Author: N.Z. Bear

OK, to all those kind folks who have been on the opposite side of the ‘Pledge’ argument as this bear, here’s your big chance to sweep right past that little issue and win the bigtime: convince me that there is, indeed, a God.
If there is a kind and benevolent deity watching over us all, then rumor from Ain’t-It-Cool-News will prove true, and become reality:
News hit these green shores this morning which seems to solves the problems of the world – or at least a few sci-fi franchises.
On one hand, The BBC want to continue ‘Doctor Who’ but up the budgets, which isn’t feesable without an American audience.
On the other hand, Anthony Stewart Head wants to spend time in the U.K with his family, but loves the cult audience that ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’ brings him. With t Whedon and the BBC STILL to announce a date for ‘Watcher’ ‘Giles’ or ‘Ripper’ – he may have found the perfect answer…
in a feat of impreccable casting, someone decided to put those hands together and consider something that makes this fanboy sign in post-orgasmic fullfillment: Giles taking on The Daleks!!!
Giles and Doctor Who?
Yes, please!
(PS – Yes, I am a ranting fanbear; get over it… what, I’m only allowed to post about horrible diseases and deep arguments on the nature of our society? Phlpht! to that…)

From
The Bear Necessities? It’s “silly season” in the mainstream press at the moment, and Bibendum is no exception. Apparently villagers in Dobratic in Bosnia have had a young bear living in the meadow close to the village since hunters killed his mother. The villagers have fed him and according to locals he is so tame that you can sit down and enjoy a beer with him without fear that he will turn aggressive. However, the bear, named Mrki, has been tricked into going on the wagon when people grew tired of his drunken ‘singing’ after finding half-drunk cans left over by the locals.
According to village coffee shop owner Tadija Sugic “It got to the stage of him drinking up to 20 cans of beer a day and getting drunk. We tried to give him soft drinks like cola and orange, but he just didn’t like them so we decided to trick him with non-alcoholic beer – and it’s worked a treat. He loves it.”
It’s a damned shame this is happening in Bosnia, not Germany. ‘Cause what with the Germans’ new laws on animal rights, I think there’d be a fine lawsuit here.
Non-alchoholic beer for a bear! It’s … unnatural.
Update: Jeff at Protein Wisdom points us to information showing us why this will be a very healthy bear!

The U.N. released their report on worldwide HIV/AIDS infection yesterday, to little fanfare. After all, a man had just completed circumnavigating the globe in a balloon — the world had far more important matters on its mind.
A few statistics from the report:
– In Zimbabwe, the size of an average primary school class will be down by nearly 25% in 2010 due to HIV
– The expected lifespan for a person born in South Africa was 60 years in 1990. It is now 47 years.
– In seven countries in sub-Saharan Africa, infant mortality has increased between 20% and 40% due to HIV
– In Botswana, life expectancy is 37 years, down from 60 just five years ago.
– Between 2000 and 2020, the U.N. estimates that 68 million people will die as a result of HIV.
It has struck me for some time that the HIV crisis has become a horrifying example of the journalistic mantra “if it happens every day, it can’t be news.”. We’ve heard so much about HIV over the past years that we’ve become mentally saturated; the warnings and predictions simply slide off of us, unnoticed. When they are given any media play at all, that is.
Or is it the simple truth that people have a difficult time truly grasping suffering and death which occurs thousands of miles from their homes? If so, I think we need to keep in mind that if simple human decency doesn’t move us to act, enlightened self-interest should. Ross over at the Bloviator revisits an issue that I and others have discussed previously — the simple truth that if you have states which are, effectively, collapsing due to the HIV/AIDs epidemic, you inevitably end up with regions which are ripe for political unrest, terrorism, and even genocide.
I throw out the question to you, then: why is the prediction that millions of people will die every year, and the potential prospect for widespread state failures on an entire contintent, being met with such indifference?
To put matters in perspective, I added the U.N.’s prediction to data on some more familiar tragedies of the 20th century and created the chart to the right; I used numbers from The History Place. I’d add a clever or pithy comment here to describe the chart, but frankly, it leaves me without very much at all to say.
There is, of course, always the possibility or argument that the U.N.’s data is simply wrong; or deliberately inflated. I’d welcome data to advance that thesis — because frankly, I’d feel a whole lot better if it were proven true.
Clarification: The six million deaths quoted for the Nazi Holocaust is of course the number of Jews who were killed. I am well aware that many non-Jewish people were killed; however, in my haste this morning I was unable to find a source to cite for an accurate count of the non-Jewish total. Anyone who can provide one, please post in the comments.
Update: Ross found a source — at the Red Cross of all places — stating the total number of Holocaust dead at 11 million, which sounds about right to me. (Don’t expect a chart update anytime soon — it’s a pain).
Back on Topic Update: Den Beste makes a grim but compelling case that we need to consider drastic measures when dealing with — or not dealing with — the epidemic.

