In the face of the sheer stupidity of the elected government of the United States, I would like to propose a few concise amendments to the United States Constitution to keep our native criminal class on the job.

• The United States shall have no authority over matters of morality or private conscience over anyone who is not currently employed by an agency of or military branch of the United States.
• The United States shall have no authority to levy direct taxation on or regulate private property except where enumerated in another section of this constitution.
• Any law which is deemed grossly unconstitutional by the judiciary shall become a civil liability to any elected official who drafted it, voted for it or who signed it into law.
• Any law that undermines the United States' sovereignty or acknowledges a civil government superior in standing to the United States shall constitute treason.
• National security shall not be a valid excuse for excusing a law, policy or action from judicial review except where it may be proven that the United States or an ally shall be gravely or mortally injured by the judicial review.
• All laws established pursuant to Article I, Section 8 shall be deemed inferior in legal standing to all protections afforded by this Constitution, the constitutions of the several states and the legal protections of private property of the several states.
• The United States shall not subsidize or provide discriminatory tax exemptions to any commercial operation or business except in any situation where the business provides essential services to a core military or law enforcement function of the United States.
• The United States shall not allocate fund any internal development except where the construction of such infrastructure provides a greater benefit to at least two states, repairs or enhances existing infrastructure or connects new territory to existing infrastructure.

Recent science proves that good parenting, not government heavy-handedness to "save the children," is what makes a child's formative years healthy for brain development. Science sure does seem to be backing a very quaint old idea: if parents would concentrate less on buying shiny things, and more on sacrificing to provide for their kids, they would have better educated, more balanced children. Mommy (or sometimes daddy) staying home and educating them and making sure that sex offenders aren't chatting with their kids is not good for that new beamer, but it seems to work pretty well for junior's socialization and upbringing.

What's next? Will scientists find out that working less than eighty hours a week to buy that new luxury or sports car also has been proven to significantly reduce the risk of heart disease?

• Mandatory data retention.
• Dragnetting of financial records.
• Dragnetting of almost all national phone records.
• Pushing ISPs to take steps to filter content.

Those are some of the many things that the government has done which should cause anyone who cares about the future of the Internet to be not exactly thrilled about the idea of new federal regulations. Yet once again, many people turn to Uncle Sam, the peeping tom, to make sure that the Internet remains Demokratik. This is the same Uncle Sam that wants their ISPs to record everything they do online for at least six months to two years and that goes through their financial records like a suspicious spouse looking for signs of wrongdoing.

The next time that you think that you can trust the government to make sure that the Internet works properly, ask yourself if you'd like to have someone who monitors everything you buy, records in detail every place you go, keeps a log of every person you talk to and who coerces the mailman to filter your mail, be the one to make sure that your life runs smoothly. Doesn't sound so good now, does it?

The previous post on Sullivan was inspired by this which I found linked to in a post on Pajamas Media. Now, that post is gone. I wonder what brought about the decision to delete the post referring to it at Pajamas Media. I hit reload about 10 minutes ago and it just disappeared. There is no longer any reference to it. Don't tell me that someone actually complained that Sullivan got knocked around.

What is a bigot? In Sullivan's mind it is anyone who thinks ill of homosexuality, including obviously, homosexual marriage. But when you slow down there you realize that that's a pretty wide net he's cast. It catches every Christian from the rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth Westboro wacko, to the liberal who is unsure whether it should be allowed because of the risk of congregational schism to the Reformed or Catholic conservative who opposes state-licensed marriage altogether. Sullivan won't see the possibility that maybe it's a lot more complicated than the simple "oppressed gay man versus wild-eyed zealot religious folk" dichotomy. For that very reason, he is a bigot in his own way because he has cast us all down to the level of the Phelps clan. Not to mention the fact that he's just plain counter-productive.

Non-Christians often get indignant at the suggestion that people like Sullivan really aren't Christians. They often harass conservative Christians about who they think they are to define Christianity, a train of thought they would never extend to another religion. There is, however, a simple explanation. If you don't believe that your religion's scripture is entirely true either as metaphor or literal text, you don't really believe in your religion. I'm not talking about mild translation problems, but rather basic ideas about sexual morality, for example. Andrew Sullivan is guilty of pointing to biblical injunctions against homosexual sex and saying "you are wrong." That means one of two things: God is wrong or it's not actually from God. The former makes him a heretic, the latter a non-believer on at least one critical aspect of Judao-Christian sexual conduct. Either way, it is a chink in his armor as a believer, calling into question how and why he actually believes other parts.

