3 years, 7 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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Not much new today, as I prepare for a trip to Charm City tomorrow. I’m going to be trying out a new way of posting over the next few days, ecto. Ecto has long been a popular Mac blog tool, but not too long ago the Windows tool Typewriter became ecto for Windows. I’m not that big a fan of the Typepad interface, so I had been using Zempt for a while. Zempt has a nice clean interface and is easy to use, but has a couple of major flaws. It can’t handle “High ASCII” characters. In practical terms, this means a post with cut-and-pasted text will sometimes return an error if it uses typographic-style “curly quotes” or similar characters. It also doesn’t contain a usable file/image upload utility, so any post that included images, like yesterday’s post about the tenth anniversary of Oklahoma City, had to be done via the Typepad interface.
Ecto will supposedly solve these issues, so we’ll see.
[composed and posted with ecto]
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3 years, 7 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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As a non-Catholic, I was more interested in the ritual than the substance. The crowds massing in St. Peter’s Square, the announcement via smoke color of burning ballots, MSNBC’s SmokeCam, the traditional invocation in Latin. Like a Dan Brown novel come to life. That the process and ceremony have changed so little 256 Popes later s fascinating.
The immediate reaction is that the selection of a 78 year old Vatican insider (they still have someone called the Grand Inquisitor?) is a vote for continuity, a way to buy time to address the vexing issues facing the Church. That seems to be the general consensus, although some have focused on Benedict’s former life in the Hitler Youth and on his opposition to more liberal theology. Here’s homosexual Catholic Andrew Sullivan:
IN HIS WORDS: "How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking… The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves – thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Eph 4, 14). Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and ’swept along by every wind of teaching’, looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires." - Pope Benedict XVI, yesterday. And what is the creed of the Church? That is for the Grand Inquisitor to decide. Everything else - especially faithful attempts to question and understand the faith itself - is "human trickery." It would be hard to over-state the radicalism of this decision. It’s not simply a continuation of John Paul II. It’s a full-scale attack on the reformist wing of the church. The swiftness of the decision and the polarizing nature of this selection foretell a coming civil war within Catholicism. The space for dissidence, previously tiny, is now extinct. And the attack on individual political freedom is just beginning.
Professor Bainbridge responds that Sullivan is an "ass":
The new Pope recognizes that there is legitimate room for disagreement on all but the most basic Church teachings, such as the gospel of life, and that even there Catholics may in appropriate instances even vote for politicians who do not share the Church’s view on that central tenet.
So which is it? I suspect that the Church does in fact view Benedict as a caretaker Pope. But caretaker Popes aren’t always.
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3 years, 7 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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EA Sports is posting five days worth of screenshots of the next generation Madden football game for the new XBox. Now I know I will be assimilated. Here is the real Michael Strahan:
Here is the EA Michael Strahan:
Color me impressed.
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3 years, 7 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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Here’s something I can get behind. From the Individual-i website:
Today, the rights of individuals are being eroded: by government, by corporations, by society itself. This icon — the Individual-i — represents the rights of the individual.
It represents the right to privacy and anonymity in the information age. It represents the rights to an open government, due process, and equal protection under the law. It represents the right to live surveillance free, and not to be marked as "suspicious" for wanting these other rights.
While I’d dispute that it is even possible for corporations to reduce the rights of individuals, the overall goals of the "movement" seem laudable:
Individual-i stands for:
* Freedom from surveillance
* Personal privacy
* Anonymity
* Equal protection
* Due process
* Freedom to read, write, think, speak, associate, and travel
* The right to make your own choices about sex, reproduction, marriage, and death
* The right to dissent
If you like it, you can buy stuff. Anybody drawing inspiration from both Benjamin Franklin and Frank Zappa can’t be all bad.
[via Boing Boing]
[Listening to: The Hardest Button To Button - The White Stripes - Elephant (3:32)]
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3 years, 7 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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April 19, 1995. Ten years ago. A lifetime ago. It’s been ten years since McVeigh blew up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 of his own countrymen. Ten years since we watched news coverage of corpses of children being removed from the wreckage of concrete and steel and fertilizer. This is always a bittersweet time of year for me, as we were married a year and a day after the bombing. It’s one of those moments seared into memory (I will always remember that I heard of the bombing on NPR as I was driving from our apartment in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania to Dickinson Law School in Carlisle looking for post-law school job leads).
This is what we saw then:
The Oklahoma City bombing, even more than the attempted terrorist attack on the World Trade Center several years before, brought home the reality of terrorism to Americans. 168 murder victims seemed almost incomprehensible. That it was an American who did it made it even harder to deal with. That it was only a small taste of what was to come on a September morning would truly have been beyond our ability to process.
