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."

Once again, IPCentral's James DeLong argues that we need to regulate the market to liberate it and make it work. This bill has no business mandating technological measures because as the copyright holders, the record labels can choose who to license their works to. What's that? It's a burden on the poor record labels to have to find out what sort of protection their works would enjoy as they are streamed across the network? Why it's simply obscene that the onus should be on them, and not the software engineers who write the streaming media software, to ensure that they are streaming their music securely.

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.

They are free to pack up their bags and leave at anytime. Isn't that what IPCentral has been arguing they would do without DRM? Or is it that in the real world they cannot do that because without that money, they would be one step closer to not being able to operate their business?

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.

We always knew that you couldn't rely on the mainstream media for accurate reporting, but the Trademark Dilution Revision Act of 2006 is a good example of why you can't always believe everything you see in the blogosphere either. I'm certainly not blaming TechDirt for overreacting to the "threat" posed by the Trademark Dilution Revision Act of 2006 (HR 683) because I fell into the same trap myself of taking Editor & Publisher seriously without doing any independent fact checking. However, I just read the text of the bill that was passed according to GovTrack, and the reality is that the bill exempts from litigation everything that was said to be subjected to litigiation by Editor & Publisher.

(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.

Now, compare that to what Editor & Publisher claimed would be the effect of this bill:

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.

That is a far cry from what the bill actually stipulates. We can debate the merits of the bill on other fronts, but I am not sure why this bill was actually such a big deal. Maybe a Senate version actually contains these dreaded provisions, but the house bill category rejects those in favor of maintaining the pro-free speech status quo.

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?"

I'm not going to debate whether or not they should be able to protect their product, but I find it ludicrous that in this day and age of cheap digital technology that a studio is paying $200 million for a movie. The Lord of the Rings trilogy cost $300 million to produce. Three movies that together brought in literally ten times the amount of money that it cost to produce them cost only ²/₃ of what it took to make 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.

I know what some conservatives are thinking about this. "Kids have no right to privacy in school." True to a point, but the government is forcing most of these kids to go there because their parents don't have the money to send their kids to a private school. The government says sure, you can send your kids to a school where they won't be subjected to this treatment, but you'll have to not only pay your taxes to support our school, but pay probably at least $10,000 a semester more to send them to a good private school. It's like the right to freedom of speech in the PRC these days. It looks great on paper, until you read the fine print at the end of the PRC's constitution and legal code.

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.

Yes, if you are one of those bloggers out there who likes to reproduce just about the entire article from a MSM source, his proposal would kick your ass six ways across the gulag archipelago and back. The courts very well might actually defer to Congressional authority on this one, so don't take it too lightly because the only thing that is going to be all but guaranteed to save people from this is a sympathetic jury.

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.

In other words if you write I spilled some Coke on my Dell Inspiron, you are now a three strikes offender. How do you like them apples?

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 or for 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."

Anyone having any doubts now as to how badly broken the system really is? It treats a man who had sex with a girl who was nearly sixteen the same as a man who raped a small child. Oh sure, it didn't give them the exact same sentence, but it exposed both of them to society with a big "Sex Offender" tatoo on their foreheads as though the two were morally the same. There is something dispicable about a legal system that regards the former as being so dangerous that he has to carry around a crippling stigma that could potentially get him murdered.

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.

Others on software patents:

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.

That's precisely what this country needs. By making it impossible to use the evidence collected using the anti-terrorist laws as court evidence, the anti-terrorism agencies would be able to do their jobs without creating a real worry that we're becoming a police state. Of course, the fact that we prefer to selectively try and sentence terrorists as criminals, rather than dispose of them as foreign combatants, and in the process not muck up our criminal justice system, is why we are having this problem in the first place.

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 were told to imagine themselves as Billy, and were asked how likely it was that the teacher was going to accuse them of cheating.

You see? This is the crap that passes for a psychological study, especially one that has anything to do with video gamers. Why would anyone in that position not assume that they are going to be singled out as a cheater? Think about this one for a second if it doesn't come to you right away. Here are three variables that affect the whole thing, none of which have to do with video games:

1. The teacher just got done making a big deal about cheaters.
2. The teacher made no indication that anyone was going to receive special attention for having done well, thus negating any logical assumption that there was a positive outcome.
3. The teacher singled out a student to stay after class after having done numbers one and two.

I don't think you have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why most young men would be concerned here, though I think being a real scientist or engineer might help "social scientists" figure this sort of thing out. Having known other guys who have been on the receiving end of some extremely raw deals in school, I can see how it'd be very easy to assume that nothing good could come of that.

I think that this is more of a female thing than a male thing. Women are more likely to be docile toward and trusting of authority figures. Since both "researchers" were women, it is safe to say that they probably started out with a more female bias toward the expected behavior. This isn't a hard science, so that's a factor here. So congratulations, ladies, you have finally empirically proven what many women have known for years: men tend to be rebellious and distrustful of authority figures.

Lee of Right-Thinking from the Left Coast asks his readers to list a single power that Bush has not claimed in his war on terrorism. So, I thought that I would list some of the things that Bush **has** claimed that he is inherently enabled to do.

• Declare a state of war exists. There is a difference between ordering rapid reaction forces to go to battle for the defense of the United States and claiming the full scope of war powers. As the Commander-In-Chief, the President has the authority to order the military to defend our country against attack, but does not have the authority to invoke full wartime powers without Congress declaring war. This usurpation is precisely where the bulk of the Bush Administration's problems on national security, civil liberties and the rule of law come from. Bush simply cannot believe that anyone would just not trust him to do whatever he feels is necessary to defend this country, even though he is often unwilling to do basic things like defend the borders.
• Order wiretapping without a court order. No one can deny that there isn't a clear and present need for the federal government to be able to wiretap conversations that it believes are related to terrorism. The problem here is that Bush doesn't believe that he should be accountable to the courts or Congress on this. Without a real legal process of handling these sorts of investigations, it is virtually impossible to contain excesses or abuses.
• Selectively suspend the writ of habeus corpus. Are you a terrorist in Bush's eyes? Well if you are, who is anyone to question Dear Leader on his infinite wisdom? This is one of the scariest usurpations of power. It's one thing to try a terrorist in secret, using a nearly Star Chamber approach for national security reasons, but to suspend the rule of law altogether, in a way that could affect American citizens, is unacceptable and treasonous.

The overlap between all of the national security issues involving the Bush Administration is the basic belief that they should not have to justify themselves to the public. Considering the number of times that they have rebuffed Congressional efforts to get to the bottom of some of their activities, I think it is pretty safe to say that Bush finds the Congress and courts to be mostly useless vestigal limbs of a bygone liberal republic.

Sometimes I think there really is something to be said about the link between a number of social conservatives and the Taliban or the counterparts in Saudi Arabia who stopped firefighters from letting little girls out of a burning building because they might not be properly dressed:

A new vaccine that protects against cervical cancer has set up a clash between health advocates who want to use the shots aggressively to prevent thousands of malignancies and social conservatives who say immunizing teen-agers could encourage sexual activity.

Although the vaccine will not become available until next year at the earliest, activists on both sides have begun maneuvering to influence how widely the immunizations will be employed.

Groups working to reduce the toll of the cancer are eagerly awaiting the vaccine and want it to become part of the standard roster of shots that children, especially girls, receive just before puberty.

Because the vaccine protects against a sexually transmitted virus, many conservatives oppose making it mandatory, citing fears that it could send a subtle message condoning sexual activity before marriage. Several leading groups that promote abstinence are meeting this week to formulate official policies on the vaccine.

These people would clearly rather that teenage girls risk getting cervical cancer later in life than have sex outside of marriage. You know why this is such utter bullshit? It's because HPV can be passed down from mother to child, and so a woman who is a virgin may get it from her virgin husband whose mom was infected with HPV and passed it onto him when her HPV lesions touched his naked skin during labor. It is a disease that is very easy for a virgin to get through no fault of their own, but hey, don't believe the medical profession on that one.

I'm convinced that most social conservatives today are nothing more than latter day Pharisees. They love the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law remains a complete mystery to them. Jesus had no problem with people breaking the sabbath to do good, and I fail to see what is inherently harmful or morally wrong about giving a vaccine for a STD which can be quite easily passed on through non-sinfull behavior. As Larry Elder pointed out in his book the 10 Things You Can't Say In America, the welfare reform package did more to curb teen pregnancy rates than any other effort, not the least of which being abstinence-only education. That is the right way to teach teens about sex, but it is not effective at preventing sex. Taking away the safety net and making teens responsible for their sexual conduct is the only way to make sure that they actually have a good reason to do what is right.

