No room in the inn...not for you.

It's seldom I read a story with so many layers.

Synopsis: A woman teaching at a Catholic school was unfortunate enough to get pregnant while unmarried. She was fired for being a bad moral example to the children.

So here's a woman who messed up and got pregnant. I really hope given the context that the school spoke to her regarding the circumstances of her pregnancy, first because this would be simply awful if she were raped, and second because the most famous woman of Catholocism also had a somewhat inexplicable pregnancy... But let's suppose she had consentual sex and got knocked-up in the ordinary fashion. Was it unprotected because of her religious values? If she'd taken her sins one step further and used birth control would she still have a job? Tough break.

Now in principle, as a citizen, I support the right of churches as private institutions to hire and fire whomever they choose for moral reasons. So in that respect all is well and good.

But as a Catholic, I'm appalled. Sure the school wants to set an example for the children, but what example are they setting by kicking a single pregnant woman to the curbs? Is that what Jesus would do? Say "Get away, you dirty sinning Jezebel?" I doubt it... Of course I have to defer to the clergy about Jesus's decision-making process, but to me it doesn't sound likely. I don't think the church is following His example. If they offered her a lower profile job (to "protect" the kids) I'd be ok with that, but it sounds like she was out and out fired: a not terribly Christian thing to do.

It bothers me to see such a bad example from my own church. Even the anti-abortion groups are against the firing, pointing out that the cost of showing a pregnancy is being shamed and thrown out. That means 1: an incentive for the teacher to get an abortion 2: an object lesson to the children (whose values are being protected) to get abortions.

What's really biohazardous?

Working in a lab I use a number of hazardous reagents. Most are chemical, but we've got bionasties too; things like genetically engineered bacteria, human cancer cells, cow blood, and replication deficient viruses. Although these things sound bad and all get labelled biohazard (the biohazard bags later get incinerated), the chances of picking up an infection from any of them is miniscule.

On the other hand, if one of us is sick and blows his nose, then there's a blob of snot full of a known human pathogen. To other humans, it's suddenly the most infectious and virulent thing in the lab. Of course, tissues go into the standard garbage.

Slow blogging day

Been around the world and found
that only stupid people are breeding,
the cretins cloning and feeding,
and I don't even own a TV.
-Harvey Danger

Was surfing some blogs today when that popped into my head. Anyway, nothing substantive to share today. Carry on then.

Conservative quibbles

What is irony?

When someone at the NRO rips on George Will?

When someone who's title is "Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies" defends warrantless spying by executive powers without any oversight?

When McCarthy's entire defense of the NSA program omits that the government is spying on US citizens and only uses the word "citizen" is within a quotation of Will's?

When it ultimately turns out that the NSA has been at least occasionally intercepting calls between 2 Americans and McCarthy's entire argument goes down the tubes?

I'll tell you what's not irony: another pathos-laden piece that urges more executive power, demeans it's opponents, and concludes with a fearful closer about "a wartime enemy that seeks, above all else, to mount a massive attack against the homeland." That's just another day at NRO. Link credit to Tigerhawk, with whom I must disagree, but still thank for teaching me the word "internecine".

I like George Will. He's an old-school type who advocates smaller government and fiscal responsibility. I even agree with this piece on checks and balances. Even when I don't agree, at least his writing is good and he calls it like he sees it.

True intellectual conservatives are fun to read. To plagurize the Wachoski Brothers: reading Will is like wiping your ass with silk. On the other hand, I find reading McCarthy akin to wiping my ass with hot sauce.

Religious activism not reported by the media

Funny the things the media doesn’t report. Did you hear that 115 religious activists were arrested this past December for protesting Congressional budget cuts to social programs that would affect the poor? I hadn’t. And I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t found this site while looking for religious anti-torture groups. (I did hear Cindy Sheehan was arrested again recently, but I didn't care at the time and don't know whether it was related.)

Interestingly, I hadn’t seen this one before either. Evidently those pesky Catholics were protesting Gitmo back in December. It’s a page in a Google cache…I have no idea what happened to the original or whether it is still around, but it only happened 2 months ago.

