At the World Series of Poker last year, they instituted a no "fuck" policy. If you said "fuck," you had to sit out for 10 minutes. No other words mattered. Well they had a tourney at Larry Flynt's Hustler Casino and a player called the tournament director to tell him that someone else had said the bad word. The response was, "This is Hustler, and Larry Flynt believes in freedom of speech, now play your fucking hand."

Bob Barr had an opinion column in the paper yesterday. He called Chief Justice John Roberts' most recent dissent "unconstitutional" and railed against Roberts' allegedly non-strict-constructionist ideals. That's also BS. The case was that a woman who was having a row with her husband and knew he had a coke habit called the cops and invited them in to search her home. The husband stood at the door and refused them entrance at the same time the wife is inviting them in. They searched. Six of the Justices voted against the legality of searching the home, while Thomas, Scalia, and Roberts dissented. It's pretty simple here. The 4th Amendment protects us aginst unreasonable search and seizure, and when a woman asks police to search her home, it's hardly unreasonable for them to do so, even if the husband is concurrently refusing. Morally or ethically wrong, perhaps, but Roberts is not supposed to rule on morals and ethics, he's supposed to rule on the constitutionality of issues, and it seems disingenuous to say he's not following the Constitution in this case.

Did you hear about the bumper sticker controversy here in the ATL (I've come to love that nomenclenture for my city)? Some lady had a bumpoer sticker that said something like, "I'm tired of all the BU__SH__!" Those letters were also missing on the cumper sticker. Fine, it's tasteless and perhaps innapropriate to be placed where kids will see it and ask their parents what the word with the missing letters is, but is it enough to bring down an obscenity charge? One cop decided it was and gave her a ticket. It made the Metro section of the AJC. Then some idiot Bush hater who has to hyperbolize everything, and basically lie, to make it sound bad enough for anyone to care, writes in saying that it's ashame that this bumper sticker controversy is overshadowing the illegal war in Iraq, blah blah blah, you get the picture. That's the real bullshit! The same day that this story appeared in the Metro section, there was an Iraq story on the front page, and editorials on Iraq, and letters about Iraq. The bumper sticker has been barely mentioned on the local news. Overshadowing? Hell no, not in any way. This guy seems to think that as long as there are troops in Iraq, we are not allowed to think about or talk about anything else, or we are overshadowing the real issue. Whatever. Life goes on. During World War II, people still had jobs to do. Were they overshadowing the war because they did not sit around talking about it 24 hours a day?

Interestingly one of the judges who wrote the FISA act that has been the center of the wiretapping controversy said before a panel on the issue that the act he wrote in now way supersedes the President's authority to collect national security information under an executive order. Take from that what you will...

I'll restate my feelings on the issue for the record. Do I like people wiretapping the average American's phone calls? No, not at all. But that's not what Bush is doing. He's wiretapping non-average Americans. That is, unless you think that the average American has lots of phone calls with suspected terrorists in foreign lands. I don't, and perhaps investigating people who converse with known or suspected terrorists is the prudent course.

The argument people will make against that is "How do we know who they are wiretapping?" Does it matter? Think about it. They could be using this executive decision to spy on every American there is, but if they actually act on anything not related to terrorism, the evidence they get will be thrown out of court so fast it will make your head spin. And if they have been spying on more people, and have acted on it, it would have come out in the media. There would be a HUGE uproar. There hasn't been, and thus it almost doesn't matter if there is wiretap "creep" or not. I do consider this VERY close to the line. I can't say exactly where the line is, but like pornography, I'll know it when I see it.

This is sort of like the "Bush is taking away our civil liberties" canard. That's such BS! No one can give a single example of civil liberties being taken away by Bush . You have liberals whining about how unfair it is that conservatives rule talk radio, and wanting to pass fairness doctrines to take away that advantage, but I've yet to hear any calls from the right for suspension of any civil liberties. Please feel free to point some out to me if you know any. No one has yet been able to give me an example of the actuality of missing civil liberties, so we'll move down the ladder and look for anyone proposing we do so.