It would be better for Sullivan to simply admit the truth that his lifestyle is at odds with a basic reading of his own professed religion's teachings. There is room for him to reflect and repent, but sexuality is not a minor component of a person's identity and lifestyle. To continually engage in homosexual relationships while claiming to be a Christian (and while claiming that actual Christian scripture on homosexuality is bigoted) is not consistent with the religion itself. For him to admit that his lifestyle goes against his religion would ultimately force him to admit that by any objective reading of his religion's scripture, he is living an evil lifestyle according to its teachings. This obviously may mean little to non-Christian, but I can easily see how this might cause him to lose a little sleep at night.

Sullivan can appeal to faith all he wants and defend his fellow travelers for their devotion to their faith all he wants, but it won't change the fact that their way is the way defined in the Bible. Right or wrong, the Bible simply does not textually bear out their beliefs. Homosexual sex is a sin. Homosexuality itself, however, is a temptation, and the Bible is rather quick to recognize that each person struggles with temptation. No man or woman has been damned for a pang of temptation. Christ freely subjected himself to the temptations of the world so as to more boldly proclaim the truth that God is holy and man is sinful as he never succumbed to the temptations.

Since Thursday night we have been having some very bad thunderstorms in Fairfax County and in the surrounding areas. Herndon in particular was hit the hardest. The area that I live in saw by one estimate I heard, 12,000 people lose their power for most of Friday morning and mid-afternoon. Here's some porn for stormchasers[Sorry, I lost the file] that I took with my digital camera's video mode around 12:30-1:00AM when the storm was starting to get really bad. I haven't been through a regular thunderstorm this bad since I moved away from Charleston, South Carolina about 12-15 years ago. As I write this post, the last wave of bad thunderstorms for the weekend is starting to roll in.

Technorati tags: storm, Fairfax, Herndon, movie

Somehow this is supposed to be good for the American worker:

The H-1B program permits foreigners with at least a bachelor's degree in their area of specialty to be employed in the United States for up to six years. Under federal regulations, all such workers must receive pay equal or higher to the "local prevailing wage," and employers are supposed to ensure that they're not displacing qualified Americans in the process.

The GAO report didn't name which employers or industries were at fault. Kara Calvert, the director of government relations for the Information Technology Industry Council, emphasized that her organization's member companies don't abuse the system and use the visas only for "legitimate purposes." ITIC's members include Apple Computer, Dell, Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel and Microsoft.

Four examples cited in the report showed that Labor Department officials in recent years have approved applications even though the salaries listed on the forms ranged from $3,000 to nearly $24,000 lower than the annual prevailing rate. In fiscal year 2005, for instance, a petition for an employee who should have been paid at least $75,000 went through even though the application listed an offer of only $55,000.

It's not like the H1-B program was created to bring over people with a background in research science. A significant amount of the workers who come over are IT workers ranging from software developers to IT support people. These are not exactly career fields that have a very low number of Americans working in them to begin with. All too often employers will use outrageous excuses about how they couldn't find a qualified American because "so many Americans are terrible programmers or sysadmins," but the reality is that they just don't want to pay $75,000 to an American when an Indian or another foreigner will accept $55,000.

What is not surprising to me is that most of the people who support the flood of immigration into America, both through illegal immigrants on the unskilled end and skilled on H1-B and L1 visa ends, is that they are economics, MBAs, lawyers and public policy wonks. To put it nicely, they are the people who will not stand to lose their jobs to foreign workers coming from desparate economic situations.

I am not against the H1-B system, but it needs to be radically reconceived. It should only extend in unfettered form to people in bonafide research science roles such as the hard sciences. Engineering disciplines, the ones where Americans are pretty well-represented, should be very limited. If they aren't limited, the H1-B visa program will only serve to allow foreign workers to be exploited while the wages of citizens go down.

