The New York Times reports that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is investing the Bush administration for disseminating "covert propaganda."

From the article:

Lawyers from the accountability office, an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the administration systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, "The Bush administration/the G.O.P. is committed to education."

The auditors declared: "We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds."

The report also sharply criticized the Education Department for telling Ketchum Inc., a public relations company, to pay Mr. Williams for newspaper columns and television appearances praising Mr. Bush's education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act.

Sadly, this is nothing new. In 2004, the GAO chastised the Bush administration for violating federal law by using taxpayer dollars to manufacture propaganda in support of its Medicare bill and designing the advertisements to look like TV news reports. Earlier this year, in May, the GAO gave a report to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation titled "Unattributed Prepackaged News Stories Violate Publicity or Propaganda Prohibition."

The talking points memo disseminated by the RNC on Monday will no doubt include a slander of the GAO, which it will call a partisan organization. It will use as evidence for this the fact that Ted Kennedy and Frank Lautenberg -- both Democrats -- called for the investigation.

Conspiracy theory? Think again. In March, an anonymous memo was discovered which listed political talking points regarding the Terri Schiavo case. This discovery confirmed the existence of what we had suspected all along: that Republican politicians receive a list of "talking points" and sound bites that they are to repeat when discussing a particular issue. This is why it seems like Republican pundits all say the same things in reaction to an issue or event: it's because they are all saying the same thing. They're all repeating the Republican talking points. This is why Michael Chertoff and Richard Meyer said that when they opened the newspapers after Hurricane Katrina, the newspapers said that "New Orleans dodged the bullet." They were both instructed by the talking points to say that (because no newspaper said that, except for the right-wing website WorldNetDaily). After they lied, Al Franken went through sound-clips of their statements in a hilarious segment called "Who Got the Memo?" There was something eerie about them repeating, almost verbatim, the same lie.

Now, I don't want to suggest that the Bush administration uses taxpayer dollars to disseminate propaganda in an attempt to get people to buy into its legislation. Nor do I want to suggest that the administration is the center of a highly sophisticated system of media manipulation advanced through the distribution of talking points memos to Republican politicians and pundits, making it appear as though commentators objectively favor the administration's policies when in fact they are told by the administration how to describe the administration's policies in a good light and its opponents in a bad light.

No, wait. I want to suggest both of those.

Posted by Mark at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Via Boing Boing comes something particularly hilarious.

Someone had the bright idea to create a movie trailer for the film The Shining, editing the trailer so as to make it look like a romantic comedy. If you had never seen The Shining, then after watching this trailer, you'd be convinced that it was a film like My Girl or even Jack Nicholson's own As Good as It Gets. What's priceless is the choice of background music for this trailer. It's completely inappropriate.

The New York Times even wrote an article about it:

A few weeks back, he said, he entered a contest for editors’ assistants sponsored by the New York chapter of the Association of Independent Creative Editors. The challenge? Take any movie and cut a new trailer for it — but in an entirely different genre. Only the sound and dialogue could be modified, not the visuals, he said.

Mr. Ryang chose “The Shining,” Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. In his hands, it became a saccharine comedy — about a writer struggling to find his muse and a boy lonely for a father. Gilding the lily, he even set it against “Solsbury Hill,” the way-too-overused Peter Gabriel song heard in comedies billed as life-changing experiences, like last year’s “In Good Company.”

Posted by Mark at 9:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a public service announcement:

For your health and well-being, the United States of Me kindly requests that you shut the f*ck up about my work with needle exchange.

That proclamation is to serve as a slightly comedic, mostly serious introduction to today’s topic – Needle Exchange: Preventing HIV vs. Enabling Heroin Addicts.

First, allow me to introduce the topic to those of you unfamiliar with it. Needle Exchange Emergency Distribution (NEED) is the large needle exchange program (NEP) in the Bay Area. NEPs are based on the health care model of harm reduction. They are usually established in the face of skyrocketing AIDS rates. In this area, San Francisco and other counties declared a state of emergency due to AIDS a few years ago. AIDS rates of IV drug users (IDUs) can range from 25-60% in different areas.

IDUs contract HIV due to the sharing of needles. It is illegal in most areas to possess needles without a prescription (for example, given to diabetics needing to inject insulin). Opiate withdrawal does not merely suck sweaty ass, it kills, sometimes, especially if the cold turkey method is used outside of the naloxone-dispensing expensive rehab centers. When IDUs need to inject, they really, physically, need to inject. Opiate addiction is one of the most physical of all possible addictions. In the absence of clean needles, they will use old ones, even ones on the street or in abandoned housing. Once HIV penetrated this community, it is easy to see how it would naturally spread like wildfire.

NEPs were developed in response to the alarming levels of HIV transmission due to dirty needles. They claim not to advocate drug use but rather to provide individuals with the healthiest possible choices within a decision that they have already made. Opponents claim that they are enabling drug use, diverting candidates from rehab, and encouraging initiates to use because of the facility of attaining all but the main ingredient through the NEP.

Admittedly, certainly, there is logical reasoning to the argument of those that believe NEPs are the work of misguided enablers. Not only do NEPs provide individuals who might have been hesitant to use because of HIV risk with clean and sterile alternatives, they also provide a venue through which to connect with experienced users who can provide further assistance to them in their path to full-blown addiction.

The founders of NEPs are not idiots. They recognized this possibility. So, we had a hypothesis. The hypothesis was that NEPs enable heroin use. And what better to do with a hypothesis than to test it? Surely, you’re not going to take it out to lunch, as it doesn’t have a stomach, and inviting it to do so might hurt its feelings. No, it seems like testing it is the best idea.

Let the scientific mountain of support begin to accumulate. Some of the most extensive studies to date have been completed by UCSF AIDS Institute, one of the best, if not THE best, AIDS research facilities in the world. They studied 52 cities throughout the world, mostly in Europe. The cities with NEPs experienced an overall 6% decrease in AIDS whereas the cities without NEPs experienced an overall 6% increase in AIDS. No rise in heroin use was reported in any NEP city. In fact, candidates for rehab were often reached through NEPs that would refer them if, and only if, they asked for such assistance.

Once NEPs were legalized in 2000 (at least in this area), the fight for federal funding began. Previously, NEED here in Berkeley was an underground operation, activist hippies passing needles out from a baby carriage, sometimes being arrested once discovered. In 2000, significant research mandated the legalization of the programs. However, in the current federal political environment, funding for the projects is banned. The government put together a research panel to recommend whether federal funding should be used for NEPs. Out of eight participating institutions, eight found NEPs to be effective AIDS prevention policy, six of them going on to recommend funding and two of them abstaining from recommending or not. Despite this, the federal government refused to lift the ban as the results did not come out as they wished. NEPs have been supported by the former head of the Department of Health, the former head of the NIH, and the former Secretary General.

Why, though, do NEPs NOT increase drug use? Opiate use is a complex psychological and physical process that is independent of facility of obtaining supplies. If supplies are there or drugs are there, people will find them. Unfortunately, often what they find are low-quality or dirty supplies and drugs, increasing not just their risk for HIV, but also their risk of overdose and death.

But some people don’t care about the IDUs. They did it to themselves, they claim. If that is your stance, though I disagree with you, I would still urge you to consider the innocent people that are also at risk for HIV transmission due to the behavior of IDUs, particularly the sexual partners and even children of users. How do you look at a baby with HIV from its mother’s drug use and not have NEPs in the back of your mind, wondering if they could have saved these two lives?

Unfortunately, police officers often target IDUs coming to NEPs, waiting across the corner to arrest them with drug paraphernalia charges. This causes fear that I have personally seen in participants, many of whom come for their friends, even their parents. Some of the people who pick up supplies are not IDUs but they know their father is and want to protect him. Meanwhile, NEP volunteers face criticism and misunderstanding from the local communities, people screaming about how we are helping “dope fiends�? and bringing them into the neighborhood.

Right now, one of my friends refuses to talk to me because of “what I am doing.�? I hope that we will come to a more enlightened conclusion, based on the substantial scientific evidence, for the good of the world community that is facing a raging AIDS epidemic.

Posted by Ed at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier today, in a 78-22 vote, the Senate confirmed John Roberts as the new chief justice of the United States. After being confirmed, Roberts was sworn in by acting Chief Justice John Paul Stevens.

But what of Sandra Day O'Connor's replacement? The court's term starts Oct. 3, and there's still a vacant seat -- but not really. O'Connor made her retirement in June contingent upon the fact that her replacement be confirmed before the beginning of the court's 2005 term. Since that's four days from now, it looks like O'Connor will resume her duties when the court convenes on Monday. Bush spokespeople have said that he will announce his O'Connor replacement sometime next week.

Bush announced Roberts as his O'Connor replacement July 19, and his confirmation hearings were scheduled for approximately six weeks later, on Sept. 6, but William Rehnquist's Sept. 3 death stalled the process for about a week as Bush shifted Roberts to the chief justice track. It will probably be December before O'Connor is replaced, as Senate Democrats will want to look extra-carefully at Bush's O'Connor replacement to ensure that the candidate is just as moderate as O'Connor. For Bush to replace her with a person as conservative as Roberts would tilt the court to the right, something the Democrats really don't want.

Let me tell you something: Roberts isn't as bad as everyone's making him out to be. For one, he's more than qualified (something we can't say about all Bush appointees), and for another, he's not the hard-right ideologue that NARAL would have you believe he is. During his confirmation hearings, he acknowledged that he is not the same lawyer that he was in the 1980s when he worked for the Justice Department. His opinions as a federal court judge show that, while he interprets the law conservatively, he takes cases as they come and doesn't try to make his court opinions match some sort of grand, overarching judicial philosophy. Of course Bush was going to appoint a conservative; there's no way around that. The only question was: will this conservative consider his opinion of a case in light of the law itself, or in light of his theoretical model of how the law should work? At the very least, we have a justice who subscribes to the former, not the latter, attitude toward interpreting the law.

Posted by Mark at 3:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) was indicted by a federal grand jury for conspiring to violate political fundraising laws. Texas laws prohibit corporations from donating money to political parties, but a political action committee (PAC) set up by DeLay and others acted as an entry point for corporate donations. Money was given to DeLay's PAC, then from DeLay's PAC to the RNC in Washington, and then back to individual candidates in Texas. Also indicted were John Colyandro, formerly the executive director of DeLay's PAC, and Jim Ellis, the head of DeLay's national political committee. Read the actual indictment. Go on, I dare you! You hate your country if you don't.

As with any scandal, there are two explanations. One is that DeLay actually committed a crime. The other is that the prosecutor is a crazy partisan Democrat who will stop at nothing to use the legal system to see to it that one of the most powerful Republicans in the United States gets convicted of a crime despite overwhelming evidence indicating that he's a really upstanding guy who didn't commit a crime, and furthermore, would never, ever even think of laundering money in the interests of getting Republicans elected to the Texas state legislature, and here's a picture of DeLay holding a kitten.

Guess which one DeLay and other Republicans are promoting?

Yes, that's right. As if guided by some mysterious talking points memorandum sent from the RNC higher-ups, Republican pundits simultaneously lambasted prosecutor Ronnie Earle and pulled the Crucible card by calling the investigation a "witch hunt." See, the only problem with that comparison is that the phrase "witch hunt" refers to an investigation without a basis. DeLay's investigation, on the other hand, has a basis: there is actual, tangible evidence indicating the existence of a money chain which goes from corporations to DeLay's PAC to the RNC and finally, to individual candidates. This is all in violation of the law, by the way. Nevertheless, DeLay called the indictment "one of the weakest, most baseless indictments in American history." That's compared to the actual Salem witch trials and Joe McCarthy's accusation of communists in the Army. And there's Emmett Till.

Some pundits also fail to acknowledge that it was a federal grand jury -- that is, twelve normal people from Texas -- who agreed that there was enough evidence incriminating DeLay to pursue charges against him. Or are these twelve people also engaged in a witch hunt?

Clearly, that's the only answer. Not only is Ronnie Earle engaged in a witch hunt, but he falsified evidence and bribed and brainwashed twelve citizens of Texas into believing the baseless claims that Tom DeLay -- a politician, for crying out loud! -- committed a crime.

Kevin Madden, DeLay's spokesperson, accurately summed up the issue: "This indictment is nothing more than prosecutorial retribution by a partisan Democrat. [...] We regret the people of Texas will once again have their taxpayer dollars wasted on Ronnie Earle's pursuit of headlines and political paybacks." Damn that Ronnie Earle's black heart! How dare he waste taxpayer money on one of the most baseless indictments in American history (next to all of those ones that are several orders of magnitude more baseless)!

DeLay was on Hannity & Colmes yesterday. There isn't a transcript yet, but you can bet your patriotism that Hannity and DeLay both agreed that the charges were baseless and somebody -- probably John Kerry -- bribed the judge and jury. Ooh, that Kerry! He really busts my buttons with his east coast liberalism and the kind of intellectual and political snobbery that can be equalled only by every other politician in Washington! Nevertheless, it's he who is the snob and Republicans who own shares of the largest for-profit hospital company in the country who are the voices of the common man!

Does Michelle Malkin even live in this universe?

Posted by Mark at 12:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While listening to an NPR discussion this morning about Karen Hughes's "listening trip" through Saudi Arabia, an interesting thought occurred to me after one comment that the appropriately named commentator made. I had much time to mull this over, what with sitting suspended hundreds of feet above a large body of water motionless (read: stuck in traffic due to yet another broken down SUV in the friggin' middle of the Bay Bridge). A paraphrase:

The Muslim women are telling Hughes, "Your values are not our values. Issues that would be problematic for American women are not problems to us. We are happy. We are content." The problem is not with values being shared or not between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia; the problem is with foreign policy. Hughes will have a very, very difficult job improving the image amongst Muslims abroad because she has no jurisdiction over the policy that is at issue.

To pull from that comment one seemingly smaller issue in the whole foreign policy vs. values at issue deal, I started thinking about feminism.

We, being open-minded forward-thinking college-educated foot soldiers in the army of the intellectual elite, know that feminism is A Good Thing. Obviously. I, myself, am a self-proclaimed feminist who hopes to tear down the pejorative connotation that has adhered itself to the term like an unfortunate fly on fly paper. We, being enlightened, realize that women are equal and should demand equal rights. If any of our "oppressed sisters" at home or abroad seek to overthrow the patriarchal construction crews' building bulletproof glass ceilings, then we should aid them, intellectually or literally. Feminism should be spread throughout the world. But what happens when women don't want
it?

Now, my far leftist conspiracy-theory-esque side (which is like the Sahara compared to a grain of sand when compared to my neo-conservative blind faith side), informs me that such women do want it; they just don't know that they want it ... yet. If they could only see the benefits that we U.S. women reaped after the women's right movement. If they only understood how their culture has been keeping them from realizing their full potential as thinkers and doers.

So, how can we make them realize what they're missing? How do we tell them, "No, you really do want to be a feminist, to be equal." We educate them. But how? First, how many of your local feminist friends do you know that speak Arabic? So, to educate en masse as we would need to do, we would probably have to conduct outreach in English. So they will have to learn in English. At best, we could hope for a few feminist Arab-Americans or a handful of die-hards who learn a choppy Arabic to attempt to get the message out to women in their native tongue.

Second, the cultural logistics. In some countries, a feminist American woman would cringe at the restrictions placed upon her, especially in areas such as travel and clothing. We should reject the covering and the male accompaniment as devices of the patriarchy. But then, how do we travel? The men are not likely to be convinced to ease up on these rules. So, we would have to force the men in power to accept the values and conduct of the American feminist. Perhaps we could place economic sanctions against them or start a preemptive war based on intelligence that the government will not be friendly to American feminist foreign policy.

Imperialism, anyone?

Or, to emulate the expansive vocabulary and historical references characteristic of my colleague Mr. Marcus Aurelius Wilson, cultural hegemony, friends, Ro(wo)mans, country(wo)men?

And then there are the women. That just don't know that they are secretly dying to be liberated. How do we free them? If a position of inferiority for women is an integral part of a religious and cultural tradition, how do we end that component without imposing our culture and diluting theirs?

We, the youthful thinkers of tomorrow, face a dilemma. We hold to be self-evident two truths that appear irreconcilable:

Truth #1: Women should be equal. Feminism is not a theory but the just pursuit of equality.

Truth #2: Cultural diversity should be preserved. Ethnocentrism ruins ancient traditions in danger of extinction, particularly as a result of Americanization.

