs exist, even in contradition to all the science that says they don't work. As far as I know, there are no studies supporting the contention that these programs work. Attraction (which is what we're really talking here, not behavior) is too innate, too intwined in our personalities to be changed by a force of will. But they don't care about fact, about science, all they care about is their own little hateful interpretation of the Bible, which just can't be wrong, can it?

One great bit is how these "pro-family" actvists keep claiming that marriage is as it always has been for thousands of years, since the dawn of time. As one woman put it, "The gay activists are trying to redefine what marriage has been basically since the beginning of time and on every continent. My concern is for the children -- for the future." Honey, from the beginning of time and on every contenent, marriage has been between one man and a handful of women who were essentially his property. Marriage as an emotional bond between two people is a recent development that isn't even two centuries old.

But then again, this fight isn't about facts. Facts are inconvenient. It's about perception. And the perception on the anti-family side is that they are fighting for a virtue that goes back to the dawn of creation (6000 years ago). That's a hard notion to defeat, whether or not it is true.

(Via Americablog.)

Not a good sign

At the Cinescape Coming Attractions site, I came across this tidbit on the upcoming Rendevous with Rama movie:

As [director David Fincher] told Cinescape: “We’re still working on the script. It’s probably one of the most pilfered books of the last 30 years. There are so many science fiction films that owe at least a narrative twist or a notion to Rendezvous with Rama. I mean, Star Trek – The Motion Picture, Alien, Armageddon, Independence Day – all of these movies have plot devices and elements that are taken from it, so I don’t feel you can just do the book. I think you have to re-invent it.”

He also revealed his vision of the film would be almost completely CGI: “It’s basically a motion-capture movie. The environment is completely synthetic. The actors are performing in real-time, but you’re editing the real-time component so you can introduce the weightlessness and get the performance that you want.”

Oh dear. I hope we're not going to get another piece of crap with flashy effects that is only peripherally related to the great book it's "based on."

A bloggerific idea

Here is a great idea: Plogress. Take the legislative information from THOMAS at the Library of Congress, and turn it into a blog. Separate each Senator's and Representative's votes out onto their own page and give each an RSS feed.

The only down side is that it's all in the incredibly legalistic language of Congress (voted yes to tabling the motion to vote for the amendment that would remove paragraph 2 of subsction C of ...), but it's a great way for those citizens who actually give a damn about finding out what their elected officials actually do for them.

Go to my Rep, Timothy V. Johnson's, page. It tells you nothing about what he's doing. You can get a list of legislations he's sponsored and co-sponsored, but nothing about what he's voted for, what issues he's working on, or anything else about his actual activities. The guy was elected in my district, and I could never find out anything about his stance on any issues, and I was looking. His News page hasn't been updated in over a month, and then it's less-than-weekly. Come on, communicating this sort of thing is what blogs are perfect for; Dean shows that in his Presidential race and his Blog for America. Let's see some attempt to keep your consituents informed.

How can they say this stuff with a straight face?

This scares the hell out of me. There are currently 520 detainees at Guantanimo Bay. How many have actually been charged with being terrorists? A grand total of four.

It's always been clear that the administration isn't at all concerned with silly little things like "laws" and "evidence." Now they are formally claiming that the detainees can be held at Gitmo forever.

From a Reuters article:

It's our position that, legally, they can be held in perpetuity. (Deputy Associate Attorney General J. Michael Wiggins)

and

I think that we can hold them as long as the conflict endures (Brig. Gen. Thomas Hemingway)

"The conflict" there being the War on Terror. Which of course we can't win, because it's not meant to be won. There is no enemy to surrender, there is no capital to conquer, there is no leader that can be killed. The War on Terror is meant to scare us into giving up power over our lives. It's meant to be a tool for political speechmaking. Imagine tomorrow that we win the WOT. How would we know? Is there a certain time without a car bomb going off somewhere on the planet that will define the end? Will it end with the deaths of bin Laden and Abu whazzizname Zarqawi? Or will someone from the Justice Department just stand up one day and say, "OK, we're done! Last person out turns the lights off."

Now the administration is actually saying that, given a declaration from Donald Rumsfeld or some other official that you are a terrorist, bam, you can be held forever without access to any legal recourse or oversight of your situation.

Remember Bush's Education Secretary has called our largest teacher's union a "terrorist organization." Any Democrat or "liberal" that speaks out against the Bush administration is often accused of being soft on terror.

If we permit the government this power it will be misued. It's not a matter of if, but when. Maybe not today, but God forbid there is another terrorist attack in this country.

Nancy Grace-less

I don't get CNN Headline News, but from what I saw of her on CNN during the Petersen trial, Nancy Grace's show is every bit the rush-to-judgment, shrill platform for her rantings I expected it to be. This SF Gate article details what appears to be more lynching mentality than legal analysis:

At the three-month mark, the Nancy Grace show is already strangely skewed from the real world. Guests who advocate a wait-and-see attitude toward suspects are used as punching bags. Guests who bring a scary amount of anger are praised, often becoming regulars.

