As fans, we often direct a lot of abuse towards referees, rightly or wrongly forgetting oftentimes what a thankless task they have. In "Another referee's revolution?", we get a glimpse of the politicking at the US Soccer Federation and how it inhibits hampers referee development. Forget the facts that "senior referees who were not being paid anywhere near international amounts for international games", it seems that people involved with the referee program administration (I'm guessing here because I wouldn't know an SDA, SDI, SRA, or SYRA from a hole in the ground) got so fed up with the Federations inaction that they acted on their own.

The fact is that all of the people there had the opportunity to speak freely, to brainstorm, without fear of the retribution that is so typical of Chicago when challenged. (Ask National Referees and candidates, ask anyone who makes a critical remark about the work of the powers-that-be.)\

This week has been quite busy both at work and at home, I haven't made time to blog as frequently as in recent weeks. One of the things that I finally tackled was upgrading apache on this server from 1.3 to 2.0. All hail debian. The process was really smooth, because it was simple to install apache2 alongside apache 1.3, listenting on another port. Greg helpeed me to test the new configuration before we moved apache2 to port 80 to handle all http requests. Once that was done, I updated my blog and site code to a newer version that I've been working on. A few new features, including an About Me page, a bulleted list of my recent posts, and a minor layout tweaks.\

"publications that see large chunks of their readership drop away due to an offense to a community might self-censor to avoid further damage to their balance sheet. I don't think this threat outweighs the need of citizens to have a way to express their own viewpoints in opposition."\

There's some evidence that one of the Danish papers involved had 3 years earlier refused to run some cartoons depicting Jesus unfavorably for fear of offending their Christian readers. So what other motive other than offending could they really have by running the Mohammed cartoons?

"Which leads to my final principle, and the one that the most people will have trouble swallowing: you have no right to be protected from offense."\

I agree, this is the critical building block of a democratic, liberal society that all radical fundamentalists do not accept. By radical fundamentalists, I don't just mean muslims but the Christian-Talibans we have here in the United States. Exhibit A: the astro turf campaigns against indecency via the FCC