OK, OK. I give. No more Pledge emails! I surrender.
After putting it off for too long, I have finally gotten around to doing a roundup of all the mails and links that y’all sent me regarding the Plege decision. Despite my dread of the task, it turned out to be even worse than I thought — you people sure do go on!
I hopefully got all of them; but if I missed yours, please post it as a comment.
Here goes — enjoy!

Damn. Hesitate, and you are lost.
Driving home from work last night, listening to Marketplace, it occured to me to wonder why, given that Worldcom’s stock was at $0.10 , nobody was attempting a takeover of the company.
After all, Worldcom basically owns 50 % of the Internet. Surely that’s worth something.
So, snug in my cleverness, I figured I had an easy win: pop open News.com, find the # of shares outstanding, multiply by the share price, and wallah! Clever post describing exactly how much it would cost to buy half the Internet. (There’s the little matter of their $30 billion in outstanding debt, but that’s why I’m a blogger and not a financial analyst). I could’ve even thrown in a clever line about putting it up on eBay.
Well, seems to have beaten me to the punch.. IDT, a small telcom company, has offered to buy certain Worldcom units for five billion dollars.
Examining the deal closely, though, it seems they are only interested in some of the voice communications assets — News.com describes the purchase as being for units which provide “local phone services to businesses, and the MCI consumer and small-business long-distance operations.”
So what about the Internet? Doesn’t anybody want to buy that? As of this morning, Worldcom’s market capitalization is a measly $740 million. Given the huge level of their debt ($30B, in case you forgot), the actual price of their shares has essentially become a rounding error for anybody thinking of purchasing the company outright.
Anybody care to set up the eBay auction?

Robert Crawford out further Congressional efforts to defend life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — for record companies. Observe:

One Congressman wants to legalize cracking — so long as it’s a big corporation breaking into your computer.
While content owners now can try to block access to intellectual
property pirates, they cannot use the range of technological options
that they want, chiefly because some tactics are illegal under state and
federal law. Berman’s bill would legalize some techniques over the
protests of file-sharing advocates.
This brought a question to my mind. Given that (I believe) we’ve already got laws on the books against unauthorized entry into computers owned by somebody else, has any consumer ever actually tried to get a company prosecuted under criminal law for spyware or other intrusive programs?
These cases always seem to be discussed in terms of consumer privacy and consumer protection statutes — but in actual spyware cases where a program is transmitting data back to a company without the users consent, why wouldn’t there also be a violation of anti-cracking statues?
Anybody with any case references and/or legal opinions, please chime in…

