News For Abuse...

In a speech at the Kaiser Family Foundation, Senator Hilary Clinton advocated the implementation of ubiquitous Digital Access Management to Media, but not in the guise of protecting the profits of the recording industry. No, the left wing has now got its own bugaboo about why DRM is a must-have technology and why general-purpose computing is evil:

All across our country, kids today are playing increasingly violent video games while sending instant messages to friends and strangers on-line and listening to music they've downloaded on their I-Pods. How does a parent today who wants to protect their child from violent or explicit content have a chance? Parental responsibility is crucial, but we need to make sure that parents have the tools they need to keep up with this multi-dimensional environment.

Got that? A V-Chip for your iPod, your iRiver, and your Jukebox. The FCC isn't far behind, with a committee whose objective is "giving parents access to the tools needed to protect their children from inappropriate content via wireless devices."

And how much you want to bet, no matter how fire and brimstone explicit it gets, the iPod V-Chip will have no settings for filtering out Godcasts? That's right, you can now get a daily sermon podcast straight to your brain. Lovely, huh? I feel an SFnal moment coming on.

Fixed in a universe of pure hatred...

I am certainly not in the habit of quoting C.S. Lewis, mostly because I found his apologetics in The Problem of Pain to be slipshod, often founded on contradicting assumptions based upon whatever argument he's making in any given chapter. But this quote, from Mere Christianity, has some bearing today:

The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything— God and our friends and ourselves included— as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

I thought of this quote today because, for the second time this week, a news story came out about a horrific murder where, after a week of rampant blog-driven speculation, it turned out the truth was far more mundane and banal.

In the first case, a Coptic Christian family, the father of whom was known in his community for his virulent anti-Islamic positions, was found murdered in their homes. For weeks, the blogosphere was alive with rumours about revenge killings and dhimmitude. It was a robbery, plain and simple. The neighbor, who was in debt (to mobsters, one story goes), knew the Armanious family kept cash in the house. Greed, simple and banal.

In the second case, Judge Joan Lefkow came home one night to find her husband and mother murdered in their homes. The blogosphere exploded again with rumors about white supremacists on the march because Lefkow had ruled against Matt Hale in a relatively trivial civil case and Hale had sought a hired killer to "take care" of Judge Lefkow.

Now, it seems, that an unstable man who had lost a civil case against his doctors about his cancer treatments may have committed the murder all by himself. Mundane revenge, with no ideology involved.

I don't want to suggest that there are no monsters, that race and religious extremists are harmless. But I'll be happier when the blogosphere follows every frission of recrimination with a confession of contrition every time the theory du jour turns out to be less that a Tom Clancy or John Grisham plot, and more like real life.

Fun toys and facts

I'm trying to love Firefox, but I've been so used to Galeon for years that it's not quite working out for me. There are little idiosyncracies between the two browsers that drive me nuts. Perhaps the worst is that even if using a remote() command the invoking instance always pulls up the ProfileManager, but also bad is that the Button-3-paste command doesn't create a new tab. I like that feature.

But the one feature of Galeon I couldn't live without is the portal. Galeon has a script called myportal that allows you to view your bookmarks in a very nice layout. I wanted that feature, so I stole it. I saved the Galeon style sheet to disk and pasted it into the firefox directory. Ah, but how to get a version of the bookmarks file with the stylesheet? Geekspeak to the rescue:

 
#!/bin/bash 
TARG=`echo $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/*.default` 
sed -e '4a\ 
<link rel="stylesheet" href="portal.css" type="text/css">' \
     <  $TARG/bookmarks.html > $TARG/portal.html 

It's an embedded sed script that sticks the stylesheet reference into a copy of the bookmarks file called portal.html. I stuck it into the scheduler and once a day it transforms my collected bookmarks into a nicely edited home page.

---

I did not know there was something below brownie in the Girl Scouts. Kouryou-chan expressed interest, probably due to exposure from all the cookie kids, but still, if her interest maintains, Omaha and I can now enroll her. Interesting. Not sure I'm ready to be a Scout dad and all that.