This BBC report just made my day. Bill Gates is “’struggling to concentrate’, ‘not a natural leader’, ’struggling to keep control of a confusing world’ and ‘an unstable man who is feeling under enormous pressure.’”

Given the murder of that family in New England, this sort of report is disturbing.

Any number of places are reporting that SBC is planning on buying AT&T. Makes me feel rather sad. AT&T has done good things and bad things like any other corporation, but it really is, as the NYTimes states, an icon that is now disappearing.

Why in the world do non-citizens have the full range of constitutional rights? See this BBC report, this AP News report, or others.

Oliver North quoted an Iraqi governor who in just a couple sentences captured the transforming power that women hold: “Women voting will change everything. No woman who carries a child for nine months wants that child to grow up to be a suicide terrorist. They want the politicians to give their children something to live for, not die for — and we will have to do it.”¹ Women, who safe-guard life in its earliest moments, have the power to shape society like no other. Beyond moments such as this quote refers to, I am reminded of the homily I heard at St. Veronica’s last week. Guys are very simple; we want to be in relationship with a girl. And, for the right girl, we’ll do anything in our power, and some things we would have thought impossible, to keep her in our lives. This gives girls an unique chance to influence the world. They get to set a standard for the men in their lives, for the men they choose to date, the man they choose to marry, the children they raise. Men are of course not absolved of responsibility, it is a poor man indeed who does not exceed common expectations for morality, decency, honor in today’s society, but it is women who define what is “exceptional” and what is “expected.” God help our girls to set high standards once again.

1)North, Oliver. “Of bombs, bullets and ballots” January 28, 2005

In Germany prostitution is legal. Not only legal, it is a “normal,” tax paying industry which has access to official databases of job seekers. Yes, the scum who run such things can call you up if they like the sound of your resume and try to get you to work for them. Now Germany is also in quite a fix because it is a welfare state. And in trying to get a handle on that, it has decided that if you are out of work for more than a year, and you turn down a job offer, you can have your welfare benefits cut. How does this relate? Some scumbag offers you a job as a prostitute, you turn him down, now all of a sudden you don’t get welfare. Now, I’m against welfare in general and in principle, but in the presence of a welfare state, with its high taxes, people are hard pressed to fund private/religious social services. Add into the mix Germany’s ever increasing atheist populations (well, its Muslim population is probably increasing faster, but outside of that), and you have a situation that is worse than welfare: you have women being forced into prostitution by the state. Lovely. See this telegraph.co.uk article for documentation of this outrage.

William brought this article to my attention. I’d heard about this guy’s research from other places, and it really doesn’t surprise me. Like most (good) work from an economist, this conforms to the “it makes sense once you say it” rule. This article has more detail than the one I had seen, and I find the fact that it was sent to me significant, the research in question is more noteworthy than I had originally thought. It appears there is a chance that this will not be ignored.

Michelle Malkin writes about some of the effects of Europe’s burgeoning Muslim population. Mostly consisting of quotes from other works, this is a good introduction for those who think that Muslims will assimilate into their host cultures.

I hate shoveling ice. It is far too heavy.

So I moved Mom over to the new post page I wrote yesterday. Seems to work well. Turning off fancy quotes was fairly trivial, only took me about 5 minutes to find it. I think the complaints about it I saw online (none of which told me where to look) where just MSWord users griping.

PVI wrestled Good Council today. Lost, which wasn’t unexpected, we are giving up too many points because we are short wrestlers. Such is life, we’ve got a good batch of kids though, and its a shame they can’t have a few wins under their belt. Michael lost, but he didn’t show that lost and discouraged look after being taken down that has cost him so many matches. Definite improvement.

The Smithsonian is picking on one of their researchers for allowing an Intelligent Design article into a peer review journal. Remember, keeping such things out is a huge part of the materialist defense against such ideas. Rather than just debate them on the merits, keep them out of journals and then tell the world that the lack of such articles means it isn’t “real science.” Details are here on arn’s news blog

So I realized today why I’m having trouble with single and double quotes for my mom’s poems. WordPerfect, like MSWord, isn’t using real quotes. It is using “Fancy” or “Curly” quotes. Now I just need to learn how to turn that off. :-)

Once I have that working, I should be able to trust my code to create web pages correctly. I’ll be moving her over to a slightly different submit form that works better for just about everything else she’ll hit. And once I can trust the code to write web pages directly, I can generate more than just the web page, I can generate other views than simply alphabetical. On a side note, if I can learn about creation time and such from php, then I can do this now, and not have to generate a static page for each other view.

Update 17:55: And it turns out I can learn this, and so this page now exists, after a custom compare function to use this function. :-D

Just a short note, I just read the latest installment of Exercise Your Wonder by Dr. Howard Glicksman over at Access Research Network, a nice repository of some Intelligent Design papers, books, and other resources. I highly recommend Dr. Glicksman’s articles for anyone who actually wants to think about exactly what materialistic science claims has evolved. Dr. Glicksman presents a compelling case that the human body is a highly complex and inter-dependent construct, and challenges you to think “could this really have evolved?”. Most people I find do not want to really think. They want to believe what they are taught and told by “authorities” (scientists in this case). And it doesn’t help that so much of the response against intelligent design comes in the form of attacks against the authors (that keep them out of the main-stream journals), and over simplification of their arguments. Its fairly easy to get people to dismiss 7 day creation, and if you can keep people thinking that the choice is between that or evolution, then the argument is pretty much over. :-(

news

Lest you thought otherwise, the end of the two cases in Florida do not signal the end of th attacks on marriage. Findlaw reports on some of the continuing battles here. What a messed up world we live in when we have to worry about “sex change operations” and their effect on the validity of a marriage. Some states apparently refuse to recognize such an operation has having changed your gender. Good for them.

Some scientists have made some progress understanding the Venus fly trap. Interesting read, details are here.

Slow day today. Created an external raid, and re-looking at torque and moab. I dislike them for the most part, they seem like more trouble than they are worth. The idea is worthy enough, you have this big expensive cluster, make sure one person does not abuse it, and that everyone gets a fair shot at having their jobs get the resources needed. But the programs themselves are a pain to set up and try to understand. Looks like I’ll be visiting a client again on Tuesday, and among other things, setting torque and moab at least partially up. I wish I could get support for oscar here, the scripts they provide would handle at least some of this for me. I also am not too thrilled about visiting customers. They always ask questions I don’t have answers for.

Read Ederlyn’s post about a chocolaty Starbucks®, it reminded me of one of the (few) good points that one of William’s biology professors made: why do we eat? We eat to obtain energy. Does it really matter what we eat then, so long as it isn’t poisonous in some way? Not really. What’s far more important is that you exercise at a level appropriate to your intake. But attempts to explain that, especially in the caustic way that I’m most suited to, do not seem to get through or make an impression on people.