Author: Ed That Goes Ping

Boston.com / News / Nation / Aid cuts threatened by US over tribunal

Boston.com / News / Nation / Aid cuts threatened by US over tribunal

UNITED NATIONS — The US government is quietly threatening to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars of foreign aid aimed at combating terrorism, resolving conflicts, and building democracy unless countries agree to shield Americans from prosecution at the UN permanent war crimes tribunal.

An amendment to the 3,000-page budget bill before the House of Representatives would punish countries, even close allies in the war on terrorism, that have joined the International Criminal Court and have declined to promise they would not send American citizens to the court without US permission.

This is kind of like if the Federal Government withheld funding for local education unless the school board agreed never to press charges for child molestation against any employee of the Federal Government.

Since they have already committed a sizable number of war crimes, seeking immunity from prosecution for more is outrageous.

Scare Quotes

Cops: Teacher accused of sexual assault ‘wed’ girl in pagan ritual

I read this and I can’t help wondering if they keep putting “wed” and “married” in scare quotes because it was:

a) same-sex
b) pagan
c) illegal cause she was 14 years old (age of marriage in MI is 18 without parental consent, 16 with).

I hope it was c).

Local pagans are trying to make sure people don’t get the idea that paganism is somehow all about sexual abuse, which is not that surprising cause the first article was pretty lurid about the whole pagan thing, with accusations of brainwashing and so on.

I didn’t even know West Michigan had local pagans till a couple of ’em moved in across the street from us, in an apartment formerly occupied by Mormons…

Mac Wack Keyboard Attack

For the last few days, approximately once a day, my keyboard has completely stopped working on this Titanium Powerbook G4/500. I can still switch apps with command-tab, but I can’t type any words. Anywhere.

The first time this happened I was running several exotic enhancers, like DragThing and WindowShade X and uControl and stuff, so I toasted ’em all (especially uControl, as it is a kernel-level hack that affects the keyboard). Now I’m not running with anything unusal except Quicksilver (which I wasn’t running before), and I’ve had the same thing happen a couple times. Suddenly, no type-ee, no how. And a reboot fixes it.

Anyone ever heard of this?

(No, it’s not the numlock key. I do that sometimes, but this isn’t that.)