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.

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 modest proposal and turn it into a monstrosity. Regardless of how you feel about the NSA monitoring program, this is basically no different than allowing the NSA to order your phone company to record every telephone conversation you make. For bloggers and others, this is particularly true because if they require the ISPs to log the HTTP request data, every blog comment, post, etc. will be recorded by your provider for posterity until the law allows them to delete the data.

As an added bonus, the federal government will also get probably the majority of your webmail as well because it uses the same HTTP POST mechanism to send the email message to your service such as GMail, and SSL-protected webmail is a rarity. And lastly, before I forget, they could also intercept every single password you use online that isn't sent via SSL (When HTTPS is in the URL).

For the non-geeks out there, this is a sample (modified from this source's example) of what is sent out by your web browser when you hit the comment or post button on a blog:

POST /path/script.cgi HTTP/1.0

From: ithinkiam@postingprivately.com

User-Agent: HTTPTool/1.0

Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Content-Length: 95

username=Anonymous&post_id=55&text=I+like+being+anonymous+but+all+of+my+headers+are+logged+now

If this bill goes through, that comment would be logged by your ISP if you posted it on my blog. Unlike the telephone system, HTTP is a transactional system. It works on a request/response cycle. I send your blog a set of HTTP headers with an associated body, your blog sends me a HTTP header/body set in response. The telephone network works by having the network/phones negotiate a connection and then data is transfered. The closest equivalent would be if you dialed someone, said a sentence, they picked up and immediately responded and hung up.

The potential for dragneting here is huge, and exists in a degree that is absent in the phone call record system. My guess is that this bill will either intentionally or unintentionally not exclude any body information, which would be the equivalent of the NSA not asking the telecoms to hand over recordings of all phone conversations.
This bill is problematic because the Internet is the future of personal communications and has greater technical flexibility in conducting a dragnet operation. With proper compression, ISPs could easily afford to keep track of their customers' records for a decade or longer, meaning that every single thing you do online at your home computer is recorded. While we aren't anonymous online (it's always been an illusion), this bill would actually outright kill any pretense to privacy that Americans enjoy online. It would be to the Internet what allowing the NSA to build a massive data center to warehouse all phone calls in the United States would be. That's why I say forget about the phone records, this has far more explosive ramifications than anything having to do with call record, and they aren't even pretending that this information is just for agencies with no power to prosecute American citizens like the NSA.

If you need a reason to get worked up about this, here's a scenario. You're looking at legal porn, and stumble onto a child porn or beastiality website because your browser gets redirected by a redirection script concealed by JavaScript. It opens up popups to several other sites as you try frantically to close it. Congradulations, you now have several child porn website GET requests logged to your account, and HTTP has no concept of accidentally clicking. Were you scammed or curious? What happens if you go to a different site and get back in the same scenario a few months later? Right now, the ISP would probably delete all of that data within a week or two, allowing you to just brush it off as bad luck, but now that it's all logged, it looks like a pattern of behavior on your part, even though it's purely by accident. This is a serious consideration since they say that child pornography is their driving reason behind this law in the first place.

And for those who need an example of how this could be abused, I've got one of those too. Let's say that a drug cop gets a court order to look at someone's logs, and finds out that a guy he or she personally hates uses the same ISP. It would be easy for them to change the log analyzer's search criteria from the suspect's to that individual's IP address. Someone gets up to get a cup of coffee while the cop is looking over the data, and the cop can get the whole log file, compressed, onto a 4GB USB key drive. See, that's the difference between log analysis and wiretapping. All of the data the cops could want is in the log. All they have to do is change the search criteria.

Other blogs talking about this:

Tech Liberation Front.

Cato-at-Liberty.

The Agitator.

Shakespeare's Sister.

NewsHog.

I wouldn't call it a major epiphany, but it has struck me as very amusing to see the contortions over the immigration issue. On the one hand, people like Bush call Americans a hard-working people, yet turn around and roast the average American worker indirectly by saying that illegals do the jobs that we're too lazy to do. It can't be both ways. Either the American worker is a hard-worker or is a lazy one.

When they're not attacking the domestic proletariat, the left is trying to woo its support. Yeah, like that is going to go over really well. I'll bet that Karl Marx never envisioned workers having a distinct lack of a desire to find common "class interests," let alone like the capitalists (who butters the bread?) and fight to keep out other workers in order to sustain their quality of life, which is higher than "egalitarian standards."

This trip would not be so smooth. Word of trouble began to percolate in the morning of the first lecture. A local antiwar activist was demanding my arrest as a war criminal. My crimes were multifold: Writing an article blaming Saddam Hussein-not United Nations sanctions-for Iraqi deaths, and then advocating for Iraqi liberation. This made me responsible for "war-crimes and violating international law by indirectly causing the invasion of Iraq." Like thousands of others, I had also worked at the Pentagon and volunteered for duty in Iraq. At each university lecture, protesters worked to disrupt my speech. Some were young students, and others were older retirees, members of a group calling itself, "The Movement for Active Democracy."

It's things like this which make me increasingly unsympathetic to the "anti-war movement." Ever wonder why I don't consider Bush's investigations of members of the American "anti-war movement" to be unworthy of being classified as politically-motivated a la the Clintons' tendency to have confidential files in their hands? It's because of the myriad number of communists and crypto-fascists in this lot. I actually don't think that those who agitate for nearly unlimited state power over the lives of the rest of society deserve to be treated with anything but contempt by the agents of a liberal or even semi-liberal republic. A free society can rightfully consider a communist to be a subversive, as their group's stated goal is the elimination of (classical) liberalism and the institution of an extremely powerful central state. It would be suicidal for a free society to not treat extreme leftists and Islamists as anything other than potential subversives and hostile agents. There's nothing unlibertarian about war, despite Justin Raimondo's protestations to the contrary. War is nothing more than a collective use of force. If it's right for a single man or woman to use deadly force in self-defense, then it logically follows that a group may exercise a collective right to use deadly force in the defense of the life, liberty and property of the members of the group. Anyone who argues against a right to wage war is not a libertarian. It's one thing to oppose any current engagement of our government, it is quite another to whine about our government's ability to wage war itself. I can't help but wonder whether such libertarians even really support an individual right of self-defense since the capacity of an individual to unjustly exercise deadly force is no different in principle from a group's ability. And lastly, read this if you think that Western Europe is, in terms of speech, a model for how to run our country.

