More the anti-choice Right

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It’s no secret now that many on the Right would like to ban not just abortion, but also birth control. Recall that the cases before Roe concerning privacy were about just that, not abortion (Griswold v. Connecticut (381 U.S. 479 (1965)), about access to marital birth control, and the follow-up Eisenstatdt v. Baird (405 U.S. 438 (1972)), about access for unmarried persons). These are people who want women to be mothers not just first and foremost, but ONLY. They’re attempting to redefine pregnancy as the moment of sperm-egg union (the AMA says it’s implantation) in order to reclassify emergency contraception and even birth control pills as abortifacients, and are working to spread misinformation about condom use. This is the same crowd, most likely, who don’t want us to vaccinate against HPV, since safer sex means might lead to more promiscuity.

This makes clear that anti-choice isn’t just about abortion. If you’re truly opposed to abortion because you believe all pregnancies should have a chance at birth, the logical position is to support the widest possible access to good education and birth control, but these people don’t see it that way.

Salon has more. Read up, and then send some money to Planned Parenthood.

We don’t like where this is going

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Slashdot alerts us that scientists have discovered that capsaicin, the chemical that makes chilis hot, kills prostate cancer cells.

“The good news is that we can cure your cancer. The bad news is that you’re going to have to put this habanero up your ass.”

RFID and hysteria

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While we recognize that there may well come a time when RFID virii exist, the current stories about exploits utilize equipment that is a long, long way from the stuff people are actually using in the supply chain today. N.B. that the BBC article refers to creating an exploit in “only” 127 bytes. That’s awesome, we’re sure, but the key bit of data to remember for currently-used supply chain tags is that they hold 96 bits.

Furthermore, the exploits discussed in this paper strike us as almost comically bad; i.e., they rely on all sorts of other holes in the system, like leaving the door open to SQL injection. The “possible scenarios” they discuss are even worse, suggesting that a nefarious shopper might bollocks up a supermarket by replacing an item’s tag with one of his own.

Let’s stop with hysteria and think more in terms of the real world, ok? RFID exploits such as this are a long way off in the real world. The best protection NOW is to make sure we’re smart with new tools like RFID. An excellent place to start would be in NOT putting RFID in passports, not whining about “RFID Viruses! OMG!! WTF!!”

Coolest. Game. EVAR.

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Maxis — SimCity’s publisher — is preparing a game called Spore. This GoogleVideo is a presentation by Maxis’ Will Wright at the 2005 Game Developers’ Conference. You start as a tiny organism in a drop of water, desperately trying to evolve. The game moves through animal stages, tribal stages, a “Simcity-esque” phase, all the way through interstellar colonization. There is, of course, already a Wikipedia article, and screenshots can be had at Spore.com. It’s said to be due in Q4.

Holy crap. WANT.

Music to our ears

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Via Atrios, who quotes a Pew survey:

The single word most frequently associated with George W. Bush today is “incompetent,”and close behind are two other increasingly mentioned descriptors: “idiot” and “liar.”

Phone companies are made of pure stupid.

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So our Razr went tits-up on Monday, but with an inventive and new failure, not, apparently, the one that’s going around. (Go figure.) We called Cingular, explained the situation, and they agreed to send us out a new phone. The options were “wait a week” or “wait 1-2 days,” but the latter costs $7. Whatever; we needed a phone. It’s just another example of the pure unadulterated suck provided by wireless companies.

Anyway, as part of the conversation, they needed to know what color Razr was involved. “It’s black,” we said, “but at long as you don’t send us a pink one, we don’t really care.”

Imagine our surprise when the phone arrived the next day. It’s a silver one, which was fine. We found in the box nothing but the main phone body itself wrapped in plastic in a no-frills inner box. There was no battery or SIM card, just as we expected — but also missing was the back panel of the phone. Fifteen minutes later, when we got a human on the phone, we were told “oh, yes, we only send out the phone, not the accessories.” The back is an accessory? “Yes, sir.” Whatever (once again). Please send us a black one, then, so we don’t have Houston’s only two-tone Razr. This time, at least, they waived the $7 fee.

So the black phone just arrived. In the box was a more or less complete Razr kit, including (a) a black Razr; (b) a battery; (c) a black back panel; (d) a charger; and (e) a new manual. So much for not sending out “accessories.”

Now we’re going out, so we can send these goons their other two phones.

Things we learned today

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It turns out that cron is smarter than we thought, such that it’s much harder to fuck yourself over DST than we assumed.

Still, we moved any jobs in the skipped-or-repeated interval to before 0100 or after 0300, just to be clear.