"I think the common theme of this show tonight, Nancy, is very clear," victims' advocate Marc Klaas said during one of 14 appearances he's made on her show. "There are people on this earth who should never be allowed to give birth."

But as FOX News and Bill O'Reilley and his ilk have shown us, people aren't interested in watching reasoned analyses of the news. They want shrill rhetoric and wild accusations. A certain looseness with the truth isn't amiss, either, so long as it's in line with their ideology. Soon, I expect there will be chair-throwing between pundits.

Feed me!

OK, I set up an Atom feed for the blog. Works fine for me in Thunderbird.

This is the actual feed address: http://narciblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml

I imagine sticking this in your favorite reader software might work.

Imagine this

I want you to imagine something for a moment. Modern medicine is learning that certain virus are risk factors for certain cancers. This is oddly enough, good news, because we know we can prevent the spread of viruses and stop them from infecting people through vaccines. So imagine if a virus has been linked to a nasty form of cancer. So strongly linked, that 98% percent of the people with this cancer also have the virus. A cancer that kills thousands of American women every year, and is the number one cancer among women of childbearing age in the developing world. A virus that is so common that roughly 15% of adults have it, and may not know. Now imagine that we have a vaccine that may be able to prevent women from contracting the virus, and may protect them against this form of cancer.

Now imagine that someone wants to stop your daughter, your sister, or your mother from getting that vaccine because ... she might get the wrong idea and actually have sex.

This isn't a hypothetical situation. Conservatives want to do this in our country right now with an experimental HPV vaccine.

No mention of the existing Hepatitis A or B vaccines, or any of the HIV vaccines currently under research. I guess we shouldn't give those to American women either, or else they'd become raving sluts.

RSS?

I've been playing around with RSS for a while, reading a couple of my regular blogs through Thunderbird. I also tried RSS Bandit for a while, but didn't like the interface.

Does anyone see any reason to put up an RSS feed for my little blog? Would it make anyone's life easier?

Sorry, I seem to have peed on your Bible

A few weeks ago, Newsweek reported there had been reports of guards mistreating the Koran at Gitmo. Their anonymous government source then couldn't recall exactly what military report where he'd read that, and the resulting firestorm caused Newsweek to retract the entire story. It was accused by the White House of inciting Muslim riots worldwide, causing the deaths of over a dozen people, and damaging American interests.

The Pentagon said that no such abuse had taken place on May 17:

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman denied the substance of Newsweek's original report, calling the article "irresponsible" and "demonstrably false."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the article had "had serious consequences. People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged."

Making note of the rioting and deaths, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the news media needed to be more careful.

"I think it was Mark Twain who said that something that's not true can speed around the world three or four times in a matter of seconds … while truth is still trying to put their boots on," Rumsfeld said after a hearing on Capitol Hill. "And people have said, my goodness, why does it take so long for someone to come back and … have the actual facts?"

Via Americablog, Reuters, and the AP, we find out today that abuses did happen, including one guard accidentally splashing urine on the Koran. Accidentally. Oopsie.

Here's the part that pisses me off: "The findings, released after normal business hours Friday evening..." So, in other words, there was a deliberate attempt to bury this information so that it would get minimal press.

The fun of grocery shopping

I was at the grocery store this weekend, and as much as people complain about people's behavior while shopping, I just don't see what the fuss is about. But I thought I'd draw up a list of acceptable behavior anyway:

• Shopping is a family event. Bring all the children. The more the merrier. They'll need energy for all that walking around, too, so make sure to feed them lots of high-sugar snacks and sodas in the car.
• And speaking of the children, don't try to surpress their natural exhuberance. Children have lots of enery and enthusiasm they need to express. If they want to do cartwheels in the frozen foods section, who are you to say no?
• For slightly older children, enlist their help. If they're old enough to see over the top of the cart, they're old enough to push it, no matter the weight difference between the two of them.
• Make sure to walk alongside your cart, and pull it along behind you. Using the handles is just so last year. You look cool doing that, and traffic is only supposed to go one-way down the asile, anyway.
• Use the cell phone. Use it lots. Use it loudly. There's no point in wasting time that could be otherwise used for gossiping with your friends. And don't worry about using it at the deli counter. We'll be happy to wait.
• Using the handsfree attachment for your cellphone is a good idea, too. Having a conversation with thin air doesn't make you look psychotic at all.

Candle blogging

Beeswax, #2/0 wick. I just like the idea of beeswax candles, and they smell great, but it almost requires a pact with the devil to get them out of the mold when they're done.

Oooh!

I just found out (by catching the trailer on TV) that there's going to be a movie version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe released this winter. Due December. Looks pretty good, and it's always been one of my favorite books. Hope they do it justice. Since it's Disney, I expect they will.

We've been there HOW long?

