He was cleared after issuing his statement, but he continues to be punished by senior enlisted men and officers for raising the legal issues, according to the Washington paper.Hushen's platoon leader removed him as team leader and relieved him of sniper duties.

"I no longer have anyone to lead and train. I believe that this is the worst punishment that could have happened," he said.

You're in the Army now, you can't be right now. You won't get equipped, you son of a bitch. You're in the Army now!

Let's hear it for the Major for doing outstanding work for those who want to murder our servicemen in Iraq! Hollow point ammunition would have given our snipers an advantage and now those glorious freedom fighters who want nothing more than a theocracy have a better chance of surviving. Can someone get her an Allahu Akbar?

With officers like these watching their backs, who needs the insurgents? Say a prayer for the poor American soldiers caught between the murderous thugs on one side and politically correct, micromanaging shits like this dumbass on the other.

Take notes, class:

Today, the use of bleach, which destroys DNA, is not unusual in a planned homicide, said the senior criminalist from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.Klein and other experts attribute such sophistication to television crime dramas like "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," which give criminals helpful tips on how to cover up evidence.

Prosecutors have complained for years about "the CSI effect" on juries - an expectation in every trial for the type of high-tech forensic evidence the show's investigators uncover. It also appears the popular show and its two spinoffs could be affecting how some crimes are committed.

"They're actually educating these potential killers even more," said Capt. Ray Peavy, also of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and head of the homicide division. "Sometimes I believe it may even encourage them when they see how simple it is to get away with on television."

Nothing like a little "crime scene 101." How's that for "educational television?" With all of the controversy over violent video games, this stuff gets by without any of the usual really complaining about its damaging effects on society. Granted, it'll just mean that cops will have to work harder, but there's a big difference between a video game that is violent and sexual and a series on tv that is almost a how-to guide for criminals when it comes to crime scene sterilization.

The nutjobs have been arguing for years that games like Doom, Quake and Unreal teach kids how to go on shooting rampages, despite the obvious fact that video games do not prepare anyone for how to use an actual firearm. No one ever became a military sniper by fragging people in Unreal Tournament at a distance with the sniper rifle, but people are getting a lot better at destroying the evidence at crime scenes thanks to these shows. Fiddling while the city burns...

There's nothing quite like getting caught with your pants down in such a humiliating fashion when you're a politician as finding out that your staffers have been running a half-assed 1984-esque "Ministry of Truth" style campaign to erase information about you online.

WASHINGTON -- The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest in an independent biography of the Lowell Democrat on a Web site that bills itself as the "world's largest encyclopedia," The Sun has learned.

The Meehan alterations on Wikipedia.com represent just two of more than 1,000 changes made by congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six month. Wikipedia is a global reference that relies on its Internet users to add credible information to entries on millions of topics.

Just in case anyone is finding this news flash to be a little bit hard to believe, Wikipedia has posted examples of the incriminating evidence for us to look at. In fact, they have assembled a veritable laundry list of malfeasanse committed by users originating from the House of Representatives' network. Now I know that someone may argue that this is just some elaborate attempt to make some members of Congress look like a bunch of lowlife scum, but clearly that is not the case when you look at the kinds of information that were removed by the staffers. There isn't a whole lot of information about who was involved at this point the game, but it doesn't look good for the staffers and the people that they work for because one could imagine that if a FBI agent or two came a knocking, the congresscritters in question would happily throw their staffers to the wolves in order to save their hides and some face.

Then, there's this:

Wikipedia's online honor system has made it ripe for abuse by vandals. Recently, a user wrote in a Wikipedia bio that Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor "smells of cow dung." Another wrote that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is "ineffective." These statements were traced to the House Internet-protocol (IP) address.

"We believe that Google is in the midst of creating its own iTunes competitor, which we've dubbed 'Google Tunes.' We think this is a logical step, now that the nascent Google Video product has been introduced," Peck wrote in a research note. "We note that Google has not confirmed our expectations, and that our thinking is based on Mosaic theory. However, we do think this fits with Google's recent moves and its ultimate goal of organizing the world's information."

