So, Tom DeLay is withdrawing from his race for re-election to Congress. He says that his former Chief of Staff and his former Press Secretary are "going to jail," but that he, of course, did nothing wrong. And, besides, being the head of Congress kind of got in the way of bashing non-Christians. Now he doesn't have to spend some of the time being responsible to the government:

Yeah. If you know that we're all sinners, then you know that we have to work hard to have a moral foundation. So I felt very liberated in being able to say that. I didn't have to worry about being the spokesman for the Republican Party and all that kind of stuff.

It would be nice if people like him, who have to "work hard to have a moral foundation," could understand that not everyone is like that. Some of us find it quite natural to have a moral foundation.

Sigh. Maybe there's an insight here, though. Maybe the strongest fundamentalists are the folks who feel that everyone, like themselves, desperately needs religion to save themselves from themselves. Something like the extreme homophobes who may be acting out internal desires that distress them.

Here's a list that I create each week, some items from which get used elsewhere. My daughter, Ruthy, helps me compile this:

Apples and, well, Apples
The Beatles Applecorp and Apple Computer agreed some time ago on equitable use of an apple logo. Now Applecorp says that iTunes breaches a boundary - being music and all - and wants Apple Computer to stop.

Fact vs. opinion: Who wins online?
By the time they reach college, will our new students 5 years from now give a hoot about "fair and balanced" coverage/teaching?

Law Tells Schools to Teach Students About Online Safety
On July 1, schools in Virginia will be required to develop and implement Internet satefy into their instruction. We hope the training includes 'Netiquette, as well.

College Admission Angst Finds a Forum on Web
But is the shared information good? Does it reduce or increase stress? Why are lots of emoticons and exclamation points required?

Thank You for Smoking?
A tossed cigarette and a pile of dry leaves "took out" some fiber optic cables and a lot of Louisiana State University staffers actually got to have a weekend as a result.

Spitzer's After Spammer Harvesters
He's calling the situation "the biggest deliverate breach of Internet privacy ever." He's after Datran Media, which already has paid $1.1M in an earlier settlement.

Students plan to toss council votes after glitch
Student government folks in Madison are pretty ticker off: "It's a mess-up and I understand. But it's hard to get students to vote once and now it'll be even harder."

College official's e-mail is hijacked at Vermont State Colleges
Someone who's pretty angry about the three-week delay in telling users about a potential information exposure hacked into the email account of an administrator and sent a campuswide protest email to, well, everyone.

Antispam confab says "Filters Are Not Enough"
Lots of ideas, but maybe little agreement on what will work, although "economic incentives" like AOL's GoodMail were both supported and attacked.

Digital Divide Closing as Internet usage goes up and up and up
A recent Pew study found that Hispanics were the most active Internet users, with 80 percent spending time on line; the figure for "whites" was 74 percent, and for African-Americans it was 61 percent.

Student Protests Echo the '60s, but With a High-Tech Buzz
Your editor experienced a delightful frisson reading about how students are using the Internet to communicate about immigration issues.

Facebook's on the Block
After rejecting a $750M bid, Facebook owners are looking to reap at least $2B. They'll probably get it, too.

'Kosher' Phone Merges Technology, Faith
It's stripped down - only does phone calls. And has a huge list of dating and phone sex numbers blocked. "There's interest out there in a conservative phone," says an exec.

Secret Service returns computer to Mars Hill College student
Not a good idea to take a song about the death of JFK, replace his name with Dubya wherever it shows up, and then post it on your MySpace page.

Health files to go high-tech
It's a nationwide trend. This article describes Arizon's plan to phase in paperless medica records over the nextt two years. If our HMOs and our pharmacies could learn to communicate with each other about prescriptions, we'd have more faith in this.

MySpace Weeds-out Risque Content
Smart move! No one ever accused Rupert Murdoch of being stupid!

ICT innovations in the classroom
A nice survey of who's doing what, from an Indian perspective.

New Verizon antenna set to be built on GWU's Funger by late summer
It took a lot of paperwork and red tape, but students at GWU can look forward to better Verizon service some time soon.

Return to BVU from spring break at IT-induced headache
The lines were at the local help desk, 2Fix, and caused by "Novell Client password changes and server reboots."

IBM's WebAdapt2Me Introduced at CalState Long Beach
IBMs WebAdapt2Me is still being developed, but given the aging Boomer population, in addition to the folks who already have vision impairments of various kinds, something like this is likely to be in every OS in ten years or less.

