This week's episode was definitely a positive departure from what the show's been going like recently. Starbuck started acting less emo/crazy and acted a little more like Starbuck. Roslin started acting less power-hungry/dictatorial and a little more like Roslin. There was no mopey Tyrol or zealous Baltar in sight (except for his radio show thing). No "rebel without a cause" Lee Adama or succubus Tory.

So basically, a lot better than the rest of the season has been. Don't get me wrong, I still love the show, only watching it now feels more like a chore and less like something to be enjoyed (even cathartically). Can't wait until 3 is unboxed and brings some Warrior Princess badassitude to all the mopey-dope characters. Maybe she can get them out of a funk.

They didn't kill off Caprica Six, just a Capsix lookalike. The real one is still in the brig on the Galactica, remember?

As other letter writers have been quick to point out, this young woman was not arrested because of her choice of dress but because of her refusal to cooperate with authorities. This irritates me for the same reason that tazing story irritated me... people got all offended that this kid was tazed for speaking his mind, when really he was tazed because he was being belligerent, hostile, and uncooperative in the presence of law enforcement officers as well as a Senator and presidential candidate.

But, if poor taste were a crime, this person certainly deserves to have had the book thrown at her for that, too.

And DNA testing is only as good as the people conducting it. It is not some infallible method for figuring out who is who. DNA testing can be expensive and time-consuming to run, and forensic scientists are already overbooked. Sometimes corners end up getting cut, mistakes get made. Multiplying the quantity of their workload by god knows what factor is not going to make testing any more accurate or reliable.

As far as dumb posts are concerned...

If you had read the article you would have noticed that this new law would mandate DNA tests for anyone who was ever arrested for any violent crime, not just rape, and not just people who were actually convicted. That means their DNA would be on record for as long as the state wanted, even though they were potentially innocent both in the law's eyes as well as in reality.

Obviously rape suspects get their DNA taken on a regular basis. But this is far different than that.

I should add to my own previous post the danger that DNA poses as a weapon to implicate others in your own crime. Even if the lab is flawless in its work, who's to say that someone who hated you didn't leave your hair on the scene of their own crime? It sounds conspiracy-theory-esque, but people's blind faith in the reliability of DNA testing is such that people have been framed for crimes they didn't commit based on the presence of their DNA where they never actually were.

As long as we are discussing the whole "innocents have nothing to fear," this reminds me a lot of a discussion in my women's studies class last semester. We brought in a speaker from the local abuse victims center, which I suppose was relatively informative, but one thing that struck me as quite alarming about the whole thing was the speaker's consistent implications that any woman who claimed she had been abused must have been abused, and that any man who had been accused of abuse must be an abuser. There was no real sense of concern or even awareness for the American justice system, which has always rested on the premise that a person is innocent until proven guilty. There was a lot of complaining about the system by which an accused abuser can continue to walk free, as if anyone who is accused should be locked up for the safety of the accuser.

I mean, the justice system is in a bind. In cases of real abuse, the abuser needs to be locked up. The abused should not be forced to confront the abuser. Unfortunately, that's not how our system works and I don't see how you can get around that.

You can call Obama a staunch liberal all you like, but with his record of happily touring with homophobic Donnie McClurkin and pandering to the Illinois coal industry when environmentalism doesn't suit them, it makes me wonder if there is any room left for real liberals in this country.

Because Broadsheet has this amazing thing called editorial prerogative where they get to pick what they want to put on their column. And you have this amazing thing called "choice" which you can utilize to not read articles you don't want to and, better still, to not post silly things on the comments section which have nothing to do with the topic at hand.

Isn't the world a beautiful thing?

But Israel is an 'apartheid state.'

Just ask the uprooted, dispossessed Palestineans who get their homes bulldozed by the Israelis on a fairly regular basis.

The fact is, the state of Israel did not exist until Western guilt allowed it to violently rip the land from out under Palestineans' feet forty years ago. It's pathetic that we still go on treating Israel like the wounded victims and Palestineans like the big scary terrorists who are trying to destroy all Jewry. It's pathetic that a person who points out this simple inconsistency is immediately labeled an antisemite, or Holocaust denier, or somesuch nonsense. I feel just as bad for the Palestineans of today who suffer under arbitrary Israeli rule as I do for the Jews who did so in Europe.

They are willing to say that the polar bear is threatened, as long as they don't have to actually do anything about it.

Brilliant.