Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/07/wordpress-first-impressions/
I recently installed WordPress, mostly out of curiosity. My web site has evolved over many years from static files, to using stylesheets, and some lightly-templated formatting to facilitate the creation of an RSS feed. While I have maintained a “log” for a few years now, I’ve always been wary of the whole self-important, vapid, “blogging” stuff.
Well, I saw Keith Garner using it, and I liked the idea that it was a rewrite of some previous software, and had a plug-in architecture, so I thought I would try it out. The install was easy enough, and then I got hooked in to the possibility of importing my data from into via an RSS file. There was some wrestling involved to hack the migration script to eat my raw HTML, and a bit more to get my scraping script adapted to output the appropriate HTML via RSS, but lo and behold, everything made it in.
And I got to tweak the look and feel a great deal with the stylesheet, and by editing the index.php directly. It has all the bells and whistles. Like, comments, which I’ve never had before, but a few people have asked for. And then all this gay backtrack stuff and pingback and backflip and blogflop and whatever. Okay, it promised to be easy to install and support all the silly jargon that I don’t care about, personally. Yay.
And for the most part, it has been comfortable. I get to put things in categories. The categories can be organized hierarchically, but any given item can have more than one category. I can maintain a list of links that can be displayed in the side menu bar. No really serious god-awful, show-stopping bugs …
(more…)
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/07/wired-news-building-a-better-mozilla/
I really really enjoy using Firefox as a web browser. It is a stripped-down, development version of Mozilla, which is what Netscape became. Among the best features of this web browser are tabbed browsing, where you can keep several navigation panes in one window, and click among them by selecting them via tabs at the top of the window. The browser also tends to do a better job at standards compliance than MSIE.
Firefox also has a plug-ins architecture so programmers can add features to the basic web browser, and share them with users who might enjoy those features. I just reviewed an article from Wired News that talks about some of the more popular plug-ins. From reading this article, I have now got BugMeNot and Dictionary Search installed here at work.
Other plug-ins which I use and love:
- Tabbrowser Extensions
- Gives you more flexibility in managing tabs. With this plug-in, I can middle-click links into new tabs, force web sites that open new windows on me to put those windows into tabs, and configure Firefox to save and reload tab sessions when I exit and re-start the browser. Tabs means fewer windows all over the desktop, and saved tab sessions means I can pick up where I left off with all my web browsing without leaving the computer running at night.
- Adblock
- You know how pleasing it is to put commercials on mute, or better yet, fast-forward them with the TiVo? Well, the web works the same way. The basic Firefox already has an option to block images by right-clicking on them. With Adblock, you can right-click on an annoying image, and you get a little window asking you to edit the URL, so you can put a * on the filename, and block all ads that match a particular pattern. Some folks just adblock stuff like */ads/* but I only turn ads off when they annoy me. The slickest part might be that you can block stuff like shockwave animations, which normally give you a shockwave menu when right-clicked.
I think I should also give a shout out to Moji, which will someday help me learn Japanese. With the click of a button, you can get a web page set up so that you can hover over words and get their English or Japanese translation. Yayoi was impressed when I showed her.
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/06/22/can-he-handle-presidentwhitehousecov/
I noticed that e-mails from the Kerry campaign are consistently quarantined to my Spam folder. So I forwarded them a sample and gave them some suggestions for being less spammy. They responded promptly:
Dear Friend,
Thank you for attempting to send a message to the John Kerry Campaign. To better handle and manage our email volume, everyone must now use the new web form reached by clicking the link below: http://www.johnkerry.com/contact/contact.php
This does not inspire confidence …
… but I’m already in for $100, so I went to the web site and suggested they spend some of it on better IT.
Hrmmm, no auto-response from BushCheney04@GeorgeWBush.com. I’ll let ya know if I get anything back from the pachyderms.
And, I’m sorry to report, that Ralph Nader’s website has only a form, and no e-mail link that I can find. You’d think a populist …
/danny
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/06/18/a-special-offer-for-wired-magazine/
Dear Wired,
I really enjoy reading your RSS feeds, and I enjoyed the high-quality advertising included in my previous complimentary subscription to Wired magazine. Unfortunately, your complimentary subscription has lapsed. This is unfortunate, as I would like you to enjoy the benefits of high-quality readers like me. I thus extend this invitation to you to resume your complimentary subscription.
