MemeMachineGo!

A while back, I blogged about the Free State Project, an effort by libertarians to gather a group of libertarian activists, select a state, and move there to effect libertarian reforms. They’re alive and well, and chose New Hampshire last October. I wrote:

I don’t plan on joining them, but I wish them luck. (And, for the record, if a bunch of socialists were planning the same, I’d wish them luck too.)

Well, another group has proposed doing something similar, and the only luck I wish them is bad.

ChristianExodus.org has been established to coordinate the move of 50,000 or more Christians to a single conservative state in the U.S. for the express purpose of reestablishing constitutional governance. It is evident that our Constitution has been abandoned under our current federal system. The efforts of Christian activism have proven futile over the past five decades and, whereas desperate times require desperate measures, we are now in the most desperate of times. The federal government is considering whether marriage, the foundation of civilization since Creation, should be reserved solely to a man and a woman. Christians must now draw a line in the sand and unite in a sovereign state to dissolve our bond with the current union comprised as the United States of America.

Whereas the Free State Project was mostly considering cold places, ChristianExodus is looking at hot places.

ChristianExodus.org is researching three candidate states: Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina. These states were chosen because of their relatively small populations, their coastal access and their Christian-conservative citizenry. In addition, each of these states possesses a rich history of standing up for its rights. Our board of directors considers the values of these three states to be very similar to the values held by our membership.

And just how are they going to re-establish constitutional governance?

Our independence will be achieved by legislative vote rescinding our state’s ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

Because secession worked out so well for everyone the last time Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, et al tried it.

They talk of “government similar to the early United States.” You know, where slavery was legal, a slave counted as 3/5 of a person, and only white male landowners had the vote. They talk about “Constitutional values” and quote the 10th amendment. There’s no mention that the very first words of the Bill of Rights are “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” They quote Jefferson, without mention of it being his interpretation of the First Amendment that gave rise to the phrase separation of church and state.

And while they talk about a lot of things, it’s clear that the cornerstone of their position is bigotry against gays. That’s the issue they’re counting on to rally people to their cause.

It is evident that the forceful implementation of gay marriage will devastate our nation beyond repair and many Christians will join our ranks at that time. […] ChristianExodus.org is uncertain as to what extent Christians will rise up after gay marriage is legalized against their will. It is possible that a cry will go up from all over the Bible Belt and many different states will call for dissolution of the Union.

This borders on fomenting rebellion. I don’t think it qualifies as treason, but it comes a damn sight closer to “waging war on the United States” than criticizing Bush comes to “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” Equating the latter, of course, has been more than good enough for lots of right-wingers to accuse lots of others of treason.

Now if a group were to attempt to effect reforms consistent with things Christ actually taught — forgiveness, charity, tolerance, humility, love — them, I’d wish luck.

(Via The 18½ Minute Gap)

A man and his 12-year-old daughter spent the last four years living in a remote hillside in Portland’s Forest Park, police said. […] Police found an elaborate camp dug into a steep hillside. Under a tarp-covered, wood-framed shelter, they found sleeping bags, a partially burnt log, a Bible, a stack of old World Book Encyclopedias, rakes and other tools. A rope swing, a tilled vegetable garden and a small creek were nearby. […]

The man, who identified himself as Frank, told police he was a 53-year-old Marine Corps veteran and college graduate who served in Vietnam. He came to Oregon with his daughter, Ruth, from Tacoma with no job and virtually no money. Frank told police that the girl’s mother was institutionalized in New Hampshire, and the two now lived on a $400-a-month disability check. Rather than live on the streets and expose Ruth to alcohol and drugs, Frank said, they hiked deep into Forest Park and built a lean-to.