In this light, the conservatives' fear of moral relativism is well-founded. Absent some divine authority, or lacking any consensus about the existence or nature of such authority, relativists believe that morality is socially determined, wholly dependent on standards existing in a community at a particular place and time. In a pluralist society, then, there can be no consensus regarding good and evil. If it is not quite true that anything goes, tolerance dictates that we must respect the choices that others make, even if they are repugnant to others in the community. Same-sex marriage, under this view, is no more right or wrong than the traditional variety, and we cannot condemn those who practice it. Moral relativism is often considered to be inversely proportional to the strength of religion. The prevalence of the former, however, has surprisingly little to do with the decline of the latter. Religion is hardly in decline, at least in this country. A higher percentage of Americans go to church, mosque or temple each week than went both one and two centuries ago. By any measure, America is the most religious of all Western industrialized nations and arguably the most religious of any country outside Islam.

This was one of the few interesting paragraphs from an argument on why the web will make society less conservative. I think that the real danger that the web will create for the "liberal elites" as the author glowingly refers to them is that it will cause millions of people to start questioning their authority. It will be precisely the left that will suffer the greatest from the Internet because it is left-wing policies which will attempt to impede and regulate the whole structure of not just the WWW, but the Internet in general. "Tax and regulate, tax and regulate" has a remarkable tendency to stifle the synaptic flow of the interlinked WWW, and that's not going to benefit the left either, but rather a libertarian mentality, as people start to say "who the hell are you to regulate my web?"

Now, on the subject of morality, I think it is instructive to realize that moderation is inherently bad. Morality is a very unique thing in that the more we like it, the less meaningful it is. As they say, a religion that doesn't challenge you is a religion that was clearly made up by you. The same is true for morality. People all of the time make up standards of morality that don't challenge them, that fit them as a person, allowing them to do things which others consider to be wrong, while not appearing to be a hypocrite. Christianity is actually arguably the most morally relativistic religion because it regards all evil as the same. To murder a man is no worse of a sin in terms of how God deals with it than simply lying to that man. It's the absolute resolution of all relative sin that's the problem for people, but I digress.

In order for morality to mean anything, it must exist in defined, transcendental standards otherwise it has no use. If we go entirely based on what the community believes here and now, we have no connection to the past and the future becomes a great unknown. Certain right-to-life issues aside, social conservatives are generally very enthusiastic about technological development and share the same acceptance of technological change that secular libertarians with their absolute "non-initiation of force principle" hold.

It is precisely the left that has become reactionary. Ever fearful of technological and societal advancement, it clings to its articles of faith tenuously. Class conflict, The Revolution, etc. It is terrified of genetically modified things, worried about the digital divide, certifiably deranged about nuclear power and apathetic toward exploring space. I credit this to the fact that with a solid moral foundation, religious or secular, that is based on eternal human rights or divine mandate, one can stop worrying about many sociological things and start worrying about cool things.

The left worries incessantly about the poor having access to broadband Internet access, even though they have multiple TVs, DVD players and video game consoles, a middle class lifestyle in many countries. They worry about equality, we worry about advancement of the species. Karl Marx and other famous socialists never bothered to answer the question about what comes after the takeover and redistribution of wealth. It's as though they just assumed that human beings would be happy with stagnation and not having the luxuries of a capitalist life. We're greedy and prone to sloth as a race. We always try to make the mad dash straight to the highest standard of comfort we can get, then dream about how to acquire even more. For better or for worse, it's why we advance so quickly

Moral questions bore me. I believe in conservative biblical morality in part because it provides a framework which allows me to not have to think about right and wrong most of the time because unlike sociologists, ethicists and political scientists, I find many pursuits more interesting than asking, "is this a mitzvah?" Worrying about "social ramifications" as though they are the ultimate consideration is for people that worry too much and dream too little. It's why the moral relativists I've known have always been the most fearful and boring creatures imaginable. The sociologist tries to find complex formulas to understand why people want to radically advance things before we can "understand them." The geek just says in response, "because we can."

Or at least that's apparently the position of a number of telecoms and cable companies these days. As I was checking out an article on Salon.com, I ran into a very dishonest advertisement on their site run by a group of telecoms and conservative organizations. This group wants to frame the issue of network neutrality into big content companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and others versus "the people." The advertisement says "these corporations are going to make billions and they want to stick consumers with the whole bill."

Excuse me?! Would someone mind telling me how it's not precisely the other way around? It's Google, Yahoo, Microsoft (their three examples in the flash ad) that pay the billions up front in bandwidth costs. News that Google is a free-rider must have come like a brick in the face to Google's accountants after they tallied up the costs of their bandwidth.

Tell me, who is the free-rider here. A family pays Verizon $15 a month for 768kbps DSL, a content provider would pay a few hundred dollars a month for a T1, which isn't too much bigger in bandwidth, I believe 1.5mbps of dedicated bandwidth. You know who the free-riders are on this issue? The "regular people," the people who are allegedly going to get stuck with the bill.

The bandwidth sales model is basically like the old streaming media client/server model. Give away or sell at miniscule cost the client (the DSL/Cable service) and sell the server side (the corporate T1/T3/etc.) service at very high cost. They have started to box themselves into a race to the bottom on the client side. I wonder if DSL and Cable are even profitable in a number of areas in the country beyond decently populated areas.
I want to pay metered bandwidth. Start me out at $5-$10/month for basic 10mbps service with 2-5GB included and charge me $0.25-$0.50/GB after that. It's the only way that I am going to get consistently reliable service. We don't have unlimited electricity, so why should we have unlimited, high-speed bandwidth provided to us?

Is Bush starting to get afraid of bringing his party down?

President Bush will push next week for a broad overhaul of the nation's immigration laws and plans to tighten security on the borders, possibly with a wider deployment of the National Guard, White House officials said yesterday.
The officials said Bush will use a prime-time television address Monday to outline his plans and then visit the U.S.-Mexico border on Thursday to highlight the problem of illegal immigration.
Officials say he is considering substantially increasing the presence of National Guard troops, some of whom are already deployed under state of emergency declarations in New Mexico and Arizona. Administration officials are exploring ways to allow governors to deploy troops across state lines to help seal the porous border with Mexico.

This comes from the man who said that we didn't have enough money to add more than 210 new Border Patrol agents to the agency. It'll be interesting to see what troop strength, if anything, he actually proposes. I doubt it will be more than a few thousand troops for the entire border. My guess is that Bush will propose a number large enough to make his base look like extremists if they criticize him, but not large enough to actually be effective.

HORN LAKE, Miss. - An unidentified elderly Horn Lake couple were hospitalized Thursday after police burst into their home thinking it housed a methamphetamine laboratory. The incident occurred Wednesday about 4 a.m., said police Capt. Shannon Beshears. Beshears said it was the right address but the wrong house.

