Faith and Politics

Andrew Sullivan speaks for me:

But dividing the world and country into two sides at war, and placing Christ on one side, that of the Republicans', are politically dangerous and morally repugnant gambits. It sickens me to see my own faith abused and purloined in this way. I hope there are some Republicans left who can call this demagoguery and abuse of faith for what it is.

Immigration Debate

I watched this video from MSNBC. It's about the growing Hispanic population in some small Iowa town. Supposedly this story has something to with the ongoing immigration debate in this country, but the connection is never really explained. Is MSNBC suggesting that the 3000 Hispanics living in this little town are illegal immigrants? If they aren't illegal, then how are they relevant to a debate on illegal immigration? People are discussing apples and MSNBC's contribution is a story on oranges? Does the mainstream media actually grasp the debate that they're trying to cover?

Customer Service on the Other Foot

I've complained a few times on this blog about lousy customer service, that as a tech professional I often feel I understand systems better than those paid to understand and support them. But of course, sometimes the problems go the other way: good, helpful, knowledgeable customer service trying to help clueless users. CentOS.org, a provider of Linux operating systems, publishes a long email exchange with the city manager of an Oklahoma town (who claimed to have an extensive background in computer systems).

The city manager has his own page on the city website. Turns out his "22 years in computer systems engineering and operation" is comprised of being a manager. This demonstrates the point I made last year about management philosophy: "The model of management we have in business and government has at least one basic flaw: the focus is on management skills, not on the skills being managed." Managing computer systems does not make one knowledgeable about computer systems.

(Hat tip: Brewtown Politico)

President Rubbing Off

Interesting. We all know the president takes a fairly dim view of the law and the Constitution, especially when it gets in his way. Now I guess he's rubbing off on his fellow Republicans. American Enterprise Institute reports.

To those unfamiliar with the issue and controversy, the House and Senate passed a major budget bill by the narrowest of margins in both chambers, including a tie-breaking vote in the Senate case by Vice President Cheney, but it turned out that the bill passed the House and Senate in different forms.

This was not simply a transcription error, a misplaced comma or a misspelled word--something that would be plenty serious--but a $2 billion discrepancy that arose over a last-minute compromise between the two chambers over the time allowed for the rental of medical equipment for Medicare patients. After the House had passed its version and the discrepancy became known, Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) unilaterally changed the House bill to match the Senate’s and then sent it on to President Bush, which he signed to great fanfare.

But a seventh-grade civics student who has done his or her homework would immediately know that what the president signed is not a law. Laws, as Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution makes clear, must pass both chambers of Congress in identical form and then be signed by the president.

Of course, when Congress makes an error such as this one, it easily can be resolved by having both chambers re-pass the bill in identical form and having the president sign the proper bill. But not in this Congress with these leaders.

Because the two versions are different by a cool $2 billion, and because the more generous House version would be difficult to pass muster with fiscal conservatives, neither Hastert nor Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) wants to go through another vote. So they have decided to ignore the plain letter and intent of the Constitution and declare, with the same sensitivity to the rule of law as the queen of hearts, that it is law, period, because we say so.

That pesky Constitution makes everything so hard, doesn't it? The Washington Post has more.

Child Bride

I just started reading Kevin Sites' Hotzone. Sites is a journalist traveling to war zones all over the world and blogging what he finds. He's in Afghanistan now. This story is about an Afghan girl given in marriage at the age of four (!) and then subjected to torture and abuse at which I imagine even our president would blanche. (Who knows. If the sadistic father-in-law had uttered the magic word--terrorist--all bets would have to be off. Maybe he could have gotten the US military to do his dirty work for him.) Brutal story. But also a hopeful one for Afghanistan. In a country and culture where women are viewed as little more than slaves and women's rights are, at best, meaningless words on a piece of paper, it is a good sign that there were plenty of people to help this little girl, after her situation was discovered, from the police to ordinary locals.

Another Optional Law

In yet another demonstration of the president's view of the law, he has declared that he is not bound by some provisions of the newly renewed Patriot Act.

In [a quietly issued signing] statement, Bush said that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law's requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would "impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties."

Bush wrote: "The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information . . . "

So, once again, the president's view is, "Regardless of what the law says, I can do what I want, and I'll decide whether or not you should be told about what I'm doing."