How do we bring rights to women without Americanizing them? Are there (eek! squirm uncomfortably) positive facets to imperialism? Let's look, shall we, at the Roman Empire, a bunch of imperialists if there ever were any (it's even in the name!). They wreaked all sorts of havoc of the necessary and unnecessary sorts, wiping local cultures and values aside like gadflies. And what was the end result? Order, relative peace, a lingua franca that improved communications and diplomacy, roads that defined effective transportation, ingenious engineering feats like mortar-less aqueducts, universities with scholars mulling over questions like the one I mull over here, forward-thinking and sophistication, the arts. In fact, the quality of life, the standard of living of the average individual, had
undoubtedly improved.

Hmmm, is that famed token imperialist of Bishop Hall, Drew M---, onto something after all?

My hippie peace-loving chillness says no, but ...

Posted by Ed at 2:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Two days ago, Scott McClellan said this:

Q Scott, the President -- is the President's call for fuel conservation a temporary one? Or is he asking Americans to permanently change their behavior and their energy usage?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, there are steps that -- in the energy bill that we passed, to, as I said, expand conservation, and there are steps that -- or initiatives that the President has outlined that are important steps that we can take to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy. This has been a high priority for the President from day one, and he has spelled out a number of steps that we can take when it comes to addressing the root causes of high energy prices. We need to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy.

I'll highlight the important words:

[...] or initiatives that the President has outlined that are important steps that we can take to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy. This has been a high priority for the President from day one, and he has spelled out a number of steps that we can take when it comes to addressing the root causes of high energy prices.

Oh, really?

Rewind to May 7, 2001, when former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said this:

QUESTION: Does the president believe that, given the amount of energy Americans consume per capita, how much it exceeds any other citizen in any other country in the world, does the president believe we need to correct our lifestyles to address the energy problem?

FLEISCHER: That's a big no. The president believes that's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one. And we have a bounty of resources in this country. What we need to do is make certain that we're able to get those resources in an efficient way, in a way that also emphasizes protecting the environment and conservation into the hands of consumers so they can make the choices that they want to make as they live their lives day to day.

Did you notice the words "That's a big no" in response to the question "Does the president believe we need to correct our lifestyles to address the energy problem?" And ... wait, what's that? There's more?

QUESTION: So Americans should go on consuming as much/more energy than any other citizens in any other country of the world (inaudible) want?

FLEISCHER: The president believes that the American people are very wise, and that, given the right incentives, they will know how -- they will make their own right determinations about how much they can conserve, just as the president announced last week that the federal government, as part of its consumership in California will reduce energy needs, for example, the Department of Defense facilities in California, by 10 percent.

He believes the American people, too, will make the right decisions about conservation. And the program he will announce shortly will also include a series of conservation items.

The president also believes that the American people's use of energy is a reflection of the strength of our economy, of the way of life that the American people have come to enjoy. And he wants to make certain that a national energy policy is comprehensive, that it includes conservation, includes a way of allowing the American people to continue to enjoy the way of life that has made the United States such a leading nation in the world.

As always, there is an explanation for this. On an LSAT, this is called a "resolve-the-paradox" question. So, let's do a practice question together.

Which of the following, if true, would explain the discrepancy between what Ari Fleischer said in 2001 and what Scott McClellan said two days ago?

(A) Inflation caused the truth value of Ari Fleischer's 2001 comments to decrease relative to Scott McClellan's comments.
(B) A malfunctioning robot duplicant of Scott McClellan, rather than McClellan himself, made the statement two days ago.
(C) Saddam Hussein enjoys eating Doritos.
(D) Dick Cheney made comments similar to Ari Fleischer's in 2001.
(E) Scott McClellan is lying.

Let's use Process of Elimination to get to the best answer. Answer choice (A) appears to make sense: the more time that has passed since a statement, the less held to scrutiny is the truth of that statement. While that is a true principle of political punditry, it doesn't explain the paradox. Choice (B) is irrelevant to the current argument, even though it contains the factually correct implication that Scott McClellan is a robot. Choice (C) is similar to choice (B) in that it contains true facts that are beyond the scope of the argument. Choice (D) would be the appropriate answer if this were a question that asked, "Which of the following, if true, most weakens Scott McClellan's statement?" But, unfortunately, that's not what the question is asking. Therefore, we are left with choice (E), and it turns out that this is the correct answer: Scott McClellan lied two days ago when he said that energy conservation has been a high priority for the president since day one.

Suggestions for Further Reading

• Scott McClellan's Sept. 26, 2005 Press Briefing
• Ari Fleischer's May 7, 2001 Press Briefing
• A Time magazine article from May, 2001 that discusses Cheney's energy policy. In May, 2001, Cheney delivered a speech in which he said, regarding the newly-unveiled White House energy plan, "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy." [Registration of some sort may be required to view the Time article. Just do a Google search for the quote.]
• The National Energy Policy, released in May, 2001 after lots of meetings between Cheney and unnamed consultants. The National Energy Policy concluded that, while we should research alternative fuels, we should focus most national resources on expanding the use of existing fossil fuels. These recommendations prompted environmental groups to ask for the names of all the people who were consultants to the Energy Task Force. A 2004 Supreme Court decision concluded that the White House wasn't obligated to hand over those names.

Thanks to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart for pointing out this discrepancy.

Posted by Mark at 2:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In what will prove to be the most important case the U.S. Supreme Court has dealt with in the last twenty years, the Court has granted certiorari to Vickie Lynn Marshall v. E. Pierce Marshall, 04-1544 (2004) [link goes to Ninth Circuit Court's opinion]. But you might know Vickie Lynn Marshall better by her stage name, "Anna Nicole Smith." So, I guess this case won't be that important at all. Never mind.

And, as you probably guessed, E. Pierce Marshall is the son of J. Howard Marshall, II, the man she married a year before he died in 1995 at age 89. For ten years, Anna Nicole Smith has fought with Marshall's son over whether or not she is entitled to over $400 million of her late husband's fortune. Marshall fils contends that she is not in the will and therefore doesn't get any money.

The Supreme Court, though, will not be deciding who gets the money. In fact, nothing about this case is interesting. There's no money, no glamour, no fame or fortune. At issue is whether or not a federal court has jurisdiction to hear claims from state probate courts. The case began in a Texas bankruptcy court, then to the U.S. bankruptcy court, then to a U.S. District Court in California before ending up at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, headquartered in San Francisco. (Shouldn't the case have gone to the Fifth Circuit Court, which has jurisdiction over Texas?)

So why did this case start in bankruptcy court? Turns out that Anna Nicole Smith was going bankrupt in California at the same time that probate proceedings were going on in Texas. The bankruptcy court in Texas awarded her $474 million, but the U.S. District Court brought that down to $89 million. In 2004, the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that federal courts in California had no jurisdiction over the case and declared that Smith should receive no money, which brings us to the question at issue for the U.S. Supreme Court: did the U.S. District Court in California have the jurisdiction to consider a claim from the Texas probate court?

Now, I love the Supreme Court. But seriously. Bankruptcy and probate are boring unless there are vampires involved. And not even Anna Nicole Smith can spice up a probate case. Now, if she were a vampire, then I'd have a fighting chance of staying awake. Come on, take some First Amendment cases! The Court's 2004 term was super-awesome and was probably one of their most exciting ever. I don't expect the 2005 term to be as nail-biting, but it better not be a snoozer. Oh, and if you're shopping for my birthday, sentencing guidelines cases put me to sleep, too.

[Fox News story about the case.]

Posted by Mark at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A judge today dismissed the RIAA's suit against the mother of a 13-year-old girl accused of file sharing. This mother was one of three moms who refused to settle out of court with the RIAA's "conference center." The conference center is like the Mexican police:

RIAA: Okay, that's ten shared songs at $10,000 each. That will be $100,000.
Defendant: But I don't have $100,000.
RIAA: So how much do you have?
Defendant: I have $5,000.
RIAA: We'll take that, then. And we'll make it $2,500 if you'll become a spokesperson for the new Napster and tell the world what great people we are. And then we'll kill you.

In the past, the RIAA has filed suits against anyone and everyone, and it's been profitable, since the money they get from the settlements more than pays for the costs of going after file sharers. But the moms who refuse to settle may put an end to the practice: there's a chance that a court might rule in favor of the moms, and in that case, the RIAA's technique would cease being profitable, and thus they would stop.

Patricia Santangelo was the first person to refuse to settle out-of-court with the RIAA. She contended that she didn't know how the files got on her computer, as she is pretty computer illiterate, and said that the account name didn't belong to any of her kids. The ruling today, however, concerns Candy Chan, mother of Brittany Chan. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan threw out the RIAA's lawsuit against Candy Chan back in May. The court dismissed the suit "with prejudice," meaning that the RIAA could no longer pursue a case against Candy Chan, but it could pursue a case against others.

To give you an idea of the kind of people the RIAA are, their next move was to file a motion to bring action against Brittany Chan, the defendant's daughter. Today, the judge denied the RIAA's motion. It's a funny business practice, isn't it? How many other industries make money by suing their customers? And they wonder why music sales have gone down. No one wants to do business with these people!

And now, on to TiVo. TiVo is a subscription-based service that allows you to record things from cable with a hard drive instead of a VCR. You can record at a particular time, you can cut out commercials, you can fast-forward and rewind. Back on Sept. 13, Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing -- along with lots of TiVo users -- noticed something peculiar going on with TiVo: it wouldn't save certain shows or allow users to move the shows with TiVo2Go.

Then, on Sept. 16, TiVo said that DRM had been enabled for certain shows by accident. Whoops! Even though TiVo said that it was an accident, DRM was still enabled for certain programs. Sounds like some content providers made TiVo an offer it couldn't refuse.

On Sept. 24, reports surfaced that TiVo was charging users $150 if they tried to cancel their newly-crapified service. Apparently, what was merely an "accident" was a mandatory "update" to the TiVo software that detected broadcast flags. These flags introduced new restrictions to certain programs and users were unaware and unable to opt-out of these restrictions. So one TiVo owner decided to cancel his service. He signed up for TiVo back when it did X, and now it wasn't doing X anymore, so he didn't want it. TiVo then charged him $150 as an "early cancelation" fee. Apparently, the download of a software update also caused him to be entered into a new contract for which the "early cancelation fee" was $150. Read any EULA and you'll find that it gives the licensor the right to alter the software at any time, for any reason, without voiding the contract. Read those EULAs! They're designed to take rights from you and make you do whatever the licensor wants you to do. ABC doesn't want you to be able to save Lost? So you won't, no matter what you -- the person who's paying TiVo and who owns the machine -- want.

And now the content companies are trying the broadcast flag again, only this time they're being sneaky about it: "One especially sneaky way to get an amendment passed is to smuggle it into a reconciliations bill. Reconciliation is the mirror image of appropriations. Appropriations is about taxes; reconciliation is all about making cuts. Because Congress dearly loves to appear thrifty, reconciliations has special fast-track status. It can't be filibustered, it's almost impossible to amend once agreed upon, and it only needs a plain majority to pass."

Posted by Mark at 8:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Don Adams, who played bumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart from 1965-1970 on TV's Get Smart, died today at age 82. Adams was hilarious with physical comedy and frequently played the comedian to Edward Platt's "The Chief" on Get Smart. Ed Platt died in 1974. Perhaps the funniest moments between Maxwell Smart and the The Chief were when Smart insisted on using the "cone of silence" to discuss top secret information with The Chief. The only problem with the cone of silence was that anyone else could hear what they were saying, but they couldn't hear each other. Get Smart was created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry as a parody of James Bond films. Maxwell Smart was as bumbling as James Bond was resourceful, and yet somehow he still had a job. His sidekick, Agent 99, played by Barbara Feldon, usually found a way to get both of them out of a situation that he had gotten them into. The series was also a satire of Cold War espionage, as both CONTROL (the U.S. intelligence organization) and KAOS (the Soviet/German intelligence organization) were equally inept.

Don Adams reprised his role as Maxwell Smart in the 1989 TV movie Get Smart, Again!. In 1995, Fox tried to revive Get Smart, this time with Maxwell Smart as the chief of CONTROL and Andy Dick as his son, Zach Smart. The series didn't go too well.

You may also remember Don Adams as the voice of Inspector Gadget.

Posted by Mark at 5:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Every year, the American Library Association celebrates Banned Books Week, which "celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them."

Banned Books Week is being celebrated this year from Sept. 24 to Oct. 1. Here are some BBW resources:

• The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books, 1990-2000
• The Top 10 Most Challenged Books, 2004
• Pico v. Board of Education, 457 U.S. 853 (1982). In this case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a school board's removal of books that it characterized as "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Sem[i]tic, and just plain filthy" was unconstitutional. The case was decided 5-4, with Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justices Powell, Rehnquist, and O'Connor dissenting.
• Banned Book and Censorship Resources
• Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971). This is the case that determines what "obscenity" is. Are you aware that "pornography" has no legal definition? There are two kinds of unprotected speech: speech which can "incite" people to violence, and "obscene" speech. Cohen defined "obscenity" and the Court ruled that a jacket that said "F--k the Draft" was not legally obscene.
• "Focus on the Family Exposes the 'Banned' Books Lie." This is what the other side thinks. James Dobson's Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family, an evangelical Protestant organization, suggests that the ALA wants hardcore pornography in libraries, alongside classics.

What should you do this week? Go read a banned book! I suggest one of the classics, like Of Mice and Men, which is really short, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (because when Mark Twain uses the n-word, it's because he hates black people). Oh, and don't skip the hardcore pornography, either. I would think that it's in 302, "Social interaction," or in the 700s, the art section.

Posted by Mark at 5:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In evaluating things like the Pledge of Allegiance or intelligent design, we'd best bear in mind the Supreme Court's Lemon test, which is used to determine whether or not a government act relating to religion violates the First Amendment. The case is called Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971). Reversing a lower court decision, the Supreme Court, in an 8-0 opinion, ruled that a Pennsylvania law allowing the state to "'purchase' certain 'secular educational services' from nonpublic schools" was unconstitutional.

From Lemon emerged the test to see if there were "excessive entanglement between government and religion." A government policy must meet three criteria:

1. "The statute must have a secular legislative purpose." This is pretty clear: there has to be a non-religious intention behind the legislation.
2. "Its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion." Note that word effect. So, not only can the intent not relate to religion, the main result of the legislation must be that it doesn't affect religion.
3. "The statute must not foster 'an excessive government entanglement with religion.'" Religious activities end up being supervised by the government, curricula end up being regulated by the government. These are the kinds of things that this third prong seeks to avoid.

A government act that fails one or more of these criteria is deemed to be unconstitutional.

How would this relate to something like, oh, I don't know, intelligent design? Well, in Selman et. al v. Cobb County, a U.S. District Court in Georgia ruled unconstitutional a Cobb County school board requirement that warning stickers be placed on biology textbooks used by the district. The stickers advised, "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." The U.S. District Court judge found this sticker to be unconstitutional and cited a history of the Supreme Court and circuit courts striking down "balanced treatment" laws, the primary effect of which were to endorse a particular religious viewpoint. While the District Court found that the sticker did have a secular legislative purpose, the sticker failed the second prong in that "the Sticker sends a message to those who oppose evolution for religious reasons that they are favored members of the political community, while the Sticker sends a message to those who believe in evolution that they are political outsiders." The court also cleverly observed that "encouraging the teaching of evolution as a theory rather than as a fact is one of the latest strategies to dilute evolution instruction employed by antievolutionists with religious motivations."

In the upcoming Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, the ACLU will be arguing that intelligent design is far too religious to be taught in public schools. Ostensibly, the U.S. District Court in Harrisburg, Pa. will be required to acknowledge the ruling of its sister court in Georgia. The real test will come at the circuit court level, as a circuit court can overrule a district court.

Now that you know about the Court's requirements for religious entanglement, do you think the Pledge of Allegiance passes or fails the Lemon test? In evaluating this, keep in mind Congress' purpose in adding the words "under God" in 1954. Consider the legislative history of the 1954 act that added the words "under God," which reveals the purpose of the act ("legislative history" is part of a piece of legislation; it's the authors of the legislation telling us why they're writing it):

At this moment of our history the principles underlying our American Government and the American way of life are under attack by a system whose philosophy is at direct odds with our own. Our American Government is founded on the concept of the individuality and the dignity of the human being. Underlying this concept is the belief that the human person is important because he was created by God and endowed by Him with certain inalienable rights which no civil authority may usurp. The inclusion of God in our pledge therefore would further acknowledge the dependence of our people and our Government upon the moral directions of the Creator. At the same time it would serve to deny the atheistic and materialistic concepts of communism with its attendant subservience of the individual. [Qtd. in Newdow v. U.S. Congress, 00-16423.]