If you've ever wondered why people like Vox and I have little use or respect for most journalists today, take a look at this hit piece on social networking websites. It is written with all of the technical literacy of a caveman:

Web sites like MySpace, Facebook and Xanga are revolutionizing ideas about how the Internet can be used as a social networking venue, giving registrants the opportunity to get in touch with more people than ever before, and to share ideas, stories and facts. But also emerging are an increasing number of stories about the dark side of the endless new ways of interconnecting.

So-called "social networking" sites, such as MySpace and Xanga make it easier than ever for predators to cloak their identities online - even more so than previous types of online communication like chat rooms and forums.

The cops are right when they say that it pose a new problem in that they can function as a virtual registry of "underage targets," but this comment is an example of how completely clueless the media (and most Americans) are about programming. It's so blatantly bad that the writer should pause, reflect on his or her extreme ignorance of the technology involved and then shut the hell up. They all function on the HTTP protocol like phpBB, WordPress, Movable Type and other forum and blog suites. There is no, I repeat, no fundamental technical difference between the social networking sites of today and the forums of yore.

Psst, come here. I'll tell you the real reason why your teenager is in greater danger online these days. (In a very hushed tone) It's because you're not doing your f$%^ing job as a parent and teaching them safety and basic sexual morality. Why is your teen using these sites without you having any idea what's going on in the first place?

After reading these two two articles at Reason Online about the increasing use of SWAT officers against people in petty drug raids, I have been thinking about the violent extremism that has crept up in the "law-and-order" camp among conservatives. There can be no denying that there are very few circumstances where "military tactics" need to be used against people suspected of a crime, but many social conservatives see nothing wrong with the role that SWAT now plays in many routine operations. At 40,000 or more deployments a year now, that's an average of about 110 SWAT deployments per day. Such a rate is unconsciable for a first world country.

If these deployments were carried out consistently with the utmost professionalism as exemplified by our armed forces, there wouldn't be any problem, but all too often SWAT units seem to exhibit boredom with such mundane military tactics as reconnaissance. Stories like this, where SWAT units did not actually conduct surveillance of the property before the raid to actually verify that it was the right location, are all too common. Yet social conservatives tend to have no problem with SWAT units over this, always dismissing this as "human error" or "a case of bad apples" as though the tactics themselves are not to blame for the problems.

See, here's the thing. Military tactics don't exist to keep the peace. They exist, and are refined, to kill people, break things and completely, unconditionally subordinate a people to a state. Infantry aren't trained to break up fights, they're trained to so efficiently and lethally unleash death and destruction that a foreign nation will submit to the United States. It doesn't take a genius to see that mixing soldiering and police work will create a middle ground who will lack the clear-cut mission and enemy that the soldier has and the professional requirement of the traditional police officer to use the least force necessary to subdue a law-breaker.

Every now and then, a headline comes to my attention that is totally deserving of ridicule. This happens to be one of them. So what kind of exterminator do you call out for this type of pest? The police don't seem to be very good at eliminating them.

My opinion on many American parents, though harsh, is pretty well-established at this point. This latest "controversy" over MySpace only serves to convince me even more that a great deal of American parents are completely useless as parents, and probably almost as useless as human beings:

A 14-year-old Travis County girl who said she was sexually assaulted by a Buda man she met on MySpace.com sued the popular social networking site Monday for $30 million, claiming that it fails to protect minors from adult sexual predators.

The lawsuit claims that the Web site does not require users to verify their age and calls the security measures aimed at preventing strangers from contacting users younger than 16 "utterly ineffective."

Here's the quick summary. Teenage girl gets a MySpace account. Teenage girl posts the fact that she's 14. 19 year old guy contacts her. They decide to go out on a date. Teenage girl goes back to teenage guy's apartment. He expects to get laid. She claims she didn't see any of it coming "like a good girl." Then her mother gets pissed off because MySpace didn't send a chaperone to do her job as a mother and know the guys that her daughter is spending time with.

This has got to be the most ridiculous case of a parent not taking responsibility for their abject failure as a parent that I have ever seen. The mother is actually suing MySpace because she did not do her job, which includes knowing where her daughter is and laying down the rules with her when she sneaks out. From what's been released so far, no one even knows if the mother was caught unaware and punished her daughter or whether she's just "blaming society" for her daughter's bad behavior.

