May 2006 Archives

Now it's terrorism:

A Justice Department representative said Tuesday that the proposal would not require Internet providers to retain records of the actual contents of conversations and other Internet traffic.

Color me totally unimpressed with their "assurance." As I have said before, there is no easy way to protect privacy with this legislation. What we need to know is what information they do in fact plan to ask for legal assistance in retaining. That's the key, and it's a point that is going to be missed by most of the political bloggers and talking heads in the media. A "web conversation" is the useful information. It's the HTTP headers and bodies that negotiate the transaction. Do you really want to bet your privacy on them just stripping out the URL that was requested in the GET/POST operation?

This is the problem, and why I suspect that the Bush Administration is not being honest with the public. There are no "conversations" as far as the protocols themselves are concerned. It would take an extremely sophisticated filtering system, one tailored for each popular protocol, to strip out the stuff that rightfully should be kept out on fourth amendment grounds. As far as the network is concerned, your instant message text or login attempt at your blog is just a block of text contained within a larger message. That message is padded with what is called "metadata" or information that describes the information being sent. However, to a logger on its initial pass as it filters the data for the retention law, there would be no distinction here. It's all data. So, naturally, we would be totally dependent on the government sticking to its word.

This should scare the hell out of people who care at all about freedom:

Details of the Justice Department's proposal remain murky. One possibility is requiring Internet providers to record the Internet addresses that their customers are temporarily assigned. A more extensive mandate would require them to keep track of the identities of Americans' e-mail and instant messaging correspondents and save the logs of Internet phone calls.

In other words, because it's the Internet, allow the government to log the audio of every single Voice Over IP (VoIP) call that you make.

Other previous entries on this, to give a perspective on how this battle has evolved:

Recording everything you ever do online.
Is this really a data retention law?.
America's pedocratic surveillance state.

I wanted to believe that it wasn't true, that the guys behind the Left Behind series were not planning a game that would be a few steps away from Command and Conquer meets Grand Theft Auto for Christians. Unfortunately, the website bears out the claims. Take a look at this, my fellow conservative Christians, and see your redeemer getting blasphemed:

Wage a war of apocalyptic proportions in LEFT BEHIND: Eternal Forces - a real-time strategy game based upon the best-selling LEFT BEHIND book series created by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Join the ultimate fight of Good against Evil, commanding Tribulation Forces or the Global Community Peacekeepers, and uncover the truth about the worldwide disappearances!
---Lead the Tribulation Force from the book series , including Rayford, Chloe, Buck and Bruce against Nicolae Carpathia � the AntiChrist.
---Conduct physical & spiritual warfare : using the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world.
---Recover ancient scriptures and witness spectacular Angelic and Demonic activity as a direct consequence of your choices.
---Command your forces through intense battles across a breathtaking, authentic depiction of New York City.
---Control more than 30 units types - from Prayer Warrior and Hellraiser to Spies, Special Forces and Battle Tanks!
---Enjoy a robust single player experience across dozens of New York City maps in Story Mode � fighting in China Town , SoHo , Uptown and more!
---Play multiplayer games as Tribulation Force or the AntiChrist's Global Community Peacekeepers with up to eight players via LAN or over the internet!

You know what, I could be entirely wrong and your whole purpose in the game is to heroically fight to the death to save non-Christians from the Global Community Peacekeepers, but for some reason I really doubt that that is what the game is all about. This is the sort of thing that some "Christians" do that makes me want to crawl into a hole sometimes.

The game is heretical for two main reasons. First of all, as self-proclaimed Christians, those who are behind Left Behind's merchandise lines meet the criteria of those who "know the truth, but disagree with it" which is the foundation of heresy. Second, they know that Jesus commanded that violence not be used as a tool to advance his ministry. Christians should distance themselves from this product line and firmly denounce it when confronted by non-Christians.

There are only three scenarios I can think of to explain why a self-professing Christian would make a game like this. They are not a Christian, and want to attack Christianity. They want to increase "persecution" of Christians in the United States for whatever sick reason they have. They are one hundred percent clueless about dealing with non-Christians and can't imagine why a game that simultaneously goes against Christian teachings and glorifies religious warfare against non-Christians might not go over well with non-Christians.

PajamasMedia is an interesting metablog for the most part, but it really ought to steer clear of non-political issues like religion and technology. Especially technology. I don't know if it's just that they link to things that might interest their readers, even if inaccurate, or if they are trying to put an additional stamp of accuracy on them, but they have gotten the network neutrality issue framed completely wrong at least twice now. First time, second time.
Here's a brief summary of what network neutrality is about, in a few concise bulleted points:

1. The companies that sell bandwidth to businesses and broadband Internet access to home users want to impose arbitrary tolls on their services. Google, for example would have to pay their bandwidth seller say... $50,000 for a 100mbps line each month (arbitrary figure, but let's go with it since they're paying fair market value) and THEN would have to pay every ISP for the "privilege" of sending data to the ISP's customers at full speed.
2. The content companies, such as Google, in retaliation want to be able to force a complete equality of bandwidth to all services. This would make it very technically difficult to supply bandwidth to services that might compete agains their offerings. It's actually not fair when you consider bullet 1 in light of bullet 3
3. The reason that the ISPs and bandwidth sellers want to hit these companies on every end possible is that you, as a home broadband user, are technically a free-rider. Here's the math. A $15 DSL line is 50% the speed of a T1 line, which costs a few hundred dollars per month, and is the sort of line that would provide dedicated support to broadband services. Same rule for cable. In other words, unlimited, cheap broadband Internet access is what created this mess in the first place.
4. Solution: metered bandwidth. We don't have $25/month unlimited electricity, so why not apply that to Internet access? It costs money not democracy brownie points to keep the Internet going. Bandwidth, like electricity, is a limited resource in the sense that there are limits to how much can be used. If you want more bandwidth, you have to expand the network. Expanding the network takes money. ISPs are not making money off of your $15-$25/month broadband. Take this to its natural conclusion.

Now, I guess for an even simpler summary. Your broadband bill barely covers their bills. So, in turn, they have gone after those with deeper pockets and an inability to not pay their demands. If people paid for the bandwidth that they use on the home side, ISPs would neither have an excuse nor a reason to pursue this. Metered bandwidth is your modem/router's friend. It keeps you from subsidizing the bandwidth use of the punk kid or rich cheapskate who uses 600GB/month in file sharing activities while you use barely a few GB for your own uses. The End.

Update: third time is a charm.

Technorati tags: Network Neutrality, blogosphere, fact, check, PajamasMedia.

I would like to make a modest proposal. In fact, it's so modest that in a bygone era it might have been called common sense. Let's hold Congress and the President to practically all of the same standards that we hold engineers to. When an engineer makes a bridge, vehicle or program that kills people due to gross negligence, they can be sued and probably imprisoned in some jurisdictions. Since Congress has the nasty habit of passing, or trying to pass, laws which are highly destructive and negligent in their suppression of nasty side effects like otherwise law-abiding people going to prison, why not make Congress civilly and criminally liable for violating the Constitution?

Some may call it an attak on the Constitution, democracy, apple pie and everything else that this country stands (or stood) for. Non-sense. The only people who worry about these things today are political scientists who seem to be completely lacking any counter-proposals for how to fix the corruption mess in our elected government.

We haven't made America "safe for democracy" by taking away congressional accountability for its unconstitutional mistakes, we've given them a blank check to run amok. Judge declares a bad law unconstitutional and Congress repasses it anyway? Toss them in prison. What part of "Congress shall not..." did you not understand about the first amendment, the second or any other?

