Sharia in Britain

It's highly likely that there will be an island off the shore of France for a good long time to come, but it's looking less likely all the time that there will always be an England. Some excerpts from a much longer article:

Revealed: UK’s first official sharia courts

ISLAMIC law has been officially adopted in Britain, with sharia courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases.

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence.

Rulings issued by a network of five sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court.…

The disclosure that Muslim courts have legal powers in Britain comes seven months after Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was pilloried for suggesting that the establishment of sharia in the future “seems unavoidable” in Britain.

In July, the head of the judiciary, the lord chief justice, Lord Phillips, further stoked controversy when he said that sharia could be used to settle marital and financial disputes.

In fact, Muslim tribunal courts started passing sharia judgments in August 2007. They have dealt with more than 100 cases that range from Muslim divorce and inheritance to nuisance neighbours.

Can this possibly work? Two different legal systems in the same country are bound to come into conflict eventually. Given the prevailing social climate, which one will take precedence? I suspect it will be the one whose supporters are more willing to use violence to support its rulings. Since in a civil society violence is the monopoly of the state, this amounts to setting up a parallel government. Having two governments in one country is an unstable condition. One is bound to prevail over the other. It will be interesting, in the "may you live in interesting times" kind of way, to see how this plays out. Will John Bull stand up, or roll over?

Tools

Sippican has a few things to say about tools. Ten Of The Eleven Of My Top Ten Tools. One of them is a stick. What A Three Hundred And Fifty Pound Doorstop Looks Like. And a nifty gadget that looks like one of those things that once you have it, you'll wonder how you ever got along without it, the Tite-Tie: Something Something Else Happens.

Tropical sunset

Something pretty to have at the top of the page. Don't think of it as enormous amounts of greenhouse gas (H2O vapor!), it's just pretty.

If your fonts could talk, what would they say?

Something like this: Font Conference.


I seem to recall finding this at The Corner, in one of those collections of wacky links that Jonah Goldberg says are collected by "Debby." One of these days, those Corner-ites will figure out a way to put something like tags, or labels, on their posts, so that a reader could see all the Mark Steyn, or Mark Hemingway, or Mark Krikorian, or—whoa, too many Marks. Or one could perhaps link to Debby's wacky link collections. I'd put that in the sidebar.

Pay Microsoft to "Page Up"

Or down, even:

Microsoft patents 'Page Up' and 'Page Down'

The software giant applied for the patent in 2005, and was granted it on 19 August. US patent number 7,415,666 describes "a method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed".

O RLY? I'll be interested to see how they go about collecting the license fees.

Palin makes McCain a lot easier to vote for

I'm quite chuffed about John McCain choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate. It shows an amount of imagination and nerve that comes as a refreshing surprise. So it's the old man who has the ability to think outside the box, and the young one who is trying to play it safe with the unimaginative choice of another Senator, and a particularly dull and annoying one at that, who is prone to making unforced foot-in-mouth errors. (Inline update: more.)

There has been so much about Palin in all the news outlets and blogs lately that I don't feel any need to write a lot about her here. Althouse has been posting up a storm (a vortex?) about Palin, and that would be a place to start.

Some of the media coverage has been just god-awful. Howard Kurtz's last two Reliable Sources shows have been devoted to Democrats bashing Palin. I was going to say something last week about CNN's Lola Ogunnaike falling for the fake gun-and-bikini shot, but even Gawker has that. So a few quick links:

Transcript of the Charlie Gibson interviews. Mark Levin has some excerpts with emphasis on the editing.

Charlie Martin's list of Palin rumors and smears.

That's like "bad Charlie and good Charlie." It's not hard to tell them apart.

Sarah Palin Sexism Watch.

Bill Whittle at NRO: "Sarah Palin has done more than unify and electrify the base. She’s done something I would not have thought possible, were it not happening in front of my nose: Sarah Palin has stolen Barack Obama’s glamour. She’s stolen his excitement, robbed his electricity, burgled his charisma, purloined his star power, and taken his Hope and Change mantra, woven it into a cold-weather fashion accessory, and wrapped it around her neck."

Today's hit piece in the NY Times: Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes.