You can usually tell that the police screwed up in a case like this when an elderly couple or a bunch of children get hurt in a police raid, and then the cops say that they "acted properly." One has to wonder how the cops could have have made such an obvious mistake. It seems like a perfectly human mistake on the surface, but is it? No, and let's look at what the cops should have done when raiding a house with a meth lab, knowing how volatile they can be (y'all do know they can produce toxic fumes and potent explosions, right?)

• Get the address and send some plain clothed cops in unmarked vehicles or their personal vehicles to scout out the area and see what they can find. Meth labs, and their dealers, especially in the rural south and midwest, can be a lot more dangerous than your average pot dealer...
• When they see two houses on the same property, go back and do a little quick research. Grill the informants and find out who lives at both addresses.
• They see an 80 year old couple living on one half of it. Gee, now what are the odds that the meth lab is at THAT address? Even if it is there, an 80 year old couple is statistically unlikely to be able to get from a recliner to the bathroom before the cops have swept through the other address.

Most of the time these situations are caused by macho crap on the part of cops who want to play soldier, but didn't have the balls to join the Army, let alone the Marine Corps. Military tactics are appropriate against heavily armed criminals, but are terrible against ordinary criminals, including most meth lab owners. They just make the situation more dangerous and often get innocent people hurt or killed in the War on Drugs.

Technorati tags: Drugs, Meth, Police, Incompetence.

The Democrats need to brush up on their history:

"The religious community has to decide whether they want to be tax exempt or involved in politics."

-Howard Dean

"the power to tax involves the power to destroy"

-McCulloch vs. Maryland court ruling

I remind you of historical precedents, you decide.

Maybe it's because I have an alcoholic father, but I've never understood why conservatives behave like battered housewives toward the Republican Party. Yes, conservatives, you behave like battered housewives. The Republicans slap you around, promise you the world, then betray you with another base--err, woman--and you just take it like you can't expect any better. Well, this time your party has been all around town. They've been hanging out with every harlot (lobbyist) they could find, have been taking the baby's milk money and spending it on booze and gambling (deficit spending) and now they come crawling right back in at 5AM in their wife beater covered in another woman's lipstick and ask you to take them back in a hungover stupor.

Why do you people tolerate this kind of abuse? Would the Communists tolerate their party if it suddenly found the religion of Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard and Adam Smith? Hell no! They'd kick the two-timing bastards to the curb and probably worse once they found a lawyer or could sic the dogs on them. You people stay at home, dutifully in your minds, but just limiting your future and pissing away your kids' future as you get betrayed, betrayed, betrayed. Instead of at least flirting with better company (Libertarians, Constitution Party) you just stick by the same old abuser who you know is never going to change. In fact, you knew he'd never change when you saw that he's got a long family history of abusers (Lincoln, Grant, Nixon). It's in his blood woman, it's just who he is.

You were supposed to be financially secure, but you're deep in debt to the local mob (China) thanks to him. Your enemies are now legion because the one you were supposed to trust has spent more time haphazardly picking fights around the neighborhood than getting his house in order and choosing his battles wisely. Doesn't it scare you that when strange men come into your house without knocking (illegal immigrants), when it's just you and the kids, that he never seems to care about your fears? What was that he told you last time, "shut up you sexist bitch, they ain't gonna bother you if you just leave them be?" You were told you'd be respected and free to be yourself, but why are there all of these capricious rules that you have to follow for no good reason (Sarbanes-Oxley, McCain-Feingold, USA PATRIOT Act)? When you asked him to change and live like a normal man recently, he came out and said that he can pick and choose what sort of rules he needs to follow because he's the man of the house, you're just a housewife.

Conservatives, this is your marriage to the Republican Party.

I wrote earlier about the NSA phone record system, and didn't make much of it. Now I want to explain why even though I think it is not bad in and of itself, it is a system that could be used for some very bad things if we (and when) we get a president like Hillary Clinton in office.

The first problem with the system is that the public knows nothing about its capabilities, and the NSA is sure as hell not going to turn over that information for public scrutiny. We can only make conjecturs about its capabilities, but knowing how technically gifted a lot of the guys that work at the NSA are, it is unlikely that it is a rinky dink failure of a system like the FBI's last attempt to move out of the IT stone age.

The problem that is important for the public is the way that the system could be abused by a political president like a Clinton. Remember those FBI files? Well, this system has the theoretical ability to piece together social networks. It could easily be used by a very political president to piece together profiles of who are prominent local figures in "out-of-favor" local groups and allow such a president to launch targetted personal attacks through agencies like the IRS. Again, remember those FBI files that were supposed to be secret, but mysteriously appeared in the White House?

None of this would be an issue if there were still a clear cut legal barrier between law enforcement and the military/intelligence system. Bush did away with a lot of that, and the consequence is that we are now in a position where a political president could bring the NSA into some of these things. As an intelligence agency, their people cannot easily just "blow the whistle" on such corruption because they work with classified materials and would probably lose their clearances no matter what.

Others:

Sister Toldja.

Right Winged.

The Sandbox.

Wizbang.

The NSA's phone record analysis program is a trend to be wary of, something that needs to be scrutinized to ensure that it is actually done the way it is claimed, but really people, this is not exactly open to much abuse. If the NSA really does get all of the phone records, a false positive would be very hard to get. Let's say that a known terrorist calls you up because your number belonged to his old buddy. The record would clearly show who called who. Do you really think a terrorist is going to risk exposing himself to the police by repeatedly calling to harass a law-abiding citizen who will call the cops on him or her?

The fact that this program has been exposed to public scrutiny has caused a number of bloggers to denounce the media as though they had just deactivated our entire nuclear arsenal in the midst of a nuclear standoff. Raise your hand if you really think that the major terrorist networks actually didn't assume that the NSA was doing this, especially to them? They aren't stupid, in fact I would hazard to guess that your average 9-11 hijacker and planner was more intelligent and educated than many of Bush's defenders who are crying treason over this.

The only thing that has changed is that the terrorists now know for a fact that the NSA is actively monitoring their phone records--and has the cooperation of virtually every company that matters in the United States. If they want to communicate safely, they have two choices: invest in a good flock of messenger pigeons or build their own alternative phone network. The college educated jihadi aside, the most we'd have to worry about then would be the infamous terrorist can-on-a-string network.

The message that the terrorists get out of this is simple: "the NSA has pwn3d you, bitches." Besides, it is only a matter of time before Qwest gives in and starts working with the NSA.

And in case any of my regulars are wondering why I could care less about this, I don't think this falls under the 4th amendment because it doesn't actually spy on or seize any property. It's just information that corporations collect. The federal government is charged with providing national defense, and this is the most benign example of them using intelligence that we have ever seen.

