April 2006 Archives

I have been amused for a while that people actually believed that blogging is going to somehow introduce (to borrow from Glenn Reynolds) "an Army of Davids." Donald Sensing makes the reason why that won't happen, very clear. Despite protestations, and many columns by Glenn Reynolds denying its true nature, the blogosphere is in fact dominated by a number of large blogs, and the little guy has little chance of making an impact on a major scale.

The blogosphere is not democratic, it is republican in the mold of our old republic. Not just any man or woman can start a blog and get people to listen to them, but they are free to try to modestly make their way like a yeoman farmer living peacefully beside the plantation owner in Jefferson's Virginia. The old media was dominated by rules and social norms, the blogosphere is not. There is overriding editor whose ideology you must appease, and the A-listers benevolently guide the "conversation," rather than try to control it with an iron fist the way that the news boards determine what is newsworthy.

The real revolution in blogging has been technological, not social. Everyone wants to believe that the blogosphere is about people suddenly having this ability to express themselves that used to ellude them, or was actively denied them. I'd like to take this time to call shenanigans on that. I had a "blog" when I was thirteen. That was back in the dark ages of 1996. I had lots of them, as did most of my middle and high school peers with a working knowledge of HTML 3.2/4.0 and enough hatred of the asinine crap that gets passed off as the modern American education to use that knowledge.

All blogging is, when you get right down to it, an automated way to maintain and publish content. This blog is really nothing different in principle from the sites that I cobbled together ten years ago. The important differences are what I can do with it. I can effortlessly add, update and remove content. None of that requires multiple (X)HTML files to be modified and reuploaded. WordPress generates its pages dynamically based on what it can find in the database. How cool is that? Dead links are much harder now.

Let's also stop pretending that we're journalists. We're not. We're personal website publishers. We're no more "citizen journalists" than the poorly-hinged, trigger-happy nuts in Montana who call themselves militia are a traditional citizen army modeled on the old state militia system. The fact that journalism has devolved to the level of banality commonplace in the blogosphere in such dens of villainy, ill-repute and molestation of the English language as MySpace does not mean that we are in fact real journalists. If anything, it is a sign of the decline of the professional classes to the level of the proletariate, not the ascension of the proletariate to the level of the bourgeoisie.

I actually have a little prediction of my own for the blogosphere. In the next five years as broadband develops and more infrastructure is developed in the United States and abroad, the blogosphere will die and be reborn. People like Michelle Malkin will stop pretending to be "plain folks" and admit that they are professional reporters who are renegades in the eyes of the establishment. They will go on to "post-blogging" technologies and will become a new wave of new media. Then the blogosphere will be back to ground zero because most of us are not photogenic to be video bloggers and don't sound sexy in lossy mp3 audio (if we do at all). Blessed are the B, C and D listers for they shall inherit the blogosphere.

We're handing over to any would-be dictator the foundation of a police state, and Republicans are to blame for a lot of it. We now have a democrat trying to whore herself out to the Bush Administration's latest pet surveillance state effort to create a mandatory data retention law. Why are we doing this? Why are we creating a regulatory and technological system capable of handing over to any would be abuser a virtual cornucopia of data that would have made a KGB agent green with envy?

If you are actually daft enough to believe that this has anything to do with child pornography after reading the plethora of success stories like this, then I guess there is no way to convince you of anything. The reality is that law enforcement have gotten extremely good at tracking down people who are engaging in online sexual exploitation of children. These are the people who molest children and in some cases, are also the ones filming the child porn. In other words, we may not be really doing much about the pictures, but we're busting the actual molesters right and left. I'd say that's quite an accomplishment.

If this becomes the law, everything you do will be recorded for the government to possibly find out about. Have you ever done something by accident that wouldn't look very legal? Well you could be in for a nasty surprise if the government gets ahold of your records. After all, the next step will be to run mandatory searches on the log files to see if there was any potentially illegal activity. As this points out, even using something like Tor could get you in major trouble if someone else is doing illegal things while using Tor.

What burns me about things like this is that we may never have a true police state a la China or Cuba, but if we do, then we will have created the infrastructure to make one very efficient from the git go. It's like parking a car in front of a drunk man, then letting him have the keys if he just grabs them out of your hand.

The Libertarian Party is a party of principle, and while that is almost invariably a positive thing, sometimes it does get in the way. If the Libertarian Party would run on the following platform, it could actually take away critical votes from both major parties in 2006 and 2008 in the congressional elections. Enough that it might actually be able to take some seats in Congress for the first time.

• An end to pork barrel spending and a return to a balanced budget.
• A national debt payment plan to get at least $50B of the national debt paid off every year.
• Strong national defense. Keep spending levels stable with the military, but create a respectable withdrawl plan from Iraq. Openly suggest that the Libertarian Party would be willing to preemptively strike Iran if it were to begin preparations for nuclear attacks on American soil.
• Close the borders, register the current illegal immigrants and begin deporting all illegal immigrants with a criminal record. Require that all unskilled workers leave after two years, but provide a solid and reasonable timeframe for skilled workers to become citizens. This would strike the balance between both the supporters of the illegal immigrants and those who are (rightfully) against their being here. According to a new poll, the libertarian party could actually gain major traction in the elections by grabbing onto this issue in a balanced way.
• Repeal the USA PATRIOT Act and support additional legislation that would require all counter-terrorism activities that take place in whole or in part on American soil to be vetted by the FISA Court.
• Support a constitutional amendment modeled on something like this :Marriage being a matter between private citizens, living according to the accepted standards of their communities, shall not be subjected to regulation by the United States Government except where such regulations may be necessary to control the conduct of civilian employees and members of the armed forces. No state shall be obligated to accept the marriage regulations of any other state, nor shall any state be required by federal regulations to establish legal standards for marriage except in such circumstances where the state law may attempt to coerce unwilling parties or individuals under the age of sixteen into a marriage agreement. No state shall deny the right of property ownership and management based upon the marriage status of any citizen of the United States of America.
• Push for a line item veto power and the end the practice of ear-marking altogether.
• Restore many of the property and privacy protections lost in the War on Drugs.

The key is that the Libertarian Party ought to present itself as a fresh alternative to the two major parties, while presenting itself as the party of the little guy who stands to be royally screwed by the powers that be. The LP would do well to realize that the immigration issue is one where libertarians are uniquely suited to create a comprehensive, principled position that creates responsible and controllable immigration policies that benefit the country. Small steps at first, then bigger steps once the public has gotten a taste for a party that could actually fix the system's problems.

The record labels just can't get enough of that ol' timey regulation:

The "Perform Act," or the "Platform Equality and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music Act of 2006," would require satellite, cable and Internet broadcasters to pay fair market value for the performance of digital music. Additionally, the bill would require the use of readily available and cost-effective technological means to prevent music theft.

"The birth of the digital music place has been a boon for businesses and consumers. However, these new technologies and business models have become so advanced that the clear lines between a listening service and a distribution service have been blurred," Feinstein said. "I believe that the Perform Act would help strike a balance between fostering the development of new technologies and ensuring that songwriters and performers continue to be fairly compensated for their works."

The problem with this bill is that there are many small bands who don't care whether their works are restricted or not. They are so hungry for airtime that they'll gladly take an opportunity to get their music out there, and I see no reason why the market cannot settle this. Once again, the record labels are too lazy to actually negotiate contracts based on technical merits so they resort to having the government do it for them:

Record industry executives want so-called "parity" among the different download platforms. They argue that the new devices XM Radio is bringing to the market that allow customers to save songs on the receivers without paying for the download rip off the copyright holder.