Military Casualties

RedState.com comments on some military casualty figures over time:

Take a look at the actual US Military Casualty figures since 1980. If you do the math, you will find quite a few surprises. First of all, let's compare numbers of US Military personnel that died during the first term of the last four presidents.

George W. Bush . . . . . 5187 (2001-2004)
Bill Clinton . . . . . . . . . 4302 (1993-1996)
George H.W. Bush . . . . 6223 (1989-1992)
Ronald Reagan . . . . . . 9163 (1981-1984)

Even during the (per MSM) utopic peacetime of Bill Clinton's term, we lost 4302 service personnel. H.W. Bush and Reagan actually lost significantly more personnel while never fighting an extensive war, much less a simultaneous war on two theaters (Iraq and Afghanistan). Even the dovish Carter lost more people during his last year in office, in 1980 lost 2392, than W. has lost in any single year of his presidency. (2005 figures are not available but I would wager the numbers would be slightly higher than 2004.)

(some spelling corrected) RedState notes that Bush has lost fewer soldiers than Reagan and even Clinton did, so things really aren't going so badly. The analysis is somewhat misleading.

First of all, these casualty figures aggregate simple accidents, combat, murder, illness, suicides, and terrorist attacks into a single value. The raw data show that the number of deaths due to accidents has gone down dramatically over the years, as has the number of soldiers being murdered. These categories dominate the total deaths every year except 2003 and 2004, so their declines account for the overall reduction in military deaths that RedState notes.

What's gone up, of course, is combat deaths. Reagan had very few (19 in the year range RedState considers) whereas W. Bush has well over a thousand. That's not surprising given that Reagan fought no wars but Bush has two.

Secondly, raw numbers are reported but what is not considered is that the military in Reagan's day was considerably larger than today. Looking at the raw numbers RedState links to, I estimate an average military size of about 2.1 million in Reagan's day versus 1.4 million in W. Bush's era. Normalizing the death count for the two by these estimates, both presidents come out with a death rate of about 0.4%. So, while the absolute numbers have gone down quite a bit, primarily because of fewer accidents, the rates are not all that different.

Basically, these data show Reagan lost men to accidents, Bush to war. Is that really something to praise the president for?

Afghan Man On Trial For Becoming A Christian

Another story I, at least, hadn't heard much of until last night:

An Afghan man is being prosecuted in a Kabul court and could be sentenced to death on a charge of converting from Islam to Christianity, a crime under this country's Islamic laws, a judge said Sunday."

...

The prosecutor, Abdul Wasi, said he had offered to drop the charges if Rahman converted back to Islam, but he refused.

"He would have been forgiven if he changed back. But he said he was a Christian and would always remain one," Wasi said. "We are Muslims and becoming a Christian is against our laws. He must get the death penalty."

The United States is spending its treasure and risking the lives of its soldiers to help build up a government that executes people for converting to Christianity?

Some bloggers have been following the story. (I've been very busy lately and haven't been on top of my news and blog reading of late, which is why I missed it.) Sullivan quotes the judge in the case saying,

"We will invite him again because the religion of Islam is one of tolerance. We will ask him if he has changed his mind. If so we will forgive him."

My translation: Islam is tolerant, unless you change faiths in which case we'll kill you. I guess tolerance is the same all over the world.

No e-mail for G-men

CNET News.com reports on government efficiency:

Monetary constraints have prevented the FBI from handing out a new technology to some of its agents: e-mail accounts.

"As ridiculous as this might sound, we have real money issues right now, and the government is reluctant to give all agents and analysts dot-gov accounts," Mark Mershon, assistant director in charge of the agency's New York City office, told The Daily News.

It will take until at least the end of the year before the 2,000 agents in the New York area all get .gov accounts, the paper said.

Um, yeah.

Yahoo Mail Bug: Resolution

Last week, I reported on my adventures trying to report a bug in the Yahoo Mail web application. After I gave up on customer service, I remembered a blog comment I had read a month or two ago that had a link to the Yahoo 360 page of someone the blogger claimed was a Yahoo developer. So I sent him a message on Yahoo 360, asking if he could forward my report to someone supporting the mail application. I haven't heard back from him, but thereafter I started seeing hits in my logs to that post from Yahoo corporate addresses, the referrer on some being what appears to be a bug tracker at Yahoo. I have been saving examples of the problem in my inbox, and today I found they are being shown correctly, i.e. the address book icon is not being shown anymore. So it appears they have fixed the problem. Now, about my fee....