Others:

Confederate Yankee.

Outside the Beltway.

JustOneMinute.

Right Wing Nut House.

PoliBlog.

Stop the ACLU.

The American Mind.

The Washington Monthly.

Volokh Conspiracy.

The Strata-Sphere.

Michelle Malkin.

This is why the Republicans are going to get torn to shreds over the next two to four years in Congress. They just have no idea why they are pissing off their base:

Fitzpatrick's bill, called the Deleting Online Predators Act, or DOPA, is part of a new, poll-driven effort by Republicans to address topics that they view as important to suburban voters. Republican pollster John McLaughlin polled 22 suburban districts and presented his research at a retreat earlier this year. Rep. Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican, is co-sponsoring the measure.

The group, which is calling itself the "Suburban Caucus," convened a press conference on Wednesday to announce new legislation it hopes will rally conservative supporters--and prevent the Democrats from retaking the House of Representatives during the November mid-term election.

At a time when spending is out of control, immigration is a hot issue where the titular head of the Republican Party has the unmitigated stupidity to practically tell half of his party's base to (to paraphrase Bender from Futurama) "kiss his shiny metal ass," among other issues, the Republicans think that anti-MySpace legislation is going to win over conservatives. You know what would be an education bill that would really energize their conservative base?

The Department of Education is hereby abolished by order of the United States Congress and all federal regulatory power over local education is null and avoid.

Their conservative base is so angry with them right now that it would take something that radical for many conservatives to consider the Republicans worth supporting. There is nothing conservative about this legislation either. It is just another unfunded or barely funded mandate on state governments to buy more commercial software and enact stronger policies that they might not even want. The Republicans have lost all comprehension of what their base really wants these days.

It also doesn't help that the Republicans have been dropping like flies from the Congress now on corruption charges. Yet another Republican is under investigation for bribery. Allow me to give the RNC a little tip on how most conservatives feel about pork barrel spending. They. Really. Hate. Pork. They also really tend to not be too keen on the whole "insert coin, get legislation" trick that the Republicans have come to master.

The Republicans continue to spiral out of control as a national party. The only thing that is saving them right now is the updraft from the political tornado created by the Democrats' spiraling out of control.

Now that the election year is coming up, the Republican commentariat is going to start banging the old "a vote for the Libertarians is a vote for the Democrats" drum to scare the base. With the way that the Republicans have proved time and again in the past five years that they are unfit to run an insane asylum, let alone a superpower, the base will be pretty hard to scare this time. However, the Republicans and their propagandists need to be confronted on this issue.

A vote for a Libertarian is a vote for a Libertarian, not a Democrat. The argument that it is for a Democrat wouldn't make any sense to anyone outside of politics. Let's say you had two choices pushed on you. A hotdog and a hamburger. Two people pushing them on you, and you decide to go out and buy a taco. Would you give the time of day to an idiot who said that by buying a taco you objectively ate a hotdog by not choosing the hamburger?

If the Republicans lose in 2006 and 2008, and they probably will if the Democrats choose to run someone other than a stodgy old New England liberal, or a Nazgul, they will have only themselves to blame. Not only will the candidate have to deal with eight years of Bush systematically betraying the conservative base, but the Republicans will probably choose some moderate or liberal to run. If they don't run a good conservative leader, the Republicans will only have themselves to blame for their failure if the Democrats beat them because the very reason that the base will have switched to minor parties or have stayed home is the systematic betrayal of the Republican leadership of their beliefs. Almost everyone knows that you have to make sacrifices, but what the Republicans have done isn't Realpolitik, it's a total abandonment of basic principles and the base has nothing on the fundamental issues to show for a Republican majority except more debt and a bigger federal government.

Bacon's Rebellion is having a field day over Will Vehrs getting in trouble for making the comments that he did about Martinsville. What I don't get is why anyone actually has an real sympathy for the guy. Yes, I know he is remorseful, but the fact of the matter is that he is a state government employee and he insulted an entire region which his department serves. That indirectly insulted the potential clients of his department and any private sector employer would not be criticized for firing an employee who made caustic jokes about potential clients on their blog while making it clear who they worked for.

Too many bloggers have a populist mindset that smacks of childishness these days. He ought to consider himself damn lucky that his agency didn't just fire him outright for insulting an entire group that it serves while he allowed it to be clear on his blog that he worked for them. Newsflash people, if you want to talk about your job or anything related to your job, don't post any information that could reveal who you work for. Employers really don't like being connected in any way to what their employees say after hours.

If this is his first offense, then good for his employer for showing restraint. I certainly don't want to see him fired over a temporary fit of headupassitis. However, these bloggers who are crying foul over him getting punished are being ridiculous. You don't let it all hang out about who you work for and then make comments critical of those that your employer provides services to.

This is the sort of rhetoric that has poisoned the network neutrality debate so badly:

"It's incredible that a company like Google that's got market capitalization bigger than the combined value of the cable business....these guys just started five, 10 years ago, and they're asking for special favors already," Commisso said.

His statement conjured up earlier admissions by telecommunications power players, including one Verizon executive who cautioned that Google should not be entitled to a "free lunch."

Google is a company that probably pays well over one hundred million dollars every year for its bandwidth. Calling them a free rider is not going to make the public anymore sympathetic to the property rights of the network providers, nor is it going to be conducive to debate on this heated subject. This just smacks of blatant greed and eventually people aren't going to want to hear it anymore and that'll be the day that the FCC gets the authority it needs to be able to regulate these companies into being "neutral." That will indeed be a sad day for the Internet.

The only reason that we are having this argument in the first place is that the service providers are having a hard time making money off of their users. It's ridiculous that bandwidth to home users is not metered like electricity, gas and water. An unlimited electricity package would be absurd, and for good reasons I have come to believe that unmetered, unlimited bandwidth is as well. The cable companies and telecoms should be turning not to Google, one of the many companies that attracts their subscribers to their services, but to their subscribers and change the terms of service.

All that they would need to do is drop an entry-level cable or DSL package down to $10 per month for 2GB-4GB of bandwidth, then charge about $0.50/GB after that. That would encourage people to ration their use of the network, would attract more dialup users to their services, keep the few from mooching off of the many and provide them the profit they need to build infrastructure. The only people who would really have grounds to complain would be people involved in large-scale file sharing as they would find their monthly costs going from $25-$50 per month to $150-$200 a month if they traded hundreds of gigabytes of files.