Wow. That's just about all I can say. The Angry Bear pointed this out:

This coming Thursday, May 19, 2005, [two days ago, now] will be the 1,346th day since the attacks of 9/11. That is the same length of time from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the end of WWII on V-J Day. (Dec 7, 1941 to Aug 14, 1945).

Think about that. We've now been at war in Iraq for longer than we were in World War II. And there's no end in sight.

Via Seeing the Forest.

Cinderella Man

Just how sad is it that I'm really tempted (even though I hate sports movies) to see Cinderella Man just because it has Russell Crowe running around basically in his boxer shorts?

Damn lawyers

I got an email misdirected to me at one of my accounts. Looks like it was supposed to go to someone with a similar name, but different email address. No biggie, it happens now and then. What caught my eye, was at the end of the two-line email was this company-mandated disclaimer (edited for privacy):

DISCLAIMER and CONFIDENTIALITY CAUTION:

This e-mail and any attached files are confidential, proprietary, and may also be legally privileged information, and are intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this e-mail in error or you are not the intended recipient, please send it back to the person who sent it to you and delete the e-mail and any attached files and destroy any copies of it;kindly notify us immediately by telephone at + 99 99 9999 9999 or email us at xxx@xxxxxxxx.xxx. We thank you for your co-operation.

Any views or opinions presented in the e-mail and any attached files are solely those of the sender, and do not necessarily represent those of X and/or any of its sister companies, unless the sender mentions so expressly, with due authority of X.

Unauthorized reading, reproduction, publication, use, dissemination,forwarding, printing or copying of this e-mail and its associated attachments is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, any disclosure, copying, distribution or any action taken or omitted to be taken in reliance on it, is prohibited and may be unlawful.

Communicating through email is not secure and capable of interception, corruption and delays. Anyone communicating with X by email accepts the risks involved and their consequences. We have checked this message for any known viruses, however we decline any liability, expressed or implied, in case of any damage caused by a non-detected virus. The recipient should check this email and any attachments for the presence of viruses and defects.

For further details about our company, visit us at http://www.X.com

For Christ's sake! That's at the end of every email someone at your company sends? I'm not even sure how much legal weight disclaimers like this carry. I mean, you emailed it to me, you've lost the right to control what I do with what you tell me. I love how I'm supposed to call them internationally if they email me by accident. Plus, how I'm supposed to check the email for the presense of "viruses and defects." Viruses I can understand, but "defects?" What, am I supposed to spell-check their email for them?

Hercules

I'm sitting here half-watching NBC's Hercules, and I'm struck by how all the gods have been removed from the story. There's lots of talk about Zeus this and Hera that, but it doesn't look like they're going to be players in the story at all. In fact, it looks like key elements of the story have been changed so that the actions of the gods are now actions by mortals in the story. The rape of Hercules's mother by Zeus was changed to one by a disaffected warrior of his father's, and the insanity that drives him to kill his beloved wife and children looks like it's going to be some drug given to him in a plot concocted by his mother and wife. (It looks like all the women are going to be evil, until he finally falls in love with one later in the movie.)

We saw the same thing earlier this year in Troy, which was equally purged of all religious figures. (It also purged the relationship between Achilles and Patrokles, making them "just good friends.")

The authors of this adaptation are, of course, welcome to their own interpretation of the myths. I can't help but wonder, however, that this cleansing of pagan gods is not so much a reinterpretation and a readaptation for more modern sensibilities, but more intended to sanitize these stories to make them acceptably palatable to the so-called red-staters. By removing any references to a religion they would consider evil and "demon worship" it becomes safe and acceptable. But what does it say of us as a culture if we can't even consider the religions of those that came before us?

Update: Interesting, they didn't shy away from showing two men in bed together. Of course, they were scheming, murderous, and evil, so I'm not sure I'm all happy about that.

Update II: It just ocurred to me that the men in the movie (after the "parental generation" has passed away) are all clean-shaven. That's something that Greek men would never have done. Shaving was something for women and homosexuals, i.e. undesirable.

Scary stuff

This blog posting over at Eschaton pointed me to this site, where I found this article. This is the creepiest, creepiest, creepiest thing I have ever read in my life.

So I really am "Daddy's girl." And no man can approach me as an independent agent because I am not my own, but belong, until my marriage, to my father. At the time of my marriage, my father gives me away to my husband and there is a lawful change of ownership. At that point and at that point only, I am no longer bound to do my father's will. Instead, I must answer to my husband.

The Christian ultra-Right really and truly does want to bring the world of The Handmaid's Tale down upon us.

Prius, schmius

There's an interesting discussion going on in the comments section at Eschaton. Basically, what is the minimum price to which gas would have to rise to force major changes in your lifestyle?

A number of people have written about how great Prius's are. A little bit about the other hybrid cars, but mostly about the Prius. I've always thought the gas/electric combo is a great idea. It's a really nifty technology at least. Then I did the math...