And I thought California had budget problems. Seems Tennessee is suffering from unpassed budgetitis, which means they’ve shut down all non-essential state government services until the state legislature can stop squabbling and actually pass a budget.
Media outlets covering the story have noted one particularly intriguing impact of the shutdown, including Tennessean:
As one of the first orders of business when the House convened at 10 a.m. yesterday, Naifeh noted one impact of the partial shutdown in the government — the cleaning contract expired at 12:01 a.m.
So, Naifeh said, members will responsible for keeping their desks and offices clean. Throughout the day, lawmakers, lobbyists and even the assistant clerk of the Senate emptied trash cans overflowing from garbage that accumulated during the marathon weekend of meetings on the budget.
So, quite literally, the legislators are forced to stew in an ever-growing pile of their own filth until they can play nicely enough together to fix the mess they’ve created.
I find this a most promising motivational technique for lawmakers, which bears further exploration at the Federal level…

Dean Peters has appears to be a scoop: seems the WayBack Machine has been hacked:
PORN WARNING – it may just be my leg of the network, but any time I enter a web site to view on the The Internet Archive: WayBack Machine – I’m getting re-directed to a PORN site. Especially disturbing when I wanted to see the 1998 version of RedlandBaptist.org.
Now that’s just not right. Bad hackers! No treats.
Others have confirmed; I’m not going to try, as I’m at my place of business now, and well, there’s just no reason to tempt fate, now is there?

KCRW radio’s The Point focused on illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexican border yesterday; RealAudio is here.
At the center of the show was the statistic that since 1994, nearly 2000 immigrants have died attempting to cross the desert, despite the U.S. border patrols’ efforts to a) stop them from trying at all and b) capture/rescue them if they do try.
So the question is, what to do? One fellow on the show wanted 20,000 U.S. troops (real military, not border patrol) to take up station down south and truly seal the border. Another took the opposite view, pointing out that many U.S. businesses actually depend on the illegal workers coming into the country; that the U.S. economy is inextricably linked with Mexico’s; and that the rational thing to do is to legalize much of the immigration occuring now.
For me, either of these solutions seem better than the current reality. The 20,000 troop option, obviously, is the simplest conceptually, which always has appeal to some. Build a wall, and all that. And in the days of wholesale terrorism, having truly controlled borders doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.
But I keep thinking about the second fellow, and the points he made about the American economy depending on immigrant labor — legal and illegal. And that made even more sense to me.
It seems to me that illegal immigrants serve — and have served for a long time — to fill a gap in the U.S. economy. They take the lowest-rung jobs; that’s obvious. But those jobs also have one other very significant characteristic — they’re being paid under the legal minimum wage.
And so it seems to me that to face the question of illegal immigration in a truly open and rational way, you have to also look at the minimum wage. On the one hand, if you put those 20,000 troops down there, who’s going to do the jobs currently being done by illegal immigrants? Can the employers afford to just start hiring legal workers at full legal wages? Or do they just go bust?
And on the other hand, what if you do legalize immigration? Doesn’t the same thing happen? If you let all the immigrants coming in illegally enter legally; well then, they’ll have the full protection of the law which they lack today. And presumably, the employers who are hiring them today will be under much more scrutiny and pressure to pay them the legal minimum. So again: can they afford it or do they go bust?
I don’t know the answers here, and so at this point, I’ll give a big shoutout to Jane Galt and Prof. DeLong — either of you two care to pick up the ball from here and help me out with the hardcore economics side of this equation? What’s the economic impact, in theory, to the U.S. economy of suddenly turning all the undocmented immigrant jobs currently being paid under minimum wage into fully legal minimum-wage jobs?
Supplemental Linkage:
Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) – One group supporting broader legal immigration.
National Border Patrol Council – Labor union for Border Patrol officers. Hear from the people on the front line.
Operation Gatekeeper – Department of Justice doc on one of the recent attempts to crackdown on immigration.

