Category: Uncategorized

Tolkien Family Struggles

A lot of people (including me) are looking forward to the release of the Lord of the Rings films (assuming they don’t suck), but among those less than thrilled by the move is the Tolkien family. According to the Daily Telegraph (UK), the Tolkien family has been hounded by fans of the books who make themselves a nuisance, and have had no input on the films.

Of course the latter fact is due partly to the family’s opinion that the books should not be made into films. According to Richard Crawshaw of The Tolkien Society, “The Tolkien family are definitely not on board as far as the film is concerned.The general view is that there is not a need for it as it is a book of words and was not created to be a dramatic presentation.”

Father John Tolkein, one of JRR Tolkien’s sons, tells the Telegraph that, “The Tolkien family is under perpetual abuse of one kind or another. It goes on all the time. I am anticipating endless bother when the film actually comes out.”

2-3 gigabyte CD-RWs

At Comdex, TDK Electronics announced new CD-RW drives it will introduces later this year that will use multilevel recording to achieve much higher write speeds as well as larger capacity.

TDK claims that by using special media the drive will be able to write 2 gigabyte CD-Rs at 36X speed. TDK says it plans to scale the capacity up to 2.6 and then 3.2 gigabytes.

Will this fly? It might, depending on how much the drives cost. The cost-per-megabyte of the media is roughly equal to the cost of using current CD-Rs. If the drives cost roughly the same as high-end CD-RW drives, then this technology could be a viable CD-R replacement until the various rewriteable DVD efforts finally sort themselves out.

I use CD-R technology for back ups as well as archiving large multimedia files and the 650mb limit of current CD-R technology is really showing its age and the companies working on writeable DVD seem intent on delaying any real alternatives as long as possible. TDK’s drive isn’t a long term solution, but given that it may take another four or five years for cheap, standard DVD rewriters, this might be just the ticket.

Unsolvable FreeCell Starting Position

My wife is currently obssessed with FreeCell, the card puzzle game that ships with Windows. I’ve never been much into card games, but she can play FreeCell for hours.

So I was happy to point her to a web site that demonstrates there is at least one beginning FreeCell position which is impossible to solve in principle.

Edward Walsh on the Animal Enterprise Act

Several years ago, the United States created the Animal Enterprise Protection Act which was supposed to give courts and prosecutors more power to go after animal rights terrorists. The results have been less than stellar — only a single activist has ever been convicted under the law and there are now more terrorist acts than ever before, with the animal rights terrorists expanding into environmental issues. What is to be done?

Edward Walsh wrote an excellent review of the Animal Enterprise Protection Act for Lab Animal which is reprinted on the web site of the National Animal Interest Alliance (Walsh is a member of NAIA’s board of directors). While Walsh correctly perceives the Animal Enterprise Protection Act’s problems, I must respectfully disagree with a good portion of his analysis.

Why is the law so rarely invoked (i.e., almost never)? Walsh thinks it is because of confusion and loopholes within the law itself. I suspect there is a different dynamic at work — namely there is almost no political pressure to actually devote significant resources to exposing and prosecuting animal rights terrorists.

For this, the animal rights terrorists have largely themselves to thank. By carefully focusing exclusively on property crimes and avoiding injury or death to human beings, the Animal Liberation Front makes it difficult to justify the sort of massive investigation that has focused on extremist anti-abortion protesters who have frequently inflicted injuries and even committed murder. Moreover, by targeting property the vandals simultaneously create a great deal of positive outpourings from within the animal rights movement, while at the same time avoiding the sort of national negative press that might otherwise galvanize a public outcry against them.

Think about it — when was the last time an act of animal rights terrorism was included in a network news broadcast. The only recent instances I can think of were the attack on a laboratory at the University of Minnesota and the Earth Liberation Front’s arson in Colorado, neither of which created any sort of sustained outrage among the public.

Add to that mix the extreme difficulty in tracking down ALF and ELF terrorists. As the FBI has repeatedly said, political terrorists organized into small autonomous cells (as the ALF/ELF are) are the most difficult terrorists to catch. To date the terrorists who have been caught and prosecuted in the United States have been apprehended largely by accident (i.e. the terrorists made a serious mistake which brought them to the attention of police). Moreover, since there is no overarching ALF organization, but rather ALF is more like a brand name for animal rights terrorism, catching the perpetrator of a given act of terrorism only implicates maybe four or five other activists at most. The result is a minimal payoff for an extremely difficult task.

