Self Nulification

Laura Mallory thinks Harry Potter is a witch. So she sued to ban Potter books from schools.

At Tuesday's hearing, Mallory argued in part that witchcraft is a religion practiced by some people and, therefore, the books should be banned because reading them in school violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

"I have a dream that God will be welcomed back in our schools again," Mallory said. "I think we need him."

Oh, so God isn't something religious.

It's Relative I Guess

I heard a lawyer say that he was expensive. I was standing in his office in an old building off Harry Hines looking out his window at the Crescent where I attended many meeting in one of my former lives. Those were expensive lawyers.

Promiscuous Teleology

Just go read this.

From the comments:

Is our thinking brain part of evolution? The question should be: How come human are capable of reasoning and understanding complex ideas? If a (relatively) few can, what prevents the multitude from doing so too?

More On The Bad Immigration Bill

Over at USA Today is an account of the twisted thinking of politicians at work on the immigration question. They cannot be honest to save their butts. Now the burning Bush has rolled out Chertoff and others who should be working for their paycheck instead of stumping for his insipid rehash of bad ideas on illegal immigration.

One example is this exchange with my comments in bold italics:

Chertoff acknowledged that there is "a fundamental unfairness" in a bill allowing illegal immigrants to stay. But trying to force them to leave would be impossible, Chertoff said, "We are bowing to reality." Translation: It's too hard to do the right thing so lets just forget about their status because they can't vote anyway.

He dismissed the argument of Republican conservatives, such as Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Calif., who argue that illegal immigrants will leave if strict enforcement of U.S. laws makes it impossible for them to find a job. How does he know this? They've never tried it.

"You're not going to replace 12 million people who are doing the work they're currently doing," Chertoff said. "If they don't leave, then you are going to give them silent amnesty. You're either going to let them stay or you're going to be hypocritical." Translation: A lot of bad businesses would go out of business or would have to pay their workers living wages that would take them off the taxpayer's back.

Bilbray said his idea hasn't worked because "there's been a conscious strategy of not enforcing the law." That's true. There have been virtually no penalties to companies caught with hundreds of illegal workers.

Chertoff, whose department has staged a number of recent raids that have resulted in mass roundups of illegal workers and sharp protests from religious groups, warned there will be more if the workers don't get a chance to become legal. "We're going to enforce the law," he said. "People all around the country will be seeing teary-eyed children whose parents are going to be deported." Those raids were just that, staged. They punished the workers and drew not one drop of blood or treasure from the offending companies. Providing enough legal workers for viable jobs is one function of legal immigration. It should never be used to prop up businesses who's managers are so dumb or greedy that they must use illegal workers to compete in the marketplace.

Bush and Chertoff are vile men, quite willing to cynically punish thousands of illegal immigrants harbored by companies who are huge contributors to political campaigns. Companies who's competitors, stockholders and customers should loudly demand the end of hiring of illegal workers and further, that executives and managers of those companies be punished severely for it. So what if those companies go out of business? They are not viable and a burden on the taxpayer with constant need of public subsidy for them and their workers.

Since these practices are the primary cause of illegal immigration, amnesty should immediately be given to those currently working in this country illegally. The only requirement should be that they name the people they have worked for since arriving in this country. Those named should be sent the bill for every dollar spent on social services and other costs encountered by our country as a result of this problem. Those named should also be ostracized and publicly shunned and their companies should be stripped of any government business now and in the future.

We the people need to take this problem out of the hands of our gutless politicians. Someone should start an organization that could provide a way for patriotic companies and citizens to provide traceable certification that the run or patronize only businesses employing legal workers being paid well above poverty wages and working in well above minimum standard conditions. And none of that off-shoring outsourcing crap allowed. I'm available to work on such a project but, I don't come cheap.

Probably Woody Allen

There's big controversy on the Jewish view of when life begins. In Jewish tradition, the fetus is not considered viable until after it graduates from medical school. More>>

The Grand Bargain

Ive looked at the "grand bargain". I'm not sure there is anything grand about it. I don't think it should be rated even ordinary on a middling scale because it is nothing new for the money. and it has cost lots of money and lives. The nation has anguished over the problem and it has been used by some very bad people for very bad ends. It is still being used for political purposes. Politicians and even a large number of people on the street don't seem as if they really want the problem to go away. They seem to make more profit from the arguments than they should. Here's my 2 cents.