And we all know that expecting social conservatives to hold teens responsible for their conducts is as unlikely to happen as a race baiter like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson holding the inner city communities responsible for their crime and poverty problems.

The use of drugs has claimed many lives, but the War on Drugs has claimed many more lives. This is not an attempt to argue that drug use is moral, but rather to highlight the sheer volumes of people who have been injured, maimed or killed as a result of being caught between drug dealers and drug warriors. This is not even attack on law enforcement in general, but rather a sobre reminder that law enforcement has been sucked into a vortex of self-destruction through the tactics it has to use to enforce the drug laws. These tactics, tactics that would have been considered monstrous by those who won our independence, have corrupted many in law enforcement and turned a number of them into the very monsters they are charged with hunting.

The following exerpts are provided to help people looking for proof of that the no-knock raids, the use of unreliable and secret informants and the militarized tactics of drug officers has indeed taken a very high toll on many good Americans. Unlike some, I will do my very best to screen out suspect cases and to focus instead on ones where there is a clear sign to those who are willing to see it, that innocent, normal, law-abiding citizens are often victimized by the tactics that have become acceptable for law enforcement to routinely use in fighting the "War on Drugs."

• The El Monte Police Department has no evidence that anyone in the family of Mario Paz--a 65-year-old man fatally shot in the back by an El Monte officer during a search of his home Aug. 9--was involved in drug trafficking, nor did officers when they shot their way into the house in the nighttime raid, a senior police official said. Source.
• Once inside the apartment, the police handcuffed Spruill and then realized they had raided the wrong place. The layout was not the same as given by the informant. After at first refusing medical care, Spruill, who had a heart condition, subsequently went into cardiac arrest on the way to Harlem Hospital where she died later that morning. Source.
• "It was the wrong house," Beshears said. "The house was totally dark and the TACT members went through to the bedroom looking for the suspects." A man and a woman - both in their 80s - were injured as TACT team members secured the house although no drugs were found. There were children in the house also, but they were not awakened, Beshears said. Source.
• The second part of the series discusses the U.S. Postal Service, which has had a number of scandals involving informants in the past several years. In the last part, Curriden reveals new information about the case of Donald Carlson, a 41-year-old businessman who was severely injured when police raided his San Diego home. Police were acting on a bogus tip from an unreliable informant that Carlson was involved in a cocaine smuggling ring. Source.
• They had gone to Scheper�s house as part of a drug investigation, according to the Statement of Probable Cause filed in court as part of the case against Scheper. Scheper says the detectives were looking for a housemate he had evicted some three weeks before, who in turn was connected to a man they had arrested. Police officers stayed in Scheper�s house for hours and left three empty pizza boxes there after turning the place upside-down, according to photos that Scheper says were taken just afterward. Scheper, a welder who often works 12 hours per day making sets and props for movie production companies, had no drugs other than some prescription pills. He had nothing illegal at all. He had no prior police record.Source.
• Bibb County District Attorney Howard Simms said he would seek the death penalty against Antron Dawayne Fair, 21, and Damon Antwon Jolly, 20, who are accused of firing shots at Whitehead. Also indicted on murder charges in the case were Cynthia Greene, 20, Thomas Mason Porter Jr., 22, and Hassan Shirell Harclerode, 26, police said. Harclerode wasn't at the home at the time of the shooting, but he was charged because, as the home's renter, he was responsible for activities there, authorities have said. Earlier, Simms had suggested that he would try to seek the death penalty against all five. But he said Tuesday that in order to do so, Harclerode, Porter and Greene would have to have had prior knowledge or participated directly in the killing. Source.
• David Laing says police overstepped the law when they stopped his car, decided he was driving under the influence of marijuana, and searched his vehicle and two-year-old son. Under Canadian law, that kind of search is illegal. What upset Laing even more is that some the officers he tangled with were actually American police officers. Source.
• April 2, 2004 -- An 84-year-old Brooklyn man says he and his wife - who uses a walker - were terrorized by cops who invaded the wrong apartment looking for a drug dealer. As a result of their terrifying two-hour ordeal, Martin Goldberg said he has facial bruises and his 82-year-old wife, Leona, is in the hospital with an irregular heartbeat. NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said the cops went to the right apartment in the wrong building of the Sheepshead Nostrand Houses in Sheepshead Bay. "The Internal Affairs Bureau is investigating this regrettable mistake to determine why required safeguards were neglected," he said. Source.

Police Corruption

• TROUP, Texas -- It happened without warning. The FBI swooped in, shut down Troup's five-man police force, and jailed the chief and a sergeant--the 2005 Chamber of Commerce officer of the year, no less--on charges of corruption. Startled residents watched in silence as authorities secured the tiny station with yellow crime-scene tape and swarmed the building for evidence. Source.
• A Quincy woman who tried to board a plane at Logan International Airport in February with $46,950 stuffed inside her bra says she was heading to Texas for plastic surgery on her buttocks and breast. Article Tools But, in a lawsuit filed yesterday, Ileana Valdez said a male Drug Enforcement Administration agent told her she had a ''nice body" and didn't need any surgery -- then seized the cash, claiming it was drug money. Source. Why is this case believable? It's because the government looks badly on people carrying large amounts of cash with them. In most countries around the world, credit cards are not very common, and cash is the preferred method of payment. Since this woman is originally from the Dominican Republic, it is very likely that she saw nothing wrong with it. Why was it in her bra, you might ask? Drug agents are allowed to seize large amounts of cash that someone carry on them in and out of the country, and many people who like to carry cash are afraid that if they encounter law enforcement with large amounts of cash, that they will be automatically suspected of being drug dealers. As the article notes, federal property forfeiture laws allow drug agents to seize cash that is even suspected, but not proven, to be tied to drug crimes.
• The Volusia County Sheriff's Office has launched an investigation after discovering about $500,000 worth of cocaine and marijuana missing from the agency's evidence compound, according to Local 6 News. Officials said Monday that the investigation into the missing drugs began two weeks ago and has now expanded into a federal criminal probe conducted by the U.S. Attorney�s Office. Volusia Sheriff Ben Johnson has ordered a complete audit of every piece of evidence in the department's inventory, according to a release. Source.
• A 27-year-old man caught with a kilo of white powder failed to convince police and a judge that he was clean, and was jailed in connection with a major amphetamines bust - for carrying flour.The arrest was billed as the biggest amphetamines bust of the year in Sunnmore and police wanted their catch held while they went after suppliers higher up the crime chain. The prosecutor and judge both trusted the police assessment implicitly. Source.

Misc. Government Problems

• GILLETTE -- A booster club's tie-dyed T-shirt that reads "We can take a hit" has caused a stir at Campbell County High School. The shirt was designed for the football season by members of the Madd Dog club, a group of seniors who display school spirit at games. Some school officials say "take a hit" refers to marijuana use. They have banned the shirts at school and all related games and functions. Source.
• Dr Salvatore Culosi Jr had come out of his townhouse to meet an undercover policeman when he was shot through the chest by a Special Weapons and Tactics force. It was about 2135 on a chilly January evening. The 37-year-old optometrist was unarmed, he had no history of violence and displayed no threatening behaviour. But he had been under investigation for illegal gambling and in line with a local police policy on "organised crime" raids, the heavily armed team was there to serve a search warrant. Source.

Ann Althouse seems to miss Matt Welch's point:

People blog for lots of different reasons, and blogging is still burgeoning and developing. Don't cave into nostalgia for a Golden Age, especially one that got its golden glow from the horror that was 9/11. Things were bound to change and shake around, and some bloggers that you liked then may put you off now. But there are always a million new bloggers, and blogging is a beautifully fruitful format. The great power of blogging is the way it releases the creativity of the individual mind. That sense of not being able to predict your own opinions and observations -- that feeling of writing to discover your own ideas and interests -- is the great intrinsic value of blogging. There will always be millions of individuals blogging for the sheer joy of self-expression. Find them.

Everything that Ann says here is true, but that's not the point that Matt was trying to make. Blogging has been made out to be the heir apparent to the mainstream media, and yet there is little evidence to show that it is a bonafide alternative. There is an almost ideological attachment to attacking the mainstream media that fails to perform the much needed introspection that is required for it to become a meaningful alternative to what is effectively a very decrepit profession in many respects these days.

