When my friend Hans Reiser was charged with the murder of his wife, I based my belief in his innocence on three factors: his character, his long-standing inability to carry out even simple plans, and the astonishing series of prejudicial leaks that somehow kept coming out in the months before the trial. The fact that the kids (key witnesses) were taken out of the country and not returned in time for initial testimony also smelled peculiar.

Lacking a body or any strong evidence, they tried to build a case where he both killed her in the heat of passion and also planned it meticulously in advance. The former is possible for anyone, the latter was obviously absurd to anyone who ever spent an hour in a room with Hans.

My argument against the former was simply that the person I’ve known since 1993 might kill in the heat of the moment, but had the character to own up to it after. Obviously I was wrong.

While flipping through my “couldn’t possibly ever be non-spam” folder (which occasionally reveals what real companies try to discover email addresses for their customers by correlating with spammer databases, and I mean you, Calumet Photo, Lexus, and Bed, Bath, & Beyond), I found a message that wasn’t offering viagra, penis enlargement, breast enlargement, free downloads that would add me to a botnet, or the opportunity to help some nice Nigerian take over my identity.

No, today’s offer is “help some Russians launder money stolen from other suckers”, as a Transactions Group Specialist.

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Now that the Supreme Court has unambiguously ruled on the only “right of the people” ever to be considered “the right of state governments”, the Chicago Tribune has come out of the closet: “repeal it!”, say the guardians of freedom.

We’re just not sure whose freedom they’re guarding.

Quoting:

"The death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the rape of a child"

I agree, but only in the sense that hanging’s too good for him, not, as this court has decreed, that it is cruel and unusual punishment incompatible with “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society”.

Feh. They’d better rule against the Second Amendment in Heller, if they want to keep themselves safe from parents everywhere.

Way to bolster your credibility, Hansen:

James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Actually, I’d like to see this happen, because the defense teams would quickly subpoena the source code for all of the computer models being used to project future climate conditions, opening their assumptions up to real independent investigation. You know, “science”.

I spent too much time working in a university computer science department to have too much faith in the results of highly-tweakable computer models. Between twiddling the knobs to get what you want and simply leaving out variables that are inconvenient or too difficult to model, I suspect most sophisticated models could be replaced with:

10  PRINT "WORLD ENDING, PLEASE FUND MY RESEARCH"
20  GOTO 10

A friend just called to tell me I might not want to start my drive home just yet, since there’s a big fire near Watsonville. Checking in with Google News, I see these headlines:

Fireworks sales OK in Watsonville despite fire danger
Watsonville Fire Grows To 1000 Acres
Blaze Closes 6-Mile Stretch of Highway 1

[Update: over a thousand acres burned, smoke you can smell from 101, and some nitwit down the street from me is setting off fireworks.]

A frustrated fan of post-racial Democrat candidate Obama says:

"Hillary Clinton would not even still be in the race if Obama was a white man."

If Obama had been a white man, he wouldn’t have been in the race at all, because he’d have made John Edwards look too good.

After being passed the Olympic flame, Majora Carter pulled out a small Tibetan flag that she had hidden in her shirt sleeve.

"The Chinese security and cops were on me like white on rice"

(via ESPN)