The milage for a Prius is 60 highway/51 city. Let's average that and say 55. For the Saturn Ion with an automatic transmission it's 32/24 for an average of 28. The Honda Civic is a bit better at 38/32 for an average of 35. Let's say you drive 10,000 miles a year, which I think is reasonable unless you have an 80 mile commute. (How anyone can live in California is beyond me.) Say half that is highway, and half that is city driving. The Prius will use 182 gallons of gas per year. The Ion will use 357 per year (327 for a manual trans.) and the Civic comes in at 285 gallons. With gas around $2.30 a gallon, that means the Ion will cost $403 more per year to run, and the Civic $239. Hardly chump change. So the Prius looks like a good deal.

Uh oh, but look at the base prices for these cars. (This is a simplistic analysis, so I'm not bothering with any options.) The Saturn starts at $12,000, the Civic at $13,300 but the Prius costs a whopping $21,000! Even if gas prices rose to $5 per gallon, it would take 10 years to make up the difference in purchase price for a Saturn, and 14 years for the Civic.

Compared to an SUV, sure, the Prius is probably a great price and you'd save a lot each year on gas. But it's not fair to compare the Prius and the Ford Monstrosity. If you compare it to similar sedans, the Prius is not an economical choice. Believe me, I wish it were, but the math just doesn't work out. This is just one case where economy doesn't pay.

Yay Texas

Manya passed this along to me today. State Rep. Senofria Thompson gave this speech on the floor of the Texas legislature opposing a Texas Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. It's long, but read the whole thing; it's worth it.

I have been a member of this august body for three decades, and today is one of the all-time low points. We are going in the wrong direction, in the direction of hate and fear and discrimination. Members, we all know what this is about; this is the politics of divisiveness at its worst, a wedge issue that is meant to divide.

Members, this issue is a distraction from the real things we need to be working on. At the end of this session, this Legislature, this Leadership will not be able to deliver the people of Texas, fundamental and fair answers to the pressing issues of our day.

Let's look at what this amendment does not do: It does not give one Texas citizen meaningful tax relief. It does not reform or fully fund our education system. It does not restore one child to CHIP, who was cut from health insurance last session. It does not put one dime into raising Texas' Third World access to health care. It does not do one thing to care for or protect one elderly person or one child in this state. In fact, it does not even do anything to protect one marriage.

Members, this bill is about hate and fear and discrimination. I know something about hate and fear and discrimination. When I was a small girl, white folks used to talk about "protecting the institution of marriage" as well. What they meant was if people of my color tried to marry people of Mr. Chisum's color, you'd often find the people of my color hanging from a tree. That's what the white folks did back then to "protect marriage." Fifty years ago, white folks thought inter-racial marriages were a "threat to the institution of marriage."

Members, I'm a Christian and a proud Christian. I read the good book, and do my best to live by it. I have never read the verse where it says, "gay people can't marry." I have never read the verse where it says, "thou shalt discriminate against those not like me." I have never read the verse where it says, "let's base our public policy on hate and fear and discrimination." Christianity to me is love and hope and faith and forgiveness-- not hate and discrimination.

I have served in this body a lot of years-- and I have seen a lot of promises broken. I should be up here demanding my 40 acres and a mule because that's another promise you broke. You used a wealthy white minister cloaked in the cloth to ease the stench of that form of discrimination.

So, now that blacks and women can vote, and now that blacks and women have equal rights-- you turn your hatred to homosexuals-- and you still use your misguided reading of the Bible to justify your hatred. You want to pass this ridiculous amendment so you can go home and brag-- brag about what? Declare that you saved the people of Texas from what?

Persons of the same sex cannot get married in this State now. Texas does not now recognize same-sex marriages, civil unions, religious unions, domestic partnerships, contractual arrangements or Christian blessings entered into in this State-- or anywhere else on this planet Earth.

If you want to make your hateful political statements then that is one thing-- the Chisum amendment does real harm. It repeals the contracts that many single people have paid thousands of dollars to purchase to obtain medical powers of attorney, powers of attorney, hospital visitation, joint ownership and support agreements. You have lost your way-- this is obscene.

Today, you are playing to the lowest common denominator-- you are putting aside the real issues of substance that we need to address so that you can instead play on the public's fears and prejudices to deceive and manipulate voters into thinking that we have done something important.

I realize that gay rights are not the same as civil rights-- but I can guarantee you we are going in the wrong direction. I can not hide my skin color. In fact, in most of the South, people as pink as Rep. Wayne Smith were still Black by law if they had a great grandparent who was African. I was unable to attend an integrated and equally funded school until I got my Master of Laws degree. There were separate and unequal facilities for nearly everything.

I got second-hand textbooks even worse than the kind you're trying to pass off on every public school student next year. I had to ride to school on the back of the bus. I had to quench my thirst from filthy coloreds-only drinking fountains. I had to enter restaurants from the kitchen door. I was banned from entering most public accommodations, even from serving on a jury. I had to live with the fear that getting too uppity could get you killed --- or worse. I know what third-class citizenship feels like. In my first term, one of my colleagues walked up and down this aisle muttering about how Nigras should be back in the field picking cotton instead of picking out committees.

