I like Biggie’s stuff (the guy certainly had tremendous talent, even if some of his songs are just too glorifying of violence and misogyny for me to handle).  And I think his story is a fascinating one that could make for a great movie.  However, I was worried that it would have problems similar to the ones described in this review:

By all accounts, Biggie also shared Woolard’s talent for wheedling affection from a skeptical audience, both off- and onstage. (A scene in which he wins over a restless college crowd with the bravura boast “Party and Bullshit” is a musical high point.) The Christopher Wallace this movie shows us is not such a swell guy: He deals crack to a pregnant woman; ignores his first, out-of-wedlock daughter when his second child by another woman comes along; and runs out on his mother, Voletta (Angela Bassett), after she receives a cancer diagnosis. But even after the movie shows us what happens when Biggie’s charm runs dry with his wife, Faith Evans (Antonique Smith), we’re expected to keep forgiving him ourselves. Again, Woolard’s natural warmth as an actor makes this easy enough to do. But the screenwriters, Reggie Rock Bythewood and Biggie’s biographer Cheo Hodari Coker, can never decide whether they’re telling a dark morality tale (about a man brought low by his own choices who reforms just as his lifestyle catches up with him) or a simpler story of unalloyed triumph cut short by violence.

A new report is out–read more about it here and read Jim Martin’s take here.

Fr. Martin, a Jesuit (and sometime writer for BustedHalo) doesn’t mention this bit, about religious orders (and some might say, a muted reference to the Jesuits):

“Of course, here and there some case or other of immorality - again, usually homosexual behavior - continues to show up,” according to the report. “However, in the main, the superiors now deal with these issues promptly and appropriately.”

The evaluators had no such praise for schools run by religious orders, which critics consistently condemn as too liberal on celibacy, homosexuality and church teaching in general. The report said “ambiguity vis-a-vis homosexuality persists” within institutes run by religious orders. The report also cites those schools for failing to fully adhere to Catholic theology.

Nearly one-third of the 40,580 U.S. priests belong to religious orders.

It’s Adam Smith’s dream.  And the internet brings it that much closer.  These are the kinds of things that make democracy work.

What does any of this have to do with the federal budget? Well, USAspending.gov might look like any other government Web site, but its API—that’s Application Programming Interface—allows access to the site’s raw data in an open, standard file format, similar to a transit feed. (“Wow,” Moore said. “That’s really powerful.”) Enterprising programmers, researchers, bloggers, or watchdogs like the Sunlight Foundation or Govtrack can grab that data and slice it, dice it, chart it, graph it, map it, or mash it up with new feeds.

It’s not just the API that’s a big deal, Greg Elin, Sunlight’s chief data architect, told me. “It’s the discipline an API imposes,” he said. To build one, an agency has to record and store data in a way that anticipates public use. “Data sharing is no longer an afterthought,” Elin explained. “You begin with the notion that you’re going to share information. And you’re going to make it easy for people.” (Compare that with the approach of the Federal Communications Commission, which allows only limited searching of filings and comments; or that of the Department of Justice, which puts out data on foreign lobbying in unwieldy PDF format and binders.) An API also encourages the release of data in real time, instead of in occasional reports, like Federal Election Commission figures, or earmark spending.

Last September, Moore added a feed that broadcasts imminent train arrivals in real time. He’s eager to see what people will do with it. “We can’t envision every beneficial use for our data,” Moore told me. “We don’t have the time, we don’t have the resources, and frankly, we don’t have the vision. I’m sure there are people out there who have better ideas than we do. That’s why we’ve opened it up.”

These are both from Slate.  The first is about why should join already (as if you haven’t!).  The second is about why google might someday do it better.

A debate at the Washington Post:

Should the presidential inauguration ceremony include prayers by clergy? Should President-elect Obama say “so help me God” at the end of his oath of office? Should Chief Justice John Roberts ask him to?

Well, it can’t just be that.  This is an interesting case study in how parents are instrusted to raise their kids by the state:

Speaking generally, Bernyk said the state’s “decision to remove a child is based on the safety and well being of the child and the risk to that child, and that decision is made in conjunction with the courts and the county family court judge.”

The Campbells made national news last month when a ShopRite supermarket refused to sell them a birthday cake with Adolf Hitler’s name on it. The story generated a slew of angry Internet chatter.

Forensic psychologist N.G. Berrill said naming a boy Hitler could be considered child abuse.