Hmmmm. Somewhere along the line, swapped me into a new category on his blogroll. I’m now under “A Few Good Men”, with such notables as Sgt. Stryker.
Maybe it’s because I complained about the transvestite implication of his previous category for me, “Some Like It Hot”.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Update: If you are suffering from InstaWithdrawal, go check out Martin… he’s got the goods on what all your favorite bloggers are up to…

I’m not a huge modern-era Disney fan. Little Mermaid was fun; everything else since I could pretty much take or leave. Didn’t even bother with Mulan and Atlantis; although Emperor’s New Groove was a blast.
But and Stich… this one’s a classic.
I first encountered Stitch in one of the many mini-preview “inter-Stitch-als” that Disney released on the Web in the leadup to the release — starting way back about six months ago. It was a takeoff on Beauty and the Beast, which Stitch crawls out on a chandelier to observe Beauty and her Beast dancing gracefully through the ballroom — and then proceeds to come crashing down in the middle of the dance floor, nearly squashing the pair.
Beauty dusts herself off, raises her nose and sniffs, “I’ll be in my room — Get your own movie,” walking off stage — and Stitch, muttering something incompressible in his own odd language, then gives an unmistakable wolf-whistle as the fair lady passes out of sight.
I was hooked. I liked this little guy’s style.
And it only got better. Watching the Interstitchals that followed, and the full length preview that eventually came after them, gave tantalizing glimpses of a film that combined beautiful handpainted animation with a central character who embodied fun in a way that I hadn’t seen in a Disney flick — or any other — in ages; if ever.
So when I finally saw the film last weekend, I expected to have a good time. I expected to laugh; I expected to revel in Stitch’s blithe disregard for all civilized norms of behavior and his sheer perverse joy in wreaking havoc on the world around him.
What I didn’t expect was to be touched. The goddamn thing actually brought tears to my eyes.
Because in Lilo and Stich, writer/directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois have created characters and story that mines deep veins of human emotion and need — for belonging, for family, for a sense of self and of place in the world.
These are not new or original themes to find in an animated feature by any means. But Lilo and Stich does something few ‘kids’ films attempt: it tackles deep and intense emotional issues headon, without sugarcoating them with the now-common postmodern wink-and-a-nudge that excuses the audience from any actual need to feel for the characters. And so it delivers the fun and mischief that the trailers promised — but it demands that you come along on a rocky ride through dark emotional territory along the way.
And in doing so, it ascends to the level of animated masterpiece the likes of which hasn’t been seen since — well, since Bambi.
I saw one review of the film which said that criticized it for being too derivative of ‘E.T.” I don’t recall the reviewer’s name, but this totally misses the boat. Stitch is not E.T. —- he’s Frankenstein for kids.
But he’s more than just the pathos and loneliness of the Frankenstein monster shrunk down into an odd-looking six-armed blue doglike package. Stitch lights up the screen with his utter delight in destruction and mischief. He is in this way, a direct descendent of that classic of ‘toons, Bugs Bunny. But part of Stitch’s charm is that unlike Bugs — who causes trouble in a generally honorable way, but does so with full moral knowledge of his actions — Stitch is a true innocent. He truly has no concept of right and wrong; he just knows that smashing stuff and wreaking havoc is fun.
And that combination — the abandoned loneliness and monsterous innocence of Frankenstein blended with the joyful mischief of Bugs — is what makes Stitch the most compelling animated character I’ve seen in years. Maybe ever.
Go see the movie, and let the little fellow introduce himself.
You might cry — but you won’t regret it.

Yet another fellow is doing the ole’ move thing (also to a new host; also to MT). Make sure to update your bookmarks for Wisdom.