Many bloggers, unfortunately many of them being more popular bloggers, have shown themselvest o have very defective b.s. meters when it comes ot their own. Anyone who followed the controversy that Vox Day created on his blog and WorldNetDaily column with Michelle Malkin, where he systematically tore her arguments apart, and even caught her in a moment of desperation to avoid a direct debate with him, knows that this is the case. Most of her critics would not expect better of her, were she not such a rabble rouser about blogging and so critical of the mainstream media for their problems, many of which she shares with them.

Those of us who have kept a cynical eye toward blogging have always seen it for what it is: the lazy man's website maintainence tool. Blogging is so effective primarily because it makes hosting a basic website and doing things with it accessible to the common person. The real revolution with blogging has never been the political aspect, but the technical one. Indeed, political blogging has in a very short period of time become as elitist as the older publications when it comes to the cliques and cross-referencing. There is nothing wrong with this, but let's be perfectly clear about the fact that the same old habits have reared their ugly heads in political blogging too.

Matt is right for focusing on what has amounted to a major failure on the part of political blogging to be heads and shoulders above the alternative. Too many of the major political blogs are run-of-the-mill Republican/Democrat or conservative/liberal, and too few are prone to actually cut deep through party lines to make a straight line for the truth or principle. As foul-mouthed as he can be, I have to give major props to the few like Lee from Right Thinking from the Left Coast, that have large blogs and that really know how to call b.s. out when they see it and value principle above readers. There are too many who sound like Rush Limbaugh or Al Frankin clones for there to be anything particularly revolutionary or exciting about political blogging.

As loathe as I am to admit it, but LiveJournal, Xanga, MySpace and other community sites that enable the average person to publish online are a bigger deal than all of the "A-List" political blogs combined. The humiliation of Dan Rather is not even worthy of a foot note in history compared to the creation of several million new publishers of content. That's several million more people who have good reason to care about what happens to their rights online. It might be one of the few trends that sparks a rebirth of active civic participation and awareness of how precious freedom really is the next time professional politicians ask for liberty to be sliced and diced a little more.

The illegal immigration problem is perhaps the single greatest problem facing libertarians today. It is the one issue that threatens to distance the public in a fundamental way from our cause, to a degree that the terrorism issue never could except in the most dire of situations. It is time for libertarians to accept reality and admit the truth. The majority of us have been very, very wrong about the practical, moral and intellectual problems facing an open borders policy.

There is an inherent hypocrisy in claiming to be the true supporters of "individual sovereingty" while self-righteously denouncing a collective exercise of this right. There is no moral difference between a man guarding the entrance to his house and a nation guarding its borders, which is why any rational person would call many libertarians' alleged support for the right of self-defense and freedom of association into question. It would be very justified because any argument that can be used to suggest that a nation has no right to restrict foreigners' access to its borders, can be easily carried down to the level of suggesting that no one has a right to limit access to the borders of their property.

There is a very real need to police the immigration into the United States, and to restrict it to those who would come here with the right intentions. This is not a violation of anyone's rights. One of the most basic assumptions in government is that the government is empowered to secure the territory that it was created to protect from those that are unknown to it. It is up to the immigrant to prove his or her worthiness to be here, not up to the government to justify to the immigrant why it is protecting the borders it is responsible for.

Libertarians have asked society to abdicate all control over the flow of immigrants, while accepting the risks that come with usually having no idea who an immigrant is or where they come from. That is a loophole in the government's ability to execute the responsibilities it was created for, that is so big a foreign terrorist group could drive a carbomb through. Threats to public safety from terrorism, though real and over-hyped, are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the very real crime problems that have come from having a de facto open border policy for over a decade. As the system of law enforcement along the border has collapsed, and has thus been unable to prevent the undesirable elements from entering our country, a wave of illegal immigrant crime has begun to hit our country.

With as many as one third of all criminals in some jurisidictions being illegal immigrants, it is safe to say that there is in fact a clear and present state interest in preventing illegal immigrants from entering the country. Ayn Rand once posited that a state needs to make criminals in order to justify its existance, and that is true to an extent, but the illegal immigrant population from south of the border seems to be providing no shortage of violent crime to keep law enforcement in business. Illegal immigration, and the waves of criminals it brings, is every bit as big of an obstacle to the return to small government and the demilitarization of law enforcement as the War on Drugs.

As transnational gangs of illegal immigrants such as MS-13 continue to grow in scope, brutality and willingness to unleash violence in America's cities, the government will be increasingly pressured to act. This is the moment where libertarians can modestly acquiesce to reality's demands, learn from history and prevent it from repeating itself or immolate principle in the burning bodies of cars, buildings and freedom. A general increase in crime, unlike terrorism, has a corrosive impact on society's ability to live safely enough to desire freedom.

It is one thing to stand defiant in the face of an Al Qaeda attack, but it is quite another to deal with the hum drum of daily life in an increasingly crime-ridden country where nothing is certain, and victimization is increasingly probable. That is something that wears at the soul and is a powerful motivation for a society to empower its government to do whatever is necessary to fix the problems it faces. It should go without saying that if a government loses control over its immigrants, and consequently loses control over their criminal conduct, that the results for society would be terrible. What we face today as a nation, thanks to our de fact open borders policy, is a situation in which our government has lost civil control and may end up resorting to activating its war powers to contain those problems.

The problem with an open borders policy should not be confused with immigration in general. Immigration is good for this country, and the H1-B visa program, as loathe as many of us in IT are to admit it, is not the problem it is made out to be. If anything, it has empowered our country at the expense of other countries, which is clearly in our national interests. The irredeemable flaw with an open borders policy is that it is ultimately unenforceable and thus undermines the ability of the government to carry out its primary duty to its citizens and legal immigrants without resorting to authoritarian means. One need only look to the immigration rallies, with their calls for Americans of all races, especially white Americans, to leave the continent to realize that if something is not done now, there will be dark days ahead for those who want a peaceful, liberal government.

"I'll just say this about the so-called porkbusters. I'm getting damn tired of hearing from them. They have been nothing but trouble ever since Katrina. We in Mississippi have not asked for more than we deserve. We've been very reasonable."

Trent "Spends A" Lott wants to tear down a recent federally subsidized railroad, only to replace it with a federally subsidized highway. If that's not pork barrel spending, I don't know what is. So what if your state got hit by Katrina? Where is it written that every other state in the Union has some magical obligation to give you what you want, when you want it without any griping?

But hey, we need a solid Republican majority because the Democrats are so much worse than the Republicans at wasteful spending. We'd look like Sweden if the Democrats were in office, rather than a mere crack addicted stripper with a stack of stolen credit cards!

But wait, Reason makes a valid case for why Duke Cunningham was really no worse than Lott:

Craig and Simpson clearly think defying the Constitution to buy votes with taxpayers' money is better than taking bribes to steer military contracts toward certain companies, the offense for which Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.) got an eight-year prison term. I'm not so sure. After all, Cunningham's favoritism did help create jobs in his district, and at least national defense is a legitimate function of the federal government.

Cunningham was sent to the pokey for funneling money to those who had paid him off, that's true, but the difference is that no one can actually deny that the U.S. Constitution actually technically allows pork barrel spending on defense projects, unlike intrastate transportation. I'm not going to apologize for Cunningham, but he really is no worse than Trent Lott. The fact that he accepted a bribe is a minor issue when compared to the fact that he was engaged in pork barrel spending. I'll take a regular scumbag who knows the Constitution and legislates accordingly over an honest politician who doesn't give a damn about what it says is his or her legitimate power to legislate and allocate funds.

The deck of cards is increasingly in danger of collapse. It's really starting to suck to be a conservative stuck in the unfortunate position of having to defend the Republicans, isn't it? People are now starting to see the truth that the Republicans have grown rotten to their very core, just like the Democrats, and that there is no real choice anymore. Keep telling yourselves that the Republicans are better than the Democrats. In another four to six years, that'll be like trying to convince someone that ecstasy is bad for you, but it sure beats the hell out of crack.