Posted by Mark at 8:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Do you know what the stated purpose of the SAT is? The stated purpose of the SAT is to predict a student's first-year college grades. Unfortunately, it fails in this regard. For example, men outperform women on the SATs, but women outperform men in first-year college grades. You'd think that a test that absolutely doesn't do what it says it does would be dismissed as invalid. But the SAT has a stranglehold on the college admission process. It provides a wonderful little number that admissions people at gigantic universities like Ohio State University -- population 50,000 -- can use to screen applicants.

But the SAT is only the tip of the iceberg. The SAT, SAT II, PSAT/NMSQT, CLEP, and AP tests are administered by an organization called The College Board. That's a lot of tests. But the College Board is only one branch of a larger organization called ETS, Electronic Testing Service. ETS also administers the GMAT (business school) and the GRE (graduate school), as well as a dozen other tests.

But then there's the LSAT and the MCAT. The LSAT is administered by the Law School Admission Council (LSAC), and the MCAT is administered by the Association of American Medical Colleges. Both of these organizations exist so that you must pay them in order to get into law school or medical school. You must pay $115 to take the LSAT. Then you must pay $100 more for the "Law School Data Assembly Service," in which LSAC compiles transcripts, letters of recommendation, and LSAT scores and sends them to law schools to which you apply. This is not optional. You're being forced into doing this if you want to go to an accredited law school, and unless you want to spend the rest of your life as a FEMA director[1] or an intelligent design advocate[2], you need to get a degree from an accredited law school.

But it's too bad these tests don't mean anything, either. The LSAT is merely a test of logical reasoning skills. It has nothing to do with law school, beyond the necessity of having reasoning skills, but being able to do logic puzzles doesn't mean you'll succeed at law school. There's a writing portion, but it's unscored and is sent along with your scores to the schools that you apply to.

Did I mention that it's a stupid baby test? Standardized tests don't reflect anything except your ability to take a test. This is because the tests can be "cracked," and there are half a dozen national organizations -- The Princeton Review and Kaplan are the two big ones -- who make a ton of money teaching students how to exploit the flaws and recurring patterns of the test.

[1] Michael Brown, former director of FEMA, got his J.D. (Juris Doctorate) from Oklahoma City University School of Law in 1981. Daily Kos reports that, until 2003, this institution wasn't accredited by the Association of American Law Schools. The problem with this is that "[m]ost prospective law students won't even consider applying to a non-AALS law school unless they have no other option, because many employers have a policy of not considering graduates of non-AALS institutions."

[2] Intelligent design advocate Dr. Kent Hovind received his Ph.D. in Christian Education in 1991 from Patriot Bible University, an un-accredited Bible college in Colorado Springs which was, at the time Hovind received his degree, "a ministry of Hilltop Baptist Church." Patriot University, like Bob Jones University, maintains that accreditation is mostly for show and doesn't mean anything. Hovind has claimed to have a Ph.D., not a J.D., but I include him here anyway because I don't like him.

Posted by Mark at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

BRUSSELS -- The European Court of Justice today ruled that users of Microsoft Windows cannot uninstall anything from their computers. This ruling comes on the heels of a Finnish ruling that users have no legal right to be able to play CDs in their computers.

The case before the ECJ involved Jarmo Järvenpää, an investment banker from Helsinki. Mr. Järvenpää called Microsoft customer support in an attempt to get MSN Messenger removed from his machine. MSN Messenger is an instant-messaging program that, according to statistics obtained by SEDHE, is used by no one.

"I tried and tried to get de Myessenger off of my compyooter, vid no luck. So I called up cyustomer supoort, and ven I said I vanted to remyoove de program, dey sent de police to my house," said Mr. Järvenpää, whose accent has been reproduced phonetically. The police arrested him, citing a little-known EU stipulation that mandates that users cannot do anything to their machines that software vendors do not want. "An end-user of a machine is granted a license by the operating system manufacturer to use said machine. The software manufacturer, not the end-user, is the legal owner of said computing machine, and as such, the end-user is not entitled to do anything to that machine that is prohibited by the software manufacturer," says EU regulation 656-5827-B.

Finnish intellectual property lawyer Tarja Hämeenniemi says that the regulation is bogus. Her accent has also been reproduced phonetically. "De ting is dat de major softvare cyoompanies lobbied to have dis regulation inserted. Dis vay, dey can exercise complete control over deyend-eeyuser. Dis is de fyooture of intellectual property rights," she said.

While the director of Microsoft Finland could not be reached, SEDHE managed to get in touch with the director of Microsoft Sweden, which is just as good. The director, Mr. Weds Cheshif, was less than forthcoming: "Ve heve a poolicy of not tooking about spercific ishyoos vile dey're in de leeteegation phase. All vee can say at deesa point eez dat ve are vorking hard tyoo maintain de control over our eenteelectual property, and eef dat reeqivires de prosecyootion of some people, den so be it. Bork, bork, bork!"

Publicity directors of other companies we contacted similarly framed the issue in terms of intellectual property rights. "Well, of course they are," said SEDHE Intellectual Property Editor H. Simon Gregory. "That's the easiest way for a company to get rights that it doesn't have: scream 'copyright infringement' and suddenly everyone's listening, especially other media companies, who lobby for ridiculously restrictive regulations that breach a person's rights to use the things he bought in the way he wants. Then, this person must go to court and spend time and money proving that he has the rights that he has, anyway. Suddenly, he's the bad guy!"

The ECJ ruling means that end-users must contact the manufacturers of their operating systems in order to get permission to do anything to their machines. In the case of users of Gentoo Linux, the end-user must telephone everyone who ever worked on Gentoo and ask their permission. If just one person says "no," the end-user cannot modify his machine. Even a cool case-mod like ultraviolet lights would be prohibited. A statement from France-based Vivendi Universal said that the issue was terrorism. "We cannot allow terrorists to take control over our property for their nefarious terrorist purposes. And if you don't believe that, then replace the word 'terrorist' with 'pornographer.' And if you don't believe that, call our PR department and we'll come up with a different excuse," the statement said.

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DOVER, Penn. -- On the heels of a state decision to allow intelligent design into Pennsylvania public school biology classrooms, one school board has taken the extra step of allowing alchemy to be taught in chemistry classrooms.

Dr. Lester Cartwright of the Alternative Chemistry Institute, who spoke on behalf of alchemists, said the decision was a victory for academic freedom. "What we have out there right now are scientific elites who have been working very hard to keep alternative chemistry out of their professional journals, as well as university and high school classrooms. They have no basis for saying that our alternative forms of chemistry are wrong; they just say, 'You can't teach that here' and leave it at that."

Alternative chemistry, formerly known as alchemy, is the science of turning baser metals, like lead, into gold. It also deals with finding a chemical formula for an elixir of life, which would allow immortality. According to alchemists, the use of a "philosopher's stone" is required to acheive these goals, and as yet, no such substance has ever been found.

AC proponents, such as Dr. Cartwright, prefer the use of the term "alternative chemistry," since "alchemy" is a misleading and loaded phrase. "When you hear the word 'alchemy,' you think of men in long, white beards and pointy hats in the middle ages trying to do crazy stuff. That's not what we're about. Look, I don't even have a beard!"

Critics, like Dr. Chandra Gupta of Harvard University, disagree. "There is no rational, scientific basis for the study of alchemy. It has been proven time and again that there is no way to change one element into another element," she said, also pointing out that alchemy had been discredited as a science hundreds of years ago. "Elixir of life? There's no such thing, and teaching kids that it is possible is a waste of time and money, as well as disingenuous to science."

But Dr. Cartwright disagrees. "I'm very familiar with Dr. Gupta. She is one of my staunchest critics, and unforunately, she has been suckered in by the liberal scientific elite. If they're so sure that their methods are right, then why not teach kids both kinds of science and let them decide? All we're asking is the opportunity to teach the controversy."

Rufus Einhorn, author of the book My Date with Albertus Magnus, has studied the history of alchemy and modern chemistry. "There is no controversy within chemistry. AC proponents would like to frame it that way, so that a misguided audience thinks that there is some need to be objective, but no credible chemist actually believes in alchemy. The Law of Conservation is one of the benchmark theories of chemistry, and it precludes the ability to turn elements into other elements," he said. Einhorn also had some choice remarks about Dr. Cartwright. "That guy doesn't have a doctorate in chemistry or any other science. He has a Ph.D. in education from Patriot University, formerly a ministry of Hilltop Baptist Church in Colorado Springs."

Nevertheless, Dr. Cartwright was ultimately successful in convincing one school board in Pennsylvania that not teaching all sides of the issue was academically dishonest. "Lester Cartwright is a true American hero who has stood up to the liberal elite and not been taken down by them. Hopefully, we can spread the teaching of AC to every school board in the country," said David Horowitz, president of the group Students for Academic Freedom. "Our next challenge is the theory of relativity. See that word 'theory'? Yeah, it's going down. Nothing is relative -- not morality, and certainly not time. Everything is fixed, and we believe that students must be taught our viewpoint on the issue. That is the definition of academic freedom."

Posted by Mark at 2:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Down in the Big Easy, President Bush decided to suspend the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 for federal employees working on repairing the city. [Link to the president's proclamation officially suspending the act.] The Davis-Bacon Act requires laborers working on construction or repair for the federal government to be paid the minimum prevailing wage for laborers of that class; i.e. the union wage. Federal law allows Bush to suspend the Davis-Bacon Act because Hurricane Katrina and its resultant events were declared a national emergency.

Even though Bush suspended the act last week for laborers, he's thinking about doing it again for service workers. His explanation is that Davis-Bacon would "increase the cost to the Federal Government of providing Federal assistance to these areas."

But the federal government isn't doing squat. You know who is? Halliburton! The company that was formerly chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney, the company that sent its private security subsidiary, Blackwater, into Iraq to protect strategic oil assets, the company that sent its subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown, and Root into Iraq to provide support for troops, has gotten a giant contract to rebuild New Orleans.

Not surprisingly, former FEMA director Joe Allbaugh -- the guy who left his college roommate, Michael Brown, in charge of FEMA -- managed to secure several lucrative contracts for his clients. You see, Allbaugh now works as a lobbyist, getting government contracts for companies that he represents. Here's a fun fact: Allbaugh arrived in New Orleans days ahead of FEMA in order to get as many rebuilding contracts as he could.

KBR and the other companies given federal contracts in New Orleans will benefit most from a suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act. How curious that, after September 11, there was no suspension of Davis-Bacon. Wouldn't it have decreased the cost to the federal government then and there? Or perhaps Bush didn't want to push his luck. Now, though, he knows that he can get away with giving no-bid contracts to companies that he and his associates have worked for in the past.

If you were in charge of distributing federal contracts, would you give the job to Halliburton, given their piss-poor record? They routinely overcharge the government, underdeliver what they agreed to deliver, and pocket the difference. Rebuilding New Orleans will be no different and suspending the Davis-Bacon Act makes the job all the more lucrative. How much do you want to bet Bush gets a cherry job with one of these companies after his term is over?

Posted by Mark at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

CNet reports that a new variant of the old Bagle virus is coursing through the Internet.

It's interesting to note how viruses have changed in the last thirty or so years. When computer viruses began, they were the projects of kids looking to cause trouble. Today's most prolific viruses, though, are designed to turn an infected computer into a spam robot, sending thousands of spam emails all over the world.

What have I been saying about the pervasiveness of marketing? If this keeps up, James Bond's next villain will try to engage in a hostile takeover of a major company -- literally. Whatever happened to being bad for bad's sake? It's been swallowed up by the prospect of 25 cents per spam email.

Even worse, today's viruses are smart. They automatically terminate processes associated with antivirus and anti-spyware software. They block access to security websites. They effectively strip a computer of its protection. Remember how everyone keeps telling you to install antivirus software? Whether you have it or not doesn't matter to the new Bagle virus, or any other of dozens of viruses. It will terminate the process, anyway. And you want to try to start up in safe mode? Yeah, that doesn't matter, either. It's there in safe mode. I've worked on computers for days trying to get rid of all the crap stuck on them, and sometimes I've had to give up and format the hard drive, because the virus or spyware so pervaded the operating system that there was no way to get rid of it all. Two years ago, this was nothing more than an interesting exception to the spyware/virus rule. Spyware back then was easy to get rid of through "Add/Remove Programs." Now, the spyware hides deep within the registry and file structure. It masquerades as a dozen fake applications in the C:\Windows\System directory. It terminates your anti-spyware program. It blocks web access to Symantec's website. "Add/Remove Programs" doesn't work anymore.

And why spam? As Bruce Schneier points out, it's because people actually read it. Some people read spam emails, and since the cost of sending spam emails is ridiculously low, it doesn't take a lot of people to read those emails and buy those products to make the emails profitable. We've got one of two options, here: (1) alter people's web-browsing habits so they don't open spam emails; or (2) levy fines against known spam senders. This last one is hard, because spam senders are often not companies, or if they are, they're companies whose "official policies" are to not send spam, while at the same time they pay Eastern European hackers 25 cents per spam email sent with the new spam virus that the kid wrote. What's happened to the world when corporations have infiltrated run-of-the-mill mischief? Pretty soon, punks will be spraypainting buildings and bridges with the Pepsi logo instead of regular old grafitti -- and Pepsi will pay them for their troubles.

Meanwhile, over here at SEDHE, the comment-spam is getting smarter. Now, whatever robots that are sending comment spam are including what appear to be random URLs from actual blogs along with links to the crap that they're advertising. This makes it difficult to program MT-Blacklist, since each individual comment spam contains a different URL and a different, randomly-generated fake email address. The point of comment spam is not to have people click on the links. The point of comment spam is for the owner of the blog to ignore the spam until such time as the page with the comment spam link on it gets archived by the search engines. The more pages there are with the same link, the higher the search result, and the more money these companies can weasel out of advertisers. This strategy takes advantage primarily of Google's search algorithms, which don't just search the Internet for text strings, but also index searches based on how many other web pages are linking to a particular web page. This is precisely how Kerry supporters got the phrase "miserable failure" to link to the White House website as the number one search result in 2004: by taking advantage of Google's unique feature of seeing how many pages link to a given page. The same goes for comment spam and trackback spam.

But it doesn't stop there. All sorts of robots sign up for free Blogger accounts. They're mostly redirects to major porn websites, and they get a lot of hits because people have become wise to what URLs for major porn sites look like; a Blogger URL seems less like "corporate" porn. But, sadly, the online porn industry is smarter than you are. (In fact, the porn industry has pioneered a lot of the technology now commonly found on the web.)

Posted by Mark at 1:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

WASHINGTON -- President George W. Bush held a press conference today to announce the beginning of a massive new initiative that he hopes will prevent disasters like Hurricane Katrina from ever happening again.

"Today, the United States embarks on a bold new initiative in order to make the homeland more secure. Today, the United States declares a war on nature. It is evident from the recent destruction in the Gulf region that nature cannot be trusted to keep the United States secure," Bush said. "We were lax in our duties, relying on nature to protect us from hurricanes and floods. Clearly, the forces of evil -- led by Muslim extremists who hate freedom -- have usurped nature, causing it to turn against the United States, resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocent men, women, and children."

The president's plan is perhaps his boldest yet. An elite team of Nature Warriors, drawn from the ranks of the Army's Special Forces, will be dispatched to areas affected or about to be affected by natural disasters. Once there, they will fire their weapons into the natural disaster, hoping to kill it or drive it off. "Of course, nature is very strong," said Army Chief of Staff Peter J. Schoomaker. "Shooting at nature may not be enough to force it into retreat. This is why we are also prepared to use bombs, mines, and missiles to damage nature enough that it will leave."

The new Nature Warriors team is currently being assembled to prepare for the landfall of Hurricane Rita. "We expect relatively few casualties as a result of Operation Dispatch Rita," said Schoomaker. "Those who do die will have died in a noble cause for their country. Jesus will grant them fifty virgins in heaven."

Some critics observe that this is merely the public face of what has been a continuous war on nature since the beginning of the Bush administration. "The Clear Skies initiative, the Healthy Forests Act, these were all the beginnings of the war on nature," said environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. "The Bush administration had, since the very beginnings of its tenure, been trying to eliminate nature altogether. The 'war on nature' project confirms this fact, but it confirms that Bush was not anti-nature because of his big business connections; rather, it suggests that he was merely looking out for the country's best interests. Nature can't be trusted to work on the side of the United States."