Well, that’s it. Criminey, this has been quite a haul.
After a few weeks of planning, and a good week of futzing and fooling with templates, hosts, and random CGIs, the new site design is alive and well here on our new domain: truthlaidbear.com .
First thanks goes to Stacy over at Sekimori; she turned my vision for the logo (that handsome fellow at the typewriter to the left) into a beautiful reality (& chipped in the redirect script for my old Blogspot site, too!). And more notably, she put up with my midstream vision changes, which says much for her patience.
The remainder of the design was done with own two paws; I can now say I know more than I ever intended to about CSS and Type templates. And for the record: the core MT installation was a breeze; the hard work was all the fiddling I wanted to do to get everything just right.
With the new design comes all the bloggy goodness we’ve all come to expect from Moveable Type sites: a search function, comments, and yes, even an XML feed. (For the record, I have no idea if the XML feed works or not — if you try it, let me know how it works out!) And oh yeah: I’ve got a new email address. Send it all to bear@truthlaidbear.com .
Finally, a special thanks goes out to those who helped out with beta-testing of the site over the past week. In particular, anyone with a Mac should thank Jeff Cooper over at Cooped Up for doing an outstandingly thorough job of testing and pointing out some nasty Mac errors (now resolved, hopefully). And of course, my usual suspects were a great help: Meryl and Lair came through for me as always. (If I’m leaving anyone out here, give me a shout out; I think I lost a few emails in the move…)
I expect there’s still a few bugs to be hunted down and squashed over the next week or so. If you find anything that doesn’t look right, or just have a comment (postive or negative) about the new site you’d like to share, drop me an email — or even better — post a comment on this message! If you’re pointing out a display problem, please make sure to note your platform, browser, and screen resolution. At this point, I’m reasonably confident that IE5+, Netscape5+, and Mozilla 1.0 will work just fine on all platforms; all other browsers are a question of if you’re feeling lucky today.
And oh, yeah: if I regain my energy, I might even try to write something tonight or tomorrow morning. Expect a Lilo and Stitch review soon (actually, it will be more like an “ode”; yes, I loved it), and even more comments I’ve received from folks on the issue-that-will-not-die: the Pledge.
Come on in, hope you enjoy the new look, and I’ll be back when I’ve decompressed…
Update: I did miss someone. Thanks also to Andrew over at Dodgeblog for even-more Mac testing… !

OK, I was about to declare posting done until the relaunch, but damn:
The Israeli army has destroyed most of the Palestinian Authority’s local headquarters in the West Bank town of Hebron, which it says has been used as a refuge by 15 wanted militants.
Soldiers and bulldozers are working their way through the rubble of the building looking for the Palestinians. No-one has been found – dead or alive – according to Israeli officials…
The Israeli army said it had used more than a ton of explosives in the operation. It left an enormous pile of rubble and overturned cars.
That’s from BBC report; but its all over, pick the news outlet of your choice.
One aspect that’s kind of subtle in the story is that the Israelis permitted a PA negotiator to enter the compound to attempt to discuss an end to the siege. When he returned, he claimed he found nobody to talk to.

Nobody in there who wants to talk about a peaceful settlement? Well OK then…. BOOM.
I can’t help but wonder if he was lying… thinking perhaps he might buy time for his buddies….?
The technical term for that strategy in this situation would be, of course, “Whooops.”
In the same story, you should also note towards the bottom this passage, which should exactly how serious the PA was about constraining Hamas:
In the Gaza Strip on Friday, the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, joined more than 1,000 Palestinians at a rally.
It was his first appearance in public since he was put under house arrest a week ago.
Palestinian police at the demonstration made no attempt to detain Sheikh Yassin.
He is reported to have said that he was unaware of any order restricting his movements.
In other words: not very.