Don't point out Jose Padilla to me. I know about that, and it was a major fuck up, but it's fixed. And don't tell me about the Homeland Security guys going after porn-viewers in the library. They were disciplined for that unsanctioned and anamolous act. They were idiots and no one in the administration condoned or excused their actions in any way.

Someone I know (and no one that reads this blog knows this person, as far as I am aware) made basically the same promise to me three different times over a two week period. They never followed through.

When I grew upset over this, and confronted the person, the response was, "But I made those promises several weeks ago!"

Is that not one of the lamest things you have ever heard? So you make a promise, and it's fine not to follow through for a few days, and then you have a week where you have then broken the promise, but after that it goes away and is no longer a broken promise? No! As time passes the fact that you have not fulfilled your word becomes even more of an indictment against your character. And the fact that the promise was made three separate times makes it even worse.

At any rate, I've washed my hands of the person. I prefer people who keep their word, or at least give a sincere apology and try to make things right when they don't. That said, I'm pretty easy-going with people, so a fulfillment of the promise or a sincere apology in the relatively near future, and all is forgiven.

You know what? Scratch that. In this situation an apology won't do, because keeping the promises would take almost negligible effort. An hour's time at the most. I think this person has integrity and honor, so maybe they will do the right thing.

Illegal immigration is illegal. Against the law. We can't pick and choose which laws to enforce, because then we might as well have no laws at all. I'd even support building a manned wall across the border because we're supposed to enforce laws.

Here's the thing. Are our laws moral and beneficial to the country? If you think our immigration laws are bad, and want to let all these people in the country, change the laws, but don't continue rationalizing and excusing lawlessness.

So here's the rub. As soon as you change the law, these people are no longer illegal, meaning they have to pay taxes, they have to paid at minimum wage, etc. Suddenly you'll have huge levels of unemployment among Hispanic immigrants and businesses that depended on illegal alien day laborers will have to cut back on their operations. Then you'll have people saying, "Gee, I wish there were more restrictive immigration laws again." Basically people will want lawlessness back.

The other option for change is that you tighten and enforce immigration laws. Companies that depend on illegal alien laborers will have some problems, but you won't have the huge levels of Hispanic unemployment. The hypocrisy of our current non-enforcement will no longer give the impression that laws in the U.S. are really just guidelines that no one follows. And perhaps best of all, countries like Mexico that feed our illegal population will be forced to change their ways and try to build a decent economy of their own, instead of sending all their problems to us, and receiving wages sent back from the apple orchards.

Or we can keep things the way they are now. Keep telling our children that laws aren't that important. Continue with a system that discourages cultural and lingual assimilation, artificially lowers wages, and gives pre-existing criminals and terrorists an easy way in to the country.

Out of three options, there's only one that's mostly good for the country, and that would be the one involving tightening and enforcing immigration laws.

Here's some food for thought, however. I have no problem with any race or religion most of the time. And I know that most Muslims are supposedly peaceful and such. But right now, that particular religion seems to have a lot more violence and hatred in it than any other. Demographics in the U.S. are changing rapidly, and the country may look completely different in 50 years. Would you rather the new majority be Hispanic or Muslim? Hispanic versus anyone else, and I wouldn't care, but at this moment in time, a quick look at cnn.com tells me that any American with a care for the future of the country after they die would have to prefer a future Hispanic majority.

Is Hispanic supposed to be capitalized?

Here's what I really want to say about the S.F. rally mentioned in my previous entry. The S.F. council guy called these people fascists (they aren't) and disgusting (I'm sure most of them take showers), said they were gay-bashing (they weren't), and said they should get out of his town. If a bunch of African-Americans or Muslims or any large group besides fundamentalist Christians got that reaction, people would be ready to run the council guy out of town, but since they were just Christians, it's ok. Tolerance only goes one way in S.F. And tolerance isn't just allowing something to happen. When you condemn something, and say things that aren't true about it, that is not tolerance.

I'm not exactly a big fan of fundamentalist Christians, but they have as much a right to annoy me as black people, or Muslims, or Hindus, or dolphins. They just don't have the right to burn my property, or visit violence upon me.