This is why I don't pay attention to stock analysts except for analysts like the ones at Motley Fool. There is a big difference between the video download and music download markets. First of all, the music download market is already mostly controlled by Apple and their control is not just in the sale, but the playback area as well. Second, the key to controlling the music download market is the integration between every phase of the process from the sale to taking the songs on the road. Given the fact that the iPod is the most popular product for taking songs on the road, and it's controlled by a company that would be incredibly hostile to Google, they would be mostly locked out of that component which has hitherto been shown to be critical to promoting online sales. Finally, Google would have to find some way to sell videos in a way that is cost efficient and provides the ability to exceed the playback capabilities of Apple's offerings, and to do that, their movie download software would have to support burning straight to DVD which not even Apple provides yet.

At this point in the game, Google has too much competition its way and too little good will in certain areas to get such a service off the ground. Their apathetic, bordering on hostile, attitude toward book publishers over their book search service has undoubtedly not gone unnoticed by the movie and television studios and I doubt that they'd rather deal with Google than Apple at this point given the differences in attitudes between the two companies. Besides, Apple already has the infrastructure in place to get the ball rolling on a full-blown video store and are even now selling a lot of tv downloads. If the studios are barely prepared to get involved with Apple, why would they get involved with Google at this point?

There are times when Bill Gates really shows why he is nowhere near as good at predicting trends that are developing around him. Today is one of them, since apparently he thinks that China is becoming more and more liberal every year toward its citizens. Voice of reason and insight in the wilderness, or the voice of a man who thought that private online service networks were the thing of the future, not the Internet? You decide:

(CBS/AP) The specter of state censorship and proliferation of software piracy is no reason for technology companies not to do business in China, Bill Gates said Friday.

As technology develops and Chinese innovations multiply, those problems will gradually dissipate, the Microsoft Corp. chairman and co-founder said.

"I think (the Internet) is contributing to Chinese political engagement ... access to the outside world is preventing more censorship," Gates said, referring to China's restrictions on politically sensitive internet Web sites.

Bill Gates is a very smart businessman when it comes to running his company with someone else's vision, but this is a man who is in the throes of passionate love with cheap foreign labor. However, he cannot spot a trend that is developing until it is practically on top of his company, ready to make it all but obsolete as was the case with the Internet in 1995. It shouldn't surprise anyone that he cannot see that China is being more and more aggressive in how it goes after the Internet targets that it wants, such as pornography where distribution is a serious crime. Granting access to a source of information as harmless to them as Wikipedia is one thing, but their information controls are still firmly in place. The biggest mistake he makes here is in assuming that the Internet will liberalize their government when hitherto, the only liberalization policies put into place have been pragmatic ones.

What might be more effective is if the first world countries would grow spines and tell China that if it doesn't reform, that it'll find itself without a market for its goods. While that would require a reduction in taxes and regulation so that manufacturing could actually come back home, it'd be a far more ethical thing to do than to pretend that if we take their money that they will suddenly start down the path of gaining their freedom. Isn't that the ultimate irony of this situation? The main reason that we need trade with China is because the amount of wasted taxes, the amount of regulation and the presence of extremely greedy unions in key manufacturing sectors has caused us to really need their cheap labor to be safely profitable.

We cannot call Google and Microsoft evil, until we are all willing to admit that since we buy goods made in China that we are part of the problem. There's a bit of irony in there when you realize that many of the cheap goods we enjoy are only there on our shelves because of outsourcing to China. So either we change our laws and economy or we continue to silently acquiesce to the way that the Chinese government treats its people. The safe money is on the bet that nothing short of a war or economic depression would cause the former to happen.

I have caught some crap in the past for saying that despite my opposition to our presence in Iraq, that I cannot stand Cindy Sheehan and the (usually) anti-American nutjobs that find common cause with her. If we are in fact known for the type of company we keep, I think that it is safe to say that Sheehan is not exactly a supporter of ethical and republican government and individual rights. If she were, then she would have declined this invitation:

Earlier, he put his arm around American peace activist Cindy Sheehan and said she planned to renew her anti-war protest outside Bush's Texas ranch in April. "Maybe I'll put up my tent also," Chavez said.

Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, accused Bush of being, "responsible for killing tens of thousands of innocent people."

Chavez also embraced Elma Beatriz Rosado, widow of slain Puerto Rican nationalist Filiberto Ojeda Rios. Rosado, holding back tears, said: "I accuse the United States government of murdering Filiberto."

The 72-year-old militant independence supporter was killed in a September FBI raid on a Puerto Rican farmhouse where he was in hiding. He had been sought for the 1983 robbery of $7.2 million from an armored truck depot in West Hartford, Conn. _ funds intended for the independence cause.

"They murdered him," Chavez said. "Viva Filiberto! ... Let's follow his example."

In his "defense," Chavez does have a reputation to keep. You can't keep your street credibility among the South American left without doing a regularly scheduled two minute hate against the United States. But what's your excuse, Cindy? You claim that this is about ensuring that no mother has to go through what "you had to suffer," but how would your son feel about you embracing one of the number one financiers of the Columbian civil war and a staunch ally of Iran?

Sometimes wars are necessary, sometimes they aren't. Regardless, that does not give you justification for walking hand-in-hand with a man who has been responsible for polarizing his country, arming militant factions and exacerbating the suffering of millions through support of civil war and terrorism. Just because our government has made mistakes in these areas, doesn't mean you are right in supporting a "counterweight" in those areas. I'd be willing to bet good money that she would solemnly nod in agreement with Ghandi's "profound" statement that "an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind."

Well it looks like the Bush Administration is in fact quite serious about getting that search information from Google:

Google's attempt to fend off the government's request for millions of search terms will move to a federal court in San Jose, Calif., on Feb. 27. U.S. District Judge James Ware on Thursday set the date for the highly anticipated hearing, which is expected to determine whether the U.S. Justice Department will prevail in its fight to force Google to help it defend an anti-pornography law this fall. Although the Justice Department also demanded that Yahoo, Microsoft and America Online hand over similar records, Google was the only recipient that chose to fight the subpoena in court. After the spat became public last week, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said: "This is important for the Department of Justice and we will pursue this matter."

I'm sure it is very important for the Department of Justice, but that is no reason to force a private party to pay for the government's investigation to provide support for a law that the current administration, regardless of party, wants to provide legal support for. There are plenty of ways that the government could have acquired the information that they need to support the COPA law, but they decided to strong-arm the major search engines into providing it. When you get right down to it, there is no ethical excuse for this given how absolutely non-critical the "Child Online Protection Act" is to our country's well-being. In fact, the majority of the reason that we have the law in the first place is that so many parents don't monitor their kids' internet use. The curious part about this is that, if what CNet says about their request be true, then the government isn't even asking for the right data to prove their case:

Prosecutors are requesting a "random sampling" of 1 million Internet addresses accessible through Google's popular search engine, and a random sampling of 1 million search queries submitted to Google over a one-week period.

Random samples of URLs that have been indexed is not going to help. What they really need instead is to buy a listing of just the search terms used in the course of a week, then pay someone to write a script or program to run each unique set of search terms through Google's search engine a few times a month for about three months in order to capture the ebb and flow of Google's index. That would be the most effective way for them to capture statistical data about the amount of pornographic content encountered. Granted, they'd have to do Google image searchs too and that would require people actually look at the search results since they couldn't just automate that process for obvious technical reasons. As far as I am concerned, though, this case is problematic because it is a government assertion that it can just force private businesses and individuals to hand over data and resources to assist the government in proving a point in court without compensation. Perhaps this is the logical conclusion to Kelo v. New London. Now the government is asserting that it can force us to work for its benefit. Didn't Hayek write a book about that?...

Just when you thought that there was pretty much only bad news about the Kelo v. New London decision, a company comes along and says that they won't aid and abet those who want to use the power of local governments to deny average citizens their hard-earned property rights. If I were looking for a new bank, I'd actually give strong consideration to opening a new bank account with BB&T and leaving some money in there just as a way to show my appreciation for taking such a principled stance on this incredibly evil Supreme Court ruling.