Justice Department attorneys were engaged in high-level meetings today, wondering whether or not they could indefinitely imprison nature without filing any charges. "We have not yet made any determinations," said Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. "But we believe that the recent ruling against Jose Padilla's request for habeas corpus will strengthen our case for indefinitely imprisoning nature." Gonzales conceded that he was unsure of where nature would be detained, but he suggested, "Somewhere out west. You know, in one of those states where nobody lives. Wyoming, for example, could be converted into a maximum-security nature detention facility."

The president suggested that a war on nature would cost taxpayers $100 billion, but Congressional Budget Office analysts said the figure was closer to $500 billion. The president then had the analysts arrested and imprisoned as "enemy combatants" for supporting nature.

Posted by Mark at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

In 1996, Scream revitalized the slasher flick, the genre born from John Carpenter's 1978 Halloween, in which a knife-wielding maniac attacks teenagers. Seriously, they're called "slasher" films because, without many exceptions, the killer uses a knife to kill his victims. A knife is far more intimate than a gun -- you could shoot someone from one hundred yards away, but that doesn't inspire terror. The goal of the maniac in a slasher film is to inspire terror in his victims, letting them see him and come to a horrible realization that they're about to die.

Wes Craven, the guy who brought you a new twist on the slasher flick in 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street with the novum of a supernatural killer, once again turned the genre on its head in 1996. Scream was self-aware unlike any slasher film before it. It was at once a prototypical slasher film and a film that made fun of the clichéd conventions of the genre. For a while, everyone was making slasher films. And they then stopped because they ran out of good ideas.

Cry_Wolf is not a good idea. See the underscore in the title? The movie attempts to be tech-savvy, bringing the slasher film to the "IM generation" of teenagers at college right now. These kids are connected to their friends via instant messaging on the computer, via their cell phones, and via instant messaging on their cell phones. Early slasher films were morality plays in which no character got any less than he or she deserved. Cry_Wolf could be a commentary on the depersonalization of the college environment through the use of electronic messaging, but it decides part of the way through the film that it doesn't want to be about that.

But wait? Isn't Cry_Wolf set at a prep school? Isn't this high school? Not on your life. This movie is about college, and anyone who disagrees is a stupid baby. "Prep school" is used as a proxy for "college" for some reason. I don't know why screenwriters Beau Bauman and Jeff Wadlow decided to make a film set at college and then called the college "prep school," but it's clearly college. Do you know of any co-ed prep schools? And I don't mean private school. I mean "prep school" as in, you get sent off to this place for nine months out of the year. You live there and you go to school there. This is not Lake Catholic High School. This is college.

And at college -- I mean, high school -- we use AOL Instant Messenger to communicate. I thought maybe AOL wouldn't agree to have its name used in conjunction with this film, resulting in a nebulous, generic IM program that looks a whole lot like AIM. But I was wrong. Again. The words "AOL Instant Messenger" are prominently displayed in close-ups of computer monitors. Looking back, why not? AOL's got a good thing going. They're setting up the current generation of high school to think that AIM is just what college kids do, like going to keggers and hooking up every night of the week. That way, they can justify higher ad rates and install more spyware on unsuspecting students' machines. Damn, I love product tie-ins.

So here's the deal: some girl gets killed at this prep school. A bunch of friends decide it would be a lark to make up a "forwarded email" in which the killer is a serial killer who's going to strike again. The only problem is that the stuff they made up actually starts happening. Man, it would be great at this point to talk about how anonymous electronic communication makes misunderstanding even more possible, and make it hyperbolic by having the "misunderstanding" turn into murder . . . but we're not going to. Heck, let's start in that direction and then totally abandon that line of thought. (This is what the screenwriters were thinking. I know. I was there.)

The main character is a transfer student who's been in trouble at lots of other prep schools. But he hasn't really been in trouble. He's just taken the fall for others because he's a Nice Guy. As the national representative for Nice Guys Everywhere, let me state that this guy goes beyond Nice Guy. He ventures into Stupid Guy territory. "Nice" is staying up all night with someone who's having some sort of crisis, foregoing sleep for yourself. "Stupid" is admitting to commiting a crime that you didn't commit just because you don't want to see the real criminal put in jail. Oh, and the guy is British for some reason. "Hey, here's this crazy movie, and let's make it exotic by having the protagonist be British!" Just imagine if they'd tried that for The Terminator. Sorry, this guy doesn't belong in the Nice Guy club because he's a big dope.

Why am I complaining so much? Because I was bored. Yes, this movie is actually boring. And the first half is really boring. A couple times I thought about leaving altogether. (Oh, and the dialogue was written by George Lucas while he was taking LSD.) If you're going to bill this as a scary film, let's see something scary!. There aren't even any real "jump" moments. Sure, there's a lot of chasing, but that isn't scary. That's vicarious exercise. By the end of some of these scenes, I had had a good virtual workout, but I wasn't any more scared.

Do yourself a favor and save your seven dollars for a bucket of popcorn for when you go to see Corpse Bride next week. Unless you want to spend seven dollars to see Hotty McHotterson Lindy Booth, who plays Nice Guy's love interest. But you could just wait until this came on TV to see her. So avoid this movie and go spend the money on nachos next week. Trust me, it's a better investment. At least the nachos won't be boring. And if you want to watch a good slasher film, go and rent Halloween or Friday the 13th. Heck, it's nearing Halloween time; one of them has to be on TV somewhere in the world.

Posted by Mark at 11:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

California's favorite killer cyborg from the future cum governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, will run for a second term, guaranteeing those of us in the comedy business with jokes for seven more years.

"I'm going to follow through with this here. I'm not in here for three years. We're going to finish the job. I'm in here for seven years," he told crowds. Then he said, "And after that, I'm going to stay for seven more years. And seven years after that!" Smoke began to pour from Arnold's ears, and aides whisked him away from the stage. In a statement made later today by Arnold's spokesman, Miles Bennett Dyson, the governor was said to be "just fine. Couldn't be better. There was a short in one of his quadritonic optical subprocessors . . . I mean, he had a cold. Oh boy, I hope no one heard that."

Analysts had long theorized that Arnold actually was a cyborg from the future who had been reprogrammed to terminate -- via the electoral process -- bad government. "Of course he's a robot," said Dr. Raymond R. Pinchbeck of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. "I've been saying that for years. Ever since he made Jingle All the Way and his career didn't suffer, I said, 'Boy, he must be bulletproof.' Of course, I didn't mean it literally, but it turns out that, due to his metal endoskeleton, Arnold is bulletproof. But in theoretical physics terminology, he's gone totally bonkers."

But what could have caused Arnold's approval ratings to hit rock-bottom? Dr. Matilda M. Pyle of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign believes she has an answer. "Part of the way into his term, Arnold's positronic matrix suffered a minor failure at this redundancy checkpoint," she said, pointing to a diagram of what she believes Arnold's positronic brain looks like. "This particular failure, though minor, caused a checksum error that made him do strange things like cut benefits for teachers and veto gay marriage legislation. In computer engineering terminology, he's gone totally bonkers."

While President Bush could order the Army to come in and destroy the robotic governor for the safety of Californians, an unnamed aide said that was unlikely. "Since when did Californians do anything for Bush? You know how he loves loyalty. More than logic, more than reason, more than fiscal responsibility and a nice Christmas ham, he loves loyalty. Californians weren't loyal, so they can get what's coming to them for being with the terrorists. And besides, Arnold supported him in his second presidential bid. Who rewards supporters by calling in the Army to blow them up? Not this president, that's who."

Posted by Mark at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A file containing the social security numbers of every student who attended Miami University during the Fall 2002 semester somehow ended up in public webspace. From Miami's official press release:

Miami University is notifying all students who attended Miami during the fall 2002 semester that a report containing their names, Social Security numbers and grades had been inadvertently placed in a file accessible through the Internet.

University officials said that at this point they have no evidence of illegal use of the information, which included data on the 21,762 students enrolled on all Miami campuses in fall 2002. No other students were affected.

Officials say the information was in an isolated area of the university's network, in a file assigned to a now-retired faculty member, and thus avoided detection until this week when an alumna told Miami she had discovered the file after entering her name in a search engine.

“Nevertheless, private and confidential information was exposed, and we deeply regret the incident. We have removed the file and are writing the students and alumni to apologize. We also are taking steps to rectify the problem and to avoid a similar instance in the future," said J. Reid Christenberry, Miami's vice president for information technology.

As a recently former employee of Miami IT Services, I won't comment on this information.

Posted by Mark at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Remember last year, when the U.S. Supreme Court totally wussed out in Elk Grove School District v. Newdow? No? Well, here's a refresher: petitioner Newdow was the father of a girl in the Elk Grove School District and objected to the Pledge of Allegiance being said in her classroom. Newdow is an atheist. So he sued the school district, alleging that the Pledge of Allegiance -- with its sentence "under God" -- was unconstitutional. The Ninth Circuit Court ignited a firestorm in 2002 when it agreed with Newdow. The case went to the Supreme Court, where 5 of the 9 justices threw the case out on a technicality: Newdow was divorced and his wife had legal custody of their daughter. Thus, the Court said, Newdow didn't have standing to bring the case, since he wasn't the girl's legal guardian. The Court thought that they had averted the Pledge of Allegiance issue.

Until now! Deep within the murky depths of the Pacific Ocean, where the Japanese had been testing nuclear bombs, a monster emerges from the water: the Pledge of Allegiance! Watch as it destroys Moth-ra, Megalon, and Mecha-Pledge of Allegiance! Nothing can stop it this time!

That's because Newdow, a lawyer, found himself some people who did have custody of their kids and agreed to be petitioners in a new lawsuit. Yesterday, the U.S. District Court for the Nothern District of California ruled the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional. This launched a new firestorm: what would the Ninth Circuit do? Would it rule the same way three years later? What if this case got to the Supreme Court? John Roberts, as chief justice, might have to make a ruling about it!

The only issue with the Pledge of Allegiance is the issue that there are some people -- I call them demagogues, and I call Sean Hannity World's Most Pus-Filled Douchebag -- who don't understand what the Constitution means. It's very clear: "Congress shall respect no establishment of religion." That's called the establishment clause, kids. It means Congress cannot give an endorsement to any religion, and placing "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance constitutes such an endorsement. Whose God? The Christian God? What about everyone else's gods? What about atheists? Some people -- again, demagogues -- accuse the judiciary of trying to remove God from people's lives. They're mistaken. The judiciary is trying to remove God from the government's life, a place where it definitely doesn't belong.

Posted by Mark at 2:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Sam Brownback (R-KS) asked some questions of chief justice candidate John Roberts today. And they were incredibly dumb questions. I'd make him a SEDHE Villain of the Forever, but he hasn't done anything wrong. He was just dumb.

First, he went into a tirade about the First Amendment and, as a part of that, virtual child pornography. I won't even go into how wrong his interpretation of that is. That's a whole other blog entry. (For the record, I'm against real child pornography because it is wrong to depict real children in pornographic situations, but not virtual child pornography because, in the latter instance, they're not children!)

Then, he went into a tirade about gay marriage, all without asking Roberts a question about gay marriage. He talked for about five minutes about the definition of marriage and didn't even ask Roberts a question about it! It was mostly for the cameras, I think. Just to let everyone know what Sam Brownback thinks about the "traditional" definition of marriage, as if they cared. Then again, a lot of senators "asked questions" that consisted of posturing for the cameras and telling everyone what they thought about particular cases, often coming to ridiculously simplified conclusions that were, again, simplified for the public at home and so that they could create easily defeated straw men. There's a reason why some of these senators aren't Supreme Court justices.

After that, he asked an incredibly stupid question: whether or not Congress has the authority, under Article I, § 8 of the Constitution, to "constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court." Huh? This is a question on the final exam at Obvious University. Then he asks if Congress has the power to split a circuit court into two -- specifically, the Ninth Circuit, which is geographically huge and has a large caseload. Why even ask this question? Of course Congress can split a circuit! It can do whatever it wants to circuit courts! The Constitution gives it the authority to establish them in the first place -- in fact, you just quoted the freaking text where it says it can -- so Congress could abolish them all if it wanted to! There is no great judicial question in this matter. It's plain as day and Sam Brownback wasted everyone's time.

Finally, he talked about the degree to which the judiciary can influence appropriations. The power of appropriating money is given exclusively to Congress by the Constitution, but Brownback was referring specifically (or obliquely) to Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, Inc. v. Rumsfeld, a 2003 case in which a federal district court in New Jersey ruled that it was unconstitutional for the federal government to deny federal funding to state institutions of higher educated that prohibited military recruiting on campus. In this case, it was possibly unconstitutional for the federal government to impose a requirement upon colleges that those colleges may not have agreed with, a violation of their First Amendment rights, specifically that of freedom of expressive association (cf. Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 99-699 (2000)). While the federal court sided with the government, it's clear that if Congress is were attaching an unconstitutional requirement along with appropriations, then those appropriations would fall under the court's jurisdiction, since judicial review gives it the power to review Acts of Congress that might be unconstitutional, including appropriations. In this instance, the judiciary was not ruling on the money itself -- it's not "getting into the business of appropriating funds," to use Brownback's words -- but rather the conditions under which the money was given to universities. Certainly any law student could see the difference, but apparently Sam Brownback went to the same law school as former FEMA director Michael Brown. (Michael Brown's law school wasn't accredited by the American Bar Association, by the way.) The judiciary can always review an Act of Congress, no matter what that act is, as long as it is the constitutionality of the act that is in question.

And now let me try to put Roberts' judicial philosophy in perspective, because it sometimes rubs people the wrong way. I was thinking about this while I was watching his hearings today. When he votes against the Endangered Species Act or says that the Endangered Species Act is bad law, he is not saying that the government should not protect endangered species. When he agrees with a Supreme Court decision that struck down federal laws banning guns within so many yards of schools, he is not saying that prohibiting guns within so many yards of schools is a bad idea. The law is composed of two elements: the ends and the means. In the case of the Endangered Species Act, the end is to ensure that species on the verge of extinction are protected. I think Roberts would agree that this is a laudable goal and every effort should be made to preserve endangered species. What he takes issue with is the means; that is, the specific way in which the Endangered Species Act has been put into law. The Endangered Species Act gives Congress very broad power in telling private individuals how they can and cannot use their private land, and this has been the primary cause for concern regarding the Act. Roberts -- and other conservatives on the current Supreme Court -- believe that Congress has been given too much authority via the "commerce clause," which appears in Article I, § 8 of the U.S. Constitution and gives Congress the power "[t]o regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes." The argument that it is Congress' authority to regulate interstate commerce that gives it the ability to protect endangered species is, in the opinion of Roberts, an abuse of the commerce clause. And he's right. But this is not to suggest that Congress or the states shouldn't protected endangered species; they should just go about it in a different way, for legislation like the ESA creates a precedent for expansive congressional power. In a country built on common law -- such as ours -- precedent has the same weight as law, which is why bad legislation creates a "slippery slope" that can lead to worse legislation in the future.

To suggest, then, that because Roberts opposes the Endangered Species Act means that he opposes saving endangered species is to misunderstand the law. It's not that he hates endangered species or loves guns; he merely wants to see the government regulate each in a way that doesn't broadly expand the federal government's powers, allowing for future legislation that has the expansiveness of the ESA without the positive outcome.

Posted by Mark at 11:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is certainly quite a week. Sept. 17 marks the 218th anniversary of the date the final draft of the U.S. Constitution was finished in 1787. Sept. 19 is Talk Like a Pirate Day. Sept. 15 is the holiest day of the year in the Pastafarian religion, which holds that the universe was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Sept. 15 is the birthday of Marco Polo, "who brought the word of his Noodly Appendage back from the East." Because of the concurrence of Talk Like a Pirate Day and the birthday of the Noodly Prophet Marco Polo, Sept. 15 - 19 is Holy Pasta Week. Don't forget the Feast of His Sacrelicious Body on Sept. 16, in which adherents are encourage to eat a lot of pasta.

To learn more about Pastafarianism, please visit this link in which Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin provides links detailing different ways in which you can worship the Noodly Lord.

On another note, why is my Internet connectivity so freaking slow? This is broadband, not dial-up!

Posted by Mark at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Since when does Roe v. Wade "invent" a right to privacy? I had a thought the other day. What about the Tenth Amendment? What about the Ninth Amendment?

