Oscars pre-game

Tonight is the Oscars award show (or, as David has called it, the gay Superbowl). Someone on CNN just commented that the movies nominated for Best Picture aren't exactly blockbusters and so their nomination is somehow surprising. That of course, assumes that the most popular movie is the most entertaining, which implies that the more loud explosions that an action film has makes it more likely to win Best Picture.

Personally, I'm rooting for Brokeback Mountain, though I hear Crash might be the dark horse to bet on for this year. But are these movies doing "poorly?" One of the highest-grossing movies for 2005 was Return of the Sith, which cost about $105 million to make, and grossed $380m during the first five months after its release. Assuming an average theater cost of $7, that's about 54 million people that saw the movie. (These are US-only numbers, and ignore DVD sales.) Now, 380 million bucks isn't chump change, but that gives the studio about 3.6 return on it's investment (ROI).

On the other hand, Brokeback has grossed $72m but only cost $14m to make, giving it a ROI of 5.1. Crash did even better, costing $6.5m to make, and grossing $55m so far, for a whopping ROI of 8.5. Capote and Good Night and Good Luck didn't do as well, and Munich might actually count as a flop, being $30m in the hole.

The Right is, predictably, pushing the meme that Brokeback is getting so much buzz becuase it's just another step in the Insidious Plot to Queerify America, another one of the their favorite memes.

But in popular culture, things are getting worse... This gay cowboy movie -- and it's going to win, you know, a lot of awards all over -- and their -- the media is pushing this like crazy... Why? Because they want to mainstream homosexual conduct. That's the goal.

-- Bill O'Reilly on The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly

So, I haven't -- going to see it. Gay cowboy doesn't interest me. I am going to go see King Kong. I suspect the people who make these kind of movies, though -- like gay cowboy -- would go to see a movie called 'The Gay Gorilla'. But that's the difference between Hollywood and mainstream.

-- William A. Donohue on MSNBC's Scarborough Country

Hollywood may, in fact, want to give every Oscar it can find to the first gay cowboy movie. But I think most people do not want to go into a darkened room with a tub of popcorn and munch away watching two guys get it on. I just don't.

-- John Gibson on FOX's The Big Story with John Gibson

No, I didn't see the film and I'm not at all surprised that out of seven [Golden Globe] nominations Brokeback walked away with four -- and some might say that's an indication of what the Oscar ceremonies might look like later on this year... I think what we're witnessing, Larry, is the homosexualizing of America.

-- Janet Parshall on CNN's Larry King Live

On its opening weekend, Brokeback had the highest per-showing average gross of any film ever. So it's pretty clear that someone, somewhere is actually out seeing movies like this one. It seems to me, for the reasons above, that making movies like this is also good business sense.

(See also: Conservatives quick to opine on Brokeback Mountain's "agenda," slow to actually see film, over at Media Matters, which is where most of those quotes came from.)

God must love Sci-Fi Friday

I got home last night only to find the cable (and Internet) out. Completely dead. "Dammit, it's Sci-Fi Friday!" Then at 6:59, it came back on. Just in time for the Stargate into section, with Ben Browder in just a towel. Apparently there is something better for him to wear than the Farscape-brand leather pants.

Now it looks like Patrick Stewart is returning to the small screen.

The second is the highly anticipated thriller Eleventh Hour, a high concept new drama in which Stewart plays Professor Ian Hood, a physics professor serving as a Special Adviser to the British Government.

With his Special Branch bodyguard Rachel Young, played by Extras' Ashley Jensen, Hood investigates and tries to solve disasters caused by modern science. Each of the four episodes covers a scientific hot potato - cloning, disease control, global warming and finding a cure for cancer.

Hmm. Sounds like it could wind up a great deal like the X-Files.

Doctor Who has been picked up by the Sci-Fi channel. Not that I didn't download and watch them a year ago, but it's nice to see them getting some play. (Jack Barrowman grew up in Joliet, who knew?) Now if only we can get Sci-Fi to drop the stupid movies with the poorly CGI'd monster of the week and replace them with old Doctor Who episodes, I'd be happy.

Lastly via Pharyngula, comes this quiz. I'm happy with my results:

You scored as Serenity (Firefly). You like to live your own way and don't enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you. Serenity (Firefly) 88% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 69% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 69% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 63% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 50% SG-1 (Stargate) 44% Moya (Farscape) 44% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 38% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 38% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 38% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 31% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 13% Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

What the hell is a lifestyle, anyway?

Matt over at It's Matt's World discusses a comment thread over at Illinipundit about Republicans, gays, gay Republicans, and marriage. Go read it; it's interesting.

The discussion over at IP started with a post from one of the IP guys decrying the reprehensible Judy-Topinka-is-friend-with-dirty-fags smear campaigning going on over at StopTopinka.com. Cut-and-paste, if you want. I'm not linking that so as not to raise their PageRank.

I just wanted to comment on the sort of language coming from the comment Matt links to. Not that there's anything particularly unusual in the comment itself; it is the standard boilerplate text of the Republican Christian Right:

I love all people regardless of who, what, when, where and what lifestyle they live. But it does NOT mean I have to agree with the lifestyle.

There's a blog post I've been meaning to finish about words that have lost all their meaning and have become code for something else. "Lifestyle" is pretty much the top of the list. When right-wing Christians complain about the "homosexual lifestyle," I just want to throw my hands up in exasperation. What exactly does that mean? It brings up mental images of Stepford-esque queers all sitting around in identical slacks and pink shirts, sitting around drinking tea, and discussing how to best recruit your sons* into their irresistible way of life.

Let's be honest. The "homosexual lifestyle" as Republicans use the term consists of the following: being gay. Period. That's it. There is no other behavior or action or trait that means you live the lifestyle. The term applies equally to both a boring suburban pair of white dads raising an otherwise-unadopted, mentally disabled, African-American teenager and to a cigar-smoking leatherdaddy busy spanking his naughty houseboy. So basically, "homosexual lifestyle" is code for "I don't like what you do with your dick.*"

I also don't get the idea of "agreeing" with the lifestyle. That's another word tossed about in these discussions, as well. It's not like there's not an open question to agree or disagree with. No one is asking for their consent. The word "agree" is used in this context as a substitute for "approve of." In other words, it's a way for conservative Christians to be self-righteous and be judgmental without feeling like they are being self-righteous and judgmental, which is not something good Christians are supposed to do.

This is just another example of something that Matt pointed out elsewhere. Namely, this is a situation where people make arguments that are primarily based in emotion, in favor of a position that has significant and tangible effects on someone else's life.

(*) Yes, I realize that the "homosexual lifestyle" technically covers lesbians as well as gay men, but it's the specter of two men together that seems to really disturb these people. It's no coincidence that the site mentioned above features a man in a tight, colorful bathing suit next to Topinka on its main page, and the prominently-displayed movie starts with two men holding hands. Homophobia is not about being gay, it's about enforcing traditional gender roles.

Murder for hire in South Dakota

South Dakota just passed a law banning all abortions, except if the mother will die unless she gets one. Now, the purpose of the law isn't actually to ban all abortions. The purpose of the law is to be challenged in court. It seems to be a given that, when the law is challenged in court it will lose. Then it can be taken to the Supreme Court, and right-wingers will be able to see if Judge Alito will be worth all the effort they went to to put him on the bench. So, the purpose of this law isn't to ban abortions in South Dakota, it's to over turn Roe v. Wade.

The bill contains no rape or incest provisions. That is, at least, logically consistent. If a blastocyst is an "innocent" human being, it can't be held responsible for how it was conceived.

However, I think that it's interesting that the bill only punishes abortion doctors. It makes providing an abortion a Class 5 felony, the second lowest class of felony, punishable of up to five years in prison and/or a $5,000 fine. It does not, however, criminalize getting an abortion. And that's not logically consistent. Any woman that paid someone to beat her two-year-old to death would be tried for murder, and rightly so. Why, then, does a mother that pays a doctor to kill her "unborn baby" get off scot-free? Undoubtedly, it's because the South Dakota legislature was queasy at the idea of a raped 12-year-old getting tried for murder.

