Happily, an Alabama federal judge has struck down Alabama’s ban on vibrators. I haven’t yet read the decision, but apparently Judge C. Lynwood Smith, Jr., quotes Foucault therein. More judicial decisions need post-modern French semoticist quotes, in my opinion.
Population: One
Hey, Californians. Dianne Feinstein knows better than you.
I serve as the senior senator from California, representing 35 million people. That is a formidable task. People have weighed in by the tens of thousands. If I were just to cast a representative vote based on those who have voiced their opinions with my office — and with no other factors — I would have to vote against this resolution.
She voted yes, of course. Screw the constituents.
SCOTUSBlog is one of those places that those of us who like to claim we’re keeping up with politics ought to visit frequently. SCOTUS? Supreme Court of the United States. We sysadmins have no monopoly on acronyms. The Supreme Court is the final check on those unjust laws we so frequently protest, and it shouldn’t take an Eldred v. Ashcroft to get us to pay attention. (I remonstrate with myself, here, as much as with any imaginary typical reader.) Link discovered on the mad tea party.
Apologies to my LiveJournal readers for the unkempt apostrophes; the problem is now fixed. For the curious: the MovableType RSS feed templates escape the posts as if they were XML, and XML includes this ' entity which is not supported by most HTML browsers. So I switched the encoding to HTML style, and nothing seems to be suffering.
After three and a half weeks, my cable installation finally happened. Not currently recommending AT&T Broadband; they are very lucky that a) my landlord won’t let me get DishTV and b) RCN doesn’t go to my street yet. But hey, it’s there now and I’m happy about that.
I also got to activate my TiVo. People say this a lot, but it’s an incredibly great invention, implemented quite well. I had my little TiVo epiphany while I was setting up some season passes (which allow you to specify a given show to record for the whole year). By the time I was halfway done, it was five minutes past the hour and I was missing Smackdown. But wait — I had Smackdown on a season pass, and it was recording, so I could just go watch it from the beginning. Superb.
David Chess is utterly brilliant.
FROM:PRNCSS. L ORGANA
DEAR friend.
I AM PRINCESS LEIA ORGANA ONLY SURVIVOR
OF THE ROYALFAMILY OF ALDERAN (ALDRN).
I AM MOVED TO WRITE YOU THIS LETTER,
THIS WAS IN CONFIDENCE CONSIDERING MY
PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCE AND SITUATION.
“Huh?” you say? See also this.
Red Dragon was just kind of there. Excellent cast, decent enough acting, and the story is strong; alas, the movie didn’t do much for me. Most reviewers have mentioned that Manhunter was a better movie, and it was. But Red Dragon is not so much laboring under the weight of Manhunter as it is crushed under the weight of Silence of the Lambs. Here and there, entire sequences are lifted from Demme’s masterpiece. Brett Ratner did his best to recreate Silence, and he produced something fairly creepy and somewhat enjoyable, but in the process he lost track of what made Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon different than his Silence of the Lambs. Will Graham is not Clarice Starling, and the cracks in their psyches are of a very different nature. The cinematic Red Dragon forgets that Graham’s personal fear is his similarities to the monsters he hunts, and attempts to treat him as though he merely shared Clarice Starling’s fear of failure. But it’s not failure he fears at all. It’s too much success that gives him nightmares.
Nice little interview with David Twohy, regarding whom I am a staunch fanboy. It’s mostly about Below with a little news about the upcoming three-movie Chronicles of Riddick. (Vin Diesel was here.)
I’ve upgraded MovableType to the just released 2.5. Looks good. Perceptive people will note the search box on the left (for the fancy-pants version of the blog) or below the main title (if you’re reading the plain version).
Edit: I have also made a couple of small tweaks to the alternate view section of the sidebar. You don’t care about those but I wanted to point them out so that I could say “There’s one additional change I made; prize to the first person to notice it,” and not have people say “You added another syndication option.”
This post is mostly about this, but also about this.
For what it’s worth, I don’t find Gary Haubold’s comments very compelling. Let’s break it down.
He presents no evidence that “If (2) did not exist… then odds are WE WOULDN’T ACTUALLY HAVE TO DO ANYTHING…” Unless you count all caps as evidence; I don’t. He doesn’t state his premises. Which is a shame, because one of them (whether he realizes it or not) is that there’s no reason for Saddam’s inner circle /not/ to defect if they know Saddam is going to lose power.
But that’s flawed, by current pro-war doctrine. One of the stated reasons for invading as quickly as possible is that Saddam is the kind of person who would set off nukes purely for vengeance, in the event that he was losing a war. If he’d nuke the US in a case where it would gain him nothing, how much more likely is he to take revenge on his own people if they betray him?
I suspect that even if Saddam’s inner circle was inclined to defect, fear would a powerful incentive against that decision — even in game theory terms, which Mr. Haubold didn’t actually use. Risk analysis requires them to consider the possible outcomes of betrayal in combination with the probability of each outcome. When the worst outcome is torture, followed by death, the probability of that outcome doesn’t need to be too high before that decision starts looking bad.
It’s worse if these people care about potential torture and death for their families, of course.
That covers my opinion of Mr. Haubold’s game theory. However, even if you accept his odds at face value, it’s an interesting and rather abrupt jump from “odds are” to his pentultimate paragraph, in which he says that war protestors are doing damage to the war effort simply by protesting. No mention of the odds, whatever he thinks those odds are — it has gone from a matter of probability to a definite statement of fact.
Protestors are only doing damage if in fact Saddam’s inner circle would betray him in the event that the inner circle was convinced that the US would go after Saddam full-bore. Since that has not in any way been proven, or even analyzed, it’s premature to say we should recognize the damage protestors are doing.
Whether or not free speech is more important than engaging in hard-core fighting, finally, is a personal question. I believe that free speech is in fact worth fighting for, whether directly (as Voltaire had it) or indirectly (as in the situation Mr. Haubold posits). What are we defending, if not the principles of our nation?
It requires courage to willingly adopt a course of action that may lead to harm to oneself. This is true when applied to soldiers fighting a war. It is also true when applied to those protesting tactics which are both effective and unjust.