Update: I read over the technicality in that was brought up in this followup at Editor & Publisher and the issue is starting to make a little more sense. The issue is that by adding the prefix "sub" to the exemptions, they have effectively removed the rest of the trademark sections from having these exemptions. I'm not a lawyer, but I have a feeling that a judge would not look kindly on someone getting sued for writing I hate Coke. I spilled some Sprite on my Dell Inspiron and now Microsoft Windows won't load. I guess I'm stuck with my MacBook. A judge very easily could be persuaded to see this bill as an attempt to circumvent the first amendment in the name of trademark protection and shut it down. Still, we ought to be vigilant. While I don't think this will end up being an issue once it hits the courts, it does bother the hell out of me that Lamar Smith pushed this through. There is no way that this could be accidental. If it was intentional, than the congresscritter needs to earn his pay and proof-read his damn bills.

(3) EXCLUSIONS.--The following shall not be actionable as dilution by blurring or dilution by tarnishment under this subsection:

(A) Any fair use, including a nominative or descriptive fair use, or facilitation of such fair use, of a famous mark by another person other than as a designation of source for the person's own goods or services, including use in connection with--"(i) advertising or promotion that permits consumers to compare goods or services; or "(ii) identifying and parodying, criticizing, or commenting upon the famous mark owner or the goods or services of the famous mark owner.

"(B) All forms of news reporting and news commentary.

"(C) Any noncommercial use of a mark.

With only the most minimal notice in the mainstream press, the bill as it currently stands would remove three exceptions from part of the present trademark law:

--News reporting and commentary.

--Fair use.

--Non-commercial use.

I also looked up all six versions of the bill that went before Congress, and each version contained the protections in them. In fact, one of the amendments that was tacked on struck out the entire text of the legislation after the "enacting clause." I could be wrong on this, but judging from what I see on Thomas, all of the basic protections that were originally in the bill survived the amendment process and are in the final version(s) of the bill that will be heading to Bush to sign if he hasn't done so already.

*Sigh* I don't check up on the Barking Moonbat Early Warning system in a while (real jobs suck, don't they?) and Allen has to take out the ol' cluebat and crack a few skulls. I understand the policy though. I had to shutdown the comments on my "childfree" posts for a while there because of the trolls who just ranted and raved.

I always wondered about "OldCatMan." I've had three cats and like cats better than dogs, but I'll be damned if I'd ever even jokingly call myself a "cat man." Something bugs me about that name. It just don't sit right, you know?

I just had the distinct pleasure of running HaikuOS on my desktop PC a few minutes ago. It actually booted into a stable, pretty, semi-usable desktop. What's the big deal, you ask? Well if you don't want to buy a Mac and don't want to deal with all of the crap that Linux foists on you, then HaikuOS is naturally the project to keep an eye on. In case y'all don't know, it's an open source clone of BeOS. There are still some real holes in terms of the subsystems, but they have come a long way in the past four years. IMO, it would be safe to say that they have covered more ground in those four years than Linux did in its first four years.

To give it a shot, download either BeOS Max Edition or BeOS Developer Edition. Install one of those on a partition you can spare, then take the latest image from Sikosis and copy it from a Windows or Linux partition onto the main BFS partition. Mount it with this command mount -t bfs haiku.image Haiku. Then format a second partition, copy all of the contents from the Haiku image you just mounted over to the new BFS partition and update BootMan. Sounds a little technical, but it's a lot faster and more trouble-free than installing Linux or Windows. Be warned, though. BeOS Developer Edition defaults to French in the installer. Neither the Developer Edition or Max Edition are official releases. They're just hacked together updates of the old BeOS R5 Personal Edition released before Be went tits up in 2001.

Also, if you care about competition, go to the HaikuOS team website and send them a small donation to help them keep the Haiku Foundation going. I just contributed my $10 tonight.

Anyone ever stop to think that maybe $200 million is too much for a single movie? I guess not:

At the Cato conference today, a movie industry attendee kept asking the copyleftists who favor the abolition of copyright the question: "If we cannot protect the product, then how can we invest $200 million in a movie like King Kong?"

Probably the bulk of the studios' problem is tied to their never ending quest to make the Most Expensive Movie Ever. They pay outrageous amounts of money to stars and almost use special effects as a crutch in a lot of cases. It would be nice to see them focus on bringing out more, newer talent that is willing to work cheaper on both of those fronts. One of the most important changes in the past five years or so is that it is now quite possible to make a movie using a standard PowerMac or a suped up Linux workstation instead of one of those ungodly expensive SGI workstations that they used to be so enamored of. Many of the big name movies of the past eight years were made in whole or in part with Linux. Something tells me that if they would put more effort into reducing production costs instead of wining and dining the big name actors and actresses that they would have fewer problems with costs.

Good ol' Mayor Bloomberg is working hard to ensure that no child will be left behind when the United States formally transitions to a police state:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced yesterday that police officers with metal detectors would conduct unannounced sweeps of students and their bags at middle schools and high schools throughout the city beginning later this month.

The scanning, as students arrive for classes in the morning, may be conducted at any of the roughly 80 percent of secondary schools that do not have permanent metal detectors, Mr. Bloomberg said, but schools where officials perceive there is a heightened risk will probably be searched more frequently.

In announcing the plan, the mayor cited a recent increase in the number of guns and other weapons confiscated in the public schools even as major crime in schools citywide has declined this year.

Students and school officials will get no warning of the scanning, but to comply with legal restrictions, the mayor said the city would post notices outside schools alerting students that they can be searched on entry.

This is just another good reason why we really need some major school reform in this country. We wouldn't have half of the discipline problems we face today if there was a free market for public education based on a voucher system. Parents would actually be held responsible for their little hoodlum's behavior because the school could expel them for bringing a firearm into the school, and then the other schools could refuse to provide them services.

I also wonder how many conservatives who are sympathetic to the school administrators have themselves been through a modern school lockdown. They feel a lot like what one would expect a prison lockdown to be like. Combine that with random searches and a curriculum that enforces conformity and crushes critical thinking and you have a recipe for a passive citizenry.

Rep. Lamar Smith has been a busy little anti-freedom beaver lately. He's managed to systematically screw over bloggers and the little guy in general with two of his latest proposals. His extension to the DMCA is more modest, but according to CNet's News.com, it has the potential to do the following to bloggers and others:

Boosts criminal penalties for copyright infringement originally created by the No Electronic Theft Act of 1997 from five years to 10 years (and 10 years to 20 years for subsequent offenses). The NET Act targets noncommercial piracy including posting copyrighted photos, videos or news articles on a Web site if the value exceeds $1,000.

Then there's the patent law which claims to, how do they say it in Washingtonspeak? "This bill will clarify the rights of trademark holders and eliminate unnecessary litigation." In regular English this means, "I'm Lamar Smith, wholly owned lemming from the great state of IP attorney land. We have annexed your country. Please, do not resist your new trademark-bearing overlords." So what does this monstrosity of an IP bill do?

With only the most minimal notice in the mainstream press, the bill as it currently stands would remove three exceptions from part of the present trademark law:

--News reporting and commentary.

--Fair use.

--Non-commercial use.