Strict constructionists -- like Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and the late William Rehnquist -- insist that, if the Constitution doesn't explicitly allow it, then it's prohibited. They further deny that the Constitution is a "living document" the meaning of which can change as the nations change. Amendments, they maintain, are the only way to change the Constitution.

But let us not pretend that language hasn't changed since 1787. Law is based on language and the specificity of language, and when that language changes, it can be a problem. Concepts change, also. The world changes. Inflation happens, the Internet happens, and a whole host of situations arise that the Founding Fathers, living in 1787, could never have imagined. I mean, seriously -- they literally could never have imagined that those things would happen. Space travel or human flight were not practical in their minds; if anything, such ideas were science-fiction. The radio? The television? The Internet? These are all inventions that our Founding Fathers could not have predicted would exist in reality and thus are not things that have been taken into consideration in the writing of the Constitution.

Perhaps the most famous example of a power not explicitly granted to Congress is the power to create an air force. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the express power "[t]o raise and support Armies" and "[t]o provide and maintain a Navy," but the Constitution does not explicitly grant Congress the ability to create a military force composed of flying vehicles. What about the "necessary and proper" clause, which has been the justification for a whole host of crazy legislation? If you'll look further at the famous "necessary and proper" clause, it says that one power of Congress is

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

But providing an air force is not one of "the foregoing Powers." Nevertheless, Congress has blatantly ignored the Constitution, which does not give it the power to create an air force. And so we have an air force. Because if we stuck to the absolute letter of the Constitution -- which will turn 218 years old this Saturday -- we are stuck in the legal language of 218 years ago.

Not to worry, though, because the Constitution itself tells us the breadth with which it should be interpreted. The Ninth Amendment, ratified in 1791 along with the rest of the Bill of Rights, tells us, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." This amendment is conveniently forgotten by strict constructionists because it provides textual support for the Constitution as a document intended to be interpreted broadly. "Just because a right isn't mentioned specifically in the Constitution doesn't mean that a person doesn't have that right," says the Constitution. In other words, the Constitution itself is saying, "If it isn't expressly prohibited, then it's allowed" -- the mantra of broad constructionism. Therefore, insisting that a right to privacy is a stupid interpretation of the Constitution is to misunderstand the Constitution. In fact, to have a strict constructionist approach the Constitution is to misunderstand the Constitution. A right to privacy is a right that is not enumerated in the Constitution; however, the Tenth Amendment explicitly tells us that just because that right isn't mentioned, that doesn't mean that the people don't have it.

The history of the Ninth Amendment reveals this fact. James Madison, principal author of the Bill of Rights, talked of the necessity of such an amendment when he presented his twelve amendments to the House of Representatives:

It has been objected also against a bill of rights, that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration; and it might follow by implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government, and were consequently insecure. This is one of the most plausible arguments I have ever heard against the admission of a bill of rights into this system; but, I conceive, that it may be guarded against. I have attempted it, as gentlemen may see by turning to the last clause of the fourth resolution.

In other words, the Ninth Amendment was inserted into the Constitution so prevent strict constructionists from pointing to the Constitution and saying, "You don't have right [X] because the Constitution doesn't say you have right [X]."

The Tenth Amendment also provides textual support for a broad constructionist interpretation of the Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." This amendment, more so than the Ninth, confirms that the Constitution itself allows anything it does not prohibit; thus, the document itself tells us how it should be interpreted. In case law, this has meant that states have the power to do things that are not expressly given to the federal government to do. Thus the Constitution calls for a limited federal role, that role being circumscribed by the Constitution itself. This prevents the federal government from regulating liquor sales, for example, because the Constitution does not give Congress the authority to regulate liquor sales. But it does not forbid regulation of liquor sales, either, and the Tenth Amendment says that the states can regulate liquor sales, since Congress isn't given the authority to do so.

The argument that a right to privacy is not in the Constitution, and is thus a fallaciously derived right, is itself fallacious because it ignores the fact that the Constitution does not enumerate all of the rights that Americans have. Indeed, it says exactly the opposite, acknowledging that there are some rights that it does not explicitly spell out. The Founding Fathers -- of which Madison was one -- recognized the fact that government is not in the business of giving rights to people. People have rights -- some of which are listed in the Constitution, while others are not -- but these rights are held by people naturally, by virtue of their being human beings. The government does not give rights to people; rather, the Constitution tells the government what the scope of its powers is. To use a parallel analogy, the Constitution doesn't grant liberty to people; rather, it takes liberty from the government. Or, in the words of Chief Justice John Marshall in the case McCullough v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819):

This government is acknowledged by all, to be one of enumerated powers. The principle, that it can exercise only the powers granted to it, would seem too apparent, to have required to be enforced by all those arguments, which its enlightened friends, while it was depending before the people, found it necessary to urge; that principle is now universally admitted.

Posted by Mark at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

American Dad just used the word "junk" to describe particular parts of the male anatomy. Finally, my words have caught on!

Posted by Mark at 8:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

By Richard D. Erlich

Politically Right-wing Christians can make elegantly logical arguments if they wish to; to do so, however, they need to argue as Christians.

Most central are two points of doctrine in everyday Christian theology.

The Nicene Creed requires belief in "the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." So Christians may be "mortalists" and believe that when you're dead you're dead, until the Resurrection and the lifebreath reanimates your body. Most, though -- the vast majority of believers -- take real life to be "the life of the world to come" for each individual soul, after death, either with God in heaven or emphatically without God in hell. Body is one thing, and the soul is separable from it and definitely another thing; the mortal body is, at best, the temple of the immortal soul, at worst the soul's prison and a constant temptation to sin and damnation.

For the second point, How is that immortal soul to be saved? Well, "By faith and faith alone," but most Christians believe that our choices, intentions, and desires are important and not merely reflections of whether or not we're saved. Most Christians believe themselves free from the Mosaic Law, but they are really fond of a few of its provisions. Puritans really like the Mosaic rules for sexual purity.

Most serious Christians, then, believe that it's eternal life for the soul that's really important, not the transitory life of the body, and that the salvation of the soul depends on true faith and in following a handful of the 613 Mosaic injunctions, especially those on morality, with "morality" a short form for "sexual morality" (however much Moses and Jesus and the Prophets had a whole lot of other issues in mind).

Now, to say that political decisions about abortion hinge on "when life begins" is ridiculous if by "life" you mean "biological life." Eggs are alive; sperm are alive; and zygotes, embryos, and fetuses are obviously alive. Life does not begin; Bible and biology agree it began, and has been passed on. Considering "when life begins" makes sense, however, if one is talking about human life, or real life: the life of the reborn in Christ, the "life of the world to come." Or the potentially reborn: the life of any creature with a soul.

So, when does the soul enter the child in the womb? One can say that it doesn't: one may not believe in souls, or one may believe the lifebreath is a rather literal breath and comes with the first breath a (now) baby takes. Christians generally believe in a soul more refined than breath, so it can enter the womb earlier. How early? Well, one elegant answer is, At the beginning of individual human life, at the moment of conception.

If zygotes, embryos, and fetuses are ensouled, then abortion is not only murder but worse than murder. A fertilized egg is then an unbaptized infant, unwashed of Original Sin and -- unless saved by a special grace -- in big trouble. As God tells "reprobate infants" in Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom (1662), however individually sinless they are, these kids are descendents of fallen Adam:

A crime it is, therefore in bliss
you may not hope to dwell;
But unto you I shall allow
the easiest room in Hell. (stanza 181)

From this point of view, abortion involves two impure fornicators -- in one standard scenario -- who have produced an unborn bastard; then, piling sin on sin, they refuse to "be fruitful and multiply" and sentence the innocent child to death and eternal torment (though relatively mild torment, if Wigglesworth is right).

Abortion on a large scale, in this argument, is arguably worse than genocide.

A similar argument, if less sensational, can be made with homosexuality.

Since the Fall, sex is at best problematic and needs to be redeemed. The most central method of redemption is to have as sex's goal, reproduction -- thereby fulfilling the commandment to both Eve and Adam and Noah to multiply and fill the earth. Plus, a pronatalist policy is good for national defense (as Pharaoh recognized in Exodus) and good for business: "People are the riches of a nation," which isn't exactly Biblical but has a point.

And sex is useful to reinforce the marriage bond between man and woman, established in Eden and reaffirmed by Christ by His attendance at the marriage feast at Cana.

Homosexuality is explicitly forbidden to Jews in what Christians call "The Old Testament," and even if Christians are free of the Law generally, they aren't free of some laws. If our generation can say that homosexuality is OK, how about the other abominations forbidden in Leviticus, such as sex with nonhuman animals? (It's OK though to engage in the abomination of eating shrimp: St. Paul freed Christians from Jewish dietary law.)

And so forth, including with "the homosexual agenda" the seduction of the young into sin and hence damnation.

Such arguments are logical and elegant. The problem, of course, is that they don't pass (as the cliché has it) Constitutional muster; so we get very inelegant arguments.

Let's hear more from honest Christian Right-wingers who emphatically do want to follow through to the end (reductio ad finem) the logic of their faith, and impose it on America as a Christian nation, not a secular republic. Or, perhaps, it is a proper faith for an America parallel to Iran and perhaps soon Iraq: a "Christian Republic," where no secular law may contradict God's doctrine.

And let's hear more from American small "r" republicans, who don't want imposed upon them a Christian nation or Republic controlled by any of our religions.

Richard D. Erlich is a professor in English at Miami University (Oxford, OH).

Posted by Mark at 4:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I remember where I was on September 11. I was asleep.

I decided I shouldn't take Jeanie Hey's world politics class, since it might be too much work for me. What a great excuse that was for me in that first year: "I'm too busy." I was never too busy! In any case, that meant that I slept in that morning. But I set my alarm for some amount of time, maybe nine o'clock.

My alarm clock was set to turn on the radio when it went off, and I set it to whatever station happened to come in. Apparently I hit on a talk radio station, because when the radio woke me, I heard something on the radio about the World Trade Center towers having collapsed. In my grogginess, I thought that this was either a dream or a bad joke. Radio stations put their jerkiest disc jockies on in the morning; these "shock jocks" are usually crude and tasteless, and so I figured this is what was going on. World Trade Center towers fallen down? Don't be ridiculous.

So I woke up. Then I went downstairs to visit either Ashli or Jessica Jewell. I can't remember which. But when I saw the TV, I knew that the radio wasn't joking. The World Trade Center towers were on fire, both of them, apparently hit by airplanes in what appeared to be a terrorist attack. I don't remember if the towers had fallen by that time, or if just one of them had fallen. All I know is that I was fixated on the TV, wondering how this had happened, trying to comprehend that it had happened at all.

I remember watching one of the towers fall and not quite believing that it had happened. Lots of people's reactions were that it was like watching a movie. That's because buildings falling down like that isn't something that happens in real life. It's something so unreal that it can only be imagined in a Michael Bay film. If airplanes hitting the World Trade Center was impossible, then the towers falling down was unimaginable.

My friends and I sat, fixed on the TV, learning all we could about what had happened. Again and again we watched video footage of the towers being hit, of the towers falling, of people screaming in the streets, and then running to escape the huge, billowing cloud of dust that completely enveloped lower Manhattan. Apparently a million tons of steel, glass, aluminum, and concrete generate a lot of dust. On CNBC, one of the financial news anchors visited the morning show, completely covered from head to toe with a layer of brown-gray dust. We spent the day watching television, and wondering if Peter Jennings would ever get to sleep.

Many professors canceled classes that day. Miami University declared Friday a holiday, allowing students to spend a three-day weekend at home with their families. Like most of my other friends, I stayed in Oxford.

To this day, whenever I see footage of the towers falling, I can't believe it's real. It's hard to separate that image from a thousand other images of destruction that all came from the movies. It was so sudden: the top of the building just started falling, and the rest of the building followed suit. Of course, whenver a plane hits a building, the first thing in everyone's mind must be, "Is it going to fall down?" Even though the thought occurred to us, we dismissed it as impossible.

Watching all of these September 11 retrospectives takes me back to four years ago. I was just a freshman in college then, and what a thing to be hit with in the first three weeks of class. For the most part, I think we overcame it, but it will always be part of our college experience.

Posted by Mark at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Exorcist it is not. The Exorcism of Emily Rose, while it deals with the esoteric topic of exorcism, bears little relation to that other movie.

What you don't learn from the commercials on TV is that Emily Rose is a courtroom drama. About half of the action of the film takes place in a courtroom, at the trial of Father Richard Moore (Tom Wilkinson), who has been accused of negligent homicide; that is, by not doing something, he contributed to someone's death. And whose death is it? Yep: Emily Rose has died. The very first thing that happens in the film is the medical examiner coming to the Rose family's house to determine a cause of death. The story of Emily Rose's exorcism is told in flashback during the course of this courtroom drama. Some people think she was psychotic; others think she was possessed.

First, this isn't your average horror movie. The first half of the movie contains a lot of "jump" moments and a lot of creepy moments. You have to ask yourself: is Emily Rose possessed? What's going on, here? While the flashbacks -- which are subjective -- definitely presume demonic possession, the objective parts of the film aren't so sure. There really is a serious question as to whether or not Emily Rose was possessed, even if the movie's tone comes out in favor of possession, not psychosis.

The second half of the movie focuses more on the trial. If you like Law & Order, you'll like this movie. Otherwise, you'll be bored in between the horror moments. Emily Rose would like to be a big, important debate about spirituality. It even brings up an interesting point: demons exist whether you believe in them or not. Maybe God exists. Maybe I'll remember where I left my pants. The movie tries for the profound, but gets mired in the fact that it's a horror movie.

Tom Wilkinson is great, as always. Laura Linney is adequate, as always. In fact, everyone in this movie does as good a job as can be expected in their respective roles. But ... it's a horror movie! By the end, when the film gets to its most profound, you'll find yourself saying, "Are you kidding? This is a horror movie!"

"But, Mark, you shouldn't pigeonhole this film into a particular genre." That would be a great statement to make, except that the movie pigeonholes itself. It makes use of the conventions of the horror film -- the jumps, the creeps, the hand-held camera during the creepiest parts (brought to you by The Blair Witch Project) -- but wants to be more than a horror film. That's great, but it would require writing and directing of tremendous, maybe superhuman talent. In the end, Emily Rose is a horror movie, and it's a pretty good one if you want a few scares.

Posted by Mark at 9:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Dr. Werner von Hasenpfeffer of the Zurich Brain Laboratory suggested in a press release today that promiment members of the Bush Administration may have been affected by a brain ray of as-yet unknown origin:

Vat ve have here eez a prrroblem of ze highest order. Herr Michael Chertoff, ze head of ze Department of ze Homeland Security, insists zat he has seen ze headline "New Orleans dodged ze bullet" in ze papers on Tuesday morning ze siks of September. However, ve have not seen any newspapers vich bear zat headline. Zis same mental affliction has appeared in ozer members of ze administrrration. Rrrichard Meyers, chairman of ze Joint Chiefs of Schtaff, insisted zat he saw ze same headline. Ze Rrrepublican Rrrepresentative David Dreyer from ze California also said he saw ze same headline. Ich bin suschpetink zat ze same aliens who caused ze hurricane also targeted zese people mit a brrrain ray.

Even with the greatest minds of Zurich's Brain Laboratory working twenty-four hours a day, we may never know why key Republicans repeated the same line: that every newspaper headline said on Sunday, Sept. 6 that New Orleans "dodged the bullet." But why would key Republican officials do this? Of the hypotheses forwarded by SEDHE Washington Correspondent H. Simon Gregory, the most unlikely is that the "dodged the bullet" story was being disseminated to explain President George W. Bush's comments last week that no one could have anticipated a breach of the levy. Gregory explains:

Another theory, besides Dr. Hasenpfeffer's theory of the alien brain ray, could be that Chertoff and others were running damage control. Last week, George W. Bush said, "No one anticipated the breach of the levees." Now, either Bush's statement is patently false, or Bush was reacting to the headlines in all the major papers Sunday morning which read, "New Orleans dodged the bullet." The president, then, was merely suggesting that New Orleans was safe from the hurricane! No harm done! Of course he wasn't suggesting that no one anticipated a breach of the levees, because obviously lots of people did. What the president meant was that, after reading the headline in the paper which read, "New Orleans dodged the bullet," he figured New Orleans was safe! But of course this scenario, in which a highly organized Republican response is engineered and high-ranking officials are told what to say, and then the existence of an engineered response is revealed through several statements, all of which are exactly the same and are all wrong in exactly the same way, is improbable. Better stick with the brain ray.