I see nothing wrong with a newly elected executive firing holdovers from the old regime. Things might have gone better for G.W. Bush if he had done a bit more of that kind of thing. I'm thinking of George Tenet and Norman Mineta in particular. "A new broom sweeps clean."

Some of the attacks are so vicious that I would not have believed them if I had not seen them with my own eyes. Don't let the kids see these. You don't want them learning this kind of language.

Heather Mallick: A Mighty Wind blows through Republican convention.

Cintra Wilson: Pissed about Palin. "Sarah Palin may be a lady, but she ain't no woman."

Wendy Doniger: All Beliefs Welcome, Unless They are Forced on Others. "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."

There's plenty more of this stuff. It's nasty to look at, but it's encouraging to see such consternation among the Democrats: it shows that they think they might lose.

Update: Confederate Yankee has the the real list of books banned from the Wasilla library. Total number of books removed from the library = 0. By the way: librarians "censor" their collections all the time. Books are acquired or not, and deaccessioned (disposed of, in regular English) as part of the normal course of business. Go check your local library and see if they still have a copy of the thoroughly discredited Arming America by Michael Bellesiles. Mine does, with more in the state system. I have donated books to the local library that have just gone missing, never been catalogued, never seen again. Were they censored? The bottom line is that if the librarian likes a book, it stays; if the librarian does not like it, it goes, or is never acquired to begin with. But nobody had better tell the librarian which books should stay or go! What librarians count on to preserve their hegemony over their little domains is obscurity. Most people just don't care. A librarian is a different kind of creature from an archivist, whose goal is to preserve everything. Librarians can't do that. In a small-town library, shelf space is precious, and decisions must be made as to which books stay and which books go. When a mayor appoints a librarian, the mayor has to hope that the person she has chosen will not decide to fill the shelves with Harlequin romances, and deaccession the Decline and Fall, even if no patrons check out the Decline and Fall from one decade to the next.

Another update: Eric S. Raymond: Heh — “Read My Lipstick”.

And another update: Plenty of Palin posts over at Sundries.

AT&T U-verse installation

Getting this put in at B's house last week went pretty smoothly, as far as the physical installation was concerned, once the installer actually showed up, the day following the day appointed. They did call on that day, Tuesday, to re-schedule, so that was not just a no-show. It was raining on Tuesday, and there was some outside work involved (not much, but some), so that amount of slippage did not seem unreasonable. We decided to keep the phone on analog service, so this was not a "whole enchilada" U-verse installation. I like the old style phones that can keep working through a power outage. The installer did a nice job routing the cables, including network cable under the carpet from the gateway to B's desktop, though I think he would have preferred to use wi-fi for that connection. I said that I would rather not be administering the router over wireless, and all that went pretty well.

So now B has Turner Classic Movies, and a better grade of DSL. According to Speedtest.net anyway. It seems to have a lot of latency, if I am using that word correctly. When I re-open Opera or Firefox with a bunch of tabs and windows from the previous session, the system hangs up for what seems like a long time. With the Verizon DSL I have at my place, the Speedtest.net score is just about the same, but I don't need to go get a cup of coffee if I am re-opening 20 tabs. On the other hand, this computer is noticeably quicker (2.0 GHz Athlon 64, 1.5 GB RAM vs. 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM), so how much of that is the connection and how much is the system might be hard to say. On the gripping hand, I don't remember that hangup happening with the slower straight DSL that B had before. Screen going all white, browser window with only the title bar showing, click in the taskbar to switch windows and nothing happens, no, that's new.