Given that I am in a valuable target demographic, (a mid-career technology professional, an upper middle-class geek, and a business manager,) I believe that sending me a complimentary subscription to Wired Magazine is in your best interests, and in the best interests of your advertisers. Please do not pass up this special offer. Act today!
As an avid reader, I look forward to hearing from you. It is my sincere hope that you can continue to enjoy the beneficial advertising revenue that a valuable reader like myself can help to bring your fine publication.
Sincerely,
-danny
Unfortunately, their web site is either rejecting my message without an error, or it keeps accepting it over and over, but it is just not telling me that it has been accepted. Maybe I’ll send them a paper offer. I could throw in some stickers, perhaps.
/danny
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/06/05/spam-spam-sausage-eggs/
Some output from the daily cron job:
Total Number Folder
----- ------ ------
664829 90 .spam/
3765099 411 /dev/null
83557 27 /home/djh/Maildir/
41492 16 /usr/sbin/sendmail -oi dannyman@gmail.com
The first is likely spam, which goes in a “quarantine” folder that I review every few days, catching the occasional “false positive.” The second is definately spam, and /dev/null is a special place on a Unix system that is akin to a black hole or a “circular file.” The next line are messages that are not spam — twenty seven legitimate messages, and sixteen of those are actually addressed to me, and are thus forwarded to the archive of my GMail account.
That’s right kids, around five megabytes of spam per day. Five million “bytes” is five million western characters, or letters, that a computer scans for me automatically to shitcan. I’m not sure whether to be depressed at the spam or marvel that the filters process it so well. The latter is surely the greater achievement!
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/05/28/microsofts-priority-update-laptop-de-nazification/
Cleaning out the inbox, I find this image to recall:
Yes, apparently there was a swastika or two found in the reserved areas of a font set that had been converted over from some overseas workers who didn’t know any better. The de-Nazification of my laptop was regarded as a Critical Update for Windows that may have required a system reboot.
/danny
3 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/05/19/budgetcom-contact-us/
Hello,
I made a reservation for a one-day rental, to pick up at Palo Alto at 2pm, and return to SFO at 4pm. I was told that this would cost $30. At the facility, I agreed to another $20 for insurance. “You don’t already have liability insurance?” He prattled something about “piece of mind.” As I don’t want to drive without the state-required liability insurance, and I don’t want to be liable for your vehicle, I agreed to about $20 in insurance.
I received a free upgrade, drove around, filled up the tank, and dropped the car off promptly.
Total charges $78.54. I was figuring I’d be out around $50. What happened?
I note you nailed me for “1 HR and 1 DY” though technically I guess I had the car for “2 HR and 1 DY” .. okay, yeah, whatever. $10.
Then, $3.19 sales tax. Okay …
LDW? $18? What’s that? And PAE/ESP/SLI CHG? $23.90? Which of those are insurance and what insurance am I obligated to get when I rent a car?
As it stands, I can not say that I would use Budget again. I feel as if I have been taken advantage of.
Thanks,
-danny
hey say. If anyone wishes to impart some car-renting advice or wisdom, I’m happy to hear. I could publish your message here.
/danny
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/05/12/obligatory-abu-ghraib-rant/
I was looking at those pictures yesterday from Abu Ghraib … they are terrible. And while I believe that we have to root out whatever elements of the chain of command are responsible for what happened, I have a hard time accepting the excuses of those little guys … you weren’t schooled in the Geneva Convention? You were forced to smile while doing depraved things to naked men? I like a bit I read somewhere about one guy in the prisons wasn’t willing to do anything the least bit shady unless the party ordering it filed appropriate paperwork.
Ginmar, who is stationed in Iraq, and whose blog is totally worth reading, put it well:
Maybe it’s the idea that these soldiers just weren’t the scary-looking weirdos in the alley we’d like to believe they are. It’s so easy to look at the mob and hang their savagery on their religion, their country, whatever. But when the mob is one of our own, I think it’s important to claim them and confront whatever it was that made them do it.
I’ve heard that Iraqis are sickened by the video of that guy beheading an American. You know, I don’t want people to die, but if the guy is killed for a particular nefarious purpose, and it backfires … I think that guy who lost his head, if it reminds the Iraqis that their partisans are at least as sick and depraved as our confused kids from West Virginia … there is plenty of evil to go around, hopefully a lot of folks can keep it in mind that America is less evil.