If this makes no sense to you, just move along and don’t worry about it.

Dept. of Economics, Nonstandard Instrument Division

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From one of our far-flung correspondents:

So, [a coworker] bought a little Toyota three years ago for about 5m pesos ($7500 at the time) and the going price used is now about 4m pesos ($8000 now). So the dollar has sunk faster than the depreciation on the car, and he’s going to make money (in dollar terms) by selling his car after driving it every day for three years. I think it says something about the quality of your currency if you can make money by going to South American and investing in cars.

Dept. of Stupid, Compressed Gas Division

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Go read this; the following excerpt sets the scene:

These [tanks] are usually equipped with pressure relief fittings, since nitrogen does tend to want to be a gas, and gases do tend to want to expand quite a bit. This tank, though, which seems to have been kicking around since 1980, had been retrofitted by a real buckaroo. Both the pressure relief and rupture disks had failed for some reason in the past, so they’d been removed and sealed off with metal plugs. You may commence shivering now.

Maybe this is why they’re so hostile to due process

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The prosecution may well have totally screwed any chance of the so-called 20th hijacker getting the death penalty.

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 13 — The sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui teetered on the brink of a mistrial today, as the judge in the case angrily said she might spare him the death penalty following the disclosure that a government lawyer had improperly coached some witnesses. “In all my years on the bench, I’ve never seen a more egregious violation of the rule about witnesses,” Judge Leonie M. Brinkema said.

Shouldn’t this be a slam dunk? Isn’t Moussaoui (a) barking mad and (b) representing himself? They can’t win under those circumstances, so they have to CHEAT, even knowing what the stakes are? Wow.

More here.

The Baby, the Bathwater, and the Moral Bankruptcy of the Catholic Church

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Catholic Charities in Boston will stop helping to place ANY foster children in permanent homes rather than facilitate same-sex adoption.

The controversy began in October when the Globe reported that Catholic Charities had been quietly processing a small number of gay adoptions, despite Vatican statements condemning the practice. Over the last decades, the Globe reported, approximately 13 children had been placed by Catholic Charities in gay households, a fraction of the 720 children placed by the agency during that period.

Yeah, you read that right; 13 out of 720. They’re willing to bail on the 707 to keep from helping the baker’s dozen. Nice move, kids. Clearly, dogma is more important than compassion, though we Heathen think your ultimate boss may disagree.

If it were up to them, they’d figure out a way to make those myths about masturbation true, too

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Never forget that our nation, “conceived in liberty” as we may be, was in fact initially founded by people too uptight to be British.

The latest manifestation of this ongoing American puritanism is detailed in the latest New Yorker; forces on the Right are working to prevent the widespread adoption of an HPV vaccine, since to remove its risks would be to encourage sex. HPV is a precursor to cervical cancer in women, but men can carry the virus as well. By pursuing this angle, they are actively attempting to stifle medical innovations that would reduce disease and death because they don’t want people fucking any more than is absolutely necessary. How much more screwy can you get? In what way is this moral?

(Yes, we just linked to Andrew Sullivan, but we initially got it from Atrios.)

They’re all bought and paid for.

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The House has passed a bill backed by food industry lobbyists gutting all state food labeling laws and assigning all such authority to the FDA. The bill had no hearing, and is moving forward despite the opposition of most states’ attorneys general.

Maybe the Senate will be more sane on this, but we doubt it. At what point will be insist on REAL lobbying reform?

There’s no getting around this: the GOP is a criminal enterprise

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Point 1: The President has admitted on national television taking actions that are indisputably illegal; the domestic spying initiative has been undertaken in contempt of the FISA law put into place to curb executive abuses precisely like these.

Point 2: The Senate Intelligence Committee voted yesterday in a party line vote to not investigate the domestic spying plan, thereby abdicating their responsibility for oversight and, indeed, the rule of law. The Republican members of the committee have no personal integrity and no respect for the rule of law if they can use their position to protect a manifestly lawbreaking president.

A vote for any Republican, period, is a vote in favor of these tactics. I don’t care who they’re kin to, or what they say they’ll do. As far as the Heathen are concerned, they can all go straight to hell.

Heathen Birfdays

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There have been a couple here lately…

  • Last week saw the birth anniversary of certain ScotsHeathen; and
  • This very day, we believe, is the birthday of certain former Heights-area restauranteur-heathen, now engaged full-time in (probably futile) attempts to keep the Heathen Attorney and his Progeny from all forms of mischief.

Happies to all!