I didn’t have kids then, as our first was still four years away, but even then I understood that Oklahoma City was nightmare-inducing for those who did. The day care center was supposed to be a safe haven, a place of comfort during the time the kids had to be separated from the parents. Then on an April morning, it became a place of pain and suffering and death. Four and a half years later, when it was time for our little one to go to a day care center of his own, half a continent away in a place that seemed more secure, I still thought about Oklahoma City, but took comfort that I was in a different place, in a different time. Terrorists could never attack Washington, DC, right?
We moved on from 1995, as we always do, weaker in some ways and stronger in others for having suffered. The Murrah building was a place to work and to build and to create. Now it’s a place for quiet contemplation:
Five years ago we dedicated a memorial bearing these words:
We come here to remember
Those who were killed, those who survived and those changed forever.
May all who leave here know the impact of violence,
May this memorial offer comfort, strength, peace, hope and serenity.
Little did we know how soon we would need that strength and that hope. To those who lost loved ones ten years ago, my hope is that they have found peace.
[See more at A Small Victory]
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3 years, 7 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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3 years, 7 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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Joseph Thorndike, writing a guest op-ed at the NY Times, thinks that Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Hurts So Good”>H&R Block and TurboTax make filing taxes too easy.
By 2002, more than half of all returns came from paid preparers. More recently, software has eased the burden for those determined to go it alone; such programs can reduce thorny tax calculations to a series of simple questions. With each year, Americans have become increasingly insulated from the trauma of figuring out what they have to pay.
So why is this bad? When it comes to taxes, pain can be a good thing. It keeps people vigilant, encouraging them to keep a wary eye on government. That, in turn, exposes problems and encourages reform. Making taxes easy removes an impetus for Americans to force the government to do something about the tax code.
Thorndike, described as “a contributing editor at Tax Analysts, a nonprofit provider of tax information,” focuses on the dreaded Alternative Minimum Tax, concluding that if everyone had to perform the AMT calculations manually, maybe the creep of the AMT into the middle class could be stopped.
He may have a point, but as a user of TurboTax for ten years, I can say that I know full well that tax preparation is too hard. Would I spend fifty bucks a year on software if they were easy? It’s all a moot point anyway. Surely Congress knows that the tax code is incredibly complex. Given available alternatives, one has to conclude that banning TurboTax wouldn’t make much difference. I’d love to abandon the income tax for a simple tax with virtually no deductions, but we’ve become too dependent on using the tax code as a means of social engineering for that to ever happen.
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3 years, 7 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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So just as we’re recovering from Saturday’s Thunder Over Louisville (traditional kickoff of Derby Season), we Louisvillians get to host “Justice Sunday“, which the NY Times describes thusly:
The Family Research Council, a Christian conservative advocacy group, has organized an April 24 telecast, “Justice Sunday,” which includes prominent conservative Christians speaking by simulcast to churches, Web sites and Christian broadcast networks. Under the heading “The filibuster against people of faith,” a flier for the telecast reads, “The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith.”
As has been widely noted, Senate Majority Leader Frist will be contributing a taped oration to the program (although it appears that he won’t be making a live appearance at Highview Baptist Church). I’m bothered by the whole spectacle, although perhaps not for the usual reasons.
I hate euphemisms, and this statement is full of them. People of Faith? Why not just come out and say what you mean, which is conservative, largely evangelical Christians? There are lots of “people of faith” who are not rushing to sign up with the FRC and Dr. Dobson. How many Hindus or Muslims or Jews or Unitarians are you likely to see on Justice Sunday? People of Faith just makes it seem the program organizers are trying to hide something, even if they’re not.
Placing this in starkly religious terms (the filibuster is being used against people of faith) also diminishes a very worthwhile argument about the role of the Senate in judicial confirmations and the makeup of the federal judiciary. I for one think that it is wrong to withhold a vote on judicial nominees via filibuster, no matter the reason. If it’s wrong for Harry Reid to filibuster ten Bush nominees into oblivion, it’s equally wrong for a Republican minority to do it to a Democrat president, a point that is lost in all the bluster over religion. The nominees are opposed, rightly or wrongly, for a perception that they are unsuited for the bench due to strongly held socially conservative beliefs. Their religion, while a strong contributing factor in the views they hold (as are the moral beliefs of every person a strong contributor to the position they take on the issues of the day), is not the reason they are filibustered.
The Democrats, either through partisan opportunism or a knee-jerk reaction to conservative evangelicals, are behaving just as badly.
