At least they have an excuse now to create a movie that is entirely focused on special effects and that has absolutely no discernible plot:

Proving that there is no relic from our childhood that cannot be turned into an expensive event movie bearing almost no resemblance to the original artifact, The Hollywood Reporter says that Universal has acquired the movie rights to Asteroids, the bleeping, blooping 1979 video game in which crude line drawings were used to represent rocket ships and gigantic space rocks.

No doubt it will be written by Uwe Boll and directed by Michael Bay, what could go wrong with this? Super Mario Brothers was such a tour de farce that this is sure to be a box office smash (like bugs on a windshield at NASCAR). Hollywood has long been clamoring for a movie that could focus entirely on technical features, and now they have it.

The SCOTUS body slammed public schools on a major strip search scandal. From the ruling:

What was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana [Redding] was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear. We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable. [emphasis mine]

Is this a crack in the zero tolerance edifice? The Supreme Court just smacked them down on the basis that there was no reason to believe that the pills were harmful, and that the public school officials had no reason to believe she would go so far as to hide them in her underwear. Both are excellent points since the first point reinforces the issue of there being actual harm, and the second not only reinforces the fourth amendment by restraining how far a search can go, but can be cited in the future to stop perverts (think it's not an issue?) from using it for a peep show.

The only dissent, from Clarence Thomas, seems to be based primarily on federalism grounds, not defending anything that actually happened or the use of power.

(I had to "take a break from the break" since this was an uncommonly good SCOTUS ruling)

I've been blogging for about 7 years now (3 domains total...) and honestly it's getting a little old these days. In fact, for the last week, I've come close to shutting it down completely a few times. I'm not saying that I am quitting, but I am going to be taking a break for about a month or so, and see if it still is a good fit for me. Honestly, I just don't know if it is. If I do come back for real, it'll probably be on a less frequent, but more substantial basis, and focus more on programming and religion than anything else.

For a while now, I've skated on a thin edge with this at times, and lately I've found it to be getting disruptive to my "offline life." It's time to put it away, pray over it, and see if it's a childish thing or not. I have a feeling that in its current incarnation, it's the former.

Comments are still open, and I'll be monitoring them from my gmail account (and checking out feeds from Google Reader), but that's about it for at least a month.

Yeah, I know. The Internet is going to shut down without me creating new ways to blow bandwidth over HTTP, right?...

From an argument between Cathy Young and a left-wing feminist:

Rather than pulling out the rather musty notion that paternalism, and/or downright patriarchy is what these women and their children need, why not directly open our society's resources to benefit these families? How? Universal healthcare access, generous family leave benefits to workers, better quality free schooling, and family law that recognizes families as they are rather than wishing for what they never were. Because regardless of how much society encourages marriage among parents, women will continue to get pregnant and bear children outside of marriage, just as they have from time immemorial. All the encouragement in the world will not make it go away.

I'm sure that Young's sparring partner was completely oblivious to the irony of her argument. Her demand for a more active government is extremely paternalistic. If her description of what she thinks the government should be doing does not amount to the figure of "provider and protector" that was traditionally assigned to a husband, then I don't know what is.

Feminism is a necessarily statist movement because most of the goals of the broader feminist movement cannot be accomplished with the government's active interference in private life. Women cannot "have it all" without either being exceptionally wealthy, run into the ground by their careers or without the active involvement of the state. Someone has to pay for child care, education and health care, and that usually isn't the women because their career choices tend to make earning a high income on their merits exceptionally difficult. Take away public education, dismantle all of the laws regulating vacation and sick leave, and chop out the welfare safety net, and within a generation the culture war would be over.

It's worth noting too that in order to advance the sexual freedom of women, a key issue for feminists, the government has had to provide a comprehensive welfare safety net for single mothers and make adultery a functionally meaningless offense in court. The welfare safety net not only makes it possible for single women to behave in extremely irresponsible ways without fearing for their finances, but the obliteration of adultery as an issue in family law has helped to make the marriage social contract (and its legal aspects) dangerous to men. It is now legally possible for a woman to cheat on her husband day-in and day-out, then divorce him under a no-fault divorce statute, and see his finances and custody rights devastated.

A very significant portion of what is defined as "women's rights" are positive rights, meaning that they coerce others to behave a certain way. Public education and socialized child care require taxes. "Generous family leave benefits" coerces employers to behave a certain way, and actually affects labor rates for all employees. Socialized health care not only requires a great deal of taxes, but results in decreased choices and rationing of health care services and products. No fault divorces have enabled the destruction of otherwise sound marriages and families without penalty to the divorcing spouse, and without any recourse for the injured spouse and children. As I have said before, marriage is the "black sheep of contracts" because it is the only contract that many libertarians will cheerfully defend any breach or nullification as damn near a civil right and as a public good.

It is time for libertarians and other minarchists to accept the fact that feminism has a rich history of statism, and that today it is deeply statist. Nostalgia for non-statist variations needs to be allowed to die. Core political libertarianism already addresses the "women's rights" that are legitimate rights.

Megan McArdle actually has a very good point:

Not because hospitals are above covering up malpractice, or because doctors don't protect other doctors, but because any private hospital would have been terrified of getting sued.  The VA is very hard to sue because of sovereign immunity.

The sovereign immunity angle is almost a foregone conclusion because the federal government is not going to allow itself to be targeted en masse by people like John Edwards, nor will it allow itself to be easily held accountable by the common man for actual injuries. Sovereign immunity is the bane of civil libertarians in how it allows police to get away with incredible incompetence, and even borderline criminal conduct without even an apology to their victims. It's the legal mechanism which allows the police to bust down the wrong door, cause all manner of property destruction, terrorize a family, and the cite a warrant and claim good faith.

