Ed Stoffel

Cal Thomas recommends this film which opened this week...

"Amazing Grace" is the account of William Wilberforce, a courageous member of the British Parliament in the latter part of the 19th century who, more than any person, was responsible for ending the English slave trade. Starring Ioan Gruffudd as Wilberforce and co-starring Albert Finney as the slave trader, John Newton, who converted to Christianity and subsequently wrote the hymn, "Amazing Grace," this is a film about political and moral heroism with implications for our time, offering all of the rationalizations for maintaining the slave trade, including allegations that it would wreck the British economy and the most outrageous of all, that the slaves, themselves, had allegedly not registered any opposition to the trade.

If we gripe about the lousy films most of the year, we should support the films that do it right, like Amazing Grace.

 Continue Reading: What a Friend We Have in Hollywood, Cal Thomas

A group of illegal immigrants at a Baltimore area 7-Eleven had the misfortune of asking ICE agents for work. Incredibly, the agents took the time to look into the men's background, and arrested 24 of them.

"Fugitive aliens and other immigration-status violators [flout] our laws and threaten the integrity of our immigration system," said John Alderman, acting director of ICE's Baltimore field office. "Although ICE conducts targeted enforcement actions, we will not ignore immigration violations we encounter during the course of doing business." Six of the men have criminal records in the United States, eight of the men have failed to comply with final removal orders from an immigration judge and one man had been caught at the border on four occasions, ICE officials said. --- "We're making it more difficult for people to be good," said the Rev. Robert Wojtek, pastor of neighboring St. Michael and St. Patrick Roman Catholic parishes. "What sin against God have these people done?"

Apparently, illegal immigrants are only breaking "man's laws".

 Continue Reading: Aliens ask wrong people in van about work, Washington Times

Microsoft is so determined to block HD-DVD piracy in Windows Vista that things will often just stop working, including HD video cards and monitors. The OS overhead to manage DRM seriously affects Vista's performance and stability.

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection. That's that AACS you're talking about for premium content, typically HD data from Blu-ray and HD-DVD sources. But here's the gist of it. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software costs. And these issues affect not only users of Vista, but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista, for example hardware on a Macintosh or on a Linux server.

 Continue Reading: Peter Gutmann on Vista DRM, Security Now!

Illegal immigrants have been sneaking into the country, stealing identities, and taking jobs from those here legally. National Guardsman have been overrun at the border. Now we learn that a deal is in the works to give away billions of dollars in Social Security money to millions of today's illegal Mexican workers.

At first glance, a law called the Social Security Protection Act of 2004 seems to prevent this giveaway from occurring, since it forbids illegal immigrants from claiming Social Security benefits. But a loophole in the law allows immigrants who gain valid "work authorized" Social Security numbers at some point to eventually file a claim for benefits. That means if an illegal worker becomes a citizen through guest-worker amnesty legislation or the totalization agreement, the government would use all earnings to calculate his or her retirement benefit -- including money made while working in the U.S. illegally. The high cost of such a deal is of great concern.

 Continue Reading: Protect Social Security, Shannon Benton

 Meanwhile: Police Sued For Capturing Illegal Immigrants, Judicial Watch

Free will - do we have it or not? That's the question scientists are now considering, rehashing the debates of philosophy and religion:

Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, "Free will does exist, but it's a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free. "The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don't have it," he said. That is hardly a new thought. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, as Einstein paraphrased it, that "a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants." Einstein, among others, found that a comforting idea. "This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals," he said. How comforted or depressed this makes you might depend on what you mean by free will.

 Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don't, Dennis Overbye, NY Times

People continue to get Obama confused with Osama. First Ted Kennedy said it at the National Press Club (1-11-05), then others have repeated it as a joke. Now, someone at CNN slipped when preparing a bumper graphic (1-1-07). Daily Kos suggests it was deliberate but mistakes like this happen all the time, even at the networks.

 Update: CNN Apologizes for Mistaken Headline, AP