We'll finish laying out today's Tarot cards and see if they give us a picture of what's going on.

VI The Lovers

According to a California Supreme Court ruling yesterday:

A man may be convicted of rape if his sexual partner first consents but later changes her mind and asks him to stop.

XII The Hanged Man

We see here that something called "volunteer" executions have been on the rise, tripling over the last decade.

Between 1993 and 2002, 75 volunteered for death, compared to the 22 consensual executions between 1977 and 1992.

On the other hand, you have people firmly opposed to the death penalty, usually on the grounds that it is inhumane to execute people. They would say that "life" is an appropriate sentence. But according to the article, they're wrong. Thus, those who support the death penalty ought to favor life imprisonment, and vice versa.

One reason inmates might want to be put out of their misery is something called "the loaf." In this ABC News story, some prisoners are arguing that being forced to eat this death-row delicacy amounts to "cruel and unusual punishment." So what's in this thing, anyway?

"The loaf" is bread with milk, carrots and potatoes added for nutrition, so it's a full meal. At some prisons, inmates who keep misbehaving get the loaf with water and raw cabbage, instead of regular prison food.

XVI The Tower

One of the reasons TV "reality shows" have been so popular lately is that they're cheap to produce. No longer, according to the NYT today. Turns out these things are starting to attract lawsuits like wireheads to Linux. And no wonder. We want to see how far people are willing to go. On a recent Candid Camera prank they asked Philip Zelnick to go through a special airport security checkpoint they'd set up for him:

A security guard made him lie down on a conveyor belt and pass through the X-ray machine. It left him, he said, humiliated and "bleeding all over the place."

0 The Fool

Remember the Golden Age of Answering Machines? We do. At one point back in the 80s people were really getting into putting joke messages, impersonations, music, all kinds of crap on their machines, and then they'd give you their number and ask you check it out, like it was their freaking Webpage. "Hi, this is Winston and Tammy. We're going to electrocute this cute kitten [cue 'meow' in background] unless you leave your name and number..." I guess nobody told this family in Copenhagen that those days are over.

"We have been taken hostage by two children. Hurry. Please bring some help after the tone," the droll message recorded by Lene Becker said, according to Monday's edition of the Politiken newspaper.

I The Magus

Futurist and Sci-Fi author William Gibson has his own Weblog now. It seems that a few other people spotted this today but in my defense I snagged it myself on technorati. A visit to the site reveals the same the dry calmness that pervades all of Gibson's work, with a spare, stripped-down layout ("When everbody else is going high-tech, go low"). His latest book, Pattern Recognition, comes out this February. I'll review it here when I finish my copy. A trade reader who snagged an uncorrected proof of the manuscript reports here that it's good.

On the basis of today's cards, we'll opine that powerful forces are shaping what's looking like a world filled with fools. But you knew that already.

3:56:58 PM       

Yesterday's selection was rough going, so I thought we should lighten up a bit today and lower the carnage meter a few notches. Why, you're welcome.

Over at Rayne Today there's a link to one of those of those online personality quizzes, in this case one that reveals which Tarot card you are. Turns out the Raven is The Wheel of Fortune. Makes sense. We watch the cycle of Samsara turn and look for a spot to rest our wings. Spots like these...

VII The Chariot

Imagine pulling up to the 7-11 riding one of these:

This bad puppy is the Dodge Tomahawk, a concept bike unveiled at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.

The 500-horsepower Viper V-10 engine gives the vehicle a potential top speed of nearly 300 miles per hour.

V The Hierophant

Our Wise and Happy King has a plan ready to help out the cash-strapped folks who are out there looking for work. He's proposing to add $10 billion to fund state aid and something he's calling "personal reemployment accounts" for the chronically unemployed—the "jobless" is the preferred term—which leads to our focus on how language is being used to pull a fast one on us.

First off, look at "jobless." It puts the emphasis on the job and the individual, as opposed to "unemployed," which casts more responsibility to the employer. This is political linguistics at its best. But the "$3,000 personal reemployment account" is a true masterstroke. We love "personal" everything these days, from personal service to personal pizza, it's My Private Idaho all the way.

The employment accounts would foreshadow an effort by the administration to "privatize" large portions of Washington's unemployment and job training programs by shifting responsibility to states and individuals. Those qualifying for the money could use it for job training, transportation or child care while they are unemployed and could keep whatever is left once they are rehired.

VIII Adjustment

This story looks like one thing, and then you see it's entirely the opposite. The headline at today's Washington Post reads: A Pared-Back Security Initiative.

Well, you look at that and you think, "Oh, good, they're backing off a bit. Excellent." Not so fast, bud.

The original proposal didn't slide everything onto the Homeland Security Agency's plate, and it did have a number of safeguards to ensure input by people like the EFF.

The new draft pares the number of security proposals from 86 to 49. Among the draft's changes was the removal of an explicit recommendation for the White House to consult regularly with privacy advocates and other experts about how civil liberties might be affected by proposals to improve Internet security.

IX The Hermit

That would be Glenn Harlan Reynolds, also known as Instapundit. This is a story about a story about him. He's the subject of an article at today's Chicago Tribune that looks at how he runs his blog, and there's a lot of coverage of blogging and amateur punditry in general. He has some thoughtful observations.

"People are hard-wired to gossip and what's going on the world, and I think blogs are a reflection of that. They're most like 18th Century coffee houses where people got together to talk about the latest news."

We'll have more Arcana, major and minor, in this afternoon's Raven.

12:06:47 PM