Newsweek & WaPo give columnist space for bigotry.

Chuck Colson is one of those men who writes weekly columns for God picked up by hundreds of mainstream newspapers around the country, apparently because God himself never writes. He's probably managed to make himself more famous for being to the right of Pat Robertson than he ever was for being one of the Watergate Seven and going to jail for Nixon.

Colson has written an apalling column which has appeared in Newsweek, the Washington Post and all his other outlets calling for the dismissal of chaplains from the military who serve Wiccan or other "pagan" religions, writing

It is debatable whether paganism is a religion, per say [sic]. It is generally defined as a pre-Christian state, but it takes a wide variety of forms-- all the way from relatively benign New Age-style nature worship, to pantheism, to witchcraft, and even human sacrifice.

Those who publicly identify themselves as pagans are at best a marginal number and are basically no different from dozens of other cults. I see no reason why Wiccans or pagans generally should have the services of taxpayer-paid chaplains. It is perfectly appropriate, if a group meets court tests for religion, that outside priest/ministers be allowed to come into federal facilities and minister.

By the way, that [sic] in there is mine; I have to believe that the editors of the column allowed it to go through only to show that Colson's writing barely reaches the level of a rabid D-list blogger and is not the work of an intellect firing on all cylinders.

You will probably be heartened by the comments section. They're overwhelmingly opposed to Colson's proposal that the courts should be the ones to determine whose religions get promulgated on federal property.

Yes, you can dishwash (some) keyboards

Filthy Keyboard

So, I have a Microsoft Internet Pro keyboard, not "natural touch" (split keyboards and Dvorak^[?] do not mix; in fact, they bend your wrists out the wrong way) and it was getting pretty filthy. So filthy, in fact, that I decided to try something desperate: dishwashing it. The MSIP (ick!) is a well-designed and reliable keyboard with a collection of "internet feature" buttons along the top row. Those can easily been programmed to work with Linux and X-Windows with the Linux Easy Access keyboard service enabled.

For the record, I'm pretty sure those stains are just wine and chocolate.

Its physical design makes it ideal for dishwashing: the entire top half, consisting of the keys secured to the shell, comes loose with the removal of six screws from the underside. All of the electronics are in the bottom half, so you can toss the entire top half of the keyboard into the dishwasher, safe in the knowledge that you're not risking much.

Clean keyboard.

I reassembled it and the results are very promising. The keyboard is clean once more, only a few scuff marks but no dirt or grime left at all. And it works quite nicely. It has a curious "dry" feeling to it, but that may be what it really felt like when I bought it two years ago.

What's especially nice is that these keyboards turn up regularly in second-hand stores like Goodwill or the Salvation Army, and cost only about five dollars apiece. I own two. Even if the electronics on a second-hand are flaky, if the topshell is in good shape you can always marry it to your existing keyboard and just keep rotating your topshell every couple of months, throwing one into the dishwasher. You need never have downtime.