Others:

Six Meat Buffet

Captain's Quarters

Michelle Malkin

Great cartoon lampooning Trent over this

Right Wing News

I used to be a de facto atheist. Sure, I called myself an agnostic, but I had no reason to believe that there really was anything there. Yet, I have never had a commitment to materialism as an ideology. That's what separates the rational rationalist from the irrational rationalist. The former does not twist and contort himself when faced with a seemingly irrational explanation that is supported by an incredible amount of circumstantial evidence. If 100,000 people have a seemingly wacky experience at Fatima, Portugal, that's not necessary a sign that something was in the water. Only a fool would believe that that many strangers are either conspiring to deceive or coincidentally having nearly the exact same mass hallucination. There is no hallucinigenic that has the ability to cause such a focused phenomenon across so wide of a population.

This random musing came to me when I was thinking about how the materialist atheists are trying to "debunk" Jesus walking on water. Somehow Jesus apparently stood on a huge block of ice that he managed to surf out in the Mediterranen SeaSea of Galillee while convincing his disciples that he was just leisurely strolling toward them. There are three possibilities here: Jesus was one hell of a surfer and they didn't see his surf board, this event never happened or it did happen because he is the Son of God. Take your pick. An ancient Jewish man surfing a block of ice off the coast of an arid desert nearly two millennia before ice could be produced by humans is not a viable explanation. It is the sort of thing that passes for post-modernist creative writing, not a scientific explanation.

This is one of the reasons I ended up abandoning atheist-leaning agnosticism. I was quite frankly embarrassed by how far most of my fellow travelers would go to explain away the seemingly Lovecraftian great unknown. It's not a new color we've never seen! You're just hallucinating! Cthulhu doesn't exist, even though he's tearing the crew apart! There is a rational explanation for it all! The most rational being that you're not hallucinating, your brain is accurately receiving signals from its sensory organs and there is no materialistic explanation for what is happening right in front of you. I've seen spiritual beings before. I've felt their presence. Even as a near atheist I never discounted their existance because I had rational proof, albeit non-empirical evidence.

More:

Right Thinking From The Left Coast.

The FBI proves to its detractors that it has a long way to go before it has reached the level of power that the KGB had:

Perhaps that's why many of the basic principles of running a multimillion dollar, high-tech effort were ignored. The bureau didn't bother with an overall assessment of its technology needs. Instead, IT managers made assumptions about what Trilogy should contain. Simple requirements documents, meant to lay out the system's basic functions (like searching multiple phrases at once), became detailed descriptions of logos and look-and-feel. Commercial software was eschewed in favor of complicated, hand-coded alternatives.

Eventually, the FBI got its hardware: new PCs and some higher-speed network connections (although a Congressional report would eventually uncover $10 million in questionable contractor payments and $7 million in missing gear). But Trilogy's software component-Virtual Case File, the system that was going to replace the old "green screen" investigation manager-never came to be. VCF was supposed to let agents import audio and video into its digital files, search all FBI databases simultaneously, and let approval forms be authorized online, instead of by hand or by fax. With a hyper-aggressive, 22-month schedule and a series of ever-shifting demands from the bureau, the contractors were never able to deliver.

Today, agents still struggle with the antiquated system VCF tried, and failed, to replace. According to current and former intelligence analysts throughout the government, the FBI's technological infrastructure is still decades behind that of other agencies.

Defense Tech throws some additional fuel on the fire with a host of good quotes by former FBI employees and people who worked in agencies with some similar responsibilities. By now, it should be clear that the FBI, far from being the poster child for what is good for law enforcement, is the epitome of what needs to be fixed in American law enforcement. The agency more closely resembles a confederation of feudal lords and their fiefs, than a modern federal agency with responsibility for some of the most important casework in the country.

It cannot be said enough that the FBI needs to clean house starting from the top and working its way down. Every RAC and SAC needs to be pushed into early retirement and strict orders guaranteeing field agents, forensic techs and IT workers the authority they need to get their jobs done without managerial nagging and obstruction need to be handed down by the Attorney General or the President.

There is one important thing missing from this analysis, however, and that's that the real problem is not from the FBI's "over-reliance on hand-coded software." Custom-written software often is more flexible than commercial off the shelf software (aka COTS in contractor circles). The reason that the FBI failed was that it did not balance the use of custom software with COTS. The latter is often the best foundation. You take commercial and open source toolkits ranging from the Java and .NET platforms to libraries such as Hibernate, Spring and Atlas and use them to build a custom platform that coherently glues them together. Hibernate, for example, is incredibly useful for abstracting away a significant amount of database-related operations as many businesses of all types are finding out. Hibernate's corporate sponsor JBoss in particular has found how useful it can be because they are using it as the basis for their EJB 3.0 implementation.

I have little doubt that if someone goes back and looks at the way that this system was implemented, that it will not be pretty obvious that a reliance on old methodologies, use of wildly inappropriate technology and most importantly, terribly bad management at the FBI, were the culprits for the IT meltdown at the FBI. The sickest part is that the "Virtual Case File system" sounds like something that a team of Java developers with a ten to twenty million dollar budget for Oracle and BEA WebLogic licenses and the ability to license search technology from Google could have done successfully in two or three years tops. Google already has image search capabilities and Microsoft (as well as others) have experience writing image-recognition algorithms. If the bureaucratic crap wasn't so stifling, this system probably wouldn't be that hard to put together. I'm not saying that to poo poo the skills of the teams involved, or that I could have done it perfectly, just that it's not exactly rocket science. It's precisely the sort of application that J2EE was designed for.

During DeLay's ten years as House majority whip and leader, his victories on welfare and tort reforms, the pro-life agenda, tax and spending cuts, and foreign and defense policies were a credit to his legislative mastery. The spending excesses of recent years turned some conservatives against him, but his unparalleled ability to enact their agenda will stand as his legacy. He has also done more than any other Republican to retain and expand the GOP majority in the House - most notably through a Texas redistricting that erased Democratic gerrymandering and added five Republicans to that state's delegation.

The National Review is clearly out of out touch with reality here. Any man who looks at the socialist spending policies that Bush put forward and then proceeds to say that there is no more pork to be cut is not in any way, shape or form a man whose principles lead him to limited government. That and his times with Jack Abramoff are a good reason for conservatives to throw away their support for the man. I hate to be the one to inject some common sense and ethics into the wannabe wonks' world, but there comes a point where people like him have to go.

The NRO crew should just be happy that so far there is little likelihood that he is going to get torn apart in a criminal court. If they think his resignation is bad for conservatives, just wait until the Abramoff scandal gets to the point where prosecutors have some real red meat to go after with congressional (and former congressional) republicans.

After chatting with Difster about this article from Reason, I would like to take the time to address some of the libertarian concerns here. Bear in mind that my personal philosophy is that principle must be tempered by reality, so some of this will deviate from the hypothetical libertarian stance that consenting adults should be free to do almost whatever they want.

I agree, in theory, that marriage should be defined by individuals and religious institutions, not the state, but unlike a lot of libertarians, I believe that we must be mindful of the law of unintended consequences. There are three major problems with polygamy that are raised by the Reason article, all three of which are very important considerations for libertarians formulating a stance on this issue.

The first issue is that polygamy creates an underclass of unmarriageable men. The second issue is that in gender-imbalanced societies like India and China, the crime rates for these men are above average and showing bad trends for the future. The third issue is that it doesn't take that many men to pull enough women out of the "marriage market" to create this destabilizing underclass. The very existance of a real underclass of men who are unmarriageable, not because they have chosen bad courses in life, but because there are simply not enough women to go around poses a dire threat to a liberal republic's existance.

It amazes me that any libertarian would deny that liberty always has been, and always will be, threatened most when the public is afraid of a perceived enemy. Would not an underclass of young men, who have been rendered increasingly bitter by seeing older, wealthier men snatch up all of the marriageable young women, be an even scarier enemy than foreign Islamic terrorists? The fact that a number of these might be decent men who would try to get a wife instead of committing crime doesn't negate the very real danger that many of them, a very large minority, of them would turn to gangs and other criminal lifestyles. For libertarians to not consider this inherent flaw in legalized polygamy would be to stake the entire republic's liberty on the good graces of a minority of wealthy, established men.

Difster raised the issue of the government using coercion to maintain order in the face of this underclass becoming brutal and violent. To which I respond, and where are they going to get the army to fight this class? The polygamists that exist today in the areas around Utah where the Fundamentalist separatist wing of the LDS Church practices polygamy go right for the women who are in the age group who would be dating and marrying the young soldiers. Take that away from them, and you take away the possibility that the young soldiers could be free men with homes to defend, a very destabilizing trend for the military. Regardless of how many would exercise this right today, taking it away by allowing older men to marry a significant number of the young women could not be healthy for the military or police forces.