Edit: Here's the dictionary definition of tolerance...

"The capacity for or the practice of recognizing and respecting the beliefs or practices of others."

The council member dude was pretty much as intolerant as he could have been but for killing people, or blocking them from assembly in the first place. But if you're left-wing, tolerance only seems to go as far as those that agree with you.

What do you think of this?

Basically a large group of 25,000 or so Christian teenagers held a rally where they talked about being good Christians and spoke against violence and bad words in music and such. Where there was some good 'ole gay-bashing or not, I don't know, but the main thing is that there was no violence, it was an utterly peaceful rally.

So one of the local left-wing politicos decided to trash it as a disgusting facist rally that should not be in his city. This guy probably loves anti-Bush demonstrations, but can't take it when someone disagrees with him in his fair city. Well sorry, bud, but at least this rally was peaceful and held without hate (as far as I can tell).

It's amazing how much press coverage protests can get. If you protest against Bush, you only need like 5 people to get on the news, and they'll just gloss over the numbers for you. If you want to protest a proposed immigration bill, it's easy to get 500,000 immigrants, many of them illegal, and you'll get all over the news. I read one blogger who was there and he said, "I thought it was more like a million, whereas the police said 500,000, but ewven the organizers said a million, so that must be right." I've never been in a crowd near that size, but I have a hard time estimating how many people are around when it couldn't be more than a few hundred, so an estimate of that magnitude from someone who was inside cannot possibly be very accurate.

At any rate, the key to this issue is who didn't show up, and that's the many millions more Californians who are against illegal immigration, but don't care about it enough to miss March Madness. There's probably a rule of thumb out there that for every person at a protest, there are 8 people who disagree. Think about it this way, if the majority wants something, they usually get it, no need to protest. It's only when a minority (and I mean minority in opinion, not race at all) wants something that they protest.

Today I gave my presentation on blogging. Had the teacher looked at our written out speeches, I'm sure I would have one of the best, but that wasn't what we were graded on. Public speaking has never really been my forte, but I think I've gotten to the point where I can do a pretty good job- except for today. I got up there and forgot everything. I completely skipped over the part where I was supposed to state my goal for the presentation. I changed slides at the wrong times. I kept having to glance at my notes, but the nerves had my hands going in and out of my pockets (not good for a speech), and the notes with them, drawing more attention. I said "um" or "uh" several times. With all that, I still got a decent grade, but I had really hoped to be able to impress people instead of getting comments from my peers like, "You really picked it up at the end."

Next time I'll just have to practice more.

Edit: One comment I got from the teacher was that I ahve a good speaking voice and cadence when I was speaking the parts I wasn't umming and ahhing through. That means I should be doing voice-overs, right?

I have the final graded presentation on blogging on Monday. I've been working on making the speech more natural, and trying to better integrate Powerpoint slides. I'm fairly knowledgeable on the subject of blogging, and find that I want to have a few topics in mind and just start talking. Some of my very best speeches have been done in this manner, as I find memorizing pre-written lines to sound stiff and unnatural coming out of my mouth. This might be a weakness in my writing, but perhaps I'm just more suited to impromptu rather than planned out speechmaking. The powerpoint slides are becoming increasingly constraining because of this. I feel like I'm having to make the speech match the slides, and losing whatever spontanaety I could possibly have. My dislike of Powerpoint is increasing because of this. What if my topic doesn't lend itself to visual stimulus? Unfortunately part of the assignment is to make slides, so I'm going to have to learn to do it. I just keep thinking back to all the political speeches I've seen, VERY few of which had slides. Can you imagine Bush with a laser pointer during the State of the Union?

In business, companies typically look at profits and losses in terms of percentage of revenue as opposed to absolute dollars. Joe's Plumbing may only make a $2000 profit in a given month, but if Joe's revenues are $4000, that's a 50% profit margin, which most companies could never dream of having. At the same time IBM could have a bad year and only profit $10000, a miniscule percentage when compared to their revenues. Wouldn't you rather be Joe than the CEO of IBM?