More of the same from Bush:

Still, with public support for the war in Iraq eroding and the Pentagon under Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld moving more and more into intelligence-gathering activities, the naming of an active four-star general raised concerns in Congress and with civil-liberties groups.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, suggested Hayden consider resigning from the Air Force and "put to rest questions about whether an active duty military officer should lead the CIA at this time."

National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, who oversees the CIA and 15 other spy agencies, said Hayden had no such plans and called him "a very, very independent-minded" individual who wouldn't bow to any Pentagon pressure.

It should come as a surprise to no one that Bush picked a man after his own heart, a man who simply cannot read the Constitution for any sort of comprehension. Hayden is on record in an interview stating that there is no probably cause constraint in the fourth amendment, and I think that says it all right there about how qualified this man really is to anyone who cares about strict constructionism or tradition. Most people who know anything about the fourth amendment know that probable cause is a key part of its text. I find it very hard to believe that Hayden didn't know that probable cause is a key feature of the restrictions on his line of work when it applies to civilians. Makes you wonder what parts of the fourth amendment he would agree to whole-heartedly respect to the letter.

Bush is admitting that he might have been wrong about something related to the War on Terrorism? Wow, he must really be desperate to regain a few percentage points of popularity:

Berlin - Unites States President George Bush said in an interview broadcast on Sunday that he wanted to see the camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba closed and the prisoners held there put on trial.

"I very much would like to end Guantanamo; I very much would like to get people to a court," Bush said in an interview on the German television channel ARD.

"And we're waiting for our Supreme Court to give us a decision as to whether the people need to have a fair trial in a civilian court or in a military court," he said according to a transcript of the interview released by the White House.

People keep saying that the Supreme Court authorized the federal government to try people who fight out of uniform as unlawful combatants, like those Nazis caught on US soil in World War II, but I doubt that simply holding them indefinitely was what they had in mind back then. Regardless of what your stance on the wisdom of the War on Terrorism, it's not good for precedent to allow the President to just arbitrarily designate someone as a terrorist and then hold them indefinitely. That's a very easy way for a future, more corrupt administration to say that someone is "so bad that the constitution shouldn't apply to them."

Part of the problem with holding these people indefinitely is that it just gives our enemies too much ammo. They can say that the United States doesn't really represent an alternative to regimes like that of Egypt and Saudi Arabia because they too have "exceptions" to due process of law for those detained by them. It would be far better for us to swiftly try these people in a military court and then shoot them in accordance with international law for illegally waging war out of uniform than to just hold them in limbo. No one knows whether they're real intelligence assets, or just people who might fight against us again if released. If they're the latter, then why shed any tears for them if they get a firing squad? At least they'll get due process.

It is not the least bit hypocriticial, though, for Tony Blair to be upset about Guantanamo Bay given his openly cavalier attitude toward civil liberties and due process of law. However, if Bush is serious about ending our system of detention for terrorists and replacing it with even secret military trials, I'd say that that is great news. Better the harsher process of a military court than nothing at all because that would only help to make the case for trying Americans caught on American soil in regular federal courts.

A papist forgets part of the job description and now wants to renegotiate part of the contract with God:

Those who blaspheme Christ and get away with it are exploiting the Christian readiness to forgive and to love even those who insult us. There are some other religions which if you insult their founder they will not be just talking. They will make it painfully clear to you...Christians must not just sit back and say it is enough for us to forgive and to forget...Sometimes it is our duty to do something practical. So it is not I who will tell all Christians what to do, but some know legal means which can be taken in order to get the other person to respect the rights of others...This is one of the fundamental human rights: that we should be respected, our religious beliefs respected, and our founder Jesus Christ respected.

To which I respond with the words of Jesus (John 15) on the subject of getting dissed:

¹⁸"If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. ¹⁹If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.

No pain, no gain, right guys? I've got to wonder about a cardinal who has such a weak stomach for abuse from the world. Jesus made it very clear: follow me and your life may very well suck because of your loyalty to me until the day you die. You have two choices, either you can live with it as a price of salvation or you can walk away. Regardless of your choice, shut up and be a man about it. Faith is only strengthened by adversity.

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. Police in Knoxville say a student at a small Tennessee Bible college has told them he set fire to an adult bookstore to serve God, but now realizes it was a sin.

Things like this make me wonder sometimes what the hell is being preached in some of the deeper parts of the Bible Belt. How stupid do you have to believe that God would welcome this sort of crime done in his name? When in the Bible has God ever said that committing sin in his name is going to ingratiate you toward him?

For you non-Christians out there, this is what the Bible means by passing judgment. He not only discerned their sin, but condemned the store owner as a person for it by burning down his store. He didn't rebuke him, he became a religious judge, jury and executioner which he had no biblical authority to be.

Unlike Hugh Hewitt, I don't think that the Republicans are headed in a direction that will be pretty for them in the 2006 and 2008 election. Judging from President Bush's approval rating numbers and the pomposity of certain infamous Republican legislators, the Republicans have reached the point where they have completely lost direction and don't really serve anyone. There are people who insist that they stand for "God, family and country," but they are about as attached to reality these days as the old time Democrats who believe that their party is still the same that it was when FDR was in power.

The conservative movement today has become so large and diverse that it is virtually impossible to actually define what a conservative is today, and that's why the Republicans are falling apart at the seams. The tent has gotten so big that one can be little more than a "pro-war, traditional values socialist" and be considered a conservative today. What the conservatives in the Republican Party have pushed for cannot be considered "rightist" in most respects. The positive highlights of the last twelve years of Republican domination of Congress have been:

• Lower taxes
• Increased military spending
• Welfare reform

Those are good things, things that needed to be done, but the Republicans have also bought hook, line and sinker into the idea the idea (nay, the fraudulent myth) that the state is the be-all, end-all solution to virtually all of America's problems. Some of the more prominent examples:

• They've brought deficit spending to unacceptable levels.
• They've expanded social welfare spending to levels not seen since LBJ and a Democrat Congress.
• They've expanded the discressionary powers of the federal government's law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
• They've consistently, as Porkbusters has shown, attacked and undermined controls on discressionary spending as well as the people who support them.
• They've not only reneged on their old goal of abolishing the Department of Education, but they've greatly expanded it including adding additional federal regulations on local schools.
• They've supported the Law of the Sea Treaty, a treaty that would actually give real sovereignty to the United Nations.

It's an ugly reality, but the reality is that the Republicans haven't done anything to reduce the scope of government in the past six years that they have been in power, that hasn't been matched by at least two things to increase the scope of government. The Republicans lack anything that could considered a meaningful vision for this country that is very different from what the Democrats provide, and the Democrats do a much better job of being liberals than the Republicans have since Bush took office.

