I heard heard a snippet of a story on NPR -- an interview with a woman who "trusts George Bush because he is a Christian".

That has got to be among the stupidest things I've ever heard. This is a guy who has advocated the torture of terror suspects, and has almost certainly broken Federal law in order to illegally spy on American citizens.

Think about it. FISA permits surveillance without warrant for up to three days, and given the number of individuals who were under surveillance, it's clear that obtaining those warrants after the fact would not have caused the administration undue inconvenience. Therefore, the argument that FISA ties the NSA's hands with respect to domestic surveillance is a red herring. Therefore, the administration must have another reason for circumventing FISA's warrant requirement. Why would they want to circumvent FISA unless they planned to perform surveillance that they knew the FISA court wouldn't condone?

And if the administration's argument that the executive branch legal right to tap anyone's private communication in a time of war (which has been made permanent, don't forget) is accepted by the judiciary and the American people, then there is nothing to prevent that power being applied for political purposes. A warrantless domestic surveillance program has no transparency whatsoever, and is therefore a threat to our democracy.

What difference does it make if he says he's a Christian? Don't actions speak a lot louder than words?

This guy should not be trusted. He should be impeached.

I've spent a lot of time this weekend perusing Misty Irons's web site. If that site is any indication, she is a model for the values that Christians are always talking about but (as far as I can see) rarely applying. I was unsurprised to learn that by demonstrating these qualities in the real world, she got herself in quite a bit of trouble with her church.

My favorite quote:

The future of the Christian church in America lies with the preservation of civil liberties, not with the dogged pursuit of our Christian moral agenda to the annoyance of everyone else.

It's very encouraging to read that sentiment on a very conservative Christian's site.

Yes, this story is filed under "Faith", for what could be a more religious question than "Emacs or vi?"?

There seem to be, conservatively, dozens of web pages out there that attempt to provide vi users with the rudiments of Emacs competence. However, there seem to be few if any (and none in the top dozen Google results for "vi for Emacs users") that do the opposite. So, since I'm in the midst of coming to grips with vi, and making decent progress, behold my "vi for Emacs users" page. It's a work in progress; if you want to see some particular Emacs task elucidated, or you find an error, or want to make another comment, then please comment on this story, since the actual vi-forEmacs-users site is static.

I've helped a couple of different people build small web sites over the past few months, and I've decided that doing it by hand is just too painful. However, none of the available tools seem suited to quickly and easily getting a new site off the ground and looking decent. I mean, sure I could spend a week figuring out how to install a Zope content management server, but that's a pretty big gun to employ for a static site with a dozen or so pages.

So I spent MLK day developing LittleSite. LittleSite is a small (under 200 lines) PHP script that finds all the HTML files in its own directory, builds links to them all, and renders them all in a consistent, customizable, and reasonably attractive way. Adding new content is as simple as adding a new HTML file; that file will automagically be indexed and added to the link menu. All pages are rendered with a consistent layout, background, and decorations.

I think this is pretty cool, but I'm sure it's been done dozens of times before. Anyway, it was a nice way to spend a day learning PHP, and it's made my site-maintenance chores a lot easier.

So, House leadership is going to institute tougher ethical rules. They "continue to be the party of reform", according to some wag I just heard on NPR.

So we're supposed to believe that the same guys who had no problems breaking the existing ethical rules are going to start obeying them because they're "tougher". Sounds to me like they're just expanding their opportunity to break rules.

Ed Brayton is on my wavelength. Or vice versa.

I just finished reading Judge John Jones's decision in the "Kitzmiller vs Dover" case. I'm pleased to say that Judge Jones got it exactly right, and in the process laid waste to the entire scaffolding of misstatements and outright lies that forms the basis of the "Intelligent Design" movement.

Funny of the day:

First, from the text of the decision, page 137:

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

Good call, sir! From the Discovery Institute's reaction, posted to their website:

"Judge Jones got on his soapbox to offer his own views of science, religion and evolution," John West, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, said in a news release. "He makes it clear that he wants his place in history as the judge who issued a definitive decision about intelligent design. This is an activist judge who has delusions of grandeur."

