Fiat Lux

I know there are far worse things going on in the world, but this is what's getting my disgust-o-meter going today:

Colombian smugglers turned puppies into drug mules by surgically implanting them with packets of liquid heroin, authorities said.

[snip]

Ten puppies, including Labrador retrievers, were rescued during a 2005 raid on a farm in Colombia, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said Wednesday, while announcing more than 30 arrests.

A veterinarian had stitched a total of 3 kilograms of heroin into the bellies of six pups. Three died from infections after the drugs were removed.

I don't care what you think about whether or not drugs ought be illegal; people who do stuff like this are evil.

I caught this shot of the boys as I was heading out the door to class this afternoon. There's nothing particularly unique or special about this moment; just two sweet kitties enjoying each other's company.

I've seen them, courtesy of Wikipedia and Flickr. They're not flattering, but they're not in Der Stürmer territory either. The Danish government is completely correct when it insists it has nothing to apologize for.

I'd say more but I have to run off to work. Neil Shakespeare found some good stuff on the subject in a Flickr comment thread.

This is really getting out of hand. Cooler heads need to start prevailing, and fast.

Several thousand Syrian demonstrators set the Danish and the Norwegian embassies on fire on Saturday to protest at the publishing of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad by European newspapers.

The title of this thread comes from a Flash animated cartoon, by the way. Hopefully nobody will be offended by it.

And while we're on the subject of "stupid things people do because of religion", Shakes had a good one yesterday about a small-town teacher who tried to introduce opera to her students by showing a video about the opera "Faust," and ran afoul of the local parents. It's hard to excerpt, but here's a bit of it. Go read the rest:

How pathetic is this? A children’s introduction to opera video has provoked parents to go on some sort of obnoxious rampage. And for what reason? Because they didn’t think the video was appropriate for children. Apparently, however, it is appropriate for children to be exposed to their parents calling their teacher a Satan worshipper.

Seriously, I know opera is seen by most as old-fashioned and not really useful in today's world, but the Faust legend is a literature classic, opera or no. Not wanting kids to know about Faust because the Devil is involved is flat-out ignorant.

The Heretik says today:

THE COURAGE TO BEGIN is one thing, the courage to continue perhaps greater.

Very true. Even the simplest acts, like starting to write, can be courageous. And we need more courage in this world.

Sometime I think fear is just as dangerous an emotion as hate.

The memory of the righteous is a blessing.

RIP Betty Friedan.

In the racial, political and sexual conflicts of the 1960s and '70s, Friedan's was one of the most commanding voices and recognizable presences in the women's movement.

As a founder and first president of the National Organization for Women in 1966, she staked out positions that seemed extreme at the time on such issues as abortion, sex-neutral help-wanted ads, equal pay, promotion opportunities and maternity leave.

My copy of The Feminine Mystique is about 20 years old now. Its pages are getting discolored and the spine is bent and cracked. And what bothers me most is, when you pick it up and read it some 40+ years after it was written, how little some things have changed since then.

We've made tremendous strides in women's rights since 1963, but there is still a long, long way to go. I'm very grateful to Friedan for the work she did in laying out the path.

UPDATE 2/5: Curious as to what I mean when I talk about how little has changed? Go read chapter 9 of The Feminine Mystique, 'The Sexual Sell'.

Too much to say, not enough time to say it. Not feeling like doing hit and run blogging either. Bleh.

Comcast took us offline for about 24 hours, for the second time in less than a month. This is getting annoying.

This crossed my path today:

A civil rights group is suing classifieds website Craigslist for publishing what it calls discriminatory housing ads. Lawyers say some of the offending listings called for "no minorities," or "no children."

Other listings were more specific, "African Americans and Arabs...won't work out," or, "requirements: Clean Godly Christian male."

Newspapers clearly cannot publish ads that discriminate. But Craiglist says while it asks people to read and understand the law, it cannot be responsible for ads that break that law.

Ultimately the question seems to be whether Craigslist is a publisher or a service provider. One's protected, the other isn't. I'd be surprised if CL doesn't end up having to make some changes in how housing ads get posted to the site, but time will tell.