Elimination of the news reporting and commentary protections would overnight put newspapers at much greater risk of trademark infringement actions being brought against them, for everything from a columnist's or editorial writer's ill-received reference to a company's trademark, to, say, a news photograph of a homeless person's shopping cart parked in front of a row of gleaming, readily identifiable new-model cars at the dealership of a well-known automaker.

Lamar Smith, it allowed to do so, would systematically gut the IP law protection afforded to bloggers, journalists and pretty much every normal person out there. These efforts could be quaintly renamed the Omnibus IP Attorney 100% Employment Act of 2006.

Pork barrel spending. Pork barrel legislating. Blatant attacks on civil liberties like McCain-Feingold. Sticking the middle finger right in the face of the conservative base (immigration). Yes, those Republicans are truly different from the Democrats. If this is what a wobbly majority looks like, what will a strong Republican majority make our country like? We'd go from something like this, to something like this.

Much apocalyptic ink has been spilled over the issue of network neutrality recently. There are two key issues that are germane to the subject and they are whether service providers should be reserve bandwidth for some services and whether or not service providers should be able to discriminate against traffic from other providers. The "two-tier Internet" that would be created by network discrimination policies scares many seem to be the beginning of the end for the free-wheeling Internet that many of us have come to expect, but that is hardly the case.

Many service providers have for some time now implemented controls over how bandwidth is allocated in an effort to keep the quality of service acceptable to their customers. Were it not for these efforts, a few file sharers could easily bring down an entire cable or DSL residential service by themselves. In fact, according to some estimates, as little as one percent of all broadband users use forty percent of the entire network's capibilities.

In order to provide high quality on-demand multimedia services over the Internet, it will be imperative that ISPs be able to discriminate to some degree. Some providers, such as Verizon, want to create their own alernative to the cable networks. In order to do that, they will need to be able to maximize the amount of bandwidth that they can provide to that service while balancing that service with their DSL packages.

Video on demand is incredibly taxing on network resources and the quality of service that would be present for such a service where all bandwidth is available in one big pool would poor in the best case scenario. Any delays caused by overconsumption by other users could cause unacceptable delays in the transmission of the video (or other) data that would have a very damaging impact on the user experience. The best solution for that problem is to allow ISPs to take a percentage of the bandwidth capabilities they have built up and allocate them exclusively toward their bandwidth-intensive services so as to be able to guarantee a baseline of performance to their customers.

Some people worry that this sort of discrimination might cause a loss of competition, but it is nothing more than an evolution of existing policies to meet new needs. Network service providers have no incentive right now to become hostile toward legitimate protocols such as instant messaging protocols, email or web access. Fortunately for consumers, even if they were to become hostile toward legitimate protocols and commercial services, most of the popular, legal uses of the Internet are not bandwidth-intensive and would not see much disruption from such discrimination.

The one network neutrality issue that could be a short-term cause for concern is whether or not network providers will be able to wreck havoc on each other's traffic as it moves out of network. AT&T raised the spectre of this issue when they started to suggest that Google is a free rider (ironically, they're the epitome of a paying customer) and ought to have to pay extra to let Google users on AT&T's network access Google at full speed. This issue ultimately becomes a conflict between the ISP and its users, not those who build services on top of its network, and that is why it is doomed to failure.

If an ISP were to actually make good on a threat to impose an "Internet toll" to connect to its users, the service providers targetted by the threat would be able to retaliate by modifying the delivery of their service to inform the user why the service is slow. This ability is something that every content provider from the lowliest blogger to the elite of the Fortune 100 could bring to bear on the ISP. It is incredibly unlikely that the ISP's customers would remain passive in the face of a deluge of notices informing them that their ISP is attempting to extort money out of companies that are already paying hand-over-fist for bandwidth to provide their services to the public.

As if market pressure were not enough of an incentive to "play nice" with others, the federal government has let it be known in the recent past that it will not tolerate network discrimination whose sole purpose is to be anti-competitive. When North Carolina-based ISP Madison River attempted to but the kibbosh on its users access to Vonage's Voice over IP (VoIP) service, the FCC quickly intervened on Vonage's behalf and resolved the matter. This sort of problem is nothing new to federal regulators as it is little more than any other run of the mill anticompetitive business action.

A "two-tier Internet" does not represent a fundamental shift from the original architecture of the Internet. It is in fact a recognition that there must be some control over the network in order to make it work as a popular medium. The primary concerns over the "two-tier Internet" have been mostly disingenuous hand-wringing over the fate of file sharing networks.

There can be little doubt that in the future, ISPs will have a great deal of incentive to shut down illict file sharing as legitimate services take off. This process will certainly not be perfect, but it is infinitely preferable to a scenario in which the government determines network policy. It is much easier to negotiate with private corporations than federal regulators and bureaucrats. One need only look into the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act to realize why the ham-handed attempts by the federal government to formulate IT policy and standards for the general public are nothing short of a disaster waiting to happen.

Sometimes babies are given names that are outright cruel. This happens to be one of them. The baby was named Saviour God-Scientific Allah. Who the hell names their kid Saviour God-Scientific Allah?! I'm sorry, but if you cannot prove that there is some existing or former culture where a name for a child came from, you shouldn't be able to name your kid that. Parents have no right to make up blatantly bullshit names for their kids like this. It's bad enough that some people name their kids Nyquil, Tomato, Cappuccino or Apple, but Saviour God-Scientific Allah is just beyond the pale.

When you get right down to it, there can only be one meaningful standard of what constitutes human life and that is genetic membership in the species homo sapien. There is simply no other viable determining quality of what it means to be human because everyone has a standard of what should or should not be considered a stage of development where human life is sacred.

I know it's terribly cliche to use the slippery slop argument, but there is no way to avoid it with abortion and what constitutes human life. It starts with saying that a first trimester baby is not a baby because it is incredibly undeveloped. Flimsy, but we can go with that. Then society gets used to this and the new frontier is the second trimester. Then we end up a while later debating partial birth abortion. Pretty soon, in the eyes of the legal system, a child in utero is not actually human at all as far as the law is concerned.

The conditioning necessary to accept abortion as a medical right and not a medical necessary evil (such as in cases of ectopic pregnancies) ultimately devalues all human life. It creates a precedent that says so what if you are as genetically human as every born child and grown adult? You're not sufficiently developed to make your right to life trump a "woman's right to choose."

There really is no difference between a late term abortion and infanticide. Sure, it may occur inside the womb where only the doctor will see it until the baby is removed in pieces, but it is infanticide nonetheless. Already society is slowly becoming conditioned to accept the idea that it is somehow different, even though a child who is subjected to partial birth abortion is no less viable than one who has just been born. Just because the descent down the slippery slope is sluggish, doesn't mean we aren't collectively sliding.

Development is not a viable standard for human life because it is a proven fact that there is a peak in human development followed by a decline. Is one at their "most human" at their physical and mental peak? Is a child less human than an adult because it is less developed? If that be the case, then a typical senior citizen is far less human than your average college student because the former are well into the post-peak decline. Perhaps this is why an increasing number of Western countries with weak moral bearings are finding it increasingly difficult to respect the lives of the elderly in matters of euthanasia and quality of life issues.

So clearly, the only standard that can mean anything for what can define one as being human is membership in the species homo sapien. If we budge and say that one person is less human than another, the old problems will arise only with different sets of victims. I for one am not inclined to be optimistic about where we will end up because humanity's inability to learn from its mistakes and not repeat them is only matched by its inability to draw connections between past and present events and trends.

