Blog Jones

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I realize that people all over the world have bigger problems, but frankly I can’t feel their pain. For some reason I only feel my own. I’m lucky that way.

-Scott Adams: The Dilbert Blog: My Huge Problems

Bill O’Reilly and the rest of Fox News would like you to believe that there is a vast contingent of the American public who wants to ban Christmas, that we need to save Christmas from liberals and from American retailers who say “Happy Holidays.”

Before all that, however, came a much more effective war on Christmas, from the Puritans:

Liberal plots notwithstanding, the Americans who succeeded in banning the holiday were the Puritans of 17^th-century Massachusetts. Between 1659 and 1681, Christmas celebrations were outlawed in the colony, and the law declared that anyone caught “observing, by abstinence from labor, feasting or any other way any such days as Christmas day, shall pay for every such offense five shillings.” Finding no biblical authority for celebrating Jesus’ birth on Dec. 25, the theocrats who ran Massachusetts regarded the holiday as a mere human invention, a remnant of a heathen past. They also disapproved of the rowdy celebrations that went along with it. “How few there are comparatively that spend those holidays … after an holy manner,” the Rev. Increase Mather lamented in 1687. “But they are consumed in Compotations, in Interludes, in playing at Cards, in Revellings, in excess of Wine, in Mad Mirth.

A brief visit to dictionary.com tells me that compotation is the act of drinking or “tippling” together and that Interludes are a “short farcical entertainment performed between the acts of a medieval mystery or morality play.” It does not, however, tell me what “Mad Mirth” is. But it’s basically clear that Puritans are generally against happiness on Christmas, regardless of its source.

On the other hand, there is something to what the Fox News guys and the “put Christ back in Christmas” advocates are saying. Here’s a shot of my paper’s “Faith and Values” section this morning:

The section I marked in blue is the only section which I would have expected: A column by Billy Graham reminding us why we celebrate Christmas. The yellow section is a column about Christmas that does not mention the word “Christ” once. And the section marked in green, which takes between 2/3 and 3/4 of the page, is the poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” In the Faith and Values section.

Perhaps the editors are Santaists!

UPDATE: As often happens when I don’t take the time to investigate properly, I probably overstated the case. My bad. Eugene Volokh points out why.

It’s still pretty unsettling, but not quite the civil rights violation I thought.
–
One of the key principles of our government is that all citizens have the right to know what laws apply to them. How else can you have due process of the law?

How can you say “ignorance of the law is no excuse” when the government deliberately hides the law from you?

Apparently, however, there are in the United States of America secret laws.

According to Kevin Drum, “John Gilmore is suing the government because he doesn’t think he should be required to show ID before boarding a commercial flight.” The law that requires this action is one of these “secret laws.”

Quoting News.com:

The Bush administration…claims that the ID requirement is necessary for security but has refused to identify any actual regulation requiring it.

A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals seemed skeptical of the Bush administration’s defense of secret laws and regulations but stopped short of suggesting that such a rule would be necessarily unconstitutional.

“How do we know there’s an order?” Judge Thomas Nelson asked. “Because you said there was?”

….The Justice Department has said it could identify the secret law under seal, which would be available to the 9th Circuit but not necessarily Gilmore’s lawyers. But any public description would not be permitted, the department said.

Excuse me?

The Justice Department is preventing the public from knowing what the laws are? Furthermore, it’s preventing Gilmore from defending himself by preventing his lawyers from knowing what law he may or may not have violated?

And this is coming from the “Justice” Department?

What other “secret laws” are we under? Am I going to go to jail for violating a “secret law”? Perhaps put there by secret police and tried in a secret court using secret evidence?

Are you sure this is still the freest nation on earth?

Let’s hope that the courts rule this unconstitutional. If they fail, my confidence in the American justice system will be severely shaken.

Donald Pirone, a man in Atlanta, GA, rides the subway. He saw that another passenger was having trouble with the machine that dispenses subway tokens, and so he gave him one. In response, the other rider gave him the $1.75 that a subway token costs, even though Pirone did not ask him for the money.

And for this act of kindess, he was handcuffed and cited with a misdemeanor.

Instead of giving Pirone a warning, the officer decided to handcuff him and give him the misdemeanor citation under a 1992 state law that bars passengers from selling Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority tokens, [Transit Authority spokeswoman Jocelyn Baker] said.

“What you’ve got to keep in mind is that fare abuse is a chronic problem,” Baker said. “It costs MARTA millions of dollars every year.”

