Running out of time.

With little more than a hour to meet a deadline on a little piece I'm writing, the FedEx guy shows up with that Blue Snowball Microphone I've been waiting for. I can't resist screwing in the little tripod stand, plugging in the USB cord, and firing up Quicktime Pro to test it out. I justify the digression from my writing project by reading what I've written out loud to do my little sound test. I edit a bit as I go. Then -- atwitter with the hope that this is that device that can catapult my podcasting to a whole new level -- I play it back. Is it good? Well, I'll just do an extra little podcast tonight to demonstrate the power of the Snowball! But for now, I must get back to this writing.

Bonus revelation: I have yet to do any Christmas shopping! Me and deadlines -- we have a very close relationship.

Where police beat up couples for walking together in the park.

India!

Two policewomen have been suspended in the northern Indian city of Meerut for slapping and punching couples who were dating in a public park....

Police chief Rajiv Ranjan said ... the police action was part of a drive undertaken at periodic intervals - often at the behest of the parents of young women - to "cleanse" parks and other public places of people indulging in acts of public obscenity.

"Winter."

Nice photo, by Andy Goldsworthy: "Torn crack in leaves / Laid on a sheet of ice wedged between two trunks of a Hawthorn that had once been a single tree until struck by lightning.”

"A noticeably calmer Saddam Hussein sat quietly in his defendant's chair."

At the resumption of his trial, Saddam Hussein has adopted a new demeanor -- for whatever reason. Tranquilizers? Resignation? New legal strategy? Re-analysis of the political effect of acting obstreperous? The reason he's trying to project: Religion?

UPDATE: Ah, he's chosen to play the victim.

The powerful district court decision in the Intelligent Design case.

Here's the NYT report on yesterday's decision in the Intelligent Design case. An excerpt:

Judge [John E. Jones III], a Republican appointed by President Bush, concluded that intelligent design was not science, and that in order to claim that it is, its proponents admit they must change the very definition of science to include supernatural explanations....

"To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect," Judge Jones wrote. "However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions."...

Judge Jones's decision is legally binding only for school districts in the middle district of Pennsylvania. It is unlikely to be appealed because the school board members who supported intelligent design were unseated in elections in November and replaced with a slate that opposes the intelligent design policy and said it would abide by the judge's decision.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs said at a news conference in Harrisburg that the judge's decision should serve as a deterrent to other school boards and teachers considering teaching intelligent design....

Witold Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, who helped to argue the case, said, "We sincerely hope that other school districts who may have been thinking about intelligent design will pause, they will read Judge Jones's erudite opinion and they will look at what happened in the Dover community in this battle, pitting neighbor against neighbor."

What a powerful district court opinion! It will remain unreviewed, the final word at the end of a cautionary tale for all school boards who contemplate adopting Intelligent Design in the future.

Eugenie Scott, executive director, National Center for Science Education, an advocacy group in Oakland, Calif., that promotes teaching evolution, said in an interview, "I predict that another school board down the line will try to bring intelligent design into the curriculum like the Dover group did, and they'll be a lot smarter about concealing their religious intent."

It's hard to see how they will ever hide this intent. If there is any controversy at all -- and could there not be? -- opponents will bring up the Dover case and make much of the fact that a federal judge has equated Intelligent Design with religion. It simply won't be possible to adopt Intelligent Design without talking a lot about religion now. The next school board may be "smarter" about what it needs to do to achieve its end, but if it's that smart, it should also perceive the world of trouble that lies ahead. If the judge's decision doesn't faze them, the political losses of the school board that voted yes certainly should. Proponents of teaching Intelligent Design in science classes will have a hard time admitting it, but this one district court opinion just killed their movement.

"Some of the judges say is they feel they've participated in a Potemkin court."

A federal judge has resigned from his position on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court:

[U.S. District Judge James] Robertson indicated privately to colleagues in recent conversations that he was concerned that information gained from warrantless NSA surveillance could have then been used to obtain FISA warrants. FISA court Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who had been briefed on the spying program by the administration, raised the same concern in 2004 and insisted that the Justice Department certify in writing that it was not occurring.

"They just don't know if the product of wiretaps were used for FISA warrants -- to kind of cleanse the information," said one source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the FISA warrants. "What I've heard some of the judges say is they feel they've participated in a Potemkin court."

Robertson is considered a liberal judge who has often ruled against the Bush administration's assertions of broad powers in the terrorism fight, most notably in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld . Robertson held in that case that the Pentagon's military commissions for prosecuting terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were illegal and stacked against the detainees.

Some FISA judges said they were saddened by the news of Robertson's resignation and want to hear more about the president's program.

"I guess that's a decision he's made and I respect him," said Judge George P. Kazen, another FISA judge. "But it's just too quick for me to say I've got it all figured out."