After reading this discussion on Feministe, it should be readily apparent that what most feminists really want is not true liberty, but rather the right to be a libertine. The common excuse that is used is "the boys do it, girls ought to be able to do it too." Better women than these immature little girls have always asked the more appropriate question, why are the men allowed to do it (whatever "it" is in a discussion about morals).

Like it or not, but women are frequently the party that loses one way or another in any manner involving sexual or substance immorality. This is just the way the universe works, and we can all value equality, but the real world doesn't operate that way. Women cannot be players because women get pregnant and are more prone to getting infected with sexually transmitted diseases than men. It's not a matter of whether men like this or not, it's that this is the way things work. One might as well gripe about the chemical composition of the air that one breathes.

Women are not as strong as men in the ways that count for battle. Go ahead, assert your right to not be raped in front of a man who would rape you and see how quickly the universe imposes your rights upon his evil heart. You will become a victim, and a very stupid victim, if you allow yourself to be put into a position where you might have to go one-on-one with a healthy young man that wants to rape you. What have you gained by not respecting your physical limits and recognizing the dangers they expose you to? That's what I cannot understand about feminists today. What do you gain by risking a confrontation with an enemy that you know you probably cannot beat, when you have no reason to do so? Go ahead, wax shrilly about how men can be safe in these situations, so women ought to be able to as well. Your indignant protests will not change the fact that you, as a typical woman, cannot be safe in many of the situations that a man who is in decent shape could be safe in.

There is no moral authority in victimhood, except when one is victimized willingly. It is revolting that Feministe and many of her readers would have the audacity to compare Sister Karen Klimczak, the Catholic nun who was murdered by a convict while she ran a halfway house for recently released felons, with a typical preppy, bar-hopping white girl who gets raped while engaging in some less than upstanding conduct with strange men. If you have to even ask why these two women are totally separate classes of victims, a separation not due only because of the different criminal acts involved, I doubt you would be able to fully grasp the explanation.

It's only really white middle and upper class girls who even think along these lines. There are precious few run-of-the-mill feminists in the ghetto, in the warzones of the Congo or in the shantytowns of India. The average woman in these places would be shocked to see the abject stupidity of women who are allowed some of the best education in the world, yet are so daft that they'd put themselves in harm's way because they "shouldn't have to worry about getting raped by a man they just met." That's all well and good when you have a sisterhood of like-minded mental midgets, a comfortable family life to fall back on and a college degree that will win you inroads into corporate life. In Africa that typically means a death sentence as a fresh load of AIDS condemns a rape victim to death.

Evil exists and it's not going to go away. The experiment of human civilization has tried to reach utopia in the metaphorical sense, and only ended up reaching that destination in the literal meaning of the word. It takes a stupid or incredibly naive person to actually believe that evil is a state of education as opposed to a state of moral being. Ironically many of history's most prominent villains have been incredibly educated by modern standards. Is it so hard to conceive of this evil "other" state of existence, wherein one is in fact incapable of caring about right and wrong? Dismiss it as insanity, but some of the clearest words about the world have come from breath-takingly evil men and women.

Pedocracy: Noun. A system of government where all consideration for policy ultimately revolves around the children. Noted for its extreme irrationality and quickness to suspend civil rules of engagement wherein the perceived absence of rules and regulations affected law-abiding adult citizens could have even a minimal impact on the psyche of a hypothetical child. Most commonly found in first world countries beset by terrorism, grossly incompetent government leaders and a general societal malaise.

Mandatory data retention requirements worry privacy advocates because they permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity that normally would have been discarded after a few months. And some proposals would require providers to retain data that ordinarily never would have been kept at all.

CNET News.com was the first to report last June that the U.S. Department of Justice was quietly shopping around the idea of legally required data retention. But it was the European Parliament's vote in December for a data retention requirement that seems to have attracted broader interest inside the United States.

At a hearing last week, Rep. Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican who heads a House oversight and investigations subcommittee, suggested that data retention laws would be useful to police investigating crimes against children.

When is it not "for the children?" If you think that the USA PATRIOT Act is ripe for abuse, mandatory data retention laws are even worse. Cue someone to come in and say that they're good laws that will just be abused by a bad president. Anyway, there are very simple and good reasons why one of the last things we need is to have mandatory data retention laws.

• Law enforcement has not made a case for how they have been stymied by the current system which allows them to order data retention when they have probable cause to believe that a criminal act is taking place. By law, whenever they can convince a judge that they have reasonable grounds to suspect that a crime is taking place, they can get an order to force an ISP to retain its logs of the suspected activity. This system has worked very well, and it also happens to balance the privacy of the citizenry with the needs of law enforcement. If law enforcement needs this new power, they need to present empirical, not anecdotal, evidence to the public proving that they have been systematically prevented from enforcing the law because of the absence of these laws and policies.
• This is akin to a universal wiretap. Would you feel comfortable with letting the federal government record every single conversation you have over the phone and then be able to scrutinize your every last word at their convenience? If not, then recognize that this is tantamount to the same thing because they can just hand over a court order requesting all of your logs to be given to them for some small crime and then find out all of your activity for up to a year. Only a naive person would actually believe that law enforcement wouldn't target them because they're "only a smallfry in the scheme of things." People from all walks of life and all socio-economic levels get sent to prison, and there are far more pages in the federal legal code than in all of the scriptures of the top 15 religions in the United States combined. Do you want to take the chance that you won't be the one?
• The cost to ISPs to maintain these records for any "useful" amount of time would be catastrophic to the profitability of most ISPs and would naturally result in making smaller ones less efficient and capable of serving their customers. The bigger ISPs would actually benefit from such a regulatory system because it would impose costs on their small competitors that actually could bankrupt them. ISPs do not typically operate on very high profit margins, so adding even a few hundred dollars a month to the cost operations could have damaging effects on the small ISPs.
• These laws are not even needed for the majority of criminal investigations involving sexual predators looking for children because those investigations start with activities in chat rooms, IRC channels, IM, etc. In such situations, law enforcement officers are quite capable of contacting the service provider and getting their cooperation if it is needed for that investgiation. In a lot of cases, in fact probably most of them, they can simply save the conversation onto their work computer and go arrest the predator when he or she tries to meet up with the "kid."

It may be hard to police what goes on today, but it's no harder than it has ever been. In the roaring twenties, police did not have the authority to chase crooks out of their immediate jurisdiction and didn't have the radios they needed to coordinate chases. Things haven't really gotten more dangerous, it's just that the danger has shifted to newer, less familiar fronts.

Others:

Virginia Libertarian.

Lunda Wright's Research Blog.

Why Now?.

The Lazy Genius.

Gonzales and other officials have declined to discuss Berry's case and resulting investigations, but they have pointed to a threefold increase in federal prosecutions of child pornography and abuse cases nationally over the past decade

The signs of America's decline are all around us, but people continue to deceive themselves into thinking that America really is the moral country that we'd like to think it is. Sadly, America's moral center has been hollowed out, and it's time to face the ugly truth. New fines and harsher prosecution cannot stop this problem. The laws on the books are already very severe for this class of offender.

This country is being given over to its own depravity by a wrathful God. Romans 1 is starting to become one of the most relevant pieces of scripture for our country. Statistics like this should make Americans turn to God and prostrate themselves before him. Alas, in our national overconfidence, most Americans will turn to the state to add even more penalties to these crimes because they are unwilling to face the truth that these crimes are increasingly common because America is spiritually dying.