Side note -- We've never found the Craiglist housing ads particularly helpful. All three of the places we've ended up renting in the Bay Area have come from other sources -- the first was via a paid service, the second from the SF Chronicle ads, the third from the San Mateo Chamber of Commerce.

My initial response on seeing this story was that it had to be some sort of bad joke. Apparently not.

Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been "authorized" by Cheney and other White House "superiors" in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.

Libby specifically claimed that in one instance he had been authorized to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein's purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to correspondence recently filed in federal court by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

The article goes on to note that this is essentially the Oliver North defense, and that it more or less worked for North.

In the North case, the Iran-Contra independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, was forced to dismiss many of the central charges against North, including the most serious ones-that North defrauded taxpayers by diverting proceeds from arms sales to Iran to finance the Nicaraguan Contras-because intelligence agencies and the Reagan administration refused to declassify documents necessary for a trial on those charges.

Given this administration's penchane for secrecy, I would not at all be surprised if it worked again.

UPDATE: Shakes is POed too, but also feeling apathetic:

Every day, there are new stories emerging about which I should feel outraged, and yet five years of no accountability is making me weary. How many hundreds incidents of unethical or flatly illegal behavior am I meant to read without having the slightest bloody ability to do a damn thing about it?

Indeed. I feel the same way.

As William Gibson pointed out, paranoia is often narcissism. Dave Neiwert makes an excellent point today about the fine line between healthy concern and paranoia:

I recall that the right also used to claim that Clinton was not just building concentration camps, but he was also secretly wiretapping American citizens. That he was assassinating political enemies in secret. That he was remaking the presidency into a virtual dictatorship with limitless powers. All without a smidgen of anything approaching factual evidence.

And now we have a president who really is not just preparing to building mass detention centers, but who has been conducting illegal domestic surveillance, who has claimed the power to order assassinations on American soil, who does appear to be claiming limitless powers as a "wartime" executive. Is it any wonder, really, that people's paranoia meters are running at full blast?

I remember reading some of the Y2K websites back in 1999, and was vaguely amused to find how often they would wander into "New World Order" tinfoil hat rhetoric. Just because we're seeing similar rhetoric on the other side of the spectrum doesn't make it more true. As always, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

All of which is not to sat that there's no potential for abuse here. There definitely is, and we need to be aware of it. But jumping to the exact same conclusions that proved to be groundless in 2000 is probably not the way to go.

Ah, the mixed emotions of being a cat owner. This morning I woke up to find that somebody, probably Tommy, had pried open my underwear drawer, dug into the contents, and dumped pretty much everything onto the floor. I'd post a photo but Scott's still asleep and I don't want to wake him.

Instead, here's a photo of one of Gimi's favorite places to be:

It's cute and all, but kind of hard to get stuff done when he's up there.

On a side note, I think I'm going to be getting a new digicam for my birthday this year. Got any suggestions for a good 5 megapixel model in the $300 price range? My current camera is a Sony DSC-P30 and it's held up very well over time; I wouldn't be thinking about replacing it at all except that it's only 1.3 megapixels and I'd really like to be able to take print-quality photos with the digital.

At any rate, I'm looking hard at some newer Sony models but Scott thinks I should look at some other as well.

Not something I'd normally write about. However, the Indianapolis Star did a multi-article special report on the topic this week, and one of the main contributors is someone I've been friends with since we were 12.

So check it out.

Remember a week or so ago, when I posted a report about a small town where trying to educate kids about opera by way of "Faust" was considered too radical?

Now another town has decided that "Grease" and "The Crucible" are inappropriate (the NY Times notes that they are the second-most frequently performed musical and drama in US schools). And all it took was three letters to the school's principal to start the censorship ball rolling.

Even better is the chilling effect this will have for upcoming productions and even on the drama teacher's career:

The teacher and her students are now ruling out future productions they once considered for their entertainment value alone, like "Little Shop of Horrors," a musical that features a cannibalistic plant, which they had discussed doing next fall.

Torii Davis, a junior, said that in her psychology class earlier that day, most students predicted that "Little Shop of Horrors" would never pass the test.