I don't think this was really the intended purpose, but this bill also outlaws in vitro fertilization, where some fertilized embryos are usually discarded. In fact, it looks to me that abortion is a (fairly) minor felony, but IVF is first degree murder. South Dakota law defines first degree murder as:

Homicide is murder in the first degree if perpetrated ... with a premeditated design to effect the death of the person killed or of any other human being, including an unborn child

The new anti-abortion law defines an "unborn child" as "an individual living member of the species, homo sapiens, throughout the entire embryonic and fetal ages of the unborn child from fertilization to full gestation and childbirth."

This law makes no distinction between an "unborn child" and an unborn child inside a pregnant woman. So it seems to me that a fertilized zygote in a petrie dish can be murdered. Oddly enough, that would be first degree murder, but an abortion is only a Class 5 felony.

If I were a fertility doctor in South Dakota, I would be very concerned right about now.

Protecting marriage

For various reasons, I'm reading The Family Secret: Domestic Violence In America by William Stacey and Anson Shupe. It's about their experiences with women in a shelter in Dallas in the early 1980s. Nothing in it really comes as any particular surprise, but I think I have a better understanding and deeper empathy for these women and children caught in truly desperate circumstances.

One section, however, I found very interesting. It's talking about the available options to battered women, and what steps the women went through to get help before finally winding up at the shelter. Police are often of no help (this was written in 1983, when domestic violence was probably taken less seriously than it is today). They note this about the clergy:

...women in Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and conservative Protestant churches (such as the Church of Christ, the Southern Baptist Church, and various fundamentalist denominations) are most likely to find their priests and ministers of little help. The kinds of family conflict that might lead to divorce or separation threaten these groups. Their clergy are likely to recall the admonitions of Saint Paul on controlling women and use them to justify telling the woman she must stay in the abusive home. Here women will probably be counseled by a minister to "try to be a better wife" or to "be more considerate of him" and "obey him." Leaving the abusive man, or divorcing him, will be branded desertion or a sin, shifting the blame to her.

In short, if she is a church-going battered woman her chances of getting meaningful ministerial help are better in churches of a more moderate-to-liberal persuasion such as Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, or Unitarian.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the churches that are likely to deride a woman for leaving an abusive husband are the same ones that are so vociferous about arguing against gay marriage. What I think is so telling about the passage above is that it shows these same conservative churches are willing to put the benefit of the institution above the welfare of the individuals inside that institution.

I don't think any rational person doubts that marriage provides benefits to individuals that aren't available to single people or unmarried couples. I have yet to see a rationally-based argument against equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians. They all just use vague terms like "protection marriage" and "traditional marriage." But couching the fight in terms about equality and fairness isn't going to turn them to our side, because they are more interested in maintaining the illusion of what they think the institution should be rather than what it really is.

Some perspective on this President's Day

Thanks to our 24-hour cable news networks, we are better informed than ever.

This morning I turned on C-SPAN while I was eating breakfast. It's President's Day, so they were having a Presidential-themed morning. Several scholars that had written books about the history of the Presidency were on. There was some debate about what the worst Presidential decisions were in our history, and who the best and worst Presidents were. It was a lively discussion that stretched from Lincoln to Harding, to Carter.

Then, just briefly, I flipped over to CNN. They had 30 seconds of video of a 60-something-year-old woman that had just given birth. Then they cut to a story about a 30-pound housecat in China.

Thanks, CNN. What would we do without you?

A big story for our little town

It's one thing for the DI's cartoon story to get picked up my Malkin and other bloggers. It's another for it to get picked up by the NY Times.

TheSquire has another blog entry on the cartoons, and links to an interview where Acton claims the reason he was suspended was that the other editors are afraid for their lives:

[Interviewer]: No, but I mean, has anyone told you that's the reason they're upset, fear of reprisal?

[Gorton]: Well, not that specifically, but that has been voiced to me by quite a few people, yeah. I had a staff meeting on Monday, and pretty much my entire newsroom was there, and that was one of the major things that was brought up.

I'm really hoping that he's blowing this out of proportion. The editors actually, seriously, afraid for their lives because of this publication? This isn't the Middle East. Heck, it isn't even Demark, and the offices of the Danish paper that ran the cartoons hasn't even been bombed.

I still want to know why this major news story was run on the Op-Ed page.

Priorities, people

In looking for her posting on the DI's suspension of the Cartoon Two, I made the mistake of going over to Michelle Malkin's blog. The first thing I see is a blog entry comparing the publishing of the now-infamous Muhammed cartoons with the publishing of newly-released photos of the abuse that occured at Abu Ghraib. She's making accusations of hypocrisy in that there is controversy around the cartoons' publication, but not the Abu Ghraib photos. Seriously.

Let's see. One was, at best, terribly disrepectful of a major part of the world's population, and the other was concrete evidence of widespread and horrific abuse of prisoners, possibly condoned by senior officials in the American Army.

If you can't see the difference in the importance of these two things, go have your sense of proportion checked.

Happy VD

First of all, Happy Birthday to Jon. It must be nice when the whole world celebrates your birthday by giving chocolate to people.

And for the rest of you, planning to eat those chocolates, send flowers, and snuggle up tight for the evening, well, I hope you get the crabs.

Something is rotten in the, um, state of C-U

A quick summary for those of you that read this blog but aren't in C-U (i.e. Manya) or that don't have any significant ties to the University (i.e. David, Billy, and Jon): The Daily Illini published some of the infamous Danish Muhammad cartoons that are causing such a stir all over the world. This has caused some interesting discussion on the op-ed page, but also some friction in the op-ed staff itself. TheSquire has some interesting speculation here, and a followup here. Unfortunately, the DI's "Hey, ours isn't quite as crappy as the News-Gazette's" website has the editorial that introduced the cartoons, but not the images themselves in its archive. You can find a copy of them here.

Something about the op-ed explanations doesn't wash. It appears that two of the editors, the editor in chief and the opinions editor made the unilateral decision to run the cartoons, without informing the rest of the editorial staff. I don't know if that's true or not. I do want to say that I think the cartoons -- only because of the reaction they have spawned -- are themselves newsworthy. Some of them are quite innocent (I especially like the green one with the star and the one with the crescent halo), and I can't see how anyone would object to them. Some of them are flat-out racist. Some I can't figure out because they're in Danish.

Squire points out that the moral dimension to running these cartoons comes not from their newsworthiness, but from the motivations of those putting them in the paper. That's why I find the dissenting editorial by the Cartoon Two in today's DI so interesting. From that editorial:

The members of the editorial board are scared. They are scared of the unknown, scared of violence and scared to accept a principled action on our behalf, all while hiding under the guise of the journalistic "process," a process we believe has been upheld...

All editors present in the newsroom the night before publication learned of our decision to publish the cartoons. There were no objections. Not until they witnessed a backlash from the Muslim community, one that we were prepared for, did the board cower to their demands.

Are Gorton and Prochaska seriously suggesting that the other editors are afraid of a Middle-East-like violent reaction to the publication of these cartoons? It's interesting that their entire editorial is couched in language that calls their colleagues cowards. They are "scared of the unknown," they are "hiding under the guise" of the "process," and that they are "cowering" to the Muslim community's demands. This sort of "attack your opponent" arguing makes me very suspicious of their movies, but I won't speculate on them here, since I really don't know any of the individuals involved. (That I later found that Squire accuses Prochaska of being a "drinker of the neo-con kool aid" increases my suspicions.)

I just want to finish this by quoting from another article from today's DI:

Iran, a predominantly Shiite Muslim country, has seized on the caricatures as a means of rallying its people behind a government that is increasingly under fire from the West over its nuclear program.

Shiite Muslims do not ban representations of the prophet and some in Iran's provincial towns and villages even carry drawings said to be of Muhammad.

The protesting, rioting, and violence has never been about the cartoons. They were just an excuse. It's about the meme in the Middle East that the West is anti-Islam.

UPDATE: TheSquire points out that there's some good stuff about the DI controversy over at The Next Frontier. The Cartoon Two have been suspended from the paper during an investigation. My prediction: this will cease being about how the DI came to the decision to run the cartoons and the unilateral decision by the Two, and will become a "good conservative Christian vs. evil liberal Muslim university elite" soundbite.