Despite what some people may tell you, the Constitution is not difficult to read. In fact, our founding fathers were extremely blunt, and Article II (which establishes Congress) reads more like a grocery list than a modern legal document. The fastest way to tell that someone has a bad political agenda is when suddenly they become legal gnostics, with the Supreme Court as the governing inner circle that knows all about the hidden truths buried deep within masonic invisible ink in the text.

Just when you thought that your privacy rights might be safe for the time being, the Bush Administration has once again renewed its efforts to create a TCP/IP surveillance state. Gonzales is now trying to heckle ISPs into working with the Department of Justice on data retention policies that would prove to be disastrous in the long run to the basic privacy rights and security of the average American:

In a private meeting with industry representatives, Gonzales, Mueller and other senior members of the Justice Department said Internet service providers should retain subscriber information and network data for two years, according to two sources familiar with the discussion who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The closed-door meeting at the Justice Department, which Gonzales had requested, according to the sources, comes as the idea of legally mandated data retention has become popular on Capitol Hill and inside the Bush administration. Supporters of the idea say it will help prosecutions of child pornography because in many cases, logs are deleted during the routine course of business.

It will undoubtedly help them, but then so would allowing the federal government to get a realtime, warrantless power to access anyone's bank and credit information without those pesky probable cause constraints. There are limits on these powers for a reason: the ends do not justify the means. Child pornography is not nuclear terrorism. It is not such an extreme threat to civil society that basic safeguards can be eschewed in order to stop it. What Gonzales is stumping for is the Internet's equivalent of a NSA program that not only scans your phone number records, but also records and does batch analysis of the audio of every single phone call that you make. Mandatory data retention laws provide the fundamental foundation for a totalitarian surveillance state on a TCP/IP-based network.

I find it actually quite disturbing that child pornography is used as the justification for this, when we get reports daily of law enforcement successfully busting actual child molesters using the "measely" powers that are already provided to them. The current system, by all counts, seems to be working just fine. The real problem that law enforcement faces is getting other countries like Russia and Thailand where child molestation is punished nowhere near as badly as it is here to cooperate. Clearly, this is just a side issue. This administration has time and again sought to reduce the scope of the due process and privacy rights protected by the Bill of Rights against the federal government.

"I will reach out personally to the CEOs of the leading service providers and to other industry leaders," Gonzales said. "Record retention by Internet service providers consistent with the legitimate privacy rights of Americans is an issue that must be addressed."

As I have noted before, there are unique privacy implications that apply to TCP/IP-based communications that do not apply to the telephone network. The amount of information that could be gathered on a person through these sorts of policies is simply outrageous, and we already have existing laws that allow law enforcement to get data retention set up when the probable cause standard has been met. This law or "gentleman's agreement" would amount to a policy of stripping people of every pretense of privacy online so that law enforcement could go back and analyze a person's entire history of online activity if they suspect a crime has been committed. It's not an exaggeration to say that the potential for civil liberties abuse is so extreme here that it would represent an effective destruction of the fourth amendment as far as the Internet is concerned because there would be few technical and practical barriers to police abuse of these powers.

There is no way for the Bush Administration to implement data retention policies in such a way as to be "consistent with the legitimate privacy rights of Americans," unless one starts from the premise that Scott McNealy (former CEO of Sun Microsystems) espoused, "you have no privacy, get over it." There are three levels that they could do this, and one of them is a pretty safe bet that they are going to consider as simply part of the other two. They can log all DHCP assignments of IP addresses, thus keeping track of what IP address was issued to a user, they can log all popular protocols at the protocol level (headers and bodies for SMTP, POP3, HTTP, etc.) or they can simply do a packet-level dump. Either way, the amount of information that they would get would amount to a profile of online activity that would make it easy for the federal government to scrutinze almost everything you have ever said or done online.

If you think that the system is not ripe for abuse, consider this. If they log at the protocol level, thus trapping the messages, not the raw packets themselves, they will get every username and password you submit to a website, email or possibly IM server without encryption. Just like the backdoors in encryption that the Clinton Administration wanted, criminals can exploit this as well. The longer that those logs exist, the more potential there is for a criminal to walk away with a true motherload of information about an ISP's users. In addition, law enforcement might be tempted to break the law and ethical standards. If a cop finds out that his ex-wife uses that ISP, it would be very easy to discretely strip out her log information, put it into a separate group of files and store them on a USB key drive.

This issue is one that most big bloggers have hitherto ignored, probably because they are not computer geeks. It threatens the very heart of basic relations between law enforcement and the public in regard to privacy rights. As I have said before, if you think that the NSA program is "problematic," this goes well above and beyond anything that might be considered controversial about it. This push by Sensenbrenner's office and the Bush Administration, if allowed to go through, would represent the first bonafide establishment of the surveillance capabilities necessary to usher in a Cold War-style police state in the United States.

Technorati tags: data, retention, Gonzales.
Links:
Wizbang.

It just warms my heart to see Congress getting bitten in the ass by its own legislation. One could almost expect them to learn from their mistake and not repeat the same mistake, but that would be expecting a little too much from America's native criminal class.

If the Congress thinks that the Department of Justice is "out of control," it is only because they gave it the mandate to run around like a rabid pitbull on Capitol Hill. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people, given the way that they have cooperated to undermine our freedoms.
I say let them rot in prison where they belong. It's the same fate that they would wish on their fellow citizens. Maybe after a dozen or two more of them have been arrested and sent to prison, they'll start to think about ways they can serve their constituents rather than rob them, use the money to buy political favors and invent new excuses to send people to prison.

I've been opposed to a national ID card for some time now, and this is a very good reason why. How can we trust the federal government to run a national ID card system when Congress won't apply even basic security restraints to the way that the federal government handles information?

R. James Nicholson, the Veterans Affairs secretary, said Thursday that: "I am outraged at the loss of this veterans' data and the fact an employee would put it at risk by taking it home in violation of VA policies." On May 3, the unnamed employee's home was broken into and the database was stolen, Nicholson said. No encryption was used to protect the data.
The bill, called the Data Accountability and Trust Act, or DATA, establishes strict standards for commercial companies to follow in the event of a data breach--including notifying customers "as quickly as possible," posting an alert on their Web sites and picking up the cost of credit reports for one year.
Not one of those requirements would apply to federal agencies.

Let me spell it out for those of you who support the REAL ID Act and other proposals for creating a national ID card system. A significant amount of your personal information will be tied to your national ID card and the federal government is not going to have any meaningful responsibility to ensure that your information is protected from basic security violations.

The information that was lost by the VA employee was just the tip of the iceberg of how badly the public could be hurt by the way that the information privacy and accountability standards are moving. Unlike private businesses, the federal government can just collect whatever information it wants, when it wants to collect it. People cannot "opt-out" of government information storage. Would you want all of the information that the governments in this country have on you to be "protected" by a government that is unwilling to enforce security policies?

I am very suspicious of this VA scandal. There is absolutely no professional reason why the employee had to take that information home. His or her home is the last place where a backup of such information would take place, and even if they were a DBA or programmer, they would not need any of that information on their laptop to be able to do their work from home. It is very easy to just generate test database information for that kind of work, if the employee were a programmer, and if he or she were a database administrator it would be defenseless on every level.

Isn't it just a little too convenient that so many records were stolen the one weekend that the employee took home over twenty six million records? I think it was most likely an attempt to make a hell of a lot of money on the part of the employee.

For several thousand years, the Bible has been a source of understanding for educated men and women. I noticed the following verse from Proverbs chapter 29 tonight as I was reading my Bible. It's simply amazing how much this book applies even today.