We are, aren’t we? I’ve heard as much from Americans and from Arabs.
What is really disgusting … I saw some Republican Congressman saying that the controversy is worse than the act itself, because, after all, these were a bunch of bad guys who may have had blood on their hands. This at the same time that I hear about 80% of Iraqis who are picked up are picked up by accident. Pandering. It is dishonest, it is cheap, it is without honor. The honor lies with Senator John McCain, who said something along the lines of “and I have some personal experience with this, but torturing prisoners never works, they’ll just tell you whatever you want to hear.”
The ruthlessness of our enemies can never excuse our reciprocal depravity, since the reason we are fighting is because we hold ourselves to a higher level of moral expectations than our enemy. Right? I wouldn’t have us win by becoming indistinguishable from that which we sought to replace. Torturing Iraqi’s in Saddam Hussein’s prison … that should have ceased when the statue got pulled down.
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/05/07/limbaugh-torturing-prisoners-is-an-acceptable-good-time-torelieve-stress/
Apparently, if you are a political conservative, being a dumb-ass who undermines your nation’s war effort by torturing other human beings is all in a day’s work, or so Rush Limbaugh would have you believe:
“This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?”
To prove that he just doesn’t get it, he goes on to state:
“This is a pure, media-generated story. I’m not saying it didn’t happen or that the pictures aren’t there, but this is being given more life than the Waco investigation got. It’s almost become an Oklahoma City-type thing.”
Uhm, hello? The bigger point is that it is a big media thing! Not only is fucking with prisoners wrong, not only is it a big deal for us, but it is an even bigger deal on Al Jazeera. The whole point is that we have to win “hearts and minds” and you do it by not being a complete bonehead who takes pictures of your colleagues acting like inhumane jackasses, humiliating subjects of the population you are trying to dissuade from rising up and trying to kill you.
A fraternity prank? Torturing and sexually humiliating Arab men is not the same as cow-tipping! If we refuse to see Arabs as the human beings that they are, then why should they see us as something other than sexually depraved monsters with no moral decency who might as well be destroyed?
There’s a lot of fucking retards in this country.
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/04/30/write-what-you-know/
Benjy,
Isn’t there anything in your current life that makes you nuts? Like, the other day I got some coffee grounds. I have a twelve-cup coffee pot, but the instructions for the coffee grounds are for ounces or milliliters of desired coffee. How many ounces in a cup? Well, I looked in my fridge and was able to convert a cup on the milk serving size to ml, which I then correlated with a 6oz serving size on the orange juice, to arrive at 1 cup = 8 oz. And it’s like 2 tablespoons per cup or so, which is just insane.
I went back to my normal method of just dumping grounds into the filter ’til I figured thats just enough. Yayoi called the Starbucks consumer hotline, and a guy with an Indian accent had no idea what she was talking about. He probably drinks tea, but apparently his best advice was “I’d use more coffee.” After all, he is taking that call on Starbucks’ behalf.
It is not fair that a person who has not had their coffee should have to perform so much math in the morning.
Love,
-danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/04/28/buncha-random-stuff/
I’m on my third day of my new work shift of 7am-3pm. It is a little rough getting out of bed, sure, but I get the office to myself for two hours, I get lunch early, and at 3pm I have time to enjoy some sunshine and maybe the paper and a magazine or two, down the block at the local coffee shop. Then it is five or six and I still have time to engage in domestic or creative activities. So, today, I have some time to type stuff here. A random smattering of links and observations and whatver.
In cleaning out the mailbox, I have to give props to Matt Johnson for what he titles “YA Mirror” … the contents? A copy of “Curt Tucker is a Liar” for posterity. Google is doing its job just right, at the moment. I’m such a mean, defamatory person, huh?
Yayoi’s Mom visited last week, alla way from Japan’s third-largest city, right between the big big Tokyo in the East, and the nearly as big Osaka in the West. Well, you see the parallel as apparently we’ll have to visit Nagoya next year for their own World’s Fair. Anyway, the whole visitation worked really nicely. The ol’ lady has an awful fondness for food and drink, but today I’ve noted that my belly has shrunk considerably from the massive swelling it exhibited Monday. I also have new pants and a belt and you know what, a little N Scale steam engine for my future model railroad. Japanese-style! Yum!