Update Then again, maybe not. The english language ones appear to be solved, but I'm getting some from yahoo.es now.

Blogger Customer Service

I've ranted about Yahoo customer service recently. Apparently Blogger isn't that much better. Instapundit posts an email from a reader whose blog on Blogger was stolen, but can only get gibberish answers from customer service.

Dark Matter

This is something I've always wanted to get off my chest as a former astrophysicist. Most readers can just tune out now. USATODAY.com has an article reporting observations of the microwave background that purportedly support the inflation extension to Big Bang. I can't comment on the findings without reading the actual paper in ApJ, but the article includes the statement

Normal matter, the stuff of people and planets, is only about 4% of the combined matter and energy in the universe. Dark matter, invisible and exotic physical particles, and dark energy, a gravity-defying force behind the continuing expansion of the universe, makes up the rest.

This idea has always bothered me. Here's the story. Inflation cosmology is an attempt to solve some paradoxes in Big Bang. Its essential point is that in the first flicker of time after the Big Bang event, the universe expanded at speeds far greater than the speed of light. That explains the essential isotropy of the universe, how parts of the universe too far apart to have ever communicated can have similar structures and properties. That's known as the horizon problem. See Wikipedia's entry for inflation for a more thorough introduction.

The detailed physics of inflation is far beyond me, but a critical piece of the theory is that the universe must be perfectly flat. This has to do with general relativity. Basically, if the universal density is high, the universe will collapse on itself. If is the density is low, the universe will expand forever. The transition point between the two is called a flat cosmology. (In GR terms, the metric tensor has constant elements only on the diagonal. Also known as the Minkowski metric.) The corresponding density is called the critical density. Inflation requires the universe to be at exactly this density. Unfortunately, observations give a density well under this critical value. That is, of course, only looking at observable matter. Since inflation requires the critical density, and observable matter gives a density which is only a small fraction of critical density, everything else must be totally unobservable matter, which we call dark matter. That's where USA Today's statement comes from.

This has always struck me as a modern example of epicycles. In the old geocentric views of the solar system, they had to impose bizarre, unphysical motions on top of the simple circular orbits the planets were assumed to have around the earth. These were called epicycles and were needed to explain things like retrograde motion. The only purpose for these epicycles was to bridge the gap between what their theory predicted and what was observed.

The dark matter hypothesis does exactly the same thing. It proposes that most of the matter of the universe is totally undetectable (meaning we can't actually test for it) whose only purpose is to flatten the universe to comply with the predictions of inflation. I call dark matter the cosmological fudge factor. Whatever we don't see, we just assume is there and unseeable. That's always struck me as totally unscientific.

The idea of dark matter comes from the study of galactic rotations. Rotation curves are measures of how fast matter is orbiting the galactic center as a function of distance. We can determine the mass by looking at brightness. Knowing the mass and the speed, it is fairly simply physics to predict what will happen. Unfortunately what was sometimes found was that there was not enough mass in the galaxy to keep matter in the outer parts of a galaxy in the orbits that were seen. Matter should have been flying off the galaxy rather than being bound gravitationally to the galaxy. The solution, again, is that there must be matter that we're not seeing that is increasing the mass, and therefore the gravitational pull.

Now, this use of dark matter is not so bad. First of all, unlike inflation, the theory we're trying to preserve is extremely well established (basic gravitation) so there's very good reason to expect its predictions to be right. Beyond that, it's simply not unreasonable that there would be matter in a galaxy we're not seeing. Dead stars, dim stars who are simply not bright enough to be detected in our telescopes, dust, etc. All are examples of mass, potentially considerable mass, that would not be emitting light for our telescopes to see.

But when this idea is applied to cosmology, the dark matter morphs from perfectly reasonable things to bizarre, exotic particles no one has ever seen, nor can they see by definition.

Like I said, I have always found this rather unscientific.