By justice a king gives a country stability, but one who is greedy for bribes tears it down.

It is time for this country to start facing up to the facts. We have all of the trappings of religion, but we aren't a religious or spiritual country. The Bible lays out a hard truth for us: we got ourselves into this mess when government stopped being about protecting life, liberty and property.

Social conservatives are just as implicated as liberals in this. The key to "saving America" is getting our government back to first principles, forcing people to accept responsibility for themselves and their children and providing them a framework in which to do that.

America can be saved, but it will come at a great cost to our society. We will have to stop relying on others for what we ought to do on our own, and for conservatives that will mean doing the unthinkable on two fronts. Not only will we have to restore liberty and responsibility, but we will have to restore our military to the model our founders intended. That would mean, reducing it to the status and capabilities of a "self-defense force," a military incapable of going beyond providing a rapid response before the militias can be called up to form a standing army.

I say these things reluctantly. I have come to realize lately that historically a government big enough to project itself abroad and influence the world will not bring justice to its people. It is time for America to demilitarize, downsize its police forces, cut regulation and taxes, let people live, hold them accountable for hurting others and to stop finding petty, ideological excuses to avoid the lessons of history.

So, on behalf of my countrymen, I applaud the FBI for taking down corrupt members of Congress on both sides. This should be only the beginning. For too long we have used half-baked excuses like "serving the needs of their constituents" to mask the very obvious fact that we'd call it systematic corruption if it were in any government but our own.

May Jefferson be only the beginning. Heads should roll, terror should fill the hearts of Congressmen who have taken bribes. Bring our military back home to be with its families, stop worrying about the rest of the world and focus on getting our collective house in order. Most importantly, Mr. Bush, if you are indeed a Christian, you will recognize that we are at a critical moment in our history. We are about to lose our country's very soul to corruption and blatant hatred of our traditions and Constitution. For the love of God, bring the iron fist of the state to bear on the culture of corruption with a fury so terrible that the reverberations of your inquisition will be with us for a thousand years.

And people wonder why I passionately despise the public K-12 education system in the United States

LIBERTYVILLE, Ill. - High school students are going to be held accountable for what they post on blogs and on social-networking Web sites such as MySpace.com. ADVERTISEMENT

The board of Community High School District 128 voted unanimously on Monday to require that all students participating in extracurricular activities sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of "illegal or inappropriate" behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action.

The concept of In Loco Parentis is officially under assault. One parent was quoted as saying that this is overstepping their authority. You... think?! The school system superintendent responded with a very snarky comment dismissing her complaints that her rights as a parent were being violated with the statement:

"The concept that searching a blog site is an invasion of privacy is almost an oxymoron," he said. "It is called the World Wide Web."

It ought to creep out anyone that cares about responsible government that the schools are starting to reserve this power for themselves. This is a police function, not the function of a school, public or private. The only time that a school has any business "monitoring" a student's website is to check on the content to see if it poses a clear and present danger to the safety of a student, while on school time.
Listen, conservatives and libertarians alike, stop supporting the public school system. Stop voting for candidates that want to keep it afloat. It is a vehicle for enforcing social conformity and reducing the capacity for rational thought in the majority of its wards, minorities in particular.
If you think that there is nothing truly sinister behind this clear breach of In Loco Parentis, consider this:

Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

It's part of an assault on liberty 158 years in the making.

Despite superficial differences and incompatibilities on moral and philosophical issues, Christianity and libertarianism can be reconciled very easily on the most fundamental issue: how the two view human nature. Christianity focuses on the depravity of human nature, while libertarianism, being relegated primarily to the realm of politics, is founded on the belief that human beings will naturally be tempted to abuse power that they have been granted over their fellow men and women. In this sense, libertarianism is a subset of the Christian outlook on human nature. No true Christian can honest ly claim that human nature pulls us toward the greater good rather than the greater evil, therefore from a scriptural point of view the libertarian outlook on political power is completely in line with the Bible's teachings on the essence of human nature.

One of the things that popular tendencies that tends to mislead otherwise well-meaning Christians, judging from many ofthe misguided critiques of libertarian political theory that I have read, is the belief that the Bible prescribes a particular political order. Where Islam attempted to provide a foundation for all of society from worship to warfare, Christianity is a government of the spirit only. There have hitherto been three approaches to providing for a Christ-based political system, religiously-inspired Socialism, the oft amorphous ideology known as "conservatism" in America today and religious-informed libertarianism. All three are lacking, but the libertarian approach is the least lacking, and unfortunately for the utopians only the second coming will provide for a perfect system of government and society. Much has been written about why Socialism is a horrible system to organize society around, and much could be written about why conservatism is misguided, but the real issue here is why libertarianism is at least the less evil of the three.

In their misguided zeal to transform society, many conservative Christians make the mistake of assuming that the power of the state has a moralizing influence. All it takes is for one to reflect upon the cultural and spiritual devastation that has been unleashed upon the nations that succumbed to radical Socialism such as Russia and Germany to see how wrong this view of state power really is. Libertarianism is not, despite the almost libelous screeds written against it, opposed to state power in principle, but rather to giving the state any more power than it absolutely needs to function. The power of the state can easily corrupt those that wielded it, and as Christians we must all recognize that there are far more opportunities to be evil afforded to a police officer who crosses the line and becomes a criminal, than an ordinary street thug. Not only do they have the freedom to act as a criminal, but they have the power of the law enforcement apparatus and public trust to shield them from most of the scrutiny that would easily catch a normal criminal. The same applies to all areas of government from the military to the welfare offices as Social Security, for example, has had its share of problems as well.

The impact of most acts of evil will not be readily felt, though they have a corosive impact on everything around them. One of the many goals for the separation of powers between not only the branches of the government, but its agencies as well, was to limit the power wielded by any one group. Throughout history, evil men have always been attracted to positions in society that afforded them an unacceptable degree of power over their fellow man. One of the many reasons why our government has fallen on a moral level to such a new low in our history is that without the barriers that make protect the public by making government agents go the extra mile to do the job right, the standards of ethics are inherently and subtely lowered. When cops are given more lattitude to "get rough" with people rather than be restrained in their dealings with them, they will naturally tend to take that conduct a little farther each time. That is unfortunately human nature at work, and why the conduct of the state must be held to the highest scrutiny and standard possible, lest we encourage evil conduct and attract even more of the dregs of society to positions of power.

The libertarian distrust of most of the state powers wielded today is not without a historical precedent supporting it.Throughout the twentieth century, the classical liberal/libertarian critique was vindicated time and again by the failed social experiments in countries ranging from the Soviet Union and China to Western Europe. Despite what some may believe, many of the things that are being proposed today to fight the all but defunct War on Terror, have already been tried by many of the countries that we trade with now--and they all categorically failed. Every successful democratic society has always prohibited its law enforcement agencies from directly working with its intelligence agencies except when the latter need the assistance of the former to stop an intelligence or terrorist operation affecting their territory. The hallmark of every totalitarian state has been a hand-in-hand relationship between the cop and the spook, a relationship which is slowly forming between our own FBI and CIA. Imagine the power that is at the finger tips of a cop who can tap into the NSA and CIA's advanced monitoring systems. They would be able to capture almost everything you say and track you by spy satellite, thus being able to find out virtually anything they want about you using systems originally designed to never be targetted against Americans. The infamous Total Information Awareness project, despite its technical flaws, would have given law enforcement the ability to get a list of virtually every single economic activity you have ever done and get ahold of most of your records held by any institution in this country, all with a wink and nod from law enforcement saying that they would police themselves.