In an unusual move, BB&T Corp. said Wednesday it will not lend money for commercial projects on land seized by the government through an exercise of eminent domain.

Banks rarely restrict lending for philosophical reasons, but the Winston-Salem bank said it wanted to publicly oppose a widely reviled Supreme Court ruling in June that allowed such seizures.

"The idea that a citizen's property can be taken by the government solely for private use is extremely misguided, in fact it's just plain wrong," Chief Executive John Allison said in a statement.

You know, since they actually put up money to teach people that Capitalism is something other than the simplistic Marxist explanation of "the rich exploit the poor," I might have to consider opening a savings account with them at some point and leaving some money there as a rainy day fund. The fact that Wachovia, Bank of America and others won't at least come out and condemn bad eminent domain seizures of private property is troubling because it invariably means that they want part of the action.

Web 2.0, you've heard about it and have been told that it will do everything from curing cancer to finding a loving home for every orphan worldwide. It's the latest and greatest thing that the Interweb allegedly has to offer, and if you're a geek, chances are you may have some interest in it. Flashy, responsive AJAX-driven user interfaces give the illusion that web pages are actually standalone applications that have a deep relationship with the wholesome goodness of online services such as Google's massively power, and apparently massively logged, search services. It's revolutionary, it's on the horizon and it will be a fundamental paradigm shift.

Unless of course you actually remember the dot com bubble burst. Color me cynical, but take the arguments for AJAX. What is AJAX, you might ask? It's a technique, not a product, but you'd never know that from the way that many of the tragically-too-hip-to-know-what-the-hell-they-are-talking-about are proclaiming its ascendancy over the mundane, but ironically far more secure, "Web 1.0" model of website development. You see arguments about why AJAX is going to take over from J2EE and kill it using the wildly inappropriate to David and Goliath. The only problem is, J2EE actually often ends up being the backbone of AJAX applications. I guess it's hard for David to see how precarious his position is when he's riding on the shoulders of Goliath.

Dynamic, dynamic, dynamic. Web 2.0 is incredibly dynamic, or is it? In Java with Swing and .NET with Windows Forms, one can create a rich user interface that is incredibly easy to maintain, but that simply cannot be said of this "radically new Web 2.0" thingy. Try creating an office suite using the LAMP platform and the AJAX methodology. Unless you know what you're doing, you will spend most of your time reinventing the wheel, at least once if not half a dozen times. See, here's where the reality comes in and brings the hype mercilessly to its knees. XHTML is still practically paleolithic when it comes to defining user interfaces. If Web 2.0 were so revolutionary, it would be possible to create a sophisticated user interface using something equivalent to Microsoft's XAML, JavaScript and a little bit of server-side magic.

But you can't. Get over it. There are very few web applications even pretending to be mainstream that are so well-designed that they come off as real applications, rather than as super-special web pages that do nifty things. WordPress 2.0 is delightful, especially given how sophisticated its new post creation system is. I absolutely love it and think that I've finally settled down on the blogging platform for me. However, most AJAX applications do nothing that "Web 1.0" applications didn't. Yes, it is an important step forward to be able to make asynchronous requests to the web server in order to be able to do dynamic updates and things like that, but come on people... that is an evolutionary update. A revolutionary update would be Microsoft and Mozilla working together with the W3C to create a new markup language that lets you describe a desktop quality user interface, with all of the ease and sophistication of Swing or Windows Forms and utilizing the Model-View-Controller paradigm. The only problem is, this would make website development the domain of software developers, not web designers.

What we are seeing now is not Web 2.0, but rather Web 1.1. The Web is starting to go through some real growing pains, and incidents like the recent attacks on LiveJournal prove that the state of web development cannot be considered to have undergone a whole revision, which is tantamount to an overhaul of the entire process. For enterprise applications, things are shifting to a real "2.0" thanks to frameworks like Spring, Hibernate and Ruby On Rails, but those are improvements are on the back end which appeals more to Computer Science nerds that the flashy digerati. Perhaps the worst part of all, is that "Web 2.0" illustrates the danger of not requiring web application designers to be bonafide software developers. Degreed or otherwise, would you really trust your web application's security to someone who knows only PHP and JavaScript and is incapable of telling you why J2EE or ASP.NET makes much more sense for many applications than the lightweight languages used in the LAMP stack?