Cowardly Democrats

Sen. Feingold has introduced legislation to censure the president over the domestic spying operations he authorized, in violation of the Constitution and the law. Really there should be impeachment. But that's out of the question. Republicans won't do their jobs because, well, they're Republicans and feel obligated to support their man in the White House, regardless of his crimes. The Democrats are just cowards, so terrified of doing anything that might alienate voters that they do nothing, and in so doing alienate voters who have the crazy idea that members of government should actually do their jobs and that parties should actually stand for something.

One of my earliest posts talked about the failure of Congress to simply do its job. Our system of government relies on the assumption that they will, and if Congress abdicates its responsibilities, the system breaks down. This is a perfect example, as was the anti-torture bill the president signed earlier this year. There the president, in signing a bill into law preventing him from torturing prisoners, explained that he, in fact, had no intention of actually complying with the law. Anyone want to bet that when he violates that law, Congress will do something other than keep its collective mouth shut?

In both the spying and torture cases, the president knows no one has the cajones to stand up to him, so he flagrantly disregards the law to do whatever he wants. As long as the throws that magic word "terrorism" in front of it, no one will stop him. The system is designed to handle such a situation, but only if the members of Congress do their jobs, which is too much to ask of this group.

I like the title of this Brewtown Politico post: Note to Democrats in Congress: grow a pair. I sure wish somebody would. Some will say Bush already has. OK, I sure wish somebody competent would.

Il Vittoriano

In my last post of Rome photos, I included one of the Palazzo Venezia. Rome Daily Photo has a photo of the same place with more information about the big equestrian statue in the middle of my picture. It's called "Il Vittoriano" or Altare della Patria (Altar of the Nation).

It’s located between Piazza Venezia and the Capitoline Hill. It was designed and built by Giuseppe Sacconi between 1895 and 1911 to honour Victor Emmanuel, the first king of unified Italy. It is built of pure white marble and features majestic stairways, tall corinthian columns, fountains, a huge equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel and two statues of goddess Victoria riding on quadrigas. Tomb of the Unknown Soldier with an eternal flame, built under the statue of Italy after World War I. This monument is controversial because too big for thearea but I like it .

If I do say so myself, my picture is a little better.

Another Example of Great Yahoo Customer Support

I wrote a while ago about lousy customer service at Yahoo. I have another great example from this weekend. Here's my problem report:

I've been noticing for the last week or so that some spam email is being delivered to my Inbox as if the sender was in my address book. In other words, the address book icon is showing in folder view next to the sender. How are these people getting into my address book? When I click the icon to view the address book entry, it says the person is no longer in the book.

So, there's either a bug in the mail application that is causing certain spammers to appear as if they are in my address book, or the spammers are somehow hacking the address book to put themselves in for a short time. I think it would have to be the former, since it appears from experience that the icon appears when the sender address is in the book at the time the folder is viewed, not when the email was received. You would think Yahoo would care about either situation and it would be something they would want to fix.

Yahoo's helpful reply:

Believe us, we dislike receiving spam as much as you do. Your Bulk Mail folder is designed to radically reduce the amount of spam you receive in your Inbox by directing most incoming bulk mail messages to your new Bulk Mail folder instead. As this system only directs messages addressed to you to a new folder, you should not receive any additional spam as a result of this new folder. Yahoo! does not send unsolicited email messages nor do we sell or rent personally identifiable user information to anyone. For more information on this, please see our Privacy Policy at:

http://docs.yahoo.com/info/privacy/

This system is automatically activated and a Bulk Mail folder is generated as a result of your having received a message that our automatic filter has determined to be a bulk mail message. Our intent is to send solicited emails (those bulk messages you have requested) to your Inbox; however, we may occasionally send these messages to your Bulk Mail folder. If this occurs, you can click on the "Not Spam" button, located in every message. By sending examples of spam to Yahoo! for review, it will increase the effectiveness of Spamguard, Yahoo! Mail's filtering system. Yahoo! will use the messages you send to constantly improve the Spamguard technology.

Messages will remain in your Bulk Mail folder for a default period of 30 days, unless you delete them yourself. You have the option of adjusting the amount of time your bulk mail will reside in the Bulk Mail folder. Simply go to "Mail Options" and click on "Spam Protection" and choose either 1 month, 2 weeks, 1 week, or 0 days (i.e. drop bulk messages). After the amount of days specified, the messages will be subject to automatic removal. You may wish to empty (delete the contents of) your Bulk Mail folder yourself on a periodic basis, as these messages will count towards your mail quota until deleted.

