February 2006 Archives

Lest there be any doubt as to why I have the utmost contempt for the left and its thought process, I present to you, fair reader, a good example of why I so vehemently despise the American left and all it stands for:

The justice makes the U.S. Constitution sound like a real estate lease or a last will and testament. Even some of those may be subject to different interpretations over the years.

Isn't it the genius of the Constitution that its principles are broad enough to meet the demands of changing times? Isn't that the great virtue of any basic law -- that it is broad enough to grow in response to different conditions? Isn't that why a country's constitution is sometimes called its organic law?

That would be the genius behind the United States Constitution. The wording is clear, crisp and relevant. There are no stipulations, limitations, exceptions, simply put, the document is utterly devoid of legalese. The average person, regardless of whether they agree with it or not, can actually read and understand it. The only people who find it to be so incredibly difficult to grok are those that really, really want to go against the Constitution without appearing to have absolutely no respect for it. Such people would include Paul Greenberg and a random sampling of the people who work in the Bush Administration.

Let's take the first amendment for example:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The only exception to the freedom of speech part is treasonous activity, and that's only because treason is included in the Constitution. The rest of the first amendment can be read as though it were its own context. Congress shall not do a damn thing to regulate any of the following except where they apply to people under the employment of the federal government. Now how hard is that text to understand? The founders did not leave a large number of exceptions, clauses, etc. They just simply wrote "the Congress shall not do X." A child could grasp the basic meaning of that, which says a lot about the people who find cryptic meanings in the Bill of Rights. They are in fact either incredibly subversive and dishonest or abysmally stupid. Take your pick, but anyone who gets fuzzy-headed over the meaning of the Bill of Rights is either not a good person or is incredibly mentally challenged because the text is so straight to the point without any equivocation.

As with a living organism, if law does not adapt, it dies. It becomes a dead letter -- instead of a living thing. The logical opposite of a living Constitution is a dead one.

The very reason that the Constitution has become a dead letter is because of the fact that idiots like Paul Greenberg cannot bring themselves to restrict the government to it. They have no desire to limit the federal government to the powers it gets from the U.S. Constitution. The Bill of Rights should be relevant today, but ideologues like Greenberg won't allow it to be because it interferes with their post-modernist agenda. The English language has not fundamentally changed in the past two hundred years; texts written in 1776 are quite easy for any modestly educated person to read.

It is invariably a sign that someone is dishonest when they twist such simple words around and say that just because they were written in one period, does not make them appropriate today. This is why socialism is still a powerful force around the world. It has been tried to the best of human ability, but the end result has always been carnage, but every generation insists that it is not inhibited by the primal defects that made the previous attempt fail. There is nothing intellectual about this approach to the Constitution, rather it is hubris that is thinly veiled in a layer of appeals to emotion and temporary fancy.

If the Constitution does not mean the same thing today that it meant two hundred years ago, then there is no point in even bothering with it anymore. Freedom of speech at the federal level may not have been as far in scope in the late eighteenth century, but it certainly was interpretted far more seriously than today. We have judges who cannot for the life of them imagine how placing spending limits on political advertising, or outright silencing all political speech for a period before an election, is a restriction on freedom of speech. What we have here is evolution, but devolution, from a very simple, but elegant design to a system so complex, ugly and dysfunctional that any engineer would wish violence upon the committee whose ad hoc idiocy spawned it.

"Idiot" indeed is the appropriate appellation for the people who think of the Constitution as a living document. Of what value is the first amendment if "Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of speech" changes in meaning from generation to generation? None, and same for all of the amendments. Those who believe it is a living document cannot be bothered to govern even by the principles of the tenth amendment which delegates the vast majority of powers to the states and the people. They rape the meaning of the interstate commerce clause until it is so stretched apart that it includes any action which has even the vaguest impact on interstate commerce. By saying it means whatever a new generation "needs," what they're really saying is that the words themselves have no inherent meaning, which in turn means that there are no inherent rights secured, nor is there any inherent limit on the power of the state.

The battle over the Constitution and its meaning is not about the Constitution itself, but about truth versus post-modern nihilism. There are few, if any, words in the Constitution that can be considered genuinely archaic. A few of them may be funny, but none of them are what one would call archaic, which is to say from a vernacular used before the time of modern English. Those who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the simple words and phrases of the U.S. Constitution are not decent people worthy of civility and respect for their ideas. Rather, they are hell-bent on tearing down the things that made this country great, including its culture of freedom. So, it's for that reason that I applaud Scalia for having the guts to openly call them idiots. Their actions and beliefs deserve words that are a lot worse than that.

I have changed my mind about the Dubai Port deal. Why? It's a very good reason, actually. I was very suspicious of them until I read in a commentary about them that they managed a port in Hong Kong and, as I recall, three in China. If the Communists in China trust DP to manage their ports, then maybe they aren't that much of a security risk. I must be high as a kite, you're thinking. No, actually, I think that if one of the most paranoid regimes on Earth sees no harm in letting them operate on their ports, there probably is little cause for concern. We do still need to scrutinize the UAE government and DP, but if everything checks out, I think it's worth allowing to go through.

The cold, hard truth is that China takes its security deadly seriously compared to how we treat our security. If their screenings show no major cause for concern, then I think this is probably a pretty safe way to go.

The mainstream media is feverishly predicting the Demise Of Blogging As We Know It^tm:

You're forgiven if you cling to the conventional wisdom that blogging, like half-pipe snowboarding, enjoys an unrelievedly rich future. Forgiven, but maybe behind the curve. A new report from Gallup pollsters, "Blog Readership Bogged Down," cautions that "the growth in the number of U.S. blog readers was somewhere between nil and negative in the past year."

If blogging is falling apart today, which I don't believe, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt, there's a very simple and logical explanation for that that should immediately jump out. It's hard to write anything that others want to read. The majority of blogs are about people, not ideas, new things, art, etc. They have no redeeming value of any kind to anyone except the owner and the people in their lives. I'm not one to judge the value of such blogs, but realistically these have no future and if they dominate the blogosphere, then clearly that is going to skew the statistics dramatically.

As much as both sides hate to admit it, both the bloggers and the mainstream media need one another. Despite their best efforts to deny it, no one save for ideological leftists genuinely believes that the mainstream media is objective, or often even highly professional these days. The mainstream media is increasingly struggling with problems such as reporters who just blatantly make up "facts," make up quotes and then attribute them to those they interview and even outright disregard the input from technical advisors whose input would eliminate juicy, ad revenue-generating controversy from a particular subject.

Bloggers are putting increasing pressure on the media to differentiate itself through professionalism, indepth coverage and, well, everything that it was supposed to be doing all along. That doesn't mean that most journalists are actually doing this as of right now, but the blogosphere puts valuable pressure there where it needs to be, and is the only thing that mightcause a revitalization of the mainstream media. I'm not counting on it, but that doesn't mean that the media doesn't desperately need the raking-over-the-coals it gets from bloggers. Bloggers, in turn, get a significant amount of the information that we comment on through the mainstream media. Without the mainstream media, the blogosphere would be rather... bland and asinine for the most part.

The mainstream media should not welcome the death of the blogosphere anymore than Microsoft should welcome the death of Apple. It takes the underdog gnawing on the ankles of the big dog with a ferocious temper sometimes to get the big dog to stay young and relevent. Granted, as I said, in the case of the mainstream media it might be so apathetic and lethargic at this point that the underdog will nip the femoral artery and put the old bitch out of her misery once and for all.