UPDATE II: This just occured to me. If these cartoons were considered by the editors to be so newsworthy, why were they published on the Opinion page and not as a regular news article? Could it possibly have something to do with the EIC and the opinions editor having an easier time of getting them published without having to consult other members of staff? Just speculating...

Happy birthday, Charles Darwin

It's Darwin's 197th birthday today. I just thought I'd celebrate that by linking to a Catholic group that is offering a reward for people that can prove the Earth goes around the Sun. Why? Because they think the Sun revolves around the Earth.

Seriously. It's not a joke.

The basis for this group's geocentrism is that it must be true because the Bible says so. Which is basically the same evidence Intelligent Design creationists spout for their movement. In the mind of ridiculous Christians, scripture trumps reality, every time. That's what the whole evolution vs. ID debate boils down to: does science take observable reality as its touchstone, or one group's religious myths?

The whole idea of the Earth going around the Sun or vice versa is a mathematical convenience, of course. There is no stationary reference frame to measure movement against, a concept which the author of this challenge obviously doesn't understand. You just try telling him that.

Paging Dr. Frist...

I saw this clip, or one so strikingly similar I can't remember the difference, about a year ago. It's a back-to-back comparison of Bush speaking ten years ago during the TX gubernatorial debate and some more recent clips of him speaking, including during the Bush-Gore Presidential debate.

The difference is absolutely night and day. Frighteningly so. The clip and the linked blog entry suggest it's pre-senile dementia. I think it's a bit of a stretch to diagnose him from this sort of thing, probably put together with an agenda, but what sort of other explanations are there? No, really, I'm asking. Better preparation? He hasn't spoken well in any speech I've heard him give. Is he being coached to speak slower? That doesn't explain him stumbling over his words so much. Stress? Lack of sleep?

I don't think we really have any protection against a President that goes senile or suffers from Alzheimer's while in office. There is a clear line of succession if a President dies, but not if his mental acumen degrades or becomes impaired.

Could this explain why Dubya seems to only speak in front of pre-selected, Republican audiences? Any flaws would likely be forgiven and considered unimportant by those already of the faith, rather than those looking at him with a skeptical eye.

SOTU

The State of the Union address is tonight. For some reason, whenever I see that abbreviated as SOTU, I immediately think of STFU. Whatever.

Would anyone like to take part in my poll on how many times the word "terror" or "terrorism" will be used in tonight's speech? My vote is for 25. The winner gets a cookie. Put your guesses in the comments. I'll even accept entries after the fact, as long as you swear you didn't cheat. This is an honor system blog.

One of the other major topics Dubya is expected to opine about is health care costs. I'm not very informed on this topic (but that doesn't usually stop me from having an opinion). I've been reading Angry Bear a lot lately; they seem smart. Kash had this to say today:

If he addresses the question of high medical spending at all in his State of the Union address tonight, Bush is likely to focus solely on the medical liability insurance explanation (though I’m willing to be pleasantly surprised on this). His proposed solution to this problem is tort reform. Unfortunately, as I’ve written about previously, non-partisan estimates suggest that tort reform is likely to produce only a small decline in health care costs, of perhaps $6 billion per year, out of total medical care spending of $1,878 billion in 2004. That's not much of an impact.

... A more recent study in the International Journal of Health Services found that in 2003, administration costs in the US health care system ate up about $400bn, or about 25% of total health care spending.

... The NEJM study estimated that hospitals and doctors devote roughly one-fourth of their resources to dealing with insurance paperwork

I have a blog entry I've been meaning to get around to that shows for-profit insurance companies are inherently poorer than not-for-profits. Maybe this is why. Twenty-five percent of our health care spending is unproductive overhead. Holy hell.

Update: I just can't bring myself to actually watch. I'll see the important parts on the Daily Show, I suspect.

Can you shame those who have no shame?

You know, the Internet is a wonderful thing. It puts a truly mindboggling amount of information at your fingertips, and it's all accessible at lightning speed. Some use that power for good. Others, for evil, or at least money-grubbing unethicalness.

A few days ago, I received this comment spam, probably the first since turning on Bloggers CAPTCHA. It advertised www.abrams-california-health-insurance.com. I'm pissed off by the fact that they're spamming my blog to advertise what I figure is crappy health insurance, but I'm really pissed off by the fact that they're doing it in sub-eighth-grade English.

It wasn't just me, this spammer hit over 250 other blogs with this crap. In my case, the spam was left by someone who came to the blog after Googling for "general health care." His IP address was 68.123.236.84 (adsl-68-123-236-84.dsl.irvnca.pacbell.net). The spam payload domain is registered to:

Abrams & Associates
23232 Peralta Dr #119
Laguna Hills, California 92653
949-472-9892
949-472-9815

Interestingly enough, if you go to the website, there isn't a single email address to be found anywhere. Not one. Not even at their "Contact Us" page. For an Internet-based business? I guess they don't want to get spam, but don't mind foisting it off on the rest of us. There is one in the domain registration entry, however. So it would just be terribly tragic if dan@insuresaver.com got picked up by some other spammer's spider and poor dan@insuresaver.com started getting a bunch of spam on his own. (See what I meant about a staggering amount of information?)

I am not the only one to take umbrage at this sort of behavior. One of the other spam victims was this guy on whose blog the spammer actually left his email address. (So it would be terrible if vpatel@acsseo.com got spidered as well.) So he called Advantage Consulting Services, the spammer, and left a message, and they actually called him back and confessed to being the blog comment spammer. God, if you're going to run your business in a horribly unethical manner, shouldn't you at least lie about it?

The implementation of the various CAPCHAs means that this wasn't an automated process. So I guess the good news is that some poor spammer was kept up until 2:30 in the morning cutting and pasting his spam into little blog comment forms.

Just to be abrasive, I sent this little missive to vpatel@acsseo.com:

To: vpatel@acsseo.com
Subject: Please stop spamming blogs with your advertisements

My blog is not a medium for you to advertise on. If that's what you're looking for, go spraypaint it on someone's building.

"We use industry best practices and ethical standards" my foot.

It was considerably more polite than the first draft.

Wooden ticking coolness

I'm not usually one much for do-it-yourself projects (although I have been known to pick up a hammer now and then if I know some people renovating their house...), but this wooden clock project looks cool. This guy put one together, and has some interesting photos and details on making one. I'm tempted to give it a try, but do I really need another project?

(Via BoingBoing.)

Who cares about an old piece of paper?

I just caught the end of a briefing on C-SPAN by Michael V. Hayden, the Principal Deputy Director for the Office of National Intelligence. The briefing was, of course, all about the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping of US citizens.

He was asked about the standard of evidence for the wiretapping that's been one of the main topics in the news lately. After stating, "If there's one amendment [his office] understands, it's the Fourth Amendment," he reiterated the claim that the administration can now bypass the FISA courts because the searches are "reasonable," and that's the only standard required by the Constitution. He responded to this reporters question, before leaving the room, that no warrants were required by the law.

I'd just like to briefly quote:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

-- The Fourth Amendment

On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson was probably a terrorist.

UPDATE: Via Eschaton, I found a transcript of the session:

LANDAY [reporter]: I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American's right against unlawful searches and seizures.

GEN. HAYDEN: No, actually -- the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But the --

GEN. HAYDEN: That's what it says.

QUESTION: But the measure is probable cause, I believe.

GEN. HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But does it not say probable --

GEN. HAYDEN: No. The amendment says --

QUESTION: The court standard, the legal standard --

GEN. HAYDEN: -- unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: The legal standard is probable cause, General. You used the terms just a few minutes ago, "We reasonably believe." And a FISA court, my understanding is, would not give you a warrant if you went before them and say "we reasonably believe"; you have to go to the FISA court, or the attorney general has to go to the FISA court and say, "we have probable cause."

And so what many people believe -- and I'd like you to respond to this -- is that what you've actually done is crafted a detour around the FISA court by creating a new standard of "reasonably believe" in place of probable cause because the FISA court will not give you a warrant based on reasonable belief, you have to show probable cause. Could you respond to that, please?

GEN. HAYDEN: Sure. I didn't craft the authorization. I am responding to a lawful order. All right? The attorney general has averred to the lawfulness of the order.