I'm really not trying to be an elitist here, but there is no point in my mind in trying to get away from the awful dichotomy that is Web 2.0. Either it's a presentation system, or it's an application framework. Let the professional software developers build the real web applications and leave the other work that doesn't involve real programming to the designers. The problem is that Web 2.0 has hitherto been primarily the domain of people who care more about the "wow factor," than the people who care about real software development. In the end, if it's going to be the wave of the future for application development, it's going to need to be more rigorously developed and scrutinized, but that's the dull part and why it'll not happen until enough of the shoot-from-the-hip defenders of the flashy new "paradigm" are forced to admit that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Don't get me wrong, I like AJAX and enjoyed working with it enough in college to make a point of teaching it to other students, using it in my projects and even giving a mini-lecture on how it works and how to use it in a web application. I also think that XHTML is a very good presentation framework, but the problem is that it is not really conducive to the kind of user interface development that one gets used to doing standalone software development. The more you learn about this topic, the more you will begin to lose respect for the tech columnists whose inability to get anything right in regard to software development issues is often stunning given the fact that their jobs center around reporting on the industry. So either ignore the hype or research it. Just don't be a fool and think that things have changed much since the last attempt to make web pages seem like quasi-desktop applications (dotcom era with Flash and Java Applets).

I'm sure that the average Chinese internet user is just thrilled at the knowledge that Google is actively complying with the stipulations put into place by their government on the grounds that some is better than none. Doubly so in light of Google getting into a legal hissy fit with the US Department of Justice over search logs:

Google said Tuesday it would launch versions of its search and news Web sites in China that censor material deemed objectionable to authorities there, reasoning that users getting limited access to content was better than none.

The new local Google site, expected to be launched on Wednesday at Google.cn, will include notes at the bottom of results pages that disclose when content has been removed, said Andrew McLaughlin, senior policy counsel for Google.

"Google.cn will comply with local Chinese laws and regulations," he said in a statement. "In deciding how best to approach the Chinese--or any--market, we must balance our commitments to satisfy the interest of users, expand access to information, and respond to local conditions."

Anyone else get sick of that "the law is the law" bullshit when companies use it to justify cooperating with repressive regimes? Yes, Google has an obligation to its stockholders to make the most money that it can, but surely there comes a point where what matters is right and wrong. The ugly part in all of this is that by continuing to trade so much with China, we are effectively saying that we agree with how they treat their people. It's a little hard to say that we support freedom abroad when our government turns a blind eye toward trade with countries that treat their ordinary people a little closer to cattle than real, free citizens.

Free trade has had no appreciable liberalizing effect on China's government. The country is still a repressive bastion of tyranny and human rights violations. In fact, their government has grown even more efficient at suppressing its opposition thanks to the advent of many modern technologies. It's far easier to build a sophisticated and thorough surveillance system for HTTP than the telephone system because the former is an order or magnitude or more easier to automate. Our continued trade relationship with China will not only not help the average Chinese become freer, but rather it will make their government more entrenched and put our people in greater risk of poverty and even war with a newly empowered China. Just because China is not a military superpower today, doesn't mean it won't have the ability to hold its own in a war against us at some point in the next five to ten years if their economy continues to grow and they continue to funnel significant amounts of their incoming capital into their military. So, I think it's only fitting that our foreign policy toward China should be inspired by the spirit of our War for Independence:

If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you and may posterity forget that ye were once our countrymen.

--Samuel Adams

Some things are worth more than wealth, liberty and morality are two of them. That's why I am willing to pay higher prices for goods made in countries other than China. If liberty is worth more to you than wealth, do yourself a favor and never shop at a Wal-Mart if you can because the sheer volume of goods in there that are made in the Communist Elite's Rapocracy of China is nauseating.

From CNN:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- More than half of students at four-year colleges -- and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges -- lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers, a study found.