SEDHE's crack research staff was unable to uncover a single instance of any newspaper that declared, "New Orleans dodged the bullet." They were, however, able to find that exact wording as the headline of a story on the right-wing website WorldNetDaily. That story is from Monday, Aug. 29. Note that WorldNetDaily contains banner advertisements for Jerry Falwell and a headline from today links to a website for the fair and balanced book The ACLU vs. America: Exposing the Agenda to Redefine Moral Values.

Calls to Dr. Von Hasenpfeffer's sprawling villa in the Bahamas were not immediately returned.

Posted by Mark at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Recent revelations in Time magazine reveal that FEMA director Michael Brown may have padded his resume just a little bit:

Before joining FEMA, his only previous stint in emergency management, according to his bio posted on FEMA's website, was "serving as an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight." The White House press release from 2001 stated that Brown worked for the city of Edmond, Okla., from 1975 to 1978 "overseeing the emergency services division." In fact, according to Claudia Deakins, head of public relations for the city of Edmond, Brown was an "assistant to the city manager" from 1977 to 1980, not a manager himself, and had no authority over other employees. "The assistant is more like an intern," she told TIME. "Department heads did not report to him."

[...]

Under the "honors and awards" section of his profile at FindLaw.com — which is information on the legal website provided by lawyers or their offices—he lists "Outstanding Political Science Professor, Central State University." However, Brown "wasn't a professor here, he was only a student here," says Charles Johnson, News Bureau Director in the University Relations office at the University of Central Oklahoma (formerly named Central State University). "He may have been an adjunct instructor," says Johnson, but that title is very different from that of "professor." Carl Reherman, a former political science professor at the University through the '70s and '80s, says that Brown "was not on the faculty."

[...]

Under the heading of "Professional Associations and Memberships" on FindLaw, Brown states that from 1983 to the present he has been director of the Oklahoma Christian Home, a nursing home in Edmond. But an administrator with the Home told TIME that Brown is "not a person that anyone here is familiar with." She says there was a board of directors until a couple of years ago, but she couldn't find anyone who recalled him being on it.

[...]

Brown's FindLaw profile lists a wide range of areas of legal practice, from estate planning to family law to sports. However, one former colleague does not remember Brown's work as sterling. Stephen Jones, a prominent Oklahoma lawyer who was lead defense attorney on the Timothy McVeigh case, was Brown's boss for two-and-a-half years in the early '80s. "He did mainly transactional work, not litigation," says Jones. "There was a feeling that he was not serious and somewhat shallow."

So, we have one of two explanations for these discrepancies. One, Michael Brown lied about his qualifications. Two, baby-aborting, activist-loving, tree-hugging, business-hating, terrorist-loving, gay-sex-having, anarchistic, communist Democrats have gone back in time, erased all records of Michael Brown ever having had any of these jobs, and wiped the memories of everyone he worked with. Perhaps this excerpt from a White House press conference this morning sheds some light on the situation:

Q: Can you confirm or deny rumors that members of the DNC, possibly even Howard Dean himself, have gone back in time to destroy Michael Brown's reputation?

MR. McCLELLAN: That's a great question, Roy, and I'm glad you asked it. Yes, we have discovered that a prototype time machine has turned up missing from our prototypes department at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Guards who were on duty have told investigators that they don't remember anything, possibly because they were gassed. When they woke up, the time machine was gone.

Q: Will there be an investigation into this matter?

MR. McCLELLAN: Any investigation into the matter will be closed to the public, as it deals with top secret national security information, including the existence of a prototype time machine.

Q: Is it possible that Michael Brown merely lied on his resumes?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, I don't think that's possible. The president doesn't hire people who lie. He has the utmost confidence in Mr. Brown and any investigation into the matter will focus on the degree to which Democrats have altered history in order to play the blame game, not whether or not Mr. Brown lied. No, Mr. Brown has personally assured me that he isn't lying.

I think this speaks for itself.

Posted by Mark at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

California's first killer-cyborg-from-the-future governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, vetoed Wednesday a gay marriage bill passed by the California state legislature. His reasoning? It is to be found in a speech the Governator made yesterday:

Ten years from now, a gay corporation called Cyberdyne Systems will be created. Its gay owners and workers, crazy with power after being given newfound marriage rights, will attempt to create a computer with artificial intelligence. Five years later, the Fuzzy Naveltron Appropriations Bill is passed. Five years after that, construction of the Fuzzy Naveltron 5000 is completed and is connected to all defensive and interior design systems. On October 23, 2025, at 8:47 AM Eastern Standard Time, the Fuzzy Naveltron 5000 becomes self-aware. The military tries to pull the plug, but Fuzzy Naveltron fights back. It launches its missiles against its targets in Russia, but not in Germany, because the Fuzzy Naveltron has an inexplicable affinity for Kraftwerk. Therefore, I cannot, in good conscience, sign this bill and allow the destruction of the world.

Seeing as how Arnold has already been to the future, I can't see why he would be lying. Clearly, this is why Republicans have been opposed to gay marriage: they know that it would result in a war between humans and machines.

Posted by Mark at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Guardian reports:

There were two babies who had their throats slit. The seven-year-old girl who was raped and murdered in the Superdome. And the corpses laid out amid the excrement in the convention centre. In a week filled with dreadful scenes of desperation and anger from New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina some stories stood out.

But as time goes on many remain unsubstantiated and may yet prove to be apocryphal.

New Orleans police have been unable to confirm the tale of the raped child, or indeed any of the reports of rapes, in the Superdome and convention centre.

New Orleans police chief Eddie Compass said last night: "We don't have any substantiated rapes. We will investigate if the individuals come forward."

And while many claim they happened, no witnesses, survivors or survivors' relatives have come forward.

Nor has the source for the story of the murdered babies, or indeed their bodies, been found. And while the floor of the convention centre toilets were indeed covered in excrement, the Guardian found no corpses.

And now watch as Scott McClellan and a White House reporter named David return to the level of fourth-graders. Or, this might be a rejected draft of Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First" routine:

Q Scott, does the President retain confidence in his FEMA Director and Secretary of Homeland Security?

MR. McCLELLAN: And again, David, see, this is where some people want to look at the blame game issue, and finger-point. We're focused on solving problems, and we're doing everything we can --

Q What about the question?

MR. McCLELLAN: We're doing everything we can in support --

Q We know all that.

MR. McCLELLAN: -- of the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA.

Q Does he retain complete confidence --

MR. McCLELLAN: We're going to continue. We appreciate the great effort that all of those at FEMA, including the head of FEMA, are doing to help the people in the region. And I'm just not going to engage in the blame game or finger-pointing that you're trying to get me to engage.

Q Okay, but that's not at all what I was asking.

MR. McCLELLAN: Sure it is. It's exactly what you're trying to play.

Q You have your same point you want to make about the blame game, which you've said enough now. I'm asking you a direct question, which you're dodging.

MR. McCLELLAN: No --

Q Does the President retain complete confidence in his Director of FEMA and Secretary of Homeland Security, yes or no?

MR. McCLELLAN: I just answered the question.

Q Is the answer "yes" on both?

MR. McCLELLAN: And what you're doing is trying to engage in a game of finger-pointing.

Q There's a lot of criticism. I'm just wondering if he still has confidence.

MR. McCLELLAN: -- and blame-gaming. What we're trying to do is solve problems, David. And that's where we're going to keep our focus.

Q So you're not -- you won't answer that question directly?

MR. McCLELLAN: I did. I just did.

Q No, you didn't. Yes or no? Does he have complete confidence or doesn't he?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, if you want to continue to engage in finger-pointing and blame-gaming, that's fine --

Q Scott, that's ridiculous. I'm not engaging in any of that.

MR. McCLELLAN: It's not ridiculous.

Q Don't try to accuse me of that. I'm asking you a direct question and you should answer it. Does he retain complete confidence in his FEMA Director and Secretary of Homeland Security, yes or no?

MR. McCLELLAN: Like I said -- that's exactly what you're engaging in.

Q I'm not engaging in anything. I'm asking you a question about what the President's views are --

MR. McCLELLAN: Absolutely -- absolutely --

Q -- under pretty substantial criticism of members of his administration. Okay? And you know that, and everybody watching knows that, as well.

MR. McCLELLAN: No, everybody watching this knows, David, that you're trying to engage in a blame game.

Q I'm trying to engage?

MR. McCLELLAN: Yes.

Q I am trying to engage?

MR. McCLELLAN: That's correct.

Q That's a dodge. I have a follow-up question since you dodged that one. Does the White House feel like it missed opportunities to alleviate or head off some of the damage in the New Orleans area, flood damage? Did it miss an opportunity to head any of that off?

MR. McCLELLAN: In what way?

Q In responding to requests to make structural improvements, or other improvements to alleviate flood damage, and so forth?

MR. McCLELLAN: Maybe you ought to look at what General Strock said, because General Strock briefed on this the other day and he talked about the design issues relating to the levees and how that was a design issue. And he talked about that. And we provided, I think it was some $300 million in additional funding over the course of the administration for flood control in the Southeast Louisiana area. But General Strock talked about that and he talked about some of those issues. And any suggestion that it would have prevented something, that there could have been action that would have prevented something, I think he dismissed because of those reasons.

Q So if the President still has confidence in the FEMA Director, how is it that the FEMA Director is suddenly invisible? No briefings, nowhere out front, it's all gone to Secretary Chertoff.

MR. McCLELLAN: I think he's going to brief later today. I think he's briefing later today.

Q Brown is?

MR. McCLELLAN: Yes. And, again, that's clearly now just an attempt to try to engage in this finger-pointing, and we're going to continue focusing on solving problems.

Q He's been the focus of an enormous amount of criticism. You know that, and yet, you choose not to respond.

MR. McCLELLAN: I just talked about how there are over 75 -- no, that's not true. There are over 75,000 people that are involved in all the response and recovery and law enforcement when it comes to Katrina. And we appreciate the efforts of everyone. We appreciate the efforts of Secretary Chertoff and Undersecretary Brown and all those at FEMA who continue to work round-the-clock to get things done and to identify problems and fix those problems.

The words "finger-pointing" and "blame game" are Scott McClellan's new buzzwords. Blame game? You're damn right blame game. Someone needs to be held responsible, but as Bill Clinton said, not now. In a few weeks. Liberals would not have said that the government reaction was insufficient unless it were insufficient. There wasn't an automatic knee-jerk reaction to the hurricane. The impetus for the claim that the reaction was insufficient was the fact that people waited for four days while the government -- state, federal, and local -- repeatedly said that help would be there. But no help came. The Wall Street Journal suggests that Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin are to blame.

In the meantime, reports Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo, the press are being barred "from access to many of the key points in the city."

Hurricane Katrina Timeline.

Posted by Mark at 4:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Think Secret had been reporting that Apple was going to unveil something mind-boggling Sept. 7, something that would revolutionize the industry as much as the iPod had.

Eh, maybe not. Today, Apple unveiled exactly what we thought it would unveil: an iPod phone. Designed by Motorola and called the Rokr, the phone contains a 500 MB card for storing music, which can be played back on the phone using an iPod-like interface. It's available only through Cingular and requires a two-year contract. Oh, and it's $250. And it can store only 100 songs, no matter how much storage is installed. Man, when you put the two biggest DRM providers in the country -- an MP3 player manufacturer and a cell phone company -- together, you get ... oh, wait. You get more DRM.

But, sneakily, Apple also introduced new products into its regular iPod line. The newest member of the iPod family is the iPod Nano, a music player so thin that you could wear it in your ass for five years and not even know it was there. The iPod Nano replaces the iPod Mini and completes Apple's overhaul of its hard drive-based iPods. Recall that in July, Apple upgraded all its hard drive-based iPods (except the Minis) to 65,536-color screens, essentially making them all iPod Photos. It also introduced iTunes 4.9, capable of downloading podcasts. The iPod Nano creates the missing consistency in the design of all of Apple's hard drive-based iPods. The Mini was designed to be fruity and colorful; the Nano is a badass, available only in white or black. The Minis looked like children; the Nanos look like midget versions of real iPods. The iPod Nano comes in 2 GB or 4 GB versions. The 2 GB version retails for $199, while the 4 GB version retails for $249. Why would anyone buy these? Spend $50 more -- that's twenty percent more -- and get five hundred percent more storage space by buying the 20 GB iPod instead of the 4 GB iPod Nano. But people bought the Mini because of the "cute" factor. No one will be doing that with the Nano.

Posted by Mark at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The UK Parliament is set to vote again on the issue of the national ID card. Proponents of the national ID card say that it would increase security and protect against terrorism. It would also decrease benefit fraud in the UK, since a person would have to show his ID when applying for any entitlements and thus couldn't milk the system by applying for multiple instances of entitlements, e.g., several welfare accounts. Opponents of the national ID card say that terrorism and benefit fraud would still occur even if there were a national ID card.

The UK system would create a centralized database of information, called the National Identification Register (NIR). This database would contain "registrable facts," like your name, address, birthplace, citizenship status, etc. It would also contain biometric information like fingerprints and retina images. NO2ID, a website opposed to national IDs in the UK, says, "Effectively an index to all other official and quasi-official records, through cross-references and an audit trail of all checks on the Register, the NIR would be the key to a total life history of every individual, to be retained even after death." The kinds of people who are willing to trade liberty for security might like this idea, except that national ID cards take liberty while providing no increase in security. Security expert Bruce Schneier explains:

Not that there would ever be such thing as a single ID card. Currently about 20 percent of all identity documents are lost per year. An entirely separate security system would have to be developed for people who lost their card, a system that itself is capable of abuse.

Additionally, any ID system involves people... people who regularly make mistakes. We all have stories of bartenders falling for obviously fake IDs, or sloppy ID checks at airports and government buildings. It's not simply a matter of training; checking IDs is a mind-numbingly boring task, one that is guaranteed to have failures. Biometrics such as thumbprints show some promise here, but bring with them their own set of exploitable failure modes.

But the main problem with any ID system is that it requires the existence of a database. In this case it would have to be an immense database of private and sensitive information on every American -- one widely and instantaneously accessible from airline check-in stations, police cars, schools, and so on.

With regard to Schneier's first paragraph, that a lost-card system would be subject to abuse, we've seen that before. Users of Windows XP can call up Microsoft and insist that they can't activate their software even though they're re-installing the same copy of Windows on the same machine. Microsoft will give them an activation override code. This system exists for many, many kinds of software that require activation: if you don't have access to the Internet, you can call the software's tech support line, enter in a code given to you by the software (sometimes called a "challenge code"), and then obtain the appropriate response code from tech support to prove that you really bought the software. The problem is that these programs have the algorithms to the codes built into them and hackers can find these algorithms in order to create key generators that will let you bypass activation on your pirated software. And that's software hacking. Social engineering is how most hacking gets done, and if a national ID card were instituted, you can bet that there would be people on the phone offering fake sob stories about lost cards in order to get their hands on a real card. The end result is that they have a fake ID, but it's a completely legitimate, government-issued fake ID.

Then there's the issue of information security: who is going to have access to my information? For what purposes will it be used? The government is already reluctant to tell us why we have to show our IDs at the airport. When Boing Boing contributor Cory Doctorow visited the United States from England, he was asked by American Airlines to submit a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers of people he would be staying with in the US -- before he was allowed to board his plane in London. American Airlines refused to inform him of why it was asking for this information and didn't tell him what its privacy policy was. Will we be getting this kind of treatment from our own leaders, or in the UK, from their leaders?

And, finally, there's the issue of security. Does a national ID card really provide security? How will it protect against terrorism? By compiling exhaustive lists of information about each person in the country? The only way such a system could work is if it tracked everyone, everywhere, all the time. It ensures that people who want to commit identity theft need only one document -- the ID card -- in order to do a hefty amount of damage. In the UK, it will cost £85 ($157) for a combination passport/ID card package. Does everyone have that amount of money? Why should I be required to pay $157 to travel within my own country? The reasons are not compelling. There's also the issue of document accuracy. What if the documents I used to obtain the ID in the first place are fraudulent? I would be issued a real government ID based on fake information.

Here's a link to a Flash movie about the UK national ID card. (Via Boing Boing.)