So, one could respond by using mercenaries, but that has the obvious flaw that mercenaries will typically do whatever their employer commands, regardless of how contrary it is to greater concerns like, well, the rule of law. Perhaps there is no causation between polygamy and illiberal states, but the western tradition of armies of citizen-soldiers would only be undermined by allowing a marriage paradigm in which large numbers of unmarriageable young men are expected to fight for multiple-married men. If the contempt that the average soldier in our Civil War for the landed elite who paid their way out of fighting wasn't bad enough, imagine the contempt today for a class of elite men who are busy screwing multiple young wives, not tending to a plantation or mill (which is a somewhat understandable exemption). Cast them as family men all you want, but the average jarhead in the field is not going to feel that way.

The inherent danger to the existance of a liberal republic that comes from polygamy is that the state will naturally have to accept a much more mercenary element among its law enforcement and military components. Reliance on the possibility that polygamy would be rare is dangerous social policy for libertarians to pursue because family structure policy is one of the few areas of policy where a decade of bad policy can cause several generations of sweeping chaos for a liberal republic. If the old marriage license system was not bad enough, its subversion in the last forty years has lead to a chaotic system which has undermined the family, a pivotal social structure for a free society. Polygamy, combined with an increasing Islamic community, could only spell disaster for our stability and freedom as tens of thousands of young men get recruited for terrorist acts. It is for all of these reasons that I think that a libertarian state must be realistic, and cautious, and thus limit acceptable marriage to only "two consenting adults."

Somehow it will be blamed on poverty for making murderers out of good men:

Since Hurricane Katrina, 35 murders in Houston have been related to Katrina evacuees.

"They're going to try to establish their turf whether it be gangs or drug related and the people here are going to do the same, so we've been watching these developments very carefully," explained Hurtt.

The crime rate in Houston increased 32 percent from this time last year. The spike in the crime rate forced the Houston Police Department to take action. It added 20 additional police officers in the areas where most of the Katrina evacuees live.

Anyone else starting to think that maybe there is something to Bill Cosby's criticisms of the people of New Orleans? Maybe the reason that their city failed so miserably in the face of the hurricane is that the city culture itself had grown so corrupt that it could no longer be trusted to govern itself. Yes, yes, it's "only two to three percent" of the evacuees right now, but who is to say that it won't increase? Even more important is the fact that these people are going to live in areas where they cannot possibly afford to live in like Houston and Northern Virginia.

We had a woman come up here, with no family or friends to say with, naturally, and complain on one of our radio stations that she just didn't know how she could make it in big bad Northern Virginia. What the hell are these people doing, going to expensive urban areas, areas that are a lot more expensive than New Orleans was, with not even friends or family to help them out? Are they just too good to go to smaller towns instead? I'm as sympathetic as the next person to a lot of the evacuees, but a lot of the people were more interested in "protecting Wal-Mart's plasma TVs" than just trying to rebuild the pieces.

Hat tip to Gateway Pundit.

(The title is taken from my father's habit of accusing those who called him out on bad behavior of making him into the "turd in the punch bowl.")

Cathy Young does a very good job of whipping the hell out of that scoundrel Tom DeLay for his woe-is-me-I-am-persecuted-for-Jesus crap. Newsflash for you, Tommy Boy, you are being subjected to the time-honored American tradition of tarring and feathering a varmint politician. You ought to be glad that Jesus is not a Republican because if he were any bit a traditional American, and not the Son of God, you'd be getting lynched by a mob of good ol' boys on the Day of Judgment after Jesus sicked the dogs on you to tear you up.

But... I digress...

According to a Washington Post report, one conference speaker, Navy chaplain Lieutenant Gordon James Klingenschmitt, compared himself to Abdur Rahman, the Afghan convert. Showing slides of himself and Rahman, Klingenschmitt inquired, "What do these two Christians have in common?" and answered: "Perhaps we are persecuted." His persecution consisted of being disciplined by a commander for saying sectarian prayers at a sailor's memorial service.

This right here sums up one of the greatest sicknesses that pervades many religious conservatives. What was done to him was persecution in a technical sense, but not in any sense that Christians throughout the ages in troubled areas would recognize. At worst, we should call it "soft persecution" because there are no real penalties for witnessing for Jesus in this country. So what if you lose your job for that? It wasn't your constitutional right, and I fail to see anything in the constitution that prohibits the Congress from passing laws, or enabling the creation of policies, that restrict the conduct of officers of the military. At the end of the day, the military is just another employer, and has the (sometimes unfortunate) ability to police the conduct of its employees.

Let me make something clear right now before I continue. I am a born again Christian who came to Christ in a conservative, calvinist Presbyterian church. Feel free to take that to most of its logical conclusions about where I stand on religious issues. Yet, I have also been an opponent of abortion on self-determination grounds since before I became a Christian. I also vote Libertarian in almost every election, and take great pride in voting for Badnarik, not Bush in 2004 for what it's worth. Anyway, let's continue now that that's been established.

Such bizarre secularist excesses should be condemned. But the complainers go much further. They cry persecution when religious conservatives are denied the ability to impose their beliefs on everyone-for instance, to ban abortion or gay unions. In fact, much of the hostility they encounter is directed at this political agenda, not at religion as such: People who bash the religious right seldom object when faith is invoked to protest war, poverty, or racism. This is a double standard, to be sure, but it's just as hypocritical for religious conservatives to suggest that Christians who don't subscribe to their brand of values aren't "real" Christians.

This is where Young's article goes downhill very quickly. There are many logical reasons to oppose abortion, not the least of which is that if you don't tie the value of a human life to being genetically human, a slippery slope is created. At what point does a person become sufficiently human that they are guaranteed the basic human rights? This is an issue that should bother libertarians deeply. Most libertarians fail to recognize that since Roe v. Wade, there has been an incrementalism toward defining a child in utero as less than human starting originally in barely recognizable stages of development, running now to the point where partial birth abortion enjoys the same legal protection as the morning after pill. We have partially legalized infanticide in the most undeniable way by allowing a woman to reach the end of her pregnancy, then abort. How much longer until the culture reaches the point where a woman has the right to a "post-delivery abortion?" I ask because there is no meaningful difference between allowing a partial birth abortion and giving a lethal injection to a recently born infant except that the mother doesn't see the former until it's in pieces in a trash bag.

Libertarianism is simultaneously a philosophy that is cynical about human nature and tendencies, and optimistic about the worth of human life, liberty and dignity. As such, I believe it is ultimately impossible to be a libertarian and support abortion. This "right" can be wrapped up in a cloak of empowering women to control their own bodies, but that is a sophistic argument because the lifeform that is about to lose its life is genetically human and not a piece of her body. There are consequences to this attitude, not the least of which is that we have secured a foothold for the idea that some lifeforms of species homo sapien are unequal to others in basic rights of existance, and also the idea that there exists a right to terminate another human being's life outside of self-defense. I leave the question of whether it should be permissible to take one's life to others and God, but there can be no doubts about libertarianism needing to unconditionally reject the notion that any human being has a right to terminate another person's life except in true self-defense of one's life or that of another.

At the moment of death, a person is as genetically human as they were at conception so I see no reason to even waste time defining whether certain stages of development make one more human, since the opposite of that, since human beings decline after their sexual peak, is that at certain stages of development we become less human. If a baby in utero is not sufficiently human to be worthy of an inherent right to life because it is underdeveloped, then surely the average elderly person who cannot survive without a constant stream of medication is no more human than that child because their body cannot survive without outside intervention either. So which is it? Making people responsible for their conduct, or Logan's Run?

Note: I am completely ambivalent about the issue of gay marriage as I believe that the only legal definition of marriage should be a 1:1 relationship. This article from Reason explains my position quite well on why there are important secular reasons why polygamy must be illegal.

Now, for the issue of Christian identity. I am not one to say that anyone who can fully, and unconditionally, embrace the Nicene Creed is a non-Christian, but I have a major problem with Young's assertion that there is not a fundamental standard of being called a Christian. First of all, if we deny the inerrancy of the scriptures, then how do we know that any of it is true? It would be wise to then just abandon it altogether because outside of that notion, Jesus was a real nutjob, which is why CS Lewis posited that one cannot simultaneously reject the Bible's inerrancy, accept that Jesus said what the Bible credits to him, and call Jesus simply a good teacher of morals. The man is a lunatic by that standard, albeit more quaint and ethical than David Koresh, but ultimately no more worth following than the madman of Waco.