The problem that we did not notice until after the installer tech had left was that the two TV sets that had secondary cable boxes, that is to say the ones other than the DVR, were difficult to listen to because of a loud ground hum. It was just annoying on one of them, but loud enough on the other to actually drown out the audio from the channel that was playing. SO: a call to tech support. Help desk suggested various things that did not actually help, and then said that we could have another tech come over that evening (Wednesday, now; this was all supposed to have been done on Tuesday) or the next morning (Thursday). No-one showed up Wednesday evening, or on Thursday; a call to the 800 support number on Thursday afternoon got an operator who told me a story about a bad batch of set-top boxes, and that our service call had not actually been written on the schedule. Tomorrow (Friday) for sure, at noon. Calling again at 2 PM Friday, I spoke to another operator who said that somehow the noon appointment had once again not been written into the schedule. This operator was able to contact a tech who was able to show up about 3:30. At this point we finally find out that the U-verse set-top boxes have a known defect: when connected by coax, the volume drops off drastically, hence the ground noise and static overcomes the audio signal. The fix is to use the composite (yellow, white, red RCA plug) cables to connect the TV to the box. Of course, with a TV that has only a coax connector for input, this means you need a RF modulator. Fortunately, B had one handy. Unfortunately, it was already in use to connect a DVD player. Well, we seldom use that DVD player, so it could be removed from the circuit for a while until I can figure out something else. For the other TV, what worked was to run the composite cables into an old VCR, then run coax from the VCR into the TV. Essentially, this amounts to using the VCR as a RF modulator. So I need to look for a RF modulator with two sets of RCA inputs to hook up the DVD player. Which will leave the old RF modulator left over. So it goes. And see the April 6 update.

If the help desk operator would have 'fessed up to the known problem with the coax connection, I could have straightened this out on the same day. But the only advice given was to reboot the set-top box, in a couple of different ways. Which not only did not fix the problem; it wasn't even related to the problem.

By this time it was supper time on Friday. So this pretty much shot the heck out of last week. The tomatoes are doing great, though. We have Oxheart, Rutgers, and JetStar plants, all bearing pretty well. The Oxhearts are the tastiest by a lot. But they're all good. Summer tomatoes, there's nothing like them. They're worth the trouble. (Not much trouble.)

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Update, November 15: B now has "Total Home DVR." It isn't really, but that's what they are calling it. It allows you to watch recorded video on any TV set that is hooked up to a U-verse box. It will be truly Total when you can manage (start, schedule, delete) recordings, and use the rewind and pause features, from any box. [See July 20 update!] However, it's not disappointing, it's encouraging. No visit from a tech was required to make this happen. The software was upgraded from AT&T central. This gives hope for the future. These set-top boxes have USB ports that are completely useless right now, as far as I can tell. [See Jan 16 update!] But the ease of pushing software upgrades such as THDVR would appear to indicate that some thought has been given to adding features in the future, without the need to change the hardware.

We have tried scheduling recording from the Web interface, and find that it works just fine. (Though for some reason it picks up the recording about a minute early, so that you see the end of the previous program and intervening commercials. That's not just for Web-scheduled recording, it's for all scheduled recording. I'll take it—it's better than missing the opening.) We have not tried this from a cell phone, so no comment on that.

The Internetty nature of the service leads to some odd side effects; it's possible to have the same program on two sets, out-of-synch! Weird. That never happened with cable or broadcast!

Once in a while we get digital artifacts: tiling, pixelation, stop-and-restart. If this happens when recording, the artifacts are recorded. Kinda messed up last week's "The Mentalist," when Patrick switched the deck, and the picture froze right before the switch, and came back right after. Hey, whaddy do? But it's hard to tell if the problem is with U-verse or with the originating station. The digital problems persisted with the feed from WFSB for a while; switching to WCBS gave us artifact-free video. Still, that recording is messed up.

On the Internet side, I have not been seeing that "white screen when trying to open many tabs" problem in the last few weeks. And I will be looking forward to seeing what else comes down the cable in the way of software upgrades in the future. What is that USB port going to do?

There is much more information available in the forums at ATT Utalk, U-verse Users and DSL Reports.

Tomatoes are all gone by, now. My, but they were good.