I’ve always found it odd that more religious folk don’t protest torture. Maybe they do routinely, but no one pays attention?

Freedom isn't free...so charge some for yourself

I once had a conversation with a guy at a party who programmed data mining programs for credit card companies. Interestingly, it’s not a warning sign to banks when you spend wildly. Instead, they start to get concerned when you stop buying junk and start buying necessities. I guess if you charge a gold watch, you can probably cover it, but if you suddenly stop spending and have to charge gas and food they get worried. (maybe you even quit and went to grad school, the horror)

I only mention this because there are all kinds of programs out there silently analyzing our behavior and one of them may or may not come across the donation I made today when I joined the ACLU. I can only imagine what massive corporate credit entities think of the ACLU... Anyway, since I already know they'll be appraised of my spending, I thought I might as well share the decision with you.

Here’s where you go. If a poor graduate student can afford it, you probably can too. And if you need to ask why, you need to pay more attention.

Ignorance is bliss. It’s also cowardly.

So I was wrong about the photos making a blip on the radar. If you read the daily ABC News political summary ”The Note”, you'll find no mention of it. Guess phenomena that incite world violence just aren't political news.

Worse photos released today by Salon. Catch them soon before they are censored.

One in particular shows a bound naked man with an object shoved into his anus. The soldiers involved were exonerated because of the man’s proclaimed mental illness. Yeah right. That naked guy bound hand and foot in a military prison just happened to find a convenient phallus. Even buying the story, why are we keeping mentally ill people shackled naked?

No officers have been prosecuted to date. Don’t tell me they never noticed the wounded, hooded, naked men chained to each other. If they never noticed they would surely have been court-martialled for incompetence. They knew and they weren’t tried. Why not? I imagine they were following orders.

This was paid for with our tax dollars. It has been covered up by the Executive and also by both parties of the Senate who viewed those photos in 2003. The courts have dallied and stalled for 3 years, and even our vaunted 4th estate is turning a blind eye.

I see people trying to minimize this or ignore it because they want to be proud and this makes them feel bad about America. Tough shit. That’s both cowardly and lazy. This is not what America stands for. We have a problem. If you want to be proud of America, do the brave thing and view the photos. We need to fix this properly. It should have been done 3 years ago. And there is worse to come.

Goodbye Paul, I wish things worked out...

The Democrat establishment ushered Paul Hackett out the door. No doubt they saw he had a fire in his belly and got worried. I'll remember him most from his appearance on "Real time with Bill Maher". I don't want to go catcher in the rye, but he seemed like less of a phoney bastard than your usual political type. Wouldn't surprise me if Republicans picked him up.

It would make my day if he ran for senate anyway as an independent. Of course that would push odds in favor of Mike DeWine. That's how you play hardball though. If he feels shafted by the Democratic establishment, it's well within his power to shaft them back.

If I were Paul I'd do it in a heartbeat. Between the coin scandal and all the other crap in Ohio, the voters have got to be looking for something fresh and new. An Independent might be more appealing than a Democrat or Republican. He might not have the power to win, but he could deep-six the Democrats who definitely need that Senate seat. They would be hot and heavy to work something out (they want him in the highly Republican district he almost won last year...like that's a reward) because the reality is he has a play to make. He should tell the Democrats what it will cost them for that play to go in their favor. And they aren't in any position to bargain.

'Cause we can't censor Australia,,,yet...

The government has done a good job to date of stonewalling the ACLU's attempts to get rights to the remaining Abu Gharib photos, but as it happens some of them ended up in Australia. Hey, I know new abuse photos barely make a blip on the US press radar, what with the gunshot wounds, Katrina stuff, and whatever...but trust me: the world is watching even if we aren't. I took a quick look around on Wednesday at noon. While the major US press outlets did carry the news, they weren't carrying the images (CNN had one of a hooded person holding a box, but none of the bloody ones). Curious that they are pressworthy the world over, but not in the US...