It goes on, and on, about how I shouldn't respond to spam emails and how to use the spam button, etc. Does this answer have any relevance whatsoever to the problem I'm trying to report? I like Yahoo, I'm trying to be helpful by reporting something that could be a problem for their service, and this is the answer I get? Instead of an email either asking for more information if my report wasn't clear enough to investigate the problem, maybe asking for an example in my Inbox now so they could investigate the backend code to figure out why the icon is being shown, or a simple thanks for reporting the bug, I get useless information about how their spam blocking works.

Also note that the last quoted sentence is not even correct information as mails in the Bulk Mail folder do not count toward quota. So I get not only useless but incorrect information.

Update I decided to try one more time with Yahoo so I wrote another email to them trying again to explain what I have observed and why it's something detrimental to Yahoo's service. I closed by stating I did not need a canned reply about spam, but rather that they should forward the report to their technical support so they could investigate. Yahoo's reply? A canned message saying they think I have been the recipient of a worm.

Here's my followup email:

I don't really want to go round and round with customer service like has happened so many times. I will try one more time, and then, oh well it's Yahoo's problem. I mean no disrespect, but that's a pretty bad answer. If you read my question, you will hopefully see I am trying to report a possible bug in your mail service that is causing spammers to appear as if they are in a user's address book, which (a) gets the email around Spamguard and (b) makes it more likely for a user to read the email, thinking it must be from someone they know.

This report does not require a canned answer out of an FAQ (by the way, with not always correct information; mail in the Bulk Mail folder does not count toward quota) about what spam is. Rather it is something that should be followed up with your mail application support team to investigate why this is happening.

The beginning of Yahoo's "helpful" reply:

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Mail.

Based on the information you have sent, it appears you may have received an email containing a worm virus. This does not mean your computer has been infected with the virus, but most likely a computer that contains your email address within its address book has.

I throw my hands up. Maybe someone on the technical side in Yahoo will read this.

Update In case anyone is following this, I have looked at several examples in my Inbox now. All were sent from Yahoo addresses, and they are all announcements of a new email address. When you make a new user ID in Yahoo, do they give you the ability to send out announcements of your new address? These are the ones that are showing up in my Inbox as being from someone in my address book.

More on Administration Incompetence

Meet the Press has an interview with Michael Gordon, co-author of Cobra II. This clip references a classic example of administration incompetence in planning for post-war Iraq. In 2003, Rumsfeld sets out a memo calling for the creation of the New Iraqi Corps, a body out to be the foundation of a self-sustaining government. What was not considered was that the acronym, pronounced in Arabic, sounds awfully close to the f-word. Oops.

Reminds me of the story of the Chevy Nova. Chevy couldn't figure out why they couldn't move their Novas in Latin America, until someone pointed out that nova means "doesn't go" in Spanish.

Church Burnings Have Never Stopped

Last month I made quick reference to a spate of church burnings in Alabama, a story that was not--and still is not--getting much coverage. (Interestingly, a Google news search turns up a link to an editorial in the Tehran Times, which has apparently been removed from the site. One in the Tehran Times is one more than in major US newspapers.) Alice Smith (hat tip: Persecution Blog via Adam's Blog) points out that church burnings, which we tend to associate with the past, have never really stopped.

Arson burnings of churches had slipped from the nation's conscience until fires this month in Alabama brought them to the forefront again, but the fact of the matter is church burnings never stopped over the past 15 years.

...

From 1990 to 2000, some 1,507 churches burned and were labeled either arson, attempted arson, suspicious or undetermined, Johnson-Mackey said. From 2000 to 2006, the coalition documented a "minimum" number of 600 church burnings.

It's so common, a National Coalition for Burned Churches has been formed, which helps to rebuild burned out churches. As the Daily Dispatch says, "It's appalling that such an organization need exist, but obviously there's a demand for its services."

Adam's Blog has a breakdown of church burnings from 1999 to 2001. Because of history, we might expect most burnings to target black churches, but the majority are in white churches.