It was sad for the both of them ladies to part with each other Monday morning. So, when dropping off at the airport I did the smoothest thing I could to park in the far lot and ride the people mover in to give them ample time for goodbyes. Among my newfound afternoon activities I ought to write that lady a thank-you note.
On Saturday I drove us all down to visit Champaign. Weird weird story is that as soon as I arrived at the Illini Union, I received an e-mail from a stranger on my hiptop with the title “Curt Tucker is Still a Liar” purportedly from a current employee who closed with the words “wish I’d seen this web page before I started work there.” I’m no Ralph Nader, but we can all do our small, incendiary part to get the word out when a public entity gets us a notably good or bad experience.
Ah, by the way, I’ve got a GMail account. More out of curiosity than anything. I’m not checking it so often at this time: dannyman@gmail.com. The interface is kind of slick. It groups messages in to “conversation” threads, which is something that Microsoft notably sucks at. It is also good at folding quoted blobs of text out of the way. I’d be impressed if some of their storage came from some algorithm that cleverly identified quoted text and simply cross-referenced the blob appropriately. But then, text isn’t so expensive, right? The big savings would come from being clever with binary attachments. Calm down, Danny!
I’m also on orkut in case you have decided to join that hip wave of friendster technology.
Oh, you need cheap ink for your bubblejet? I’ve done well with 1800ink.com. They sent a little business card with my order, which I taped to the printer for the next time I run out. Stuff came fast, and I paid like $3 for perfectly good cartridges that retail for like $20.
Eh, fuggit. I’m caught up on e-mail to early April now. Progress progress.
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/04/16/still-plenty-of-work-to-do/
It has been a busy busy week at work. And just now at noon on Friday it has started to calm down a bit. I figure I can spend some slack time. It is not just that I feel tired, but I do this clever thing of keeping a log of all the stuff I do at work. Based on the size of this week’s log, I have evidence that this has been the busiest week I’ve had at work so far.
Especially because the sun has come out the past few days, warming Chicago up to a pleasing 70 degrees, I start to lament the virtuality of my existance. During the Winter or during the Summer, it is not so bad to be cooped up in a climate-controlled environment, taking it easy, whiling the season away. But you know, doing computers eight hours a day, five days a week … there’s less interest in the virtual work hobby after hours. And especially when the sun comes out … it is just time to take a nice long walk and smell the grass.
Things have been moving around at work, and things will be moving around more. I’m stepping more into the role of “manager” and one of the things I’ve had very little time to work on is a job req for some introductory-level first-tier support representatives. There is a lot of work to be done. It is actually somewhat intimidating, but then that is good because it is nice to have a challenge. Anyway, can’t talk much about that.
Yayoi’s Mom is coming in from Japan for a week, starting Wednesday. I’ll be surrendering my bedroom to our honored guest. Yayoi seems a little cheerier lately. I think she feels more secure in her relationship with me, and the weather it is not winter any more … there’s that feeling of liberation when you can just step on out of your house without wrapping yourself in layers and layers of stuff.
And it is nice when your Mom can appear in the flesh from 10,000 miles away. It is tough to be a stranger in a strange land where none of the words are pronounced as they are spelled.
Though, she does like Chicago. We went out last night with a whole bunch of strangers that she knows through an association with a cooking club she joined online. She likes that we can go out to a fancy sushi restaurant and rap with a gaggle of intelligent young professionals. We shared our table last night with a loud-mouthed young doctor lady, and a quiet British-Canadian from Toronto who is working for a video game company, thanks in no small part to NAFTA. Champaign-Urbana is not the same.
One thing I’ve done lately is move back to FreeBSD. Windows is nice when you don’t feel much urgency about getting work done. But if I want sheer productivity, it is hard to beat a crisp, clean fvwm2 desktop. Where Windows lends me alt+tab, and tends to run out of memory and sit around swapping, fvwm2 with a 3×3 grid of nine virtual desktops lets me jump around from screen to screen. It is actually more visual than windows … it lets me spread out, but the real estate is in part a cerebral one. The rest of the guys at work have twin flat-screen monitors. I’ve appropriated a single, large 20″ CRT … I have nine very large work screens that I can swap through, and my workstation can keep up. I’m such a freak.
Still, it is a bit painful in that it is not easy to work with Word documents, and I have to figure out how to configure Java to work in the web browser, and Flash, as well as the little bits of glue that would let me click on something in the e-mail client, and have it open in the web browser. And then there’s the web sites — and we have a lot of “control panel” stuff at work — that only work in Internet Explorer, so I have to turn and talk to the old laptop waiting at my side.