For more check out this post by Ed Driscoll.

The pro-market forces in the network neutrality debate seem to be missing a single, very important point, on one of the key aspects of network neutrality. Why should Google, Amazon, my blog and others pay for bandwidth at every network that our traffic flows through? More importantly, why should the "market decide" who wins on something this fundamental? Take this quote from CEO of Deutsch Telekom:

Ricke said it would only be fair if content providers like search engine Yahoo--which offers e-mail, online games and music videos--would pay for access to networks that would allow them to deliver their products at higher speeds.

"It is not fair that only the customer, via the monthly subscription fee (for using the Internet), pays for this great new world," Ricke said.

Just where is the fairness aspect coming in? Let's say that Google has its bandwidth provided by some fictional corporation known as XYZ Telecom (I don't know who leases them their lines right now). Google pays, probably conservatively, in at least the tens of millions every month for its bandwidth. More realistically, probably well over one hundred million dollars. Google also happens to be just one of many, many companies that line the pockets of their bandwidth providers quite handsomely. Only a patently dishonest individual could claim that Google is screwing anyone over because they pay for their lines like every other telecom customer and even have invested incredible sums of money into buying their own dark fibre. Yet, somehow Google is screwing them over because the profit margin isn't quite what the telecoms would like it to be.

An even better example is Apple. The telecoms' CEOs love to make soundbites about the cost of bandwidth to provide streaming video and reliable audio online. Apple's iTunes Music Store probably goes through almost as much, if not more, bandwidth every month than Google does, and that will be even more the case when they start making full movie sales part of their service. They will, in turn, negotiate new deals with their bandwidth providers to greatly increase the amount of bandwidth available at their data centers which process the vast volumes of transactions that go through the iTunes Music Store. Who is going to make big wads of cash off of this increased demand for video products from the iTunes Music Store? Not just Apple, but their service provider(s)! After all, I don't see bandwidth giveaways for corporate America nor do I see armed mercenaries under Apple's employment coercing the telecoms into providing them free or far below fair market priced bandwidth.

So why do I think it should be illegal for Verizon or SBC to limit Google's service through XYZ corp? Practicality and principle. There reaches a point of absurdity with principle that principle must yield to reality, and this is definitely one of them. The telecoms' customers pay for access to each other, and they pay for it on the basis that they don't get severely limited. Only in the perverted minds of the telecoms is it justified to sell a 1.5Mpbs DSL service, and then throttle it down to effectively around 300kbsp because the service that the user is requesting hasn't paid for "premium service." The fact that Verizon and others are not getting any kickbacks from the enormous sums of money that Google pays XYZ Corp, and the fact that they didn't properly price their DSL/Cable plans, does not justify them changing the nature of the service midstream. It's not Google's problem, it's not my problem, it's Verizon's for being unwilling to allow full internet service, even though that's what they're claiming to sell.

The problem here as I see it, is not a matter of whether Verizon should be allowed to devote 80% of its network to providing high-quality IPTV services, but how they should be able to limit their customers' access. If they are selling 1.5Mbps of downstream bandwidth to their customers, they should have a legal obligation to do everything they can to provide that service at any given time. If that means sacrificing part of that 80% they want to reserve, then tough luck. You sell a service, you have an obligation to provide it. That means that they have no right to throttle access to the iTunes Music Store down to 300kbps because Apple did not pay up. If they artificially limit my 1.5Mpbs connection, then they have actually refused to provide the service that I am paying for.

Let's not get distracted by focusing on the issue of whether they should be able to provide premium delivery to services that pay them. It'd actually be a good thing for Verizon, SBC, Deutsch Telekom and others to charge a nominal monthly fee to provide an even higher quality of service for certain technologies such as IPTV. The issue is that this not what they're talking about. They're talking about making companies like Google pay again for bandwidth they've already bought and making their broadband customers pay for services that they have no intention of providing. After all, why else would they be raising a stink about fairness here? Routing others traffic is part of cost of doing business when you're in the networking business. Google's ISP should respond by throttling all traffic from Verzion's network down to nothing. Or, even better, Google should buy the infrastructure in between major points in the global network and shutdown Verizon, SBC and others entirely until they agree to end this nonsense once and for all.

There's one thing that I have never liked about horror movies. It's one of those few things that makes me almost attavistic with a desire to reach through the screen and slap the hell out of the actor or (usually) actress that is committing this cardinal sin of congenital idiocy. It's the old "ineptly try to insert the car keys in while the monster is coming" schtick. The individual in question tries frantically to get the keys into the ignition so that they can get the hell out of there before the Super Bad Thingy gets them, but all they can do is poke at the ignition with the keys as though they were a chimpanzee with a stick poking a dead animal. I can't stand it, and almost immediately find myself rooting for whatever is trying to get them.

Yeah, yeah it's supposed to be panic, but that's just the thing. You have two choices. Either you can act like a deer caught in the headlights of a redneck's huntin truck or you can focus on the one pathetically easy task that you must perform perfectly in order to get the hell away from the Super Bad Thing. I am just sick of this rehashed panicy character thing. It's really old. The next time it happens, I really want to see the Super Bad Thingy tear the character limb from limb because they couldn't swallow their panic just long enough to stick the key in the ignition. I just can't root for a character that is that much of a weakling anymore than I can root for a deer that just stands there as a hunter is about to shoot it.

How you can tell that America is not a theocracy:

He was interrupted by Steve Drain, who bellowed that God hates gays and their enablers and "so, therefore, God hates the U.S. military."

According to an account reported by the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune, about a half-hour before the service, Deirdre Ostlund, Kemple's mother, approached the six Kansans and told them in a cold fury: "I'm Andrew's mother and I want you to know you are truly hateful people."

As Ostlund turned away to enter Zion Lutheran Church, Shirley Phelps-Roper taunted her: "Adulterer! You can't admit you sent your own child to hell! If she does not heed this warning, she will look up from hell with him."

If America were a theocracy, the Phelps would have been tried for blasphemy and would either have been excommunicated (which is a spiritually dangerous, almost deadly punishment in its own right) or put to death. Why? Because scripture is clear that God does not hate homosexuals, but rather hates their sin. The sin of homosexuality is a severe one because all sexual sins are against one's own body as well as God, but that does not in any way make them sufficiently egregious as to make them unforgivable. There is, however, one sin that the Bible says quite clearly is unforgivable, and that is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

Phelps is not a Christian anymore than Osama Bin Laden is. His approach speaks directly against basic Christian teachings and regardless of the label that he wears, it is not fitting for him to be referred to as a Christian. He is a sick and evil little man who is doing his very best to stifle any genuine call for repentance for those he encounters and is an enemy of God, not a devoted follower of God.

So, what would he be doing here if he were a Christian preacher instead of a lying charlatan? He'd be praying on behalf of the fallen and would be urging others to strengthen their relationship with God so as to earn God's favor for our country. Instead, he turns people off to the Gospel message. Some preacher. I'm sure Satan will give him a merit badge or two someday.

Rather than change the law, we will just take the easy way out:

If a rape victim becomes pregnant and bears a child, the rapist could have the same parental rights as the mother, said Krista Heeren-Graber, executive director of the South Dakota Network Against Family Violence and Sexual Assault.

"The idea the rapist could be in the child's life ... makes the woman very, very fearful. Sometimes they need to have choice," Heeren-Graber said."