So, I have to wonder about Rep. Chisum's 3/5 of a person amendment. Some of you folks hid behind your Bible then, too, to justify your cultural prejudices, your denial of liberty, and your gunpoint robbery of human dignity.

We have worked hard at putting our prejudices against homosexuals in law. We have denied them basic job protections. We have denied them and their children freedom from bullying and harassment at school. We have tried to criminalize their very existence. But, we have also absolved them of all family duties and responsibilities: to care for and support their spouses and children, to count their family's assets in determining public assistance, to obtain health insurance for dependents, to make end-of-life or necessary medical decisions for their life partners--- sometimes even to visit in the hospital, even to defend our own country. And then, we can stand on our two hind legs and proclaim, "See, I told you homosexual families are unstable." And nearly every one of you on this Floor has a homosexual in their extended families.

Some of you have shunned and isolated these family members. Some of you, even some of the joint coauthors, have embraced them within your own family for the essence of Christianity is love. Yet,you are now poised to constitutionalize discrimination against a particular class of people. I thought we would be debating real issues: education, health care for kids, teacher's health insurance, health care for the elderly, protecting survivors of sexual assault, protecting the pensions of seniors in nursing homes.

I thought we would be debating economic development, property tax relief, protecting seniors pensions and stem cell research, to save lives of Texans who are waiting for a more abundant life. Instead we are wasting this body's time with this political stunt that is nothing more than constitutionalizing discrimination. The prejudices exhibited by members of this body disgust me.

Last week, Republicans used a political wedge issue to pull kids-- sweet little vulnerable kids-- out of the homes of loving parents and put them back in a state orphanage just because those parents are gay. That's disgusting. Today, we are telling homosexuals that just like people of my ilk, when I was a small child; they too are second class citizens.

I have listened to all the arguments. I have listened to all of the crap. Mr. Chisum, is a person who I consider my good friend and revere. But, I want you to know that this amendment is blowing smoke to fuel the hell-fire flames of bigotry.

You are trying to protect your constituents from danger. This amendment is a CYB amendment for you to go home and talk about.

Makes me glad to be a Texan.

Sobig

I'm now nearing 500 mail messages containing the Sobig virus. All were sent through a high speed connection in Oregon belonging to comcast.net. Comcast, of course, doesn't give a damn. Yahoo, however, has done a 100% job of filtering them out. I'm just keeping track of the number out of interest.

The Sobig virus is currently the cause of 5% of all the email in the world. Holy crap. Damn antisocial, virus-writing bastards.

Yeah, I'm talking to you

To whoever in Oregon has been sent 305 copies of the Sobig worm in the past three days, buy a fucking virus scanner. How can anyone run Windows these days and not have one? It's like owning a car without seatbelts.

Happy 05/05/05!

The Kansas State Board of Education starting holding hearings today about whether or not evolution should still be taught in schools, or if it should be taught alongside creationism cloaked in its current "intelligent design" mantle.

How the hell has it come to this? How can it be 2005 and Americans are still unbelieving of the central tenet of scientific fields ranging from biology to astrophysics?

Oh, there's the usual crap about how evolution is "just a theory," putting it in such dubious company as the germ theory of disease, the theory of gravity, and Einstein's theory of relativity. There's, of course, the bit about "something coming from nothing," a concept which apparently doesn't apply to God. All of these are great soundbites, but they're not science. Apparently, decisions about science can no longer be left up to the scientists.

C-SPAN [vile streaming video link] did a bit on it's morning call-in show about whether or not people supported or opposed the teaching of evolution in schools. Along with the pro-evolution people, there were some real winners. One woman called in claiming the Bible Codes proved the Bible was correct, and therefore evolution was wrong. My favorite was the guy that called in, all but screaming into his telephone, about why are there still monkeys if we evolved from monkeys? Huh? Huh? Why? (My question: how are there monkeys smart enough to use a telephone?)

I think this whole debate is about more than just evolution. Pro-creationism are trying to force an issue into the school system by claiming there is doubt about this scientific theory and trying to make it seem like there is a debate where there is none. Science made up it's mind about this decades ago. The issue has been well-debated by people much smarter than me, and it's been decided.

I think this is about the Christian ultra-Right trying to force it's religion and its agenda into a realm of our society where it's not wanted. We're seeing it with the attack on the judiciary, the branch of government hardest for these people to control. We're seeing it in pharmacists refusing to dispense certain prescribed drugs. (Hope you don't have a Christian Scientist pharmacist. Or worse, EMT.)

This is not a small deal. The scientific literacy of the average American is horrific. We are educating fewer and fewer scientists and engineers every year. In a world where there are a billion Indians and 800 million Chinese more than happy to do our jobs for us, and in an era of increasing globalization, our growing ignorance is going to have far-reaching consequences.

Why didn't WE think of that?