And they say that no one ever gets unfairly hurt by the sex offender laws:

The death of William Elliott, 24, is reigniting the national debate over sex offender registries. His anguished mother said yesterday that he should not have been on the same list as criminals who preyed on children.

He had been convicted of having sex with a girlfriend who was two weeks shy of her 16th birthday, the mother said. ''My son was not a pedophile," said Shirley Turner. ''He shouldn't have been labeled that. . . . He just wanted to love that girl and make a family; that's all he wanted to do."

Without the registry, ''he'd still be alive today," Turner said. ''I'd still have him."

I completely understand the outrage over acts against little kids, but a lot of sex crimes are very questionable as to whether or not they were in fact crimes. Do we really need more people to be convicted of sex crimes for taking a piss behind their big rig truck? There have even been cases of kids and teens getting charged with sex crimes because they accidentally kicked their sibling in the crotch. The system is out of control and must be fixed, but in order to do that, people would have to sit down and coldly, rationally propose reform. That... is just about the last thing that anyone can expect to happen on a subject like this.

Hello, Feministe readers. Question for those of you who have come here to see what kind of "fucking evil man" I am, to paraphrase one Feministe commenter. What good is it to talk about the obvious right to not get raped when you are defending the behavior which causes many young women to be able to be raped? In that confrontation between victim and rapist, this right exists on paper and it becomes a contest between "wills to power." Ever heard of the will to power? Look it up sometime, it might enlighten you about why it's incredibly stupid to argue about rights when you the only choice you have at the moment is fight or flight. I have a right to not get robbed or beaten to death in a bar fight, but you don't see me complaining about how "if evil men would stop getting homocidal over the slip of the tongue, people wouldn't be murdered." Evil people are evil. They don't need a reason to rape you other than they want to. If you want to exercise your right to expose yourself to evil people by doing things you know will increase your chances of getting in contact with evil people, fine. Just stop complaining about what they do to you because you brought it on yourselves by exposing yourselves to easily avoidable situations. No, you can't always avoid them, but you can't always avoid a bear or mountain lion while talking a walk through the woods. So, does it make sense to argue then that you should be able to walk through a big cat exhibit at the zoo without getting mauled? That's what you're suggesting you have a right to not expect when you get into a car with a strange man or go to a seedy bar in the wee hours of the morning. You're taking a walk through the tiger's cage and betting that he won't try to bite your head off.

The Java software market is a good example of why software patents are not needed. The only serious use of patents in the Java market is to add teeth to the enforcement of the Java trademark. The end result is a market for application servers, with a few dozen vendors, that was worth over $1.2B in 2004 and that shows signs of growing very prominent over the next several years as the demand for hosted applications continues to grow. Not only that, but there are several interchangeable versions of the Java platform available which has helped to foster the development of serious competition for control of the Java market.

The .NET market has not been so fortunate as the Java market. Microsoft has refused to open up the .NET platform to the same degree as Sun has, and while there is freedom to implement parts of the base specifications, the legal status of any alternative implementation is in limbo because Microsoft won't commit to the same open licensing of its patents for .NET that Sun has for Java. There is no ".NET Community Process" that can provide the same sort of assurance that the Java Community Process can provide. One of the benefits of the JCP has been that it has provided a few major corporations with sufficient incentive to write their own Java implementations that a credible open source implementation was not even started until recently whereas no on has hitherto dared to develop a commercial .NET reimplementation.

The very existance of these implementations is important because they provide the developers and users of Java and .NET with the assurance that they are not betting everything on just one vendor. Advocates of software patents almost always underestimate the importance of such multiple, non-patent-encumbered implementations to the success of a platform. Developing Java or .NET may be expensive, but for the actual developers and users who will make use of them, there is often even more to lose by tying an entire infrastructure to a technology that can only be provided by one vendor.

Lastly, consider this, you skeptics out there. Where would the market for Java application servers be today were it not for Apache Tomcat and JBoss providing high quality open source alternatives to the extremely expensive proprietary servers? This alone is a very good reason why software patents ought to go. Had Sun left other companies and open source groups in limbo on what they would do with their patents, few companies would have invested into the development of Java application servers. It was Sun's decision to not use their patents except as a mechanism to control the purity of the implementation of the Java platform that really got things going. Since Microsoft has not yet committed to allowing others to develop .NET runtimes that are fully compatible with theirs without licensing technology from them, the market for .NET products has been primarily limited to those who wanted to replace existing Microsoft-specific code rather than build a totally new market the way that Java has started.

Update: Correction, I realize now that I did not do enough research on the JCP patent licensing issues. I admit that I was wrong about that. I think my original point, that the fact that Microsoft has not created a fair process for others to work within for .NET has been very much to its detriment compared to Java in terms of competing implementations.

PFF.

The whole CSX controversy involving Trent Lott should serve as a good reminder to conservatives and libertarians why the Republican Party is, at the end of the day, a party of fraud and deception. Anyone else getting sick of Trent's moaning about how the other forty some states that weren't affected by Katrina have some sort of karmic debt to Mississippi and Louisiana? On at least one occassion, the dishonorable senator has actually used the word "entitled" to describe the relationship between his state and the taxpayers in forty some sovereign states' bank accounts.

The very same welfare-entitlement mentality that conservatives scream about with the left is alive and well among the Republicans. I could understand and forgive him for demanding a zero percent interest loan from the Federal Reserve for the state, but no, he wants a redistribution of wealth. Dare we call it what it really is? It's nothing more than an emergency redistribution of wealth because Mississippi should have no problem passing an emergency reappropriation bill to divert funds from other services to this railroad. Are they so poor that they cannot raise taxes, have a referendum on a public bond? How about borrow one billion dollars from private banks like every other institution would have to if it didn't have insurance?

Let me be clear about one thing. I have the utmost pity for the people who lost everything in Katrina. Like many Americans, I donated food and other things to help them recover. What I deeply resent is the righteous indignation of Trent Lott who acts as though my state, the Commonwealth of Virginia, somehow mysteriously channeled the wrath of God on the revelers at Mardi Gras. Knowing what a corrupt cesspool Louisiana is, I can assure the dishonorable senator that we would have done a more effective job of handling such a powerful weapon, as Virginia as a fine military history. That's what I truly can't stand about this. The insinuation that we, the citizens of the other forty some states somehow owe them like we did something to them.

Out of principle the congressional delegations from the other states should slap down any appropriation for Mississippi. If you want our money, please ask and we'll help out. Come to us screaming about how we owe you and you can just dig into your own pockets for the money. Where I come from, we don't call that being a victim. We call it being an asshole.

Others:

Law Hawk.

ThoughtsOnline.

Since I stuck my neck out and challenged my fellow liberty-minded individuals about the social cost of implementing many libertarian policies up front, it's time to expand on this subject a little. Let's just come out and admit a sad truth about libertarianism: it often has an isolated, borderline sociopathic concept of freedom. Most people on some level reject this because on some level they recognize that there is a social cost to certain exercises of liberty. That is why I identify more with classical liberalism than the far more radical libertarianism.

It may seem counterintuitive first, but civic virtue and libertine values cannot coexist. The drug and easy sex culture in America have worked together with other factors to create a society where the average citizen no longer has the civic virtue to take up arms in their country's defense. Libertarians can shake their heads all they want, but history has shown this to be the case. The more hedonistic a society gets, the more freedom that the culture (as opposed to the state) tolerates, the less chance there is for civic virtue to flourish.