Well, there’s still plenty of work to do …
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/03/30/who-wants-to-trust-richard-clarke/
For two long days last week, Lorie Van Auken sat in a stiff, armless chair in the 9/11 commission hearing room, right behind the witness table, listening as one government official after another tried to explain how things had gone so wrong. As the hours wore on, Auken, whose husband, Kenneth, was killed in the World Trade Center, was becoming irritated. “We had been sitting here listening to all these people tell us what a great job they had done,” she says. Then, on Wednesday afternoon, Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism chief, pulled up to the microphone. Turning around to face the family members who had died, Clarke issued a blunt apology. “Those entrusted with protecting you failed you,” he said. “And I failed you.” Clarke asked their forgiveness. Van Auken, like many of the family members in the gallery, began to cry. “I cried hysterically, and I couldn’t stop. Here was somebody, at last, telling the truth.”
Pat Wingert
_Bonds of Steel_
Newsweek
April 5, 2004
Go ahead, Bush administration, rebut Clarke’s accusations by going after his credibility. I watched his hour-long “Meet the Press” interview Sunday, and I was really impressed with the guy. I trust him more in the White House than Bush, Kerry, or Clinton. It is reassuring to know that he has been there as a public servant so long, and it is sad to see him chased out by the Iraq-obsessed ideologues in the White House.
Errr, what I mean to say, is Bravo, Pat Wingert, for writing such a gripping lead paragraph. It rocked!
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/03/29/amen-mr-newdow/
Okay, so as mentioned previously, I was pretty excited at the prospect of Michael Newdow arguing over the Constitutionality of “under God” before the Supreme Court, which happened Wednesday. He’s a Doctor with a law degree, though he is not a practicing lawyer. He did the ballsy thing of representing his case himself, and by all accounts, he represented himself, and the rest of us Atheists, quite well. I have a new hero.
The New York Times published excerpts from Wednesdays hearing which are an invigorating read. I’ll excerpt a few excerpts here:
JUSTICE DAVID H. SOUTER: What do you make of this argument? I will assume that if you read the pledge carefully, the reference to under God means something more than a mere description of how somebody else once thought. We’re pledging allegiance to the flag and to the republic. The republic is then described as being under God, and I think a fair reading of that would — would be I think that’s the way the republic ought to be conceived, as under God. So I think — I think there’s some affirmation there. I will grant you that.
What do you make of the argument that in actual practice the affirmation in the midst of this civic exercise as a religious affirmation is so tepid, so diluted then so far, let’s say, from a compulsory prayer that in fact it should be, in effect, beneath the constitutional radar. It’s sometimes, you know the phrase, the Rostow phrase, the ceremonial deism.
What do you make of that argument, even assuming that, as I do, that there is some affirmation involved when the child says this as a technical matter?
MR. NEWDOW: I think that that whole concept goes completely against the ideals underlying the Establishment Clause. We saw in Minersville v. Gobitis and West Virginia v. Barnette something that most people don’t consider to be religious at all to be of essential religious value to those Jehovah’s Witnesses who objected. And for the Government to come in and say, we’ve decided for you this is inconsequential or unimportant is an arrogant pretension, said James Madison. He said in his memorial —
JUSTICE SOUTER: Well, I think the argument is not that the Government is saying, we are defining this as inconsequential for you. I think the argument is that simply the way we live and think and work in schools and in civic society in which the pledge is made, that the — that whatever is distinctively religious as an affirmation is simply lost. It — it’s not that the — that the Government is saying, you’ve got to pretend that it’s lost. The argument is that it is lost, that the religious, as distinct from a civic content, is close to disappearing here.
MR. NEWDOW: And again, I — I don’t mean to go back, but it seems to me that is a view that you may choose to take and the majority of Americans may choose to take, but it doesn’t — it’s not the view I take, and when I see the flag and I think of pledging allegiance, I — it’s like I’m getting slapped in the face every time, bam, you — you know, this is a nation under God, your religious belief system is wrong.