I blame a lot of it on the fact that people like Karl Rove and Tom DeLay stooped to cheap compromises to bring people into the Republican big tent. Instead of steering toward the center, the Republicans' conservatives should have steered the party hard to the right in practical ways that would command the loyalty of the public such as ending corporate welfare, creating an enforceable and fair tax code, paying off the national debt, transitioning young people to private accounts instead of Social Security and being tough on immigration and national defense.
There are other issues, not the least of which is that the average social conservative today is not discernibly Christian in their outlook on the role of government. They simply have no concept of "spheres of sovereignty" and cannot think outside of the state. I'll get to that later.

I caught at least three visits to my blog on the data retention law today from the House of Representatives. Another one was from the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunication in Cambodia. Each of those images is a clickable link so you can see the stats on these people.

The MPAA continues to desparately try to build a time machine in an abortive attempt to turn back the clock on its piracy problems:

The WSJ calls the study "bad news for the MPAA's antipiracy efforts." So it is, but the industry has never claimed that occasional law suits and "education" would solve the problem. The industry is constantly seeking tougher measures that would, it is feared by the tech industry, have the potential of interfering with its business models and practices.

It's the movie studios that need to change their business practices and models to suit the new digital distribution system. IPCentral and Tech Liberation Front have both tried to answer the question of how a $200M movie could survive without asking the more important question of whether a $200M movie is generally a good investment even in ideal situations. I think it is absurd that the movie studios pay that much for a single movie because it makes it extremely dangerous for them to release a movie, and I question whether even in the "old market" a $200M movie was generally a safe investment.

It is at this point quite frankly absurd for the movie industry to seriously think that the market can sustain a constant stream of extremely expensive movies when there are so many factors against that. Imagine what would happen to the major car companies if they stopped producing anything but luxury and sports cars. Could anyone seriously see them surviving in the long run trying to sell six digit expensive Italian and Italian-style sports cars as their primary product instead of a variety of cars and trucks? Well, that's precisely what the studios are doing. They don't yet recognize the value of inexpensive movies to them. Underworld with its great sales levels and $22M budget should have proved to them that they definitely don't need to splurge on everything to make a pretty penny. Underworld Evolution, the sequel has also done quite well for a movie that didn't even break $50M in its budget.

They also need to stop wasting so much money on actors and actresses. There is simply no justification for why they are paying upwards of twenty million dollars for a single performer. They may claim that they have to pay that much because people want to see the actors and actresses that command that much money, but the studios are the ones who create the demand in the first place. They could easily shave off millions of dollars of production costs by continuously bringing in new talent and working from a wider talent pool than what they have now.

In terms of enforcement, the movie studios would be better off seeking smaller fines per movie traded. The current fines are so high that many juries are loathe to give a college student a multimillion dollar fine for trading even a thousand movies. Besides, there is some sophistry to the tip of the iceberg theory behind these fines. If I share a copy with someone, that's theoretically $20 that would not have exchanged hands because of me. If the person who received the copy in turn shares it, their actions have cost $20. A simple, just system would allow the studios to collect the cost of the DVD plus a small premium to cover legal expenses. If a student got a bill for $22,000 for trading 1,000 movies ($20 each, $2000 for legal expenses perhaps), that would be a lot easier for a jury to agree with than the ridiculous sums that can be awarded for a single movie being traded today.

It is inconceivable that the American public will sit passively while all content industries collapse in an orgy of free riding and piracy, so this latest news is gloomy for everyone, not just for the MPAA. It makes "tech mandates," "ISP filtering," "secondary liability," and other potential responses more likely, and all of these raise difficult problems. They are also much feared by the tech industry, and with reason.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. Conservatives in particular are quite apathetic as a group to Hollywood's problems, and that's understandable given Hollywood's promotion of socialist values for the last forty some years. You can't spend three generations promoting anti-property values and then turn around and cry foul when people practice what you've preached--on you. Doesn't make it right, but the odds are not in favor of the movie studios and record labels for many on the right to get overly worked up about them getting pillaged by pirates.

Rep DeGette has finally started talking about some of the details about her mandatory data retention law. On first glance, it doesn't seem to be a bad law. In fact, it actually seems to be completely overblown:

It's not clear whether the DeGette language would be limited only to commercial e-mail providers and ISPs and places like coffeehouses, bookstores, or home users that provide Wi-Fi access at no charge. Also, an expansive reading of DeGette's measure would require every Web site to retain those records. (Details would be left to the Federal Communications Commission.)

The bill is only two very short pages long. CNet is, I am sorry to say, just fear-mongering on this issue because the bill clearly excludes websites and other services from having to do any logging:

INTERNET ACCESS SERVICE.-The term 9 'Internet access service' means a service that enables 10 users to access content, information, electronic mail, 11 or other services offered over the Internet, and may 12 also include access to proprietary content, informa13 tion, and other services as part of a package of serv14 ices offered to consumers. Such term does not in15 clude telecommunications services.''.

It's possible that the FCC could try to require all service providers to do this, but any judge would see that the bill only grants authority to regulate companies that provide general TCP/IP access. Now, the bigger question is will this satisfy law enforcement and I seriously doubt that it will come even close to satisfying the Department of Justice's desire to get ahold of as much data as possible. However, on its face, this bill, as is, is not a particularly big deal. The burden it would impose would be to periodically update a simple log file and even for a large ISP it's unlike that that log file would get bigger than a single DVD-R for an entire year if some good compression is applied.

Update: Mark has a point. Even though this is semi-necessary, there is probably not enough clear constitutional authority to enact this new police power. As such, I think it is worth opposing, even though it is "common sense" in the long run. They need to start doing things the right way and police powers of all things need constitutional grounding.

One of the things you have to understand about the Herndon election retaliation against illegal immigration is that Northern Virginia is practically crawling with illegal immigrants. Despite what the open borders advocates may claim, they do in fact do jobs that Americans will do such as construction work and do present a drain on both the wages for non-white collar jobs and government services. Herndon is not really that nice of a place by Northern Virginia standards, and I have a decent idea because I live on the outskirts of it near Reston. Once you go past Worldgate Drive on start to get on Elden Street, you're really starting to get into an area that reminds you of Manassas (aka Little Tijuana).

Here's my semi-educated guess on why the Herndon voters voted the way they did. The illegals bring at least as many problems as they bring benefits. Prices for everything are already high in Northern Virginia and the only people who are seeing the benefits of the reduction in wage costs that they bring are the employers. It's starting to get a little class warfare for those who aren't in a white collar job where this generation of Mexican immigrants can't really threaten them. People saw the writing on the wall. Things are bad enough in Herndon, Manassas and other parts of Northern Virginia. Adding the day laborer center would only make the process of f$%^ing over the average American citizen and legal immigrant here more efficient.