Just to be very clear -- and believe me, if there's any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it's the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. And so what you've raised to me -- and I'm not a lawyer, and don't want to become one -- what you've raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is "reasonable." And we believe -- I am convinced that we are lawful because what it is we're doing is reasonable.

Look, I'm just a scientist. I'm not even particularly a history buff. And even I instantly knew that the Fourth Amendment requires probable cause and a warrant. Are we really supposed to believe that the second-highest intelligence guy in our country really doesn't know what the Constitution says?

Blogging, explained in 30 seconds

Yeah, this pretty much sums it up.

How not to kill your fish

One of the Franks died yesterday after the weekly water change. After talking it over with Guy at Fish Shop (what is it with the cute guys working at Sailfin?), it looks like it was chlorine that did it. It turns out adding dechlorinator to the tank, then adding the appropriate amount of tap water is not the way to do it, unlike what I read online. Add the dechlorinator to the bucket of water, wait 15 minutes or so, and add it to the tank. There is something like 1-2 ppm of ammonia in Champaign tap water, which is what I initially thought did it, but that wouldn't have worked nearly as fast as this.

Some useful fish, plant, and aquarium links, in case anyone is interested, or comes across this page after Googling:

• Sailfin: The Champaign fish store. Accept no substitutes. They have a large inventory, and everyone there seems to know their stuff.
• PlantGeek.net: Lots of good information on planted tanks. I think I like plants in aquariums almost as much as the fish. Since they also help keep the water quality up, I don't know why anyone would want to bother with the plastic ones.
• The Age of Aquariums: A lot of profiles on different fish species. Pretty pictures, too.
• FishProfiles.com: More fish profiles, separated by category. You can also search on size, diet, etc.
• Freshwater Aquariums: The About.com section on freshwater tropical aquariums. Annoyingly ad-filled, but some good, basic information there.

If anyone knows any other good sites, please let me know.

A mountain of publicity

A Mormon theater owner in Utah pulled the movie Brokeback Mountain from his theaters, only two hours after a reporter mentioned what the movie was about. (Two gay cowboys in love, in case you've been living under a rock.) He's since refused to say exactly why he pulled the movie, but, since he's also pulled the showing of Transamerica, I think we can make a pretty safe guess.

It's not because the movie has any graphic sexual content. It's R-rated for "sexuality, nudity, language and some violence." That's "sexuality," mind you, not the "some sexual content" of Casanova, the "strong language throughout, strong crude and sexual humor, and nudity" of Grandma's Boy, the "nudity and brief language" of Mrs. Henderson Presents, the "strong graphic violence, some sexual content, nudity and language" of Munich, or the "violence and language" of Syriana. Those are most of the other R-rated movies shown at Megaplex Theaters. So just showing that gay people exist is enough to get you banned from this asshole's theater.

What truly shows the hypocricy of this bigot is that his theater is also showing Hostel. That's a movie that starts with "exploitative sex as an appetizer," is about three young horny men that get lured to an Eastern European hotel with promises of loose women, only to be kidnapped and tortured. Graphically tortured. Ultra-violently graphically tortured. The Salon review describes it thusly:

But what's made "Hostel" instantly notorious is not the philosophical questions it raises, such as they are, but the intense and horrifying nature of its violence. You could argue, in fact, that Roth is playing to precisely the kind of jadedness he says he's criticizing. In the last few years horror directors have all but abandoned mood, atmosphere and suggestion for full-on graphic bloodshed, and Roth, a protégé of Quentin Tarantino and one of the most talented filmmakers in the genre, is leading the way.

He has no apologies. "This is a really, really violent and bloody film," he says. "And if people don't want to see that, they absolutely shouldn't go. I think there is absolutely an audience that wants their horror horrific. They don't want it safe. I'm not trying to make movies that appeal to everyone, and I think the advertising makes that clear. This is stuff that really horrifies and disturbs me."

...I tell him the truth about my own reaction, which was that I admired the humor, the tremendous craftsmanship and even the shock value of "Hostel," but found the Grand Guignol torture scenes excessive. (Unless you're a hardcore fan of Italian, Spanish and Japanese gore flicks, you've never seen anything like this.)

So, to sum up: Gay people in love = bad. Graphic, gore-filled depictions of torure = good.

Fundamentalist Christians have their priorities seriously fucked up.

Say hi, everyone

Per Manya's suggestion, I'd like to introduce you to Frank. And Frank. And Frank, and Frank, and Frank, and Frank.

That's Frank, there on the left. I think.

No soup for you

It seems to me that if you're going to call for a discussion on a rather controversial topic, and then complain that people are making personal attacks, tell them they can't sit at the "adult table," and then refuse to take part in the discussion, you shouldn't go on your blog and call people names.

Go to the kiddie table. Do not pass Go. Do not collect dessert.

McFetus

Pharyngula (now at his new server) has an interesting little question and pic up on his blog. I suspect the anti-choice coalition people have some magic soul detector that can answer the question for us though.

Perhaps, someday, Iraq will be this enlightened

Arrested gay men "to get hormone treatment"

Gay men arrested at a party in the United Arab Emirates are set to be issued with hormone injections, according to officials in the country, as part of the punishment for homosexuality in the country....

The treatments are used in the country, where homosexuality is illegal, in an attempt to cure gay men and turn them straight.

Again, we see how being gay is equated with being insufficiently masculine. The article doesn't say which hormones are used in the UAE to "cure" gay people. Historically both testosterone and estrogen (as was forced on Alan Turing). And we all know how well that worked.

Even with all the controversy surrounding gay marriage in this country, I'm very glad I live here rather than the more barbaric parts of the world.

Bring on the violence!

Squire ... ahem, excuse me ... The Squire links to a list of new Illinois laws that took effect at the beginning of this year. There is one, however, that won't be coming into play, the Violent Video Games Law and the Sexually Explicit Video Games Law. A judge ruled that the law was written so vaguely that it became unconstitutional. That's fortunately, since it was a pretty stupid law to begin with.

I ranted about that a while ago. It looks like after I wrote that, the law was amended so that the intended penalty for selling an M-rated game to a 17-year-old was actually less than the one from selling him alcohol. That was a small breath of sanity, I suppose. But the whole notion of criminalizing selling games is ridiculous to begin with. Why should they be treated any differently than movies or books or TV? This was obviously just a knee jerk overreaction to a non-problem. Good riddance.

Mawwiage

Matt over at his world continues his thoughts on marriage and John Bambanek's column in the DI a few weeks ago. I've long since said that conservatives shouldn't be allowed to play the "queers can't marry because they can't have kids" card unless they're willing to accept the annullment of all straight marriages after menopause. But then again, I'm a liberal. I approve of logical consistency.

Go. Read. Comment.

I'm back (and front)

I'm back from Texas. Hope everyone had a Happy Issac Newton's Day or whatever. Blog posting will now resume on it's regular irregular schedule.

Light posting

I am leaving for the Obligatory Family Visit soon, so posting will be light to nonexistant for a while. I'm sure you will manage.

I hope everyone has a happy holiday season. (Just to irritate Bill O'Reilly.)

Welcome back, ILPundit

I was about to remove ILPundit from the sidebar the other day, when I visited his blog and found he had resumed his insightful, yet entertaining, political blogging. Plus, he's fabulous; it even says so right on his blog.

Welcome back.

In defense of marriage

Matt over at It's Matt's World applauds John Bambenek for bringing up the question of same-sex marriage in his latest Daily Illini editorial. John basically says our society needs to have a discussion about what the role of marriage should be in our society. I say we've gone and had that conversation while John was napping. Marriage is about a loving couple coming together and making a life together. The only question that our society is grappling with is about who gets to take part in that institution.

Conservative, including Bambenek, always like to trot out the "gays can't have kids, so they can't get married" argument. Bull. Nothing about heterosexual marriage requires children. Children are a happy consequence of sex and, historically, marriage has been the approved gateway to having sex. Yes, children and marriage have always been closely linked, but marriage has never existed because it provides for "well-adjusted and well-raised children," as John asserts.

A woman can spend about half her life out of her childbearing years. I don't want to hear any more conservatives saying how marriage is only important because chidren can come of it until they also start objecting to post-menopausal women getting married. There is no reproductive reason for a woman "of a certain age" to have sex. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Therefore, insofar that marriage is intended to provide for the healthy upbringing of children, there is zero reason for a woman past about-forty to be able to get married.

