Monthly Archives: March 2010

NSA’s warrantless wiretapping ruled illegal (updated)

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Finally. A federal judge, Vaughn R. Walker, has ruled that George Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program was in fact illegal. This despite the efforts of the Obama administration to fight the result.

In a 45-page opinion, Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated a 1978 federal statute requiring court approval for domestic surveillance when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity in Oregon, and of two lawyers who were representing it in 2004. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been “subjected to unlawful surveillance,” the judge said that the government was liable to pay them damages.

More info from the EFF here.

Update: Click here for the full text of the decision.

Hitchens on the Pope

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Christopher Hitchens takes on the Pope directly in Slate. And Hitchens is right about his position. Read the entire piece.

The church needs and wants control of the very young and asks their parents to entrust their children to certain “confessors,” who until recently enjoyed enormous prestige and immunity. It cannot afford to admit that many of these confessors, and their superiors, are calcified sadists who cannot believe their luck. Nor can it afford to admit that the church regularly abandoned the children and did its best to protect and sometimes even promote their tormentors. So instead it is whiningly and falsely asserting that all charges against the pope—none of them surfacing except from within the Catholic community—are part of a plan to embarrass him.

This hasn’t been true so far, but it ought to be true from now on. This grisly little man is not above or outside the law. He is the titular head of a small state. We know more and more of the names of the children who were victims and of the pederasts who were his pets. This is a crime under any law (as well as a sin), and crime demands not sickly private ceremonies of “repentance,” or faux compensation by means of church-financed payoffs, but justice and punishment. The secular authorities have been feeble for too long but now some lawyers and prosecutors are starting to bestir themselves. I know some serious men of law who are discussing what to do if Benedict tries to make his proposed visit to Britain in the fall. It’s enough. There has to be a reckoning, and it should start now.

Dowd on the Pope

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Maureen Dowd is at her best today. Taking on the decades old cover-up of the abuse of children by priests, she nails the Church up to and including the current Pope.

It doesn’t seem right that the Catholic Church is spending Holy Week practicing the unholy art of spin.

Complete with crown-of-thorns imagery, the church has started an Easter public relations blitz defending a pope who went along with the perverse culture of protecting molesters and the church’s reputation rather than abused — and sometimes disabled and disadvantaged — children.

The church gave up its credibility for Lent. Holy Thursday and Good Friday are now becoming Cover-Up Thursday and Blame-Others Friday.

The era of the iPad?

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Someone has taken a gigantic swig of the Kool-Aid. Mike Elgin, writing in ComputerWorld  is predicting that the iPad will be the most important release, culturally and financially, that Apple has ever made. Bigger than the Mac, bigger that the iPod, bigger than the iPhone.  He bases this conclusion on a view that the iPad can successfully address many markets simultaneously.

I think the iPad is the most important launch in Apple’s history — bigger than the Mac, iPod or iPhone. More than that, I think it’s the most important cultural phenomenon of this generation. It’s bigger than technology.

I’m no fanboy. I’ve tried to envision some conceivable series of events that might leave the iPad as only moderately successful, but I can’t come up with any. All circumstances, facts and events in technology, media and elsewhere seem to point to the same inexorable outcome: The iPad will be huge.

While I firmly believe that the iPad has a potential to be huge, I am surprised by his certainty of success. The ultimate outcome, in my view, depends almost totally on the ingenuity of developers that can come up with the “killer apps” for the device. I think the software applications, rather than the innate characteristics of the hardware platform are key. The original PC was largely driven not by the hardware but by a single killer app: the spreadsheet.

The iPad hardware and native interface are certainly impressive and provide a strong platform for applications. To use a garden analogy, the soil is rich and ready for planting.  And it may well be the best “new” soil in three decades.  The iPad presents a better than 50-50 chance that one or more developers are up to the challenge of creating a game changer (or several game changers).  But the device itself is more a potentiality than a done deal.

Of course, I haven’t even touched one yet, so what do I know?

In other news, Apple just launched the updated iTunes version 9.1 with iPad support.

Rumor: Apple developing CDMA iPhone? (updated)

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting (subscription $ required) that sources tell them that Apple is developing a CDMA iPhone, compatible with Verizon’s network in the US, which could be available in September. Apple stock is up strongly after hours on the rumor.  Apple has, as of now, not confirmed this rumor.

If this is correct, this is a major blow to RIMM and to Android. As of now, approximately 6:30 pm Eastern, AAPL is up 2.5%, RIMM is down 2.3% and Verizon is up 3.7% in after hours trading.

Disclosure: I own Apple stock. Nothing on this website should be construed as investment advice.

Update: Probably as a result of this rumor from the WSJ, Apple set another new all-time closing high today, March 30, 2010. Apple now has a market cap higher that Wal-Mart (again).

Child abuse in the Catholic Church

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Matt Taibbi asks a question that I have had for some time. Any organization, other than the Catholic Church apparently, would be brought up on criminal charges for harboring those who sexually abuse children. Where is law enforcement in all this?

[The Catholic Church is] a giant for-profit company using predatory salesmanship to sell what they themselves know is a defective, outmoded, basically unnecessary product. They’ll use any means necessary to keep their market share and if they have to lie and cheat and deflect and point fingers to keep the racket going, they’ll do it, just like any other sleazeball company.

But I think it’s time we started considering that what the church is is even worse than that. It’s possible we should start wondering if the church is also a criminal organization that in this country, anyway, should be broken up using RICO statutes.

One of the few areas where I agreed with George Bush was in the notion that a country providing safe haven to terrorists should itself be treated as a terrorist organization. Morally this isn’t a difficult one to figure out; a country that keeps house for a bin Laden and doesn’t assist other countries in trying to catch him is a rogue state, one that should be booted out of the community of nations.

We don’t permit countries that harbor terrorists to participate in international society, but the Catholic Church — an organization that has been proven over and over again to systematically enable child molesters, right up now to the level of the Pope — is given a free pass. In fact the Church is not only not sanctioned in any serious way, it gets to retain its outrageous tax-exempt status, which makes its systematic child abuse, in this country at least, a government-subsidized activity.

And then there is this from Christopher Hitchens:

In other Catholic news, claims of abuse of children are spreading to Italy.

In a case recalling the accusations against Father Lawrence Murphy in Milwaukee, who was claimed to have abused up to 200 deaf children, one Italian former pupil claimed that priests had sodomised him so relentlessly that he came to feel “as if I were dead”.