It’s too late to make any impact on anyone who supported the Live8 concert, but it still might be of interest to some people:

Varifrank has ten quick Economics Lessons.

He also shares the sentiment that Nostalgia is a Mental Disease and shares the following with the “Me” generation:

But that’s ok Gary. My generation will be here after yours is soon gone to write the legacy of your lives. That is our revenge. We get to be the ones to tell your tale. And I do admit your generation did do one thing right, it created the internet.

Thanks man! You just gave the power of the press, once just reserved for people like yourself, to average wingnuts like me. “Power to the people” isn’t that how the song used to go? Well here it is baby!, only it seems that your generation really didn’t mean “power to the people” it really meant “power only to people who think just like us”. Whoopsie Daisy! I guess that didn’t work out quite like you planned either. Is there anything your generation worked on that did work out? Well, yeah, The Internet. Now chock full of those people you and your cartoon now decry as ‘unemployed losers’. Its funny the way you say it just like your parents called the people in your generation “in need of a haircut and a bath”.

I’ve nothing to say but “Amen.”

I had Varifrank on my blogroll before the move to WordPress, and I forgot to put him on this one. That oversight has been rectified.

I’ve complained before that I don’t care much for the way our society seems to want to blame manufacturers for what their customers do. That was the reason I recently complained about the Supreme Court decision on peer to peer software.

Now, Hillary Clinton wants to go one step further: she’s trying to blame a software developer for what hackers do to their software. In addition, she wants to pass legislation to impose a $5,000 penalty on retailers who sell “adult rated” games to children.

Neither Rockstar Games nor the game retailer sold anything explicit to these people — they downloaded a mod to make the game explicit. At the very worst, that should fall under the same laws that would limit whether someone could draw an explicit cartoon and make it available for public download. Without looking at the GTA:SA EULA and the mod in question, I can’t say for certain that it violates the EULA, but I imagine the Rockstar Games representative who says that the mod is a violation probably knows what he’s talking about. That would be the only illegal thing done here, in my opinion.

Parents, not government, are responsible for raising their children. The video game industry has provided a rating system to help parents make decisions as a courtesy (though, admittedly, not out of the goodness of their hearts — they were trying to avoid government regulations), and even if they didn’t, information on what’s in a game is very easy to come by if one puts any effort into it at all.

If Hillary wants to hold someone responsible for letting kids get hold of things that are inappropriate for their ages, why doesn’t she try fining the parents? Oh, wait, that’s right. As far as Hillary’s concerned, it’s not the job of a family to raise children, it’s the job of the “village.”

Why anyone would vote for this woman, I’m at a complete loss.

Jane of Armies of Liberation wants to make sure that everyone’s aware that the government of Yemen is trying to silence the opposition.

( þ Dean’s World)

Harry and his friends enter their sixth year of school, as the wizarding world prepares for war with the returned Voldemort.

This one was a good deal better than the last one, which I didn’t enjoy nearly as much as I had the first four (which I can’t really rank, because I liked them all fairly equally). Harry’s not perfect, but he’s also not the jerk that he was in the previous book. He’s considerably more real in this book than in any of the previous ones, and that’s a refeshing change (though he’s still my least favorite of the main characters). This was the first book that really made me anxious for the next one, but that could be a result of the fact that there’s no real story here — it ends just as the real story starts.

All in all, I’ll rate this one 7/10.

(Spoilers in the extended entry)

Others commenting on …The Half Blood Prince:

Captain’s Quarters
A Small Victory (Halfway through)

More …

The Clay County Commission and the Ten Commandments are in the news again:

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — The Clay County Commission voted unanimously before an audience of nearly 200 Wednesday to leave a plaque of the Ten Commandments on the wall of its chamber.

The plaque is one of several historical documents — which include the Bill of Rights — that are on display, said Commissioner Jimmy Sams. The display has been up for several years.

I’ve mentioned this before, and really, I only bring it up because I feel the need to respond to this:

County resident Jesse Sizemore has asked the commission several times to remove the Ten Commandments, citing the constitutional requirement of separation of church and state.

As simply and clearly as possible: There is no Constitutional requirement of separation of church and state.

The word “church” doesn’t appear in the Constitution. The word “religion” only appears in the first Amendment to the Constitution, which reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Even allowing that the Fourteenth Amendment extends the protection of our rights to the local level (which it really doesn’t — it says “State“), displaying the Ten Commandments is not an establishment of religion. We don’t require citizens to recite the Commandments, nor do we ask them to swear that they follow them. It’s merely a display that symbolizes the historical and cultural influences on our county.

As I said in the post I linked before, I really don’t care all that much about this issue on its own merits. The Ten Commandments are an important part of my religious beliefs, and I like having them there as they’re a nice nod to the culture of our county, but I don’t see having them taken down as a slap in the face. If we had a decent-sized Muslim community, I’d be okay with displaying some symbol of their beliefs, too. The same would be true of Buddhists, Hindu, or members of any other faith.

However, I have a huge issue with the attitude of modern America that the Federal Government should stick its nose into every little aspect of our life. This is a local government issue, and as it doesn’t involve the infringement of any right, those wanting to bring in the Feds should shut up and nominate an anti-Ten Commandments candidate to take the plaque down.