The spectre of Big Brother never fails to be followed by inhumanity, and almost two hundred million people paid the price for humanity to learn that lesson in the 20^th century alone. The great lesson of the 20^th century was not that classical liberalism/libertarianism failed, but that it is the only political system capable of tempering the very worst aspects of human nature. While every liberal state has had its fair share of evil, which is to be expected, the evil of all of the liberal states throughout history pales in comparison to the evil of a single major Socialist state of the 20^th century such as Nazi Germany, the USSR, Maoist China, Khmer Rouge Cambodia or even Ba'athist Iraq. Whatever evils such as overindulgence in vice may be tolerated by a libertarian state, pale in comparison to the death camps, the cruelty and fear of the "knock in the middle of the night" that are par for the course with the alternative.

When libertarians object to things such as regulations of cable tv content, it is not necessarily saying that we agree with the content, but that rather that we see the bigger picture. The one behavior that the government never fails to exhibit is a desire for self-aggrandizement, which is clearly the biblical sin of pride writ large in this case. Most popular media is offensive to Christian sensibilities and there is little that we can safely do about that other than to vote with our dollars. It is dellusional for American Christians to believe that Jesus' admonitions that the world will hate the Bible's message cannot come to pass in America. We put our confidence in the state to do the right thing at our own peril, and most likely we will end up like Sweden, where a pastor was arrested for speaking out against homosexuality using verses from the Bible. When the government is given the power to punish people for speech that is deemed dirty and obscene, it will naturally come to the conclusion that much of the Bible is dirty and offensive. And why not? The Bible is full of references to genocide, incest, random violence and admonitions that many segments of society's behaviors are unacceptable, homosexuals being the most obvious example. The immediate feel-good feedback that we get from banning pornography must be weighed against the general powers that our government then has to begin declaring other things sexually obscene. The slope is inherently slippery because it is greased with the evil inborn through original sin.

Often even the most innocuous tools for good will be turned evil by man and that is a reality that Christians must cometo grips with. We live in a fallen world where we will always be the minority and thus we must recognize that anything we allow the state to do will be done most of the time by those not redeemed by Christ. Therefore we must recognize the fact that most of the people who will enforce the laws that we set up will be non-Christians and if we have them enforce biblical morality they will do so as non-Christians. We have the freedom to avoid most of the problems of vice, regardless of type, by choosing to not partake of it. We can avoid pornography by turning off our TVs and not buying it online. The same applies for all other vices. Unfortunately, what constitutes a vice varies from person to person, even among Christians, and thus the drafting and enforcement of these laws will vary greatly as well. It is the nature of those attracted to the power of the state to want more power, and from the ability to regulate one small area that may be legitimately regulated will naturally come the suspicion that more areas should be regulated.

The key stumbling block that conservative Christians will have to overcome to understand why libertarianism is compatible with a Christian worldview is to understand the difference between legislating morality and legislating virtue. Libertarians are in favor of the former, but not the latter because basic morality such as laws against murder, rape, incest and theft are matter of public protection. Where we part ways from our conservative counterparts is that we recognize the fact that any action that harms oneself, when freely undertaken in a sound mental state, is not an action which produces a victim. Virtue is not the same thing as basic morality, it is going above and beyond what is expected of you. There is no basic morality issue that prevents non-Christians from fornicating for example, but as Christians we are not called to the lowest common denominator of morality in our lives, but rather we are called to virtue. It is not possible to legislate the full spectrum of Christian morality without legislating virtue, and invariably we will be left with one of two types of government: a theocracy or a cold, secular state with a totalitarian agenda. Then if we legislate as Christians, and not as ordinary citizens seeking basic public order, we pick and choose what morality to enforce based on our own pleasures and not a rational approach. It is ultimately a losing proposition.

If there is one thing that we cannot remind ourselves enough of as Christians involved in politics in any way, it is that a Christian and a non-Christian will generally not be motivated by the same core values nor have the same justifications for our ideas and approaches. A Christian is motivated to not steal from their neighbor because of the calling of God to His morality, which society would at least grudgingly call virtue because our motivation is much higher than mere rational self-interest. The inner justification of the average non-Christian for stealing is a form of rational self-interest. If you disregard your neighbor's rights, then how can you be surprised when your neighbor retaliates in a similar fashion? This is why the libertarian approach is ultimately the one that provides for a system that accomodates Christians and non-Christians alike. It provides for a system that forces people to respect each others' rights as human beings while denying them the chance to use the state to deny them that respect. It doesn't force them to live righteously, but it doesn't give them the chance to justify their own depravity either because the libertarian approach provides those who are the targets of evil acts with many opportunities to right the wrongs that have been to them in a consistent manner. One obvious example is that libertarians oppose the application of excessive force laws to private citizens defending their property against theft. By taking this position, libertarians allow private citizens to take an active part in keeping society safe and relatively moral rather than giving the sole responsibility for that to the police who tend to fail miserably when they have a monopoly on that.

One thing that conservative Christians are just going to have to accept is that efforts to enforce virtue by the state will always be spotty in their success. The upside to accepting this is that we can we be safe, knowing that the odds of our government encouraging evil will be much less than if we make the enforcement of morals its top priority. Conservative Christians frequently make the mistake of assuming that the bloodthirsty totalitarian states of the 20^th century were amoral and interest only in power. They were not only not amoral, but they were guided by a perverted sense of morality and vision for society. For the Communists the moral order they sought was righting the wrongs that the capitalists had allegedly unleashed upon the proletariat and for the National Socialists it was lifting up the poor aryans who were the historical victims of the Jewish people according to their revisionist history. They turned fighting class warfare into a virtue and mandated it through their laws. We can see from the history of that misbegotten century the dangers of having a state which has such a domineering regulatory power over human conduct and nature. Societies change in their alignment with God, and it was only natural that theocratic Czarist Russia with its legally mandated calls to virtue became the repressive Soviet Union as Christianity's influence faded away in Russia. As American Christianity suffers the same fate, we Christians must ask ourselves whether we want to learn anything from history, or doom our children tQo live in the United Socialist States of America.

Akismet is having one hell of a time right now filtering out some of the spam I have been getting lately, so I had to manually run a SQL query to kill a bunch of spams. Here's a simple command you can run in your MySQL server to get rid of them: UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_approved = 'spam' WHERE comment_ID BETWEEN startIdNumber AND endIdNumber. You have to first run the commend SELECT * FROM wp_comments ORDER BY comment_ID DESC to find the latest spams, and substitute the appropriate numbers for startIdNumber and endIdNumber. In my case it was BETWEEN 2053 AND 2062.

Technorati tags: WordPress, Spam.

I'm not shocked, nor am I particularly appalled by Google's latest "censorship" problems. As a private company, it is their right to choose who to aggregate and who to not include. It is hardly even an act of bonafide censorship because all they are doing is delisting website that they don't like from their aggregator, which just happens to be one of many online.