Why isn't the economy judged in the same manner. People from all parts of the political spectrum, including myself, castigate Bush for being a big spender, but when you look at spending as a percentage of our GDP, Bush is about equal to Clinton and far better than Reagan. Considering our economy is a lot bigger than when Reagan was in office, doesn't it make sense that we also spend a lot more money? Sure, the debt is getting up to numbers that sound more like something a kid would make up (900 gazillion, for instance), but our GDP is far larger than that. Bush is holding steady at 16-17% GDP, whereas Reagan was more like 19%, and I imagine that FDR was off the charts by this measure. I also often hear things like "Our children will owe XXXX dollars per person to pay off the national debt," but the population is bigger than it used to be, so what was the per person back in the 80's? Of course that's not a fair question. Our economy has become very efficient, with technology raising our productivity per citizen to levels never before dreamed of, so the GDP/population ratio would be very different than it was in the 80's, making the debt/people metric not very accurate.

I often hear people say that they wish the government was run more like a business, with more efficiency, so it's only fair that we measure the government like a business as well, isn't it?

The government has finally gotten around to releasing the translations of some of the documents taken from Saddam's regime during the initial invasion. Among the revelations? That no WMD theory is in tatters. He had them, his generals knew it, and they got them shipped out of the country beforehand. Not only that, but he planned ot reconstitute his WMD programs as soon as sanctions were lifted. Here's a link to an article about it. Look for more to come, but don't be surprised if the mainstream media neglects to report most of this. That would mean they would have to admit to being wrong.

So here's a link to an image of all the cartoons at once. Since the western press is scared to print them even online, and I don't speak Dutch, this is about the best I could do without an in-depth search.

I may have some of the facts slightly wrong on this, but the gist is correct. The board of student paper of the University of Illinois (which seems to be all adults instead of students) just fired the editor (who is a student) because he printed the famous riot causing cartoons. And in a statement afterwards, they said they were committed to free speech and a free press, which I suppose is a good reason to censor people and fire people for printing things you don't like.

The hypocrisy of the press in this affair, and I mean just about every news outlet in the country, has been amazing. Kudos to the papers that printed the cartoons without firing anyone, and also kudos to the papers who did not print the cartoons, but at least admitted they didn't because they feared for their safety. A big "you're a lying hypocrite" to everyone else.

I'm studying for a midterm right now, but later I think I'll try to find a link to the cartoons to put up. Yeah, go ahead and protest, there's a big area outside my house that you can picket.

I've spent some of the weekend working on a speech about blogging for my communications class. Turns out it's about 2 minutes too long, so I have some editing to do. Shouldn't be much trouble. The prof has this silly thing where we are supposed to go in tomorrow and rehearse 3 minutes of a 5.5 minute speech and get feedback. Why not just make us do the whole thing? I also have to make powerpoint slides to accompany the speech. I have almost no experience with powerpoint, so I made some very simple black and white slides. I'm not really a fan of the powerpoint concept, because I feel that most people spend so much time making them pretty that they just aren't very informative. I'd like to change that, but I had a hard enough time figuring out how to make slides in the first place. One of my classmates is a self-professed master, so I'm hoping she'll agree to meet me at Starbucks sometime this week and help me out with the aesthetics, and maybe with some of the moving stuff. I may not like powerpoint, but it seems to be the thing to do in b-school, so I guess I'll be learning as much as I can. Should be an expert within a few months. I'll be so proud!!!

The speech itself covers a range of blogging-related topics. I start out with Trent Lott and Dan Rather, and why you should read blogs, move on to Glenn Reynolds and why you should write your own blog, and then on to how to start a blog. Finally I conclude with the epic of Evan Williams, which may not be perfectly accurate, but it's close enough and gets my point across (the point being that he got rich through bloggin). It's accurate as far as I remember, and since it's an unsourced anecdote, it's all good.