It is doubtful that, barring any such outcry from the public, police and prosecutors are going to devote significant resources to cracking down on animal rights terrorism. I suspect that it will, unfortunately, require the loss of life before the proper resources are allocated this important task. And, unfortunately, I think loss of life is becoming more and more likely.

Although they have been pretty successful at evading capture, however, animal rights terrorists have been singularly unsuccessful at creating political change in the United States. Frustration at their political impotence seems to be motivating the terrorists to take more daring and dramatic actions, and it is only a matter of time before there is a loss of life associated with these actions (there have, in fact, already been some close calls in the United States).

Once the political will is there, the Animal Enterprise Protection Act will be largely irrelevant. In fact it is hard to understand the point of having such an act in the first place except as a symbolic gesture. It would be far better off to simply charge animal rights terrorists with arson, burglary or what have you and ask judges to consider the political nature of their crimes during the sentencing phase.

One idea I oppose strongly is Walsh’s suggestion that there be a federal death penalty for animal rights terrorists who commit murder. It would be better to see a mandatory life without parole for people who commit acts of political murder.

Source:

The Animal Enterprise Protection Act: A scientist’s perspective brings the law into focus. Edward J. Walsh, Lab Animal, February 2000, v.29, #2.

Penn State Feminist’s Show How Far Feminist Movement Has Fallen

Penn State uses student and taxpayer funds to pay for sexually explicit feminist festival.

Disclaimer: This article includes descriptions and quotations of events that occurred at Penn State that some readers might find offensive. Unfortunately events filled with shocking and/or offensive displays are considered cutting edge by radical feminists.

Pennsylvania State University became embroiled in controversy after a November 18th program sponsored by feminists at the university. The program, “CuntFest,” was paid for entirely by student and taxpayer funds.

Sponsored by Womyn’s Concerns and the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance, the program garnered $10,000 from Penn State’s University Park Allocation Committee (UPCA), which is responsible for disbursing student fees and general funds earmarked for promoting student activities on campus.

UPAC claimed afterward that it was deceived about the nature of the activities, but as Eric Langborgh of Accuracy in Academia noted, what exactly did UPAC think it was getting when the two groups submitted a description that said the event would “feature woman-centered, cuntlovin’ fun entertainment”?

The events of that evening would be unbelievable if there weren’t so many precedents — and if the feminists who sponsored them didn’t immediately defend them against “right wing” attack.

(Again, this description is going to get very graphic because what happened at Penn State was very graphic.)

Langborgh wrote a long description of the events that he witnessed,

Walking in the host building’s door, potential audience members and other students just going about their business were unwittingly confronted with a four-foot tall ceramic model of a vagina. Conference organizers would then offer what appeared to be fruit juice poured from a spout just underneath the “clitoris” to passersby by asking, “Would you like some ‘pussy juice’?”

The event’s title takes its name from Inga Muscio, who read from her book, “Cunt: A Declaration of Independence,” as well as a new book she is working on.

In a new novel she is writing, for example, Muscio portrays a women who is gang raped and then becomes a serial killer who victimizes six families killing all of the fathers and sons while leaving the women untouched, with the protagonist saying, “They should not have mated with the beast. I left them their daughters.”

That was nothing compared to performance “artist” Jess Dobkin. Dobkin performed partially nude and clearly aimed to shock and titillate her audience rather than enlighten. Here’s one of the less explicit scenes that Langborgh describes,

Innuendo then took a back seat to nudity when she removed her top to reveal her breasts which she had painted to look like smiley faces with her nipples acting as a noses. Coupled with audible gasps from the crowd, she proceeded to suck each breast; presumably to enable her to subsequently thread strings through her pierced nipples. These strings were then used to maneuver her breasts like puppets as she stood behind a prop made to look like a brick house with two holes cut out for her breasts so they could “talk” to one another.

Later Dobbin showed a film she made called Butt-F—ing Bunny which featured paper puppets engaging in various sexual acts including the one described in the title.