The pair went into the city twice a week to stop by the bank, attend church, buy groceries and clothes from Goodwill. Frank, a devout Christian, said he taught his daughter using the old encyclopedias. […]

Even though the child and father lived for such a long time disconnected from society, the girl had been home schooled and was in good physical shape. In fact, the girl received a very good education from her father while living among the trees. Officials said the girl, who would be normally in 7th grade, is at a 12th grade equivalency.[…]

Police persuaded them to leave the camp, promising help them find food and shelter. The pair spent two nights at a homeless shelter. Barkley found the man a job and a place for the two to live on a friend’s horse farm in Yamhill County. Now, Barkley said, the pair are living in a mobile home and adjusting to life with heat, electricity and running water. The man mows lawns and is learning to drive a tractor, and the pair ride bicycles to a nearby church on Sundays.

Nice to see that this story had a happy ending.

A dude asks for relationship advice… on Slashdot.

A nice sized group of us here at work recently picked up City of Heroes, and started playing together. While all of us were gamers to some extent, now we’re all pretty addicted and want to play together online all the time. The problem some of us are running into is that our significant others aren’t too happy with us gaming all the time. Other then the two obvious solutions (quit playing or dump the significant other) I’m wondering how other people have deal with it? I tried installing Zoo Tycoon on my other computer and saying ‘Look honey, cute bears’ but she just didn’t bite.

I, of course, am a grammar god.

But even I would consider it precious to employ all the usage rules implied by that quiz in any other context.

I think being a usage wonk boils down merely to choosing which windmills to tilt at. By the time an error is so common as to be corrected in usage guides, it’s clear that the battle has already been lost.

(Discussing which battles I fight constitutes a spoiler for the quiz. If you want to take it, chase the link above before reading further.)

Some of my quixotic battles:

• the subjunctive voice


• “12 items or fewer”


• refusing to use “they” as a third person singular¹


• “lay” and “lie”


• using correct cases for objects of prepositions and verbs, and for predicate nominatives, e.g., “whom,” “It is I”


• number agreement, including using “everyone” as singular

Some I’m not interested in that were represented in the quiz:

• insisting upon “that” to the exclusion of “who” for an anonymous animal


• refusing to split an infinitive (I was surprised to see that hoary old chestnut on the quiz)

I avoid ‘impact’ as a verb, but not ‘contact’ (or ‘network’ or any of dozens of other verbed nouns in techspeak.) I’m usually pedantic about word choice. “Irregardless,” confusing “flout” and “flaunt,” the construction “try and do” in place of “try to do” — all these things grate on me, as do many others. Fortunately, I’ve gotten better about correcting people (oh, yeah, and I accept “fortunately,” et al, as particles instead of insisting upon, e.g., “it is fortunate that.”)

In another couple of generations, probably at least 75% of these will seem as quaint and irrelevant to young English speakers as avoiding splitting infinitives seems to me, even to people reading usage guides.

But I’ll persist, because, well, I really like being excruciatingly correct.

(By the way, I’m sure it’s not a very great challenge to find some usage errors in my MMG! entries. My tone here is normally casual; if I held everything to the highest standards of copy editing, I’d post less, and I don’t want that.)

¹ Yes, I know Shakespeare used it that way. Dude also couldn’t spell his own name the same way twice.

Bug Me Not allows you to look up registrations for sites that require them for no good reason, like the New York Times or Washington Post.

I don’t surf without it.

In 2000, a Vermonter wrote:

As the mother of a gay son, I’ve seen firsthand how cruel and misguided people can be.

Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I’ve taken enough from you good people.

I’m tired of your foolish rhetoric about the “homosexual agenda” and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.

My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay.

The rest is good, too.

Jon Stewart’s William & Mary commencement speech:

I am honored to be here and to receive this honorary doctorate. When I think back to the people that have been in this position before me from Benjamin Franklin to Queen Noor of Jordan, I can’t help but wonder what has happened to this place. Seriously, it saddens me. As a person, I am honored to get it; as an alumnus, I have to say I believe we can do better. And I believe we should. But it has always been a dream of mine to receive a doctorate and to know that today, without putting in any effort, I will. It’s incredibly gratifying. Thank you. That’s very nice of you, I appreciate it.