Bambenek's column generated several letters to the DI's editor, and he responded to some of them on his own blog (toot!). He again brings up the issue of children when he says

If someone chooses not to have children because of their life circumstances, they can change their mind in one cycle. No amount of mental wrangling will allow for gay couples to produce their own children.

Not only has John just spit in the eye of all the loving adoptive families out there, he's never heard of a sperm bank. All it takes these days for a lesbian to "produce her own children" is an intimate encounter with a turkey baster. There are thousands of gay couples, male and female, out there with their own children. But, for some reason, their lifelong committment to each other doesn't count. The argument goes: they're not really a "family" so they shouldn't be allowed to get married.

My roomate from my freshman year and his wife are in the process of adopting a baby from Guatamala. I'm not sure why, and I wouldn't dream of asking. There may be fertility issues; they may just be incredibly generous people. I just don't understand why they count as a family, but Matt and his husband don't.

Mmmm, sacrelicious...

Best. Slashdot. Post. Ever.

If you don't think that what is in the Bible is literal, you CAN'T be a Christian.

So when Christ said "I am the door" (John 10:9), do you suppose he had hinges and a doorknob?

This response is a close runner-up.

When I read your comment, I imagined a female voice (such as that in your car) saying "Your Christ is ajar".

Edumacation in Kansas

Go read the new Kansas Teacher's Guide for Intellegent Design. Put out by the Kansas State Board of Edukation.

UPDATE: The Squire has posted his response to his current pet creationist. It's worth a read. I'm not sure I've ever seen as good a bitch-slap in letter form before. Plus, he quotes me, apparently under the impression I know what I'm talking about.

Now here's some intellegent design

Science vs. Norse Mythology, on Creation

Clearly, we need to start teaching the controversy. Give elementary school students all the information and let them decide for themselves.

So I know this guy...

Yes, I know, a lot of confessions start out with "I have this friend...", but that's not what this is about. I really do know this guy. Not all that well, we've only met once, but have corresponded online for a few years now. We initially met in the gay.com chatrooms, and he seemed like a nice enough guy that, for a while, I was trying to decide if the three-hour drive that separated us was too big an impediment to dating. He's now in his first year at a seminary in Chicago studying to become a Catholic priest. So much for that fantasy.

The Vatican released a new document this week about the ordination of gay priests. (Matt also has some comments on it.) The document has apparently been in preparation for years, and came to light during the child molestation scandal. If you want, you can read the entire document here. This is the money quote (emphasis mine):

...the Church... may not admit to the seminary and Holy Orders those who practice homosexuality, show profoundly deep-rooted homosexual tendencies, or support the so-called gay culture.

The "practice homosexuality" bit I get. Sexually active gay men in the priesthood are verboten. Check. That makes (some sort of) sense. Sexually active straight men in the priesthood are also not allowed. Of course, you will never hear of the Vatican putting out a policy document saying that men who "practice heterosexuality" should not be ordained.

The second bit, the part about the "deeply-rooted homosexual tendencies" is the part that pretty much says gay people can't be priests anymore. Notice that they've left quite a lot of wiggle-room with the terms "deeply-rooted" and "tendencies." As in, "Oh, he's not really homosexual, he just has homosexual tendencies." That's very odd wording. It does fit with the Church's stance that gay people are really just broken straight people that have been contaminated with evil homosexual cooties. I wonder if we will start to see a Catholic increase in the rise of the loathsome "ex-gay" movement. That has pretty much been a fundamentalist, evangelical, Prostestant phenomenon until now.

The third part in the proscription above is just so unnecessary. The "so-called gay culture"? I'm not even sure what that means. Does this mean no shopping at Abercrombie and Fitch? No more Lifetime television? Is it five Hail Mary's for humming a showtune? Oh, you have to just love the snide "so-called" modifider on that phrase. Sure, no more tweaked-out circuit queens in the seminary, but something tells me they weren't exactly lining up in tonsures and hairshirts in the first place.

I was chatting with my proto-priest friend online this evening. From what he's described, it sounds like this instruction from on high is basically being ignored by the American clergy. J. is still openly (ex?) gay and still in the seminary. So it doesn't look like "deeply-rooted homosexual tendencies" are enough to stop you from becoming a priest.

The reason for this new document is obvious. Since the dawn of the Catholic Church's child-raping scandal, they have been trying to blame it on the presence of gays in the priesthood. The Church and it's officials don't seem to understand (or find it convenient to misunderstand) that pedophilia and homosexuality are as distinct as statutory rape and heterosexuality. By coming out with this new document the Church appears to be doing something about cleaning house with respect to its sexual problems, while not having to go to the trouble of actually doing anything. Since it appears (from my one data point) that seminaries are not necessarily doing anything different about accepting gay people, the Church gets to have it's gay priests and eat them, too.

Attack of the 50 foot twink

There's a fairly new billboard on Green St. that I have to go by on the way to work every morning. It's a huge black-and-white Abercrobie and Fitch ad, with some shirtless, twentysomething, heavily waxed, twinkie guy on it. It just occured to me that the ad doesn't actually have the advertised product in it anywhere.

So I guess this really means the only thing A&F sells is the label, not really the clothing.

Wikihelp

I recently had to revert some vandalism over at Wikipedia. Does anyone know how to make a contributors name or IP address linkable to their contributions in the edit summary? Like in this one. I've been playing around in the sandbox, and can't figure out how to do it.

A voice of reason

I'm listening to the C-SPAN stream I previously blogged about, and I'm listening to the interview and call-ins with Michael Chapman. Chapman is the descendant of Darwin, and wrote Trials of the Monkey, about when he visited Dayton, Ohio, where the Scopes Monkey Trial took place.

He said something in the interview that I thought was so well put, I'd share it.

If you had a sick child, and if you were in a room full of a hundred doctors, and ninety-nine of them said, "We diagnose this disease as X, and we think the best treatment for it would be Y." And one doctor said, "I think we should pray for this child." Which one would you go with?"

Then he mentioned the National Center for Science Education's Project Steve as a good way to measure the ninety-nine evolutionists vs. the one ID proponent.

Frankly, I think it's more like as if that one doctor said, "I've never seen any of these things called germs all these other doctors are talking about. They've never proved they cause sickness. This disease is clearly caused by the child's sin, and the Devil should be beaten out of the child and that will make him better."

LATER:

Oh man, this interview ends on a great note. This guy's not a scientist, and he's not shy about saying so. He's a writer, and you have to feel bad for him because all of the caller's are talking about evolution, and not his book. But he's very well-spoken and quite insightful.

[Talking about the idea that evolution is a big fraud perpetrated by amoral atheist scientists.] In the history of science, you often see supernatural explanations for things that later are found to have a natural explanation. There will be probably things that remain a mystery, but it doesn't seem to be a logical way of looking at the teaching of science. To simply speculate about something that can't be proven.

And this part surprised and really cracked me up. A great way to end the program.

[About how ID is a uniquely American religious phenomenon.] In a way, the Church is capable of supplying more comfort to people in their lives than the theory of evolution does, but is that the function of knowledge, I don't know. I think it's also interesting to look at the failure of the American education system... And when you look at Darwin, and when you look at how he was educated, or not educated. He didn't actually go to college; he was sort of an educated and enlightened amateur. And then you have George Bush, who went through the education system, and actually graduated from Harvard. And here is a man who has had all of the advantages of the American education system, and has the views of a basically somewhat ignorant fundamentalist crowd. It's a bizarre thing to see how a man who has reached that level, with such an apparent lack of understanding of science.

Oh, I think I like this man.

I am the monkey king

Yesterday, I was sitting down to eat breakfast, and turned on C-SPAN as I occasionally do. This should tell you two things about me. One, I am such a television addict that I don't even eat breakfast without it on, and, two, I'm really a nerd.

The topic for the last hour or so of Washington Journal was Intellegent Design. The first guest was a reporter who talked a bit about ID in general and Kansas's recent decent back into the Middle Ages. The next guest was the scientific laughingstock Michael Behe, which is when I turned the set off in disgust. Watching the archive on the C-SPAN website (yes, really, I'm a nerd) there was a third guest, Matthew Chapman, a descendant of Charles Darwin who wrote Trials of the Monkey. There are, apparently, no actual scientists in Washington.