I forgot about the Presidential Press Conference, so I missed the first bit, but managed to catch a bit of the smirk-through-the-Q&A session. Bush wants to allow people to put some of their own money into an account that can be invested, giving people the opportunity for a higher rate of return. It would be "your money." The government wouldn't be able to "take it away."

Apparently, Bush just invented the IRA.

OK, yeah, I'm weird

And you thought Hannidate 2005 was bizarre? I forget where, but I recently found a link to RepublicanPeopleMeet.com. On a total lark, I signed up just to see what it was like inside. You have to fill out a initial profile. The weirdest thing is that in the "What are you looking for in a partner?" section, it makes suggestions about what you should ask for, and the very first suggestion is, "Assertive/Submissive." Huh? I thought the whole surrendered wife movement had come and gone. So naturally, I said that "submissiveness is very important to me."

Inside, it looks like there are scads of women looking for good, dominant, Republican men, but only 14 men looking for the same, in the entire country. I got a kick out of rwfacist's profile:

A little about me...
I am an aryan republican who believes that affirmative action and immigration are the greatest challenges that this nation faces.

What are you looking for in a partner?
I am looking for a strong, blue eyed, blonde who doesn't mind raising similar blue eyed, blond haired children.

I'd just like to add...
I enjoy marching, large torchlight rallys that occur at night, and Octoberfest. My life's dream is to invade Poland.

Sure sounds like a good, red-blooded American Republican to me.

This just in

From the "Yes, we are a bunch of inbred dumbfucks" department: State Rep. Gerald Allen of Alabama (boy, now that's a surprise) introduced a bill that would ban the state from spending money on books that recognize or promote homosexuality. That would include any book with a gay character or a gay author. (Presumably not Fagbashing for Dummies, however.) Allen is such a nutjob that he even wanted it to extend to Shakespeare, because of the cross dressing inherent in his plays. He has now relented, and it would not apply to the "classics," but leaves that term undefined. He now only wishes to ban "some Shakespeare."

He's doing this, he claims to "protect our children" from the "homosexual lifestyle." It appears he's only interested in protecting "our" straight children; the gay kids can go fuck off.

This ban would include:

• The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, one of the biggest poofters of all time.
• Our Town, by Thornton Wilder, which is a perennial classic in high school theater and English classes
• The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
• The Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address, because recent research suggests Abraham Lincoln may have been gay
• any writings by Walt Whitman, probably the greatest American poet of the 20th century
• ... and so on and so forth

More reading:

Alabama Bill Targets 'Gay' Books
Possible Gay Book Ban in Alabama
Legislators debate gay books in schools; other bills stalled

Bleep! this, nitwit

AMC is running Bleep! Censoring Hollywood, studying a "controversial movement" of a small number of companies that sanitize Hollywood movies of sex, profanity, and violence. ClearPlay, for example, is software that automatically fast-forwards through, or mutes over, sections of the film.

The AMC site has quite a bit of streaming video, which doesn't seem to play right for me in Firefox (which is just another example of what's wrong with the entertainment industry). In one of them, Steven Soderberg is complaining about the edit of his movie Traffic,

It doesn't make me happy that some anonymous person sitting in a room somewhere can recut Traffic, and can essentially sell that version of it through this software, and it has my name on it and the implication is that I condoned it or that it represents what I did.

First of all, it's not like anyone is going to accidentally get a CleanFlicks (a NetFlix-like service) version of a movie and not realize that it's been edited. People seek these services out for a reason.

Secondly, and what Soderberg doesn't seem to get is that I don't give a damn about his artistic vision. It's my movie, and I'll do with it what I damn well want to. If I want to fast-forward through the rape scene in Showgirls, I damn well will. If I want to freeze-frame Russell Crowe's mostly naked scene in The Sum of Us, I damn well will (and have). I read magazine articles out of order too, and even tear out the heavy paper advertising inserts I find so annoying. Once you sell me a product, it's mine to do whatever I want with. You've lost control, get over it.

OK, yeah, cleaning up Hollywood movies is kinda silly. And, yes, I'm a bit disturbed that one of the things that one of these companies remove from movies is "homosexuality, perversions, and cohabitation." But it's not the director's decision in these matters, and it's not mine, either.

Things would be different if his name were Monica

Remember Jeff Gannon/James Guckert? It appears his fifteen minutes have been extended another five. Not only is he on the cover of this week's Advocate, but there are new questions about his comings and goings at the White House. I doubt Secret Service paperwork is regularly this sloppy, but it looks like his perpetual temporary pass was used on days there was no White House press briefing, and his comings and goings were poorly tracked.

Excerpted from this Raw Story article:

Gannon’s ready access to President Bush and his work for a news agency that frequently plagiarized content from other reporters and tailored it to serve a conservative message may raise new questions about the White House’s attempts to seed favorable news coverage.

Perhaps more notable than the frequency of his attendance, however, is several distinct anomalies about his visits.