"Audrey works in a flower shop," Ms. Davis said. "She has a boyfriend who beats her. That could be controversial."

Ms. DeVore went down a list of the most commonly performed musicals and dramas on high school stages, and ticked off the potentially offensive aspects. " 'Bye Bye Birdie' has smoking and drinking. 'Oklahoma,' there's a scene where she's almost raped. 'Diary of Anne Frank,' would you take a 6-year-old?" the drama teacher asked.

"How am I supposed to know what's appropriate when I don't have any written guidelines, and it seems that what was appropriate yesterday isn't appropriate today?" Ms. DeVore asked. The teacher said she had been warned that because of the controversy, the school board might not renew her contract for next year.

I wonder what those head-in-the-sand culture bigots would think of "South Pacific" ... the guy who sleeps with a Polynesian girl gets killed off, after all ... maybe they would consider that appropriate punishment for immoral behavior. The underlying message, that bigotry will lead to unhappiness, might just sail right over their heads though.

ADDENDUM: Something I remembered after I hit the "submit" button -- back in the day, quite a few of the music/drama types in my high school class were enamoured of the Stephen Schwartz musical, "Godspell" (which is a muscal adaptation of the Gospel of Matthew). We begged our theater teacher to schedule a production of it. He refused, saying it would be too controversial. And given that the Jewish population of our school was probably better than 50% I suppose he was right. He did not generally shy away from controversial subject matter -- one of the productions we did do during my years at school was the Schmidt / Jones piece "Celebration", which includes a number in which two characters are making love while a third person watches.

Is there a point to my anecdote? Not really, I just thought it was interesting to show how what is and is not 'appropriate' for high school students can vary so widely.

So now the US has two Vice-Presidents who shot someone while in office. At least Cheney didn't kill his guy.

A friend of mine with some actual experience hunting had this to say about the whole thing:

As a hunter, this perhaps one of the WORST POSSIBLE THINGS you can ever ever EVER do.

Quail hunting is dangerous. From what I read the lawyer was hidden from Cheney's sight and then another covey flushed into the Veep's direction.

RULE 1 of hunting: NEVER EVER EVER have 2 groups of hunters who aren't parallel with each other in some fashion. Draw a line and don't cross it. Better yet, stay spread out and never deviate.

The Veep is a f*cking asshole...but his hunting companion is none too bright either. Cheney's actions would have him banned from most hunting clubs in my area for life.

I have no idea whether or not this is legal. Requiring employees to have what amounts to multiple surgeries in order to perform their jobs? One to put the thing in, one to take it out. Plus possibly others if there's ever a problem with the implant.

Details:

Two employees have been injected with RFID chips this week as part of a new requirement to access their company's datacenter.

Cincinnati based surveillance company CityWatcher.com created the policy with the hopes of increasing security in the datacenter where video surveillance tapes are stored. In the past, employees accessed the room with an RFID tag which hung from their keychains, however under the new regulations an implantable, glass encapsulated RFID tag from VeriChip must be injected into the bicep to gain access, a release from spychips.com said on Thursday.

Although the company does not require the microchips be implanted to maintain employment, anyone without one will not be able to access the datacenter, according to a Register article.

Ironically, the extra security sought may be offset by a recent discovery of Jonathan Westhues, where the security researcher showed the VeriChip can be skimmed and cloned, duplicating an implant’s authentication. When contacted, those at CityWatcher were unaware of the chip's security issue, according to the spychips.com release.

If members of the US law enforcement and security communities can do their jobs without surgical implants, this company ought to be able to do so as well.

Snark on Cheney aside, both Josh Marshall and ReddHedd at firedoglake have more from people with actual hunting experience on why something really stinks about the Vice President's shooting accident.

I'm feeling pretty grumpy this morning. Home 'net access is down AGAIN -- this is the third time since 2006 began and I'm really starting to wonder why we didn't just get DSL. We brought our modem over to the Comcast office and got a new one, which was supposed to solve the problem, but it didn't. Comcast said that they have to schedule another service call, and oh by the way, we'll have to pay for the service call. Um, I think not. We're using 100% company-supplied equipment and Comcast did the installation and set-up themselves less than 6 months ago. Any problems we're having are not caused by us, and we should not have to pay for the service call.