And here, I want to be able to tell my child that I have a very valid religious belief system. Go to church with your mother, go see Buddhists, do anything you want, I love that — the idea that she’s being exposed to other things, but I want my religious belief system to be given the same weight as everybody else’s. And the Government comes in here and says, no, Newdow, your religious belief system is wrong and the mother’s is right and anyone else who believes in God is right, and this Court —
JUSTICE GINSBURG: If you had her here in this courtroom and she stood up when the Justices entered and she heard the words, God save the United States and this honorable Court, wouldn’t the injury that you’re complaining about be exactly the same, so you would have equal standing on your account of things to challenge that as you do to challenge what the school district does here?
MR. NEWDOW: I don’t think the injury would be even close to the same. She’s not being asked to stand up, place her hand on her heart, and say, I affirm this belief, and I think that can easily distinguish this case from all those other situations. Here she is being asked to stand and say that there exists a God. Government can’t ever impose that —
JUSTICE GINSBURG: If she’s asked to repeat or to sing, as the Chief Justice suggested, God Bless America, then she is speaking those words.
MR. NEWDOW: Again, if it were a situation where we said, let’s only do nothing else in this classroom, all right, we’ll say God bless America and let’s just say those words or something, I think that would violate the Constitution as well. If it’s just, let’s sing one song a day and once a month we get God Bless America, no, that would be certainly fine. We don’t want to be hostile to religion.
But here we’re not — it’s not a question of being hostile to religion. It’s indoctrinating children and Congress said that was the purpose.
Amen, Mr. Newdow. On the one hand, if you argue that the phrase “under God” is “ceremonial deism” there are some hard-core pious folk that would take offense at you uttering the name of the Lord without due reverence. To take the Lord’s name without reverence is blashpemy. No good. You can not say that “under God” doesn’t really mean anything, especially when uttering the phrase is anti-thetical to us Atheists.
When I was a child we would stand every morning, place out hands over our hearts, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. In the ears of every American is a chorus of young schoolchildren drilling on a core belief system every morning. Before it became a bad word, we viewed the pledge as “indoctrination” … repeat these words, and you will come to live by them.
I’ve never been a “religious” person, and the more I thought about it, the less this “under God” business made any sense to me. For years, I’d utter the Pledge of Allegiance, every last word. Every word means something to me … except those two words. I have not come to know God, so who am I to bring it into my pledge of national allegiance? Isn’t that sort of dishonest?
In my youth I was also a Boy Scout. Ostensibly the Boy Scouts of America do not allow Atheists, but none of us really cared so much. One of the Scout Laws that I did stumble on was that a Scout is Reverent. What is Reverence? Well, the “Boy Scout Handbook” explained that Reverence is respect for God, and respect for the belief systems of others. Well, what do I know about God? Nothing. I do know that other people make a very big deal out of their professed knowledge of God. I concluded that, for these purposes, I was an Atheist. I could respect God by not making false pronouncements about it, and I could respect others by not giving them a hard time about their beliefs. Reverence achieved.
Eventually I’d drop that phrase, those two words, from my daily recitations. It wasn’t that I was rejecting God so much as I could not profess — I could not make a false claim — to its nature and its relationship with my nation. To do so would be impious, irreverent, and dishonest with regards to my own belief system.
To see the mentality … the theocratic bigotry, if you will, from out nations leaders, we can turn to Justice Breyer:
JUSTICE BREYER: So it’s not perfect, it’s not perfect, but it serves a purpose of unification at the price of offending a small number of people like you. So tell me from ground one why — why the country cannot do that?
MR. NEWDOW: Well, first of all, for 62 years this pledge did serve the purpose of unification and it did do it perfectly. It didn’t include some religious dogma that separated out some —
… Again, the Pledge of Allegiance did absolutely fine and with — got us through two world wars, got us through the Depression, got us through everything without God, and Congress stuck God in there for that particular reason, and the idea that it’s not divisive I think is somewhat, you know, shown to be questionable at least by what happened in the result of the Ninth Circuit’s opinion. The country went berserk because people were so upset that God was going to be taken out of the Pledge of Allegiance.
Now, I’m really proud of Michael Newdow here for not losing his cool in the face of … well, whatever that was. He pulled us right to the point — we got along perfectly well without those words, without alienating “a small number of people” like me. So, if someone points out, however politely, that this imposition is … well .. kind of rude, right? Does Religion teach us to be rude? To belittle the beliefs of others? If so, then that might explain why a few of us avoid religion.
Now, here is perhaps the one highlight you may have heard from the whole exchange:
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: Do we know — do we know what the vote was in Congress apropos of divisiveness to adopt the under God phrase?