Maybe it does take a village to raise a kid these days because the combined intelligence and capacity for taking responsibility of the village would equal what parents had as individuals a hundred years ago. Back in the "dark ages," a parent would have been too mortified that his or her teenager was sneaking out to go out with members of the opposite sex without them knowing about it, to actually file such a lawsuit. The mother would have brow-beaten her daughter into submission for such a thing, but in this "enlightened age," it's easy to blame the computer network (MySpace) for the consequences of your teenager's bad behavior. Saying that the girl should have known better is a not so tacit admission that the mother not only didn't teach her daughter basic safety skills (men who try to get in your pants at 14 are typically not good men), but also basic self-respect and morals.

This trio deserves one another (cue a feminist to accuse me of saying that rape and sexual assault are ok). They are embarassments to their genders and social archetypes for the sort of people who are tearing this country down.

There is a little bit of silver-lining. One day, girls like her will have the protection of the intelligence community and military, thanks to the NSA taking the first steps to get sites like MySpace scanned by their datamining operations. And you thought that Big Brother wasn't actually there to help you!

It seems to me that the "greatest" accomplishment of the expansion of "democracy" has been to lay the framework for the Fascist creed, "Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato." ("Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State"). The politicization of private life in "democratic" states has reached a point that is more or less as extreme as the politicization that people experience under a totalitarian regime. It's a matter of degree and brutality, not the way that people relate to their government and the amount of control that the government has over what people do.

The real question is where do these two types of governments draw the line on what they can control, and the answer to that is essentially "nowhere." As long as the vast majority of private life is politicized to some degree or another, the potential for totalitarian abuse under a democratic facade is a realistic possibility at some future point. In fact, what makes the democratic state even more dangerous is that it has the superficial support of the majority and that only serves to justify its intrusions into private life.

People even use the democratic state to do things that they would never do if it were just up to them to do, like take their neighbor's money and give it away to others. Few people would consider themselves humanitarians, as opposed to mere thieves, for taking money out of their neighbor's pocket to give to "charity," but suddenly it becomes a sign of good will toward others when they discretely vote to have a government agent do it. This is a litmus test for dishonesty, not extremism. If you can't pay someone to do something to someone else, then why can you vote to make someone able to do it for you? If you can't morally pay someone to rob or murder your neighbor, then you can't vote to have a politician do it for you.

There's a puritanical streak in a lot of people who support these "extended functions" of the democratic state. There's just no difference between the welfare-regulatory state and the "soul-saving" puritanical state. Either way you are forcing someone to do what you think is right, when they're not hurting anyone by not doing it. The only way to ensure freedom is to get rid of this puritanical streak from politics and push it back into private life. Pushing your neighbor to be morally upright and generous are both good social pressures, but these things are not relevant to the affairs of state. If you force someone through the democratic process to be morally virtuous and "generous" with their money, I have news for you. You are indeed inclined toward totalitarianism and you are (as is the case with many leftists) the moral puritan that you so self-righteously denounce.

And therein lies the great flaw of the modern democratic state. It is very aggressive in forcing people to live their lives according to the dictates of others. Invariably it becomes a zero sum game for everyone as minority political groups lose power, get trampled on and then resort to violence to regain their lost freedoms.

I have a little theory about the "decency" legislation and the moralist nutjobs that support it. They don't want to admit that many parents are lazy, materialistic wankers who can't be bothered to sit down and get involved with their kids. They can't sacrifice any of that "American Dream" of a big house, a Lexus and Cadillac in the dual garage and great, expensive vacations every year. They're too busy working overtime to "make ends meet," which is a nice way of saying that they're trying to maintain a lifestyle that is upper class by African standards of living at the expense of their kids, to actually learn how to control the media that comes into their homes.

Most parents who really complain, and I mean really complain (like the miserable pukes at the Parent's Television Council) don't want to learn how to use that remote control. They don't want to have to see the hurt look on little Johnny or Susie's face when they assert their parental authority by using that emotion-damaging n world: "no."

Between Thursday and Friday I was in the office for about twenty nine hours by the time it was all over. We had a hellacious deadline to meet, but by the time that we left, it was looking good. My body has finally started to return to "normal" after all of the stress, lack of sleep and crap that we went through to see the deadline through. Life and blogging should return to normal now :)

Look at what Bush has been laboring in secret for. After reading the whole article, please tell me how Bush actually respects American sovereignty in a way that is actually different from how a Democrat would:

The CFR task force report called for establishment of a common security border perimeter around North America by 2010, along with free movement of people, commerce and capital within North America, facilitated by the development of a North American Border Pass that would replace a U.S. passport for travel between the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

Also envisioned by the CFR task force report were a North American court, a North American inter-parliamentary group, a North American executive commission, a North American military defense command, a North American customs office and a North American development bank.

