24 Oct 2012
Mourdock’s mistake is speaking for God

The Republican Party scares me more and more with every election cycle. They are rapidly becoming religious fascists, and if anybody out there seriously thinks they'll stop with opposition to abortion and gay marriage they'll be in for a rude shock if the Teavangelicals get control of House, Senate and Presidency. Contraception will be next on the target list - even the humble condom is an affront to their almighty god. Who knows what their god will demand after that?

Steinberg correctly points out the dangers of this attitude in this piece, albeit from a Christian perspective. He's a bit more optimistic than I over their minority status, but that could be due to his location in Chicago and mine in rural Indiana.

I actually witnessed an incident similar to what he uses to illustrate his point. Some years ago I co-officiated at a funeral for two young boys who died in a fire. The family (and the funeral) was heathen, and before the service a relative of the grieving mother approached her and said "It's really OK, your little boys are in Heaven with Jesus now, and all things work for the glory of God." The mother wheeled and literally punched her cousin out cold.

These theocrats have got to be stopped, and soon, but it can't just be done in the political arena. It's going to take a cultural change towards tolerance to get any lasting good effects. Steinberg seems to think that change is underway. I hope he's right.

Indiana GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdock joined a growing list of Tea Party Republicans — Joe Walsh, Todd Akin — who stumbled into a briar patch by telling women what to believe, in this case when Mourdock said when a women conceives after a rape, “it’s something God intended.”

(link) [Chicago Sun Times]

19:20 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Rights? You have no right to your eBooks

Future tyrants won't have to burn the library, they'll just turn it off.

News spread quickly on the web today of the predicament faced by a woman in Norway, Linn, who has lost all access to the eBooks she legitimately purchased from Amazon. The story first emerged on a friend's blog, where a sequence of e-mails from Michael Murphy, a customer support representative at Amazon.co.uk were posted. These painted a picture some interpreted as Amazon remotely erasing a customer's Kindle, but in conversation with Linn I discovered that was not what had happened - something just as bad did, though.

(link) [ComputerWorld UK]

08:27 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

Who needs lawnmowers?

Not only is the grass nicely clipped, it's automatically fertilized...

The Near Eastside has an enormous number of vacant lots with overgrown grass and weeds, and almost as many abandoned houses. Instead of calling the city to take lawnmowers to those lots, or a letting a handful of good Samaritans do it themselves, the neighborhood association decided to buy sheep and let them graze.

(link) [Indianapolis Star]

08:15 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link