General – Page 200 – The Blog That Goes Ping

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…

Drawing

Pencil drawing I did the other day. Just fooling around.

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.)

Could use some good news

Sometimes the terrible things you hear about turn out not to be true.

Yay!

(Warning: sometimes they do turn out to be true even when people say they aren’t. But it sounds like this isn’t one of those times.)

Yahoo! News – U.S. OKs Evidence Gained Through Torture

Statements produced under torture have been inadmissible in U.S. courts for about 70 years. But the U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of 550 foreigners as enemy combatants at the U.S. naval base in Cuba are allowed to use such evidence, Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle acknowledged at a U.S. District Court hearing Thursday.

OK, let’s be fair. If American military tribunals under Bush’s oversight weren’t allowed to use evidence obtained under torture, they’d have no evidence at all. You don’t want to cripple our nation’s defenders do you?

Like I always say, Bush will go down in history as The Torture President.

Part of a general pattern: Illiberals (known colloquially as “conservatives”) generally think you can solve problems by hurting people. They don’t like laws that keep them from doing so, because when they are unable to hurt people, they don’t know where to begin.