I find it amusing that this article on discovery.org is attributed only to "staff". Apparently even the people who work at DI don't want to be associated with the drivel it produces. It's also apparent that whomever wrote the reaction piece did not take the trouble to read or understand the Dover decision before reacting to it. And there's the fundamental nature of IDiocy: they make no attempt to understand that which they criticize.

In fact, it seems that even the Dover school board members that voted for the ID disclaimer had no idea what "Intelligent Design" means. From the decision:

... One unfortunate theme in this case is the striking ignorance concerning the concept of ID amongst Board members. Conspicuously, Board members who voted for the curriculum change testified at trial that they had utterly no grasp of ID. To illustrate, consider that Geesey testified she did not understand the substance of the curriculum change, yet she voted for it. Moreover, as she indicated on multiple occasions, in voting for the curriculum change, Geesy deferred completely to Bonsell and Buckingham. Second, Buckingham, Chair of the Curriculum Committee at the time, admitted that he had no basis to know whether ID amounted to good science as of the time of his first deposition, which was two and a half months after the ID Policy was approved, yet he voted for the curriculum change. Third, Cleaver voted for the curriculum change despite the teachers’ objections, based upon assurances from Bonsell. Cleaver admittedly knew nothing about ID, including the words comprising the phrase, as she consistently referred to ID as "intelligence design" throughout her testimony. In addition, Cleaver was bereft of any understanding of Pandas except that Spahr had said it was not a good science book which should not be used in high school. In addition, Superintendent Nilsen’s entire understanding of ID was that "evolution has a design."

I expect that IDolators will continue to deploy the same tired old assertions and lies in their attempt to get their religious views taught as science. They'll carry on saying "Evolution is just as much a religious position as ID", knowing full well that in that case, gravitation and chemistry must also be "religious" positions, since there is as much scientific evidence supporting the theory of evolution as there is supporting the theoretical frameworks explaining gravitation and chemistry. They'll continue to insist that "gaps" in the fossil record present a "challenge" to the theory of evolution, when the fact is that in the hundred and forty years since Darwin first published the Origin, there has not been one single positive fact that called the basis of the theory into serious question. They will go on calling those who promote understanding of evolution "atheists", even though a great many biologists and theologians see no necessary conflict between evolution and belief in the supernatural. And, eventually, maybe in Kansas, maybe elsewhere, they'll try to get creationism taught in science classes again.

When that happens, the plaintiffs can reach for the Jones decision, and put a swift end to yet another "utter waste of monetary and personal resources".

I was much struck by two recent stories on NPR, which have inspired me to end serveral weeks' neglect of this blog.

The first story is Penn Jillette's essay for "This I Believe", the NPR column on personal faith. All the previous installments I'd heard had all dealt with the alleged truth of the existence of one or another god; and naturally many of these pieces were mutually contradictory. I had just about given up on ever hearing any non-theistic viewpoint expressed, but Mr Jillette has done a wonderful job. As a friend of mine recently quipped, "As long as everybody has their own imaginary friend telling them what to do, we're never going to get along."

The other story is this piece about the Supreme Court's consideration of New Hampshire's parental consent law. This law requires that parents be notified 24 hours in advance of a minor having an abortion, and makes no provision for exception except in the case of "imminent death" of the minor.

During the story, the NH legislator who introduced the bill defended it by stating that it's "common sense" that parents will want to know if their child is about to have an abortion. Now, it's also common sense that people ought not to smoke cigarettes or over-indulge in alcohol; do you plan to legislate against those things as well? And have you noticed that while such notification may be common sense from the parents' perspective, it may not be from the child's? Have you considered the plight of children in abusive homes, or those who have been abandoned, or those who have run away from home for valid reasons of self-protection?

And isn't any attempt to legislatively enforce "common sense" exactly the sort of big-government interference in personal affairs that conservatives are always bleating about?

I saw Serenity tonight. I'm going to go see it again tomorrow, and maybe the next day as well.

The Pope plans to prohibit homosexual men from becoming priests, believing that this will eliminate child molestation by Catholic clergy.

This is not only a slap in the face to the millions of gay men who are not child molesters, it also constitutes tacit approval of those few straight priests who are.

Memo to Benedict: some small percentage of both gay and straight men are pedophiles. It's those people you should be worried about.