Well I guess since we can't be mean to those big bad rapists we have to show tough love to the children by killing them. Afterall, we can't simply pass a law saying that if you rape a woman, you irrevocably lose all parental rights over that child. There is one thing that should be added to this, though, and that's that instead of demanding child support, the state will provide either a tax deduction equal to the child support or a small benefit if the rapist is convicted. The reason I think that this is necessary is that rapists, being bad people, might take violent and deadly offense to having to pay child support. That is the best way to support the child, while not dangers to the mother and child.

There's a major logical inconsistency here. If you oppose abortion in general, there is no good reason to support it in the case of rape or incest. There is no moral difference between a child created under these circumstances and a child that was created by two consenting, non-related adults.

One of the lessons that I got out of my readings of 1984 (I love it and have read it a few times) is that in the face of tyranny, people will sometimes choose to rebel in ways that offend the sensibilities of more conservative individuals. Yes, I know the book is fiction, but it is in morals and spirit a very realistic critique of life under Stalin in the Soviet Union. Some people choose to rebel through sexuality, crass language and conduct and violent behavior in the face of cold, inhuman bureaucracy. And why shouldn't they choose this path, since it is one of the last ways for them to exert their humanity and individuality in the face of a militantly conformist system that impinges on increasing numbers of areas where it has no business getting involved?

Life in America is increasingly becoming rigidly regimented by the forces of political correctness. A significant amount of the fundamental freedoms that were enjoyed at the turn of the twentieth century flat out do not exist today, and in the past several years, the attacks on individual freedom and choice have grown steadily. If people identify with incendiary writers with a flamboyant shock jock tendency, writers and public figures like Ann Coulter, it is a sign of the culture itself being cut off. Today, the only people who get their voices heard in the face of political correctness are those who care so little about the consequences or the feelings of others that they will not be silenced by the bureaucratic fascists in academia, government and corporate America.

Civil debate on many issues is dead. There is an official orthodoxy and the only ones who survive it are those are willing to go for the throat in defense of their ideas. When Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost attacked Ann Coulter for her willingness to be radical, over-the-top and flamingly-outspoken, it didn't surprise me. The sad reality is that while George Will is a better intellectual than Coulter, he and most "civil" conservatives don't take the battle to the left. We libertarians rarely tend to be the types that back down in the face of the typical left-wing, politically correct attakcs.

In my opinion, it's actually good to have a conservative who is willing to come out and mutilate the sacred cows of the left like a drive by UFO raid. Many less-intellectual people associate an unease with defending one's views with a weakness in the ideas themselves. Since conservatism is the leading force on the right at the present time, if a general right wing push in America is to be achieved, it is necessary for the conservative ranks to have members who are willing to fight fire with fire. Everytime a conservative backs down and says with a mealy-mouthed tone of voice, "I'm not (insert prejudice here" and genuflects before the alter of tolerance and accepted liberal values, the right (and this includes libertarians to a fairly significant degree) is discredited in a small way.

You don't have to like writers like Ann Coulter to realize that they serve a good purpose. She is a pitbull for the right and is not willing to sit around while the robbers are walking out with the loot. Most conservatives of all stripes, however, while good people, are unable to muster the intestinal fortitude to get down in the trenches and fight their opponents. Regardless of whether many more "civil" conservatives like it, you can only afford to use morally superior methods to win a war when you have the ability to safely do so. Unfortunately, conservatism is by and large about as prepared to fight this war as the British Army of 1776 would be to suppress the IED-equipped insurgents of modern Iraq. Many conservatives do not realize that the culture has not swung in a conservative direction post-9/11. It's imperative that they understand the difference between a fear of foreign attackers, triggering a vote for a stronger national security program, and a general push toward a limited government, right-wing system. In many areas, such as academia, we have gained almost nothing and are still losing ground.

When student newspapers are being censored for allowing students to see what a violent controversy is about, it should be obvious that civil discourse is being attacked. Those who insist on totally civil rules of debate, in the face of what is a blatant attempt to stifle all intellectual opposition to a hard left, post-modernist institutional ideology are not being morally superior. They are just lambs walking right into a slaughter. You can abide by certain limits to establish a moral superiority, but refusing to using incendiary rhetoric, some of which might be very offensive, is self-limiting. It's regrettable that cool heads debating rationally is nowhere near the norm today, but that is the way things work.

Lee Harris has one of the best commentaries I have seen so far on the "portgate" issue. Check it out at TCSDaily.com. In my opinion, he's consistently the best contributor that TCSDaily has, and for him to come out so strongly on this issue, in this way, is a good sign for me that this is not just about paranoia versus pragmatism.

Nothing to do with terrorism, they said. The UAE are our buddies, they said. So why is it that they were known to go galavanting around Afghanistan in areas where Bin Laden operated openly?

The report states U.S. intelligence believed that bin Laden was visiting an area in the Afghan desert in February 1999 near a hunting camp used by UAE officials, and that the U.S. military planned a missile strike.

Intelligence from local tribal sources indicated ``bin Laden regularly went from his adjacent camp to the larger camp where he visited the Emiratis,'' the report said.

Notice how things are starting to change among bloggers and the press, since we're being "assured that there is no security threat?" There is still evidence to show that the UAE government is not as anti-terrorism as it is made out to be. It's just one of the many reasons why I have said that Bush supporters are like Clinton supporters. A few words of good news comes out and all of a sudden, it was just a "communication problem."

I think this boils down to a very severe problem with the way that many Americans think about war and foreign affairs. A lot of Americans, probably most, think in terms of dichotomies. If you are anti-Bush, you must be at least sympathetic to Kerry. If you help us in part of our "War on Terror," you must be anti-terrorism. It's a fundamental weakness that is perhaps the greatest one that many Americans have in terms of understanding issues like this.

Just because the UAE is helping us fight our enemies, does not make them our ally. Islamists in governments in the Middle East have spent decades funneling cash and weapons to terrorist elements around the world in order to build up their movement. They do not appear to be Islamist on the surface to the casual onlooker, but their goals are the same. The House of Saud always seemed like a quaint, albeit corrupt, government to many Americans, but in fact they have spent quite some time funding the expansion of Wahabi Islam around the world to create an ideological base for their religious expansion by the sword. The Saudis let us work closely with them and seemed to be our ally in the Cold War and the Gulf War, even as they were (and still are) funding the rise of Wahabi Islam and its corresponding bloodshed around the world.

One can easily imagine scenarios where Islamists gain employment with DWI and end up bringing weapons into the United States through this deal. All it would take would be for someone with the corporate headquarters with a suitcase nuke to make an official visit to a port site, drive off for lunch into the middle of New York City and that's all she wrote. The very reason why we have to worry about this company is that if there are Islamists who have access to its shipping channels and corporate transportation, they will not be the raving lunatics of Gaza and the West Bank, but rather cold, dedicated and professional in the delivery of their attack.

It seemed ironic to me earlier today when Joe Carter dismissed this story as pure paranoia, considering his defense of the "wisdom of repugnance." It is repugnant to me, and many others, that we are allowing a foreign corporation with very intimate ties to its government, to own the port operations at some of our most important ports. Yes, I know about the Chinese COSCO corporation, and I don't support that either. The one does not justify the other.

