The First Church of Free Speech

I’m not sure if you’re aware of the existence of Jack Thompson. He is most famous as an anti-video game “activist”, aka another cowardly lawyer attempting to find a scapegoat for the problems of children, and he is one crazy fucking bastard.

Yack’s been on the radar lately because some stupid crazy fucker teen killed two people and claimed that video games made him do it. Yack went on to claim that games like Grand Theft Auto 3 are actually “murder simulators” designed to allow players to kill cops. Obviously the man has never played a single one of these video games he’s decried as violent and immoral, but that won’t stop ol’ Yack, who fights against the evil of pixellated blood with his crazy bastard sword and his trusty old Bible.

Did I mention that this crazy bastard appears to be one of those puritanical fascist Christian types?

So, ol’ Yack is on a crusade against violent video games, which leaves one to wonder if he’s taking care of his children (hell, if he even has any children; I don’t know who’d marry a crazy fucker like Yack Thompson). His latest stunt was a hypocrisy-laden offer of $10,000 to the first game developer who made a game that targeted the video game industry - i.e. a videogame where the player hunted down and killed video game industry professionals, much like his claims that GTA3 is a cop-killing simulator.

Soon after, one of the fine men who run Penny Arcade, Mike Krahulik, fired off an email criticizing Yack’s comparitively paltry offer, a fraction of the sum total of money and toys that the PA charity Child’s Play raised for children’s hospital all across the country.

Yack then betrayed his hypocrisy yet again by calling Mr. Krahulik and offering vague threats: “My email sig had my phone number in it. Jack actually just called and screamed at me for a couple minutes. He said if I email him again I will ‘regret it’. What a violent man.” Further details of their “conversations” are available here - along with the rest of the whole sordid affair - but let me just say that it ended with him calling Gabe a “pissant”.

How ironic. The crazy fucking bastard on a crusade against violent video games is himself a violent, unstable crazy fucking bastard. Is anyone surprised at this?

Of course, someone took him up on his fucking disgusting challenge. Predictably, Yack declined to release the promised $10,000 - promised to charity, mind you - and called the whole thing “satire”. Jerry Holkins put it best: “Thompson now claims that his repellent suggestion was “satire,” and we must conclude that his financial offer was also satire, some new breed of satire apparently that I’m sure is just hilarious to people in need.”

And in a perfect example of why these two guys are better people than Yack Thompson the Bullshitter could ever be, they donated the $10,000 that Yack reneged on, and they did it in his name, which is just the icing on the cake.

Yack responded in the only way he knew how: vague legal threats, followed by a fax to the Seattle Police asking them to arrest Gabe and Tycho - of course, claiming a “campaign of harassment”, which as a lawyer he should be familiar with - especially in terms of perpetration.

I can’t believe this sort of shit is happening. This jackass claims to be such an upstanding, moral person, fighting against the videogame industry for what’s “right” - i.e. what’s right as defined by those in power - yet he’s willing to sling around terms like “computer geeks” and “moral midgets” at these people whom he considers to be killers in training.

This is the worst sort of scapegoat tactics, hypocrisy and radical Puritanical censorship that I have ever seen, and it sickens me. And it should come as no surprise that Jack Thompson, the Crazy Fucking Bastard, has used such vicious attacks in the past against Janet Reno, when she defeated him for the position of Dade County State Attorney.

This should be news. This shitbag should be smeared across the headlines and labelled as the crazy fucking nutbar hypocrite that he is. And I wonder why it’s not happening.

Good luck to the guys at Penny Arcade. The crazy fucker is at your doorstep, and I’m not as optimistic as you are as to the eventual outcome. It’s going to be a tough battle, because this guy will inspire a lot of support from his fellow crazy puritan assholes.

The Wall Street Journal has apparently obtained notes from a conference call regarding Miers’ nomination. The call was basically a Who’s Who of American Christian bigots along with a couple of justices who were close friends with Miers.

Naturally, they received assurances that Miers would vote to overturn [i]Roe v. Wade[/i] if given the chance. So I’m wondering, with Iraq being in the shape it’s in and just about every single other one of Bush’s ambitions in shambles, is this the one last claim to a “positive” legacy he has left? Is he now content to be the guy who appointed the justice who was the swing vote in overturning [i]Roe v. Wade?[/i]

Because with all the conservative whining about abortion, it’s looking more and more like Miers is a one-trick pony. Bush wants her there to do exactly one thing: put those damned uppity women back in their places. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about how she’ll rule on anything else, because she’s a Christian conservative.