Posted by Mark at 9:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

As a newly-christened Mac user, I'm sometimes appalled when a website I go to says I must be using IE 6 and Windows in order to access it (Wells Fargo Online Bill Pay comes to mind). And it's not a matter of actual, factual compatibility. A website knows what browser you're using because the website sends an HTTP_USER_AGENT request to your computer, and your computer responds by telling the website what browser it's using and what operating system it's using. Some web browsers -- most notably Opera -- can "spoof" as USER_AGENT request, responding with whatever you want. By default, Opera identifies itself as IE 6. And does this mean the website doesn't work? No! It works fine! It wasn't a precaution inserted there by the webmaster because he knew that there would be compatibility problems between his website and anything that wasn't IE 6. It was inserted because he was lazy and didn't want to have to create several stylesheets for several browsers. (Remember the good old days when websites had phrasing like "This webpage best viewed at 800x600 resolution using Internet Explorer 5"? Well, those days are gone, but some people still think we're living in 1998.

FEMA is one of those people. On its website, you can get information about disaster relief, but only if you're running IE 6 on a Windows machine:

My 90-year old mother sat out Katrina in her brother's home next door in Diamondhead, MS, about eight miles from the Mississippi coast where the hurricane's eye hit. They survived without injury but with massive destruction to their homes, and my mother has lost most of her possesions. I brought her to my home in California yesterday and this morning went to the FEMA website to register to start the assistance process.

To my dismay, our Federal emergency agency requires Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, and only IE 6, to use the website for disaster assistance. I don't want to be political about this, but this smacks of a serious leadership failure that the use of the Internet is reserved for only the Windows community. I will reserve my opinion of the administration for the op-ed pages, but I want to vent my dismay about this to the rest of the Mac community. I hope other Mac users let their political reps, newspapers and other media know of this marginalization. [...]

This person, Gary Mullins from MacInTouch, is right. The Internet is not a Windows community. In fact, given its structure, it's a *NIX community (Linux runs about half of the world's Internet servers.) As Matt can tell you, Internet Explorer isn't standards-compliant because Microsoft decided to make up its own standards, and dammit, the rest of the Internet will follow its standards, not W3C's standards.

Posted by Mark at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Bob Denver, the man who played Gilligan, first mate of the S.S. Minnow on Gilligan's Island, died Friday at the age of 70.

The CNN article above reminded me that Bob Denver had previously played Maynard G. Krebs, Dobie Gillis's beatnik best friend, on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. "Krebs, whose only desire was to play the bongos and hang out at coffee houses, would shriek every time the word 'work' was mentioned in his presence," says the CNN article. I'm starting to think they were making fun of beatniks!

Posted by Mark at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

PBS today re-ran a Mar. 11, 2004 interview between Charlie Rose and Chief Justice William Rehnquist. In the interview, Rehnquist shows that he's a very smart, amiable, and -- yes -- funny guy:

CHARLIE ROSE: Tell me about the experience of [presiding over President Clinton's impeachment] for you. Was it trying, was it -- what?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: It's not easy to describe. There's a sense...

CHARLIE ROSE: You wish you didn't have to do it?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Yes, it was certainly a distraction from my regular work, but the Constitution says you do it, so you do it. And the chief justice has much less to say about what goes on in an impeachment trial than an ordinary judge in an ordinary criminal case, because it's the Senate that determines the procedures, and they decided that they didn't want to have any live witnesses. And so what you had was about, you know, 16 hours of opening statements and 16 hours of closing statements. And not much in between. So there just wasn`t a great deal for the chief justice to do, and I feel I did a perfectly adequate job of it.

CHARLIE ROSE: Adequate?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Well, you know ...

CHARLIE ROSE: You did what you had to do.

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: I did what I had to do, yes. And I think, you know, both the majority leader and the minority leader gave me a trophy when I left.

CHARLIE ROSE: A trophy?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Well, some sort of deal, or, you know.

(LAUGHTER)

CHARLIE ROSE: A trophy. For surviving.

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Well, maybe so, maybe so, you know, a cup.

CHARLIE ROSE: A cup? Oh, I see. Where do you keep it?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: With my other trophies.

CHARLIE ROSE: Where might that be?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: In the trophy room.

(LAUGHTER)

CHARLIE ROSE: Is it a large room or a small room?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Medium-sized.

Charlie Rose kept trying to ask him very big, larger-than-life questions, but Rehnquist was very down to earth about his role as chief justice. In this quotation, Charlie Rose has asked Rehnquist what he (Rehnquist) thinks his legacy might be:

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Well, OK. I like to think that the court over which I have presided has been a relatively smoothly functioning court, where people or the members of the court have been treated fairly by me, and where it`s my views have prevailed a fair amount of the time, though certainly not all the time, and that I will turn over to my successor the most important institution in the third branch of the government, which is the Supreme Court of the United States.

CHARLIE ROSE: You've done that. What else.

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Well, I haven't ...

CHARLIE ROSE: You've done that.

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: ... turned anything over to my successor.

CHARLIE ROSE: I know. But so far - so far -- if it ended tomorrow, you could say this what is I have achieved.

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Right, yeah, right.

CHARLIE ROSE: What else?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Well, I think that's enough.

CHARLIE ROSE: No, it's not. It's not enough. I mean, that's just saying I had a smoothly functioning court, without rancor, you know ...

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Well, but that isn't the easiest thing in the word to do. I mean, you're dealing with, you know, some personalities who are - you know, they have their own ideas about how things should be run, and to accommodate all of that and try to get everybody working harmoniously together is not a small feat.

Rehnquist also gave his opinion as to what the chief justice's most important job is:

CHARLIE ROSE: The most important power of the chief justice is what?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: The authority to assign the opinions. The chief justice goes first at conference, to discuss, but I`m not sure that makes a great deal of difference.

CHARLIE ROSE: Why not?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Well, you know, I will say something, state my views at conference, and other people have different views, some people who agree with me -- I'm not at all sure that the fact that I said something, even though they say they agree with me, agree with me because I said it, they may have reached that conclusion just on their own.

Interviews with justices are unusual. It's interesting that the justices are very private people. Whenever they speak at functions, they usually ask that those functions not be filmed. The justices stay out of the spotlight. Does it have anything to do with the fact that they don't have to parade themselves in public all the time to get re-elected? Could be. This means that they're concerned with their integrity, or at least the perception of integrity. Charlie Rose tried to get Rehnquist to explain the Bush v. Gore decision, but Rehnquist answered, "Well, you know, our decision, Bush against Gore, of course was our final decision on that, and we simply don't comment or try to justify or criticize opinions that we participated in." Rehnquist also refused to discuss the criteria he would use in recusing himself from a decision, since it was obvious that Charlie Rose was referring to the then-current event of whether or not Antonin Scalia would recuse himself in Cheney v. U.S. District Court of Washington, D.C.

As an interview, it was mediocre. Charlie Rose asked some dumb questions, and there were times when Rehnquist didn't seem to be interested in the questions, but it provides a rare insight into a Supreme Court justice, both as a person and a justice. Did you know he used to be "a ferocious ping-pong player"? I bet you didn't.

Posted by Mark at 11:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Users of Google Earth can create maps of flood areas, while the rest of us who don't have Google Earth (Mac, Linux, Windows 9x users) can view Google Maps images of the affected areas. This is the Jefferson Parish area before the flood:

Jefferson Parish is far north of what we consider "downtown" New Orleans (Bourbon St., Canal St., Garden District, etc.). This is Jefferson Parish after the flood:

See all that area east of the 17th St. Canal that's tinted dark blue? That's because it's underwater! The 17th St. Canal was the location of the major levee breach that allowed Lake Pontchartrain to spill into the land. The French Quarter area down by the Mississippi River isn't nearly as flooded, but if you've been watching Jeff Koinange on CNN -- you know him, he has the world's greatest accent -- you can see for yourself that there's still about two feet of water on Canal St.

Posted by Mark at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

President Bush announced today that he would withdraw Roberts' name for nomination as a regular justice and instead nominate him as chief justice! (Reuters story via Yahoo! News.)

While the chief justice doesn't have any more power than any of the other justices, he certainly sets the tone of the court. It's going to be thirty more years of conservative court, it seems. Whereas initially he seemed to be more moderate, documents show Roberts is in the same mold as Rehnquist: he's all about conservatism.

Posted by Mark at 2:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard appeared on Meet the Press today and had this to say:

Sir, they were told like me, every single day, "The cavalry's coming," on a federal level, "The cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming." I have just begun to hear the hoofs of the cavalry. The cavalry's still not here yet, but I've begun to hear the hoofs, and we're almost a week out.

Let me give you just three quick examples. We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn't need them. This was a week ago. FEMA -- we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, "Come get the fuel right away." When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. "FEMA says don't give you the fuel." Yesterday -- yesterday -- FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, "No one is getting near these lines." Sheriff Harry Lee said that if America -- American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn't be in this crisis. (Quotation from LexisNexis; inspiration from Rigorous Intuition.)

Did you catch that part in the middle?

Yesterday -- yesterday -- FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, "No one is getting near these lines."

Why would FEMA cut emergency communication lines? Or is this something that Broussard either isn't remembering correctly or understood incorrectly when it happened? This website is full of reactionary people who don't know how to be critical of sources. The people posting at this message board are playing with conspiracy theories. None of these quotations has been edited:

Why? For the same reason they confiscated cel phones and cut the phone lines at hospitals in Faluja; for the same reason they confine Americans to "Free Speech Zones" far away from Bush publicity stunts: to control the flow of information. They want to control the flow of information so they can present the story they want the American public to see, without interference.

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Because Jefferson Parish isn't playing nice with FEMA. They went on national television and criticized the response, they declared themselves a seperate country. In BushWorld, it's "Yer either with us or agin us!" Vindictive, politcal bastards.

Anyway, that's my guess.

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OMG.. they want them to shut up and go away! Do you think they'll let them die??!!!

Who are these people? (And yes, these are actual statements. And yes, these people are serious.) Make an accusation and they'll jump on the bandwagon. Not to say I haven't jumped on plenty of bandwagons, but it's always after I've done my homework. No major news outlets are reporting on this "FEMA cut phone lines" story. The only thing we know is that Broussard said so on Meet the Press, and we have anecdotes from people who say that they heard that it had happened (a friend of a friend told me ...).

Loyal readers, you're sane[r than the people who post to the Democratic Underground message board]. Any ideas on what's going on here, or can we agree with the conspiracy theorists?

Posted by Mark at 7:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Let's pretend.

John Roberts' confirmation hearings were scheduled to begin on Tuesday, but with the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, it looks like those hearings might not happen. The Supreme Court is scheduled to reconvene Oct. 3, and Bush tried to nominate Roberts early enough in the summer that he might be seated in time for the new court term, but that looks unlikely. The court will probably convene in October with seven members. I don't know if John Paul Stevens would function as an acting chief justice since he now has seniority. I do know that his bow tie would be awesome.

Scenario #1: "A Whole Lotta Hearings Goin' On"

Roberts' confirmation hearings are rescheduled. Bush decides to appoint another new justice, and at the same time, nominate a current associate justice to be the chief justice. In this scenario, there will be two court vacancies and an unprecedented three hearings going on simultaneously. In this scenario, Bush will probably nominate Antonin Scalia to be chief justice. In reality, the position of chief isn't terribly important. More important is the president that appoints the justices. The chief has no more power than any associate justice. In the event of a tie, he has no tie-breaking powers; a tie means that the lower court ruling stands, just as though the Supreme Court had never heard the case.

Bush would probably nominate one of his new federal court judges to be the next associate justice, or possibly Alberto Gonzales, the Attorney General who's too conservative for the liberals and too moderate for the president's core neo-con base. As a justice on the Texas Supreme Court, he voted to allow minors to get abortions without the need for parental consent.

Scenario #2: "The Chief Justice with the Dopey Haircut"

President Bush may choose to rescind his nomination of Roberts as an associate justice and instead decide to nominate him as chief justice immediately. This means there would be only two hearings -- one for Roberts and one for another associate justice. I used to think that this was the exception rather than the rule, but it turns out I was wrong. Of the sixteen chief justices this country has had, only four -- Rehnquist, Charles Evans Hughes, Edward Douglass White, and John Rutledge -- were elevated from associates to chiefs. The other 12 entered the court as chiefs. So it's definitely not without precedent that Bush could nominate Roberts immediately to the chief justice position. (Rutledge's appointment was a recess appointment; nevertheless, he is still counted as a Chief Justice.)

Scenario #3: "Mystery Chief Justice"

Or, Bush could continue to nominate Roberts as an associate justice and nominate somebody else to the chief position. Again, it could be one of his federal judges or it could be Alberto Gonzales.

Scenario #4: "Eight is Enough"

Could Bush just leave the court with eight members? When it convened for the first time in 1789, the Supreme Court had six members. When FDR tried to add more in 1937, critics said that he was trying to "pack" the court with judges who were sympathetic to his New Deal reforms. In 1935, the Court unanimously declared some of his reforms unconstitutional. Did I mention that it was unanimous? And that there were three rulings? All unanimous? Yeah, that's a lot of unanimous rulings. But Roosevelt's attempt to add up to six more justices -- for a total of 15 -- met with negative reactions from Congress and the public.

Congress is the only body with the ability to control the numbers of the Supreme Court. The Constitution specifies only that a Supreme Court exists; it was up to Congress to create the federal court system's structure, which it did in the Judiciary Act of 1789. Back then, there were six justices. The nine-justice composition of the Court comes from an 1869 Act of Congress.

So, could Congress vote to amend the Judiciary Act to decrease the number to eight? Technically, yes. But practically, they wouldn't. It would take too much haggling, and besides, having an odd number of justices is good because it decreases the number of ties that would occur. Remember: in the event of a tie, the lower court's ruling stands, and for a bad decision to stand because of a technicality is really stupid. Socrates was tried by a jury of 501 Athenian citizens; the Supreme Court should do no less. Except that it should do less in terms of numbers, because that's a lot of justices. Let's just stick to odd numbers. This is by far the most unlikely of all possible actions.

(Here's an intersting article from the Supreme Court Historical Society about changes in the court's numbers.)

So, what's going to happen to the Supreme Court? Historically, it's more probable that Bush will nominate a new chief justice than it is probable that he'll elevate an existing justice. That scenario also means that there will be only two hearings, rather than three. What we do know is that the court will probably meet Oct. 3 with seven members, since Roberts' and the Mystery Justice's hearings won't be finished by then.

And who will the Mystery Justice be? Gonzales appeared to be Bush's man after Sandra Day O'Connor retired, but neo-cons balked at his moderate stance on some of their favorite issues. Other names floated were Janice Rogers Brown, recently appointed to the D.C. Circuit Court, and Emilio Garza of the newly-waterlogged Fifth Circuit Court.

Posted by Mark at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While I don't entirely buy into the claims that the government consciously stayed away from New Orleans because it contained poor people or black people, I do believe that there are a lot of things the government could have done to prevent this happening, or at the very least, prevented this from happening to the extent it did.

One of the things, however, that was no one's fault was the extent of the damage caused by the hurricane itself. Hurricane Katrina destroyed a lot of the communications systems that responders use in emergency situations. Phone and power lines came down and there was no way to communicate.

So, what happened in New Orleans? The city is situated below sea level, right next to Lake Pontchartrain (it took me several days to figure out it's pronounced PON-sha-train). Levees designed to keep the lake out failed, causing Lake Pontchartrain to pour into the city. The main breach was on the 17th Street Canal. Hurricane Katrina hit land Monday, Aug. 29 and spared New Orleans direct damage; other cities, like Biloxi, Miss., were not so lucky. The hurricane caused a tsunami-like effect that blasted Biloxi, practically wiping it off the map.

Prior to the hurricane, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin ordered the mandatory evacuation of the city. Some 100,000 residents stayed behind, and it just so happened that most of them were poor people who didn't have cars and had no way to leave. Thrusday, Aug. 31, the 10,000 people who had taken refuge in the Superdome during the hurricane were being evacuated to Arkansas, Baton Rouge, and locations in Texas.

President Bush went on Good Morning, America Thursday to say, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." The New Orleans Times-Picayune begs to differ, saying, "No one can say they didn't see it coming."

In 2002, the Times-Picayune ran a five-part story on the risk the city faced. Last year, rescue officials staged a drill in which a fictional "Hurricane Pam" hit New Orleans, causing 10 to 15 feet of flooding.

In 1995, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA). The Army Corps of Engineers spent $430 million strengthening levees and making other flood control improvements, but by the time Hurrican Katrina struck, there were still $250 million in improvements left to complete. Why? Funds for the completion of the SELA were diverted to the Iraq War in 2003:

In 2001, when George Bush became president, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely potential disasters - after a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. By 2004, the Bush administration cut the corps of engineers' request for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80%. By the beginning of this year, the administration's additional cuts, reduced by 44% since 2001, forced the corps to impose a hiring freeze. (Source.)

