Pinging stuff I care about.
What You’ll Wish You’d Known when you were in High School, by Paul Graham. I am bookmarking this here in my blog to expand on later. I don’t have time to read it this moment. It’s via slashdot and all that.
It interests me because while I am not a dot-com millionaire, I am finding out a lot of things I wish I’d known a long time ago, and I was thinking about writing just such a piece. I wonder how much mine would be different from Paul’s. Quite a bit, I suspect, from previous Graham stuff.
From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth . . . So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
George W. Bush
Second Inaugural Speech
January 20, 2005
Officers of the Central Intelligence Agency and other nonmilitary personnel fall outside the bounds of a 2002 directive issued by President George W. Bush that pledged the humane treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody, Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel, said in a document.
In written responses to questions posed by senators as part of their consideration of his nomination to be attorney general, Gonzales also said a separate congressional ban on cruel, unusual and inhumane treatment had “a limited reach” and did not aply in all cases to “aliens overseas.”
mes
Gonzales excludes CIA from rules on prisoners
January 20, 2005
thanks to billmon with a hat tip to PuddingTime
Boing Boing: Steve Jackson Games’ electronic publishing venture is brilliant
Steve Jackson Games — the venerable and excellent publisher of strategy and role-playing games — is producing an amazing new digital line of products: games distributed as PDFs. What’s amazing about that? Well, they’re only available direct from SJG, and only by electronic cash. They come with “insurance” so that if you delete the files or lose them in a crash, SJG will replace them (this also means that if you find yourself at a friend’s house and you want to play the game, you can login to the site and download any of your games). They come with software to help you build characters and otherwise relieve some of the tedious bookkeeping associated with paper-gaming. Finally, they don’t have any DRM, because SJG believes that its customers are not crooks.
Cool, but the Forge RPG bookshelf has been around for a long time.
See, this isn’t even a little bit out of character for James Dobson. He really is that batshit crazy.
Christian right against ‘pro-gay’ sea sponge – World – www.theage.com.au
Christian right against ‘pro-gay’ sea sponge
By Tom Leonard
New York
January 22, 2005Conservative Christian groups in the US have found a new sinner to rage against: SpongeBob SquarePants, a children’s cartoon character.
To his young fans and Nickelodeon, the television channel that broadcasts his escapades, SpongeBob is a sea sponge who lives with his pet snail, Gary, at the bottom of the sea. According to Nickelodeon, his “enthusiasm about just about everything makes him downright irresistible”.
Not to organisations such as Focus on the Family and the American Family Association, which insist that the character is spearheading an insidious campaign to spread homosexuality among children.
“Does anybody here know SpongeBob?” Dr James Dobson, Focus on the Family’s founder, asked guests this week at a dinner in Washington for Republican congressmen.
Dr Dobson accused SpongeBob’s creators of enlisting him in a “pro-homosexual video” in which he appeared alongside fellow children’s television characters such as Barney the purple dinosaur and Jimmy Neutron. The makers of the video planned to send it to thousands of primary schools to promote a “tolerance pledge” that includes tolerance for differences of “sexual identity”.
But, as far as his critics are concerned, SpongeBob’s complicity in the spreading of sin is proved by the knowledge that he is already a well-established gay icon – supposedly because he holds hands with his sidekick, Patrick, and they like to watch an imaginary television show called The Adventures of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy.
Nile Rodgers, the video’s creator, argues that objections to the program are based on a misunderstanding.
He insists that the video, which has been shown on network television, carries no reference to sexual identity and the tolerance pledge is mentioned only on his group’s website.
SpongeBob was “outed” by the US media in 2002 after reports that the TV show and its merchandise were popular with gays. His creator, Stephen Hillenburg, said at the time that he thought of all the characters as asexual.
It is not the first time that children’s TV favourites have come under the critical spotlight of the US Christian right. Tinky Winky, the purse-toting purple Teletubbie, was in 1999 declared a homosexual role model by the Reverend Jerry Falwell.
I made the list at #3! And yet I agree with virtually all of this.
Via MeFi