The first full customs union was originally known as the European Economic Community (informally called the Common Market in the UK), established by the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and implemented on 1 January 1958. This later changed to the European Community which is now the "first pillar" of the European Union. The EU has evolved from a trade body into an economic and political partnership. For more details, please see History of the European Union. As president of the Convention on the Future of Europe, the former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing proposed to change the name of the European Union to United Europe but it was not adopted.

Well, I am back to using Windows XP for now. Vista has a major problem with its kernel's I/O system. Almost everytime that I would try to read from or write to a SMB share on another machine on my network, I would get 10kb/sec-40kb/sec. It was a ridiculous bug that cost me a lot of time and trouble because I use my desktop more as a server for file backups and so it usually has several GB of data from my laptop sitting on it. Also, the file system problem showed up when I tried to copy from my USB key drive.

Now, don't get me wrong. When Windows Vista RC1 comes out, I will install it and mess around with it. I'm hoping that this bug is fixed by then so that I can actually use Vista as my main desktop once RC1 comes out.

The Westboro Baptist Church is infamous for its protests against the funerals murdered homosexuals and American soldiers who have died in Afghanistan or Iraq. They are a hateful bunch whose "Christian faith" is just a thin covering for their unadulterated bigotry. In fact, there is nothing Christian at all and in this latest interview, one of their leaders revealed that they are guilty of several major sins against the triune God of Israel.

Phelps-Roper: "You're proud. You're proud of your sins. You can't do enough sinning. You think 'gay' pride, bimbo. You have sinned away your day of grace."

²⁸I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand. ²⁹My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father's hand. ³⁰I and the Father are one."

-John 10

Does God hate fags? Of course not, he hates the sin. How do we know that God loves sinners even while they sin? Let's see what the Apostle Paul said about God's committment to saving sinners, even while they do not know that they are sinners.

^>6You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. ⁸But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

There are other problems too with this group. They freely work against the Great Commission. We are told to go out and make disciples of all nations, but their purpose seems to be to actively fight the conversion of unrepentant Americans. Why, it's almost like their goal is to actually aid the devil's attacks on American culture instead of fighting them. A very curious position for a disciple of Christ to take, isn't it?

Paul writes on allowing sin to increase:

¹What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? ²By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? ³Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? ⁴We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

The point about not sending her sons to fight for the United States because it is sinful is not a Bible-backed teaching. The army of the Roman Empire was full of Christians before Constantine converted, and the Centurion in Luke 7 was never asked to leave his post as a Roman officer. In fact, Jesus commended him as he was saying "I tell you, I have not found such great faith even in Israel."

To any non-Christians who are angry at this group and feel that they represent Christianity in any way, I encourage y'all to ask yourselves the following questions:

• What sort of Christian is gleeful at the destruction of his or her enemies?
• What sort of Christian fights tooth and nail to see the Great Commission undermined, especially in their own country?
• What sort of Christian freely tears up core doctrines and rewrites them to get a leg up in a pissing match on television?
• What sort of Christian celebrates the deaths of brothers and sisters in Christ just as gleefully as he or she celebrates the deaths of non-believers?

Stop the ACLU.
Mudville Gazette.
Barking Moonbat Early Warning System.
Michelle Malkin.

I just installed Windows Vista Beta 2 which is free for download from Microsoft. When I first installed it, I thought that it was going to be a warmed over piece of crap with potential like Beta 1. Damn was I wrong. The difference in daily usability so far is like night and day. This version actually runs well and the new 3D interface is amazing. I now think that desktop Linux may have little future unless something this radical becomes the norm among Linux distributions. Why? It actually feels faster than Windows XP does on my laptop (Pentium M 1.7Ghz, 1GB of RAM, Radeon Mobility X300 w/ 128 of RAM) and Linux tends to be slower than Windows XP on this machine if I am using anything mainstream.