I’m sure my fellow doctoral graduates—who have spent so long toiling in academia, sinking into debt, sacrificing God knows how many years of what, in truth, is a piece of parchment that in truth has been so devalued by our instant gratification culture as to have been rendered meaningless—will join in congratulating me. Thank you.

The Guardian writes on Doonesbury at War. But I’m going to hyperfocus on this one bit where they’re trying to be too clever:

BD, aka Brian Dowling, college football star and one of the lead characters…

Brian Dowling was a Yale quarterback when Trudeau was writing “Bull Tales, ” the forerunner to Doonesbury, for the Yale Daily News. He clearly served as part of the inspiration for B.D.

When our characters graduated in the Doonesbury musical, conventional names were given for Zonker, Boopsie, B.D. — Edgar Harris, Barbara Ann Boopstein, B. John Dowling.

“Barbara Ann Boopstein” stuck and Boopsie’s been called that in the strip since. I can’t recall further mention of “Edgar,” but neither has there been any denial that Zonker has a “real” name.

Not so with B.D. In a recent FAQ, Trudeau refers to “B.D. (full name: B.D.)”

He milked it for a joke in a recent strip in which a doctor calls Boopsie “Mrs. D.” and asks “What is ‘D’? Some kind of hip-hop name?” Boopsie replies “He’s never told me. I think it’s birth order.”

Trudeau seems to be pretending he never identified that the “D.” was for Dowling (consistency has never been the strip’s strong suit.) And he’s never identified that the “B.” is for Brian.

In short, the Guardian is wrong, Wrong, WRONG!

I saw a preview of Napoleon Dynamite tonight. It was excruciating and very funny. Maybe I’ll comment further later, but…

I’m off to the East Coast tomorrow. You can elope, but there’s no escaping The Chinese Wedding Banquet. Don’t expect to hear from me before Wednesday. Unless maybe I finish rebuilding my laptop before I go to bed, and find an Internet cafe when I’m there.

I’ve got a sitter to take care of the house and the cats, but not the blog. Jym? Post ‘em if you got ‘em.

=v= Fun list with photos of Pork Tornado's picks for the ten worst album covers of all time. They may or may not be the worst, but they sure are funny.

Tragically, there's no mention of the misused apostrophe, so it's up to us to point that out. And isn't that David Crosby on the cover of #7? (I have to admit, I'm much fonder of the album covers than the commentary, but as the writer says, I'm welcome to start my own blog and write better captions. I'll just add that to my to-do list ...)

(Via Pork Tornado)

=v= This psychic "reads" breasts to divine the future. One has to wonder about the strategy of publicizing such a service as an anonymous poster in the "men seeking women" section of craig[no apostrophe]slist, though.

Mr. Anonymous Breastreader would do well to emulate the clever marketing strategy of fellow feelup artist Ulf Buck, a blind psychic who "reads" buttocks (which he says are "more intense" than palms — no argument there). Buck had worldwide newswires publicize his special talents.

=v= Bicycling forums are abuzz with an Associated Press story about Baby Boomers buying recumbent bikes. Recumbents are easier on the creaky old joints (supple young ones, too), so it's time to rush a dubious media trend story to print.

Zed rides a recumbent. As a relative whippersnapper, it thus becomes his duty to help little old Boomer bikers across the street.

I’ve declared today a personal Stop Junk Mail Day and am taking all the relevant steps to prevent my address being distributed.

Here’s how to stop junk mail, and here are some good reasons why:

The environmental impact of junk mail is substantial. In 1991, 62 million trees were cut for junk mail. Over 74,000 acres of trees were cut just for catalogs. In 1989, 63.7 billion pieces were sent, including 55 billion catalogs. This represents 7.4 billion pounds of junk mail. Pulp processing to produce paper for junk mail requires 25 billion gallons of water.

Don’t bother with a commercial stop junk mail kit; it doesn’t save much effort over doing it yourself by following the advice in the first link above.

Regarding the New York Times’ apology for its WMD coverage, A Get Your War On character suggested that they should have asked instead Why the hell are you still reading us? Does Judith Miller have to kill you herself?