I don't think that there is some organized conspiracy among right wing bloggers here, but it takes me aback that so many of them dismiss outright the legitimate criticisms of this deal. My question to the people defending this transaction comes down to this: what if you're wrong and they deliver a nuclear bomb into NYC? If we keep them from taking over, we can at least say that we tried. And enough of the sophistic comments about fear of this corporation's roots in an Islamic country. Considering the undeniable fact that Islamic terrorism is the most pervasive and widespread terrorism in the history of mankind, and arguably would be the most genocidal if suitably equipped, I have no sympathy for Islamic countries. It's not up to us to give them them the benefit of the doubt that Islam is a religion of peace and that they are dominated by a peaceful majority that encompasses almost the entire society. The Danish cartoon fiasco proves quite clearly that we have every right to be skeptical because the jihad is not some fantasy shared by a tiny minority.

The whole port fiasco has been grating on me all day to one extent or another, and it is getting to be rather disturbing to see the number of people on the right who so quickly dismiss the security implications of this. Once again, a lot of people seem to be suffering from a severe lack of imagination when it comes to the myriad number of ways that our enemies could strike us. Take this from Instapundit, for example:

As I noted earlier, we have a perfect storm brought about by the loss of confidence in the Administration's backbone after their inadequate Cartoon Wars response, continuing fears of terrorism (at least now the Democrats won't be able to say that it's a case of Bush fanning the flames of fear) and lousy White House PR management. As Rich Galen says: "This port deal is not a national security issue. It is an issue of this administration having a continuing problem with understanding how these things will play in the public's mind and not taking steps to set the stage so these things don't come as a shock and are presented in their worst possible light."

As I say, I don't think there's any real security issue here, but I think the Bush Administration needs to launch a full-bore effort to explain what's actually going on, something that they still haven't really mounted.

Glenn makes a good point in noting that the border security issue is one that has blown the Bush Administration's credentials sky high for many of us on the right. The problem with the Bush Administration in terms of the trust factor alone is that they have run our national security policy with a schitzophrenic back and forth between "we're at war" and business-as-usual tactics. We have wartime surveillance and detention powers, but a disturbing lack of interest in (and outright vocal opposition to) border security. The ports, especially the major ones, form a strategic part of our border security. It still seems like a no brainer to me and many others that letting a corporation based out of a country that has a terrorism problem, especially of the Islamic kind, is dangerous for our security.

There are a number of ways in which terrorists could exploit the DWI ownership of these port operations. Just having them in the work force alone would pose a security risk. A lone terrorist could get a job with them, come over on official business with a suitcase nuke and take out a chunk of New York City. You could have terrorist infiltration into the management of the company at positions that are high enough to be effective, but low enough to keep outside of the government's scrutiny. Then there is the possibility that they might just let a few weapons go through unchecked. The possibilities exist, and even if improbable, so is the successful hijacking of a few airplanes with box cutters and then using those same airplanes as missiles against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

I have to say that you know something is fishy when Michelle Malkin goes pitbull on Bush over one of his administration's actions. Supposedly, the whole background check of the business and transaction took between twenty and twenty five days. That's nowhere near long enough to do a thorough background check of the company. If the CIA had done a background check for six months to a year from top to bottom, I might have no problem with this, but this is too rushed for comfort. There is definitely at a minimum a disturbing lack of concern among the Bush Administration for the security implications here.

James Joyner of Outside the Beltway seems to echo the typical sentiment here for many of the Bush Administration's supporters:

My only point in any of this is that people like Rep. Sue Myrick seem to think that we have somehow sold our ports or even security control of our ports to the Arabs. That's not the case. Whether the government owned Dubai company in question can be trusted to carry out the functions previously assigned to a private U.K. firm is not something about which I have any particular insight. I merely note that the fact that there are Arabs involved is not does not constitute a prima facie case that we should deny the contract.

Now, James, would you feel the same way about a corporation owned and run by the Chinese government? This Middle Eastern company is said to be owned by their government, and it's a government in a country that is in a region which is known as a popular hotbed of terrorism against American interests. How would you feel if it were a front corporation for the People's Liberation Army instead of the UAE government?

Oh and this from Right-Thinking from the Left Coast is a perfect example of why we cannot trust the UAE. No national security issue, my ass!

But if he aspires to live in a world of reciprocity, then it makes no sense to limit the possibilities of the exchange to code, excluding money, hardware, or services. Because people value different things, money and markets are the way in which societies achieve reciprocity. The ranters claims of the moral superiority of a gift economy or a barter society are puzzling.

It's a geek thing, and something that DeLong will probably not be able to understand given the difference in perspectives at play here. People like Torvalds, and I include myself and many of my friends in this category, do software development as much for fun as any other motivation. This is why the relationship between open source software and corporate America is so wierd. The software is written because someone decided that they didn't like Product $X and tried to do a better job themselves. Other people jump in and contribute code, art, documentation, etc.

DeLong's definition of reciprocity is different than Torvalds. The latter is more specific than the former. Money does not make a kernel work better, and since Torvald has been hired for a while to work on the kernel by various companies, it makes little sense for him to care about money if he's happy with his job. Torvalds did not start developing his kernel as a business, but as a hobby. If he decides that code is more useful to him, then that's his business. It would seem that IBM, Compaq, Apple, Intel and others that have at some point worked on Linux agree with him that code is a more valuable contribution since he won't license them the right to fork off derivative products from what kernel code he owns.

There is nothing stopping a business from dividing up a pie of a few million dollars between the kernel team's full time members in exchange for the value that they have gotten from it. What DeLong seems to want is the rights to the code in exchange for money, which means ultimately the right to fork the code. Torvalds is not giving that up and I don't blame him.

There is dishonesty afoot in the fair lands of ABC News. Some n'eredoweller has seen fit to blatantly and unabashedly lie about the accuracy of a story in order to whip up anti-video game hysteria. Good heavens, this couldn't be perpetrated by the intrepid truth-seekers from the fourth estate have been caught with their pants down in a shamless effort to create news where none existed! Hark! Doth mine ears hear the sounds of yon barristers from Nintendo on approach?

Hah! All I can say is that this story has made my day! It's about time that someone finally caught the mainstream media in an outright slander/libel case against video game makers and gamers. For years they have been selling their news about how video games are going to destroy the youth of America, and finally they have been exposed. It used to be that video games were going to cause a wave of violence (some still try to sell that one), and now it's apparently a playground for pedophiles.

Couldn't have happened to a better company. Stuff like this proves why bloggers are getting credit where they may not even deserve it. With this much unprofessionalism in the most important media outlets, who can you trust these days? Parents, remember this incident the next time the media shouts "oh no! Video games will make demons out of your children!"

OK, here is the VMWare Player image of HaikuOS that was built on Feburary 19^th by Sikosis. To use it, download and extract the zip file, install the VMWare Player download and double click on the file HaikuOS.vmx to load the virtual machine inside of the VMWare Player.

I just got done testing out a disk image of HaikuOS that was built yesterday morning. In case anyone needs a link to where I got it, I downloaded the disk image here. Ok, so a very fair question that I'm sure some of the semi-/non-geeks in the audience will have, why should y'all care? The answer is really simple. HaikuOS is an open source reimplementation of BeOS, an operating system that was far, far ahead of the competition. It was to MacOS what MacOS was to Windows if that gives you any indication of how amazing cool it was. Imagine an operating system that was futuristic, light-weight, had a great GUI, could run as fast on a PII 450 as Windows does on a P4 and that had the "it just works" goodness of MacOS.

