If Obama's going to exploit parents of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting to push his agenda, it seems fair to point out that not all of those parents agree with his plan. Funny how this gets no news coverage. From Mediaite: Why Hasn’t The Media Been Reporting On Or Booking Pro-Gun Newtown Parent Mark Mattioli?

Some of the most compelling voices in the current debate over gun violence are those who have been touched by it, particularly the parents of the twenty children slain at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14. It’s strange, then, that one of those parents, Mark Mattioli, has simultaneously been white-washed and virtually blacked out of the media’s post-Newtown coverage....

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...[T]he testimony of several other parents received widespread attention, particularly that of Neil Heslin, whose testimony was interruppted by shouts from gun advocates. Mattioli’s testimony, however, received very little attention, and what attention it did get was manipulated to obscure his apparent political views. The New York Times published a piece quoting Mr. Mattioli’s opposition to new gun laws, but softened the more explicitly political portion of his testimony. CNN similarly avoided Mattioli’s politics, while reporting a “divide” on gun control in Newtown.

(Of course, in a sane country we'd be looking at actual research and evidence on crime and violence to figure out whether locking people up for possessing unapproved firearms would make us safer and more free, rather than trying to dig up pathos-filled anecdotes...but, yeah, good luck on that.)

Students involved in Boston College Students for Sexual Health, a group distributing free condoms around the Catholic university, received a letter from the administration telling them to stop. The letter from dean of students Paul J. Chebator and director of residential life George Arey claimed that "The distribution of condoms is not congruent with our values and traditions".

But as chairwoman of the group Lizzie Jekanowski said, "It harkens to a much deeper Catholic morality of caring for your neighbor — and that’s literally what we’re doing, is caring for our neighbors."

If Catholics ever get over the sex hangups and focus on that caring for your neighbor thing, the Church could actually be a force for good in the world. Want to take bets on the odds of that?

Wired covers the story of Alfred Anaya, a stereo installer and car customizer who built secret compartments into cars. Some people use such compartments to hide legitimate valuables from thieves; others use them to smuggle drugs. As Wired's Brendan I. Koerner explains, dual-use technologies plus federal prosecutorial discretion leave makers like Anaya with a sword hanging over their head. Alfred Anaya Put Secret Compartments in Cars. So the DEA Put Him in Prison:

The challenge for anyone who creates technology is to guess when, exactly, they should turn their back on paying customers. Take, for example, a manufacturer of robot kits for hobbyists. If someone uses those robots to patrol a smuggling route or help protect a meth lab so that traffickers can better evade law enforcement, how will prosecutors determine whether the company acted criminally? If it accepted payment in crumpled $20 bills and thus should have known it was dealing with gangsters? If the customer picked up the merchandise in an overly flashy car? The law offers scant guidance, but prosecutors have tremendous leeway to pursue conspiracy charges whenever they see fit. And as 3-D printers enable the unfettered production of sophisticated objects, those prosecutors will be tempted to make examples out of people who are careless about their clients.

I've been concerned for a while with the attitude some of the "New Atheists" have displayed towards Islam, unfairly singling it out in a way that borders on Islamophobia. (Anyone who says the religion of Rumi and Hafez is at its core a religion of hate, doesn't know what the hell they're talking about.) Over at Salon, Nathan Lean has a good look at the problem: Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens: New Atheists flirt with Islamophobia

Until 9/11, Islam didn’t figure in the New Atheists’ attacks in a prominent way. As a phenomenon with its roots in Europe, atheism has traditionally been the archenemy of Christianity, though Jews and Judaism have also slipped into the mix. But emboldened by their newfound fervor in the wake of the terrorist attacks, the New Atheists joined a growing chorus of Muslim-haters, mixing their abhorrence of religion in general with a specific distaste for Islam (In 2009, Hitchens published a book called “God Is Not Great,” a direct smack at Muslims who commonly recite the Arabic refrain Allah Akbar, meaning “God is great”). Conversations about the practical impossibility of God’s existence and the science-based irrationality of an afterlife slid seamlessly into xenophobia over Muslim immigration or the practice of veiling. The New Atheists became the new Islamophobes, their invectives against Muslims resembling the rowdy, uneducated ramblings of backwoods racists rather than appraisals based on intellect, rationality and reason. “Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death,” writes Harris, whose nonprofit foundation Project Reason ironically aims to “erode the influence of bigotry in our world.”

Apropos of Easter weekend, this reminder of why we can't have nice things:

According to a 2010 Pew Research Center survey, roughly half (48%) of Christians in the U.S. say they believe that Christ will definitely (27%) or probably (20%) return to earth in the next 40 years.

Why bother protecting the ecosystem when the Rapture is nigh?

"Mission Accomplished."

Wave of Iraq blasts kill 56 decade after invasion (Yahoo! News)

A wave of bombings tore through Baghdad on Tuesday morning, killing at least 56 people in a spasm of violence on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion.

The attacks show how dangerous and unstable Iraq remains a decade after the war — a country where sectarian violence can explode at any time. And though attacks have ebbed since the peak of the insurgency in 2006 and 2007, tensions simmer and militants remain a potent threat to Iraq's security forces.

I am not making this up: three of the Ukrainian navy's "killer" dolphins swam away from their handlers during training exercises, probably heading out to look for some (ahem) tail.

Ukrainian media reported earlier this month that only two of five military-trained dolphins returned to their base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol after a recent exercise.

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry denied the reports, while refusing to confirm the navy makes use of dolphins, despite the frequent appearance in Ukrainian media of photographs of dolphins with military equipment strapped to them.

The dolphin training program dates back to at least 1973, when the Soviet navy would train them to find mines, and even plant explosives on enemy ships and to attack swimmers. The Ukrainian navy's program is said to have included training dolphins to attack swimmers using special knives or pistols fixed to their heads.

Mike Mika likes video games. He's turned his 3-year-old daughter on to them too, including the old-school classic Donkey Kong. Then one day she asked, "How can I play as the girl? I want to save Mario!"

So Mika tells us Why I Hacked Donkey Kong for My Daughter:

Mario is made up of four eight- by eight-pixel tiles. So each frame of animation is created with four tiles, each having three colors from the same palette. Two nights after my daughter’s request, I was knee deep in the Donkey Kong ROM, trying to make sense of the graphics. If I was going to replace the sprites, I needed to go all in. I needed to reduce Pauline’s height – she is three tiles tall to Mario’s two, a throwback to when Donkey Kong was going to be a Popeye game. I managed to reduce her height by taking some liberty with her design. I kept the head and hair pretty much intact. But, without any sort of onion-skin animation tools, I was animating blind with only the Mario sprites as reference.

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Meanwhile, a couple of my friends decided to tweet about it and post some of the work-in-progress to Reddit. By the time I started to catch up with all my social feeds, something insane had happened. This little mod exploded. I didn’t follow the whole Tropes vs. Women thing, but I saw a lot of references to it. In my wildest dreams, I just expected a bunch of fellow coders to chat about the merits of the mod. I never expected it to ignite a gender-role debate.

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Having kids is incredible. And having a daughter is something special. I get the opportunity to see the world through her eyes. And if this experience has taught me anything, it’s that the world could be just a bit more accommodating. And that if something as innocuous as having Mario be saved by Pauline brings out the crazy, maybe we aren’t as mature in our view of gender roles as we should be.