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Update, December 19: I'm seeing a lot of searches on things like "connect dvd player to uverse." Sorry, you can't do that. The DVD player must be connected to the TV set, not to the U-verse set top box (STB). The U-verse STB has a good number of outputs, but the only inputs are coax and ethernet; one of these must be used to connect to the gateway router (Residential Gateway, or RG, in U-verse-speak). In our case, the audio problem on the coax mentioned above is not present with the primary STB [yes it is! see April 6 update], the one with the DVR, but only on the secondary STB's, the ones without the hard disk. So if your TV set has a coax input and composite A/V input, one thing to do would be to connect the U-verse DVR to the coax, and connect the DVD player to the A/V input (composite red, white, yellow — or red, white, and s-video or component video, if you have that). I recently bought a multi-input RF modulator, to connect a DVD player, DVD recorder/player, and VCR to a TV with both inputs: the U-verse STB, the one with the DVR, goes into the coax, everything else goes into the RF modulator, the RF modulator goes into the composite, so the TV/VCR switch on the TV remote switches between U-verse and whatever is active on the composite input. Could do it the other way around, I suppose.

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Update, Jan 16: Something for the USB port to do! There's a new remote available, with a page feature. The base for it connects to the STB by the USB port.

And a couple of days later: manual recording on the U-verse DVR suffers from the way that the DVR is tied to the guide. (Ouch! Sorry about that rhyme.) Example: a program you want to record is coming on "after football," with a nominal time of 10 pm to 11 pm. The game runs a bit long, as they always do, so you are paying attention, and hit the record button when your program actually starts, about 10:30. The DVR will record until 11:00 and then stop recording, because the guide says that that the program ended at 11:00. If you're still up and paying attention to the red light on the DVR, you can start recording again. Which will give you a recording titled "Channel X News" but which is really the second half of your program. I suppose if U-verse were to enable full manual control of the DVR, some number of halfwits or people who were just sleepy would turn it on, fall asleep, wind up with the dreaded Disk Full error. On the other hand, machines that think that they are smarter than I am, when they actually are not, are machines that are going to annoy me. I know there's a workaround for this, where you guess how much extra time you'll need … but to my mind, there ought to be a way to use that DVR the way that you could use a VCR, that is, once you start recording, it will record until the media is all done or you tell it to stop, without stopping on its own partway though the middle.

Then there was that one episode of "Fringe." I thought I had set the DVR to record it, and sure enough, there it was in the Recorded TV list, listed as "Fringe;" the info button said that it was "Fringe;" but it was an hour of the shopping channel, instead. A little glitchy, yet.

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Update, Feb 15: Another thing about manual recording and "tied to the guide." There is no facility for simple timed recording, again like a VCR. Now that Howard Kurtz's "Reliable Sources" on CNN Sunday mornings has become a segment of the four hour long "State of the Union with John King," the guide shows that whole four-hour block as one item. There is no option to record only the 10 to 11 AM segment of it. Oops! Can so do that, from Menu or Recorded TV buttons (right -arrow over to the "Add a recording" tab). In finding this, I also discovered the search feature, which will search for titles, people's names, and I don't know what else: there are thousands of entries.

B now has "Weather on Demand" on channel 227. It takes a while to start the app, but once it's started, it's reasonably quick. This is Accuweather for places of your choice, by name, map, or zip. Better than The Weather Channel because there's no waiting through documentaries about famous hurricanes to get to the local info, and since you can see any forecast you like, no waiting to get to the not so local either.

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Update April 6: I had been wondering about that ground hum on the coax, and sure enough, it was so! present on the primary STB as well as the little ones. We just had not been listening closely, and, as I mentioned above, different sets respond in different ways. So I re-arranged the inputs on that TV, so that now the STB with the DVR goes straight into the composite jacks on the TV, and the RF modulator goes into the TV's coax input. Result: the hum is gone. There is a side-effect. If you switch the TV/VCR switch on the TV when there is no signal coming from the RF modulator (no devices turned on), you can see and hear the broadcast signals of the local stations. Fuzzy, with no antenna other than the length of coax, but still there. I would have thought that would be gone by now, with the switch to digital broadcasting. It was delayed, though. We'll see how much longer the signals are visible.

Since I have been using U-verse TV, I find ordinary TV far less satisfactory. "Whaddaya mean, I can't rewind? I want to know what she said!" It's surprising even when using one of the TV's at B's that is on a STB other than the DVR to get the message, "This receiver cannot rewind live TV." So on the whole, I'm quite pleased with it. (Thought I should say that sometime, as I seem to be doing a lot of complaining here.)

