Exhibit A: Senator Arlen Specter. Step 1: First excoriate proposed legislation in no uncertain terms: Specter said hearings before his Judiciary Committee showed that the military Combatant Status Review Tribunals do not have an adequate way of determining whether suspects are enemy combatants. He charged that by striking habeas corpus rights for terrorism suspects, the…
Read More How to be a Man of Principle(TM)Sully has the video of Hillary’s Break-Through Speech against the Bush Cheney administration’s policy on torture. UPDATE: Russ Feingold was there too.
Read More Just when you thought the Democrats were AWOL….OK, all you EMACS devotees. Who among you know what EMACS stands for? “Editor MACroS”, that’s right. But what language were these macros originally written in? Thanks to Good Math, Bad Math, you can now read all about the World’s Greatest Pathological Language: TECO. I first encountered it in 1970, when the Essex University PDP-10…
Read More At last! TECO!!Andrew Sullivan quotes Vladimir Bukovsky on the consequences of the toleration of torture by Russian leaders: … in its heyday, Joseph Stalin’s notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high…
Read More Bukovsky and Sullivan on tortureI was updating my profile at the UK social networking site, Friends Reunited, and decided to pay attention to a question that I’d hitherto ignored: “What are your 20 favourite words”. This is what I came up with: love, peace, new, unexpected, honest, whimsy, intense, tranquil, touch, trust, humanism, experiment, imagination, learn, reflection, evolution, revolution,…
Read More 20 wordsThe replacement batteries for my PowerBook finally showed up last Friday, which is a bit quicker than Apple promised. The instructions state that you should drain the old batteries before changing them, by (for example) playing a DVD. In my experience DVDs don’t really stretch the machine: I found a nice Java applet at the…
Read More Can I take my PowerBook on an airliner now?Over the years, I’ve tried to find the best record store wherever I happen to be living. The place to go to browse, discover long-lost musical friends, or find the obscure CD reissue of an equally obscure LP. Yes, I know that I have access to vast online resources, but there’s still a place for…
Read More I have found my musicThe food cupboards and refrigerator are now fully stocked. Until now, they looked like what you might find in an Embassy Suites hotel during an extended business trip. I also have a fairly full selection of drinks, but I haven’t yet got somewhere to put them; none of the cupboards will accomodate a (vertical) bottle…
Read More Getting in gear….Sitting back, sipping my first gin and tonic in the new apartment, I realize that it’s been a long time since I posted a Random 10. I roll the dice, and the new iTunes 7 is kind; it serves up a couple of the best of Brit-pop, together with several newer gems and a couple…
Read More Time for a random 10Here are five pictures that I took yesterday, in part to test my new shirt-pocket camera. You can see how arduous my “commute” is going to be….
Read More 5 from Sunday