Certainly there are grounds for allowing people of goodwill to disagree on what constitutes "real Christianity." Liberal calvinists, such as myself, are not well-received by most Methodists or Baptists, and so I understand the importance of allowing people to disagree on secondary issues. The question, however, is at what point is one no longer a Christian? Should Mormons be considered Christians, even though their beliefs are well, shall we say, a tad non-canonical and abberant by any traditional Christian norm? What about so-called Christian Scientists with their non-Biblical teachings on physical reality. Physical reality is kind of important since it is God's creation according to the Bible, and the realm that we exist in. To be fundamentally offbase here would be to deny a crucial undercurrent of Biblical thought that stretches from cover-to-cover; from ancient Judaism, to modern Christianity.

There is another point worth considering here, and that's that many of the people who don't object to Christianity being used for the causes that Young cites, are also the people who want to explicitly bar or push out Christian motivations from any aspect of governance and the public sphere as a whole. The Bible has important traditions and teachings in it that prevent the believer from legislating his or her religion. Read Matthew 10:11-16 as a starter here.

There is a large faction among the politically active who find a Christian motivation itself to be problematic, even when it is so benign as keeping violent video games from being sold to young kids. Some of the more radical ones that can be found online even wonder why it is wrong to let children be exposed to pornography, though I would never debate the fact that adults have a right to corrupt their minds with pornography. The complete lack of personal moral restrictions in the law is as bad as a total restriction, if for no other reason than a society which does not balance freedom with responsibility and the rights of others is one in which freedom will soon die out. Drug users whose right to intoxicate themselves is not tempered with a responsibility to take care of their children will invariably lead to either a renewal on restrictions (presuming we can end the War on Drugs) or a number of people who bear the scars of abusive or neglectful parents. The sovereignty of the individual must be tempered by the sovereign's duty to his or her subjects (children and other dependents) and to his or her due to respect neighboring sovereigns' sovereignty. That to me is what is crucially lacking in most of those who advocate nearly unfettered individual rights; the near complete lack of personal responsibility as though each person were a king or queen living on an island and whose decrees impacted no one but the crabs, fish and trees.

Half of Americans agree that belief in God is necessary to having good moral values, and more than two-thirds say they would not even consider voting for a nonbeliever for political office. Georgia state legislator Ron Foster ruffled no feathers a few years ago when he noted, in defense of posting of the Ten Commandments in government buildings, that judges or public officials who don't believe in God are "more likely to be corrupt."

Well, considering the fact that the average Communist country was officially atheist, I think there is a good reason to give credence to that belief. While despots have never hesitated to use religion as a tool for self-aggrandizement and consolidation of power, even symbolic deference to the church, mosque, etc. provides a check on their power. Imagine what would have happened to Bush if he outright said that he didn't feel bounded by religion, then proceeded to pass most of his orders increasing police powers? The natural result would have been a Christian conservative base that would have been deeply skeptical of him, and probably would never have supported him in the first place. Giving the man sweeping powers to detain without trial and monitor without warrant, would have been unthinkable for most of them because they would have believed his desire for power to be tempered by no meaningful morality.

And that is the problem. There are standards of morality that exist independent of religion, but they are not transcendental. An objectivist cannot claim that their standard of morality is universal because it comes from man. Without a divine authority willing it to be, a moral code is nothing more than a personal code, and carries no weight beyond the adherent and his or her willingness to impose it on others. How can an objectist really argue with a Nietzschean that he is right and the Nietzschean is wrong, and that the Nietzschean really ought to stop without appealing to a moral code that exists above them, and that is not subject to the desires of either people? That is the crucial question, and one that is terribly important for choosing leaders. Even when I was a de facto atheist, I would never have trusted a politician with any police power if he or she did not at least make a damn good argument that he or she believed that morality comes from a non-human source. The last thing one wants is a leader who believes that morality is subjective and bound to the times or human whims to be the one with the police powers and finger on the nuclear launch button.

Australia shows the United States how to really get its fascist police state on:

Last week, Federal Parliament passed a law that allows the Government to read private emails, text messages and other stored communications without our knowledge. The power extends to innocent people, called B-parties, if they have been unlucky enough to communicate with someone suspected of a crime or of being a threat to national security.

The Government should sometimes be able to monitor the communications of innocent people. This may be necessary to protect the wider community where a suspect can only be tracked through another person. However, the law goes beyond what can be justified and undermines our privacy more than is needed.

Under the Telecommunications (Interception) Amendment Act, the Government will be able to access communications not only between the B-party and the suspect, but also between the B-party and anyone else. If you have unwittingly communicated with a suspect (and thereby become a B-party), the Government may be able to monitor all your conversations with family members, friends, work colleagues, your lawyer and your doctor.

Start taking notes, Dubya. This is how to really get it into high gear. Make it so that anyone who is contacted by a suspected terrorist gets their rights taken away! Yeah, that'll really do it, that'll really make Australia a safer country. I can just see the grand terrorist scheme to keep the Aussie "intelligence" apparatus busy by calling up random people and getting the intelligence services to monitor them.

If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear? If the government has no time to waste in pursuit of those terrorists, it has no business getting sidetracked by screwing with the (moral) privacy rights of its citizens.

I have for a while considered the issue of polygamy to be far more grave to our country's future than the one of gay marriage. While I do believe that there is something inherently dangerous in allowing homosexual marriage to receive the same status that heterosexual marriage has, it is still a monogamous relationship and would in that sense, not really tip the scales toward the old, pagan orders of old. The thought of returning to polygamous societies should terrify libertarian and social conservative alike for, as Reason makes clear, polygamous societies have never had a track record of being liberal republics. Not only that, but there are clear and present security problems that have to be taken into consideration:

The problem in China and India is sex-selective abortion (and sometimes infanticide), not polygamy; where the marriage market is concerned, however, the two are functional equivalents. In their book, Hudson and den Boer note that "bare branches are more likely than other males to turn to vice and violence." To get ahead, they "may turn to appropriation of resources, using force if necessary." Such men are ripe for recruitment by gangs, and in groups they "exhibit even more exaggerated risky and violent behavior." The result is "a significant increase in societal, and possibly intersocietal, violence."

Crime rates, according to the authors, tend to be higher in polygynous societies. Worse, "high-sex-ratio societies are governable only by authoritarian regimes capable of suppressing violence at home and exporting it abroad through colonization or war." In medieval Portugal, "the regime would send bare branches on foreign adventures of conquest and colonization." (An equivalent today may be jihad.) In 19th-century China, where as many as 25 percent of men were unable to marry, "these young men became natural recruits for bandit gangs and local militia," which nearly toppled the government. In what is now Taiwan, unattached males fomented regular revolts and became "entrepreneurs of violence."

Some don't object to rendering millions of men unmarriageable, in fact they even think it might be healthy for society, but the issue is not as rosy-colored as the apologists for polygamy would make it out to be. The child abuse that is present in modern polygamous households in the United States alone should raise serious questions as to whether a good man would really want multiple wives. So far, the track record has been that polygamy has been first and foremost about expanding a domain of sexual conquests, despite the hypothetical possibility that some men might legitimately fall in love with other women besides their first wife.

I suppose I can understand how certain Christian sects feel that this is ok, afterall they deny the existance of a devine plan for each person's life. They genuinely think that Jesus was just trying to make a general point about sin when he said that to look on a woman with lust is to commit adultery. Lust is, in practice, all but indistinguishable from general sexual desire for men. To claim that a man can sexually desire another woman besides his wife without bordering on lust is, technically correct, but not so practical that society or the church should accept it as a valid practice. It is like saying that one can be intensely prejudiced toward another race without being hateful. Yes, it is theoretically possible to do so, but the boundary is so thin that only evil can come from allowing people to dance along that line and pretending that since God is merciful, that surely God will forgive those who, despite knowing the dangers, chose to live a very dangerous moral life.

