Do you feel safer?

There's a fantastic comment on Charles' weblog (LGF). It's a great summary of the way our country has "secured" itself post 9/11, and the tone is perfect.

The Bat

I'm looking for info on the next version of The Bat, and I found this interview with lots of neat info. The interview isn't dated (I hate that), but whenever it's from they're behind schedule on version 2. Once version 2 comes out I'm pretty confident that I'll switch. I probably would have switched already if their message editor had had a redo function.

Traslucent Databases

Interesting bits about "Translucent Databases" on O'Reilly, and John Udell's weblog, via PHP Everywhere.

Why I'm not a Roman Catholic

I want to start a series of "Why I'm Not a" lists. Back in the day, I had an "opinions" section of my website where I had stuff about Roman Catholicism, Christian Science, etc. explaining why I disagreed with them. Unfortunately, they were pretty poor, and I never worked on them, so I removed them after a little while.

Then recently I had a short discussion with a Roman Catholic who e-mailed me about a comment I had on my Christianity page about Roman Catholicism. I challenged him to explain some of the strange doctrines of Roman Catholicism, but I had to remember the many many issues I had off the top of my head (there are so many I never remember them all at the same time). Furthermore, since I came of with the list on the spot, I couldn't document everything.

So, I'd like to start keeping a list of my gripes with various religions, issues, etc. The lists will focus on "negative" comments, negative meaning that my points will be criticisms of the belief system, rather than "positive" statements about Christianity. You'll get an idea from the list I'm about to start in this post, but basically I'm unashamedly coming from within the Christian worldview in my comments. A "positive" statement, "Why I am a Christian", is a separate document to create another day

So, without further adieu, here's my preliminary list of reasons Why I'm Not a Roman Catholic:

• I don't believe the Pope can speak infallibly
• The apocrypha isn't Scripture
• Purgatory is not a Scriptural concept - it's taught nowhere in Scripture, and in fact it's precluded by Scripture
• The transubstantiation is a very weird doctrine, for a whole bunch of reasons. It turns Christians into cannibals, it seems to obviously misunderstand Christ's symbolism, and it's just plain against the laws of nature.
• Mary wasn't a virgin her whole life, neither was she born through an immaculate conception.
• We're saved by faith, not by works. Roman Catholicism is a works based religion. To be fair, it's only "partially" a works based religion - they do believe faith matters of course, but Scripture says we're saved by faith, and not by works. Once you make any works the basis of your salvation, you're screwed.
• No one is to be called "father" but our father in Heaven.
• It's against the teaching of Scripture for priests to have to be celibate. In fact, you can make a strong case that priests should be married, according to Scripture.
• I believe the Roman Catholic Church commits idolatry through prayer to Mary and the saints. Mary is a human, she's dead, she doesn't intercede at all for us, etc.
• The Church's view of what a "saint" is is warped. The Bible considers any believer a saint. The Roman Catholic Church turns it into some kind of title to be earned.
• We are not obligated to confess our sins to a priest, only to God.
• A priest, furthermore, has no power to forgive, only God can.
• A Christian cannot lose his salvation. The Church teaches that you can and you have to "earn" it back if you do.
• The Church confuses sanctification and justification. It teaches that we are finally saved by our own inherent righteousness, not the righteousness of Christ. "Infused" vs. "Inputed", etc.

See, I've run out of things already, but I'm sure I have lots more. Ideally, I'll later document every one of these statements with a reference in the Catholic encyclopedia or other Catholic reference source, and provide a corresponding counter point from the Bible or one of the reformed catechisms.

This is how pissed I am

This is how pissed I am: After finding out about the Bush administration's loosening of the restrictions on the privacy of our medical records I actually thought: "Gore wouldn't have done this".

From the Times article:

The administration decided to abandon the core of the Clinton rules, a requirement that doctors, hospitals and other health care providers obtain written consent from patients before using or disclosing personal medical information for treatment or paying claims. Instead, providers will have to notify patients of their remaining rights and have to make "a good-faith effort to obtain a written acknowledgment of receipt of the notice."

Administration officials made the change despite opposition from consumer advocates, patients' rights groups and psychiatrists.

The secretary of health and human services, Tommy G. Thompson, said the rules struck a common-sense balance.

"The prior regulation, while well intentioned, would have forced sick or injured patients to run all around town signing consent forms before they could get care or medicine," Mr. Thompson said.

What kind of legal language is "a good-faith effort". And what kind of lying bull is the running "all around town" comment? If you need it in a hurry, you fax a damn form over and they sign it. That's the best reason they can come up with?

I'm going to quote the entirity of the NewsMax.com e-mail alert I got in my mail, because it's not reproduced online:

1. Why Did Bush OK Medical Record Sharing?

On Friday, the Bush administration announced new changes to medical "privacy" rules promulgated by the Clinton administration.

Of course, the new rules completely opened the barn door for massive abuse of your personal, confidential medical records.

Under the Clinton rules, patients needed to sign a consent form to have their records released - but even that requirement was a joke. Under those rules, doctors and medical providers could have you sign a waiver of consent before even seeing a doctor. If you refused to sign, under the Clinton plan you could have been refused treatment.

Now the Bush rules, promulgated by Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, go even further than the Clinton rules. Doctors don't even need to get patients' consent to share their medical records with others - they just need to make a good-faith effort to keep records confidential.

The Bush rules also keep open the use of your medical records for marketing purposes by third-party marketing firms and pharmaceuticals.

Obviously, the Bush administration knows this issue is a loser; that's why the new rules were announced on Friday - just in time for the weekend graveyard for news. (NewsMax particularly likes "Friday stories" - we highlight them and carry them on the top of our page on Monday just to teach the politicians the Friday trick doesn't work with us. In fact, it backfires.)

Why is the Bush administration moving ahead with such rules?

Washington insiders tell NewsMax that pharmaceutical companies made mega-donations to the Republican Party and the Bush 2000 campaign. These same companies want access to medical records to increase their ability to sell drugs to consumers.

No matter, the new changes to medical records pose a significant threat to your right to privacy. It should be opposed by citizens of all political parties.

Of course, my final jury's still out. It does seem like the there are some good provisions in whatever they've drafted. I also can't, in "good faith", make a final judgement simply on the information I have now. So I have to learn more...

QueryString Encryption

Via Sam Gentile, QueryString Encryption.

Pyra deal

How we're spending our time at Pyra:

To implement this deal, we have finally finished the long-in-the-works upgrade to an entirely new codebase (no more ASP). You see, a huge bottleneck for the last year-and-a-half when it comes to fixing bugs and adding features is that much of the code we have in production currently we knew we needed to move away from in order to go where we wanted to go.

No more ASP... so what technologies is Blogger based on?

Awwwww

Man, now I miss my dog. We should have more pictures of her than we do.