Yahoo! American Hostage Jill Carroll Released In Iraq
Less than 24 hours after her twin sister made an emotional appeal for her safe return, kidnapped American journalist Jill Carroll was released by her captors on Thursday (March 30) and is reported to be safe and unharmed in an undisclosed location in Iraq.
I had written about this earlier.
This is techie rant.
We unix/linux/open source guys like to pretend that we use the highest quality software that exists. I believe in most cases this is true. I still get pissed off, though, every time I try to edit a large file with vim. Face it, folks, sometimes you need to edit large files. It shouldn’t be that damn hard. I am editing a 760k file. Mind you, it is a mysql dump and has very few very long lines. It is still a trivial amount of bytes in this day and age and yet I am sitting here watching it faithfully doing nothing for minute after minute.
Here is my vim process:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
31730 lolife 25 0 7552 4976 1576 R 99.9 0.5 6:45.26 vim
…using 99.9% of a nice fast dual-CPU box to edit a freaking 760k file!
Can some genius set me straight on this?
Seattle Sees Worst Mass Killing Since ’83
If your little fucked-up fantasy ends with you killing yourself, may we recommend you just start by killing yourself? We would all really appreciate it and it would be a lot less trouble on your part as well.
We abhor the thought of suicide and we applaud the many individuals and organizations who work to prevent suicide. We take no joy in saying it but we’ll say it again: do not kill a bunch of people and then kill yourself. Just kill yourself. If you are going to kill yourself anyway, please do not pull innocent people into your fucked up psychosis. Get help, or off yourself, but do not kill other people.
Thank you,
The Rest of the World
Katherine Kersten is making a good career out of being completely wrong.
Her latest missive, Once same-sex marriage is OK, polygamy’s next, is yet another example. There are many problems with her logic here. First of all, anti-gay people like her know that no law can be passed that will strengthen (or weaken) their marriage. They claim that anything but “one man one woman” hurts marriage but they can never say exactly how. Take, for example, her closing paragraph:
What’s the likely endpoint? Marriage may be redefined out of existence, and replaced by a flexible, contract-based system of government-registered relationships. So get ready. Today gay marriage supporters’ mantra is, “How does my same-sex marriage harm your marriage?” Down the road it may be, “How does my marriage of two men and a woman harm your marriage?” If we don’t answer the first question with resolve — making clear that “one man-one woman” is at the heart of marriage in Minnesota — we may not have a chance to answer the second.
What is clear is that Kersten has no idea how same-sex marriage harms marriages. She just knows she doesn’t like it. This is true of most anti-gay folks. They just don’t like it and their solution is government prejudice. Do the fucking math, folks, you are wrong on this one.
Now on to polygamy. First of all, polygamy as it is practiced is not a victimless crime. Particularly in the case of Mormons, women are brainwashed into utter subservience and polygamy is a tactic in the systematic abuse of women by people who think the Bible says that women are second class citizens. Our government has a responsibility to protect women against this abuse. By contrast, the government has no duty to protect one person from being in a committed and long-term relationship with another person of the same sex. Polygamy is not a victimless crime, same-sex marriage has no victims.
Now throwing away the evil Bible-thumping bastards who want to enslave women, is there a reason why the state can’t sanction polygamy? I think there are quite a few reasons why it would never make sense. First of all, contracts between 3 parties are much more complicated than between 2. What responsibilities does husband #1 have to husband #2? What about paternity? Are their parental rights for the “partner” which is not directly a parent? How is property and child custody handled in divorce? The complications go on and on. Unlike Kersten, I don’t have some Biblical rational for attacking polygamy. Unlike Right Wingers, I don’t think the government should invade my home and my privacy because the neighbor down the street disagrees with my lifestyle. I think government should have little oversight over my personal relationships.
Polygamy, though, is an unpopular practice embraced almost solely by religious fanatics and using it to attack the civil rights of homosexuals is a red herring and a symptom of the weak constitutional argument against gay marriage.
Lefty blogging and podcasting can be yours at LoLife.
U of M study finds atheists are least trusted
This is a fantasy that people have in their minds that in no way relates to reality. They think atheists are scary because they are scared of the notion that when they die they might just be dead. They project this fear on to people who are, on average, incredibly moral, compassionate, peace-loving, tolerant and patriotic.
This is in video form. I guess I need to pull out the audio track but it doesn’t make much sense.
The Lolife Podcast No. 60: Equations (Quicktime format)
(Courtesty of the the Church Sign Generator)
I think Condoleeza Rice should call this radio station and tell them to give this guy his job back. It was a slip of the tongue and he was trying to compliment her. It is not as if he was ripping her a new one and had a Freudian slip. We can’t go condemning people for things like this.
This reminds me of when there was a big uproar because some economist used the word niggardly, which is not a racial slur nor does it have any racial roots.
Sometimes people just don’t think straight about this stuff.
I am conflicted. I am against the death penalty. I don’t believe it is an effective deterrent, I don’t believe the state should be in the business of killing its citizens, I believe that prison is a harsh sentence in itself, I believe that some criminals can in some small way make amends for their past crimes, I believe that the risk of executing innocent people is very real and I believe that the penal system must leave open the possibility of reform.
But I am happy that this fucking scumbag is going to die. I think it would be more just, though, if we gave this poor girl’s father a baseball bat and let him beat this fucking scumbag to death. That would be justice. A humane death is too good for this fucking scumbag.
I have not one ounce of mercy for people who hurt children. The fact that this fucking scumbag dares to plead for leniency because he has a family is utterly contemptible — somehow he was willing to harm someone else’s family in the most cruel and wicked way.
This fucking scumbag dying won’t really make anything better. But I have a hard time granting mercy to those who so cruelly denied it to others. Justice would be the baseball bat.
lolife 
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