“Lucky”

It happened back in July 2002. A guy named Charles C. Benoit in Liberty, Missouri decided to barbeque a kitten for fun.

The incident made national news for a day or so. Benoit, age 24, was entertaining a group of friends at his apartment. They were barbequing, and Benoit - apparently quite a showman and eager to keep the crowd entertained - decided to make the evening a bit more interesting by chucking a live 7-week-old tabby kitten on the hot grill coals.

A dozen or so people stood around and laughed.

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Some interesting news coming out of federal courts yesterday: a judge in Vermont ruled that forcing a criminal suspect to reveal the passwords to his computer’s encryption is a violation of his constitutional 5th amendment rights. Assuming the ruling is upheld (and it likely will), it could have wide ranging effects.

A federal judge in Vermont has ruled that prosecutors can’t force a criminal defendant accused of having illegal images on his hard drive to divulge his PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) passphrase.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that a man charged with transporting child pornography on his laptop across the Canadian border has a Fifth Amendment right not to turn over the passphrase to prosecutors. The Fifth Amendment protects the right to avoid self-incrimination.

Niedermeier tossed out a grand jury’s subpoena that directed Sebastien Boucher to provide “any passwords” used with his Alienware laptop. “Compelling Boucher to enter the password forces him to produce evidence that could be used to incriminate him,” the judge wrote in an order dated November 29 that went unnoticed until this week. “Producing the password, as if it were a key to a locked container, forces Boucher to produce the contents of his laptop.”

At first glance, the prosecution’s point seems pretty straightforward. But as is usual with potential landmark cases, this one was a bit unusual - but just so as to pierce right to the legal heart of the matter.
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Love Harlan Ellison, been a fan of his for a long time. In case you haven’t been introduced to the man and his works, Harlan is a rather vocal and opinionated writer, mainly of short stories and essays. He’s a champion of the idea that a writer without strong opinions (and the will to fight for them) isn’t much of a writer at all.

On Friday I found myself in the mood for a really good Harlan rant. Luckily YouTube was able to set me up:

And alas, true, every word.

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Ed. - Since I wrote this, Tropical Storm Fay has turned her eyes towards a Cat 1 Tampa landfall. Ironic.

Great NYT piece today about the general weather amnesia setting in over in Florida, only four years after we got our collective asses kicked by five hurricanes in six weeks.

“Officials tell us that they are really quite worried about people who would not cooperate, who are not aware of what was about to happen,” said Robert Blendon, director of the Harvard report. “And just thinking of the mobile homes, if people stay and they really are blown all over, public officials, ambulance services, Red Cross units have to go find these people and provide them with support and services.”

The public cost could be significant. Miami-Dade County has spent $250 million in local, state and federal money cleaning up from the hurricanes of 2005, Katrina and Wilma, and officials say that when people are unprepared, the expense rises substantially.

That is partly what worries Larry Gispert, director of the emergency management office for Hillsborough County, on the Gulf Coast. Mr. Gispert says the questions he has received at preparedness seminars this year — like “When is the next hurricane coming to Tampa?” — show that residents are woefully uninformed.

I used to live in Tampa, so I can tell you that folks there live in their own special breed of hurricane denial. But still, you have got to be kidding me.
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In most of Western civilization, we’ve elevated reductionism and ambivalence to the status of state religion. We write off cultural myth as merely fanciful storytelling (or worse, literal truth); reduce vital political debates to the competitive give-and-take of a football game; entertain the idea that formal education is little more than cultural repression; even at times chuck out the concept of personal responsibility, reducing the meaning of one’s actions (or inactions) to the status of pointless drama. All the while, congratulating ourselves for our equivocating, Cracker-Jack-prize incredulity.

Reductionism is everywhere in our society, the marauding anti-ideology that shames thoughtful discourse in favor of surface-appealing just not giving a fuck.

So I love it when we occasionally discover that, yes, somewhere behind personal opinion and emotional diatribe and superficial and unthinking belief, there is actually a meaningful reality that we can see and touch and appreciate. That some things are actually just true.

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