There is an equilibrium point, and we have gone past it on one end as badly as many societies have toward the collectivist end, where freedom is respected in a way that promotes an individual appreciation of a legitimate greater good. America has improved in some respects, but it is naive to say that America has become more liberal in any positive sense of the word. What passes for "anti-authority" rebelliousness today is lukewarm compared to the willingness to violently dismantle an abusive government that existed in the first generations of Americans. Part of this can be tied to the increasing dependency on the government, not the least of which being the disbanding of state militias in favor of a professional army. However, a lot of it came from the dismantling of traditional, societal morals and values.

The reason why I went so far as to say that our country is not ready for a return to liberty is that our culture has been so morally torn down that many of the prerequisites for sustaining liberty simply do not exist anymore. There can be no question as to whether or not the family has been fundamentally broken in the past few decades. A lot of libertarians foolishly call the "choice of family structures" a sign of increasing liberty, but the reality is that the family unit has always been a bulwark against powerful government. Why else would Karl Marx have considered the traditional family an enemy of Communism? The church and traditional "self-help organizations" that used to provide for the welfare of the poor and vulnerable have also collapsed in the past two to three generations since the introduction of a comprehensive welfare state.

I know that many libertarians consider it incredibly passe to suggest that Judao-Christian values are essential to a state of liberty, but there is an unfortunate truth to this. Religion is very important to the functioning of a free society because religious morality is immutable and can stand against those who say that "the times demand change." Consider the fact that the Bill of Rights only started to become ambiguous when the influence of religion started to fall away. There is an unfortunate truth that the more socially liberal the culture (as opposed to the state) has become, the more ambiguous and meaningless the Constitution has become.

Now I know that many libertarians would by now want to know how I propose to fix the system. It's a long process, and it would probably not be completed within my lifetime (and I'm only 22). I would propose the following constitutional amendments to start things off:

• A balanced budget amendment.
• A line item veto.
• An amendment to explicitly state that Congress cannot regulate anything inside of a state except where it directly relates to an enumerated power or is part of a purchase or barter that takes place between two states. Only retail sales on that one, not even production could be regulated.
• An amendment that states that the Bill of Rights cannot be regulate in any manner by Congress except where a citizen is attempting to use them to cause loss of life, injury or destruction to property that does not belong to him or her.
• An amendment that states that no citizen must ever obey an unconstitutional order or law, and that the members of Congress who supported it or the President (whoever handed it down) may be subjected to civil penalties if the enforcement of the law results in loss of life, liberty or property. The only exceptions allowed would be measures necessary to enforce basic discipline in the armed forces or to regulate the conduct of civilian employees in matters relating to due process of law or national security.
• An amendment that strips the President and Congress of all legal immunity from criminal prosecution, that retroactively subjects all officials to federal law and that allows the state governments to pursue criminal prosecution of such crimes in their own courts using federal law if the federal legal system is incapable of acting.

There need to be some major institutional reforms put into place that force the system to start constricting back into something manageable. From there, start with steep spending cuts and small business-friendly deregulations. After that, the process of incrementalism truly begins.

It must feel like treason to a lot of environmentalists to see some of the more prominent veterans of their movement coming out and saying that nuclear energy is, for the time being, the last, best hope for the environment. This wouldn't even be controversial if environmentalism wasn't a religion for many of its members. However, unlike real religions, which offer salvation or sensual pleasures, the best that environmentalism can offer is a clean wildlife preserve and a smug sense of self-satisfaction. Neither of those happen to be the sort of thing that causes one to die for one's beliefs or to take truly principled stands such as riding a bicycle 30 miles each way to work everday in order to not increase CO₂ levels.

Nuclear energy is a marvelous thing for the environment. It's powerful, it's clean and it is a viable replacement for fossile fuels for America's energy needs. A critical reaction that devastates the environment is possible, but then the future of nuclear technology is with nuclear fusion power which cannot go chernobyl when the excrement hits the oscillating device. It's the best that can be hoped for because no one is going to tolerate major energy tax increases, and the public will most certainly go ballistic if the environmentalists try to revert us back to the 17^th or 18^th century's energy use levels. Simply put, no nuclear power, no green agenda.

Others:

Instapundit

Joe Carter's post on "Libertarian Paternalism," inadvertantly hits on something that is very missing among many libertarians, namely a recognition that while certain decisions may be not dangerous legally, they are not morally valid choices. Libertarians often fail to recognize the distinction between personally condemning someone's choices and condemning them with the force of law.

Some libertarians fail to recognize that it is immoral for a parent to be a substance abuser because they have an inherenty duty to their children. Any criticism of the "individual sovereignty" of the parent to use drugs becomes a moralistic rant, even if no one may be actually proposing outlawing that behavior. They bristle at the very notion that a parent should be coerced by social pressure to give up liberty over their own body for the benefit of their children. The problem is that not all choices carry the same consequences and any durable philosophy must take social cost into consideration.

There should be no doubt that drug use, pornography use, alcohol use and all other consumption of vice carry a potential for moral corrosion in their users. Libertarians must find a way to simultaneously recognize that substance abuse can have a devastating moral consequence on other people, sometimes in ways that can all but ruin their lives, while advocating for a sensible, responsibility-based legalization program. And that's where a lot of it breaks down. Liberty cannot exist in a society where neither the government, nor private groups are able to or will to enforce personal responsibility.

If libertarians, and those ideologically aligned to them, are going to succeed in reforming the government, then the only choice will be to pass laws which force personal responsibility while decreasing the scope of government and law in people's lives. This is non-negotiable because this country has been stripped in the past few generations of many of the important checks and balances that used to provide a "defendable, sustainable liberty." The chaos that would be created without weaning society off of the government would be enough to permanently discredit our goals. In many respects, the United States is no readier culturally to accept a return to a classical liberal state than Iraq is to accept the system of government being imposed upon it.

The most effective way to ween the public off of the welfare-warfare state would be a policy of systematically cutting back on the tax and spend powers, coupled with a general push to rejuvenate civil liberties across the board in every area touched by the government. The government should go back to the approach of trusting the law-abiding parties and scale back its law enforcement to the basics: violent crimes against people and property crimes. We must have this baseline in place first before more radical experimentation such as the elimination of the marriage licensing laws, war on drugs, pornography and other issues can be resolved in a satisfactory manner.

Lastly, it is also worth noting that libertarians must be realistic and accept a "good enough" government; a point where they can be content with making no more progress. This is what will finally separate liberty-minded people from the utopian statists. There are some legitimate concerns that the socialists have had, and we ought to hear them out, though we disagree with their methods and most of their conclusions. Our goal should be to create a liberty-based society that is based on principle, but not ideology. The line there is very simple. It's time to stop when the social costs become so drastic that it is increasingly apparent that the idea is good on paper, but not feasible given the culture we are working with. There is always a future, but we cannot afford to delude ourselves anymore into thinking that it won't take just as long to de-socialize our country as it took the Fabian Socialists to socialize it.

Mark Call fairly politely responded to my request for Biblical evidence supporting his position that polygamy is not inherently immoral and against God's law... and I have to say that I am convinced now that he is correct. If it is not in scripture, then it's usually better to assume that God did not intend it to be that way. While I do believe that God is not fond of polygamy, the key issue is the intentions of the man who takes multiple wives. A good man, a man who intends to provide for all of his wives and isn't forcing them to live far less than they would if he married only one is not going to bring the wrath of God upon him because he is doing what is fundamentally right: caring for his wives.