The problem is that there are too many people who have bought the untrue idea that we need cheap labor. That's bullshit. It is true that there are a lot of people running businesses that depend on this class of worker. Workers who will live in squalid conditions, work in dangerous conditions, accept brutal behavior from their employers, and who have no vote. People who run those kinds of businesses are responsible for the huge burdens placed on our health care, education and other public programs we properly have established to care for the needy. So that cheap labor you have building your house is costing you a bundle in taxes. The value of the house would go up and taxes will come down when we eliminate these kinds of business people from our country.

I don't think there should be any kind of guest worker program, not even a sponsored program. I think we should take care of the demand side of the equation first and make tough laws that punish employers who hire illegal workers. Real tough first time fines of say, $50,000 per employee per day and imprisonment for those who repeat or who hire a significant number illegal workers. There should be a reward system in place for employees who report their employer like, citizenship for that person. It is bullshit that illegal workers cannot be identified. It is trivial for employers to know way to much about workers already. Let them band together and find a way. It should not be the taxpayer who foots the bill for that.

What about security you ask? Sealing the border will not stop the terror idea. It is an idea. There have been far more people injured and killed by the deprevity of our illegal immigration practices than by so-called terrorists and most terrorists in this country have been born-here citizens.

That's it. No billion dollars per year fences on the border, no more than a reasonable border patrol, more open borders for tourism and trade and more open guest-but-not-work policies.

Gas Prices and Haircuts

I don't drive much. That is my main contribution to America's quest for energy independence and reducing pollution. Today was one of those days when I did drive a little more than usual. I had breakfast out. I went 1.6 miles round trip to visit some friends. Then I cruised over to the shops and got a haircut, some new shirts and I got my mail on the way home. Total travel today, 5.9 miles.

The price of gas is directly related to demand versus how much can get through the pipes. When I look around, it doesn't take long to figure out why gas cost as much as it does. All our cars are huge, they go lots of places just because we can, there is only one person in the car most of the time and I had to wait over an hour to get my hair cut when there was no one else but me in the shop.

I could just about eliminate my need for gas if only someone would build a car that runs on credit card applications and packaging materials. That's mostly what I got home with today.

Hard Drive Backup, Restore and Image Cloning, Free and Easy

For more than a year, I have been using a very good and free program DriveImageXML to backup my whole system. I normally just use one hard drive in my computer but it works for as many drive as you got. !;-) One of the things I love about the program is that it allows compression and I can save several copies of the whole drive over time on the backup drive. I use an external USB attached drive for storage but one can use other things such as network drives, maybe internet places or even DVDs and CDs if you want to do it the hard way.

Up until a few days ago I had only limited experience with actually restoring files and such using this software. I had restored one complete hard drive and done a few other individual files and directory restores over the last couple of years. I was out of practice. A few days ago I decided to entertain myself by restoring a complete clone of my primary drive just to see if all was well with this backup/restore scheme. I found that the restored drive would not boot correctly.

After much skull scratching and even trying to repair the installation from my Windows installation CD, I found the answer. You guessed it, all I had to do was follow the instructions. The instructions for DirveImageXML that is. But it turns out the instruction don't really cover using a "used" drive as the restore target.

The problem came from restoring to a drive that had previously been used in my computer as the second, non-system drive. I bought a new hard drive a few months ago just to have a spare. I installed it in my computer to verify that it was not DOA. I plugged it in, turned on the computer and there it was in the explorer window. All is well. I unplugged the drive and forgot about it. Just to have a spare.

When I decided to test my backups to make sure the restore part of the equation works, that is the drive I used as the target drive. I also used the Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows to boot from and run the restore function of DriveImageXML. UBCD4Win comes with DriveImageXML included. I've tried the build-your-own BartPE version and several others and UBCD4Win is the best. It just works.

So, I shut down my computer, pried the case open, unplugged C: drive and connected the new drive in it's place. I fired up the computer and booted the UBCD. Then I started DIXML, selected the backup file (preciously deposited on an external USB drive) and clicked the next button to restore it to the blank drive. Then, I tooled over to WalMart and got some Coke and some chocolate coated peanut clusters. The restore process was done in about an hour. Your mileage will vary depending on the size of the backup files. In my case that is about 35% of a 120GB drive restored to a 160GB drive. But then the problem came out.