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Update July 20th: A couple of weeks ago, Total Home DVR just became much closer to truly Total. It's now possible to start a recording from any set-top box, stop it, erase it, or schedule it it advance. Also: the Search feature, System Information, and probably other things I have not discovered yet, are available now from the secondary STB's. Whoopee! The main STB with the DVR in it is still the only one that can rewind live TV, but who knows how much longer that restriction will apply. Also new is a screen saver, and automatic repeat, after about 3 minutes, of a recording.

Wanderin'

I've been a-wanderin'
early and late
from New York City …

Not to the Golden Gate. I'll get back there someday. But lately, here:

and there:

and elsewhere:
Not a whole lot of Internet in some of these places. A little break from smoking quite so much blog.

Giving up on education

In comments on Wowsers are ever with us, below, blake said "Yeah, the city cares if you're armed, but they have an uncanny ability to detect education and stamp it out of existence." Dallas would appear to be taking a preventive approach. If children are not educated, then when they grow up, they'll have no education that needs stamping. A post by Tolewyn, "E" for effort, inspires a longer one by LawDog, Stop the planet! I want off! on Dallas's new "effort-based grading" system. Found in Jerry Pournelle's mail.

Update: Mickey Kaus, this morning, has Dems rally against unions! OK, teachers' unions. Still … The line in this that most strikingly resonates with the Dallas developments noted above is this:

One panelist--I think it was Peter Groff, president of the Colorado State Senate, got the ball rolling by complaining that when the children's agenda meets the adult agenda, the "adult agenda wins too often."

The adult agenda for many who work in the schools seems to be warehousing rather than educating.

Gotta go away again now for a while. I might add to this later.

War in Georgia

Blackfive has a bunch of posts: one, two, three, four, five, six (roundup post), so far.

More on Monday: Zbigniew Brzezinski compares the current conflict to Sudetenland (1938) and Finland (1939). And another roundup, in which Laughing Wolf says, "I expect to see Tbilisi besieged before long, for Putin is most serious about deposing the current government and president. Nor do I think his plans stop there." At StrategyPage: Why Georgia Lost the War. Putin, having re-established autocracy in Russia after their brief fling with something like democracy, is now looking to re-establish Russia as a superpower. The evil empire did not go away for long.

Robert Bidinotto describes the non-response of the West to this naked aggression as "anticipatory capitulation" (via). It looks to me just like the non-response of the West to Russian aggression in 1956, in Hungary, and 1968, in Czechoslovakia. (And no, I did not comment on that post! That's somebody else.)

Wowsers are ever with us

Richard Miniter describes Why L.A. Should Be Pushed Into The Sea. Smoking, this time. Members of the anti-fun brigade are present in the comments.

John Lott says: "Nonsmokers may feel better off because of bans, but what they gain is less than what smokers lose. If the opposite were true, it wouldn’t be necessary to impose the bans."

In Gram Parsons' Sin City (almost 40 years ago!), the singer is resigned to the earthquake that will come to clean up the town, so to speak. Looks like the more puritanical segment among the bien-pensant would like to enforce righteous behavior lest the city be smitten. But since many of them would recoil at the notion that God would (or could!) smite a city for the behavior of its people, then the motivation must be be something else. What could it be? And what accounts for their inability to view other human beings and fellow-citizens as people like themselves, to be respected rather than to be controlled? Some kind of philosophical immaturity similar to what we see from the plaintiffs who sue over anything or nothing, I suppose.

A nation-wide smoking ban would be a lot like a return to Prohibition. Of course, we already have the "Son of Prohibition" going on, in the form of the War on Drugs; and MADD and their supporters and sycophants in the legislatures are working on the alcohol part of it. I'd like to see the pendulum swing back in the Dionysian direction in my lifetime. Less regulation, more freedom, please.

Iron Law, another version

In the comments on Tom Maguire's coverage of a NY Times article on Section 8 housing and its effects on neighborhoods, Megaera mentions "The Iron Law of Bureaucracy in action (also known as Lady MacBeth's Rule): What's done cannot be undone."

So now we have two Iron Laws, Jerry Pournelle's and this one.

Hmm. Megaera, Meg; that name seems to ring a bell. I should give Hunter Hawk a call, one of these days.