Lots of interesting thought going on around this issue; here’s a roundup of the comments I’ve received from folks:
Dave the Redwood Dragon agreed with my position, and added:
To his sentiments I’ll add only this: that the genius of the Founding Fathers in regards to the place of religion in political affairs was the insistence that their intersection take place only on an individual level, not the collective level of government action or support. The Pledge is, by virtue of its recitation in schools and other public, government-supported forums, just such a collective expression, and so the phrase “under God” is, as I said above, a blot on the Constitution.
Well said.
Allen at Cockalorum, however, finds me damp, and my arguments unconvincing, writing:
“You’re all wet.
Tolerance is not helped when one person can exercise a veto over everyone else. The whole thing is based on the idea that the plaintiff’s little girl is somehow harmed by hearing or saying “under God.” This is an endless road to go down, trying to shield everybody from having their feelings hurt. A wise parent would tell her to get over it. There are lots of things in the world that I don’t like, but I don’t expect the court to change them for me. If we allow this, we turn our society into a bunch of little groups angry at each other, and claiming Constitutional protection for their own parochial view.
I don’t believe that the Constitution was ever intended to create the kind of church-state wall this decision seems to call for. The fact that it guarantees freedom of religion on one hand and outlaws establishment on the other indicates that what it is after is tolerance, both by the majority and the minority. But this decision favors intolerance by a minority. For you to compare the pledge to religious fascism is more intolerance. We really need to get rid of the “I’m being picked on” mentality and learn to live together. If the girl had been kicked out of school or subjected to actual abuse and maltreatment by the school administration for her refusal to say the pledge, she’d have a case, but that isn’t the case here. Basically, this is a case of censorship masked as a constitutional imperative.”
Sorry, but I don’t buy it. This isn’t about tolerance: I would not support a lawsuit that tried to bar children from reciting the “under-God” version of the Pledge at recess on their own, for example, so long as there wasn’t any nefarious coercion or encouragement going on from teachers or faculty. Treating this like a censorship case totally misses the point that we’re talking about a state-sponsored loyalty oath, not something published in a newspaper or discussed among individual citizens. There’s a big difference. And for the record, I didn’t compare the Pledge to religious facism — I pointed out that we are at war with religious facism, and that at such times, it is important for us to consider what kind of society we want to be (I prefer a secular one). I actually said quite clearly that I did not think the “under God” phrase was the first step towards the Talibanization of America; and in fact, pointed out that this is used as a strawman argument by those who want to make secular folks like myself look unreasable and stupid (without actually going to the work of providing solid arguments against us).
One note of concession: I don’t have the legal or Constitutional background to have a firm opinion on whether the Constitution was truly intended to build as severe a wall between Church and State as I would like to see; I suspect it probably wasn’t. So I’m fine accepting that potentially, on Constitutional / legal grounds, this decision might have been in error. My arguments are aimed at what decision would be right for our society; I leave the legal analysis to those more qualified.
I also attempted to goad some of the Christian bloggers I know into commentating; I met with partial success with Dean over at HealYourChurchWebsite — he dropped me some interesting thoughts in e-mail, but pleaded server-movage when I bugged him to actually blog them. So here are some key exerpts:
“…First of all, we’re talking Constitutional Law here – and me being a guy with a bach’ in Music/Opera and masters in Computer Science/Operating Systems – if I can’t abstract it into neat, reusable and easy to perform axiomatic semantics — hmmm —… To me, the very same code monkey who brought you the Mean Dean Anti-Spam E-Mail Obfuscator [cool technique — you should check it out -NZB] , it appears that “Separation of Church and State” has been confused with the “Establishment Clause” – and those whose religion is a to be anti-religious have taken opportunity of this confusion to rid society of any mention of God.
In other words, this has more to do with judicial activisim than anything else – and will be struck down when it gets to the Supreme Court. A point well made by Pejman Yousefzadeh
And here’s my rub on all this. If more Christians would spend more time reading Os Guinness than watching TBN, we would have a group of people who could intelligently and articulately argue this point before it ever got the 9th US C.C.A.
There will always be God haters. Just as there will always be those who hate in the name of God. By our society dumbing down our kids as to what is and is not in the Constitution, rulings like this are no surprise.
Personally, I think this is just another sign that Christians have abdicated being an influence on their society with a fortress mentality. That is, we need more believers in all areas of law, media, the universities, everywhere if we are indeed going to be the Salt and Light Jesus compelled us to be.
For me, I do it with HealYourChurchWebsite.com and writing software that saves lives…
I’ll predict right now that all these various “separation of church-n-state” cases will ‘blow-up’ in the face of those who are anti-God. Because at some point, some clever lawyer is going to successfully argue that athiesm _IS_ a religion … and when that happens, there will be an entire backlog court history to prove that the U.S.Gov’t has been actively endorsing _ITS_ tennants.
You heard it here first.”
Well, not surprisingly, I don’t agree with many of Dean’s comments (but I thank him for obliging me by sharing them). Quick responses:
First, I disagree with the argument that this is about being “anti-God” or attempting to install atheism as a state religion. There is a difference between making the Pledge — or any other document — not mention a deity, and making the Pledge explicitly declare the non-existence of any deity. When the court case comes around that wants to make the Pledge read “One nation, under no God, indivisible”, then I’ll be willing to agree that this is anti-God. Until then, I stand by the position that this is about making government God-neutral, leaving the practice of religion to individuals (as Dave points out so well above).
Second, I still believe that there is something inherently special about this particular case because it is an oath of allegiance. That’s about as symbolicly important as it gets. And so I do think it is different than having “in God we trust” on our money. The note on my money doesn’t bother me terribly much — although I wish we didn’t — but the Pledge does trouble me, simply because, as I’ve written previously, it sends such an explicitly contradictory message to the one group that we should always try our hardest to be honest with – our children.
And third, I think the cry of judicial activism is a bit overstated. If the Pledge had existed in this form for 200 years, coming down from the Founding Fathers, then perhaps it might be accurate to accuse the court of activism. But let’s remember: the phrase is question was explicitly added by Congress in 1954. I would look at this less as judicial activism, and more as fixing a dumb law that should never have been passed by Congress in the first place.
One more thoughtful email from a reader I need to quote/post/respond to here, but that will come later…