When I removed the boot CD and restarted the computer, the windows user login screen appeared, I typed in my trusty password and bluie, window is shutting down. Not a good thing. As it turns out, having the hard drive attached to this computer in the past meant that my windows installation took note of that particular drive and remembered that it ain't the boot drive. I did a zillion other things, but after DriveImageXML finished restoring the files to the drive and before closing out and restarting the computer on it's new C: disk, all I really needed to do was; click on tools in the DriveImageXML window, select "Set new Disk ID"and go.

I recommend that everyone who owns a Windoz computer immediately go and get both DriveImageXML, and UBCD4Win. NOW! Oh yeah, use them, floss regularly and practice safe sex. Practice, practice, practice....

I wish I could have been there.

It's nice to see a few others know what destruction Jesus brings to all who follow him. I know these words well:

Well, let me say that I did shed some tears later – not for the man, Jerry Falwell, but for the person that he could have been. How dare he outlive the people that I care about who thought he was so wonderful. How dare he prey on gullible people who cannot see how dangerous this nutjob was and remains even in death. How dare he polarize this nation in such a disgraceful manner and push creationism in our schools and paranoia in our society. How dare he condemn to hell - and he did do so - anyone, including people of faith, who didn't believe his cartoonish superstitions. How dare he tell lies to children!...

Read the rest and don't forget to watch the video.

It is regrettable that the gullible also share some of the blame for insisting on remaining gullible. But there are those far worse, those that use gullibility as one of their excuses and who go along to get along.

Hannity - Reed On Falwell, Slaughtered By Hitchins

Ralph Reed tries to hide his lying crookedness behind a facade of piety. He and Hannity are two of the sleaziest people on earth. But here they are thinking they can become heroes by praising Falwell whom god struck dead this week and by trying to attack Christopher Hitchins for calling Falwell what he was. It is particularly stupid of Hannity and Reed to claim Falwell should be honored for creating Liberty University, a compound no different that those built by the likes of Jim Jones, David Koresh and Elizabeth Clare Prophet.

PW

I feel that nothing so casts down the manly mind from it's height as the fondling of women and those bodily contacts which belong to the married state.

[St. Augustine, De Trinitate 7.7]

Climate Myths

Getting the major claims about the global climate all together in one place is hard to do in a sound bite world. Michael Le Page, however has done a good job of it with an article in New Scientist debunking 26 mythes about global warming. Go There and sin no more.>>

More Computer Stuff

I visited my old work joint this morning and got off with some goodies. The owner let me have the computer I used there along with a handfull of accessories and a used LCD monitor. So now I not only have backups of all my bits, I also have hardware spares. I switched the LCD monitor with the one I've been using here. I think the picture is a little better in most ways but it is a 17" monitor in place of the 19" CRT I've been using. There is another problem, besides a slightly smaller screen, that I haven't figured out. Everything is distorted taller and skinnier than it should be. A perfect circle on the old CRT monitor comes out as a circle stretched vertically on the LCD. I have played around with all the resolution settings and the least distorted is 1280 x 1084. The monitor is a Dell 1702FP and I think it's supposed to go to 1600 by something but I haven't got it there yet. At least it will save some electricity. A pretty good morning.

Falwell Struck Dead, Kind Words

It is often said that if you can't say something nice about the person, don't say anything at all. With that in mind, he's dead, that's good. More>>

Fax: T Paine to A Dean

"It cannot therefore be an object for faith to act upon, for faith is nothing more than an assent the mind gives to something it sees cause to believe is fact. But priests, preachers, and fanatics, put imagination in the place of faith, and it is the nature of the imagination to believe without evidence." More>>

Templates and links

Messing with Blogger Templates for this site is a pain. Since this site is hosted elsewhere so that I can manage the email the way I want, for now at least, adding links and tweaking other stuff requires hunting down the code and typing and trying and ... just too much work. Now that I've learned that, maybe I'll teach myself how to build it all another way. At least I've managed to put up some links to some of my favorite reads over there on the right side of the page. Some day, we'll be able to do all this with just our cell phone. I can imagine a cell phone that can figure out where it is, scan a product or allow me to pick one from a list and tell me where to find it at the best price including drive and time expenses. Maybe we'll even be able to post stuff and see our favorite feeds as we go about out business without having to use our 200 watt computer. Or, maybe, just maybe, someone will come up with a cell phone that will understand and rub my back and say, "Good Dog".

Back to basics

I've been shopping for blogging methods. It is just too much work. So I'm back to blogger for now.