David Greenbaum explains the historical context of the decision to add “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance back in 1954. Indeed, as I suspected, the decision was utterly and completely steepd in religion and was explicitly aimed at contrasting the fundamentally religious United States with the athiest communist leadership of the Soviet Union.
I thought I was more or less shock-proof at this point, but some of these satirized propaganda posters by Micah Wright managed to make my jaw drop a little. That’s impressive! Interestingly, Wright is a veteran of the invasion of Panama, and a former member of the Second Ranger Battalion in the Army.
Mozilla users should check out Financial Institutions and Mozilla Operability, which lists banks that do and don’t support Mozilla with their online banking applications. My personal bank account is at Bank of America, and it’s never given me any trouble at all when I access it using Mozilla. (It’s listed as compatible on the list anyway.)
Once again manufacturer hype has been proven to be just that when facial recognition technology was tested in a real world trial.
Salon CEO Michael O’Donnel sent a concise statement to Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews rebutting the recent wire story talking about the magazine’s impending doom.
Paul Krugman’s latest is on corporate corruption. What else?
Somehow I just heard about longbets.org, a site where people can put their money where their mouth is when it comes to long range predictions. There are plenty of bets by people who readers of this site will certainly have heard of, and the terms of the bets themselves are quite interesting as well. They range from the bizarre (Danny Hillis betting Nathan Myhrvold that the universe will someday stop expanding) to the pragmatic (Esther Dyson betting Bill Campbell that Russia will be the world leader in software development by 2012). Cool stuff. ...
Perl.com has posted a synopsis of Larry Wall’s fifth design document for Perl 6, Apocalypse 5, which discusses regular expressions. Regexps are near and dear to my heart (thus proving that I’m truly a total geek). I’m still wrapping my brain around the proposed changes, but they certainly look like an improvement from a usability standpoint. I really admire Wall’s ability to rethink Perl in a radical new way. There’s a lot of inertia that would preclude massive changes to the way regexps work, but he’s not afraid to buck that inertia and try to figure out ways to make them more approachable to those people who don’t yet have many years invested in the status quo. I’m impressed by that. ...
Howard J Bashman explains how the Constitution works simply enough, for those who don’t yet understand: This decision is easy to parody; it is easy to denounce. One of the most interesting aspect of yesterday's television coverage of the ruling was when reporters took to the street to interview the average person. Those interviews suggest to me that it would be quite amusing for television stations to take to the streets regularly to ask the people what they think about having the Constitution enforced in ways that are not favored by the majority. For example, we could ask the person on the street what he or she thinks about the Fourth Amendment when it is used to exclude evidence that was necessary to convict an actually guilty individual, or what he or she thinks about excluding the unconstitutionally coerced confession of someone who is guilty. The beauty of the Constitution is that it doesn't matter if the person on the street likes the consequences of the document's provisions, because various parts of the document exist to protect the most vulnerable and least popular.
They’ve ruled that it is, in fact, unconstitutional to chain prison inmates to poles in the midday sun as a form of punishment, and that inmates punished in that way can sue the state.