Guckert made more than three dozen excursions to the White House when there were no scheduled briefings. On many of these days, the Press Office held press gaggles aboard Air Force One—which raises questions about what Guckert was doing at the White House.

On at least fourteen occasions, Secret Service records show either the entry or exit time missing. Generally, the existing entry or exit times correlate with press conferences; on most of these days, the records show that Guckert checked in but was never processed out.

So Secret Service records show that a male prostitute entered the White House, but don't show that he left, possibly until the next day. Hmmmm. I wonder what that could mean.

If his name were Monica, Republicans would be impeaching.

(Via AmericaBlog)

Welcome to the blogolution

How cool is it that WILL has a blog?

Shocking

The four top officers accused of wrongdoing in the Abu Ghraib torture scandle have all been cleared. I guess that all the abuse was simultaneously going on at multiple locations was just ... a coincidence. So much for the administrations vaunted "personal responsibility" theme.

The sad part is that I'm not suprised one whit.

Yeah, what he said

Did you ever read something that was put so well, you're afraid to add to the discussion because you're afraid that you'll mess it up? With that, I'll just link to this blog entry: Keep the Church Out of My State

There is only one thing I could possibly contribute to the discussion, and it was not written by me:

... the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion ...

-- The Treaty with Tripoli, 1796

So is this evil in a good way?

My blog is apparently 22% evil. Funny, I figured I'd be worse than that. I'm slightly more evil than David's Reports From the Edge, but I'm not sure if he's ahead or I am.

Gematria, by the way, is the study of numerolgy of Hebrew alphabet, usually applied to the Talmud. It works by assigning a number value to the letters, and adding up the numbers associated with the letters. It seems 3 is a good number and 13 is an evil number.

I couldn't help but wonder who else was good and evil.

• Liberal blog: DailyKos is 27% evil.
• Liberal blog: Eschaton is 45% evil. Hmm, gonna have to watch that guy.
• Liberal blog: AmericaBLOG is 37% evil.
• Conservative blog: Powerlineblog is 40% evil.

and ...

• rushlimbaugh.com is 95% evil. Seriously.

Bunnies!

OK, so whoever did this is no Jennifer Shiman, but this is the sort of thing that Flash excels at. Not basics like navigating your crappy website, but rather singing, dancing bunnies. Bunnies are always good.

The only logical conclusion

Daily Kos has put up a copy of the Republicans new "Fillibuster against people of faith" ad. Yeah, because Democrats are all just a bunch of athiests. And if you're not a right-wing, whack-job, conservative Christian, you're an athiest too.

I can only draw one logical conclusion from this new tacic.

Republicans hate the Constitution. They hate freedom. And they hate America.

Please answer the question

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was at NYU today to receive an award. There was a Q&A period with law students beforehand. According to NYUNews:

In asking about Scalia's dissent in Lawrence v. Texas and his view that privacy is not constitutionally protected, Eric Berndt, a law student, shocked the crowd by asking, "Do you sodomize your wife?"

Scalia refused to answer the question. Administrators at the event, immediately silenced Berndt.

Scalia has repeatedly claimed that there is no right to privacy. Presumably he has no such right, just like all other Americans. Furthermore, he claims that it is legitimate for the State to regulate the sexual behavior between even married citizens.

We need to do more of this. If right-wingers are going to claim that there is no legal right to privacy, and that they should be the arbiters of sexual morality, then we must be vigilant and persistent in determining that they do not take part in such sexual deviancy. Including homosexuality or oral sex or even more perverted things like letting the wife be on top.

So, Justice Scalia, will you please answer the question?

Revelations

Tonight is the start of Revelations, NBC's big Left Behind-esque miniseries about the Biblical end of the world. I'll probably watch it; there's lots about the end of the world and in Christian theology that can make for entertaining fiction. See Neil Gaiman's Good Omens for an amusing example, and 1991's The Rapture for a thought-provoking and creepy example.

But this sort of thing worries me. It seems that we're seeing more and more fanatical Christians claiming that this is the End of Days, and that God will soon destroy the world. Fortunately, not before he sucks up the faithful into heaven with the Celestial Dust Buster. These are not people that take the Bible lightly, nor do they understand that much of it is metaphor and allegory. These are the people that actually believe that there will be a seven-headed, ten-horned Beast that will come from the sea to make war on the peoples of the Earth. That's not an analogy. That's exactly what they think is going to happen.

This kind of thinking just isn't healthy. The recent church shooting in Milwaukee took place at a church that teaches we are living in the End Days. Jerry Falwell claims that the Antichrist lives today as a male Jew. These people seem to be the "moral values" voters that are trying to exert tremendus pressure on the government. They're not a small force, and their efforts aren't harmless. One of the reasons they are so pro-Israel, as I understand it, is that the Second Coming can't happen until the Temple on the Mount is rebuilt by the Jews. That's a major political football because there's an important Muslim temple built on that site now. So this sort of thinking does influence our foreign policy.