Plus, Scott didn't get me anything for Valentine's Day, which is also making me feel grumpy. I'm not a high-maintenance kind of girl. I don't expect expensive gifts or even flowers (although they're always nice). I would have been happy with just a card. But not getting anything kind of rankles.

And yes I know, V-Day is a totally artificial holiday, I have a wonderful husband who loves me very much and shows it on a regular basis, yadda yadda. I know all of that. That does not change how I feel. If I can find the time to pick out a card for him, he should be able to do it too.

I'm on campus now and need to get some stuff done before classes start. I have the iPod cranked and hopefully that will help improve my mood.

Still no Internet access chez Lux and not sure when it's going to be back up.

This sux.

So a Comcast tech showed up before 8:00AM and fixed our Internet connection. As suspected, it was NOT anything we did. Some hardware downstairs needed to be changed, and the splitter here was also a problem. Those have both been changed out for 'better' equipment. We'll see if that's the end of it; at this point I don't really trust anything that a Comcast tech tells me.

So now we get to wait and see if it goes out again or not. This time we're hedging our bets and have placed an order for DSL from our old DSL provider. We won't be able to get the 6MB download speeds that Comcast promises, but I'll settle for slower downloads if the damn thing just stays up and connected 24/7.

The home access outage has put me wildly behind on a number of things but I will try to get back up to speed in the next 24 hours.

Kevin Drum's translation of the new BushCo health plan proposal:

Current system (for those with insurance): When you get sick you go to the doctor. When your kids get sick, they go to the doctor. You don't have to quibble over costs or spend time second guessing your doctor over whether a test he recommends is really necessary. As Bush himself says, it seems like a pretty good deal.

Now here's what Bush is trying to sell: When you get sick, you should spend a lot of time shopping around for doctors to find one you can afford. You should put off tests that he recommends if they're expensive. You should haggle over the cost of drugs as if you were buying a used car. And when you get home you should worry about whether you made the right decision or not.

Indeed. Of course, if you don't have health insurance the whole issue is moot, and neither the current system nor the BushCo proposals are good ways of solving that particular problem. But given the existing setup, less worry = better.

In the "OMG I can't believe sane people actually do this' zone:

A note to China's half-billion men: no matter how tightly you shut your eyes and wish and wish and want to believe, eating schlong will not help you get boners.

What an amazing world we live in.

Belated Hat Tip: Rangelife.

There's a piece on the AP wires today with a long list of all the discrepencies around last weekend's Cheney shooting. I do think this story is going to fall off the news cycle soon, but it's a nice summary for those who're interested.

I really don't understand how it is supposed to help small businesses to incent them to buy huge gas-guzzlers like Hummers but not more fuel-efficient vehicles for their businesses. Seriously, WTF?

Federal tax rules that took effect last month allow a credit of up to $3,150 for anyone buying a hybrid car. The credit is the same regardless of tax bracket.

However, owners of small businesses who buy a Hummer, Ford Excursion or other SUV weighing more than 3 tons get a deduction of up to $25,000 — depending on tax bracket — if they use the vehicle exclusively for work.

The benefits don't stop there. Once they subtract the $25,000 from the cost of their 3-ton SUV, small business owners can deduct the depreciation on the remaining amount. Someone who bought a $60,000 SUV, for example, can claim the remaining $35,000 over six years.

No such luck for small business owners who buy cars weighing less than 3 tons. No matter how much the vehicles cost, they can claim just $15,535 in depreciation over six years and $1,675 each additional year.

Seriously, I'd (almost) rather be doing my Finance homework than shopping for a new digital camera.

It shouldn't be that hard. I have a very nice SLR camera I use for what little high-end photography I do, so the digicam is just for day to day snapshots. I don't have a long list of "must have" features. I have a reasonable budget. There's a ton of cameras out there to choose from.