This is an area that is full of immigrants, and so it is easy to see that this is not an anti-immigrant backlash in general, but a pretty specific one. We have tons of foreigners here who are legally and this is a very racially and ethnically diverse region of the country. This area is also a pretty establishment-oriented part of the country. If voters got that pissed off over the day laborer center, the major parties should take note because this is an issue that's not going to go away.

Others on the Herndon issue:

PoliPundit

RightWingNews

Michelle Malkin

Mark in Mexico

Sensible Mom

Digger's Realm

Right Wing Nuthouse

Wizbang

I got to thinking about the esteemed Congresscritter from Colorado's befuddled response to her mandatory data retention law, and got amused at how easily a badly configured HTTP proxy could be fooled into registering false positives. Imagine running a script like this on someone you hate's computer, only with domains and file names that don't look absurdly fake on their face like the ones I used:

import httplib

domains = [
    "www.wehostkiddyporn.com",
    "www.welikeemreeeelyoung.com",
    "www.misckiddypornsite.com"
]
files = [
    "13yoldgangbang.jpeg",
    "12suck_dick.jpeg",
    "6yrold_teacher.jpeg"
]

for domain in domains:
    con = httplib.HTTPConnection(domain, "80")
    for file in files:
        con.request("GET", file)
        con.close()

The scary part is that let's say that it does come up as a bunch of 404 errors, as it should. How many cops, judges and jurors are not going to believe that this script's bogus requests weren't a sincere effort to get ahold of some illegal content? Reason 53,632 why this is a dangerous bill.

James DeLong of IPCentral has asserted in the past that the issue with software patents often boils down to a matter of patent quality, and that is technically true, but that is not the bigger issue at work. Take for instance, the "trackback protocol." On the surface it seems like a concept that should be patentable, but it is little more than a trick that leverages existing HTTP capabilities to negotiate linking between two websites. It is a protocol that is so easy to implement, that I have provided a simple Python script that implements it. Even a non-programmer should be able to get the gist of what the following code does to see how ridiculously easy it is to implement this protocol for automatic link negotiation:

import httplib

headers = {"Content-type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded","Accept": "text/plain"}
trackbackVars = "title=My+Test&blog_name=Blind+Mind's+Eye&excerpt="
trackbackVars += "Much+Ado+About+Nothing&url=http://www.codemonkeyramblings.com"

conObj = httplib.HTTPConnection("www.codemonkeyramblings.com")
conObj.request("POST", "/2006/05/01/no-king-but-bush/trackback", trackbackVars, headers)
response = conObj.getresponse()
print response.read()

That code should look pretty familiar to anyone who has spent some time doing website development. Does it remind you of something that you commonly build to enable feedback between a website user and the people behind the website? If it doesn't jump right out at you, take a moment to think about what it's doing, it shouldn't take you more than five seconds. Ok, good. Yes, it is basically nothing more than a form submission. It loads up a few variables to populate the transaction, then sends the data off to a remote script using a HTTP POST operation, just like most web forms use.

The trackback protocol is actually simple, it's what happens behind the scenes that is worthy of being protected. Movable Type's implementation of trackback is different behind the scenes from the way that WordPress implements the same protocol. This is also how file formats and other network protocols work. The important part is not the protocol itself, but how the protocol is implemented. Not only that, but the interoperability that is fostered by a lack of patentability is what drove the creation of the modern commodity computer industry.

I don't think that SixApart has tried to patent this technique, but I would be quite surprised if they couldn't do so under the current system. Hopefully this little example can show at least a few people out there that what may seem really novel on the surface can be ridiculously easy to implement in practice and should not be patentable.

Support your sisters because you can be sure that even when they admit that they were lying, they were really just hiding the truth that they had been raped like in this case:

The results can be devastating. In 1996, Los Angeles police officer Harris Scott Mintz was accused of rape by a woman in the neighborhood he patrolled, and then by his own wife as well. At a pretrial hearing, the judge pronounced that he had no doubt about Mintz's guilt. Then, his wife admitted that she made up the charge because she was angry at her husband for getting in trouble with the law; subsequently, Mintz's attorneys uncovered evidence that the first accuser had told an ex-roommate she had concocted the rape charge in order to sue the county and that she had tried a similar hoax before. By the time the case collapsed, Mintz had spent five months in jail.

I'm sure they only claimed that they had lied because they were afraid of the White Male Oppressive Patriarchy^tm's supa fascist threats of being stoned to death for harassing one of its own. Clearly, no women, especially not white women, ever cry rape as a way out of dealing with men they don't like or just want to hurt for one reason or another.

Let's lower the standards of evidence needed to prove rape even further because women just don't lie about these things, and we know that men will always take what is not immediately handed over to them freely on a silver platter. They have no reason to because they never want to make statements about rape by terrorizing thousands of women.

Ok, on a more serious note, these cases have to be dealt with without even an ounce of mercy and leniency by the authorities if bonafide rape victims are going to get their day of justice. As long as there are appreciable numbers of women getting away with false charges, men on juries and in law enforcement are not going to trust women who come forward. It makes them prejudiced, you see, and with good reason. Decent people typically would rather risk letting a bad person go free than send an innocent person to rot in prison.

Rue the day that people feel the exact opposite and trust the authorities enough to immediately buy just just one person's shaky testimony hook, line and sinker. That'll be a day of true victimization for women, only it'll be at the hands of the state, not a bad date choice. You screw with the standards for evidence at your own peril. You make it easier to convict a rapist, you'll make it easier to convict someone for just about any crime and I don't think I need to remind anyone that cops and others are not exactly immune from planting evidence and lying under oath to get a conviction.

The movie industry once again proves that it is full of liberals who have an uncanny knack for not accepting responsibility for their failures. Would you want people who blame the spectacular failure of their products on mere word of mouth to run this country? I wouldn't:

We used to have a weekend to get our money out of a movie like Stealth or Doom. Now we get one night, tops. And that's not enough to break even, the way it might have been in the good old days before the summer of 2003. That year saw the perplexing, terrifying failures of T3 and Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and Matrix Whatever. We thought it was about sequels, when it was really about word of mouth.