Women's Roles in Hollywood

I have to say I haven't seen as many films this last year as I usually do, and even fewer of the heavily nominated films. I don't really get much into Oscars. I know what I like, and great films don't always get the acclaim, and ridiculously overrated films sometimes get all the glory (Leaving Las Vegas or English Patient, anyone).

But there is one consistent truth in the Oscars: the mundane quality of the nominated performances for best supporting actress show just how shallow the pool is for actresses. There may be enough quality roles out there to fill out the best actress category (not always true), but after those five roles, women are about tapped out. After that, it's totally ordinary, uninteresting roles for the second tier, followed by the truly bad roles for everyone else.

Rachel Weisz, last night's winner for supporting actress, proves the point. I saw The Constant Gardener. It was so uninteresting it wasn't even worth a review posting. What a disappointment. Weisz's character was bland and poorly put together. Do you think the woman might have had just a little emotion mere hours after miscarrying late in her pregnancy, or having a still born child (the film never really explains what happened, just that in some way they lost the baby)? Nope, the loss is totally brushed aside. The character was, at best, a 2-D sketch of a human being.

It's not that Weisz did a bad job. It's that the role was so poorly written that there's not much anyone could have done with it. Regardless of whose fault it is, the performance is hardly the stuff of legend, but it is apparently one of the best of the year for women. Compare that to the male performances. The worst supporting actor nominee usually did a vastly superior job than the best supporting actress.

While we live in a supposedly enlightened age with equality for women and all that, women were much better off in film back in the 40's. Women then had access to a steady stream of strong characters to play. Today they have access to a steady stream of characters who look good and often doff their clothes to emphasize the point, not to mention to compensate for poor writing. (Sorry, but nudity is lazy film making that almost always is used to make up for the other shortcomings of the film. Can't write a decent relationship between two characters? Strip the actress, and no one will notice. Picture dragging in the middle? Throw in some nudity to keep people interested.)

Rome Photos: Miscellaneous

In two previous posts (here and here) I have shown some photos of my vacation in Rome from 1997. This will be the third and final installment. The complete album can be viewed here.

	A view of the city of Rome, from the roof of St. Peters. I remember taking this photo very vividly. I was in Rome in August, the hottest, most humid time of the year. The Vatican, being a functioning Catholic Church, among everything else, required all visitors to wear appropriate clothing, i.e. no shorts or T-shirts. So, you have to wait in line, in the heat, in long pants. Once inside you find there are no elevators, so you have to walk all the way up the stairs, something like 500 steps as I recall. And these steps are in a cramped staircase without air conditioning or even a fan to move the air around. Once you're in the dome, the cramped staircase gets more cramped as the walls start to curve over on you, because you are acually climbing up the walls. It was quite a relief to finally get out on the roof.
	A view over the Tiber of the dome of St. Peters, through some trees.
	The Palazzo Venezia. It is just down the road from the Forum, as I recall. From a balcony on the side of this building, Mussolini gave some of his biggest speeches while dictator of Italy.
	Rome is a city of fountains. Nearly every square has one.
	Another fountain in another square in the city.

Tags: Rome, photos, travel

What Bush Was Told About Iraq

Recently I wrote that one of the great mistakes of the neocons was their refusal to believe their own eyes. They also didn't believe their own ears. The National Journal documents many reports to the president and his immediate advisors that dissented from the neocon version of the world. For example, remember those famous aluminum tubes that the president claimed were for nuclear weapons? What he neglected to tell anyone was that other analysts in government sharply disagreed with that analysis and believed the tubes were for conventional bombs. The dissenters were, of course, right.

(In fairness to the president, the wording in the presidential summary, as quoted by the Journal, does make it seem like the balance of opinion was for a nuclear bomb interpretation and the dissent was downweighted. "The one-page October 2002 President's Summary specifically told Bush that although 'most agencies judge' that the use of the aluminum tubes was 'related to a uranium enrichment effort... INR and DOE believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons uses.'")

Remember how often the president warned that Iraq was an imminent threat? What he forgot to say was that the intelligence community unanimously disagreed with this conclusion. Why confuse anyone with facts like that?

Darfur

I haven't written on Darfur in quite a while. As far as I can tell, the coalition founders have stopped sending out their weekly posts. But both the killing and the world's apathy continue unabated. I encourage readers to continue getting news about the catastrophe from the Coalition for Darfur blog.