And it ran on PC hardware. I kid you not, fair readers, as I have personally witnessed all of the above from my times using BeOS R4, R4.5 and R5 before Be went bankrupt and sold its IP to Palm, who ended up wasting it. I would probably never have a good reason to buy another Mac if and when HaikuOS reaches a full, stable release and can run natively on my hardware.

So, what can you do with this disk image? Not much, as far as desktops go right now. Remember, this is a development build that is not supposed to be used by casual users. However, I am in the process of packaging up a VMWare download for anyone who wants to use VMWare Player to test it out. And of course, why should you care about it, as far as your computer goes? Really simple, actually. Linux is too bulky and complex for most users, and MacOS X requires special hardware. If you want choice, and the chance to have an OS that really works, support HaikuOS. The majority of the basic infrastructure is now in place, and progress has really been picking up over the last six months. In another six months to a year, it is very likely that they will have a usable beta out for testing. So, go to their website and make a $5-$10 donation every so often to help them get the funds needed to keep things chugging along. (I have already given them about $15 and plan to send them another $15 at the end of the month or so)

***Update***
For a good review of HaikuOS, check this out.

On Tech Liberation Front and IPCentral, there seems to be some disagreement as to what kind of control DRM really is. In my opinion, DRM is a new breed of control. It is not a legitimately comparable to a lock because it is significantly more powerful and nuanced. Calling it a mere lock is like calling an Acura TL analogous to a new type of carriage. The closest definition is that it is a "self-enforcing, policy mechanism." It is more comparable to having a lawyer watching over your use of your car to ensure that you are using it in a manner that is deemed acceptable by the manufacturer. Is that mod to the body acceptable? How about that new paint job? Did you check to make sure that you had the right to install a custom-made MP3 player? This is what DRM can subject us to, and it has only been Apple's rabid zeal to keep their brand in tact that hasn't allowed DRM to become a share-cropper system. Make no mistake about it, the content producers do not like Apple, but what can they do? As long as Apple controls the iPod, there is no alternative because no system out there works on the same level as what Apple has control of.

Fortunately, we can rest safely in the knowledge that DRM getting cracked does not cause a wave of copyright infringement. Ironically, most of the illegal rips that have appeared on file sharing networks were leaked by those affiliated with the studios. Perhaps the one flaw that was most widely exposed was not the fundamental weakness of the CSS system, but rather that many DVD manufacturers did not fully implement the DVD restriction specs. My Daewoo DVD player, for example, is not particular about encryption or region codes being present. DRM does little good if parts of the specs are just tossed out by the implementer, and that is a global problem that no amount of federal regulation can solve. It is for this reason alone that a major argument can be made that DRM needs to be a one-vendor monopoly so as to control the entire system. Perhaps you have to be a software developer to see openness as a gaping hole here, but it seems like a technical pipedream to have an "open standard DRM." Interoperability and security are invariably at odds with one another when it comes to DRM.

The only way to allow buyers to preserve the value of their data at that point is to let them break DRM systems for what can be reasonably called fair use reasons. Why James DeLong and others are so squeemish about using law enforcement for real, not for profit infringement is beyond me. It would seem to be the best balance between protecting copyright holders and their customers since the final determinations would be made by humans, through legal standards. If non-fair use copyright infringement is theft, then clearly there is a good reason to make use of the government's law enforcement capabilities. In practice, the best protection of copyrights will end up being the threat of loss of life, liberty and property, not reasonably easy to hack content restriction systems.

On a side note, what I would like to know from the IPCentral guys is, at at what point do we just give up on DRM ever working? At what point do we say, "the market will not accept this." All of the DRM schemes that have been proposed by vendors with the ability to get them out to the public in force, except for Apple's FairPlay, smack of a vaguely Orwellian tone for the average buyer. While the features would be beneficial for businesses, they wouldn't be for me or any other average buyer. Please, spare me the idealistic "the market will find away" rhetoric. I am more of a cynic than a libertarian and what I see promises a future dominated by certain DRM schemes that are not... shall we say... liberal in their treatment of the buyer's use. So, at what point do you admit that you were wrong if the market fails to create any real DRM schemes that provide a variety of choice rather than a share-cropper relationship between copyright holder and copyright good buyer?

I have never tried to suggest that I am an optimistic for I am a cynical realist when it comes to humanity. I have for a while rejected any concept of the "innate goodness of man" in light of the obvious fact that humanity has been a brutal race as often, or even more so than it has generally conducted itself in an enlightened manner. It is with this preface that I would like to make a small stand on the MySpace controversy.

My heart does not bleed for the teens who expose themselves in such a blatantly stupid manner on MySpace. Kids, if you provide a roadmap to your home, all of your contact information and semi-sexually explicit pictures of yourselves, you're throwing meat to starving wolves. This is not neverland, well, in the Peter Pan sense. This is the real world where evil men and women get off to that sort of thing. You have two choices: be dorky and safe, or be cool and risk getting involved in a sexual relationship with a Very Bad Person. It's your call, and quite frankly, I really don't care which you choose.

So now, why don't I care? Why am I so heartless toward these pure, wholesome children? It's because they're not children, not pure and not wholesome. A fourteen year old is four years away from being a legal adult. She's damn well old enough to understand the dangers of rape and to know what puts her at risk. The exposure of so much personal information from an eight year old is one thing; an eight year old is unequivocably just a child. A teen, however, is not a child, but a young adult had damn well better start behaving like one in public, especially when it comes to personal safety.

If you can't keep your miserable little brat safe, then keep them off my Internet. There, I said it. I don't pitty the girls who post sexually explicit pictures of themselves, and I'm not going to waste emotional energy assuming that they have deep scars because daddy didn't love them. I sure as hell do not want their competitive attempts to one up their female peers to get in the way of my enjoyment of the Internet by bringing out all of the soccer moms and Al Gore to regulate it until its safe for toddlers and useful only for the same.

Back when I was their age, ironically when few parents had ever used the Internet in 1995-1997, no parent allowed their kids to publish any of this information. They sure as hell would have revoked their kid's access if they posted any sexually explicit pictures of themselves. Fast forward to today. We've had eleven years for the Internet to be integrated into mainstream society and people in general are more naive than ever about it. So, I guess they'll blame it all on Apple and Microsoft for making it appear friendly with their flashy new interfaces. That's the way these people work.

**UPDATE** 12/4/2007: Y'all have finally done it. Comments are closed, and if you have a hard time understanding why, just check out the last few comments. If you have more than a handful of brain cells, the reason will be self-explanatory.

Our elected government, in its "in"finite anti-terrorism wisdom, is seriously set on course to allow a state-owned corporation based out of the United Arab Emirates to operate some of our most strategically important ports. In related news, the Roman Government, it has been recently discovered, outsourced the management of its city defenses to the Huns citing budgetary problems...

And what was the most outrage that the Senate could muster over this outrageous move that borders on outright treason? It's "politically tone-deaf." Thank you, Senator Graham, for your scathing rebuttal to the Bush Administration whose last election was won on anti-terrorism grounds.

So, I'm wondering. What happens when the security switches over to a bunch of jihadis at these ports and they start bringing weapons over to our country? Oh, I'm sure that the Bush supporters will find every reason to say that Kerry would have been worse. Excuse me, but bullshit. Like Hell Kerry would have been any worse at this point. But hey, if you want to stick to your fantasy world where Bush has done everything he reasonably can to keep us safe, that's your right. One of the freedoms in the penumbra of the ninth amendment is the freedom to maintain dual citizenship in lala land.