Making great progress; the new design seems to be holding up well under the critical eye of those folks who voluntered to check it out in ‘beta’. Most everything is done; a few more tweaks and then I’ll tackle the (hopefully not too odious) task of converting my Blogspot posts.

The final conversion will occur over the weekend, so don’t be surprised if the Blogspot site (here) starts doing funky things (which will be required for the conversion). If all goes well, I’ll relaunch first thing Monday morning PST.

Also: I will not be doing an Ecosystem update this weekend; sorry. Only so much time in the day & my non-writing blogging time is full up with the conversion. There will be a new update next week/weekend.

If anyone is feeling particularly helpful, I’d love some pointers on the following:

a) Any warnings/gotchas about converting posts from Blogspot to MT
b) Suggestions on how best to create redirects so folks going to my old Blogspot pages will go to the new MT site

I could also still use a few more Beta examiners; the more the merrier. No requirements other than to look at the new site sometime over the next 72 hours and tell me what you think; if you’re interested, me a line.

Ouch! couldn’t make it to the panel either.

No InstaGuy, no BleatMan. That really sucks…

Instaguy (fresh from a failed attempt at heading to the blogging panel — sorry about that Glenn!) – us to a challenge from TAPPED:
WE CAN’T BELIEVE THIS. You can say a lot of things about the Pledge of Allegiance ruling released the other day. But never did Tapped believe that anyone — even Cal Thomas — would say this:
“On the eve of our great national birthday party and in the aftermath of Sept. 11, when millions of us turned to God and prayed for forgiveness of individual and corporate sins and asked for His protection against future attacks, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has inflicted on this nation what many will conclude is a greater injury than that caused by the terrorists.”
So although he hedges slightly, it seems that Thomas basically thinks the pledge ruling is worse than 9/11. This is simply stunning — and at least as bad as dumb statments by Falwell/Robertson on the right or Chomsky on the left. The blogosphere ought to get itself whipped into a frenzy about this one.
Nah. Whipping and frenzying is not required for situations like this. They can be handled calmly, rationally, and dispassionately. Observe:
Mr. Thomas, you, sir, are an idiot. Good day.

Meryl us to a scientifically interesting and morally heartwarming story from Jerusalem — it’s definitely worth a look.

I want one of