Boycotting the Irrelevant

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South Dakota Logo South Dakota has, as we’re sure you’ve noticed, enacted the most sweeping abortion ban in years with a law that should not withstand Constitutional scrutiny (whether the new farther-right SCOTUS will hold that way is anybody’s guess). This editorial points out the obvious: that in a post-Roe world, states would be free to enact whatever level of abortion regulation they wanted, but with consequences. There are, of course, economic ramifications, and among those is the possibility of a tourist boycott.

It occurs to us, however, that the states most likely to enact sweeping abortion bans are in fact that states we probably don’t spend any money in anyway. We Heathen have never spent any money in South Dakota, and we have no plans to, and that’s got nothing to do with their attempts to lay claim to their citizens’ uterii. Are there any reliably Red States with actual tourist attractions? (We’ll stipulate Texas, but take our word for it that we’re not entirely sure how abortion would be regulated here post-Roe.)

(Image from comments at DailyKos.com)

Belated Weekend Observations

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Prince remains teh awesome, even when relegated to backing duties as “just” a guitar player for protege Tamar’s last-minute Houston gig on Friday night.

Said gig started at midnight, which is late enough that we took post-work naps to better prepare. We are: old.

Prince’s awesomeness is in no way reducted by the unmitigated halfassery of the venue. They were clearly wholly unprepared for the crowd — which was only about capacity; it wasn’t super-crowded — and had the world’s worst will-call scenario despite knowing in advance that virtually everyone going to the show would be doing will-call. We’ve been in Soviet hotels with better efficiency ratings. A significant number of people were STILL IN THE WILL CALL LINE when the music started, and they’d been there over an hour.

Said venue also manage to have, near as we could tell, only two bartenders. There may have been another bar somewhere, but we can’t be sure. We CAN be sure that the ones we saw were absolutely swamped and wholly insufficient to the crowd gathered ten deep around their bar.

We can’t decide if our favorite part was the “Purple Rain” encore or the moment, early in the show, when Prince dropped the mike and name-checked Sexual Chocolate.

Dept. of CNet Not Doing Its Homework

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So the goons at CNet are running a story on a Mac hacking contest trumpeting the results: the Mac in question was hacked in half an hour. However, CNet doesn’t bother to even LINK to the site in question or describe the parameters of the test, making it very hard for people to discover some key facts about this “hacking” event. Here’s the real scoop, and the only piece of information you need to know:

The contest “organizer” gave anyone who asked an account on the machine. This means the contest isn’t about getting access; he gave that out to begin with. It was about escalating privileges, which is much simpler. This is why you don’t give user accounts to anyone who asks for one — not that a sane person would, of course, unless they just wanted to get a headline on CNet. It’s also been pointed out that, in addition to handing out accounts, the “host” also left every single service running, thereby providing the maximum possible number of opportunities for his new users to vandalize his machine.

Summary? Like the much-ballyhooed Mac malware of last month, it’s a non-event. Is OS X a hardened system capable of withstanding any conceivable attack? No, certainly not. There’s no such creature. Is it manifestly more secure and stable than anything Microsoft makes? Absolutely.

And can we rely on journalists to print inflammatory stories with no background or follow-through? You bet your ass.

Update: There’s a sober and level-headed discussion of the “hack” over at ubergeek news source Ars Technica.

Colbert’s Ubergeek Shout-out

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It is with no small degree of embarrassment that we admit to remembering every single thing mentioned in this little video clip from the Colbert Report about the new online D & D game (which we will not be playing, thanks).

If you need a little refresher, you can’t do better than Lore Sjoberg’s Book of Ratings entry on D & D monsters. It begins with the Displacer Beast:

As far as I know, the idea of a six-legged panther with squid tentacles that looks like it’s somewhere other than it really is originated in the mind of D&D creator E. Gary Gygax, possibly as the result of blunt trauma. Not that I’m complaining. The displacer beast is an excellent example of synergy; a panther with squid parts is considerably more intimidating than a squid strapped to a panther.

Frist, still a jackass

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Bill Frist is doing his best to make sure the Senate Intelligence committee does absolutely nothing to investigate Bush’s manifestly illegal domestic spying scheme.

Frist specifically threatened that if the Committee holds NSA hearings, he will fundamentally change the 30-year-old structure and operation of the Senate Intelligence Committee so as to make it like every other Committee, i.e., controlled and dominated by Republicans to advance and rubber-stamp the White House’s agenda rather than exercise meaningful and nonpartisan oversight. […] These are truly desperate and extreme measures to block an investigation of the President’s conduct. Sen. First is literally threatening the Committee not to exercise oversight over the President’s warrantless eavesdropping on Americans. Glenn Greenwald