Well, why the hell are you still using Internet Explorer? Does Bill Gates have to kill you himself?

At least they patched this one… after their initial reply recommending retyping all URLs instead of actually clicking on links.

Seriously, get Firefox. Get Opera. Dump Explorer. (Then get Thunderbird or Eudora Light and dump Outlook.)

Cracking the Code to Romance is the story of four computer-assisted dating strategies, each one progressively scarier.

Burton spends his days coding in Wi-Fi-enabled cafés and using his AIM Sniffer to keep an eye on all the data traveling over the cafés’ networks. Between marathon Java-thrashing sessions, he often finds he wants to introduce himself to “a cute girl with a laptop” but is too shy to make an approach. That’s where the Sniffer comes in handy. If a hottie fires up her AOL Instant Messenger client, Burton sees her login name and can send her an IM. “I’ve gotten several first dates that way,” he says. […] He calls the process wardating, in homage to the old-school hacker practice of wardialing, calling every possible combination of numbers to find open computer networks.

I also have to quote one of the stupider things I’ve ever heard. Elsewhere, the article describes how a guy has hacked Friendster to get users’ private info. When the author contacted Friendster for comment, she was told “We have a policy that we are not being hacked.”

Getting ready for the G8 Summit:

He has just heard a rumour that 2,000 body bags have been delivered to the clapboard Chamber of Commerce across the road from the bookstore. This intelligence is passed around like a joint at a fortysomething party, a delicious whiff of recreational danger. Five minutes later, one of the island’s fire chiefs drops by, fresh from a briefing. It’s not a rumour. The body bags are here, together with a refrigerated lorry to take away the corpses. “I liked it better when it was a rumour,” says Larry.

(Via Unknown News)

Life imitates a Bruce Sterling story #zillion: the Catholic Church is outsourcing prayers to India.

With Roman Catholic clergy in short supply in the United States, Indian priests are picking up some of their work, saying Mass for special intentions, in a sacred if unusual version of outsourcing. American, as well as Canadian and European churches, are sending Mass intentions, or requests for services like those to remember deceased relatives and thanksgiving prayers, to clergy in India. […]

The Rev. Paul Thelakkat, a Cochin-based spokesman for the Synod of Bishops of the Syro-Malabar Church, said, “The prayer is heartfelt, and every prayer is treated as the same whether it is paid for in dollars, euros or in rupees.”

(Thanks, Dad!)

Were the pyramids built by kite?

When people think about the building of the Egyptian pyramids, they probably have a mental image of thousands of slaves laboriously rolling massive stone blocks into place with logs and levers. But one Caltech aeronautics professor has set out to demonstrate that the task could have been accomplished by several people using a kite to move the heavy stones. On June 23 [2001], Mory Gharib and his team raised a 6,900-pound (3132.6 kg), 15-foot (3.0 m) obelisk into vertical position in the desert near Palmdale by using only a kite, a pulley system, and a support frame.

But, wait, where do the aliens fit in?

Being fluent in two languages could protect against age-related cognitive decline, says a study in the June issue of Psychology and Aging. […]

All the bilingual people in the study had used two languages every day since the age of 10. The study found that both older and younger bilingual people performed better than those who spoke just one language. Being bilingual offers widespread benefits across a range of complex cognitive tasks, the authors concluded.

(Via Languagehat)

A friend of mine skipped town. I bought his bookcases from him. Five of them.

I now have more than enough bookcase space.

I can hardly believe it.

I am a happy bookaholic.

I’m going to be busy the next few days; don’t expect any entries from me until Monday.

Check out the fine weblogs and journals to your left.

Let’s see. You can be arrested for refusing to identify yourself, fossil fuels don’t come from animal fossils, and a Ukrainian restaurant is serving chocolate-covered pork fat.

Oh, and R.A. Lafferty’s classic Slow Tuesday Night is available on SciFiction.