There are several compelling points, secular and religious, for why polygamy is not only stupid beyond acceptability as a social policy, and morally/spiritually dangerous. First of all, if monogamy does not work for the obvious reason that many are too selfish and sexually-oriented in their relationships, then polygamy would be an abject disaster. The same "family men" who cannot handle one wife and set of kids, are going to end up pursuing multiple wives for the very worst of reasons. Second, unmarriageable men do pose a clear and present danger to internal security, causing as Reason notes, an increase in authoritarian state power. Without the civilizing impact of knowing that a steady relationship is possible, many men would enter self-destruction mode and would prey on society, and this would cause the crime rate to reach a point that the government could no longer be liberal. Third, it is not up to society to judge whether it is good that some men should marry and that some should not. It is also, society's obligation to ensure that a man is not able to marry in such a way that he knows will victimize and cheapen the lives of his wife and children. Multiple wives inherently are weaker in their relationship with their husband. The very cultural attitudes that cause a man to marry multiple women also prevent him respecting their lives, liberty and property, a fact that has been shown in most polygamist cultures.

The Reason article does a better job of putting most of the practical considerations into words than I can at the moment. I think that between its secular, libertarian arguments and the conservative religious arguments on the other side, it can be safely admitted by both sides that polygamy is a very bad thing for the United States to allow. The sorts of men who are drawn to it now are at heart closer to being sexual predators than good men.

One would think that Jerry Taylor would still be smarting over his attacks on the CentOS team. They were so stupid, so asinine, and so easily avoided that he is without excuse for his conduct and he knows it, but that hasn't stopped him from resorting to ad hominems against the developers:

Taylor said that he didn't understand why so many people were concerned about an e-mail exchange between two people.

"This is just a bunch of freaks out there that don't have anything better to do," he said. "When I came in to work Monday morning, I had about 500 e-mails, plus anonymous phone calls from all the geeks out there. [CentOS is] a free operating system that this guy gives away, which tells you how much time he's got on his hands."

Apparently the software is good enough for him to use, but not good enough for him to do a little bit of research on. Instead of attacking the CentOS team, he ought to be attacking the hosting service that didn't even know what distribution of Linux he was running. He called up Vidia, the hosting service for the town's website, and they didn't even know that they were running CentOS!

The only freak here is Jerry Taylor who, instead of doing a little Google search on CentOS, contacted the team, threatened them with law enforcement action and didn't even have the decency to politely just ask what was going on. What kind of man would want to represent his community in such an offensive and inappropriate manner as this? A freak! Only a freak would want to give his home town such a bad name.

Taylor said that the mistake could have happened to anyone, and he stands by what he did.

"I'm not about to follow any instructions on an unknown web page," Taylor said. "That could put a virus on my system."

Mayor Paxton said that the city manager knows a lot more about computers than he does, and he trusts Taylor

"The city manager was doing everything he could to protect the website," Paxton said. "There was no profanity used, nothing vulgar used, just Jerry [Taylor] trying to find out what was going on. He was being aggressive and finding out what happened to the website."

So aggressive is what we're calling being an abusive, obnoxious ass these days? If this man knows a lot more about computers than the mayor does, that should be a very good sign that they need to just outsource all of the regulation and management of anything computer-related to outside parties because this guy is a grade A idiot. There may not have been profanity, and the language may not have been vulgar in his opinion, but Taylor's conduct was rude, inappropriate and the sort of behavior that should get him dismissed from his office.

Contacting a group of developers and then accusing them of hacking your web server without even the slightest credible evidence to back up your accusation is the stuff that one expects of a raving lunatic, not an older public official. No matter how you look at this, there is no reason to justify why a man who boasts of having twenty two years of systems engineering experience would freak out over this. His reaction was more akin to a computer illiterate secretary than someone who is responsible for designing and implementing complex, multi-tiered computer systems which is what systems engineers do.

"I was just frustrated," he said. "I've got a strange website coming up, and I don't know who caused it." Taylor said that he also did not regret threatening Hughes with FBI action, since he believes that was what prompted Hughes to start treating him seriously.

"After that, he called me Mr. Taylor," he said, "And he got me the information I needed."

Paxton said that even though this was garnering worldwide attention, the council had other things to deal with.

I don't suppose it ever occurred to him that Hughes started calling him "Mr. Taylor" because he was starting to build a paper trail to use against Taylor and the government of Tuttle in a court if a formal complaint was filed with the FBI over it. If I were in his shoes, I would have started to contact people in law enforcement and getting a lawyer to find out what my legal options were at that point. What Taylor did was not only a campaign of systematic harrassement, but also one of badly attempted intimidation. No one at the FBI would have taken him seriously because operating systems just don't get installed like spyware. Even the dumbest forensic tech and field agent at the FBI probably is well aware of that fact.

Bottom line is that despite the best attempts at the old CYA game, neither the mayor nor the city manager can prove to anyone but the most dim-witted that what Taylor did was reasonable. How many people have turned off their firewall on Windows and rebooted their computer, only to find a pristine installation of Linux on it? None.

There are a number of people who are extremely stupid who work in IT, and Tuttle seems to be one of them. If the man is so inexperienced that he cannot read basic Apache instructions without getting jittery about virus concerns, then any decent practitioner of the art of software development and integration, or any of its related disciplines, should demand to know how he got by for twenty two years as a systems engineer. Just what the hell is he doing with Apache that is going to expose him to a virus anyway? Is he running an unpatched PHP script with a bug list as long as his arm?

This is yet another reason why I cannot be a socialist. I simply cannot trust the government to regulate IT when there are so many Jerry Taylors, and so few intelligent people in government, especially at the local level. And it's not even like they make up for their lack of intelligence in terms of decency, honesty and a commitment to serving the public. They compensate for being little dicked or titted shits by holding power over the people's heads.

If I were in Huges' place, I think I might have responded with something like this:

Mr. Taylor, your incompetence and ignorance of basic system administration is astonishing given your claim of having twenty two years of experience as a systems engineer. Any competent systems engineer would quickly recognize that CentOS is an operating system and as such cannot be installed willy nilly on the servers that host your website. Even if I wanted to, and I do not, no one from the CentOS team could have done what you suggested without direct, physical access to the web servers. Have you ever rebooted your PC and found that a hacker had put a different operating system on it than the one you had before? If so, you'd be the first person ever to encounter that.

You can beg, you can plead, you can threaten, and God knows, you have certainly done enough of the latter to make me want to tell you to unconditionally piss off. Your lack of civility has been a reprehensible slander against the presumably decent people who make up the majority of Tuttle. If they ever catch wind of this, hopefuly in a fit of embarrassment and thirst for good rapport with the rest of their nation, they will engage in the time-honored American tradition of driving a vermin politician from his office to the county line. Let us pray also that the FBI is there to inquire as to why you felt the need to conduct an official campaign of harrassment against me and my team.

Surely by now you have no doubt discovered that I am henceforth unavailable to you good sir. I wish you God speed in your attempts to grok the complexities of Apache configuration (how I endeavor to say that with a straight face). Do not be intimidated by this, as this is a symbolic Apache, not one who is liable to scalp you or subject your women to uncouth conduct. You have nothing to fear, except fear itself. Well, I should not be so hasty. You ought to avoid sharp objects as well, if your brain finds shifting into first gear to be so terrible of an expectation as was displayed in your emails to me. Good luck to you sir, and may you find the following volumes enlightening:

• Critical Thinking For Dummies
• Civilized Conduct For Dummies
• Reading For Comprehension for Dummies
• Computers For Dummies
• Linux For Dummies
• Complete Idiot's Guide to CS101

I just saw V for Vendetta (finally) last night, and have been stewing a little on some of the criticisms about it... here's my not so nice take on that.

Any fan of the second amendment should gleefully cheer the logic of V for Vendetta. Terrorism, according to the movie, is not the enemy. It is a means to an end, just as a firearm is only the means to an end (self-defense or hunting). You can have two car bombers, one who blows up an American embassy, the other who bombs an Iranian police station as part of an effort to liberate his people from the mullahs. Yet, who in their right mind, would claim to be a lover of liberty and find cause to condemn the latter? That is why I find it disgusting that self-proclaimed conservatives would actually object to the movie on political grounds. V is not an Islamist, recognized a code of chivalry in his dealings with innocent civilians, and focused his entire actions on restoring good government. We need no reason to justify our efforts to kill the terrorists who attack us because their cause is unjust, their targets uncivilized and cowardly, and their cause wholly against decency, modernity and civilization in general.