Ahead of the curve?

I saw this on a Prius today.The Prius indicates an early adopter. Maybe this guy is ahead of the pack, a harbinger of what is to come. While looking for the image, I found a number of different designs featuring the same idea, some with the names the other way round. They are both wrong for the job, and I heard somewhere that two wrongs don't make a right. Still, if the Dems want to win, this looks like the way to go, given that Edwards is out of the picture now.

Al Gore's new boat

My word, I'm getting tired of this "Al Gore and the Global Warming" nonsense. It's pretty clear that even Gore does not take his gospel at all seriously, but is just putting one over on the rubes who will bite on his hook. I dare say he'll be trolling for a few fish in the new boat.

B.-S. One. I doubt it will ever leave Center Hill Lake.

It's smaller than David Geffen's yacht, that's true, but for a lake boat, it's pretty darn big. The Mayflower was smaller, and used no diesel fuel, bio- or otherwise.

"Free credit report" is not so free

The Instapundit draws our attention to this, in the NY Times: The High Cost of a 'Free Credit Report.' Shorter version: the only site where you actually get a free credit report is AnnualCreditReport.com. The "Free Credit Report Dot Com" (I can hear that jingle) version signs you up for a $14.95 per month credit-monitoring service.

Catsup, ketsiap, ketchup

Catch up. The real stuff has anchovies. Fancy that!

Nothing here lately, there's been lots of Real Life to be attended to.

Al Gore makes a bid for the title of looniest (wanna-be) leader in a while. Demolish and rebuild the nation's entire electrical power generating system in 10 years? Yeah, right. Some people are just innumerate. Not Gore so much as his followers. If Gore had trouble with math, he wouldn't have been able to make all that money out of these here carbon credits. Grumble, grumble …

Obama goes abroad, loses Teleprompter, speaks to worshipful crowds everywhere, with foot still firmly planted in mouth. No need to link this, it' s all over. But, what the heck, might as well link a few.

David Evans hammers another nail in the coffin of the global warming scam.

If you are having trouble seeing the "We Are Building a Religion" Obama music video, try it here. It was working fine the last time I checked it, about a minute ago.

I'm a big fan of the HBO TV series The Wire. As a former Baltimore resident, I kind of like seeing the bits of scenery around the Inner Harbor. Here's a true crime story Too Weird for The Wire. (via)

Windows Update trouble

I've been away for a while, out of town with very limited connectivity, and when I got back, found that there were updates. Happy happy joy joy.

I always look over these updates, and usually download and install them. Today I did that, and found I had no Internet afterwards. System Restore has got me back on line, bless it. Something wrong with either the latest security update, or the latest Malicious Software Removal Tool? Grrr.

Update: This appears to have something to do with ZoneAlarm; see comments.

Wednesday, about noon: it's not the Malicious Software Removal Tool, but the security update, KB951748, that came on the same day, not playing nice with ZoneAlarm. This is a hot topic on the ZoneLabs forums, on the Microsoft user forum, and at Broadband Reports. It seems that what's needed is a fix from ZoneAlarm. The world is waiting.

There's a press release from ZoneAlarm. I tried Option 3, which seemingly would allow one to have the security update and high-level setting on the Internet zone at the same time. It didn't work, possibly because ipconfig /all shows the address of my router on the DNS Servers line. I'm not going to remove the router just to get different DNS server addresses. Apparently, option 3 does not seem to be working for anyone else either.

Here is a blog post about the vulnerability that KB951748 is intended to deal with.

Later on Wednesday: The ZoneAlarm press release no longer lists option 3, entering DNS servers' IP's in the trusted zone, but has a new version of ZoneAlarm—five new versions, actually, the Security Suite, the Pro version, the Antivirus, the Anti-Spyware, and the Basic Firewall, available for download. That was pretty darn quick! All the new versions have the number 70.483.000, as for instance in filename zlsSetup_70_483_000_en.exe. Numbers equal to or higher than this should be good; I certainly can offer no guarantees.