The LiveJournal of Zachary Marsh features karaoke night in Arkham, Massachusetts and more. (Pedantry: the author merges Arkham and Dunwich Innsmouth [Doh!] here.)

Some ambitious folks are rewriting the OED in limerick form,

And it’s time for me to do some other things…

Chicks dig guys who read:

In a bid to lure men in Britain away from TV soccer games and into book shops, publisher Penguin Books will send out a sexy model to offer 1,000-pound ($1,837) prizes to males spotted reading a selected title. […]

At the same time, Penguin, a unit of Pearson Plc, released results of a poll in which 85 percent of women said a man could increase his chances of getting a date by talking about a favorite book.

“The second Halo book, totally.”

There’s a super-strong mutant in Germany.

Somewhere in Berlin, Germany, is a baby Superman, born with bulging arm and leg muscles. Not yet 5, he can hold 3-kilogram weights with arms extended, something many adults cannot do. He has muscles twice the size of other kids his age and half their body fat. DNA testing showed why: the boy has a very rare genetic mutation that boosts muscle growth.

How cool is this? Preparatory to undergoing brain surgery, a woman needs to shave her head. So she has a hair party where she and her friends dye her hair bright colors and give her several hairstyles as they go. When she’s finally bald, her friends shave their heads, too.

(Via Die Puny Humans)

Bush actually admits that condoms just might help prevent the spread of AIDS. I’m holding my breath for the CDC’s website to restore its Clinton-era pro-condom, pro-education stance.

Think finding the real messages among the spam as you look over your mail is hard? Try doing it when you’re listening to your mail.

Blind users are finding that they are spending disproportionately more time sorting through their junk e-mail than their sighted colleagues. That’s because sighted users can simply scan large batches of messages for that one important piece of mail, whereas blind users must listen to the subject line of each message before they know whether it’s spam or not.

Having children eliminates all reason and judgement.

To investigate this question Bartels and Zeki, who have a long running programme investigating love using the very latest brain imaging techniques, measured brain activity in 22 mothers who viewed pictures of their own infants and compared this with activity evoked by viewing pictures of other infants with whom they were acquainted for the same period. […]

Among other areas, parts of the pre-frontal cortex – a bit of the brain towards the front and implicated in social judgment – seems to get switched off when we are in love and when we love our children, as do areas linked with the experience of negative emotions such as aggression and fear as well as planning. The parts of the brain deactivated form a network which are implicated in the evaluation of trustworthiness of others and basically critical social assessment.

MemeMachineGo: Fair and Balanced.

(Via Follow Me Here)

And unhappiness is an old printer that’s given up the ghost. My Panasonic KX-P7105, that I got for its nifty duplex printing, stopped feeding paper correctly such that printed pages ended up about a third of the way off the physical pages. It’s probably easy enough to fix… for about half of what replacing it would cost.

So when Dealnews showed the HP Laserjet 1012 for $128 yesterday, I ordered it immediately, and Office Depot and UPS had it here today (from Fremont to South San Francisco to Richmond to Berkeley — the economy of hubs.)

Already printed out the latest Speculations and the manual duplex (it prints on one side; you feed the printed pages back in) works well.

I’m a happy geek.

Now to get some new stories into the mail…

(If any MMG readers in the Bay Area want to take a whack at fixing my Panasonic, I’m giving it away… act quickly before all of Craigslist gets their chance.)

Pocahontas and I went to see a 4:30 showing of Fahrenheit 9/11 on Friday. As we passed the library, a block from the California Theatre, I said “Is that the line?”

A crowd thronged outside. The showing was sold out. A lame showing like 4:30 on a Friday. All the rest of the day’s showings were sold out, too. So we bought tickets for 4:30, Saturday.

When Pocahontas got home from work on Saturday, I was napping. She woke me at 3:12, saying “We’ve gotta go!” I kvetched and complained about being awakened that early for a 4:30 show — it only takes 15 minutes to bike downtown. Then we got there. The line around the corner into the alley next to the theatre, and doubled back on itself. “OK,” I admitted. “You were right.”