And now, for some final words on this subject, the Islamic world is once again host to rioting. If the Jewish people responded with violence to the cartoons that are routinely published about them in Islamic news outlets, there would be several entire Islamic countries nuked off the face of the Earth. The stuff that gets published there is at least one solid order of magnitude far more vitriolic in its denigration of Judaism than anything that was published in that Danish rag.

So let's see, to sum it all up. We are in the midst of an explosion of Islamic violence around the world that could fuel several 9-11 or higher levels of attacks, but we are allowing a Middle Eastern company, owned by an Islamic country's government, to operate our port security. This at a time when Muslims in most of the Islamic world are rioting with a fury that we have not see in a long time. The rioting has gone just about global, but hey... it's business as usual. No good reason to increase those terrorism threat levels, shut down the border, end the visas for six months to a year and nationalize control of the ports!

1. Lebanon
2. Iran
3. Phillipines
4. Pakistan
5. Libya
6. Somalia
7. Bengladesh
8. Syria
9. Indonesia

Just some of the few countries where rioting has taken place. There could be even more, but I am too lazy to really look up all of the possible places. This is not an isolated thing. This is increasingly becoming a global problem and if Bush won't change course and admit that he's dead damn wrong here, then he needs to be impeached, followed by a serious look by Congress whether the entire administration shouldn't be purged by impeachment and new elections called. The stakes are too high for politics and failure to do right. For them to not be taking this seriously is a fundamental failure on their part and one that they should lose their jobs for.

Former President Clinton has finally come out with his true feelings about freedom of speech:

He said the people's religious convictions should be respected at all costs and that media should not be permitted to criticize other faiths. He said the media could criticize any issue including governments and people, but nobody had the right to play with the sentiments of other faiths.

So how do you separate someone's religious beliefs from them? Their religion is part of how they derive their identity. The obvious reaction would be that any criticism of a Muslim would end up becoming a criticism of their religion because most people are thin-skinned and look for ways to shut up their critics.

Well this week hasn't been pretty for Gore or Clinton. They've shown their true colors when it comes to both national security and basic civil rights. The fact that some European countries can prosecute the publishers does not translate out into an obligation to do so, nor does it make it right. The Islamic media publishes some stuff that is so patently offensive and religiously hateful that by Clinton's standards, it should be shut down entirely.

If you don't believe in the right to say offensive things, you don't believe in freedom of speech. Stop making excuses, stop calling it incitement to violence. Civilized people don't riot over cartoons, no matter how offensive. Those who do, deserve to be rounded up and unceremoniously sent to prison. Civilized people don't tolerate people turning mere offense into license to go on a rampage. I'm sick of the wishy-washy leftists who are all about the freedom to denigrate peaceful religions like Judaism and Christianity, but practically piss their pants when it turns to Islam.

Who would have thought that Al Qaida actually has everything from salaried positions, to vacation policies and company healthcare? Apparently, Al Qaida actually has an internal structure that is more like a modern, multi-national corporation than the organized terrorist groups of yesteryear. Isn't globalization great? Even the jihadis are learning how to participate in the global economy!

The most intriguing aspect of this discovery is that it proves that the best way to take down Al Qaida is not the restriction of fundamental liberties in the United States (I could have told ya that one!), but rather a global financial war. They can be undermined by making it simply not economically worthwhile for their people to continue to work for them. Money is a powerful motivator and will probably be what undoes them.

The reason why it is so important to destroy them financially is that it would isolate many of the married men from their base of supporters. Married men have wives and children to support, and they would face tremendous pressure to support their wives and kids rather than fight the infidels. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine some of the wives' fathers killing them for abandoning their wives and kids to starvation. Unmarried men might be more likely to be willing to commit a suicide bombing, but they have less attachment to this world than married men, which might make Al Qaida harder to organize and maintain as a fighting force.

All of this is speculation, but a younger, more hot-headed Al Qaida would be less of a threat than an Al Qaida composed of older, more cool-headed married men.

One of the things that you have to deal with when you're a conservative Christian in America is the incessant nattering of the secularists and their persecution complex. America is on the verge of theocracy! Gays will be herded into concentration camps with cells lined with leather and perfumed gas chambers! Or... rather... maybe not. It seems that Russian Muslims are getting a little bit agitated about the whole open homosexuality thing in Russia these days, and their "solution" to it is a lot less civilized than Pat Robertson at his most tourettes-afflicted.

Clearly, flogging the hell out of gay pride marchers is as bad as debating whether homosexuals should have legal access to the marriage system in America. Come to think of it, knowing the BDSM fetish among many gay men, this threat from the Muslims might actually cause some to seriously consider a gay pride rally in Russia. At any rate, it's object lesson in the proportionality that many leftists and secularists of all stripes have, that so many of them compare American religious conservatives with these violent wingnuts as though they are all cut from the same cloth.

Now, I wonder, if different political ideologies encourage their followers down different paths of practical application, then how can anyone seriously argue that all religions end up producing the same types of followers? At what point in time have Buddhists waged holy wars? When has it been widely accepted that Christian scripture gave average Christians, or even the institutional church, the obligation and right to convert at the point of sword and exterminate entire communities that did not convert? There is overlap in terms of peace and violence, and evil has been done in the name of scripture of all types, but longterm trends of different belief systems have been markedly different.

On that note, I should remind everyone that Christian scripture has been repeatedly violated by religious and political institutions that have tried to exploit it in order to consolidate their power. One need only examine the historical differences between missionaries operating according to Christian scripture and Islamic scripture to see what I mean.

Two uniformed men strolled into the main room of the Little Falls library in Bethesda one day last week and demanded the attention of all patrons using the computers. Then they made their announcement: The viewing of Internet pornography was forbidden.

The men looked stern and wore baseball caps emblazoned with the words "Homeland Security." The bizarre scene unfolded Feb. 9, leaving some residents confused and forcing county officials to explain how employees assigned to protect county buildings against terrorists came to see it as their job to police the viewing of pornography.

I suppose that's one use for former Vice Squad agents. Still, what a waste of money. The funny part of this story is when the police arrive to deal with the uppity? library patron and librarian. The cop didn't pull the law-abiding patron and librarian out of the library, but rather pulled the ?homeland security agents? outside and gave them a friendly bit of instruction on how to properly not harass law-abiding citizens.

This is not mission creep, but rather part of a sophisticated attempt to capture terrorists since it's a well-known fact that terrorists like strip clubs. A library is clearly the next best thing because you can view porn there and porn is the next best thing to a real, live woman stripping. Just ask any man that has had to substitute pornography for a real woman. He'll tell you that it sure does beat having to use one's imagination to conjure up images of women who might be sexually interested in men like them.

Who says that Macs are significantly more expensive than their PC counterparts? Compare the high-end MacBook Pro which has almost the exact same specs as these Dell XPS laptops. Granted, the Macs have video chipsets that aren't quite as powerful, and slightly slower hard drives, but they cost a few hundred dollars less and have dual core intel processors. I'd definitely rather have a dual core processor over a faster video chipset in my laptop. Bringing the high-end MacBook Pro up to a 7200RPM hard drive adds one hundred dollars to the price tag for a total cost of two thousand, five hundred ninety nine dollars. That's around two hundred fifty dollars less than the Dell system that approachs it in cost.