The more I hear about her, the more I hope the Democrats manage to block her nomination. And with some Republicans scratching their heads over her, that could very well happen. If not, the Democrats may just filibuster and, as it says in the article, the Republicans may not have the will to use the nuclear option. They’re already facing the prospect of losing seats in 2006 because of their lock-step conformity with Bush’s increasingly unpopular agenda. The last thing they want to appear to be doing is abusing their power.

I hope Miers get grilled like a salmon. I don’t have any fantasies about Bush appointing a liberal justice or even one who’s on the fence about abortion. He’s going to nominate someone who he knows for sure will overturn Roe v. Wade if given the opportunity, whether anyone likes it or not. I’d just like to see him appoint someone who’s actually qualified. There’s absolutely nothing about Miers which sets her apart from the dozens of qualified conservative justices sitting on the appellate benches at the moment or even from the thousands of lawyers across the country who run their own private practices. If she wasn’t in Bush’s inner circle, she’d be a nobody.

And besides, she has absolutely no experience running Arabian Horse Shows. So clearly, she’s unfit for government office.

[b][url=http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110007415]John Fund of the Wall Street Journal[/url] wrote:
Judgment Call[/b]

[b]Did Christian conservatives receive assurances that Miers would oppose [i]Roe v. Wade?[/i] [/b]
Monday, October 17, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Two days after President Bush announced Harriet Miers’s Supreme Court nomination, James Dobson of Focus on the Family raised some eyebrows by declaring on his radio program: “When you know some of the things that I know–that I probably shouldn’t know–you will understand why I have said, with fear and trepidation, that I believe Harriet Miers will be a good justice.”

Mr. Dobson quelled the controversy by saying that Karl Rove, the White House’s deputy chief of staff, had not given him assurances about how a Justice Miers would vote. “I would have loved to have known how Harriet Miers views Roe v. Wade,” Mr. Dobson said last week. “But even if Karl had known the answer to that–and I’m certain that he didn’t because the president himself said he didn’t know–Karl would not have told me that. That’s the most incendiary information that’s out there, and it was never part of our discussion.”

It might, however, have been part of another discussion. On Oct. 3, the day the Miers nomination was announced, Mr. Dobson and other religious conservatives held a conference call to discuss the nomination. One of the people on the call took extensive notes, which I have obtained. According to the notes, two of Ms. Miers’s close friends–both sitting judges–said during the call that she would vote to overturn Roe.

The call was moderated by the Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association. Participating were 13 members of the executive committee of the Arlington Group, an umbrella alliance of 60 religious conservative groups, including Gary Bauer of American Values, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation and the Rev. Bill Owens, a black minister. Also on the call were Justice Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court and Judge Ed Kinkeade, a Dallas-based federal trial judge.

Mr. Dobson says he spoke with Mr. Rove on Sunday, Oct. 2, the day before President Bush publicly announced the nomination. Mr. Rove assured Mr. Dobson that Ms. Miers was an evangelical Christian and a strict constructionist, and said that Justice Hecht, a longtime friend of Ms. Miers who had helped her join an evangelical church in 1979, could provide background on her. Later that day, a personal friend of Mr. Dobson’s in Texas called him and suggested he speak with Judge Kinkeade, who has been a friend of Ms. Miers’s for decades.

Mr. Dobson says he was surprised the next day to learn that Justice Hecht and Judge Kinkeade were joining the Arlington Group call. He was asked to introduce the two of them, which he considered awkward given that he had never spoken with Justice Hecht and only once to Judge Kinkeade. According to the notes of the call, Mr. Dobson introduced them by saying, “Karl Rove suggested that we talk with these gentlemen because they can confirm specific reasons why Harriet Miers might be a better candidate than some of us think.”

What followed, according to the notes, was a free-wheeling discussion about many topics, including same-sex marriage. Justice Hecht said he had never discussed that issue with Ms. Miers. [b]Then an unidentified voice asked the two men, “Based on your personal knowledge of her, if she had the opportunity, do you believe she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade?”

“Absolutely,” said Judge Kinkeade.

“I agree with that,” said Justice Hecht. “I concur.”[/b]

Shortly thereafter, according to the notes, Mr. Dobson apologized and said he had to leave the discussion: “That’s all I need to know and I will get off and make some calls.” (When asked about his comments in the notes I have, Mr. Dobson confirmed some of them and said it was “very possible” he made the others. He said he did not specifically recall the comments of the two judges on Roe v. Wade.)