Baker acknowledged that Pirone sold the token at face value and did not make a profit. But the law is the law, she said.

“There are customer service phones for people who are having trouble getting tokens out of the machine,” Baker said. “The fact is, our officer acted within the law.”

Yeah, but that doesn’t mean he did the right thing. Don’t the police have better things to do than arrest people for doing good? Maybe incidents like this reveal why Atlanta has a worse crime rate than either New York City or Los Angeles and more rapes and robberies per capita than Washington, DC.

(via Brainwagon)

Did somebody die?

I could understand if the flags were at half-mast yesterday (as a WWII memorial), but why today?

Did I just offend you with that headline?

If you’re Joseph Farah, editor of WorldNetDaily.com, then I did.

Farah is deeply offended by Bush sending him a Christmas card marked “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” The article reads:

Bush “claims to be a born-again, evangelical Christian. But he sure doesn’t act like one,” said Joseph Farah, editor of the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com. “I threw out my White House card as soon as I got it.”

Well, you ingrate, maybe the White House has better things to do with their time than to keep a database of the religious preferences of the thousands of people they send Christmas Holiday Cards to. You could just be glad to get a card from the White House. It’s more than I got.

And, incidentally, according to an article on Slate.Com, describing a White House Christmas party:

The Bush White House isn’t hiding the baby Jesus. There He is among the wise men and barnyard creatures in the 18th-century Italian crèche. Mrs. Bush calls the 18-and-a-half-foot Fraser fir from Laurel Springs, N.C., a Christmas, not a “holiday,” tree.

Happy?

People use the phrase “Happy Holidays” because, in case you might not have been aware of this, there are at least two holidays other than Christmas which fall in the month of December. They are trying to be nice; it’s not an attack on the country’s morals.

On the other hand, responding to someone’s attempt to be nice with a mean-spirited retort is just rude. Shame on ya.

Skepticism Seems to Erode Europeans’ Faith in Rice - New York Times.

Problems with this headline:

1. Weak verb choice–”seems to erode” instead of the stronger “erodes”
2. Poor choice of nouns: Skepticism is roughly the same thing as a lack of faith; both terms are vague and abstract.

Of course, the story isn’t much better. It’s badly biased; since it’s marked “International,” not “Op-Ed,” I assume its supposed to be a hard-news story. Quotes like “Did anybody believe her on this continent, aroused as rarely before by a raft of reports about secret prisons, C.I.A. flights, allegations of torture and of ‘renditions,’ or transfers, of prisoners to third countries so they can be tortured there?” and “Parsing through the speech, Mr. Tyrie pointed out example after example where, he said, Ms. Rice was using surgically precise language to obfuscate and distract” tend to give it away.

And the NYTimes is the country’s top newspaper? Tsk.

Anyways, I’d reword the headline as:
“European Leaders Doubt Rice’s Testimony”

Anything with an active, strong verb and good, concrete nouns.

It’s a SwifferBot! Cheaper than a Roomba Vacuum robot, and cuter too!

(via Engadget - www.engadget.com)

I once heard the iPod Shuffle referred to as a “value-subtracted product.” The Apple marketing division was able to sell a lack of a feature (the screen) as a benefit (”You never know what’s coming next!”). Now, I’ve found another great example of an attempt at a value-subtracted product:

NEC has announced their new Parafield product: A laptop without a hard drive. Sales price: Almost $4,000.

NEC’s target market is large corporations. The idea is that a lost laptop represents a huge breach of security, because sensitive documents that your competitor might use against you are stored on the computer. So, NEC’s designed a computer that you can’t store files on. Instead, you have to save your files to another computer on the network (the corporate file server) or to a USB thumbdrive.

Programs–like Windows XP and Office–are stored in 3 gigabytes of flash memory in the computer. Otherwise, it’s not much different from an ordinary laptop. The specs listed on the site are actually inferior to this $1,400 laptop from Gateway, which has a higher-resolution screen among other things.

So, NEC’s marketing is trying to sell the lack of a feature (no hard drive) as a benefit (supposedly better security–personally, I think that a USB thumbdrive is mucheasier to lose or steal than a laptop).

The one advantage I can see to this is that the corporation doesn’t have to worry about viruses or spyware on these machines, but I think that that advantage will be outweighed by the disadvantages: Among them, inconvenience and lost work if the network goes down and you don’t have a USB key handy in the office.

Not to mention the price: three times as much as you would for a normal laptop!

Executives, don’t be swayed by the word “security”: This product isn’t worth the price.

(via Gizmodo)