The most appalling aspect of this is that conservatives have finally stooped to the lowest levels of the left in their big for power. Since when is Google required to not be biased? How is supporting the lawsuit against them that claims that they are an "essential service" and must therefore be regulated any different than the "fairness doctrine" that forced talk radio and others to allow leftists time at conservatives' expense?
The grievances against Google can be summed as people being too lazy to attract new readers on their own and to find alternative means of making money with their blogs. That to me sounds a lot like an entitlement mentality, but then given how big the "big tent" of the right has grown these days, that's hardly surprising.
What Google is doing is stupid and should be stopped, but it should be stopped by the stockholders, not by the courts or the government. If they aren't careful, they are going to get killed just like Netscape because of their bias. It's easy to forget that Google's business is built almost entirely on advertising and that they are competing against two media powerhouses: Microsoft and Yahoo whose pockets are quite deep. All it would take to get Google very badly exposed would be for Microsoft to do with MSN what they did with IE 4.0 and declare themselves officially neutral to all legal web content.
If you want to do something about this, then stop using Google or at least stop clicking on their sponsored links and ads unless they are hosted on a blogger's website. Do your part to make them more dependent as a company on being impartial toward all legal content. It's also a good to stop using Blogger.
Legal issues aside, it shouldn't be that hard to make your own aggregator. The hardest would be getting any money to pay for the costs of operating it because the bandwidth costs alone could be very steep. You couldn't use any advertisements because the sources that you aggregate would probably have a legal entitlement to part or all of the revenue because of your use of their copyrights. I'm not a lawyer, but I know that copyright concerns are the primary reason that you don't see Google's ads all over Google News.

Funny how Congress suddenly finds a sinister, deeper meaning in "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" when it's their hides that are on the line:

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) expressed alarm at the raid. "The actions of the Justice Department in seeking and executing this warrant raise important Constitutional issues that go well beyond the specifics of this case," he said in a lengthy statement released last night.

"Insofar as I am aware, since the founding of our Republic 219 years ago, the Justice Department has never found it necessary to do what it did Saturday night, crossing this Separation of Powers line, in order to successfully prosecute corruption by Members of Congress," he said. "Nothing I have learned in the last 48 hours leads me to believe that there was any necessity to change the precedent established over those 219 years."

And what part of the US Constitution are they referring to, as the basis for their whining about having a "separation of powers" issue? Article I, Section 6. Here it is, reproduced in full for the casual reader:

Section 6. The Senators and Representatives shall receive a compensation for their services, to be ascertained by law, and paid out of the treasury of the United States. They shall in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place.

Now, unless breach of the peace is to be interpretted as running around like a lunatic, a reasonable person could find grounds to say that the Founders intended for it to be a clause against misdemeanors, felonies and treason. That's reasonable enough. The President can only have members of Congress arrested when there are acual legal charges to bring them up on. I see nothing, absolutely nothing about Jefferson's case that warrants the kid gloves that he and other members of Congress want the FBI to use. They would never exercise that sort of restraint with a normal American citizen, so why is Congress special?

With the sort of corruption that goes on daily, that you can easily find by reading up on Porkbusters, this move comes as a great relief to the American people. We need more FBI strong-arm raids on Congress, not fewer. Congress needs to not only feel the heat for its culture of corruption, but needs to get a taste of the power that it so nonchalantly allows to be wielded against ordinary Americans.

It's impossible to call the United States a nation of laws, not men, if we allow Congress to be effectively above the law. They won't police their own members because too many of them have something to hide. If they weren't such a gathering of villainy and thievery, this might actually cause them to start discussing much needed reforms on police powers and to oppose programs like the NSA phone call analysis program and data retention laws. As always, that'd be a very big if.

PlagarismToday makes a point that has been a beef of mine for a while with the blogosphere:

These sites, which for this article I'll simply call "gray", are generally identified by a large number of very short posts, with much of it in block quotes or otherwise directly lifted content. Though they meticulously credit their sources, bowing to more traditional rules for blog attribution, and work to add at least some original content, usually over half of their material comes from other sources.

This has caused many bloggers to worry that these grey blogs might be trying to get away with content theft under the guise of legitimate attribution. The idea being that they can create a much larger volume of content if they only have to write a small portion of it. Users will simply visit the gray blogs since they are able to provide so much more information and, due to the use of liberal quoting, the user will then have no reason to visit the original source. After all, they already have most of the critical information.

Don't worry, the writer doesn't call for a major attack on bloggers or anything like that, but he or she has a very good point about the extent of bloggers often taking a significant amount of material from others and reusing it as their own or almost their own. Usually it's several paragraphs with one or two sentences. It's not a problem with a lot of blogs, like your average Blogger user because they don't have ads, nor do they have such a critical base of readers that it's likely to take away much (or anything) from the original writer. Yet, I frequently see bigger bloggers who quote liberally and rarely write up large amounts of their own content filled with their own ideas.
Is plagarism too harsh of a term for it? Probably, but there is something to the idea that bloggers need to write more of their own content. I have about 60-70 pages worth of original fiction content that I have published on my blog, though with full copyright reserved on it. I would be very annoyed with anyone who copied and pasted the bulk of it over onto their blog if they didn't give my blog a prominent citation at the top of the post. By the way, that's the reason that when I quote something like this PlagarismToday article, I tend to put the link to the citation at the top of the page, rather than the bottom.

You don't have to be original. God knows that the average political blogger thinks very neatly inside the political box just like the mainstream media does. It wouldn't be worth talking about, were it not for the fact that many bloggers want to be considered journalists. I know I'm not a journalist, but many bloggers don't understand that they aren't journalists. The blogosphere feeds off of the products of the mainstream media, which is why we need to respect their copyrights better. We have every right to make fair use quotations to formulate responses, rebuttals, agreements, etc., but just cutting and pasting content is amateur hour Google News. How many Instapundit-type aggregators do we really need?

If you think that Christians are anti-science, then consider this. Who is most opposed to nuclear power, automotive research, nanotechnology and genetically modified foods? Environmentalists and other secular luddites. Show me the major conservative Christian group that is afraid of any research except in areas that modify what it means to be human. I'm serious, show me where there is a general trend away from technology among Christians because I can show you plenty of examples where secular and neo-pagan environmentalists have gone absolutely insane over research and development of technologies they barely understand.

Those of you who think that we're all frothing at the mouth lunatics who hear evolution and screach in terror, rather than smirk at it, need to get out a little more. I am a software developer and I've known many Christians in other fields such as Physics, Chemistry and Math. There's nothing religious about genetics, quantum theory, Von Neumann machines, Calculus or the vast majority of scientific and engineering pursuits.

It really is a big and complex world out there. So look at Christianity again, but this time don't get your knowledge of it off of sugar packets like Grandpa Simpson got his history education. You might be horrified to find out that Christians are just as diverse as the rest of the country. Forget what you think you know about us because we're only 11% of the population.
Technorati tags: Christianity, Science, Engineering, Luddite.

For a country that claims to be overwhelmingly Christian, Americans have a funny habit of not believing in basic biblical doctrines:

"Americans by and large consider themselves to be Christian, but when you try to drill down to figure out what they believe, you find that among those who call themselves Christian, 59 percent don't believe in Satan, 42 percent believe Jesus sinned during his time on Earth, and only 11 percent believe the Bible is the source of absolute moral truth," said Mr. Barna, a conservative evangelical who regards these as troubling indicators.

Christian, like Fascist, is a heavily abused term in modern America. Non-Christians will arrogantly tell a conservative Christian "who are you to say who isn't a Christian," but they would never get in a Jew or Muslim's face like that over their religion.

There is, unfortunately for non-Christians and religious liberals, a true definition of what is a Christian. The Bible ended with the Book of Revelation because that was the last book written by an Apostle (John). Why does this matter? Because Jesus said that he would send the Holy Spirit to his disciples and the Holy Spirit would reveal scripture through them. Since the church fathers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Ladder Day Saints were not disciples, their "revelations" were not, according to the Gospel of John and church tradition, inspired by the Holy Spirit. I furthermore challenge anyone to show me in the New Testament where Jesus questions the validity of the Old Testament. It's not enough to believe that Jesus was the Son of God, you must also believe that the rest of scripture is true, lest we call God impotent (unable or unwilling to keep scripture accurate) or a liar.