A woman walked around with a clipboard calling on people to register to vote. I didn’t see any takers. Chyeah, like any of us weren’t registered. (I still extend my graditude to her for making the effort.)

The theatre was packed; the air conditioning couldn’t keep up. I sweated through the whole movie. I have never seen a movie opening like this in Berkeley. (Of course, I’m not usually one to rush to opening weekends, and it’s often the case that the biggest blockbusters don’t open in Berkeley, but in huge theatres in Emeryville or Oakland.)

It’s a well-crafted rant, good for riling up people who were already pissed off. I find it hard to imagine it changing anyone’s mind. There’s not much new material here for someone who reads a lot of lefty blogs, which is also to say that I saw no errors of fact (save one,) and that most of the content I know to be a matter of public record (the spin and innuendo are a different matter.) But I’m pretty sure a Fox News viewer would be alternating between “That’s not true!” and “But that’s not what’s important!”

One thing that was edifying for me: since I don’t watch TV, I hadn’t heard Bush quotes I’d read about, like his inability to utter “shame on me,” even when it meant mangling the adage he was supposed to be quoting, or “This is an impressive crowd. The haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base.”

A few bits I wasn’t thrilled with. After providing specific evidence with video of Bush and Bush Sr.’s close ties to Saudis, he has a montage of dozens of instances of the two of them meeting with Arabs, without identifying the players or circumstances, or providing any context. It struck me that he was inviting the audience to respond: “Look! They hang out with towelheads! They’re bad!”

In the same part, he suggested that the Bushes had Saudi interests more closely at heart than the American people’s, given that the latter pay $400,000 a year, and the former had given $1.4 billion to them, their friends, and their family over the past three decades (if I recall correctly.) Well, when “give” includes “invests in companies associated with” and the recipients expand to include unspecified “friends,” I find the point diluted to meaninglessness. (I’m not saying that Moore’s case here couldn’t be made; I’m saying he failed to do so in a convincing manner.)

He also mocks members of the “Coalition of the Willing,” for being, you know, small, laughable countries. The administration’s crowing over the vast international support for the war deserves mockery. But the nations themselves deserve better than being reduced to a cheap laugh line. Of the countries he singled out for sneering at, I don’t recall any that actually have troops in Iraq — he pretty much ignores there having been any soldiers from other countries there.

After seeing the movie, I read Christopher Hitchens’ rant, which I find to be much much less fair than the movie. Scott hits most of my objections. Some of Hitchens’ complaints are a fair cop: Moore attacks some actions whose opposite would also have been easy to attack (although some of Hitchens’ examples of this are ridiculous — no one would have criticized Bush for cutting short his schoolroom visit when he learned the first tower had been hit, instead of sitting around for 7 minutes.)

Another of Hitchens’ objections is what I’d count as the error of fact I alluded to above: Moore’s assertion that Hussein’s Iraq had never threatened or killed an American isn’t defensible. That they weren’t a current threat to America at large, sure. That Bushco knew that and lied about it, sure. But Moore’s statement as given isn’t true.

Complaints aside, it’s an effective and moving polemic. I’m glad to have seen it. I’m glad it’s breaking records. I’m glad that local theatres are failing to enforce the 17-year-old restriction for R-rated movies. I’m concerned that a right-wing group is trying to use a campaign advertising law to block advertising for the movie after July 30, but their attempt seems problematic, and Moore is smug about it. I’m glad it’s out there and it’s making Moore rich, and enriching the managers of the theatres showing it, despite a threatened boycott.

I’m glad Moore’s out there, and I’ll stand in line for the next one.

Just finished Charlie Stross’ The Atrocity Archives. It’s H.P. Lovecraft meets Len Deighton by way of Scott Adams. Good book. I wanted to write something about it, but China Mieville already said it better.

