The April 24 issue of Epoch Times' Canadian Edition carried an article "Ben Stein challenges Darwin" which purports to be a review of Ben Stein's new documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, but it's more like a whitewash than an actual review.  The reviewer writes: "Stein uncovers... a powerful science education establishment that threatens the livelihood of any academic who wishes to offer an alternative explanation to the Darwin concept of evolution."  In fact, one of the leading examples of those who have "unjustly lost their careers and livelihood simply for mentioning Intelligent Design publicly" is Richard Sternberg. Contrary to the reviewer's claims, however, Sternberg did not lose either his job nor his livelihood.  He did lose his editorship of a refereed scientific journal - not for "mentioning" creationism but for committing such a massive violation of academic ethics that it might constitute fraud legally as it does ethically: he used his editorial position to publish an unrefereed article by creationist Stephen Meyer in a refereed scientific journal. There are so many other falsehoods in Ben Stein's movie (from the opening scene in which they rented a classroom at Pepperdine University and packed it with extras to falsely convey the impression of University student support for his views), that all I can do is refer you to a detailed review in Skeptic OnLine at http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-04-17.html for a detailed discussion. You can also read an open letter from Richard Dawkins (Dawkins touches upon the truly evil attempts in the film to associate evolution with Hitler). There is also a website "Expelled Exposed".

News continues to filter out of the US mainstream media. Bits of news, that is. But mostly bafflegab lead by the Pentagon and the Administration. If you think there's a grain of truth in US news coverage, you should read what the NY Times has to say. And here's Citizen Greenwald's reaction to it over at Salon, commenting on how disgraceful it is that CNN et. al. have not even responded to the NYTimes' criticism, let alone done anything about it.

Gee, I'm so glad I live in Canada; OUR government would never do such a thing; OUR government enjoys such a wonderful working relationship with the press. Or not :-)

My car got totaled while I was in it, but not even moving! Not my fault...

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In addition to cranking out a new stable release (2.0.1.GA) and a new early access release (2.1.0.A1), The JBoss Seam framework has been renamed to "The Seam Framework" and has a new website, http://www.seamframework.org/. This represents a "growing up" of sorts, similar to e.g., Jakarta Tomcat becoming Apache Tomcat, and differentiates Seam from the many smaller projects that are also part of JBoss - see the new diagram at http://labs.jboss.org/projects/, and note that Seam is right there at the top of the web tier. While still funded by RedHat/JBoss, with this new domain Seam is obviously being positioned to compete head-on with similarly-named project The Spring Framework.

As part of "moving out", Seam has been given a new logo, see http://www.seamframework.org/Community/GetASeamIcon. This is used in their new web site, which is of course running on Seam and available as part of the downloads (http://www.seamframework.org/Download). Speaking of downloads, if you're using a version older than 2.0.1.GA, now would be a good time to download and upgrade.

Also, there is a new book about Seam, Seam In Action (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933988401), which you can now buy in Early Access (http://www.manning.com/dallen/) - you get EA PDF's now and the final version when it's released, and optionally a paper copy then too.

Finally, JBoss Tools - the all-encompassing Eclipse tools for developing Seam and Hibernate projects - has been upgraded to 2.0.1.GA. You might want to download this as well.

In the U.S. Congress, the House Democrats finally stood up to be counted, voting through their own bill which does not provide a unilateral amnesty for all the law-breaking that went on after 2001-09-11 by the big telecoms violating everybody's privacy. Although this bill is rather unlikely to get signed into law, it's a big baby step forward for a Democratic majority that was voted in, in large measure, to oppose Bush's crushing of the constitution.

The title "An Enemy of the State" is most often associated with a popular 1998 Will Smith movie. But it was used several times before that. The most relevant one for me is Justin Raimondo's 1992 biography of Murray Rothbard, entitled of course An Enemy of the State. Lew Rockwell has finally done this book justice with a detailed review, entitled "Still the State's Greatest Living Enemy".

I also note that Benedict D. LaRosa has written a gun control article that's worth reading. Written shortly after the Virginia Tech murders, this article lays the blame squarely on the University Administration and the state government, but brings in  other American examples. It could be read in conjunction with this UK information (UK government lied about gun crime to try to make the populace think that their draconian gun control was "working"). And this Canadian item that shows gun homicides actually on the decline, which also points out that criminals don't obey gun laws any more than any other - they are criminals, after all.

Speaking of lies, this article notes that the US Government was using prohibited weapons in Iraq and lying about it. But that should surprise nobody who's got an IQ greater than that of a wheat germ.

To end on a lighter note, here's a piece entitled The REAL Reason We Use Linux, which applies just as much to BSD.