But that's the problem. Even narrowing down the options to just two or three manufacturers, I still have dozens of cameras to choose from. And narrowing it down beyond that gets really tough. Every camera has a huge list of features, all with plusses and minuses. Every camera has both positive and negative reviews. But how to decide? Should I really care that a cover 'seems flimsy' or that a few people complain about blurry photos? How do I know if these people are being too nit-picky or pointing out real issues?

And the online guides are not all that helpful. Take Digital Photography Review, which several people pointed me to for guidance. There's a very long list of features you can use to search their listings, but if you don't narrow your choices down enough, the site only gives you the first 10 options back as a result. You don't know if that's the first 10 of 12 or 120, so you don't know if those 10 cameras are a representative sample or not. And a lot of those choices, I either don't know or don't care about the option in question. What the heck is 'white balance override', and why should I care about uncompressed format types? Beats me. In short, if I cared more about high-end digital photography, it would probably be very useful, but for a hobbyist like me it was too much.

CNET's search was more useful for my needs, but still tended to produce too many results for me to effectively deal with. A list of 125 possibilities is just too much for me to deal with. I don't want to have to spend hours on this. I just want a list of 12 or so good options so I can pick the one that I like best.

Scott's trying to be helpful and searched out two options for me to look at, one Sony, one Canon. It's a help, but I'm still feeling paralyzed by all the choices I have. As much as I want a better digital camera, it's actively stressing me out trying to pick one. I suppose I could go to the nearest store that sells digital cameras and simply buy one rather than over-analyzing the situaiton, and I might end up doing just that if I can't get my head around all the information.

It shouldn't be this hard.

Or am I making it too hard?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

-- Bertrand Russell

So famous Holocaust denier David Irving has been sentenced to three years in jail in Austria for violating this law:

whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media.

Given the recent debate over free speech issues regarding the Danish cartoons, a lot of people are probably going to say that Irving should not be jailed for what he did. I'm not so sure.

I don't see this so much as a free speech issue as an issue about lying. I don't think it is unreasonable to say that in countries such as Austria, if you're going to talk about the historical record of WW2, you have an obligation to do so accurately. Irving is entitled to whatever opinions he wants, but he's not entitled to his own set of facts, and I think it's acceptable to call him on that difference.

We send people to jail for perjury, after all. Why is this so different?

Three states have ruled that a Federal law banning late-term abortions is unconstitutional, but SCOTUS has decided they need to look at the case as well. Uh oh. That doesn't bode well.

And Shakes delivers a nice smackdown in response:

The big question, of course, is what is the point of ramming through this legislation [that restricts abortion] without a provision that allows it in cases where the mother’s life it as risk? And the obvious answer is that anti-choicers don’t trust women and their doctors to make that decision honestly—a position which pulls back the curtain on their “pro-life” Emerald City and reveals the contempt for life they actually have, in spite of their claims to the contrary. Only a person who has no respect whatsoever for human life could assume that women would invoke this rationale to terminate a pregnancy for no good reason, that expectant mothers who carry a pregnancy nearly to term would suddenly and randomly change their minds, with as much forethought as one might give to rearranging the living room furniture.

I might suggest that perhaps it's a specific contempt for women's rights and autonomy rather than a lack of respect for life in general, but she could be right. Either way, who cares? The net result is no good at all for women, regardless of the motivation.

I'm not generally a Mark Morford fan, but he did a good column in the Chronicle today about obese America vis a vis his recent vacation to Cabo. Here's a snippet:

Perhaps this, then, is the new great divide. Forget red state versus blue state. Forget liberal versus conservative, straight versus gay, rich versus poor, mullet versus sideburn, red wine versus white. The new division in America is greater than anything we have seen before: Healthy versus ill. Slim versus fat. Light versus heavy. Clean-running organs and unstrained hearts and the ability to engage with the world around you with something resembling lightness and ease and swift reflexes, versus a sort of indolent awkwardness and dis-ease and pain, an unconscious layering-on of fatty protection against a world gone angry and confusing.

Mr. Shakes had a VERY amusing experience the other day. Just go read it. You'll be glad you did.

On average, probably not:

The average income of American families, after adjusting for inflation, declined by 2.3 percent in 2004 compared to 2001 while their net worth rose but at a slower pace.