If someone says to you that they believe in Jesus, and say that they believed he sinned, then they are not a Christian. If they don't believe in Satan, then clearly Jesus must be a liar because he told his disciples that he was tested by the devil.

Yes, of course we can dance around and say, "but... but how do you know any of this actually happened." It's called faith. It takes more faith to believe that parts of the Bible are true, than to believe all of it is true. How do you know which parts are right? Most conservative Christians would, ironically, reject Christianity if they did not believe that the Bible was entirely true because they are looking for a relationship with God, not a spiritual crutch to make them feel warm and fuzzy about the afterlife.

There is a good rule to use with religions that secularists would do well to realize applies to pretty much all of them. To find out what makes a true "X," you start out from the most hardline and traditional groups and move your way out toward the "mainstream." In Christianity this would be reformed protestants, conservative Eastern Orthodox and traditional Roman Catholics. These are the people who are most likely to study their religion seriously and take it all seriously. The further you move away from these groups, the closer you get to what are known as "cultural adherents." These are the people who say that Jesus is the Son of God, but can't embrace even half of the Nicene Creed, a statement of faith that all protestants and catholics (all types of catholicism) embrace as the core testament of faith.

The leftists get a lot of credit that they don't deserve:

One thing I find a bit more reassuring about the left is that it tends to be more secular, and more willing to take on the great religious murderers, if not the great secular murderers like communism. The great enemy today is not communism, though, it is fanatic Islamofascist savagery, funded and supported by Saudi Arabia and Iran.

I am at a loss as to who these "great religious murderers" are. Considering the fact that arguably with the exception of the Armenian genocide, every genocide of the twentieth century was launched by secular governments or militias, it would seem that there is a dirth of religious murderers on par with any secular government. Now, granted, one can leap head first into the sophistic argument that since most of these societies were christianized, that the secular trappings and ideologies of their governments can be cheerfully ignored.
But, you know what? As bad as the genocides in Sudan were/are, last I heard a total of around 2M-2.1M between Darfur and the pagan and Christian south, the slaughters in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge were worse. Those are only the tip of the iceberg of what secularists have done. If anything, the sheer fact that secular institutions massacred over 150,000,000 by some counts in the 20^th century makes it pointless to talk about the "great religious murderers."

"Born-again" religious Christian George W. Bush seems singularly ill-equipped to wage war on a fellow religion, and even stumbles along, in the face of every single bit of evidence, proclaiming Islam a religion of "peace," and its deep-pockets enablers, the Saudis, our "best friends." And we don't even need to delve too deeply into Bush and his family's long, murky, and ongoing financial involvement with the Saudis to feel strong misgivings about his committment to defend the US against these religious fanatics.

This has nothing to do with George W. Bush's proclaimed faith, and everything to do with his political correctness. Yes, Bush is politically correct about a lot of things. The very fact that he cannot take on border security as a major component of his so-called "War on Terror" alone should serve as ample evidence that his professed faith has nothing to do with his lack of a spine.

I doubt that Bill Quick is trying to imply that religious people in general, Christians in particular, are hamstrung in going after other religions, but it cannot be said enough that Bush's public exercises of his faith has been... lacking. Bush's actions on security issues prove that he has a tenuous faith in the Judao-Christian teaching that human nature is corrupt and must be checked by law. The whole "wink and 'trust me'" style of the Bush Administration has been remarkably non-Christian in its view on what can--and will--happen when authority figures are not subject to oversight in their use of legal powers.

The real problem that we have is that most Americans don't want to hear the ugly truth that simply barring immigration or visits from predominantly Islamic countries would do more to protect us than all of the NSA surveillance and USA PATRIOT Act crap combined. We can't tell what's inside a Muslim's heart, and Muslims seem to be the only group that wants to wage unlimited war against our people enough to fly over here to do it. It logically follows that deporting all foreign nationals who are adherents of Islam, and ending all immigration from Islamic countries would not only keep out most potential terrorists, but serve as the most effective way to respect the rights of American citizens, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

Roci made me do it.

Thanks to Vox, I found what is quite possibly the best political blog EVER. Feministing is the blog, and here's a great sample from it to show the brilliance of the blogger who maintains it.

When our bellies are bloated and heavy with life-sucking fetuses 8 months later, we shall waddle to Washington and heave ourselves onto the steps of the Supreme Court.

There, we will raise crack pipes to our lips. We will spark our rocks and inhale deeply while our stuffy and Puritanical oppressors watch. After getting wicked high, we will chant "Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!" until hoarse.

Then, we will pound on each other's stomachs with our fists in drug-addled fury so that half-developed chunks of crack-baby will start to sluice-out from us, dribbling-down the steps of the court like a salsa of human flesh. Ahh, what an inspiring sight that will be!

If they arrest us: We are martyrs to the cause.

If they are shocked, annoyed, offended: Mission accomplished!

Once we've expunged the chunks, legs, heads, arms and goo all over the steps like the Pussy-Power Marinara Sauce that it is, we will demand that they codify in law our sacred right to smoke crack while pregnant!

Instead of worrying about the North Koreans nuking us, here's a novel idea. Worry instead about the poor scientists' families who were probably beaten, robbed, raped or tortured by the North Korean military for the failures we saw today. I wouldn't past the government of North Korea to do something very nasty to them because of the sort of face they lost as their "great enemy," the United States, just laughed at their total impotence. (*) Others: Daniel Drezner.

For several months now, a battle over "Network Neutrality" has been raging online between broadband Internet Service Providers and companies that sell expensive, dedicated bandwidth to corporate customers on one side and content companies on the other. This battle has pitted such players as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple against numerous providers of broadband Internet access, and has created no shortage of absurd rhetoric on both sides.

The fight over Network Neutrality has its origins in the push to bring high-definition audio and video services to the Internet, but it has since spiraled out of control from there. The ISPs wanted to be able to reserve large portions of their networks in order to provide a guaranteed minimum of bandwidth for these services.

In order to facilitate IPTV and other services, the ISPs would need tremendous free capacity because any delay in serving up content caused by network delays could provide a very unsatisfactory level of service in terms of quality and convenience to their potential customers. The problems started when they began to call the content providers free-riders who would have to pay up even more to fund the creation of these new network capabilities. From vague threats of having to "pay up," the ISPs moved on to suggest that content providers would have to pay them additional money for the "privilege" of providing services to their customers at full speed.

Without the content and service providers on the tech side, the ISPs have no business. After all, what good is a several hundred dollar T1 dedicated connection or even a $15 DSL package without good services such as Google, MSN and the iTunes Music Store? Without content providers from bloggers to major corporations, the Internet's infrastructure is as useless as a stretch of road that begins and ends in the middle of a deserted wilderness.

The dishonesty in the rhetoric has been reaching a fevered pitch as of late, with the introduction of the ISPs' latest attempt to portray their adversaries (who are ironically their biggest customers) as wanting to dump all of the costs on the little guy. Such an outrage! Then one considers that the infrastructure behind the DSL service, the lines that actually provide the reliable backend, are, well, just a wee bit more expensive than the $15 pittance paid out every month.

What the ISPs don't tell the public is that there are no free-riders among the content companies. They pay handsomely for their bandwidth. In fact, they are the true bread and butter for the major telecoms and ISPs. The reason that this "Network Neutrality" controversy exists today is that ISPs don't want to admit that their whole business model is flawed. They don't want to admit to their home customers that they need to pay for metered bandwidth just like they pay for metered water and electricity.