Judge Kinkeade, through his secretary, declined to discuss the matter. Justice Hecht told me he remembers participating in the call but can’t recollect who invited him or many specifics about it. He said he did tell the group that Ms. Miers was “pro-life,” a characterization he has repeated in public. But he says that when someone asked him about her stand on overturning Roe v. Wade he answered, “I don’t know.” He doesn’t recall what Judge Kinkeade said. But several people who participated in the call confirm that both jurists stated Ms. Miers would vote to overturn Roe.

The benign interpretation of the comments is that the two judges were speaking on behalf of themselves, not Ms. Miers or the White House, and they were therefore offering a prediction, not an assurance, about how she would come down on Roe v. Wade. But the people I interviewed who were on the call took the comments as an assurance, and at least one based his support for Ms. Miers on them.

The conference call will no doubt prove controversial on Capitol Hill, always a tinderbox for rumors that any judicial nominee has taken a stand on Roe v. Wade. Ms. Miers meets today with Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and Chuck Schumer of New York, both stalwart Roe supporters, who surely will be interested to learn more about her views. After Mr. Dobson’s initial comments about “things . . . that I probably shouldn’t know,” Sen. Arlen Specter, the pro-Roe Judiciary Committee chairman, said, “If there are backroom assurances and if there are backroom deals and if there is something that bears on a precondition as to how a nominee is going to vote, I think that’s a matter that ought to be known.” He and ranking Democrat Pat Leahy of Vermont threatened to subpoena Mr. Dobson as a witness.

Some participants in the Oct. 3 conference call fear that they will be called to testify at Ms. Miers’s hearings. “If the call is as you describe it, an effort will be made to subpoena everyone on it,” a Judiciary Committee staffer told me. It is possible that a tape or notes of the call are already in the hands of committee staffers. “Some people were on speaker phones allowing other people to listen in, and others could have been on extensions,” one participant told me.

Should hearings begin on Nov. 7 as is now tentatively planned, they would likely turn into a spectacle. Mr. Specter has said he plans to press Ms. Miers “very hard” on whether Roe v. Wade is settled law. “She will have hearings like no nominee has ever had to sit through,” Chuck Todd, editor of the political tip sheet Hotline, told radio host John Batchelor. “One slipup on camera and she is toast.”

Should she survive the hearings, liberal groups may demand that Democrats filibuster her. Republican senators, already hesitant to back Ms. Miers after heavy blowback from their conservative base, would likely lack the will to trigger the so-called nuclear option. “The nomination is in real trouble,” one GOP senator told me. “Not one senator wants to go through the agony of those hearings, even those who want to vote for her.” Even if Ms. Miers avoids a filibuster, it’s possible Democrats would join with dissident Republicans to defeat her outright.

There are philosophical reasons for Republican senators to oppose Ms. Miers. In 1987, the liberal onslaught on Robert Bork dramatically changed the confirmation process. The verb to bork, meaning to savage a nominee and distort his record, entered the vocabulary, and many liberals now acknowledge that the anti-Bork campaign had bad consequences. It led to more stealth nominees, with presidents hoping their scant paper trail would shield them from attack.

President Bush has now gone further in internalizing the lessons of the Bork debacle. Harriet Miers is a “superstealth” nominee–a close friend of the president with no available paper trail who keeps her cards so close to her chest they might as well be plastered on it. If Ms. Miers is confirmed, it will reinforce the popular belief that the Supreme Court is more about political outcomes than the rule of law.

Okay, now I get to pretend my readership is actually a lot larger than the two or three people who came across this thing by searching Google for “bush cheney suck ass”. This coming Friday, I’ll be in Chicago for Drunken Blog’s Evening at Adler, a get-together for Mac developers. If anyone out there will be there, let me know and we can hook up.

Today on “Meet the Press”, Condoleeza Rice explained the Bush administration’s Iraq invasion.

The fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al Qaeda … or we could take a bolder approach.

Wonderful. I expect to see new gun control laws make their way through Congress as the GOP takes “a bolder approach” to the Second Amendment. After all, people who shoot other people are the proximate cause of gun violence. We could either decide to go after the proximate cause or we could take a bolder approach and start holding gun makers and dealers responsible.

Cenk Uyger over at the Huffington Post wrote an entry asking this question. I generally like the people who post over there, but this is just garbage. Here are some choice excerpts.