The best part of the show is the people who call in. It's a strange combination of laughing at all nutty people out there, and being frightened that, really, there all these nutty people out there. Today was no exception. One caller:

It's really frightening to see how far our country has fallen with this debate. There was a time in our country when the Bible was taught in schools... I'm thirty-five years old, and since I've graduated from high school, the public school system has become a war zone. And there's nothing wrong with teaching Intelligent Design. In fact, if anything I think maybe it's going to educate students and educate children to maybe look into the Bible, maybe look into some other form of religion and find a meaning. There's too many children out there, they don't know why they're here. If you've got something like evolution they just assume, "Well i guess I'm just evolving. So-and-so is bad, i guess since we evolved from monkeys we're just going to continue to go down that slippery slope."

That's at 1:52:40 in the stream, if you want to hear it.

One of the things that the big name ID proponents always say is that ID isn't a religion, since it doesn't say anything about the designer. On the other hand, in every case I've seen, when cornered about who the Designer is, the ID proponent always says something like, "Well, in my opinion, it was the God of the Scriptures." It's pretty clear that that "God of the Scriptures" line is code for "fundamentalist Christianity." Behe himself has said that the mysterious Intelligent Designer was God. So yet again, we see that ID is just fundamentalist Christianity wrapped up in sheep's clothing.

But what I found interesting about the above caller's rant was the fact that the problem with evolution isn't that it's wrong, but that believing in it will rob your life of "meaning." Yet again, we see that when these fundamentalists are confronted with an aspect of the material world, of reality, that contradicts their preferred interpretation of some aspect of the Bible, they actually disbelieve the reality, rather than their supernatural beliefs. That's why you can't have an intellectual debate on this topic with proponents of ID. Even if you present them with mountains of evidence supporting evolution, they won't believe it. And that's because mountains of evidence supporting evolution is exactly what we have.

And it annoys the pig

Squire (1) is engaging an Intelligent Design apologist over at his blog. He says he's already received a response to his email, but only teases us with it. No details. The hints of biblical literalism he drops makes it pretty clear what the email contains, though.

I figure this sort of action is pretty much a waste of time. You can not do science if you go into something with your conclusion already decided on. Biblical literalist IDiods (heh, love that word) are so convinced of their interpretation of unquestionable scripture, that, when confronted with evidence that some part of reality contradicts it, they don't doubt the Bible, they doubt the reality. You just can't engage that level of zealotry on an intellectual level.

Science requires an open mind. It requires that you be willing to at least consider that you might be wrong, and question your preconceived notions. Radical notions require significant evidence, yes, but eventually they will be adopted if they are correct. ID is the antithesis of that.

(1) I assume that should be "Squire" and not "The Squire." The latter would just be too pretentious. Bordering on "The Artist" level of pretension. Which would have to be punished by being forced to repeatedly watch Doctor Who: The Movie. The atrocious FOX version.

Email woes

I owe some of you an email, and I know that. For some reason, Eudora is refusing to send outgoing messages. I can recieve fine, but not send. I'll switch to Thunderbird sometime when I get the chance and get caught up on my emails.

Touched by His noodly appendage

I was talking to David the other day, and was surprised he had never heard of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or the Pastafarians. What with all the press about Intelligent Design and Kansas's recent abandondonment of science, I was surprised anyone could not have heard about the FSM. So here's the link: http://www.venganza.org/

Note the scientific evidence linking global warming to the declining number of pirates roaming the seas. Arrrgh, matie.

I'm considering adding this button to the blog:

Candy corn is my kryptonite

Jon mentioned earlier the groceries in C-U are expensive. I'm not sure I agree with that, although it seems to me Schnucks is pricey for little added benefit. Plus, milk and bread I buy there go bad unusually quickly, for some reason. I've always found Meijer to have fairly reasonable prices and both their selection and their stuff seems to be better than any of the smaller stores in town.

I went this weekend, though, and it seemed some stuff was a bit more expensive than I remembered. Or maybe the stuff I needed and hadn't stocked up on lately just wasn't on sale. They seem to be in the process of up-scaling. I assume that's to better differentiate themselves from Wal-Mart now right across the street. They're putting in a bakery, and there's a new deli counter. Unfortunately, it's a lot bigger and none of the people working behind the counter can see over it.

Halloween candy was on sale. I was bad.

CIA

It looks like the CIA may have been holding people in secret prisons in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe. They're not admitting anything, but the Red Cross has had reports the US has been hiding detainees from it. Which is pretty creepy if you think about it: why would the US want to hide detainees from the organization whose primary mission is do determine they are not being mistreated? There's a bill in the Senate right now that would ban "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of US detainees. The White House wants an amendment that specifically exempts the CIA from that.

On a tangential note, Digby questions why we are hearing over and over about prisoners being raped by American interrogators. I would suggest it's because rape is probably an effective tool for degrading and humiliating someone before an interrogation, in other words, "softening them up."

What I find really dangerous is that there's this meme coming from the right wing that a terrorism suspsect has NO rights. None at all. Now, I really doubt we are doing the same things in these CIA prisons that Saddam did in his. But if we aren't willing to draw a line against torture, we might wind up being no better. There's always a stubborn suspect. Lines always get pushed. And before you know it, you've got some guy's finger in a pair of bolt cutters and you're screaming, "Where's the bomb, Akmed, you've only got six left!"

Coincidentally, the US submitted a report to the UN about our foreign detainees, although it only covered those in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Gitmo. It reads:

There is no question that under the law of armed conflict, the United States has the authority to detain persons who have engaged in unlawful belligerence until the cessation of hostilities...

Of course, there will never be a cessation of hostilities. That's the whole point of the Global War Against Violent Extremism. As long as someone, somewhere on the planet doesn't like someone else, there will be terrorism. Or the threat of a bomb. Or a dictator with an active WMD program. Or at least the desire to start a WMD program. And so on.

Oceana has always been at war with terrorism.

Back

Back from NY. There are pictures, which I will put online somewhere once I bother to get them off the camera.

In the meantime, could someone plese explain to me why Ithaca, a community of 50,000 people, including 20,000 college students can support a frou-frou grocery store which is nearly as impressive as Central Market in San Antonio, but the best Champaign-Urbana can do is Schnucks and Meijer (and I'm not all that impressed by Schnucks). OK, I haven't looked extensively at Strawberry Fields, but it's tiny, and I think about half of it is taken up with the homopathic remedies, aromatherapy, and other snake oil. I mean, if I can get fourteen kinds of fresh mozarella in upstate NY at 3 am, how come I can't find something halfway as decent in C-U?

Romeo and, um, Romeo

A victory for gay rights this week, in Kansas, believe it or not.

One of the most frustrating cases on the gay rights docket has reached a happy conclusion after several years of court losses. Matthew Limon, now 23, will not have to spend 17 years behind bars for a consensual sexual episode that took place a week after his 18th birthday with another male teenager.

Basically, the law that he was prosecuted under gave special consideration to gay people when the age gap was only a few years, but didn't apply to gays. After Lawrence vs. Texas struck down sodomy laws nationwide, the law pretty much has to treat gays and straights equally.

This is one part I found particularly interesting:

The court used the lowest standard of judicial review, giving the state of Kansas every opportunity to come up with a reasonable explanation for the vast discrepancy between its treatment of gay and straight teens. But the state attorneys failed the test.

So it sounds like the judge responded with the legal equivalent of, "You're kidding me, right?"

That's a pretty good way to end the week. Have a good weekend. Blogging will be light for the next week or so, as I will have to travel for work.

Crazy like a FOX

The national nannies at the Parent's Television Council have just came out with their Top 10 Best and Worst shows on TV. After noting that six of the ten are on FOX, Dave over at Davenetics says:

Anyone else see some irony here? The network news brand that makes the most dough off of the outrage over the loosening of American morals is also the the network most responsible for creating that outrage.

They are making money on both ends.

That means two things.

They are really good at what they do.

And they don’t believe a word of the moralistic hogwash on Fox News.