While some might try to compare metered bandwidth to the infamous per-minute access fees that were threatened during th early days of dialup Internet access, there is an important difference. Thanks to the upgrades in infrastructure and the fact that broadband is by design a persistant connection to the ISP, metered bandwidth is concerned only with how much service is actually used, not just having the service as was the case with the per-minute fees. Additionally, unlike flat fees, and even per-minute access fees (which were designed only to help telecoms), metered bandwidth would force heavy users to pay for their own costs as they utilize disproportionate shares of the total bandwidth availible.

For their part, content providers need to recognize that ISPs have every right to reserve part of their networks for their own content services. Too much of the griping from these companies has been over the possibility of facing stiff competition from companies like Verizon that want to provide TV and other multimedia services online. A lot of their backing from the "masses" has come from people who want to be able to engage in illegal file sharing of copyrighted goods, another sign that the whole debate is poisoned.

Whether or not you take a side in this fight, it becomes very clear that neither side is innocent. The content companies want to have an easier time competing and keeping new competitors at arm's length. The ISPs want to be able to simultaneously sell broadband Internet access while reserving the right to arbitrarily bilk the companies providing the very services that the broadband users want in the first place.

The real problem with "Network Neutrality" is that if ISPs demand money from content providers to let them access an ISP's customer at full speed, the market for high-speed dedicated lines will be undermined. What the ISPs have not answered is why content providers and application service providers should invest in their infrastructure when arbitrary limits may be erected at any point and at any time.

There is one silver-lining in the clouds, though, for those who fear that without Network Neutrality, ISPs might be able to pick and choose who gets a voice. Federal law provides ISPs with a large degree of common carrier status, but that status could be revoked if they play favorites. Revocation of this status, in the face of unrelenting attacks by enraged copyright holders represented by such groups as the RIAA and MPAA would, quite literally, amount to corporate suicide for any ISP that decided to eschew common carrier status to be able to play king-maker among content vendors.

Regardless of who "wins," Internet users will pick up the economic costs of the Network Neutrality battle. It is only a question of which end that will happen. If the content providers win, users will pay in the form of lower quality of service and probably paying more arbitrary fees as ISPs scramble to make enough money to continue investing in their networks. If the ISPs win, the cost of all Internet services will probably increase as content providers have to pass on additional costs to their customers. The very fact that this has been turned into a zero sum game for the little guy by two sides that are dominated by billion dollar corporations should be an indicator that something is terribly wrong with the issue itself.

Some say "fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." I'd be inclined to take the blame for Orac being so utterly clueless here, were it no so glaringly obvious what tone I was using in my original post. I'm not linking the two posts here from Orac's blog mainly because I can do without Orac and his yappy little sycophants, and I don't feel like temporarily disabling trackback autodiscovery.

In it, I happened to make a brief mention of and link to an apparent admirer of Vox's who goes by the 'nym of MikeT, who defended Vox's idiotic Holocaust analogy while calling him a "devilishly clever bastard."

And once again:

although Jesus' General with his usual humor doesn't quite see it that way and Vox's admirers still marvel at what a "devilishly clever bastard" he is

Orac, if you wonder why I don't give a damn about your opinion, it is because you are a tone-deaf moron. For someone who is so proud of his intellect, you have a remarkable inability to gauge the tone of a post. If your "fisking" of Vox is what you consider a serious response, it is no wonder he doesn't even respond to you anymore.

I leave it up to others of more pedestrian mental capabilities to discern the tone of the post that got not one, but two, snarky comments about my "admiration" of Vox. Clearly, public intellectual #1 is having a difficult time reading between the lines.

There is something to be said about a man who prides himself on his intellectual prowess the way that Orac does, and yet makes the same obvious mistake twice. However, he did prove my point about most of Vox's critics that they are so predictable that their responses can almost be perfectly modeled on a finite state automata diagram. There is a difference between principle and predictability. Once again, I leave it up for others to discover.

The Middle East once again proves that Islam has absolutely no problem living in peace with those who either don't practice it or are on the outskirts of what it considers acceptable:

THE death threat was delivered to Karazan's father early in the morning by a masked man wearing a police uniform.

The scribbled note was brief. Karazan had to die because he was gay. In the new Baghdad, his sexuality warranted execution by the religious militias.

The father was told that if he did not hand his son over, other family members would be killed.

What scares the city's residents is how the fanatics' list of enemies is growing. It includes girls who refuse to cover their hair, boys who wear theirs too long, booksellers, liberal professors and prostitutes. Three shops known to sell alcohol were bombed yesterday in the Karrada shopping district.

In this atmosphere of intolerance and intimidation, the militias have made no secret of their hatred of homosexuals.

Well, this is obviously no different from the United States where homosexuals have to deal with being criticized for being homosexual by unarmed private citizens. There really is no difference between a culture of mild antagonism towards one's lifestyle and the daily risk of being murdered by uniformed religious fanatics who have the force of law and popular opinion behind them. When you get right down to it, you would have to be a bigot to not realize that a few mild-mannered Sunday preachings against homosexuality is the same thing as getting lured to a dark ally and shot in the back of the head, decapitated, hung or having a brick wall collapsed on you.

The Grand Ayatollah, meanwhile, was apparently mistranslated. He couldn't possibly be calling for the slaughter of people based on their sexuality because we all know that hatred really only exists in the Western countries.

Mr Hili claims that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered spiritual figure in Iraq, provoked the murders by saying on his website in April last year that homosexuals should be killed in the "worst, most severe way".

Clearly it's a conspiracy. Any day now we are going to find that David Duke flew over to the Middle East, grew his beard out long and learned to ululate like a pro.

This is why I hate America's victim culture. Homosexuals have it better here than practically any other country in the world, and the bitch about getting told "we don't agree with your lifestyle." Christians get called stupid and many of us scream "persecution!" It's no wonder the rest of the world has a beef with us. I can't even imagine how ridiculous American homosexuals and Christians look to their Iraqi counterparts.

I've always found the view that Congress is supposed to look out for local interests above national interests to be odious to say the least. It's a common Political Science excuse for why earmarks are really not such a bad thing for the public, when in fact all they really are is a way to transfer wealth from one citizen to another in practice.

I'm against earmarks and Congressional careerism because our careerist Congress has taken upon itself some of the worst trappings of a Platonic Republican ruling class without the benefit of being run by enlightened philosopher kings. There is an argument from Political Science circles against term limits on the basis that Congress needs the experience on sensitive issues that only come from time.

Excuse me, what experience do they have now? They behave like ignorami on the majority of regulatory issues. At least once in the past four years there has been a serious proposal in the Senate that would bring down the entire IT industry. The careerist class is no better on other issues than a true citizen legislature would be, but the difference is that they don't even pretend to listen to those who might know better than they do about the ramifications of their efforts. Normal people will listen, the Congress that exists today is too busy trying to get reelected and maintain campaign contributions to hear evil in their bills.

As for earmarks, especially major ones like the CTX line which will cost over $700M, this is not charity money. This is money that is taken from your pocket at the penalty of imprisonment. I have a major problem with those who poo poo the extreme corruption in this culture. Congress is saying that it knows better than its own constituents how to spend the money. If you cut out all of the earmarks and programs that Congress has put together to win votes over the years, the income tax wouldn't need to be even half of what it is today.

Reason has just put out one hell of a good expose on the vitriolic racism of the progressives. This paragraph in particular explains why libertarians have for a long time opposed the sorts of economic controls that the progressives of today practically drool over.