Regardless of whether or not polygamy is compatible with the Bible's standard of marriage, the church ought to be highly skeptical of any man who wants to take more than one wife, especially today. I would personally never go to a church where men who wanted more than one wife went unchallenged by the elders and pastors. That, and the church ought to insist that any such man prove that he is capable of providing for all of his wives and children.

So, to put it bluntly, the Levirate law in my opinion is enough to settle the question when combined with the fact that nothing in the New Testament explicitly says that a man must not marry more than one woman. While I do think that Mark 10 shows a clear preference for monogamy, as that was God's original plan, I think that there is room for the church to bless a polygamous marriage if it is more or less sought for holy reasons.

Why are software patents so odious? It has nothing to do with the patent system itself. The patent system is a generally good system whose benefits typically outweigh any problems that it creates. The problem with software patents comes from a failure on the part of people who are outside of the realm of software development to realize that software design and sales do not operate according to the same rules as other products. Software, if anything, is the quintessential exception to the patent system for products because the relationship that software has to hardware and between buyer and seller does not exist in pharmaceuticals and other patent-dependent industries.

Software development rarely sees the labor and capital-intensive research that is done in industries like the pharmaceutical industry. Not only that, but the cost of entry into the market is ridiculously low compared to other engineering disciplines. Combine that with the fact that the useful life of a significant amount of software is only a few years, and it quickly becomes obvious that the patent system as is presents fundamental problems for technological innovation. A patent that would be fair and justified for a drug company would be outrageous for Microsoft, Apple, IBM or Oracle to receive. Take, for instance, the patents that Microsoft has on its file formats. Each revision of the file formats, and they are usually non-trivial modifications, is only in mainstream use for a few years. Microsoft Office 2003 uses different file formats than Office 2000. What technological and economic good does it do to make competitors beg and plead to Microsoft for licensing rights to implement compatibility with versions of Office that are no longer in mainstream use? None.

Open standards are what drove the development of the computer industry and reduced the cost of IT. Were it not for the Linux/Windows-based PC with a x86 processor, the average cost of a decent computer would not be $500-$1000 the way it is today, but rather it would be closing in on $2,000 the way it was in the mid 1990s. The more unencumbered standards are, the lower the cost of entry is into the market. In fact, the fatal flaw of the argument that standards should be owned and licensed out, is that a company like Microsoft has no reason to license interoperability patents at reasonable costs. The world that software patent supporters would create is one in which a customer's data can be legally held hostage by one vendor because another vendor cannot provide a means for the customer to shift their data to a new format without their current vendor's permission. This presents, obviously, a fundamental intellectual property conflict. The copyright holder cannot easily and legally control their copyrighted data's digital representation without the permission of a patent holder.

I think a lot of the confusion over and support of software patents comes from a fundamental ignorance about software development on the part of the attorneys and businessmen who support them. File formats, network protocols and other patentable computer concepts are not analogous to physical products, rather they are a way of representing a conversation between programs or a quantity of data. What should be patentable, if anything, is not Microsoft's file formats, but the algorithm that they use to generate them, and that's another area where there is confusion. Two algorithms may independently implement the same thing.

I have been in the past called out on Vox's blog for "adding to the burden" before because I support the church's ban on polygamy. The people who tend to think this way cite Abraham, Hosea, Solomon, David and others as examples of God tolerating polygamy, but there is something very dangerous in relying on the standards of the Old Testament. Yes, as Mark Call pointed out, the Old Testament law does accommodate polygamists, but the New Testament is pretty clear that those who choose to live under the letter, and not the spirit, of the law will be judged by the letter and not the spirit of the law. For me, that is where the religious arguments fall apart.

Jesus makes it quite clear that God is very passionate about his hatred of divorce. Not only that, but God clearly considers sexual intimacy in marriage to be an act which binds a man to his wife until death. It is a "signing" of the marital contract in God's eyes. Jesus comes out with some pretty harsh words toward those who do not take marriage seriously, and his words lend greater support to a divine disgust toward polygamy, not an acceptance of it.

As always, the sword cuts both ways. The doctrine of grace allows the sinner to be imperfect and get into heaven without works, but it requires that one not have a lawyer's mindset toward the law. Every religious defender of polygamy on Vox's blog knows that the other side to grace is that God expects a man to be happy with one wife. There is no reason why a man should need more than one woman in order to be happy and to have his needs met. Anything beyond that one woman is based on a sinful desire, and that's the flip side of grace coming into play. God can turn it right back around and say that even though you did what was technically right by getting a second wife, not a sex partner, you are still commiting adultery. If a man can become an adulterer by simply lusting, then how much worse is it for a man to defile his relationship with his first wife by dividing his duties and love?

That brings me to the final point. A man cannot have two masters, and the relationship shown in Ephesians 5 is one of a man not splitting his attention between his wife and other women. It's easier to understand if you accept another Biblical truth: Jesus did not die for the sins of everyone, but rather he died only for the elect. Who the elect are, and how they came to be chosen, is a perfectly legitimate discussion, but there is nothing to show that Christ paid the price for every human being's sin. As such, it is important to realize that Christ's death was specifically for the elect that would form the church and that that was the only group intended to be the recipient of salvific grace by God. Christ did not divide his effort, it all went to the elect.

Difster

I told Difster that I would be more than happy to add my two cents into the fight over whether or not polygamy should be legalized, and so here's my opinion on it. I think that legalized polygamy is a very stupid idea because the arguments used in favor of allowing people to enter into this type of "contractual relationship" rest on the assumption that people are rational. Not only that, but if it goes wrong, and it very easily could, the consequences would be born by those who do not make use of it. Before I continue, while I may call myself a libertarian for the sake of clarity for most people, I consider myself to be far more of a classical liberal.

Being an engineer by trade, I am wont to prevent basic problems from occuring. While there may be some major logical flaws in the article that Difster, Vox and the legions of faux-alpha males who salivate at the concept of a rotating selection of female companionship every night, attack, I think that some of the premises are very seriously worth considering.

It is a basic truth of politics that there is little empirical truth in politics. For those of you knew to the engineering/hard science mockery of the "social sciences," the fact that there are few discernable laws of human behavior is proof to us that attempting to go "aha!" and point to sources of potential causality in politics is inherently subjective. No one can actually prove why a society becomes authoritarian and decadent. There is no law, but one can look at correlation and realize that overlapping characteristics imply that social factors may tear down on a culture of freedom.

Let's face it, polygamy is a decadent lifestyle and as such is not in line with the spirit of God's law, nor is it conducive to civic virtue. We cannot draw any laws of what makes a society free because every free society has risen up from different circumstances, hence why imposed freedom collapses in typically less than a generation. It is not possible to say that polygamy is in fact a direct source of fodder for tyranny, but it is also not possible to say that limited government is inherently a cause of a free society. America has never beena "free society" by libertarian standards, and in fact was quite authoritarian when slavery was legal. It just... dependend on whose view you take and that's the problem. Libertarians typically try to apply the same standards to all without realizing that not all interests are the same.

In the idealized libertarian society, the potential body of several million American men who could literally not have a shot at marriage would not act "irrationally" by engaging in violence. Surprise, surprise, the libertarian assumption that human beings are essentially rational beings is false and doesn't play out in the real world. Wars are started by countries that have every reason to not engage in them out of simple, stupid pride.