The resignation seems to speak loudly, but what does it say? The resignation letter itself gives no reason. An anonymous source offers some context. The judge may see the process that he participates in as tainted and feel that he can therefore no longer be part of it. The judge may simply object to the procedure and feel that the resignation is an effective way to express that objection. That objection may be political opposition to the President, purely legal opinion, or some mix of the two. To the extent that it is legal opinion, it may not be an opinion that most judges, handling a fully briefed and argued case, would agree with. The one judge we see making a statement to the press without asking for anonymity says that it's too soon to have figured out such a complicated legal question. That sounds about right to me.

Character development in the movie "Annie Hall."

John -- my son John Althouse Cohen -- opines:

Annie Hall likes to get high when they have sex and Woody Allen -- or Alvy Singer -- doesn't like that. That's the most character development there is in the movie.

Are women sexually interested in apes?

Over on Huffington Post, LA Weekly writer Joshuah Bearman looks at the "bestiality" subtext to the movie "King Kong" and says:

[The] subtext turns out to be biologically based: I just read about a new study which shows that human women are aroused by watching monkeys having sex. Medical fact! The paper was in Biological Psychology, and the methodology went right to the source by measuring something called Vaginal Pulse Amplitude. There were male subjects too, but the primate porn did not get a single rise out of their apparatuses. I know -- you'd figure the dudes would be the deviants getting a little thrill from the bonobo boots-knocking. Turns out it's the fairer sex that's biologically amenable to a little monkey love.

Maybe Joshuah's especially interested in the topic of women and beasts because he's BearMan. But really, interesting study isn't it? Strange to think of the folks who dream up these studies and carry them out. Anyway, I think Joshuah and the scientists are reading too much into this study. Female sexuality is complicated and different from male sexuality. Why just test the subjects with pornography? I'll bet pictures of all sorts of things would produce a response on the vaginometer but would leave the penisometer unaffected.

Blogger glitch.

Lately, I've been having the problem of a comments page not opening. You end up on a "page not found" page. I'm always able to solve the problem by republishing the post, but I don't always notice that it's happening. Sometimes someone emails me or comments in another thread to let me know, and I appreciate that. Sometimes I'll go a long time just wondering things like: how come no one's commenting on the "Heaven" post? -- and then, eventually, it will dawn on me that it's that glitch again. So, if you were thinking of commenting before and couldn't, so to speak, get into Heaven, please try again.

Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep.

Manicurists to the King. Apparently gay. And respected enough to have a lovely tomb, with artwork that shows them embracing, some 5000 years ago.

Archaeologists were taken aback. It was extremely rare in ancient Egypt for an elite tomb to be shared by two men of apparently equal standing. The usual practice was for such mortuary temples to be the resting place of one prominent man, his wife and children.

And it was most unusual for a couple of the same sex to be depicted locked in an embrace. In other scenes, they are also shown holding hands and nose-kissing, the favored form of kissing in ancient Egypt.

But wait. There's an alternate theory: they were conjoined twins.

"The gay-couple idea is essentially derived from imposing modern preoccupations on ancient materials and not attending to the cultural context."

That blouse brings out your eye color.

Really! Science Times says your clothes can affect your eye color.

"A federal judge ruled Tuesday that 'intelligent design' cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district."

Just reported:

The Dover Area School Board violated the Constitution when it ordered that its biology curriculum must include "intelligent design," the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled Tuesday.

Predictable. Correct.

UPDATE: Here's the opinion. It's lengthy. Basically, the judge, following precedent, asks whether a reasonable observer would perceive a government endorsement of religion. He also, more briefly, applies the Lemon test. Here are some key points:

As a reasonable observer, whether adult or child, would be aware of this social context in which the ID Policy arose, and such context will help to reveal the meaning of Defendants’ actions, it is necessary to trace the history of the IDM. ...

Although proponents of the IDM occasionally suggest that the designer could be a space alien or a time-traveling cell biologist, no serious alternative to God as the designer has been proposed by members of the IDM, including Defendants’ expert witnesses....

Dramatic evidence of ID’s religious nature and aspirations is found in what is referred to as the “Wedge Document.” The Wedge Document, developed by the Discovery Institute’s Center for Renewal of Science and Culture (hereinafter “CRSC”), represents from an institutional standpoint, the IDM’s goals and objectives... The Wedge Document states in its “Five Year Strategic Plan Summary” that the IDM’s goal is to replace science as currently practiced with “theistic and Christian science.” As posited in the Wedge Document, the IDM’s “Governing Goals” are to “defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies” and “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.”...

The weight of the evidence clearly demonstrates... that the systemic change from “creation” to “intelligent design” occurred sometime in 1987, after the Supreme Court’s important Edwards decision. This compelling evidence strongly supports Plaintiffs’ assertion that ID is creationism re-labeled. ...