Socialized health care in the United States will look equal parts like the VA and your local public school system with the added benefit (to it) of being almost unaccountable. Even if free marketers were to concede that socialized health care works in Canada, the differences in both the legal system and government culture in the United States would simply not allow it to work here.

I tried to log in last night, and I got prompted to do a lot of upgrades to my blog's database. I don't know what happened, but I don't seem to have lost any data. It seems like it just inconvenienced people trying to login and do stuff like that. It's fixed now.

Federalism is a code word for harboring sinful desires:

The argument would only work if white supremacy were the reductio ad absurdum of opposing globalization and federal power, an assumption that makes no sense. You'd actually expect the most partisan patriots to embrace a radical decentralism, not racism. Perhaps expecting this objection, Stern argued that decentralist rhetoric is racist itself-that the idea of states' rights "has always been used to shield local governments from criticism over discriminatory practices" (emphasis added). And the dangers of decentralization didn't stop there. "Most Americans," Stern wrote, "define their political associations from top to bottom: One is an American, a Texan, from Dallas. There has always been a countervailing tendency...to reshape alliances so that small comes first, and large last, if at all." And what's so bad about that? "When a political movement rejects the idea of common American values and says, 'Let me do it my own way,' it usually means it wants to do things that are objectionable, and yearns to do them undisturbed and unnoticed."

The idea of a common American set of values is largely a creation of public education. It's maintained by the way that each region of the United States maintains a selectively provincial view of what the United States is. Each region tends to see itself as the authentic America, and the rest either hopelessly backward or running off a values cliff at full speed. That view of the other didn't come out of nowhere, but rather it comes from the fact that in our observation of our own region, and the behavior of the others, we see a marked disparity between our values and culture. Our own founding fathers realized that while we were capable of becoming a single country, we would always be closer to a union of nations along the lines of the United Kingdom, rather than a single unified nation like France which happens to have some other nationalities annexed within its borders.

It is true that federalism is often reinforced by regions that want to do their own thing in a manner which other states may find objectionable. Undoubtedly, Californians would be largely apoplectic at the thought of South Carolina using state tax revenues to support religious education. The larger issue is, however, why the hell is it California's business what happens in South Carolina? Cheap, asinine objections like dredging up slavery and Jim Crow laws only serve to show that those making the objection are intellectual one trick ponies who hope to smear their opponents with false associations. The truth is we are all hypocrites on this issue to some extent, as witnessed by the way that secular Californians cheerfully ignored the wishes of most of the other constituent members of the Union by legalizing medical marijuana (not that I personally oppose that).

Decentralization is of course the fastest way to save the lives of controversial people like Dr. Tiller. If Kansas had had the freedom from federal autocracy to declare abortion murder and punished accordingly, he would have had to set up shop in a state that would permit him to operate. Now, his killer had a history of mental problems, and Tiller did make himself more of a target by performing abortions that even most pro-choicers consider to be, at best, ethically questionable, so it is possible that his killer would have hunted him down across state lines. However, it is worth noting that in general, "right wing extremists" like a number of militia groups tend to be focused on the local, not the national. The fastest way for the federal government to remove itself from their radar is to simply stop meddling in their state's affairs. It is unnecessary centralization, with its imperial tone and demeanor, that sets the stage for confrontation.

It has been said that Puritanism was the fear that somewhere, someone was having fun. Likewise, it can be said that modern anti-federalism (supporting a more unitary state) is the fear that somewhere, some state is successfully doing something not blessed by the other 49 states.

There is a certain type of housewife who neither earns an income nor contributes in any meaningful sense to the raising of her children and the maintenance of her household. I propose a new term to describe this sort of "wife:" a salaried prostitute.

This is a sentiment that many of us who work on web applications can relate to:

On the face of it, Internet Explorer is just another browser, but it's time to stop drip feeding it, it's time to stop replacing its internal organs when one fails, and it's time to wean it off its nasty oxygen habit. Internet Explorer is old, pathetic, tiring to even look at, and depressing. Microsoft, let it die. (Failing that, just do what you did with OneCare: strip it down, funk it up and start all over again.)

Don't boycott Opera, boycott Internet Explorer. Buy Windows 7 E if you can, or if you don't want to or live in a non-European country, please for the love of God, remove Internet Explorer from your Windows 7 machine.

Internet Explorer jumped the shark around version 6. IE 6 was such a miserable piece of trash that it's amazing that Microsoft released it. Countless security patches and evidence that it had terrible support for web standards certainly did not embarrass them. Each subsequent version of Internet Explorer has only gotten worse, and now there is no point in using it at all at home. Preferring it over Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera is like preferring to drive a SUV that gets six miles to the gallon on the highway, can't do a u-turn on less than a four lane highway and that looks like it was the getaway vehicle for an army unit that got ambushed in the green zone. As a product, it is now such a miserable piece of shit that the first instinct of most web developers when they find that someone actually likes it, their first internal reaction is "what the hell is wrong with you."

For the sake of web progress, Microsoft needs to take IE out behind the shed and shoot it. Empty the entire magazine into it. Douse it with gasoline, set it on fire, scoop up the ashes, put them in a bag with a weight on it, and dump the remains in the ocean. From there, they can either create a whole new engine or fork an existing one like WebKit that is actually efficient and good at what it does.

What kind of rebel are you Your Result: John J. Rambo   The Lone Wolf. Born on July 6, 1947 in Bowie, Arizona to a Navajo father (R. Rambo according to the last film) and a mother (Marie Dragoo) of Italian descent. Needs no one. The original Army of One. Lives by his own code.
Nathan Bedford Forrest
George Washington
James Stark
Bartholomew Roberts
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
John Lennon
What kind of rebel are you Quiz Created on GoToQuiz