Apparently figuring out a tip is hard for them to do as well. Granted, I'm not very good at calculating exact tips, but I don't have any problem calculating 20% of $30, for example. If you cannot look at a $30 and realize that 15% of that is $4.50 pretty quickly after getting the bill, you're... well... dumb. That's coming from someone who has spent the past six years dealing with one hell of a learning disability in math that was developed in no small part to the abysmal quality of the math teachers he had growing up. Understanding credit card offers is not exactly a hard thing to do, and if the average person genuinely cannot understand them, that's a horrible statement about the quality of education in America!

I'm willing to stick my neck out a little bit here and suggest that the average American is barely more educated when they have left most public schools than the average third worlder who has been educated in a quasi-European curriculum. If they cannot read and comprehend the average credit card offer, then what other conclusion can we possibly draw about their level of education? I'm no accountant, but the terms are usually pretty explicit.

Our country is now being split into two fundamental classes: the producer and consumer classes. We maintain sufficient rigor in the educational processes for the former that they are forced to acquire the skills necessary to continue to be productive, however the former are educated only to the extent that is necessary to make them able to assist the producer class. I don't like it, in fact it scares the hell out of me for the future of our country, but sadly, it is becoming the reality of America at a terrifying speed. The only trend that seems to be countering this is the rise of homeschooling, but given how detached most parents are from their kids' education, it's unlikely that this will really ever be a viable alternative for the masses so the only thing that may be able to save our educational system is a voucher system.

It's one thing to forget things about the technical parts of speech, it's quite another to forget entire chunks of one's native language or to never learn them altogether. Most people have no need to ever know Calculus, but to have little functional skill in basic algebra is, quite frankly, pathetic. To not be able to read editorials and fully grasp the arguments that they put forward is a very worrying sign for the future of our republic. If people cannot read and understand small editorials, there is no way that they can be trusted to participate in a democratic system as even a semi-rational voter. Rather, they would be nothing more than fodder for demagogues to use and abuse freely and without consequence. This study is a greater condemnation of the "state of our democracy" than any political action taken by any elected leader in the past fifty years in this country.

I have been following Google's recent quarrel with the Bush Administration and had been holding off on commenting it until I read this. Google's shares are now down 8.5% because of this fight between the ADD Bush Administration (are we fighting terrorists, porn or the Minute Men this week?) and Google over the Child Online Protection Act. This last ditch attempt by President Clinton to salvage one tenth of a percent of credibility on sexual morality issues is quite possibly one of the most useless pieces of legislation passed in recent years against pornography.

There is something undeniably fishy about the Bush Administration going after these records at Google, AOL, Yahoo and MSN because it would be very easy for them to pay a contractor to write a Perl script that sends tens of thousands of requests to each search engine for various terms, processes the result pages and stores statistical information about what it found in a database for the attorneys to use in court. I have seen commentary online that suggests that this information could not be used successfully in prosecutions against users who searched for illegal content given the legal status of the data handed over to the DoJ. However, in light of the Bush Administration's use of the NSA to spy outside of normal channels, who knows what their real motives are given that all the information they need to prove their case could be easily acquired and demonstrated in a court without spending any real money or hassling Google or others.

In the mean time we need to be asking a more important question and that is just why the hell are these search engines keeping track of all of this information? It would be one thing to build an initial profile and then track the user to make slight upgrades to it to flesh it out, based on new search interests. However, it is quite another thing for these companies to be truly logging everything that their users search for, especially in a way that may last for years. Anyone who has read up on Google's infrastructure knows that they have enough disk space available to them to log every search that their users perform for probably a decade or more as of right now. Even if they were going through a hundred terabytes a month, they'd probably have no problem keeping up with the volumes of information that the government might want to have access to.

For now, let's give Bush the benefit of the doubt that all he really wants to do is inconvenience these search companies by making them provide the data for his case at their expense. Seriously, that's probably all this particular case is about. What it should teach all of us is that search companies can and will track everything we do and they should be regarded like fire: useful when it serves you, dangerous when it works against you. In other words, be careful of what you search for out of curiosity because it may become part of a profile that is gathered on you that one day falls into the hands of business or government officials with the power to take actions that could affect your future. Even if Google wins its lawsuit, there is nothing stopping Google from changing course in the future and handing over information as readily as Yahoo, AOL or MSN.