No doubt many of those businesses would have excluded or mistreated black customers whatever the law. But in a market free from Jim Crow regulations, other businesses would have welcomed blacks, or at least black dollars, forcing racist enterprises to bear the full cost of excluding or mistreating all those potential paying customers. (This was one of the chief reasons the segregationists pushed for those laws in the first place.) The state, in the eloquent words of the historian C. Vann Woodward, granted "free rein and the majesty of the law to mass aggressions that might otherwise have been curbed, blunted, or deflected."

The Progressive Era coincides with the birth of a new religion: scientism. Scientism is not science, rather it is an attempt to use science and pseudo-science to explain everything from personal prejudices to the metaphysical. The former is especially relevant to the problems of the Progressive Era because that was when "science proved that blacks were inferior." Of course, today we know that eugenics is a crock of bovine excrement in no small part because it is to a serious effort to upgrade the human race what banging on a piece of flint is to try to creating a workable nuclear power source. Nothing short of deliberate and direct manipulation of DNA could accomplish their goals.

Didn't stop them from believing that blacks were inferior, though. These people didn't really like living in a Christianized culture anyway because Christianity has a nasty habit of not looking fondly on claims of racial superiority. According to scripture not only could blacks be Christians, but black slaves ought to be the best Christians they can so as to not give their masters any excuse to turn away from God. The horror, a black person could be a better human being in the eyes of an almighty god than a white man. Even worse! He ought to be obedient only so that if his master continues to reject Jesus that his master is doubly condemned by the slave's good works as a Christian. Now, for some reallll commie shit. The master ought to recognize the slave as a... get ready... the white power types just eat this up... brother or sister in Christ! Just slap a Che Guevara shirt on Jesus and give the disciples membership cards for the Internationale.

We're still paying the price for the progressives' secular crusade today. We have a government that has spiraled out of control and the progressives managed to frame the issue in terms of government being the primary means of social change. Today, most conservatives and leftists alike agree on that point. If they were really inclined toward engineering, they would have had at least an inkling as to why their policies were foolish and dangerous.

Yeah, these people really deserve a government of their own:

The Hamas-led Palestinian Authority has deployed a new militia in Gaza under the command of a leading militant and in direct defiance of a veto by the PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

The paramilitary "implementation force", led by Jamal Abu Samadhana, prominent on Israel's wanted list, took up positions on the streets of Gaza City and elsewhere yesterday with the stated aim of restoring order in the increasingly lawless Strip. Late last night security force units loyal to Mr Abbas began patrolling Gaza as part of what a security official told Reuters would be the largest such deployment since the run-up to Israel's withdrawal from Gaza last August.

The moves risked increasing tension between Fatah and Hamas after two Hamas militants were killed in drive-by shootings which the faction blamed on the Fatah-dominated Preventative Security Force. But by 1am there had been no clashes between the rival forces.

Only in the Palestinian territories would a terrorist group win a popular election, field an official militia of terrorists and get some of its guys murdered in a drive-by shooting by "government" security forces. The "Palestinian Authority" doesn't even come close to constituting a legitimate government, and the Palestinians have shown that they have not one iota of ability to govern themselves since the last election.

As bad as Israel can be, you'd have to be motivated out of hatred to support the Palestinians. These people are the consummate embarassment to the Arabs. There are very few peoples throughout the world who have shown less qualification for home rule than the Palestinians.

I am switching back to Dreamhost.com, so things might be a little shaky for the next day or two. Sorry, but I could no longer deal with my blog going up and down, up and down. It was apparently down for a while this morning (few hours?) and my current host (hint, I use Instapundit's) didn't know about it until just 15-30 minutes ago. I've signed up again with Dreamhost and am changing the DNS settings over to them.

An Army of Davids or an Army of (Intellectual) Deadweights? I leave it up to you, intrepid reader. Glenn Reynolds thinks of the blogosphere as an army of swashbuckling Davids taking down the establishment. That's really nice in theory, really warms the populist heart to think that we're talking down The Man^tm. Making the Internet safe for democracy, even while the blogosphere continues its downward spiral into complacency and asininity.

I'm cynical about bloggers because of what people like Captain Ed, The Anchoress, The Moderate Voice and a host of others have written about Vox's non-controversial article. Actually, that's not true. I've long regarded blogging as nothing more than a quaint commoditization of technology packaged in a neat, accessible form. However, my cynical meter jumped through the roof today. I'll be up front, I like Vox even though I think he's a hot-headed ass half of the time. It's part of his appeal. It's that je ne sais qua that makes him readable when other pundits act like pre-packaged finite state automata. Most pundits are so predictable that you could mathematically calculate their mental states and articles for the life of their career. Predicting Vox is like predicting the aftermath of a tornado in the junkyard that is the political blogosphere.

I keep hearing about how the masses are bloodhounds for truth. Oh, really? When Michelle Malkin was strutting around like a peacock with her In Defense of Internment, and Vox ripped it to shreds with actual historical evidence (Some more evidence and examples). Where were the bloggers who attacked Dan Rather like a wolf pack? I'm not defending Rather. In fact I think he got about what he deserved, plus or minus a few pitchforks. Michelle Malkin ran like a scalded yorkie away from the fight with Vox and Eric Muller. She tacitly admitted that half of the argument for her book was pure rubbish, and based on the evidence that Vox organized (do a google search with this query:site:voxday.blogspot.com internment michelle malkin for more of his posts) she tried desparately to escape the inevitable conclusion that her book was a few hundred pages of dead thesis.

Now, I am about to give you a litmus test. If you find the following paragraphs at all morally reprehensible or highly offensive, congradulations. The mainstream media has a job for you. Quit blogging and start typing up a portfolio to submit to the editor.

And he will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: "Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic - it's just not going to work."
Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

I am not extraordinarily gifted at reading for comprehension, but for the life of me I cannot find this hidden text that says that Hispanics should be exterminated. Actually, I think I did. Vox, you devilishly clever bastard:

And he will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: "Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic - it's just not going to work."
Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

See, you have to read between the lines. This is what Dan Brown would call the Vox Code. It's based on a paranoid, discombobulated, random reading of Vox's writings to discern his true Nazi views. Rumor has it that this is about to be classified as Vox Derangement Syndrome in the DSM-IV. If you look hard enough (and long enough), you just might find out the address to mail your request for the Vox Day Nazi League Decoder Ring to help you really get the bigger picture. I just got mine. You wouldn't believe the subliminal messages.

The great thing about Vox as a pundit is that he is the fox to the average A-list blogger's bungling beagle. His stuff is pure quality entertainment if you're one of those people who gets some of their shits and giggles from watching someone make peace with their inner moron. It's that public edumacated moment of zen where the clouds part and all one sees is the void of space, the Lovecraftian nothingness which drove many a man from Miskatonic U. into the loving embrace of Cthulhu (by court order recently changed to H. Clinton).

Apparently the Republican Party thinks that all its conservative base really wants is more and more federal surveillance powers:

Wisconsin Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is proposing that ISPs be required to record information about Americans' online activities so that police can more easily "conduct criminal investigations." Executives at companies that fail to comply would be fined and imprisoned for up to one year.

In addition, Sensenbrenner's legislation--expected to be announced as early as this week--also would create a federal felony targeted at bloggers, search engines, e-mail service providers and many other Web sites. It's aimed at any site that might have "reason to believe" it facilitates access to child pornography--through hyperlinks or a discussion forum, for instance.

Trust Rep. Sensenbrenner to take a