A while back, I wrote about EFF's lawsuit against AT&T. I will smugly point out that EFF's opposition to AT&T's motion to dismiss made many of the points I had suggested. No, the EFF didn't get the idea from me, but it was nice to see them actually make a legal argument instead of launch off on unrelated topics.

Yesterday, the judge decided to keep the lawsuit rolling. This was a surpise to me. The decision is 70 pages long, so I haven't finished reading it yet. AT&T (and the government) will appeal. Now that the EFF is actually doing some lawyering instead of yelling and screaming, things may get interesting.

Of course, the President's decision to get a FISA ruling on whether the NSA surveillance program is legal will play into this, too.

Last week Paige and I went shopping for a Venus flytrap. Yes, because we wanted it to kill flies for us. No, we don't have that many flies, but why spend energy killing them when God designed a plant to do it for you?

Anyhow, I have absolutely no idea how to judge if a Venus flytrap is a real killer. We spent a good while in the aisleway looking at each one and wondering "is this one more vicious or is that one?" It felt like we were picking out a pit bull for dogfights.

A blog I visit often recently ran a post about the Holocaust.

The Special Detachment reassured the Jews being gassed by talking of life in the camp, and tried to persuade them that all would be alright. ... The Special Detachment men were also responsible for comforting older children that might cry "because of the strangeness of being undressed in this fashion."

These measures did not deceive all, however. Hoss reported of several Jews "who either guessed or knew what awaited them nevertheless" but still "found the courage to joke with the children to encourage them, despite the mortal terror visible in their own eyes."

Not that I'm encouraging anarchy, but I wonder how much of that "courage to joke with the children to encourage them" came out of the general desire we have of keeping things orderly and running smoothly, even if we don't like what's going on (or are terrified of what's going on because it's simply blatant evil).

I probably won't visit the site regularly, but today I ran across a blog by a soldier that was seriously injured in Iraq. Some of his posts are very funny. One, however, reminded me of Prince Andrei in War and Peace.

If you didn't slog through War and Peace, you can find a brief introduction here (or the whole thing here, although I'd recommend getting it from a bookstore).

Unfortunately the summary doesn't say much about Prince Andrei who, after being captured and released by the invading French force goes back to the front lines and is wounded. Luck brings him to his evacuating wife, who does her best to care for him in the back of a carriage. Prince Andrei gives up on life and eventually dies. But before dying, says many wars should never be fought, and suggests that if every country refused to take prisoners (that is, shot the wounded) nobody would go to war for trivial reasons.

Our wounded Iraqi war vet dismisses the humane treatment provisions in the Geneva conventions in similar language:

We’ve yet to see what warfare would be like if both sides played by the rules. Hell, it’d probably last forever, given the POW swaps, and knowing that if you surrender, you be given food, clothing, care, and treated better than you were in boot camp. We wouldn’t have war, just armies surrendering to each other all the time.

Please realize, I'm not agreeing with this position. I'm simply noting the parallel. Maybe I can send this to my high school English teacher and see if he'll raise my grade. Of course, my memory's gone bad, and I can't remember his name right now.

UPDATE That's right. His name was Mr. McNeil. Apparently he doesn't work there now. Not much of a surprise, it's been a while. In fact, they've got about 200 more students there now than when I was a Ram, and the racial breakdown has changed from 30% white, 30% black, 30% Hispanic, 10% Asian to 33% white, 9% black, 53% Hispanic, and 5% Asian.

While I was following the fighting in Lebanon, I ran across an article about Jewish divorce law. A Jewish Court in Israel ruled "that under Jewish law, the husband is obligated to divorce his wife after viewing the video of his wife's indiscretions, even if the video was obtained illegally."

My first thoughts weren't about arbitration, or Jewish law in the US (which can sometimes be considered a form of arbitration), or even Shasta County cattle ranchers. I didn't think about the rules of evidence between civil and criminal trials.

No, my first thoughts were about Mathhew 1:18 and 19:

Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child. ... Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily.

Looks like some things just don't change.

(Just to be clear, Joseph wasn't mean for wanting to put Mary away privily; my point is only that 2,000 years ago Jewish law required him to divorce her. He was trying to be nice in not making a public spectacle of things.)

Two quick, silly, links:

• Why I should watch what I say, and how I say it;


• Searching for spambots in a very geeky way.

Line of the day:

The French want Israel to stop attacking Hezbollah communication lines within Lebanon. It believes that force should only be used "proportionately" in times of war, which explains why they lost to Germany in 1940 despite having a larger army. The great lesson of the last century has been that anyone wishing to win a war should avoid taking advice from France, and it's comforting in a strange way that France has decided to extend that axiom into the 21st century.

For the record, I've been watching Israel take care of Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel shared lessons with the US that it learned in entering Jenin (which was reported as a massacre, until official numbers showed a very different picture). Those lessons helped shape the Iraqi invasion, and made it possible to topple Saddam in three weeks, compared to the two weeks it took to liberate Kuwait ten years earlier.

Unless the UN has changed how things work, it doesn't allow itself to send peacekeepers until both sides agree that they want peace. That was one of the big reasons the UN took so long to go to Rwanda, and why the UN basically never did anything in Sierra Leone. It's also why the US is more likely to support ECOWAS peacekeepers in Africa than UN peacekeepers. Of course Lebanon will accept a UN mission, but I'm sure Israel's not going to for a few months.

UPDATE Turns out the UN already has peacekeepers in Lebanon -- UNIFIL, which hasn't done much in the last thirty years to keep peace.