Rupert Murdoch is the Terrell Owens of media moguldom. You may hate some of his qualities, but the guy gets the ball into the friggin endzone.

He reads Left Behind so you don't have to

I've been reading slactivist lately. It's written by a liberal Christian, in what I think is much more the intent of the whole Christian-religion-thing. The whole "help others and don't be judgmental part" that modern religious fundamentalists forget. That's a religion I could really get into if it didn't have all that belief in the supernatural baggage.

The best part about this blog is that he's going through and reading the atrocious Left Behind, and commenting on it on every page. It's a brilliant idea. He's pointing out how terrible the theology is, how unrealistic the characters are, and just how terribly written the book is. The problem is that this is a terribly long way to respond to a book. He's been doing it since 2002, and has only just gotten up to page 156. The good news is that leaves the rest of us with entertaining reading for a while.

This, I think, the post that made it pretty clear I was going to like this blog.

This approach -- judgement for Thee but not for Me -- also helps to account for the current antigay mania of American evangelicalism. In a couple of Paul's other rants, he includes "sodomites" in his bestiaries of badness. Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, the dubious assumption that Paul misunderstood the story of Sodom, and therefore used this as a synonym for "homosexuals," it doesn't follow that "homosexuals are bad" is the main lesson that heterosexuals should be gleaning from such passages. But if you read such passages looking for any excuse to exempt yourself from the apostle's condemnation, this offers an ideal escape hatch. Preaching against self-love, ingratitude, love of money or love of pleasure can be a two-edged sword. But if you're heterosexual, and you're preaching against homosexuality, then you're safe. You've found the ideal target for self-exempting, self-justifying self-righteousness.

Judgment is for Other People.

Does that remind you of anyone?

At least there is email

I got my old computer working with my backup hard drive. Windows reinstalled. Windows upgraded. Windows rebooted. I don't have all my files yet, but at least I am not email-less.

You can't make this stuff up

Journalists for a major television news organization are ordered to falsify a story. They refuse. They're fired. They sue. They lose.

During their appeal, FOX asserted that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media. They argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on public airwaves. Fox attorneys did not dispute Akre’s claim that they pressured her to broadcast a false story, they simply maintained that it was their right to do so.

FOX News. Raise your hand if you're surprised.

Uh oh

Blogging may be sparse for the near future. My computer is refusing to boot, saying some configuration file is corrupted. Nor will it boot from the CD so I can do a repair installation of Windows. I've been thinking of replacing this machine for a while now; this may be the kick in the pants that gets me to actually do it.

Comment spam

I've started getting spam in the comments, so I've had to turn on the Blogger CAPTCHA. Anonymous comments are still allowed, but if it keeps up then I'll have to turn that off too. Fucking parasitic spammers are a blight on society.

These people are fucking nuts

I've previously blogged (1, 2) about religious leaders blaming gays and other sinners for Hurricane Katrina. It seems to be getting worse. Alabama State Senator Hank Erwin is now saying that "gambling, sin and wickedness" was the cause of Hurricane Katrina and it was God's punishment for all that sin. I don't really understand why he mentions gambling twice. Other than riverboat casinos and the state lottery, gambling is basically illegal in Louisiana. But when did facts ever get in the way of bigotry?

I know this will tag me an an evil, baby-eating liberal (in case you hadn't guessed that already) but conservative Christians are fucking nuts. These whackjob, irrational people hold way too much power in our country.

Look, morons, hurricanes happen occasionally. Regularly, even. When they happen, they tend to hit the Gulf Coast. It's not sin. It's not the queers. It's not even those Jew bankers or the porn on TV. If these things caused natural disasters, Las Vegas and San Francisco would both be smoking craters twenty miles in diameter. Katrina is neither the largest or the most lethal hurricane to hit the US. It just happened to hit a densely populated area that had a lot of poor people, and it was big enough to break the levees. That's it. There's no supernatural or mystical component to that.

The fact that Christians don't seem to be able to grasp these basic facts scares the everloving crap out of me. I've said it before: it really is not a big leap from "God is punishing us for the sin in our midst," to "we must purge the sinners from our midst."

(Via Crooks and Liars.)

When the Moon hits your wallet like a big pizza pie

Bob Park [*] has an editorial in Thursdays NY Times about the unnecessary manned space program to re-land on the Moon. I have to agree. Bush proposed this venture as part of his program to get men on Mars, and utterly pointless endevour. Sure, Big Grand Projects capture the imagination and make us, as a nation, feel big and important and manly. But those Big Grand Projects come with a Bigger, Grander Budget, and if we're going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars and almost undoubtedly the lives of a few people to send some astronauts to the Moon and to Mars, there had dammned well better be a better reason than it will be a bold vision for our future.

From Park's editorial:

This week NASA described plans to return astronauts to the Moon in 2018 at a cost of $104 billion. That's nine years after President Bush leaves office. Starting from scratch in 1961, President Kennedy's commitment to put a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth was realized in just eight years. What is going on?...

Two mechanical geologists, Spirit and Opportunity, are doing this even now, by searching for evidence of water on opposite sides of Mars. They don't break for lunch or complain about the cold nights, and they live on sunshine. They've been at it for nearly two years, yet their mission costs less than sending a shuttle to the International Space Station. The brains of Spirit and Opportunity are the brains of geologists back on Earth.

I'm no Luddite saying space exploration is a waste of money that could be better spent here on earth; heck, my first post-college job was working to build the International Space Station. But the ISS is now basically without a science mission, and has scaled back due to the inflating budget and the destruction of the Columbia. What little science it does do doesn't require a permanent manned presence in space. Much, if not all, of it could be done just as well in unmanned probes, or perhaps on the remaining Shuttle.

We need a good reason to go there in person first, then we are justified in spending a lot of money.

[*] If you haven't read Park's weekly newsletter What's New, I strongly suggest that you subscribe. It's pretty much always about science, but is accessible to any reader, and written with a dry wit that just cracks me up.

Puck Fanasonic

I previously blogged about my piece of crap Panasonic CT-27HL14 television. Since I posted my review and description of my problem over at Amazon, no fewer than seven people have added reviews. They all describe the exact same problem I had. I think it's pretty clear by now that that model of TV has either a manufacturing or design defect. If so, why hasn't it been recalled? This whole situation just screams class action lawsuit.

Where the evacuees come sweeping down the plain

My sister was set evacuate Houston for Lubbock (How many times do you think you'll hear that in your life?) as of 3:00 am this morning. From what I've seen on the news, I'm not sure she will have made it out of the city limits by now.

The Houston Chronicle has a really good blog about Hurricane Rita and the evacuation of Houston. They report that AAA members of Texas that are evacuating are having to be placed in hotels in Oklahoma. That's like having to flee Champaign to Columbus, Ohio, and then a good bit farther. Geez.

Um, somthin' ain't right here

I just popped over to eBay for a moment. Their front page lists the "Top 10 video games" they're currently selling. The list is:

1. Sony PSP
2. Gran Turisimo 4
3. Playstation 2
4. Halo 2
5. Xbox
6. Resident Evil 4
7. Game Boy Advance
8. GameCube
9. Nintendo DS
10. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Do you think someone should tell them that six out of the ten things on this list aren't video games?

It's like saying that the top DVD is a 30-inch Sony Trinitron.

Maybe it was too much Southern Comfort?

Now that a number of Christian and Jewish and Muslim conservatives have declared Katrina to be a punishment from God for people who are Not Like Us, it really makes me wonder what sin North Carolinans have committed to be punished with Hurricane Ophelia. Or maybe this hurricane is just a weather pattern caused by warm equatorial waters and wasn't sent from on high?

Must ... resist ...

For some time now, I've been thinking of replacing my current computer. There's nothing really wrong with it, but it's starting to show its age, and isn't quite up to snuff for playing most of the games that are coming out these days. I was thinking about just getting one from one of the custom build shops out there. I was, that is, until Jon, as the current incarnation of the Prince of Darkness, suggested building one.

So that set me off on a bunch of reading and window shopping. A few nerdgasms later, I came up with what I think is a pretty decent system:

MSI K8N Neo4-F motherboard
Athlon 64 3000+
1 GB RAM
Leadtek GeForce 6600 GT 128 MB, PCI-Express video card
Hitachi T7K250 160 GB hard drive
Antec SLK 3800B case (black is so slimming, don't you know?)