Crude? Lewd? According to its organizers, as well as some of the participants, this sort of stuff is empowering for women and anyone who questions it is part of a right-wing backlash against the women’s movement.

Muscio, in particular, pointed out the presence of AIA’s Langborgh saying,

Your school is under attack by this group. They want students to not have access to funding unless it is something Accuracy in Academia thinks is okay. Personally that’s scary, and to me that’s scary as a human being. For you all, and for other people going to school, I’m really scared. It scares me to think that people would prefer to silence someone rather than just let everybody be, you know?

That claim really captures just how much feminism has degenerated from its original goals of sexual equality to a radical faith that seems to be largely unprincipled.

Where once the cry was to end oppression by removing discriminatory barriers to entry in universities, today the campus feminists claim that they are oppressed and silenced unless the state agrees to pay for their four-foot tall replica of a vagina and their speaker who will have her breasts talk to one another.

Sources:

Feminists festival upsets student, state legislator. Daryl Lang and Erica Zarra, The Digital Collegian [Pennsylvania State University], December 7, 2000.

Penn State Feminists Stage X-Rated Event on Students’ Dime. Eric Langborgh, Accuracy In Academia, December 2000.

Unfair attention is given to recent event on campus. Jared S. Cram, Letter to the editor, The Digital Collegian [Pennsylvania State University], December 8, 2000.

That Festival. Jeffrey A. Budney, December 7, 2000.

‘Cuntfest’ Promotes Rights, Responsibilities. Erika Dunsen, December 2000.

Go Ahead, Yell At Your Boss — You’re Protected by the ADA

When the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, conservatives and libertarians argued that courts would stretch the act in ways that its sponsors would regret. Such fears were dismissed as unrealistic, but a stark example of how right they were was given by U.S. District Judge Franklin S. Van Antwerpen who ruled that being belligerent, uncooperative and irritable at work might be covered under the ADA.

The case involved Tina Bennett who is suing Unisys Corporation, claiming that her firing by the company firing violated the ADA.

The facts of the case don’t seem to be in dispute — Bennett couldn’t get along with her coworkers or supervisors. She sent caustic e-mails to her boss, and her coworkers felt they couldn’t approach her with their ideas or hold conversations with her because she was so irritable.

Bennett, however, claims that her irritable behavior is the result of severe depression, and therefore covered by the ADA. In his decision, Judge Van Antwerpen didn’t decide the merits of Bennett’s claim, but merely ruled that she can proceed with her suit on those grounds. In the process Van Antwerpen provided a road map for everyone who hates their boss — if you’ve going to yell and scream at your boss, make sure you go all the way and hold nothing back.

In his review of legal precedents, Van Antwerpen noted that courts to date had reached different conclusions as to what constitutes a “major life function” that can be impaired by a disability. One of those areas of contention is whether interactions with other people constitutes a major life activity.

Van Antwerpen resolves this by saying the issue should be whether Bennett is “substantially limited” in her interactions with other due to her depression. In other words, if say she had been a good employee who occasionally clashed with her supervisor and coworkers, that wouldn’t be a substantial limitation, but because Bennett regularly came into conflict with her coworkers, that may indeed count as a protected disability under the ADA. As a result, Van Antwerpen wrote in his decision, “it may be that with accommodations, Bennett could have performed the functions of job.”

The sort of accommodations Bennett wants are an interesting look at the just how absurd the ADA has become. One of the things lawyers ask, for example, is that any criticism of Bennett by supervisor always be made face-to-face and that it is followed by positive feedback. In addition Bennett’s lawyers want the court to forbid Unisys from “overburdening” her.

It is lawsuits such as these combined with activists judges that explain why the ADA has been a boon for lawyers but has apparently hurt employment opportunities for the genuinely disabled — unemployment rates among disabled Americans are lower now than before the passage of the ADA, despite the much better economic climate over the past several years.

The ADA is self-defeating and open to too much mischief from an activist judiciary. It should be repealed.

Source:

‘Belligerent’ Worker Is Covered by the ADA, Says Federal Court. Shannon P. Duffy, The Legal Intelligencer, December 13, 2000.