“Our debate over the rules of the Senate and the use of the filibuster has nothing to do with whether one is religious or not,” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said at a news conference with Senator Harry Reid, the minority leader from Nevada. “I cannot imagine that God - with everything he has or she has to worry about - is going to take the time to debate the filibuster in heaven.”
Democrats seized on Dr. Frist’s participation in an effort to portray Republicans as intolerant extremists. “In America, we are in a democracy, not a theocracy,” Mr. Reid said, urging Dr. Frist to back out of the event. “God does not take part in partisan politics.”
Ann Althouse is quite correct when she says that these statements have a strong undertone of mockery of religion. God has a long history of participation in politics, in the sense of the participation in politics of deeply religious individuals.
So on the one hand we have conservative Republicans declaring that the Senate is using the filibuster to marginalize “people of faith” and on the other we have Democrats mocking the religious in the course of declaring that their actions have nothing to do with religion. Lost in all the offensive behavior are the important questions of who should serve in the courts, how they should be considered, and what devices, if any, should exist to allow the minority to prevent a vote.
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3 years, 7 months ago,,
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Some people shouldn’t be allowed to breed. That’s the only conclusion that I can draw from two stories that made news over the weekend. On Sunday, Florida police charged convicted rapist and registered sex offender David Onstott with first-degree murder for the death on thirteen year old Sarah Lunde after he confessed to choking her to death and dumping her body in a fish pond.
Sarah was last seen April 9, shortly after returning home from a church trip and around the time Onstott, who once dated her mother, unexpectedly visited the family’s home.
Sarah’s 17-year-old brother came home to find the front door wide open and his sister gone, but the family initially assumed Sarah had gone to a friend’s house. She was not reported missing until Monday.
Not to in any way defend the scum who killed Sarah, but what kind of mother dates a convicted rapist and registered sex offender? And when her 17-year old brother returns home (at 4:00 a.m.) to find her missing, doesn’t report anything to the police until Monday morning? What, she just added it to her to-do list for getting back to work on Monday? Get gas, pick up dry cleaning, report missing teenager to police?
Closer to home, we had the final act in a saga that began last June, when Charles Jackson, released on prison furlough to be with his wife at the premature birth of their baby, abandoned little Miracle Dawn at a Louisville hospital (and their other child, 2-year-old Devin) and took off with wife Misty Jackson. This winning couple were arrested in Mississippi, after members of a church they were attending grew suspicious of their identities and found them listed on the America’s Most Wanted Web site. Of course, Misty Jackson is pregnant again:
An Indiana woman and her fugitive husband, who abandoned their premature daughter as she struggled for life in a Louisville hospital last June, have been arrested in Mississippi after nearly a year on the run.
Charles Jackson II, 30, and his wife, Misty Jackson, 21, were being held yesterday in the Washington County Jail in Salem. He is charged with escape and she with conspiracy to commit escape.
Margie Evans of Salem, Misty Jackson’s mother, said that she’s glad her daughter, who is pregnant again, is in custody.
“I had no way of knowing if she was alive or dead” until the arrests this week, Evans said. She described her daughter and son-in-law as “immature adults,” adding, “She’s my daughter, but she knows I don’t approve of what she’s done.” Evans, who has guardianship of the couple’s 2-year-old son, Devin, frequently visited University Hospital after the baby — named Miracle Dawn and born four months prematurely — was left behind.
Tells you something when all the grandparents of these poor kids are glad that their own children are in jail. I’m guessing Charles won’t get furloughed for the delivery this time.
The other tragedy of these kinds of cases is that there are many, many people who would love to have kids and who would do more quality parenting on the ride home from the hospital than Charles and Misty Jackson could do in their whole lives, but who are unable to conceive. That the Jacksons and Lundes of the world are so fertile when so many good people are not seems like a cruel joke.
Thanks to Michele for the Lunde link. You should what she has to say, too.
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3 years, 7 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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My Unitarian Jihad Name is:
Brother Machine Gun of Enlightenment.
Get yours.
For the origin of all this, see John Carroll’s column in the April 13 San Francisco Chronicle for the first communique from the Unitarian Jihad:
Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States. We are Unitarian Jihad. There is only God, unless there is more than one God. The vote of our God subcommittee is 10-8 in favor of one God, with two abstentions. Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation noted the possibility of there being no God at all, and his objection was noted with love by the secretary.
Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States! Too long has your attention been waylaid by the bright baubles of extremist thought. Too long have fundamentalist yahoos of all religions (except Buddhism — 14-5 vote, no abstentions, fundamentalism subcommittee) made your head hurt. Too long have you been buffeted by angry people who think that God talks to them. You have a right to your moderation! You have the power to be calm! We will use the IED of truth to explode the SUV of dogmatic expression!
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