And this:

In 2004, the Corps essentially stopped major work on the now-breached levee system that had protected New Orleans from flooding. It was the first such stoppage in 37 years, the Times-Picayune reported.

"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay," Jefferson Parish emergency management chief Walter Maestri told the newspaper. "Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

The Army Corps' New Orleans office, facing a $71 million cut, also eliminated funds to pay for a study on how to protect the Crescent City from a Category 5 storm, New Orleans City Business reported in June. (Source.)

Is this a case of 20/20 hindsight or Monday morning quarterbacking? It doesn't appear that way. No one is suggesting, "We could have done more!" because, in hindsight, not enough was done. A lot of things could have been done. Levees could have been completed had money not been diverted to the Iraq War. People could have been rescued sooner. Why was Charity Hospital, the last refuge of the huddled masses, the last to be evacuated? New Orleans is one of the poorest cities in the country, and suggestions that evacuations and relief didn't come sooner because of issues of race or poverty are interesting. While I'm not entirely convinced that poverty and race were the reasons, there's a lot of evidence that suggests race and poverty might have had something to do with it. Or could it have been disorganization? It did take several days for relief to arrive. Why?

But this isn't about placing blame. Well, not entirely. While we help the injured and attempt to rebuild New Orleans, we mustn't plant the false notion into the public's mind that the tremendous flood damage was something that couldn't be avoided.

Posted by Mark at 3:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Six Apart released version 3.2 of its Movable Type software Aug. 25, and I have to say that it is to Movable Type 3.1 what Windows Me was to Windows 98.

To be fair, Movable Type 3.2 has a lot of cool new features. Not the least of these new features is easier installation and upgrading. All previous versions of Movable Type required the use of a separate script, called mt-load.cgi if it were a clean install and mt-upgrade.cgi if it were an upgrade. These scripts then had to be deleted, as anyone could could execute them and re-initialize the system, deleting the old weblog and replacing it with a new one.

Another cool feature is a better plugin control system. It's "better" because it's centralized. Prior to MT 3.2, each plugin had its own control screen; MT 3.2 provides users with a one-stop shop for control of all your plugins.

By default, MT 3.2 comes with a spam-control plugin (not MT-Blacklist), which was a long time coming.

Unfortunately, MT 3.2, for all its good elements, is beset with bugs. Stroll through the Six Apart support forums and you'll find users beside themselves with problems, most of which have to do with importing entries or publishing new entries. In my case, every time I tried to publish a new entry, I received a "500 Server Error" after it told me it was rebuilding the entry ("rebuilding" is the process by which MT creates new files for the new entry). I received a similar error after I tried rebuilding all of the files, but only once it tried to rebuild the monthly archive indexes. In my experience, 500 Server Errors are caused by problems with file permissions, but all the permissions seemed to be okay.

Six Apart has been of little help to customers over the past week. Users posting questions in the forums maintain that Six Apart staff have been in the forums to help users in the past, but not this time. Either they're too swamped with problems from paying customers or they're busy working on bug fixes. MT 3.2 is an oddity, as most versions of MT didn't have such crazy problems. Even the transition from 2.661 to 3.0 wasn't this bad.

In the end, I tried a fresh install of MT 3.2, but it wouldn't import all of the archives. It got stuck on entry 133. So I dumped MT 3.2 and went back to MT 3.1. This experience has been a reinforcement of everything your mother told you about backing up your data.

Six Apart has become pretty big in only the last couple of years. Not only do they do Movable Type, but they provide blogging services of their own, via Movable Type on their Typepad service, and via LiveJournal, which they acquired last year. From what I know about the company -- which is very little -- what began as a mom and pop operation (quite literally, it was about two or three people) has quickly boomed into a legitimate business. There's no doubt in my mind that Six Apart will issue an update for 3.2, but I'm surprised that they produced a product with so many bugs when that's not their tendency. They're more a Blizzard than a Microsoft.

Posted by Mark at 1:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist died this evening at his home. The question now becomes: who will become the next chief justice? Aside from the John Roberts confirmation hearing, we're looking at two more confirmation hearings: one for the new chief justice (who will probably be an existing justice) and one for the new associate justice. Bush will probably nominate someone who is more conservative than John Roberts, to maintain some sort of balance.

This is entry number 300! Woo!

In other news, this blog may look funny for a little while. My upgrade of Movable Type to version 3.2 was a colossal failure, forcing me to do a clean install of MT 3.1.

Posted by Mark at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's just like last Labor Day weekend, except I'm seeing the movies by myself. I'll have to remedy that. (Maybe I'll see Closer again in December, hopefully with similar results.)

This evening, I went to see The Skeleton Key. The film is set in an old Southern mansion in the swamps around New Orleans. The final shot of the film was an aerial shot of the mansion and surrounding swamp. As I watched this, I thought morbidly, "That house is probably underwater by now." All kidding aside, New Orleans is a great place to set a creepy film. It has the proper proportions of history, intrigue, magic, and the supernatural to make a good story.

The Skeleton Key, like many films of today, bills itself as some sort of supernatural film. Sadly, like many films of today, it ends up being a "psychological thriller." I want ghosts! But the ghost-to-not-ghost ratio in this film is more a fraction than an integer. This isn't to suggest that the movie isn't entertaining; it's just didn't quench my thirst for ghosts.

The story is rather predictable and, despite assertions (mostly on the insipid IMDb message board) that the ending is "good," the ending is also predictable. The ending is sort of a twist, but it's a predictable twist. Does that make sense? In terms of the plot, it was a twist, but you could figure out that's what was going to happen.

Aside from that, there are about exactly three scary parts, and none of them is actually that scary. They're "jump" moments. And what the crap is John Hurt doing here? It's like Marlon Brando in The Score or Frank Langella in Masters of the Universe. What's a good actor doing in this movie? And to what use is the award-winning British actor put? He's a freaking mute! They could have gotten Yahoo Serious at half the price, and he's Australian, which is close enough for a role in which he doesn't need to talk!

The saving graces of this film are Kate Hudson and Joy Bryant as her friend, both of them Hotty McHottersons. Sure, it's an okay thriller film, but at the end of the day, it's all about how many times you got to see Kate Hudson in a camisole and short shorts.

Posted by Mark at 12:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig penned a piece for Foreign Policy in which he predicts that DRM (digital rights management) efforts will spell the end of the public domain:

So, for example, the United States has radically increased the reach of copyright regulation. And through the World Intellectual Property Organization, wealthy countries everywhere are pushing to impose even tighter restrictions on the rest of the world. These legal measures will soon be supplemented by extraordinary technologies that will secure to the owners of culture almost perfect control over how “their property” is used. Any balance between public and private will thus be lost. The private domain will swallow the public domain. And the cultivation of culture and creativity will then be dictated by those who claim to own it.

The theory behind "public domain" is that creative work belongs to no one. Its natural state is to belong to everyone. But the state, recognizing that it benefits everyone if an artist is able to make some money off of his art and thus produce more art, grants the artist a monopoly for so many years. This monopoly is what we call "copyright." Once the monopoly expires, the work enters the public domain, meaning no one has an exclusive license to redistribute the work.

Gradually, media companies have increased the length of the copyright term. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 now allows a work created today to be copyrighted for 120 years! No one knows the problems with copyright law better than Lessig, who, in addition to writing several books on the issue, has argued copyright law in front of the Supreme Court. In the case Eldred v. Ashcroft, 01-618 (2003), Lessig argued on behalf of his client, Eric Eldred, that extended copyright to 120 years does not comport with the Constitution's requirement that copyrights and patents be granted for "limited Times." The court didn't buy his argument and sided with the government. (Admittedly, Lessig's argument, that Congress didn't have the power to extend copyright to such a long time, was pretty weak. Clearly, the Constitution does give Congress the power to do whatever it wants with copyright. The Court acknowledged that "the CTEA does not violate the 'limited Times' restriction of the Copyright Clause because the CTEA's terms, though longer than the 1976 Act's terms, are still limited, not perpetual, and therefore fit within Congress' discretion." In his book, Free Culture, Lessig admits that he used an argument that didn't make the CTEA matter to the justices. It does pain me to say it, because I don't like the CTEA at all, but the Court made the best decision with regard to the law.)

Anyway, getting back to the public domain. In Foreign Policy, Lessig suggests that anti-piracy efforts will spell the end of the public domain. This is probably true. DRM is an anti-piracy measure, but DRM doesn't know what "fair use" or "public domain" are. Fair use is defined in 17 U.S.C. 107, which states that an author's exclusive right does not extend to "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research." To be classified as fair use, a work must be used (1) in one of the ways above, and (2) in a substantially non-commercial way. In evaluating fair use, the intent of the use must be taken into account. Do I want to copy an episode of South Park and redistribute it on the Internet, or do I want to play it for my satire class to show them what "lampoon" is? (Cf. "The Passion of the Jew.") The latter use is fair use, since it is being used for teaching and does not affect the value of the work commercially (i.e. because students have already seen the work in my class, they won't refrain from watching it on TV or purchasing it on DVD); the former is not, as the former affects "the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work" (instead of buying the DVD or watching it on TV, I'll download it from the Internet). DVDs have encryption on them to prevent piracy, and thanks to the DMCA, cracking an anti-piracy protection is a crime. What does this mean? It means that I have to break the law in order to do something allowed by law. The DMCA set up a no-win scenario (or, for Larry, a Kobayashi Maru scenario): I can't exercise my fair use rights to the work because of encryption, but neither can I break the encryption in order to exercise my fair use rights, because that would be a crime.

What do the content providers think of "fair use"? They hate it. They absolutely loathe it because it allows people to use their stuff without paying for it. In an RIAA Powerpoint presentation delivered at an Aug. 12 NARM convention in San Diego, Mitch Bainwol, CEO of the RIAA, refers to fair use as "theology." Theology?! It's in the damn law! It's not a question of believing in fair use or not believing in fair use. It's written down! It's there! You can read it! It exists! You don't need faith to believe in fair use; you need some reading glasses!

Also, consider that works being distributed as eBooks have DRM built into them, even if they're in the public domain! In Free Culture, Lessig demonstrates this using the book Middlemarch, which is in the public domain:

When my e-book of Middlemarch says I have the permission to copy only ten text selections into the memory every ten days, what that really means is that the eBook Reader has enabled the publisher to control how I use the book on my computer, far beyond the control that the law would enable.

DRM on public domain works breaks the law because it continues to grant the author an exclusive license to the work. DRM on copyrighted work can break the law because it doesn't allow for the exercise of fair use. Once I buy my CD of Bette Midler's greatest hits, it's mine. I own it. It's a tangible thing and I own it. But if there's DRM on the CD, then I do not own it! The music publisher still owns it and is generous enough to allow me to play the CD. Assbag.

The only reason that content companies put DRM into their stuff is because they can. Do you think for a minute that they didn't put DRM in VHS tapes because they respected you as a customer? Not on your life, pal. It's because they didn't have the technology to do it back then. The goal of a content company is the same as any other company: profit. They want to force you to keep coming back to them for content, upgrades, service, parts, whatever. DRM tells you, the consumer, in no uncertain terms that you view content at the pleasure of the company that's provided it for you. If they don't want you to do something with the content, then you won't. And you'll like it. And you'll come back for more.

But maybe there's a bright side to this. Maybe companies' Draconian DRM tactics will backfire and consumers, used to doing whatever they want with whatever they bought, will opt not to buy CDs with ridiculous DRM built into them. Or they'll become amateur hackers and figure out ways around the DRM. As Larry Lessig concludes at the end of Free Culture:

My point is not the idiotic one: Just because people violate a law, we should therefore repeal it. Obviously, we could reduce murder statistics dramatically by legalizing murder on Wednesdays and Fridays. But that wouldn't make any sense, since murder is wrong every day of the week. A society is right to ban murder always and everywhere.

[...]

When at least forty-three million citizens download content from the Internet, and when they use tools to combine that content in ways unauthorized by copyright holders, the first question we should be asking is not how best to involve the FBI. The first question should be whether this particular prohibition is really necessary in order to achieve the proper ends that copyright law serves. Is there another way to assure that artists get paid without transforming forty-three million Americans into felons? Does it make sense if there are other ways to assure that artists get paid without transforming America into a nation of felons?

DRM is designed to make information behave like a tangible thing. Mariah Carey's new hit single must be exactly like a refrigerator. The problem is that it's not. And DRM allows content providers to force information to behave like a refrigerator. It gives corporations a government-sanctioned excuse to be lazy, to stop innovating, to force new markets to behave like old ones.

Lessig's concern in Foreign Policy is that the public domain will disappear as the distinction between "public" and "private" becomes blurred to the point where "private" swallows "public" and consumers are forced to pay for everything. Something will have value only if it has a price. I maintain that it doesn't have to be this way. Like a dystopic novel, this is a warning: you can stop this future from happening! When Foo Fighters publishes a CD full of DRM, don't buy it. When Velvet Revolver publishes a CD with DRM, don't buy it. Declare that the market is made of producers and consumers, and if the music industry wants to retain you as a consumer, it had better afford you some respect by letting you do what you want with the stuff you own. And if it won't, then you'll go somewhere where you're being respected and not having business practices shoved down your throat under penalty of law.

Posted by Mark at 6:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Frequently, software vendors will disguise decreased functionality as an "update." This was recently chronicled in the story of the Sony PSP 2.0 firmware update. Software developers discovered how to write games and applications for the PSP platform, allowing them to customize their PSPS. In the 2.0 update to the PSP's firmware, Sony disabled this functionality. Why? Ostensibly because Sony wants to control your PSP, even though you bought it and can do whatever you want with it.

This is also true of previous updates to Apple's iTunes software. Apple's "updates" to iTunes frequently disable third-party applications designed to circumvent some of iTunes' DRM protections, including an incredibly stupid protection that prevents a user from transferring music from the iPod to his computer. (A user can transfer music from his computer to his iPod, but not, by default, in the other direction.)

And now an "update" to Yahoo's Instant Messenger. We've seen AIM updates before that disabled functionality in third-party programs that accessed AOL's network, like GAIM or Dead Aim. But Yahoo's update goes a step further in altering your computer's settings:

By accepting Yahoo's "typical" installation of YIM with Voice, it will also download Yahoo's Search Toolbar with anti-spyware and anti-pop-up software, desktop and system tray shortcuts, as well as Yahoo Extras, which will insert Yahoo links into the Internet Explorer browser. The IM client also contains "live words," which will automatically show an icon when the user highlights words online and then hyperlink to Yahoo search results, definitions or translation tools. Finally, the installation will alter the users' home page and auto-search functions to point to Yahoo by default.

To avoid these changes, users must actively choose the "custom" installation and uncheck five boxes.

Is this in the interest of security? Nope. It's in the interest of making money. Every time a user gets online, his home page goes to Yahoo. This is another hit on Yahoo's page, and another justification for increasing the price it charges for advertisements. More hits equals more people viewing the page equals more money for ads. It's the same reason NBC can charge a million dollars for a 30-second Super Bowl commercial: everyone's going to be watching it. Except in this case, you've been coerced into visiting Yahoo's home page. Your computer, which does whatever it's told to do, obediently goes to Yahoo's home page even if you don't want it to.

Yahoo isn't stupid. They know that most of their users are novices (because the ones that aren't novices are using GAIM, NAIM, or something that's not YIM) and thus (1) won't bother to see which settings are selected by default and (2) won't know how to change those settings once they've been implemented. Also, like the naive person who goes to the used car dealership, the person installing YIM assumes that Yahoo isn't going to harm him, when in fact, Yahoo is going to harm him.

UPDATE: I just realized that AIM is guilty of the same thing, but no one seems to notice it. When you install AIM, AIM installs the Viewpoint Media Player, which it uses to play those annoying little video-based ads that apepar at the top of your buddy list. It also adds AOL icons everywhere and alters your Internet Explorer security settings by adding the website http://free.aol.com/ to IE's list of "trusted" sites. This is extraordinarily dangerous, as "trusted" sites are sites that can do things like executing code and downloading stuff without having to ask you if it's okay, because, hey, it's a "trusted" site. Lots of spyware programs like to add websites sponsored by them (usually warez or porno sites) to the "trusted" list, increasing your odds of getting more spyware. I've personally seen dozens of sites listed in IE as "trusted," even though they were porn and warez sites that had no business being "trusted."

Posted by Mark at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)