Rumors of my blog's imminent collapse have been greatly exaggerated. I am back and I think for good this time. At any rate, these past three weeks have been very long as I make the transition from college to The Real World, not to be confused with The Real World. Today I completed my SCJA exam and now am a Sun Certified Java Associate and then got to spend a great night out with my wonderful girlfriend. Now that things are winding down, I might actually have some time to post again.

You.
Have.
Been.
Warned.
Bwahahah
*cough**cough**cough*

Apparently a lot of social conservatives in this country have been living under a rock for quite some time because I swear that they are either incredibly naive or dumb as a box of bricks. Perhaps that dichotomy is unrealistic and the naivete is what fuels their abject stupidity, but either way, it is providing a serious roadblock to probably the only solution of the past twenty years that could scale back the pornography industry's presence:

The proposal has had its share of critics. Some of them claim that a .xxx domain would provide legitimacy to the pornography industry. Supporters claim that a .xxx domain would make it easier for people to filter out content they do not want.

Hmmm, let's see here. Suppose all of the first and second world countries get together and ratify a treaty that would require pornography web sites to use .xxx or go to prison. That would be enforcable in the United States because it is nothing more than the equivalent of saying that cable companies cannot show pornography during the day when children might be home from school and can't be reasonably assumed to be sleeping. But no, it might "give legitimacy" to the pornography industry, as if the Republicans haven't already given it some legitimacy!

All or nothing. It's no wonder why social conservatism is basically dead as a political movement in this country. No one gets everything they want up front. The creation of a .xxx domain would be tremendously valuable to blocking online pornography in a way that other countries might participate in. But again, these people probably haven't figured out that the Internet is global, not American and thus our ability to control porn extends no farther than the willingness of other countries to get involved with us on this.

Some people just can't seem to wrap their brains around the idea that you can be a Christian fundamentalist and also be a libertarian:

Abortion. Gay Marriage. 10 Commandments. Porn. Science. But probably, mostly abortion.

It is a standard political device for fundamentalist Christians to cloak their true theocratic political agendas using the label of libertarian.? Vox Popoli comes to mind here. Fundamentalists know that theocracy isn't exactly an attractive idea when it is presented at face value; it must have a value-add? and a costume to wear. This was the elephant in the living room that was pointed out by Judge Jones in the Intelligent Design? ruling this week. The Christian fundamentalists were lying about their true beliefs and motives. They lied to the citizens and they lied to the Judge.

There is nothing libertarian about allowing minors access to pornography or abortion. True libertarians do not support the regulation of marriage by the state because they see marriage as a strictly religious institution. If a religious group wants to marry homosexuals, that's fine as long as the government is not setting the standard for marriage between consenting adults and emancipated minors. Most libertarians, regardless of religion, see nothing wrong with displaying the 10 commandments in a public place, unless they are being used to override civil law. Considering the fact that judge Roy Moore never used them as a basis for attacking civil liberties, for example he never attacked the right to practice any religion that one wants, I think it's safe to say that the two are not incompatible from a libertarian perspective.

I can speak only for many reformed protestants, the ones who make up the biggest block of real fundamentalists, when I say that most of us just want to be left alone by the government. We don't want our institutions regulated by the state. Reformed theology also points us in a direction which is fundamentally libertarian due to the doctrines of grace and predestination, two doctrines which ultimately obliterate all value to forcing Christian outlooks and behavior on non-Christians. Believe it or not, but there has always been a very libertarian streak among reformed protestant denominations. If our beliefs are so inherently destructive to liberty, then why is it that Presbyterians, a mainstay of reformed protestant Christianity, were so prevalent among the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the troops that fought the War for Independence? In fact, that war was originally called the "Presbyterian Revolt" by the British.