Anyway, we haven't as a nation confessed our sins on this and there will not be absolution until we do. The Australian Broadcasting Company did not publish all of the images, and they don't intend to, because some are TOO GRAPHIC. More graphic than a man beating his head against the wall. More graphic than a naked man chained upside down from a bunk bed. More graphic than the numerous wounds on a man's ass from some sort of rubber bullets. More graphic than two naked men handcuffed back to back (notice on that photo there are open wounds along one man's arm- more rubber bullets? cattle prod?). But hey...it's all water under the bridge. Just a few bad apples in the dead of night, right? There's worse, and much, if not all of it will continue to leak and haunt us: because we didn't take responsibility for it in 2003.

The funny part...is the way this leak is pretty well timed for the administration. When the Muslim world rises up in protest (as incidentally we would if they did this shit to us) the conservatives are going to spin it as a continuance of the cartoon fiasco...and we all want to defend freedom of speech. Of course that spin doesn't actually improve relations with anyone. It doesn't make our troops safer, and it doesn't accomplish anything. But it's easy to snowball Americans. After all, most read the American press, and thus haven't even seen the photos.

So this was either a clever leak all the way around the world, or somone at the NSA just got moved to monitoring calls to Australia. After all these leaks are a matter of national security. The people who want to know the truth are terrorist supporters. Those who committed the atrocities are only worthy of 10 years in jail, but the people who leaked them risk much much worse...

Ready Fire Aim

In his most myopic moment yet, Dick Cheney fires birdshot into a fellow hunter. With sincere condolences to Mr. Whittington, this is simply to axiomatic not to mention.

Back from Vacation

Got a chance to tour some of Colorado this week. It was pretty cool. The highlight was definitely skiing the bowl at Keystone. I've never taken the jump into a steep bowl of powder before. The first 8 feet of vertical plunge was the hardest. Frankly, it didn't go too smoothly, but I hope to someday try it again.

The 2nd coolest thing I saw this week was the Air Force Academy. The campus was very nice, despite winter making it brown and gray. The most beautiful part of campus was the Protestant Chapel. (The website graciously calls it the nondenominational "Cadet Chapel" but I've reffered to the name as posted on signs all over the lobby.) It is a beautiful piece of architecture, and worth the trip.

The AFA visitor center has a lot of really cool information, but possibly the coolest is the part about how the academy strives to build integrity, honor, and character into the curriculum. I wish my undergrad program actively taught those attributes. Imagine if all schools taught honor and integrity as a formal educational goal. (Question: would it be intrinsically counter-productive for anywhere with a business school? ) (Take-home-exercise: compare and contrast the academic obsession with "ethical" behavior vs. the military obsession with "honorable" behavior.) Anyway, I think it a worthy goal.

Also, if you're out there, the AFA is only a few miles from the Foucus-on-Family visitor center. I was hoping to get the inside scoop on SpongeBob's homosexuality, but despite my best efforts I couldn't persuade my hosts to stop there. Sorry, maybe next time.

Philly's finest.

On my daily bike ride to campus today I noticed that many of the traffic lights were out. Not blinking, just dead. This actually happens quite a lot along Spruce street, for whatever reason (probably construction at Penn). Anyway, half a dozen lights were out including the one on the South Street exit from I-95. It was a little chaotic, as it always is in a city when lights don't work, and especially on rainy mornings.

So I''m thinking: this must have just happened and the city will respond to it soon. Sure enough, up at the next broken light there's a police car with lights on. But oddly enough, the car wasn't there about the taffic lights. It was there to block people from using 33rd street which was closed off for construction.

Twelve feet away from a chaotic intersection without any traffic lights a police officer was sitting in his parked cruiser. As I peered in the window I saw he was playing windows solitare.

Where google fails

Nothing political or China related here, I just wanted to share a few cases where Google isn't the ultimate reference we want it to be.

A few weeks ago I had cause to get more background information on a gene, namely lacI . That family of genes was pretty big in biological research, so I anticipated lots of websites. What I did not anticipate was the hundreds of Laci Peterson sites that came up.

More recently I had cause to search for "standard enthalpy of formation". Although this got tons of hits, they were primarily academic sites and none of them contained any data tables. Dozens of sites explaining how to use the data, but not one saying where to find the values.

Anyway. I hope the self-aware Google is listening and can take care of stuff like this.