We've dumped Comcast for Internet connectivity and gone back to DSL. It's not as fast, but 4 multi-day outages in less than 2 months is just way too much downtime.

Between work and school I'm finding myself more and more squeezed for blog time these days, and the semester is only going to heat up more over the next several weeks. I want to try to keep to a minimum of a post a day but it's getting really hard to do even that some days. I've also cut the blogroll down a bit to help reduce my read time.

Still, this is worth posting:

Scott and I were talking about Iraq in the context of Lebanon instead of Vietnam the other day. What bothers me is that it took less than 300 US casualties of Marines to get the US out of Lebanon, yet with this set of jokers in Washington, the kind of attack that killed 241 Marines in one day in Lebanon will be seen in the context of Iraq as a reason to throw even more members of the US armed forces into harm's way.

Civil war in Iraq, should it come, is not a good thing for anybody. Not for us, and definitely not for them. Whether it can even be stopped is the question at hand. And I really have no idea. I'd like to hope that a full-out civil war in Iraq is not inevitable, but the cynic in me says that cooler heads generally don't prevail until after a lot of blood has been shed.

There's a nasty storm blowing through the Bay Area today. At first the reports had it that the worst impact would be up by Napa, where flooding is always a problem with heavy rains. But no, instead we got nailed with a bunch of power outages, including one Chez Lux.

As I was driving back home from work I saw some flashes of lightning and hear reports of a few small outages, but didn't think much of it until I pulled off Highway 92 onto El Camino Real and BLAM! out went the power. I was passing by a Safeway at the time -- one moment it was all lit up, the next moment nothing but a few emergency lights. A bit shocking, but also kind of neat to watch. You don't get a front-row seat to the show like that very often. It seemed to be a fairly localized outage, because everything was still lit up as I pulled up to my intersection, but as I was waiting to make the left turn onto my street, POOF! More blackness. Not quite so cool; we have plenty of candles & energy bars in the emergency kit (plus a propane grill), but I really wasn't in the mood for trying to make a hot meal under the circumstances.

Instead, I drove a few more blocks until I found a parking space, called Scott, and found an open restaurant for a bite of dinner. The lights were still out when I got home, so I changed into jeans, grabbed a flashlight and my laptop, and moseyed over to Starbucks for some coffee, electricity, and Internet access.

It's not quite the evening I thought I was going to have, but it could have been a lot worse.

I started writing this yesterday but the power outage (now thankfully resolved) sidetracked me.

Recent IM conversation with Scott:

Me: Microsoft announced six different versions for Vista. What a support nightmare that's going to be.
Scott: yep
Me: I'm going to stay the hell away from Vista for at least 12 months after it's releases. You, OTOH, will upgrade to it as soon as you possibly can
Scott: You got it. Probably on my new $4000 dream computer.
Me: *shudders*

I'm the kind of Windows user Microsoft probably hates: I just want my OS to run the applications I choose to install on it, and to stay the hell out of my way the rest of the time. I don't need a high-end desktop searching feature -- I know where my personal data is and how to find what I'm looking for. I don't want fancy 3-D versions of the alt-tab app switcher or funky integrated media capabilities. I have iTunes, an iPod, and a very nice TV and TiVo in my living room for that. I just might end up with the lowest-level version of Vista just so that I don't have to deal with all the add-on crap the other versions will include.

Buying the low-end version of an OS kind of goes against my grain, since I more or less consider myself to be a power user. But in this case, I suspect I'll be much happier without all the bells and whistles.

At any rate, I am quite serious about waiting at least a year post-release to upgrade (I waited a lot longer than that to go from Win2K -> XP). I have no intention of upgrading until the inevitable missed bugs, security issues, and driver problems all get resolved. Let some other schmuck do the sweating and swearing; I am not going to waste my time dealing with Microsoft's mess for them.

My new Sony digicam is on the UPS truck and will hopefully show up on my doorstep today. This may be the last shot I take with the Sony P30 I've had for some 5 years. It's been a nice camera, but 1.3 megapixels just doesn't cut it anymore.