So, as we used to say with BASICA, Ok then. I installed the new ZoneAlarm, then the KB951748 security update, rebooted to get the update working, and all seems well. Kudos and pizza to the ZoneAlarm programmers, who no doubt were coding full speed for the last 36 hours or so. You know, I haven't seen Jolt Cola for sale anywhere in years, though apparently it's still manufactured. Back in my programming days, I liked Jolt (or coffee) for BASIC, and whiskey for dBase. My, that was a long time ago.

New sport: chess boxing

19-year old Nikolai Sazhin is the new champion. Thanks to Mark Hemingway at The Corner.

The song remains the same

The subject of slanted and downright fake journalism came up in conversation the other day. I mentioned Walter Duranty, and was met with bafflement. PJ Media has a piece today by Bruce Bawer that goes into some detail about the Times's history of faking news in a way that benefits the enemies of, dare I say it, civilization. "The Times, It Ain’t a-Changin’: Just as it once did with the dangers of Stalinism and Hitlerism, the New York Times is doing its best to whitewash the threat of Islam." Thanks to the Instapundit.

I have mentioned Duranty here before.

Hansen urges trials for spreading doubt about warming

Anthony Watts has the story: NASA's Jim Hansen calls for energy company execs to be put on trial, for "high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming." The Instapundit has a great headline, Storm troopers in clown shoes, and a couple of reader emails including a suggestion that Gore and Hansen be put on trial if warming does not pick up. Also "Nobody expects the climate inquisition." Watts says: "I suspect he’ll be calling for the jailing of bloggers like myself next."

TigerHawk says: "Officials of the United States government are supposed to uphold the Constitution. It is nothing less than outrageous that a government employee would propose to criminalize speech with which he disagrees. If Hansen's ideas, which enjoy the support of Al Gore, the United Nations, the Democratic Party, virtually every OECD government, and the vast majority of the media and academic establishment, cannot win in the marketplace, perhaps it is because they are not so persuasive as he maintains."

These warmingists are taking themselves altogether too seriously. Maybe they didn't like the jokes. Perhaps we need some new jokes.

"Sex education is completely beside the point."

Says Kay S. Hymowitz of the Gloucester teenagers' pregnancy pact.

So stop calling me, Planned Parenthood! These girls did plan to get pregnant. If them, how many more? It's not the technical issues that they are having trouble with.

Thanks to Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner.

Roddenberry vs. Brin in the jungle

Or "rain forest," as we say now. A couple of recent news stories about a tribe in the Brazilian forest reveal that the Brazilian government, through its National Foundation for Indians, has had for years a policy of keeping isolated tribes isolated. FUNAI's official web page is in Portuguese, of course. Here's a page about FUNAI from Virtual-Brazil. Here's another, from the Brazilian Consulate in San Francisco. Just a couple of results from a quick Google. And here's Survival International - The movement for tribal peoples.

They seem to be following the Prime Directive from Star Trek. Briefly, that the star-farers were not to reveal their existence to dwellers on worlds where interstellar travel had not yet been invented. No interference with the primitives, even if they are all going to die in a nuclear war, or something like that. It would damage their authenticity, or something. Something much more precious than their lives. (Don't ask them, though! They might not agree.)

In David Brin's Uplift series, by contrast, every intelligent species strives to raise non-intelligent species to intelligence, about as big an interference as one could imagine. So the bears haven't discovered fire yet? Modify them genetically so that they can hold the matches, and show them how it's done. This often does not work out well for the uplifted, as they tend to become slaves. (Not on Earth, though! Earth people, and dolphins, and chimps, are the good guys in these stories.)

How does all this relate to these isolated tribes? As Freeman Hunt says, "People are not pets." It's one thing for a New Yorker, say, to leave the city and take up a simple life, cutting wood and carrying water. But for more-or-less advanced civilizations to keep people living in the forest isolated, simply to study them, or in the case that was in the news, not even to study them, seems terribly cold.

As we ease our way into the 21st century and closer to the Singularity, paradigms will be changing. When we have our starships, will there still be tribes living in the rain forest because they have been prevented from finding out about what their fellow human beings are doing in the universe? Or will there be tribes living in the rain forest because they want to live there, because they have seen civilization and like my hypothetical New Yorker above, rejected it? The first seems cruel; the second, entirely likely, and unobjectionable.