And this would be why I was excited about the transition to x86 processors. Better performance, better price and better energy use. My PowerBook G4 didn't get half the batter life that my Dell Inspiron gets with its Pentium M processor. Now that they are using the same processor architecture, they can compete more evenly on merits rather than "religion." I can't wait for the Mac Minis to make the transition, I'll definitely be grabbing one of those babies for a web development machine.

"I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?" Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt told reporters Wednesday at a regular briefing.

Houston is facing a severe police shortage because of too many retirements and too few recruits, and the city has absorbed 150,000 hurricane refugees who are filling apartment complexes in crime-ridden neighborhoods. City Council is considering a public safety tax to pay for more officers.

Hurtt said he believes building permits should require malls and large apartment complexes to install surveillance cameras. And Hurtt said if a homeowner requires repeated police response, he thinks it is reasonable to require camera surveillance of that property.

The moment they bring out that old lie, "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear," is the moment that you know that something is going terribly wrong or going to go terribly wrong. Surveillance cameras inside peoples homes is the epitome of a dehumanizing, totalitarian suggestion. Has America really gone so far down the path of tyranny that local officials are literally allowed to use 1984 as a play book? Just remember, the House Police are your friends, and would never violate your rights and their chief of police wants you to be aware of how concerned he is for the security of the residents of his fair city:

"If they are putting a burden on the criminal justice system and cheating the other residents of Houston, yes," he said. "I think people are upset when people are robbed and killed on the streets of Houston."

James DeLong is having a hard time understanding Linus Torvalds' point about the GPL and reciprocity:

I don't write code. So, in Torwalds' view, we cannot trade. But a broader view is that we can trade because reciprocity includes me giving him money, which he can then use to buy something that he cannot make himself.
The market is a giant reciprocity machine. Why is this a hard point?

Feb. 14, 2006 - We have an important warning for parents. Today marks the three-month anniversary of the launch of the Nintendo DS Wireless Connection. But Action News has learned this popular gaming system could put kids in harm's way. Parents buy the system so their children can play video games. But we have made an alarming discovery. Strangers can use this toy to lure unsuspecting children to dangerous places.

Nintendo's hot new creation markets primarily to children. It even comes complete with playmates. The handheld gaming system is like a mini computer. It has built-in wireless capability. That allows kids to battle fellow Nintendo DS players across the room or across the world.

And the conclusion that they come to is that anonymous gaming is bad, bad, bad!! We must worry parents that every child is now liable to become the victim of sexual molestation because Nintendo has not placed incredibly draconian restriction in its DS portables' wireless capabilities. How else can you intepret what amounts to a page long hit piece on Nintendo that plays the usual pedophile card against a company or technology? Afterall, it never occurred to them that with a little bit of parental oversight, this might not be such an issue.

Nintendo confirms what happened to Emily is possible but the company claims that person must also be using another DS system and be within 65 feet. Like our expert, Nintendo also warns parents to educate their children not to talk to strangers even on their gaming system. Also, beware, there are other wireless gaming systems made by different manufacturers and they may have similar issues.

Now how is that for avoiding any responsibility in the matter? Nintendo just said that to be able to do that sort of thing, the perp has to have a Nintendo DS system that is within 65 feet of your kid's DS system. It wouldn't seem to be that hard in many public places to find the middle age guy who happens to have a Nintendo DS and is trying to get into your eleven year old daughter's pants. Oh wait, maybe if parents were responsible, they would learn something about the products that they buy for their kids, but that would require them to actually give up some of their precious time For The Children^tm.

Every so often, you need a reminder for why you don't give into barbarians. With cartoons like these, it is hard for me to feel anything but contempt for the Muslims who are outraged about these cartoons. Apparently, it's ok to disparage the Jewish Israelis in a way that is reminiscent of the Nazis, but it's so offensive that they feel that it is their right to burn down embassies and riot like savages over cartoons that barely even scratch the surface of what could be said about Mohammed and Islam.

There are times when the federal judiciary makes such mind-numbingly stupid rulings about technology-related cases that it's amazing that the Congress hasn't fired them and replaced them with a pack of monkeys fresh from the jungles of Africa. They couldn't possibly make more idiotic rulings than this one:

A federal court has thrown out a lawsuit that accused a student-loan provider of negligence in failing to encrypt a customer database that was subsequently stolen.

Stacy Lawton Guin, a customer of Brazos Higher Education Service, sued the corporation on the grounds that encryption should be used as a routine security precaution.

But U.S. District Judge Richard Kyle in Minnesota dismissed the case last week, saying Brazos had a written security policy and other "proper safeguards" for customers' information and that it acted "with reasonable care" even without encrypting the database.

I actually have to admit that I am surprised by how bad this ruling is. This is an extreme example of the judiciary simply disregarding basic, established best practices for security and doing whatever the hell they want at the time. Hopefully some court will have the good sense to slap down this ruling and let the lawsuit continue on appeal.

This court might have well just said that people who handle money at financial institutions have no responsibility to the banks' clients.

Last night on Battlestar Galactica, there was a sub-plot regarding the issue of abortion. For those of you who may have not seen Battlestar Galactica before, it often delves into political sub-plots alongside the action in order to add a certain realism to the post-apocalypse society. A geminese girl was trying to have an abortion and the geminese were furious about this because they are the religious conservatives of their society. So, the President of the Colonies, Laura Rosalind, is forced to make a very hard choice. Either she can give up her cherished belief that abortion is a woman's right to choose and save the fleet both in terms of political unity and demographics, or she can continue to ignore the fact that few babies are being born.

Admiral Adama, not exactly known for his religiosity, ends up being the one that convinces her to start thinking about outlawing abortion. The fleet is aging and dying off slowly. Without new babies being born and replacing them, it would be only a matter of two decades before, as Vice President Gaius Baltar observes, the human race is extinct. The conclusion that the political leadership comes to is that regardless of whether it is a good ideal that a woman should be able to control her reproductive system from beginning to end, that reality did not afford them such faux freedom. Only two paths could be followed at this point: the path of laissez faire treatment of reproduction or the survival of the human race.

This is why I have come to regard Battlestar Galactica as my favorite non-comedy TV series of all time now. The series strips away the illusory protection of peace-time civilization and pits human ideals and desires with cold, brutal reality. It works to provide a reminder that our world hangs by a thread that can be cut when we least expect it; the colonies of Kobol never expected their Cylon enemies to be able to effortlessly shutdown their planetary defenses and launch a genocidal nuclear strike against their worlds. In the blink of an eye, the world that everyone knew was gone and they were forced to re-examine their luxuries and some of the more vice-like freedoms that they enjoyed with a critical eye. It takes away the peace and almost servile tranquility of civil life and pits humanity against the great, cold unknown. The best and worst of humanity shows itself in Battlestar Galactica.

People who are opposed to abortion would have loved this episode. In this episode, a young woman wanted to have an abortion, and was allowed to have one before the President signed an executive order outlawing abortion. The fundamental struggle here was between those who could not accept reality and those who could. Children are difficult and inconvenient, especially during pregnancy and the first few years of their lives. Sometimes individual desires must be subordinated to the greater good, and there is a fundamental difference between subordinating freedom of speech, property rights and the right of self-defense and subordinating control of reproduction. If there is to be a future for a civilization, it must be through its children, and allowing people to have abortions gives them too much control over the future of the whole civilization.