Since Arminianism is so prevalent among fundamentalists, I can understand why Christploitation has a hard time understanding that there is actually a strong libertarian vein among many fundamentalists. It ultimately boils down to the branch of Protestant Christianity that a believer belongs to. If they belong to a reformed denomination, they will tend to be "state-skeptical" to outright libertarian. If they are a typical Southern Baptist, they will reject the doctrine of predestination and thus believe that legislating their worldview is justified and beneficial for the unbeliever.

Believe me, they often piss us off too because their approach ultimately forces the church to become subordinate to the state and make compromises with society on doctrinal issues. I don't want marriage between consenting adults to be regulated by the government, and I have no problem with a hyper-liberal church allowing homosexuals to get married. Many of us don't even support public education period so for many of us, the Dover issue is a moot point since we don't support the public teaching of evolution or intelligent design.

To summarize the way many of us "libertarian fundamentalists" see these issues for the average non-believer, we see the church when left to run its affairs in isolation according to God's laws as being on the spiritual high ground that God grants us through His Word. The bigger the government, the more the church gets sucked into things, especially on social issues, and eventually we are forced to compromise our beliefs and faith because we allowed things like the sacrament of marriage to be put up for auction via the democratic process. We have lost nearly all control over the sacrament of marriage because we legislated an artificial substitute into existence in the 19^th century and now we are paying for that. We opened His sacrament up to the world and the world has trampled it. This is why many of us have adopted a very libertarian view of politics.

So, please explain to me how it is dishonest for us to seek a libertarian political order in order to have more freedom to have our religion practiced unmolested by bureaucrats and non-believers. And don't cite Dover as a good example of how we are secretly theocrats who want to make America into a Christianized Afghanistan because a fundamentalist who genuinely subscribes to libertarian political beliefs, and there are many who do, would not support public education in general. It sounds to me like many of our critics just cannot grok the difference between a Christian conservative and a conservative Christian. Remember, as Hayek pointed out, an adjective modifies the noun that follows it and thus there is a major difference between those two forms of conservatism. One little hint: one is a sprinkling of Christianity on a politically right-wing worldview and the other is a strong desire to adhere to Christian doctrines.

It would seem that nuclear terrorism may be becoming a more realistic threat to America these days, but there is good reason to hope for the future, both in secular and in religious terms. For those of us with faith in Christ, there shall be no harm that can be eternally inflicted upon us by our enemies once we are in the hands of our Lord and Savior. We know that there is nothing that they can do to us because we shall be in the hands of the Living God and He has promised us that none who He has called will slip through His hands. For those who lack that faith, we can look to Japan and realize that a country can recover spectacularly from near total devastation of its infrastructure and two nuclear assaults on it.

I suspect that if there ever is such an attack on America that it will inflict great turmoil upon our people, which is to be expected for obvious reasons. However, I have faith that we would recover and become a better, wiser nation rather than be destroyed by the attack. America is not New York City, Washington D.C., Los Angelas or any of the other big cities, rather it is thousands of villages, towns and cities. I think that such an attack would force us to reevaluate our immigration policies, take our security more seriously and care more about getting results sparing the feelings of those who fit the profiles of those that have attacked us in the past. We would have to scrutinize our politicians' foreign friendships as thoroughly as we scrutinize those of the people we screen for security clearances, but such an attack would fail to destroy us because we are too large of a country for such pissants to be able to destroy all at once. The only way that we can be truly destroyed is if we allow ourselves to go quietly into the night.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all I say use this night to reflect on what can and will be, rather than the evil that constantly surrounds us. One way or another, there is a bright future awaiting us.

You know those people who insist that unions are good for workers, and thus are in turn good for the economy? Well I think this calls bullshit big time on their inane babbling:

In a city that lost an estimated $1 billion during the strike, any kind of quiet--especially during the pre-Christmas week that typically provides up to 20 percent of many retailers' annual revenues--is not a good thing.

Here you have a single strike that lasted a few days or so and it caused an incredible amount of loss to the economy. One billion dollars is a lot of lost business, no matter how you look at it. Just imagine if this strike had been extended for another few days into New Years. The amount of damage that would have been done to retailing could quite easily have been nearly catastrophic for sections of New York City, but I'm sure that the union apologists will find some excuse for why small shop owners should be punished because of the greed of these transportation workers.