MR. NEWDOW: In 1954?
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: Yes.
MR. NEWDOW: It was apparently unanimous. There was no objection. There’s no count of the vote.
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: Well, that doesn’t sound divisive.
(Laughter.)
MR. NEWDOW: That’s only because no atheist can get elected to public office.
(Applause.)
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: The courtroom will be cleared if there’s any more clapping. Proceed, Mr. Newdow.
On NPR, Nina Totenberg reported that “those words provoked an amazing reaction from the courtroom — applause from spectators.” I later read in the Chicago Tribune:
When Newdow said the vote was unanimous, the chief justice responded, “That doesn’t sound divisive.” Newdow shot back with a quick rejoinder: “That’s only because no atheist can get elected to public office.” The remark prompted laughter and applause from his supporters in the courtroom.
Now, I cast a wide net on Google News and haven’t been able to corroborate the claim that it was Atheists cheering this assertion. I read that applause the other way, that the religious folk in the audience were cheering against Newdow, though a lot of articles imply that his supporters were cheering a particularly witty, if depressing comeback. I found the Tribune piece re-hashed in the Salt Lake Tribune with a different by-line. I found the following elaboration at law.com:
That triggered applause from the audience, which is almost never heard in the Supreme Court chamber. It was unclear whether the applause was for Newdow’s rejoinder or for the fact that atheists don’t get elected, but in any event Rehnquist angrily admonished the audience that the courtroom would be cleared if any more clapping occurred.
As the courtroom settled down, Newdow resumed his attack, telling the Court that, in fact, eight states still have laws against atheists holding office — another point that an advocate other than Newdow might not have made.
At any rate, the treatment of the outburst triggered a brief missive from my Hiptop to the Chicago Tribune, who have not responded:
Is this accurate? I recall hearing about this on NPR yesterday and interpreting that the Theists in the audience were applauding the assertion that an atheist could not get elected to public office. I don’t see why an Atheist would cheer such a depressing assertion.
If Mr. Neikirk got this detail wrong he might wish to apologise to your Atheist readers, because in his telling of the story it was an audience of rowdy, cynical, smarmy Atheists disrupting the court proceedings. If he was right then I must make amends for assuming that the court was filled with disruptive, Theist bigots cheering at such a dark notion in an effort to crush one brave, lonely dissenting citizen as he stood before our government, asking them to change two little words that trample on his religious freedom.
Heck, let’s just figure it was a few rowdy Atheists and their detractors.
Mr Newdow? A final word?
I’m hoping the Court will uphold this principle so that we can finally go back and have every American want to stand up, face the flag, place their hand over their heart and pledge to one nation, indivisible, not divided by religion, with liberty and justice for all.
Amen, Mr. Newdow.
/danny
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/03/26/bush-to-terrorists-next-time-let-me-know-before-hand-eh/
From the New York Times:
“Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to strike America, to attack us, I would have used every resource, every asset, every power of this government to protect the American people,” Mr. Bush said to a burst of applause.
“Of course, since I had no idea what was going on, I didn’t do anything, and blithely allowed 3,000 Americans to die,” I annotate mentally.
In that same article, you read the Condaleeza Rice will be happy to testify before the 9/11 committee, in private, and not under oath. This is fantastic. In order to rebut that guy who has served every whitehouse since Reagan, who has sworn, under oath, that he will not accept a job with John Kerry … they send in Condy Rice to … not swear that she isn’t lying in her testimony …
I hope this means the administration is unravelling and will go down in a massive lump in November. Of course, that doesn’t bode well considering that they have important things to do, like fix the mess in Iraq, fix the mess in Afghanistan, fix the mess of our economy and corporate governance, and keep North Korea from going completely apeshit, while improving our counter-terrorism security …
Okay, I’m a whining liberal.
Clarke is, however, a Republican. Later in that article we read the words of a Republican consultant, on Bush’s accuser:
“I saw the parade of the victim’s families on the morning shows who all applauded him. He was the first person who took any responsibility. What that does is underscore his perception as a truth teller. I think the American people are paying attention to this episode.”
This is a stark contrast to Bush’s words that opened this piece, where he said of course he’d have done something had he known to do anything, whereas Clarke said that we didn’t do enough, that he didn’t do enough, that 9/11 was his fault.
We need more responsible people running our government.
/danny
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