I haven't watched any of the Charlie's Angels movies, but T3 was at best lukewarm and the Matrix sequels were incredibly badly done with the exception of a few anime throw-ins like mech battles at the end of Revolutions. They were just mindless attempts to milk otherwise good movies. Take T3 for instance. It was just a rip off of the first two movies, the ones that were actually good movies. Same premise. Big bad murderous machine chases after an O'Connor in an aborted attempt to delay the historic inevitability of the human counter-revolution against the machines. Do we get to see any meaningful amount of the future war? No, we get to see more of the same. Violence against cops, civilians and everyone else who gets in the way. We don't get to see big armies of terminators battling human forces, nothing cool. It's just a variation on the old approach, not a fresh new chapter in the series.

You can't blame it on sequels or word of mouth for one very good reason. There are series that have done better and grown as more movies have been added. Take the Alien franchise. Then Lord of the Rings. That was a trilogy that sold really well among the audience that is being blamed for the failure of these movies in conjunction with word of mouth reviews.

And then there's the need to wean ourselves from other old habits and scapegoats. It's the movie, stupid. Not the marketing. (Though marketers shouldn't gloat yet, 'cause they can still kill a good picture.) We all have to go with our gut instincts, give up the fantasy of a formula. It's harder, but not impossible. Impossible means we have to sell the farm. Hard means we have to work harder. And that's not a bad thing. I never went to Comic-Con anyway.

And in the last paragraph, she manages to repudiate the rest of her article by admitting that the failure of Hollywood has been that they have tossed large wads of cash at movies that are fundamentally flawed from the git go. The very fact that she and her people thought that Doom was a "no-brainer" is indicative of Hollywood's memory problems. They've apparently got the memory capacity of a geriatric meth addict because there has never been a video game-based movie that has done really well.

Stealth is another example of how out of touch Hollywood has been with its audiences. Take on its own as a DVD, it's a decent movie. Unfortunately it feels like a terribly cliche movie. It has all of the plot elements of a typical "non-gritty war movie:"

• Super-advanced technology the likes of which we couldn't possibly have in the near future like fully sentinent AI with the ability to see at high resolution through a thunderstorm.
• The eeeeeeeevil military man who couldn't give two shits about the rest of the military in order to protect his pet project.
• The incredibly modelesque military woman who can beat the living hell out of the majority of men in her area of expertise. Unfortunately, since few men have established flying their fighters into the ocean and their aircraft carrier as their area of expertise the way that the female test pilots in the Navy have, this has thus far proved to be a very closed competition in the real world.
• Mad scientist who cannot believe that his creation has fallen apart.
• Good man who gets murdered by eeeeeeeeevil military man after Learning Too Much^tm

It's one of those movies you watch once to enjoy for mostly mindless entertainment, a second time to enjoy as farce. Besides, I want to know one thing. Who in their right minds thought that a sensitive, music-stealing, artificially-intelligent experimental fighter that kills itself in the end to save the main characters was going to be a hit among teenage boys?

Well, it's beginning to make sense now why Bush has not done anything about the borders. He just doesn't feel that he has any obligations under Article IV, Section 4 to protect the states from invasion and who is that dern libral commie Congress to tell him that he needs to get his act together act like the chief cop and military commander, not the King?

WASHINGTON -- President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.

If the Congress does not start to stand up to the President, then the days of the American Empire will have formally begun. What good is a Congress that has been reduced to all but rubber stamping the orders of the President? At least it is now abundantly clear to anyone with eyes to see that Bush is not a Christian because he has asserted that he is beyond the reproach of the governing authorities (Romans 13). It is also quite clear that our system is not even close to being a "nation of laws" anymore, but rather a nation of feelings and imperial prerogatives.

Now, I ask the Republicans out there if they honestly think that Kerry or Gore would have had the cajones to pull stunts like these? As much as I can't stand them (no more than I like Bush), I can't even imagine Kerry getting away with this in a mixed government. The Republicans would be having a field day over "Emperor Kerry" trying to make an imperial senate out of the Congress. But it's ok because Bush is the one doing it. We know he'd never abuse his authority because Bush is not human, he's God's gift to the American people.

Hat tip: The Left Coaster.

Lee feels the same way

Donald Sensing only responded to one point I made when he linked my blog post about group blogging on Winds of Change. I still stand by my past assertion that group blogging keeps people somewhere between the dregs of blogging on MySpace and actual, bonafide new media services such as WorldNetDaily.com. The reason I am confident that this will be so for quite some time is that blogging is pretty much by design an amateur format. It lacks the je ne sais qua that reading a column at TCSDaily.com or Reason.com has. This might change in a generation, but I have major doubts as to how far blogging can go right now in terms of really replacing any of the functions that even sites like the aforementioned have. Blogolutionaries tend to forget that even if sites like Reason.com have somewhat smaller readerships than Windows of Change, Instapundit, Wonkette, etc. that some of them have an even more influential readership than the big blogs.

It's also getting to be about time to separate video blogging and podcasting from blogging. They are deviations from what blogging is about. They are inherently uni-directional and are more like old media converted over to the Internet than a major new way for bloggers to get heard. If anything, they are the ones most likely to be coopted by the mainstream media because they will prove to be the most profitable. I think it's safe to say that most libertarian bloggers, for example, would much rather listen to a Reason.com podcast than an Instapundit or a QandO podcast. A video service-sorry, blog-would be even more popular if done right.

And that's just it, the people who think that these formats are the future grossly underestimate the costs of getting popular. Bandwidth is still expensive for John Q. Citizen. The sort of constant advertising that would have to go into video blogging would make it resemble an amateurish production of a regular television show, not the sort of drudge-like goodness of text blogging. For a regular video blog, let's look at some stats. Say that the blogger can get twenty minutes of good video in at 512kb/minute. That's 10MB right there. If they get only 100 viewers everyday, that's 1GB of bandwidth every day for about 30GB of bandwidth every month. Not too bad, but let's say that they get 1,000 viewers everyday. Suddenly they're up to 300GB of bandwidth every month, and that's not something that any hosting service is going to be happy about. I hope for the blogger's sake that they are making money hand-over-fist in advertising to pay for their costs because once they reach several thousand viewers a day, they'll be buying bandwidth in the low terabytes. Hence why I see the format getting coopted by those with enough established power and money to make it really work right off the bat.

Lastly, I think that the political bloggers are the ones who are mostly out of touch on this issue. Religious bloggers, geek bloggers and others are not really moving in the same direction because politics is a unique animal among bloggers. There is only so much room for partisan politics, so naturally there is going to be a lot of squeezing out of smaller bloggers in the political blogosphere, but I don't see that happening with the other parts because they operate on different wavelengths. I, for example, am a geek and civil liberties blogger, not a bonafide political blogger. I'm not competing to be the next Weekly Standard or National Review, but Winds of Change and Hot Air are.