The "reductio ad economics" of libertarianism misses the fundamental truth that a society where 1% of the richest men practiced polygamy and acquired a modest 5% of the female population, they would create a significant number of men who could not get married to American women. So, in comes the swarms of foreign women. Theoretically. The truth is, and this is again something that the chest-beating faux alphas (Vox being perhaps the only real one to weigh in on this) fail to appreciate the significance of. Most men are not inclined to go to a foreign country where the opportunities are fewer, the culture is strange and the women an unknown. As Vox noted, our ancestors were pioneers, but they were not pioneers for pussy. You can laugh at them and deride them, but that doesn't change the fact that they will exist in droves and will constitute a large potential problem. Not only that, but let's be quite clear about something here. This won't magically hit the dregs of society, but cross along most class lines.

So now you have a potential several million men stuck into a nearly guaranteed culture of nihilism and risk-taking. Invariably the ones to lose out will be the young men, not the older, more established men. The very men who need to have a culture that supports them and gives them a reason to wage war in its defense may literally never be able to find a wife until they are much older due to an artificially-created gender imbalance. Young men without the civilizing impact of young women to love and marry are men who are going to have a harder time seeing why their society is worth fighting for, and the rich men who have dozens of trophy wives will provide them grounds to be cynics. Anyone want to bet that Hugh Hefner wouldn't or couldn't take fifty or more wives if allowed?

The rich would be the primary beneficiaries of polygamy, and any smart person would question whether allowing them that luxury, at the potential cost of creating a damaging rift in the gender ratio is worth it. The rich are typically the last to defend their country and community with arms and just as quick as the poorest to turn to the government for protection. Again, correllation is not causation, but the fact that all polygamist societies have been authoritarian should show that authoritarianism is generally a fact of life that coexists with polygamy. Limited governments and free societies cannot exist in countries wracked by violence and crime.

As for Vox's ridiculous attempts at debunking people on religious grounds, what a joke. It requires a monumental degree of sophistry to argue that "become one flesh" is more about simple sexual intercourse than a spiritual union that starts 1:1 and ends in just 1. Yes, Vox, I am calling you a sophist about this. I find it curious that a man who can understand the second amendment doesn't mean anything more than it says finds so much grounds for finding hidden meaning in this part of the Bible. In fact, the actual verses in question suggest, along with the context provided, that this is a rather permanent (until death severes the union) union.

*Sigh* As I said, I consider legalized polygamy a very stupid plan, but I just don't care enough anymore to oppose it. If America wants to experiment in the name of libertin^H^H^Hy, then fine by me. We'll see large numbers of "lost boys" being created and libertarians will just pat themselves on the back saying that it's cruel, but what can you do? Apparently nothing because any preventative measure is social engineering. I give up, y'all can have your way, I won't even say "I told you so" when legalized polygamy causes social problems. I'll be too busy laughing my ass off at the polygamists who will find out that the most Nietzschean son of a bitch on the block is the "law of what goes around, comes around." Mark my words, the very people who will practice polygamy will typically be the very people (like the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints) who should not even be married to one woman at all.

Friends, Americans, countrymen, don't click that tv remote or change the URL. We have a dire problem with our republic today, and that problem is the ruling class of this country. Republican, Democrat, both of you are responsible for the problems we face so put your fingers down and stop glaring at one another. You are the two wolves who have been fighting over the corpse of the lamb (our republic) that has been roasting and burning over the open fire. The time to take responsibility is now.

There is something terribly wrong with this country, and it is deep inside millions of Americans who value the immediate illusion of victory over the hard process of actually addresing the problems that plague America. Do you really believe that your favored wing of the bifactional ruling party is morally better or more competent than the other? To hell with both, I say!

Millions of people who we cannot identify have crowded into our country, have taken jobs from poorer Americans and the rich have grown richer on the backs of this criminal conduct. They redistribute wealth in the form of earmarks and favoritist regulation. They steal away our liberties in the name of fighting terrorists, all the while not even trying to limit these intrusions to only the most dire of circumstances. Our government is spending like a crack-addicted whore with a stack of stolen credit cards taken from a private session with a Fortune 100 board of directors.

And we, as voters, are that board of directors! There is no thought put into legislation or appropriations anymore. The methodology is barely dissimilar to throwing darts at a dartboard with random words attached to it. The Congress and President can find $524B of their children and grandchildren's future earnings to give socialized prescription pill plans to elderly people who don't even want them, but cannot find $100M for 10,000 new border patrol agents to control the tide of illegal immigration.

America has no leadership. It is time to face up to that fact. In today's media-dominated election process, we choose the people who will handle everything from the budget to our military's nuclear arsenal the same way that we choose the next American Idol. It's not cool to elect leaders who are ethical, intelligent, educated and respect limits. They don't "feel" for the people or they don't "understand moral issues" that have nothing to do with their jurisdiction. What good is a President who calls for a "racial dialogue" or who fervently attacks gay marriage if he won't even protect the borders and demand fiscal responsibility from Congress?

That's why I look at the stuffed-silly Americans whose jaws draws drop to the floor as they see millions of illegals demand political participation in shock and horror and say, people, you did this to yourselves. You did it to yourselves by being more concerned with having delivery pizza every week and a big SUV under Clinton and you were too busy pissing in your pants under Bush, begging him to fight this mean old terrorists, to demand some accountability on the prime directives of government from either of them. When you chose to hand over your vote to the ruling class and its minions who run the Republicratic oligarchy, you chose this fate for our republic.

It's time to retire that elitist propaganda that illegals "only do the jobs that Americans won't do." What jobs are those? I didn't know that Americans were unwilling to:

• Work at Wal-Mart
• Do construction and other work for the Army
• Do contract work for the Air Force
• Do construction work for Wal-Mart
• Work as contractors at power plants and refineries
• Teach Spanish

Add to those numbers, the workers who actually work registers, stocking and other positions in Wal-Mart and other retailers. Factor in the illegal immigrants who work in food services such as catering here in Northern Virginia, gas stations, fast food and pretty soon it becomes obvious that there are few immigrants who do jobs that Americans won't do at fair rates of compensation.

Others on immigration:

• Volokh Conspiracy
• Michelle Malkin
• California Conservative

Who said that the Italian government never gets it right?

Italy passed a terrorism law after the July 7 subway bombings in London that opened the way for intelligence agencies to eavesdrop if an attack is feared imminent. Only approval from a prosecutor - not a judge - is required, but the material gleaned cannot be used as evidence in court.

Here's a little thought for you. If the CIA and NSA both agree that some foreigner is a terrorist, chances are very good, they are indeed a terrorist. Why would men like the 9-11 hijackers, if caught, need a trial? Hand them over the CIA for "processing" and be done with it. The only way to give them a trial would be to risk the civil liberties of the citizenry, and quite frankly, I see no reason to sacrifice our liberty for their faux due process of law. And let's be honest, with the kind of security constraints that would have to be imposed to keep half of the sources of evidence safe, it'd hardly meet constitutional standards.

This is what passes for social science these days:

After playing the games, study participants watched a scenario in which a teacher tells a class he suspects some students have cheated in a test.

The teacher says he is very disappointed in those who have cheated but proud of those who did well.

The teacher then asks to see "Billy" after class.

The study participants wer