I am here in my room, hearing the wind rattle the screen in the window. I am very aware right now that mine is the coldest room in the house. Tonight might well be a blanket-plus-comforter night.

Today, as I was updating the software on my iBook, I noticed that metacity was installed. I do not use metacity at all, much less on my iBook running MacOS X, so my natural reaction was to remove it. I was rather surprised to find that doing so was not all that straightforward. This is one of the things that I find inadequate in darwinports, that when I am trying to remove software that things depend on, I have to remove each manually and in order. It cannot sort through the list of packages on the command line and sort them appropriately for me. But I am going down a tangent here.

Returning to the topic at hand, I found that I had to remove the gnome python desktop stuff. Since nothing appeared to depend on it, I assumed that it must be something I installed by mistake, and removed it.

Then I go to see if gramps is installable yet. A significant number of ports have been upgraded since I last tried, so this is a reasonable experiment. What is the first package it pulls as darwinports tries to install it? Metacity.

Again, I do not use metacity at all. Gramps runs just fine on my linux desktop. Metacity is clearly not a dependency of gramps. Why is it being pulled then?

The problem with many GNOME programs (of which gramps is one), is that the authors consider the case of using the software with something other than the default GNOME environment as an afterthought at best. Thus to require a window manager for a graphical program makes some sense. But I do not use that window manager, and any of a number of other ones work perfectly well with gramps. So why in the world must I have metacity? Only because the authors of GNOME are infested with a lets-take-over-the-world attitude.

Those of us developing gaim are not like that. We know full well that gaim is not and never will be the best client for everyone. That is why we are working on the core/ui split, so that others can write their own interface, one that better fits their needs, without duplicating all of the work that goes into making that interface run. Open source is, or at least should be, about choices. We ought not to forget that.

“When the time comes, as it surely will, when we face that awesome moment, the final judgment, I’ve often thought, as Fulton Sheen wrote, that it is a terrible moment of loneliness. You have no advocates, you are there alone standing before God — and a terror will rip your soul like nothing you can imagine. But I really think that those in the pro-life movement will not be alone. I think there’ll be a chorus of voices that have never been heard in this world but are heard beautifully and clearly in the next world — and they will plead for everyone who has been in this movement. They will say to God, ‘Spare him, because he loved us!’” —Congressman Henry Hyde

I am told that the story about the new imaging for babies in the womb did make it into the news here. That is quite a surprise.

these babies are.^[1] Is it any wonder that I see this story only in the British press? Our own media would never air this story, particularly not that opening paragraph.

There is more money available for ESCR with federal, state, and private sources than can currently be spent! It is Bush’s assertion of a moral principle, expressed through his policy, that embryos have intrinsic moral worth and should not be treated as harvestable crops, which is the actual cause of all the fuss.^[1]

The commissioner said she wanted to “unbundle” large companies such as Germany’s E.On, and Electricite de France – so that the businesses that generated power and supplied gas were not the same ones that controlled the network of pipelines.^[1]

I wonder how that will square with the socialist governance of France.

It must be really very comforting to be able to dismiss everyone who disagrees with you as uneducated. “Oh, he must be ignorant, or stupid, not to believe in global warming.” It is certainly far easier than actually questioning your assumptions. Today I read that the chief economist for Chrysler thinks that Europeans are being a little bit hysterical in their approach to global warming.^[1]

The article starts with a brief summery of where Mr. Jolissaint (the Chrysler employee in question) was speaking, and what he said. It concludes that summary with “Mr Jolissant’s remarks illustrate the yawning gap between mainstream opinion on climate change among the educated elites of Europe and America.”^[2] The implication here is clear: Mr. Jolissant, and the rest of the United States, is either not as smart or not as educated as those who believe in global warming.

The rest of the article, roughly half its length, is on an entirely unrelated set of topics. It is talking about the track record of economists from the General Motors, Ford and DaimlerChrysler in economy. Apparently, if you failed to predict the extent of the rise in gas prices, or the slow down in the United States economy, you must be wrong when you say that Europeans are being hysterical. This sort of ad-hominem attack always makes a logically invalid argument, and if that is the support that Mr. Schifferes thinks best to offer as a refutation of Mr. Jolissant’s claims, we must consider that perhaps it is because Europeans are being “quasi-hysterical.”

As the Democrats take power in Congress, they, being Democrats, think first about our taxes. Back in the early days of the Republican majority in the House, a rule was passed requiring a three-fifths majority to raise taxes. Democrats elected not to repeal this rule: doing so would open them up to easy criticism. Instead, they created a loophole; the rule can now be suspended by a simple majority.^[1] This makes it much easier for them to raise our taxes as time goes on.

I am less sure what to make of the other rule change. They also voted to put Congress under a “pay as you go” rule. This rule appears to be miss-named, it does not require an end to deficit spending, or only spending money as it comes in. Instead, it requires that any tax cut be either paired with a tax hike, a new tax, or a reduction in spending. On one hand, we should not have any deficit spending, and this rule has, on the surface at least, some potential to help end that. On the other hand, not all tax cuts reduce the available funds to congress.

Taxes work on a sort of bell curve. For very low tax rates, an increase in taxes increases funds. At some point, the exact value of which economists differ, the tax rate starts to stifle the economy. People buy less, businesses make less, they innovate less, grow less. At this point, a tax hike would reduce funds. Those in favor of tax cuts generally feel that we have already passed this point. Democrats usually feel that either we have yet to reach it, or that we can avoid this effect by only taxing “the rich.”

In practice, it often feels like everyone who is not decidedly low income is part of “the rich” in the eyes of a Democratic congress-critter. That is, however, a different discussion.

The end result is that if the Republicans are right, that a tax cut would create an increase in revenue (by moving us back towards the peak of the bell curve above), then this new rule is senseless. The hypothetical future Republican majority will be forced to undermine the effects of their tax cut by raising them elsewhere, or to cut spending. I am all in favor of this latter, but either option will open them up to severe demagoguery. The net result appears to be that it is now much easier to raise taxes, and much more difficult to cut them.

[T]he Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy found that boys molested by men are almost four times more likely to become homosexual or bisexual than boys who weren’t molested. Homosexual activists don’t want you to know that, because it undermines the myth that people are “born gay.” Although homosexuals and bisexuals are less than 3% of the male population, male-on-male abuse accounts for about a third of all child molestation. The Archives of Sexual Behavior reported that “eighty-six percent of offenders against males described themselves as homosexual or bisexual.” Homosexual activists don’t want you to know that either, because it undermines the myth that homosexuality is an entirely harmless “identity,” rather than a psychological and behavioral pathology. Not all homosexuals are child molesters, and not all child molesters are homosexual–but the link is simply too strong to ignore – even if it is politically incorrect.^[1]

Naturally statistics like these, if accurate and reflective of reality (statistics are always suspect), would reshape our perception of the problems in the church. It appears the Vatican, and our bishops here, believe these statistics. The logical necessity of their crackdown on the admission of those with homosexual tendencies to the priesthood follows from this. Indeed, if you believe these statistics to be accurate, it would be hard to justify not acting as they have.