Senator John McCain has an image with many people as a political moderate. Even though his voting record as a whole is very conservative, he's achieved that moderate label by sometimes publicly disagreeing with Dubya and by making such statements as he did in the 2000 election that Jerry Falwell and Pat Roberstson are "agents of intolerance." (We already knew that.)

But now, as he angles to face Hillary Clinton for the presidency in 2008, he may have decided to cuddle up with Falwell and Robertson. McCain will be, for example, the commencement speaker at Falwell's Liberty University.

As Paul Krugman writes in the NYT: "By welcoming Mr. Falwell and people like him as members of their party, Republicans are saying that it's O.K. not necessarily correct, but O.K. to declare that 9/11 was America's punishment for its tolerance of abortion and homosexuality, that Islam is a terrorist religion, and that Jews can't go to heaven. And voters should judge the Republican Party accordingly."

Let's keep an eye peeled on McCain. I like the idea of a Republican moderate, but I'm not sure the Republican base will let one rise to the top.

Life, the Universe, and Everything: An Interview with Douglas Adams

Interesting interview with Douglas Adams, focusing on his being a "radical atheist." I especially like "People will then often say 'But surely it's better to remain an Agnostic just in case?' This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I've been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would chose not to worship him anyway.)" (Emphasis mine.) read more

Cockerel spared after 'crowing 'Allah''

We've had roosters before, and they can get quite aggressive, so I guess this makes sense.

"The two-year-old rooster was set to be turned into chicken soup after its owner, Ibragim Ismatullayev, found it to be extremely aggressive.

However, Mr Ismatullayev has said that as he put the knife to the cockerel's neck, the bird "screamed" and, on hearing this, his five-year-old son said "dad, it's saying 'Allah, Allah'."

The sound of the cockerel was then recorded on a mobile phone, and its life was spared."

However, if someone catches it saying "Yoshua" or "God" - then it's right into the pot. read more

Ventriloquists could have a field day.

Christian Dodgeball

Just for balance, Aggression is the Theme: A youth minister David M. Boudreaux, 27, "was charged Wednesday with one count of third-degree assault." It seems that a stident got a couple of lucky hits on him, so . . . he "kicked him in the groin and left The teen suffered whiplash and post-concussion syndrome and had blood in his urine after being kicked, according to court records." read more


But, you know, this kind of stuff "aggression stuff" goes back to before the big tripartite split: "However, the film's bloodiest scene is reserved for the slaughter by Moses of the Golden Calf idolaters, their wives and children." read more

Study: Prayer doesn't affect heart patients

"In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications." read more

Did you ever think about the ramifications of what goes on in someone's mind when they pray "for" you? How about when you don't want them to? Totally offensive and now, research suggests it might even be harmful.

A Fundamentalist Jurist

Nope. Not in Iran or Iraq, this is in the US.

So, Scalia says "Fuck You" in Sicilian, along with the appropriate accompanying gesture, then suggests to the photographer that he not publish the photo. Then he writes an official letter to the Boston Herald lying about it. Then the Herald publishes the photo.

People, don't you try this in church, or in court.

read more

My newest weekly "paid to blog, blog" is out:

Yummy Thoughts: Cyberware and Cultured Meat

"In the past week, two of my favorite technology trends have shown up in the news: cyberware and cultured meat. In the case of cyberware, research is heating up around the science-fiction-like possibility of someday connecting human neural tissue directly to computing hardware. That's something I very much look forward to.

Cultured meat is meat that is grown in vitro, which I read about a long, long time ago in the novel, The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth. In that story, "Chicken Little" was a slab of chicken meat, which was grown in vitro. The characters in the novel just sliced off bits of meat when they wanted some, and didn't have to actually raise or kill living animals to eat meat.

Q: What do these two concepts have in common? A: Technology meets meat.

This is science fiction, right? Yes, it is and was. But, in case you hadn't noticed, we're living science fiction these days. These are not trends to be disregarded, no matter how disgusting some people may find them."

read the rest

Landover Baptist Church

"Freehold, Iowa - The Dillard Henderson family were in the middle of a lovely Stouffer's Sunday dinner last week when a sin posse of twenty church Deacons burst into their kitchen armed with shotguns and several dozen gallons of gasoline. There was a great commotion as the Deacons demanded to know where 12-year-old Stewart Henderson was hiding his bunny rabbit, 'Mr.Cottonelle Tail.'"