I spend a good deal of time attacking the established religions. I think they are not only contradictory and counterproductive, but flat out wrong. But just because you don’t believe in organized religion, doesn’t mean you don’t believe in God.

Let me be frank. People who believe in God but don’t subscribe to organized religion aren’t any more right or rational than people who do subscribe to it. Both conclusions are indefensible; they only differ in their details and the amount of certainty they profess. Believing in your own invisible man over other people’s doesn’t make you clever.

The exact characteristics, wishes and goals of God are immensely difficult questions. And what exactly you mean by God is an even more difficult question. But I think some things are clear. God does not want you to kill your children if they curse at you. God will not cast you down to eternal damnation for eating shellfish or bacon. God did not favor Mohammed over the competing tribes in the Arabian Peninsula, nor did he whisper in his ear about taking dozens of the local women as his wives. Moses did not split the Red Sea and it did not rain frogs in Egypt.

So the wishes of God are difficult to discern, yet he’s certain that God wants everyone to act like decent human beings? How does he know? If God exists, how does anyone know that he even cares about what goes on down here? According to many theists, we can’t comprehend God because we’re like insects to him. Well when was the last time you gave a shit about the political goings-on over at that ant colony on your driveway?

This is the problem with religion. It has to constantly reinvent itself to conform with societal norms or else it faces extinction. Notice how Christianity used to unwaveringly support slavery in the United States until society began to realize that slavery was a detestable human rights tragedy. Then, all of a sudden, those Bible passages which explicitly condoned slavery were “misinterpreted”. I’ll bet money that, in 50 years, when this ridiculous, tight-assed attitude about homosexuality blows over, every major religion will blather on about how people who currently denigrate homosexuals as “immoral” were misinterpreting their holy books.

It’s a fine example of circular logic. The Bible cannot be immoral, therefore if commonly-accepted morality contradicts a straightforward interpretation of the Bible, it is the victim of misinterpretation. This turns religion into a victim rather than the weapon. The more tame of religious people often accuse the fundamentalists of using the Bible / Qu’ran / whatever to further their own ends. Well they do the exact same thing! No matter what the intentions of a believer reading the Bible, to him, the Bible will always agree with his desires. The only difference is the person.

But also, the universe is not random. There is clear and convincing evidence of order. E=MC2. In a right triangle a2+b2=c2. Pi is a mathematical constant that is used to figure out the ratio of every circle’s circumference to its diameter. Phi is the golden ratio. 2+2=4. For every force, there is an equal and opposite force. All of these things are indisputably true and indisputably not random.

Einstein had this same problem. Unfortunately, the entire field of quantum mechanics blows this conclusion completely out of the water. On the smallest scales, the Universe is indeed, random and only predictable through statistical analysis. For example, when a radioactive material decays, its atoms emit alpha particles. But there is absolutely no way to predict which atom in the sample will emit the particle. It’s totally random. We can only tell how many particles will be emitted during a certain time.

Touting math around doesn’t make the Universe any less random. The Universe is the way it is just because that’s the way it is. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be around to observe it. I know that’s not some “deep philosophical answer”, but it’s the simplest explanation and involves no ridiculous unknown terms like an invisible man living in the sky.

His central premise appears to be that order cannot come about through natural processes alone. This is utterly absurd. Have you checked the shape of the Earth lately? Do you know why it’s a very good approximation of a sphere? Because gravity molded it that way. Symmetrical forces will exhibit symmetrical results.

Where does order come from? Is it created? Does it exist outside of time and space? What is its nature? I do not believe that these are unknowable questions. I think we can.

However, the first step to rationally figuring out the reality of an existent order is to put aside the nonsensical mythologies of yesteryear. …

How the hell are we going to rationally determine whether order exists outside of time or space? We exist within time and space. Anything that exists outside of time or space is, by definition, not observable by us! Venturing into such a place is nothing but pure speculation, completely unverifiable and irrational.

What I am saying here is that there is a logical reason to have faith. But there can be no faith without reason. Without reason how could we determine what to have faith in? And when you use reason, you cannot justify any of the organized religions. Ironically, it’s time to get beyond religion, so that we can focus on God.

He means well, but he makes the exact same mistake that all these intelligent design lunatics do. He assumes that our existence is proof that God exists. Faith is, by definition, belief without reason. Applying elementary logic to any claims of the divine completely unravels them because they cannot be falsified.

So to answer the original question, the rest energy of an object is equal to the product of its mass and the square of the speed of light through a vacuum because if it was anything else, the Universe wouldn’t work.