Stross’ protagonist, Robert Howard gets to meet Lovecraftian horrors. Robert E. Howard, whose namesake he is, was a correspondent of Lovecraft’s and his contemporary in the pages of Weird Tales. But he met Lovecraft only in fiction. (Is any of that relevant? Not really, but I felt like geeking out.)

Internet Explorer is too dangerous to keep using. And that was based on last week’s vulnerability. This week’s is a new scheme to capture passwords to banking sites.

Firefox is up to release 0.9.1… and with popup blocking, selective image blocking, tabbed browsing and more, your web browsing will suck much less.

Yeah, I’ve been harping on this lately. But so long as my web log continues to show a majority of people using Internet Explorer, I’ll continue to consider harping on it to be important.

Jed recently turned me on to the Write Hemisphere, a science fiction news weblog. I’m finding it especially valuable for keeping me informed of updates to the multitude of good sf sites out there that I’ve always meant to pay more attention to.

New ultrasound tech allows cool pictures of the secret lives of fetuses.

At 22 weeks gestation babies are capable of fine hand and finger movements. In a short space of time this baby scratches, rubs and pats his cheek before doing the same to his nose. […]

From 26 weeks, they appear to exhibit a whole range of typical baby behaviour and moods, including scratching, smiling, crying, hiccuping, and sucking.

Coming soon to an anti-abortion picket sign near you.

There’s a horrendously bad law proposed currently, and another pretty bad one.

Orrin Hatch’s Induce Act would make it illegal to “aid, abet or induce copyright infringement.” This would undermine the Supreme Court’s Betamax decision that a product is legal if it has “substantial non-infringing uses.” It could make the iPod illegal, as a litigant could assert that its ability to play pirated MP3s aided, abetted and induced copyright infringement.

Basically, it could cripple business’ ability to innovate, for fear of litigation. See Cory Doctorow’s speech to Microsoft for more on why letting Hollywood dictate technology would be bad for everyone.

Meanwhile, the Senate has passed the PIRATE act which would, among other things, potentially send MP3 pirates to jail, and let your tax dollars pay to pursue what have always been civil cases.

I don’t have much patience for the endless apologies for P2P copyright infringers as doing no harm, and even helping copyright holders. It doesn’t matter whether it does no harm. It doesn’t even matter if it helps. A copyright holder has the right to decide how his or her intellectual property gets copied, not any of 10 million other people with a P2P client and an Internet connection.

But given that our prisons are so overcrowded that violent offenders get released early, I don’t think sending file swappers to prison would make the world a better place.

Please write your Senators about the INDUCE Act, and your Representative about the PIRATE Act (there isn’t currently a house version of the bill.) The links above to the EFF’s Action Center articles on the law make it trivially easy to send them email about it. Consider joining the EFF or subscribing to their Action Center alerts while you’re in the neighborhood. They’re doing important work.

The group boycotting theatre chains showing Fahrenheit 9/11 that I mentioned below is crowing over its opening weekend box office failure.

For all the hype, all the hoopla, all the shameless self-promotion by Michael Moore…The Anti-Bushites, the extremists in this country could only muster $23 Million in sales as opposed to the conservative-supported Passion of the Christ brought in $83 Million in sales during its opening weekend. We at PABAAH see this as a huge victory over the radical leftists in this country. The Silent Majority has spoken again, and it said NO to Michael Moore and his anti-Americanism. God Bless America!

WEEKEND BOX OFFICE

Fahrenheit 9/11 $23,920,637

THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST

Opening Weekend: $83,848,082

You can check Box Office Mojo for The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11 yourself.

Passion opened on a Wednesday on 3006 screens nationwide, rising to 3043 for Friday through Sunday. Fahrenheit 9/11 opened on a Wednesday on 2 screens, rising to 868 for Friday through Sunday.

It doesn’t take much math to figure that Passion brought in $5538/screen-day. Fahrenheit weighs in at $9172/screen-day. As for hype, hoopla, shameless self-promotion, Passion’s marketing budget was $25 million to Fahrenheit’s $10 million.

Looks to me like Moore kicked some ass.