We no more have to condemn all terrorism to condemn our enemies than we have to condemn all gun owners to condemn those who use a firearm to maliciously harm innocents. I am a patriot, and as such am unwilling to condemn all terrorism because that would mean condemning the men who gave us our country's independence. Having ancestors who actually shed blood in the War for Independence tends to make you a little nuanced in your perspective on politically-motivated violence; my colonial rebel ancestors would undoubtedly be called terrorists today on both sides of the pond if the events happened today. Indeed, isn't that the irony, that the USA PATRIOT Act would, technically, label the entire Continental Army as a band of terrorists? No doubt some smug republican will chortle at this, saying that I am a liberal idiot because "clearly," no one would call them terrorists. As we all know, the victor writes the history, and there should be little doubt that, had our founders lost the war, that to be called a "Jeffersonian" would be an epithet, not a stand of principle for liberty and justice. George Washington would be regarded as a villian, while Benedict Arnold a hero for his return to loyalty to the crown. God Save the King, not Yankee Doodle. You get the idea.

The movie was quick to remind viewers of a point that Orwell raised in 1984: governments have always been their people's greatest enemies. The truth is that Americans, even "hard-headed, realist" conservatives, are usually very naive about how many evil people have been attracted to government since the dawn of human civilization. America has been pretty lucky. Our armed citizenry has spared us many of the problems that other countries have faced. V for Vendetta is significantly closer in spirit to 1984 than Paradise Now. It's almost astonishing to me how libertarian the movie actually was, despite being made by Hollywood, which is renowned for its left-wing politics. You had an an evil government leader who committed crimes against his own people when they were weak, a government out of control that turned its police powers right back on its own people and that showed virulent hatred to perceived enemies.

It should be duly noted how much hatred the British government had for America in this movie. I was surprised after seeing that anti-American broadcast near the beginning that any conservative could have felt that this was a hypothetical government that deserved pity. It was a classic cautionary tale. A real and legitimate enemy (Islamists) is used by the those evil men and women who hunger for power to get the power that they want, and then surprise, they act as evil men and women. Even more ironic is the fact that conservatives will quickly defend the right to keep and bear arms in part on the grounds that the 20^th century proved that governments often can and will mass murder their own people, yet so many apparently missed the fact that the British state in this movie is a quintessential democidal regime.

As a Christian, I was not offended by this movie in the least. In fact, it was 2 hours, 12 minutes of a reminder of why people with power must follow good, strong rules even when they seem to be good people. There is a slippery moral slope that starts to get made when someone says that they are good enough that they need not be bothered with such pesky rules as "due process of law," a strong avoidance of the use of lethal force by agents of the government and transparency in government processes. Good people need never fear the light, for their actions will vindicate them in the light. We are all mixed, we all have skeletons in our closets, but it should really give good, God-fearing people a terrible suspicion when someone has a phobia of the light of public scrutiny all the while winking and saying, "trust me." Blind trust is for newcomers to the faith in their relationship with God, not responsible citizens in their dealings with the government.

I think is worth noting about the conservative criticisms of this movie is that all too often they make the mistake of assuming that those in positions of power are like them. Among the powers that be, there are no true conservatives or leftists, but power-hungry, evil men and women. Often in the bureaucracy that evil manifests itself in the form of incompetence coupled with a hateful obstruction of any reform process, which is what the FBI has suffered from in its management, and what prevented its field agents from being able to collaborate on the warning signs that three independent field offices uncovered. Those that must interact with the public will use every tool in their arsenal from blatant fear-mongering to appeals to tradition and religion. They are whores in the most pejorative sense of the word. Does anyone really think that the "Christians" in V for Vendetta were Christians, rather than evil men with enough ambition to do anything they needed to stay in power and gain more? That is the only scary part about this movie, it revealed that many people cannot in fact discern moral character at all, and that many would refuse to follow Christ's command to judge the fruit of a demagogue's heart.

I think this comment from Dr. Baehr for WorldNetDaily says it all:

The rest of "V for Vendetta" not only depicts Christians as evil people who oppress and torture "innocent" people, it also depicts homosexuals as a persecuted, harmless minority of "nice" people. Both of these portrayals are hate-filled, false stereotypes, but the second one is actually contradicted by the secret stash of homoerotic pornography that one of the homosexual characters in the movie hides in a secret room in his house. If all homosexuals, and all homosexual activists, are such goody two shoes, how come so many of them resort to unsafe sexual practices that spread deadly diseases, and how come so many of them promote pornography, support the murder of unborn children through abortion and molest underage children?

The moral blindness of millions of Christians is terrifying today in an age where our influence is being lost. The circumstantial evidence to support the corruption of our government is growing daily, and much of it is abetted by seductive calls to trust our leaders with discressionary power that flies right in the face of what our religion teaches about human nature. The unwillingness to discern whether those who wrap themselves up in the trappings of the Church was what allowed many abusive priests and pastors to rape our community from within, and now we run the risk of empowering the government to do it from without. No Christian should ever justify or cheapen what happened at Abu Ghraib, though we must not disparage our military as whole either. Yet, too many Christians forget that the Bible teaches us that people are not born with good natures, nor do good things happen in the darkness most of the time. What we face is a battle of civilizations between our own, instigated by our Islamic enemies.

The only way that they can win is to divide us from within by causing us to forget the basic tenets of our ancestors' religion, throw out our traditions and become a people with hearts of fear, not faith. It scares me to think that many of our leaders attack the very people who remind the laymen that a Biblical worldview has no place for power that is not bound by the rule of good law, that those who criticize our wars abroad are anti-God, family and country, and that having a lack of faith in our elected political leaders, including a deep suspicion of them based on historic trends is apostasy from the faith. Too often these leaders have justified evil conduct because it was for a "good purpose."

The most damning scene in the whole movie was when V broadcasted the message to the people that they, not the Chancellor, were the reason why the country had fallen apart. One man cannot change anything on that level, others must follow the change he initiates. At the end of the day, if and when America becomes a tyrannical country, most Americans will not be able to point their finger at the other side and say that it was all their fault. Conservatives will have to look to George Bush when the USA PATRIOT Act is used against abortion protesters and gun rights activists. Liberals will have to look to Bill Clinton when the (Sons of) Carnivore scour the Internet for all subversive conduct. We will get the government that we deserve, and we are headed toward a government that has abandoned all of the essential rules of conduct that our founders fought for, and that works not on traditional standards of justice, but rather the morally relativistic "ends justify the means."

For my part, I liked V for Vendetta. The graphic novel (which I am halfway through) is better, but the movie is good on its own. I think that it is more telling that many on the right are not incapable of distracting themselves from reality long enough to enjoy this movie for what it is: a good government-bashing philosophical action movie. It makes me wonder just how much these people really believe that government is a necessary evil, rather than as a misused good which is how the neo-Marxists, to borrow from WorldNetDaily's pathetic critiques, would classify it. In fact, I would go so far as to say that anyone stupid enough to call this movie neo-Marxist is not qualified to voice an opinion on politics. Marxist is the last thing that can be legitimately used as a label for a movie whose main hero boldly declares about governments, "peoples should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people." Marxism is statist, and that is such a pure libertarian sentiment that to call V a Marxist is no more of a coherent insult than to call John Locke a died-in-the-wool fascist or to call the Apostle Paul an anti-semetic rabble rouser for his harsh critiques of ancient Israeli culture. This seems to me like a case of people having a movie hit too close to home for them, that it turned one too many sacred cows into McDonald's hamburgers and so, in their desperation to find a cause to ridicule it, have taken to flinging labels, hoping that some of them might actually stick.

Some examples of the criticisms:

Hollywood Loves Terrorists

WND Hit Piece 1

WND Hit Piece 2

WND Hit Piece 3

TCSDaily's Doug Kern apologizing for fascists

Some people are stunned by the fact that American technology workers are not enthusiastic and tripping over themselves to quit their jobs so a foreigner can take it from them:

A plan to boost the number of temporary visas is facing obstacles in the U.S. Congress, despite the plan's popularity with technology companies and foreign workers.

Supporters of H-1B visas--reserved for highly skilled guest workers--applauded a move Monday by a U.S. Senate committee to nearly double the cap from 65,000 to 115,000 visas next year, and President Bush has endorsed the idea too. But by the end of the week, it became apparent that the House of Representatives may not follow suit.

I wonder why they are so popular with foreign workers and technology companies. The foreigners get good jobs, and the companies get cheap labor. Fancy that, one would never be able to see why American workers wouldn't be so altruistic as to ask for the same pay that Indians are able to command in their home country. Do it for America, you lousy communists!