You could almost track a sine wave using my ability to work on my fiction posts right now. However, I have a little announcement to make. The next fiction post is actually about 75% done now, as far as I can tell. So far, it weighs in at 9,329 words for about 17 pages. It is going to be one hell of a big post as anyone who reads this can tell. After that, I'll try to make time to really start working on the first real book of some kind.

The fundamental premise behind the Feminine Mystique, that women waste their time being housewives, has always been very ironic to me. If you look at the majority of professions that women go into to "find themselves" and not "be stifled," it is amazing that being a housewife could be considered a bad thing by comparison. Human Resources? Secretary? A whole plethora of other jobs that don't really push the individual to really flex their mental or physical muscles. How on Earth could these provide fulfillment? That's a question that I will never understand.

I say that from the perspective of a recent graduate of a good Computer Science program and as someone who is now working full time as a software developer. I can't even imagine the kind of hole inside of a woman and her relationship with the father of her children that she would rather work at most positions in corporate America rather than be free to raise her children as she sees fit. Anyone who finds fulfillment processing paperwork all day really scares me, but then that's just me. Don't call me lucky, I worked for my degree and the opportunities that it provides me to be creative.

Being a good part of a corporate machine is not going to make America or the world better, but being a good parent who is close to his or her children will leave a lasting, positive impact on both one's country and the world. The thing that Betty Friedan did that she cannot be forgiven for is her denigration of the housewife, the woman who gives up her fulfillment for the betterment of her family. To quote her true opinion of these selfless women:

"Housewives are mindless and thing-hungry. Housework is peculiarly suited to the capabilities of feeble-minded girls; it can hardly use the abilities of a woman of average or normal human intelligence."

If there was ever a textbook example of "projection," that would be it. No one faults working women who are in the workforce because they have to be in order to help their husbands support their family. While many working women are not mindless, a great many of them are indeed quite "thing-hungry." The average low-end white collar job is no more out of the league of a feeble-minded girl than is housework.

Friedan's legacy was not to liberate women from shackles, but to take them out of one pre-defined role and force them into another. What else can be said of a woman who so viciously denigrates the choices of millions of women in the name of "liberating them?" How is that any better than the men who try to force women out of the workforce? The answer to principled people is that it is not right to denigrate either choices.

Weren't we down this path with Clinton?

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff accompanied a Native American tribal chief he was trying to sign as a client to a White House meeting attended by President Bush, a newly published picture shows and a Bush spokesman confirmed Sunday.

Abramoff's presence at the meeting came to light after Time magazine and the New York Times published a picture of the president with Kickapoo Tribal Chairman Raul Garza. Bush chief political strategist Karl Rove is in the foreground, and the lobbyist is dimly visible in the background.

Abramoff pleaded guilty to corruption charges January 3. He agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors in an investigation that knowledgeable sources say could lead to charges against a half-dozen people.

2006 is definitely not shaping up to be a good year for the Republicans. Abramoff is not going down without a fight, that much has been made clear already. The Bush Administration has categorically denied any connection between them and Abramoff, but now there is at least some evidence that goes beyond he-said, she-said assertions. So who wants to start taking bets on how long it will be before this thing gets blown wide open and the "i word" starts getting thrown around in a serious way on capitol hill?

The Democratic Party really does know how to pick leaders who are adept at creating damned if you do, damned if you don't scenarios. Al Gore is perhaps the best example of this talent that they have had in recent years. If you thought that the Dixie Chicks were out of line with their statements abroad (I didn't really care either way with them), they've got nothing on Gore.

It's incredibly ironic that anyone would think that we really need Saudi Arabia more than they need us. As painful to our economy as it might be, we could go elsewhere for oil. Mexico, Russia and Venezuela and others could fill in that void after a few years. Saudi Arabia, however, needs our government's continued support in its fight against the very radicals that it armed and funded. The chickens are coming home to roost and now they're starting to realize that maybe they can't play so many games with us.

So you oppose our involvement in Iraq and even oppose limits or outright bans on visas for Saudi citizens. Just what is, your plan, Mr. Gore? This is the thing about left-liberals that sends me through the roof as an engineer. They can always whine, bitch and moan about solutions, but in those rare chances that they propose solutions of their own, they almost never work. The cheapest anti-terrorism plan that involves no foreign wars or loss of civil liberties for American citizens is for the government to secure our borders and deport all Saudi, Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian, Yemense, Sudanese and Pakistani citizens from America.

Oh, what is that you say? That'd be discriminatory? Well how many Chinese do you see suicide bombing our buildings? I counted not a single one among the 9-11 hijackers who were, dun dun dun... all Saudis! Yes, Virginia, Saudi citizens are the ones most likely to come here with intentions of raping, pillaging and murdering our citizens and legal immigrants. If you don't want to violate the rights of those statistically unlikely to be terrorists, then you have to profile the groups that are definite "at risk" groups. Since Saudi Arabia is the country that most of Al Qaeda comes from, it stands to reason that if you want to subject as few legal immigrants and citizens to any loss of liberty as possible, you'd discriminate against the one group most likely to do them harm.

Now, cue someone fresh from a hooka smoke at their drum circle to accuse me of racism for this. Please, it's a matter of citizenship. You don't profile Chinese or Mexicans for terrorism because chances are they have no involvement because recent history has shown them to have no appreciable involvement in organized terrorist cells. Saudis were to a man the perps behind 9-11, and are disproportionately represented in global terrorism. Logically, if you let a Saudi citizen into your country you have a much higher chance that they are going to be a terrorist. Since we cannot read their minds, and no one wants to restrict the rights of anyone we have no reason to restrict, there is only one solution. Tell the Saudi government to shove their quota restrictions up their collective, royal asses.

We can buy elsewhere, but at this point there isn't enough money in the world to buy support for the Saudis where it counts if they lose us. Europe isn't sympathetic, Russia has its own oil, Israel would just shrug as yet another band of thugs rose to power and the East Asian powers could quite frankly give a rat's ass less whether they buy from royal Islamists or populist, pseudo-republican Islamists. Which reminds me of one little flaw in the arguments for defending the House of Saud. Whether they fall or not, Saudi Arabia will be ruled by Islamists. The House of Saud is hardline Islamist, albeit with a taste for the good life. They are not our friends. They never have been, and never will be. They are only working with us because the monster they created in the 1970s and 1980s is coming back to get them.

I had an argument with a relative last night about the Danish cartoons that, in my mind, represents a sharp distinction between libertarianism and liberalism. Libertarians expect humans to behave as rational, sentient beings and to control their baser animal instincts, liberals, however, do not. No one in their right mind would argue that incitement of some kind was not in fact a primary motivation of the Danish cartoonists, but that point is irrelevant in the face of the reaction by tens of thousands of Muslims worldwide.

At any given moment, a person is free to choose what to be offended about. In the course of any given day, especially in larger areas of any country, occasion to take offense will be presented at least a few times a day. What we do with that offense, is what ultimately matters. Taking offense at something is an action that we choose, and there is nothing more degrading and derogatory that can be said about the Islamic world than to suggest that they were simply incapable of shrugging it off or making light-hearted jest in return. They are adults and should know better, but instead behave like toddlers with temper tantrums.

As the largest religion on Earth, Christianity has been subjected to far more ridicule than Islam by simple fact of its size making it a convenient target. It simply cannot assume the embattled minority status in many countries, though in many others it can. When it is brutally lampooned, as was the case with Piss Christ and the Las