This kind of thing scares me because when you really, truly believe that then end of the world is nigh, then there's no reason to prepare for tomorrow. It's OK to destroy the environment and raid Social Security.

But hopefully tonight will just be about entertaining (or, more likely, mediocre) television.

Next: Cialis X-treme!

I got a spam today advertising "a new medicine on the market now!" It's "Viagra Professional."

I guess it's Viagra for right-wing pseudojouranlists?

HHGTTG

There's a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie coming out. I was excited. Really excited. Then I read this review of the nearly-complete version of the movie. I'm not so excited anymore. (That's the link to the spoiler-free version of the movie. The spolieriffic version is here.)

The important part of the review is this:

To put it bluntly, they have cut most of the jokes out. I’m not being metaphorical here, they really have, in a very literal sense, removed the jokes from the story. There are scenes where all we’re left with is the set-up dialogue, there are jokes where we get the feed-line but not the punchline. It’s astounding. Occasionally, the filmmakers have actually bothered replacing the jokes but they have replaced them with really, really pisspoor, unfunny jokes; they have replaced them with stupid playground humour and pointless slapstick.

I suspect Douglas Adams is spinning in his grave so fast right now that we should hook up a turbine to him.

Update: it looks like the author of this article was Adam's biographer. As such, he's probably awfully attached to the source material, and may not have the most unbiased opinion. I guess we'll have to wait and see until us mere mortals can have a look.

Orange and something

[Note: I wrote this and it was supposed to be posted on Apr. 2. I must have saved it as a draft, rather than publishing the post. Oops.]

On my way in to work, this week I've had to pass no less than three tent-like kiosks selling sports-related merchandise. From what I've been able to glean, one of the Illini teams made it to the Fantastic Four or something. I just don't get why people are going crazy over this. But, then, I didn't inherit the sports gene. It's apparently recessive since no one in my family seems to have it.

If your kid is on the team, I can completely understand it. It's good to support your own. But people completely unrelated, who have no stake in the matter, are painting "Go Illini!" in bright orange on the side of their cars and such.

I just dont get it. Do these people really think that they are somehow embiggened by being geographically associated with one team that is victorious in a ball-handling activity? Really, if the Illini beat the (insert opposing team's racially-charged mascot name here), does this imply you are better, smarter, faster, or anything?

The university is in the middle of a budget crunch so bad, they can't find money to fix the ceiling in historic Lincoln Hall, and pieces of it are falling in on lectures. Priorities, people.

Your attention please!

The Pope is still dead.

CNN has basically been covering the Pope's death and funeral non-stop since last week. Watching it, you'd think that no other news happened since then. The only break I've seen was Larry King interviewing Jane Fonda and someone else.

You know, it's a good thing that:

• We're not currently involved in a war in the Middle East
• Tom DeLay has not been embroiled in yet another scandal.
• Tom DeLay did not claim Congress has authority over the judicial system and makes vague threats against them, possibly including impeachment for ruling in ways he doesn't agree with.
• Sixteen people were not killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan, the most serious such incident since the 2001 invasion.

I'm not saying the death and funeral of the Pope aren't newsworthy. I'm just saying that it's not the only important thing that happened in the world this week. This level of coverage is totally out of proportion.

Furthermore, it seems the coverage (which I can't bring myself to watch, non-stop so this may be in there) has been basically glowingly complementary to the Pope. Virtually nothing about how the Catholic Church basically ignored the pedophelia scandal in its ranks. Cardinal Law (see scandal, above) gave one of the Masses in the Pope's honor. Nothing about how many tens of thousands have died all over the world because the Church maintains it's a sin to use a condom, even in a marriage where one spouse is HIV+. Nothing about how the Pope recently called gay people part of "a new ideology of evil."

Are the other 24-hour news-like networks devoting this level of coverage to the late Pope? (I only get CNN.)

Still not getting it

What a crappy day for the bus to break down on the way home. The traffic on Green Street was already heavy; the lines outside the bars were a block long at 5:40. Outside every bar, it was like a sea of orange. And bright orange is not a flattering color on anyone.

It's been near-hysteria the lead up to this final game of whatever sport we're talking about. If our ball-manipulating athletic team is victorious against the other city's, it clearly means that, not just all the inhabitants of Champaign-Urbana are faster, stronger, and can jump higher than them, but it shows we're just morally superior in every way, too.

If the Illini win, I predict rioting on camplus. If not, I predict mass, cult-like suicides. Don't disappoint me, folks.

This just in

I'll sum up all of the non-stop news coverage for you for the next day or so:

The Pope is not dead yet.

This will, of course, be slightly modified upon his death, along with several multi-hour retrospectives on his life which will undoubtedly credit him with singlehandedly defeating Communism (*cough* China *cough*) and the USSR and will basically ignore the Church's willful blindness to the pedophilia in it's ranks.

PDW '05

Obviously, I don't particular care for the guy, but I see that Papal Death Watch 2005 has continued unabated since this morning. This is positively gruesome. Did nothing actually happen in the world today?