“Part of it is the infantile nature of the parents’ behavior,” Berrill said. “You can name your dog something weird, but they think they’re making some kind of bold statement with the children, not appreciating that the children will have separate lives and will be looked at in a negative light until they’re able to change their name. It is abuse.”

Two things that are interesting about this article.  The first is that there was a conference at the Vatican to rebrand confession and make folks more aware of the sacrament.  The second, more scandalous bit, is the list of sins only the Pope can forgive:

Confessions of even the most heinous of crimes and sins _ such as genocide or mass murder _ are handled at the local level by priests and their bishops and are not heard by the tribunal.

Its work involves those sins that are reserved for the pope _ considered so serious that a local priest or bishop is not qualified to grant absolution, said Cardinal James Francis Stafford, an American who heads the Apostolic Penitentiary.

These include defiling the Eucharist, which Catholics believe is the body and blood of Christ. Stafford said this offense is occurring with more and more frequency, not just in satanic rites but by ordinary faithful who receive Communion and then remove the host from their mouths and spit it out or otherwise desecrate it.

Others include a priest breaking the seal of the confessional by revealing the nature of the sin and the person who sought penance, or a priest who has sex with someone and then offered forgiveness for the act.

These sins bring automatic excommunication from the church. Once absolution is granted, the excommunication is lifted, Stafford said.

This is a really interesting debate about which I’m not really qualified to add much that is very intelligent, except that this is one of the most important questions going into the Obama presidency.

Susan Crawford, the senior Pentagon official who dismissed charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Guantánamo detainee, said in a published report on Wednesday that she had concluded that he had been tortured by interrogators. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution, Ms. Crawford told The Washington Post. We asked these experts — most of whom were in our previous debate on the legal challenges of closing Guantánamo — how this admission of torture might affect that closure and the prosecution of other detainees.

A polemic:

Yet a solution for the reading gap was discovered four decades ago. Starting in the late 1960s, Siegfried Engelmann led a government-sponsored investigation, Project Follow Through, that compared nine teaching methods and tracked their results in more than 75,000 children from kindergarten through third grade. It found that the Direct Instruction (DI) method of teaching reading was vastly more effective than any of the others for (drum roll, please) poor kids, including black ones. DI isn’t exactly complicated: Students are taught to sound out words rather than told to get the hang of recognizing words whole, and they are taught according to scripted drills that emphasize repetition and frequent student participation.

In a half-day preschool in Champaign-Urbana they founded, Engelmann and associates found that DI teaches four-year-olds to understand sounds, syllables, and rhyming. Its students went on to kindergarten reading at a second-grade level, with their mean IQ having jumped 25 points. In the 70s and 80s, similar results came from nine other sites nationwide, and since then, the evidence of DI’s effectiveness has been overwhelming, raising students’ reading scores in schools in Baltimore, Houston, Milwaukee, and other districts. A search for an occasion where DI was instituted and failed to improve students’ reading performance would be distinctly frustrating.

This is chilling:

“First baby tested for breast cancer form BRCA1 before conception born in UK,” says the press release from University College London. “The first baby tested preconceptionally for a genetic form of breast cancer (BRCA1) has been born.” The release quotes Paul Serhal, medical director of the hospital’s Assisted Conception Unit: “This little girl will not face the specter of developing this genetic form of breast cancer or ovarian cancer in her adult life. The parents will have been spared the risk of inflicting this disease on their daughter. The lasting legacy is the eradication of the transmission of this form of cancer that has blighted these families for generations.”

It’s happy news. But let’s take a closer look at the announcement, starting with the test “before conception.” This baby was tested as an embryo in a dish. She was one of 11 such embryos made by injecting drugs in the mother to stimulate production of excess eggs, which were then fertilized with the father’s sperm. Six of the embryos had the gene for breast cancer. Three more had “other abnormalities.” All nine were “discarded.” The other two were implanted, and one became this baby.

In sum, at least six human embryos were made and then thrown away because they failed a test. We now call such tests “preconception.” This is the next step in our gradual devaluation of embryos. First, we said IVF embryos weren’t pregnancies. That’s technically correct: Pregnancy begins when the embryo implants in the womb. Then we called early embryos “pre-embryos” so we could dismantle them to get stem cells. That was technically incorrect, but we did it because it made us feel better. Now we’re adjusting the word conception. Henceforth, testing of IVF embryos to decide which will live or die is preconception. Don’t fret about the six eggs we fertilized, rejected, and flushed in selecting this baby. They were never really conceived. In fact, they weren’t embryos. According to Serhal, each was just “an affected cluster of cells.”