The only question is whether or not to buy the motherboard and processor as a combo from some place that would ship it already assembled. Now I just need to work up the courage to drop that much money over at Newegg.

Quick reminder

I just wanted to let every one know that The Daily Show is starting their week-long special investigative report, Evolution, Schmevolution tonight. The saddest part is that it will probably be the only media outlet that treats Intelligent Design with the level of respect it deserves.

Update (13 Sept. 05): Naturally, I completely forgot.

Ack!

Most people come to my blog looking for porn. That's largely because I've blogged about the spambots that plague gay.com, and they're searching for one of the domains. I'm used to that.

Nevertheless, this was not the sort of search I usually see in the referrer logs: manya gang bang

Yay, Magic!

Manya asked:

How goes the magicking?
Do you like it when everyone claps when you win?

I finished my league "in the money," which I think is pretty good considering it was my first tournament online or off, and the fact that I haven't played in a few years.

And now I'm about to do it again, with a four-week-long tournament this time. There used to be a theory that Wizards of the Coast put cocaine in the cards, which wore away over time, so you had to keep buying more to get your fix. I don't understand how they do that in the online version, though.

Do not think it can not happen here

Number of Christian groups blaming gays and other sinners for Katrina's devastation: 4

Number of non-wingnut Christian groups calling this shameful: 0

New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion.

-- Rev. Bill Shanks in the American Family Association's AgapePress

"... this act of God destroyed a wicked city," stated Repent America director Michael Marcavage. "From 'Girls Gone Wild' to 'Southern Decadence,' New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin.

-- Repent America

God judged New Orleans for the sin of shedding innocent blood through abortion.

-- Constitution Party candidate for US Congress Steve Lefemine

America is now experiencing the consequences (curses) of Middle East policies, which have been opposed to God’s Word and to the preservation of His covenant land.

-- Jerusalem Newswire, a Christian website

About three hundred years ago roughly twenty-five people were killed in Salem for being witches. Their trials rested on nothing more than spectral evidence, the notion that the witch's spirit appeared to the tormented Salem girls in a vision.

In the twentieth century, the lynching of blacks in the United States was not uncommon. There were about a hundred and fifty lynchings in the 1930s, and these continued up until a few KKK members lynched a black man in 1981. The witch trials are basically ancient history, but this happened within living memory.

I've now heard two different second hand accounts (about either the coworker or relative of a friend) of people saying how residents of New Orleans are being punished by God and that deserved their fate because they lived in a sinful city. In both cases, the sin that brought on the Wrath of God (now available in chocolate and strawberry) was unnamed, but does it really matter? I've always been under the impression that Christians believed that all people were hell-bound sinners requiring the blood of Jesus Christ to be saved from the terrible fate that awaits the rest of us sinners? I mean, isn't that the central tenet of Christianity? Why are New Orleans sinners so much more despicable than Montana sinners?

Less than a hundred years ago, the rise of a particular political movement in Germany led to the deaths of around ten million "undesirable" people. (You know which one I'm talking about.) The movement is now used in our society as the personification of all things evil. That happened two generations ago, but do not think that can not happen here.

Between 1992 and 1995, about 8000 Bosnian Muslims were killed by agents of their government in an ethnic and religious cleansing. That happened half a world away, but do not think that can not happen here.

In 1994, roughly a million Africans were killed over a period of four months. Mostly by machete. First world nations, fully cognizant of what was going on, stood by and refused to take any action. Again, do not think that can not happen here.

These horrible things did not happen because the people that lived in these places and these times were somehow more genetically predisposed to horrible acts of violence. People are capable of doing the most terrible things to each other given the right philosophical framework in which to do them. Do not think that these things can not or will not ever happen here because we live in a more "civilized" society. Do not think that the people that live around you are incapable of doing them.

I am stressing this so much for a very good reason. Take a look at the quotes above, all made by Christian organizations in the past few days. These people are blaming queers and other sinners not like them for the freakin' weather. Is that really so much different than blaming the witch down the street for your child's mysterious illness? Is that really so much different from blaming the bank's foreclosure on your property on the Jew banker* that lives a few blocks away?

There is a very real and very great danger of an avian flu pandemic breaking out in the next few decades. This is not the coughs and sniffles we're talking about, but a disease that has a 50% fatality rate. Katrina has probably killed a few thousand people, largely concentrated in one geographical area. The CDC says that just a medium-scale flu pandemic in the U.S. may kill upwards of 200,000 people, all over the country.

What do you think the right-wing Christian wingnuts will be saying then?

How long do you think it will be before "God is punishing our country because of all the sinners in our midst" becomes "God wants us to purge our country of the sinner in our midst"?

Do not think it can not happen here.

* "The 'Feed the Jew Banker' way of housing purchase is not the only way to buy a house." From: http://www.stormfront.org/archive/t-101192.html Not linked for obvious reasons.

Just a thought on Roberts

I'd like to point out that Bush has just nominated John Roberts for Chief Justice after the death of Rehnquist. Although he's been a lawyer (possibly a "trial lawyer?") for a while and has argued in front of the Supreme Court, Roberts has had a grand total of two years of experience as a judge.

Are there really no judges in the country that have a more appropriate background for being the head of the most powerful court in the nation? Then again, they probably don't have such strong political ties to the Bush family.

I guess we're lucky that he didn't nominate Justice "Oh, but the state governments can impose a religion on their citizens" Scalia for Chief.

Bush does not want your $1

This is from over at Eschaton. I think it's from today's Meet the Press, but I'm not sure.

The guy who runs this building I'm in. Emergency management. He's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said. Are you coming. Son? Is somebody coming? And he said yeah. Mama. Somebody's coming to get you.. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday. And she drowned Friday night.

If that doesn't just break your heart, you must be a compassionate conservative.

Mr. President, no matter how many times you pat the head of FEMA on the back and tell him how great a job he's doing, someone somewhere in your administration has cocked up on a level never before seen in American history. You tell us that you care for the people killed, hurt, and made homeless by this catastrophe. But we know that you were on vacation when it was clear this hurricane was going to be devastating, and you stayed there after the devestation. You tell us that no one could have predicted the collapse of the levies. But we know that that very situation was predicted by the very people in charge of them. And then you praise the man on whose watch so many people have unnecessarily died.

Tell us President Bush, where exactly does the buck stop in your administration?

A bit of a pickle

I've been sitting on the horns of an ethical dilemma (a horny dilemma?). Hurricane Katrina's devastation has been unimaginable, and the need of all those people is both heartbreaking and overwhelming. I've been wanting to do at least a little something to help, and looked into ways of doing so. I have no applicable skills, and am a long way away, so that bascially means sending money. But who to send money to?

The biggest agency that seems to be involved is, of course, the American Red Cross. However, I have a strict, "If my blood is too queer for you, my money is too queer for you" policy. Untill the RC drops their blanket, ineffective, and irrational policy against blood donation by gay men, they're not getting one red drop of my cash. I don't think it's a malicious policy, just that it's boneheaded and stupid.

Looking at the FEMA site, they listed basically the Red Cross and a bunch of religions organizations. That includes Pat "Bring me the Head of Hugo Chavez" Robinson's Operation Blessing at #2. (Note: Since I first looked at it, they've moved Blessing down to #3, and added some non-religious groups.) So I was left with a bit of a conundrum. Give money and abandon my ethical priciples, or harden my heart and do nothing?

Fortunately, the Rainbow World Fund is calling for the GLBT community to give to America's Second Harvest, a food bank network . It seems to be a good charity, and only 2% of their revenue goes to anything other than their programs. So they are the ones getting my donation.

It's sucking me in...

I was bored one day and discovered that there is an online version of Magic: The Gathering. This I did not need to know. I got sucked into that game back in college, and am surprised to find it's still going strong, albeit with lots of cards and expansions I don't know about. The online version is exactly like the real-life version, just played with virtual cards you buy and trade online. I'm trying to restrain myself from jumping in, buying a playable deck, and starting this madness again.

Update (2 Sept 05): Too late, it's got me. Bought my cards, and I'm waiting to take part in my first tournament, even.