[T]he disclaimer singles out the theory of evolution for special treatment, misrepresents its status in the scientific community, causes students to doubt its validity without scientific justification, presents students with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory, directs them to consult a creationist text as though it were a science resource, and instructs students to forego scientific inquiry in the public school classroom and instead to seek out religious instruction elsewhere....

ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community....

[A]lthough Defendants have unceasingly attempted in vain to distance themselves from their own actions and statements, which culminated in repetitious, untruthful testimony, such a strategy constitutes additional strong evidence of improper purpose under the first prong of the Lemon test. As exhaustively detailed herein, the thought leaders on the Board made it their considered purpose to inject some form of creationism into the science classrooms, and by the dint of their personalities and persistence they were able to pull the majority of the Board along in their collective wake. ...

[T]he Court likewise concludes that the ID Policy is violative of Plaintiffs’ rights under the Pennsylvania Constitution....

The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board’s ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. ...

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom. Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

I love that last part about who's the real activist here. And note the passage I've highlighted in red. I think that translates into: You call yourself religious? You hypocrite! You lied and cheated your way through this case!

ADDED: I'd like to retitle this post: School Board in the Hands of an Angry Judge. He is really angry, isn't he?

MORE: The judge called it ironic that persons who claim to be religious would lie and deceive. But isn't it also ironic that a judge enforcing the Establishment Clause would throw in an opinion about what obligations religion imposes?

"'Heaven' is a corny show. But heaven itself is corny."

Virginia Heffernan writes about Barbara Walters' TV show about Heaven.

The program says nearly 90 percent of Americans believe heaven exists; most of them, presumably, think they have a shot at it. It's a nice idea. As Mr. Albom, the best-selling author of "The Five People You Meet in Heaven," says, the idea alone can make life on earth better, sprinkling a little stardust on the drudgery and meaninglessness of daily life.

Mr. Albom goes on to describe the dysphoria of being ordinary: "If you're not a celebrity, you can start to feel like you don't matter."

So that's it. The implication is clear. In the American creed - the one articulated on network news programs like this one - heaven is a place where we all get to be celebrities. At last.

Why pick on Americans? Well, we're the ones who support the existence of TV networks that put on shows like this? I wonder, if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got a look at this show, would he put it in his spiritual or his triteness category? That's a big problem with religion, isn't it? It's supposed to be the most serious thing going, but it's also always threatening to be the most ridiculous. And when it's religion on television, the chances of it coming out ridiculous are unusually high.

"Terrorists don't need to reconnoiter their target. Now an American company is working for them."

The problem with Google Earth.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad bans Western music.

No more Western music on radio and TV in Iran. Inappropriately, the CNN report begins in a way that seems to invite us to joke that Ahmadinejad has a pretty good idea:

Songs such as George Michael's "Careless Whisper," Eric Clapton's "Rush" and the Eagles' "Hotel California" have regularly accompanied Iranian broadcasts, as do tunes by saxophonist Kenny G.

But the official IRAN Persian daily reported Monday that Ahmadinejad, as head of Iran's Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council, ordered the enactment of an October ruling by the council to ban Western music.

Very sad. I hope this inspires people to push back. Music is important, and taking people's music away should strongly impress them that the government is repressive beyond reason. If only Western music were better, the impression might be stronger. Unfortunately, I can understand the feeling that the music of the outsiders is eroding your culture. I've felt, as a traveler, that the music of my own culture was eroding the culture of the foreign place I wanted to experience.

Ahmadinejad's newest effort in cultural repression extends beyond music:

The latest media ban also includes censorship of content of films.

"Supervision of content from films, TV series and their voice-overs is emphasized in order to support spiritual cinema and to eliminate triteness and violence," the council said in a statement on its Web site explaining its October ruling.

The council has also issued a ban on foreign movies that promote "arrogant powers," an apparent reference to the United States.

I have to assume the people in Iran are sharp enough to see the irony in his referring to the United States as an "arrogant power."

Quite aside from this exclusion of Western influence, there's this notion of eliminating triteness from TV and movies. Well, I'm rather opposed to triteness myself, but you know if you try to make a law against triteness, triteness itself becomes a political protest. (Remember Mu Mu?) I love the idea that playing "Careless Whisper" and acting like an idiot on television are now subversive acts. The government, purveying seriousness, can now be affronted with silliness. Now there is risk and passion in foolery.

Splogs.

Does anyone have any advice about what a blogger can do about those blog-looking things that just steal a blogger's material in its entirety to create a site with a sidebar full of links? I unwittingly discovered a way to detect these things: when you link to one of your own old posts, the thing will show up in Technorati as another blog linking to you. But I can't think of what to do once I've found it. And, no, I'm not going to link to one.