Party Poker just upgraded their software and sent me $20 for free to try to "lure me back" from wherever else I'm playing. I haven't played in weeks, so really they just sent me $20 for no particular reason, but it worked. I played. And maybe I've been playing at the wrong place all this time, because the games were EASY today. I've already doubled that money, and that's after bombing out of an MTT because I was hungry and went all-in with nothing so I could go eat. At any rate, now we'll see what I can get to starting with $20. I listened to a podcast earlier about noted pro Chris Ferguson turning $1 into $20,000 playing online. I don't have 10% of his skill, but who knows? That's like a 2,000,000% return, right?

The blogosphere still seems to be talking about the cartoons of death that caused so much trouble a few weeks, but they also still have a reason to talk about it. Most U.S. news outlets are still refusing to show the cartoons, but the cartoons themselves are actually extremely tame. Far less offensive than many of the Jesus jokes that the media will often record are. In other words, the national press has decided to censor something just because a bunch of people decided to get upset about it. What happens the next time a bunch of people whine about something? The media in the U.S. already suffers from the distrust of much of the country, you'd think they'd be making an extra effort to report the news, instead of hiding the truth. Until Americans actually see the cartoons, they have no reason to know that they are so incedibly tame that the whole riot thing was obviously a setup by Muslim religious and political leaders to... well... enforce their views on our media. And I don't think Imams living in the middle east should have this much power over our media. Journalists ought to be ashamed of the way the U.S. media has behaved in this whole affair, but most don't seem to be. I see this as an indictment of the entire system. "The people have a right to know" has become "The people have the right to know what we feel like telling them, and only if it's approved by Muslims in other countries."

As a kid, I saw all the episodes of the original Star Trek. Then I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation for all seven seasons, and saw all the movies. I didn't follow Deep Space Nine, Voyager, or Enterprise at all, and recently decided to accquire and view the entire run of Enterprise. That series, for the non-fans out there, was supposed to take place between our time and that of Kirk's. I'd heard bad stuff about the first season, and also heard that it basically crapped all over the continuity of the Star Trek universe. Now I'm in the middle of the four and final season, and I gotta say, the show started not so great and turned in to a real winner. My limited research gives me the idea that it got good when Brannon Braga stopped running the show. He's the guy responsible for Star Trek: Nemesis, the most recent in the movie series and perhaps the biggest piece of shit ever put on film. From what I can tell, that man is almost single-handedly responsible for destroying the franchise.

It's just too bad Enterprise only got good after most everyone gave on it. Now there's a decent chance there will never be another Star Trek movie or TV series.

I think the saddest part of watching the series is that the exploration of space by humanity will probably not resemble Star Trek in any way whatsoever. My recent fascination with the concept of the Vingean singularity has convinced me that there is *probably* not any other intelligent life in our galaxy, at least. If there was, surely they would have developed sufficient technology that we would have seen sign of them somewhere with all our telescopes. Think about it. From the earliest signs of "intelligence" in humans to the present has been... Well I have no clue, but let's just say 1 million years. The universe is something 16 billion years old. It's too farfetched to believe that the universe will spawn lots of intelligent races and we just happen to be first. With only a million years needed to get from no real intelligence to singularity (which should come to us in 40 years or so), surely someone else in the universe would have had their million years earlier than us.

Of course there are more things in heaven and earth.... Who knows? Maybe once a race hits singularity, they evolve into something we have no way of detecting. Mayb we are first. Maybe we're at the same point as a bunch of other races, and we'll all hit the singularity at once. Maybe species tend to destroy themselves right before singularity, as humanity often seems likely to do. Or maybe most species become super-Luddites at that point of development and ban artificial intelligence like in Frank Herbert's Dune series (which had no other intelligent races other than humanity, though Herbert's 6th Dune book hinted that there might be something else in book 7, but he died before he wrote it). It sure is fun to speculate, and I sure hope we do hit singularity in my lifetime so I can live forever and see what's out there.

So the port deal is off. Congress rejected it, and the Dubai people pulled out before Bush got to veto Congress. I have to wonder if Bush asked them to pull out so he wouldn't have to follow through on his veto threat. I also ahve to give props to the Dubai people. Now granted, I certainly don't like them since they boycott Israel, but they seem to have acted as honorable allies of the U.S. throughout this entire affair.