One thing about that Prime Directive: It was violated frequently. Nearly every week, as I recall.

Recent flicks

SPOILERS!! Be careful, now, if eyes are sensitive, shield them. Inline update: well, this was really too spoiler-y, so I have revised it a little.

I seem to have run into a bunch of heist movies lately.

Flawless: Michael Caine and Demi Moore steal all the diamonds from the London diamond exchange, then get £100,000,000 ransom from an Evil Capitalist insurance man. The diamonds are, eventually, found, and returned to the exchange so that life can go on, but the stress of the whole thing gives the Evil South African Capitalist who runs the diamond exchange a heart attack. Demi, of course, uses the filthy lucre for the Cause of Good. (Demi: "Do you have any idea have hard it is to give away £100,000,000?" You could just write one check to the Red Cross. They would probably be able to figure out what to do with it.) Thieves win.

Firewall: Harrison Ford fights off home invaders who want $100,000,000 from the bank where he works. In Seattle, in the rain. By hacking into the bank's computers. Thieves lose.

Slow Burn: Someone not identified until the end steals, yes, here it is again, $100,000,000 from everybody. This seems to be a dreamscape version of L.A., but it might be Seattle, except for the lack of rain. Much in the spirit of The Usual Suspects, in that one does not know what's really going on until the kicker at the end. Thief wins.

Chaos: Someone not identified until the end steals (move that decimal!) $1,000,000,000 from everybody, again, in Seattle, in the rain, by hacking into a bank's computers. As above, much in the spirit of The Usual Suspects, in that one does not know what's really going on until the kicker at the end. Thief wins.

These are all quite adequate in their way. Nothing to get excited about, sort of like, I was going to say Travis McGee novels, but maybe Parker would be closer, only not quite so deep. Not sure that I like this trend of thieves winning.

Other recent flix worth mentioning:

Human Desire: Glenn Ford and Broderick Crawford get bent out of shape over Gloria Grahame. Ford is an engineer, of the train-driving variety, Crawford the assistant manager of the railyard. Grahame is Crawford's wife, who has a history with an important investor in the railroad. Watching this movie is, as they say, like watching a trainwreck: you wish you could look away, but you can't. Every time a character has the opportunity to make a decision, he or she chooses the wrong one. It just keeps getting worse, and building in tension, until Glenn Ford does the right thing, close to the end. And, by that point, it comes as a surprise. Everybody has been making the wrong moves, so when one character breaks out and does the right thing, it's startling. Something that Grahame does to display the nature of her character is that trick with lipstick that squicks me every time I see it, painting a cupid's-bow larger than one's actual lips. She looks in every scene as if she had just dipped her mouth in the pudding. None of these characters starts out bad, in the sense of evil or wicked; their weaknesses cause them to fall into a vortex that spins out of control. Nice clickety-clack motif in the score.

The Bad and the Beautiful: Wow. An amazing film. I may have to watch this a couple more times to squeeze some more juice out of it. The score alone is worth the rental. (Blake, you studied with the composer of this? I may never talk about music again. Nah, I will, but, wow.) That muted horn part (valve trombone?) at 58 minutes in, while Lana Turner is wandering around the deserted soundstage, is especially nifty. I see from IMDB that there is a Kazan-Pinter-De Niro version of The Last Tycoon. I wonder how that would compare to this in terms of characterization. I'm not even going to try to summarize this. It's the heck of a movie: see it if you can.

On tour of England

Randy the Internet Ronin has been posting some gorgeous pictures from England.

Go look at them. I'll still be here when you get back.

Do you know what's in the news?

Apparently, I do. And so does Morgan Freeberg. We both hit 12 out of 12 on the Pew News IQ Quiz. But, really. These questions are not even interesting. They are in the "Is the Pope German?" category. I screencapped my score, but it's just the same as his, with the 97 at the top. Makes you think you might have missed one. In other words, 100 per cent on the quiz puts you in the 97th percentile. Got that?

Oh, all right, here it is:

That's what reading blogs will do for you. Maybe I'll go read a few more.