Let's just say that this is the first time I have not had an "oh $h1t" reaction to a new version of Windows coming out. I might actually go out and buy an upgrade license which would be a rarity for me. It'd be the second time that I've bought a non-academic Microsoft product license that didn't come with a new PC. Don't worry, I have no completely sold my soul to the Washington state collective. I am running GAIM, Firefox, XAMPP and OpenOffice on it.

Is James Webb an anti-semetic bigot, or is he just very bad at choosing people with artistic talent for his campaign? If you listen to Harris Miller, you would think that Webb was trying out to be the next Senator Byrd. It all started over this flier that was published by the Webb campaign to attack Harris during the Democratic primary.

From what I can tell, Harris is mostly upset over the fact that he does have a mildly crooked nose and that feature was carried over into a cartoon. The part about him stuffing his pockets full of money? How about his employment as a lobbyist for a group (Information Technology Association of America) that has traditionally worked hard to not only export white collar jobs, but import cheap labor? He has "done his part" to ensure that fewer Americans are employed in these industries with good compensation, the benefits of which naturally go back to their corporate employers and the rich. He has no more claim to be "for the little guy" than Bill Gates can claim to be "just plain folks."

So, how is that little propaganda piece inaccurate? He's a heavy-set, hook-nosed middle age man who in real life has stuffed his pockets with corporate money at the expense of the common man, Jew and gentile alike.

Others:

Classical Values.

Dean's World.

TheAgitator.

Outside the Beltway.

You always knew that Ann Coulter worked for Satan because of her cruelty to puppies, children and liberals. In fact, it's rumored that more small, furry creatures have died at her hands in one day than in Glenn Reynold's puppy blender's existence. Now, I bring you proof from Northern Virginia that she is in fact an agent of the unholy one who cavorts naked by moonlight with familiar spirits as she dreams up new ways to harass 9-11 widows and Democrats.

Know your enemies:

Unless we can come to understand the logic of fanaticism, despite all its alien and repugnant qualities in our eyes, we will continue to see rays of hope in the Middle East where there are none. You can kill the fanatic; but you cannot kill his fanaticism. It has a life of its own, and a will to match. Worse, what is enough to make sober and prudent men change their minds works exactly the opposite on the fanatic -- it gives him renewed conviction. Thus, those who do mourn the death of al-Zarqawi will not see in his loss the end of their struggle, but only an inspiration to struggle all the harder. For them, al-Zarqawi is not dead; he has gone to collect his martyr's crown. He will now watch them safely from Paradise, urging them on, and inspiring them with his memory.

That's why I have been saying all along that this is a war that the United States very well may not win if it doesn't get serious about. Religion is totally different from politics, even when religion attempts to become political as is the case with Islamism. Communism was defeated because our enemies sought an earthly outcome, and thus our military efforts were able to demonstrably impact their utopian worldview. Since everything was on this side of eternity, especially the results, everything could be affected by efforts made by our military and economy. However, the key component with Islamism is the eternal paradise, and that paradise just so happens to be facilitated by direct armed confrontation with our military. It would be almost like fighting the Cold War against Communist countries that believed that fighting and dying to advance the proletarian revolution was the highest goal of Communism, and that the creation of a Communist state here and now did not matter so long as their efforts one day made it come to pass.

The Islamist streak has existed in Islam since the very beginning of the religion, and it always will. The scriptures have a violent streak in them that, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't exist in any other world religion. There is violence in the Old Testament, but it is focused on specific groups for a specific time and action (conquestion of Israel by the Jews, for example). There is no other major religion that has a scripture-level concept analogous to jihad. For non-Muslims and even non-Islamist Muslims who really do reject Islamism, Islamist jihad will be a fact of life as long as Islam itself exists.

The only solution that will ultimately end Islamic terrorism is to attack the very pillars of Islam. The true believers will reject what are clearly non-divine reforms, just as conservative Roman Catholics often reject Vatican II. Simply taking out the violent passages in the Koran as "un-Islamic" is not going to change anything with the extremists. Instead, we must look at the scripture itself as the root cause of their fanaticism. Our most dangerous enemies aren't the poor man with the AK-47, but the middle and upper class, well-educated terrorists. Poverty isn't a root cause here because there are millions of poor, peaceful Muslims who live side-by-side peacefully with non-Muslims in countries like Israel, Lebanon and Albania.

If the threat of Islamic terrorism cannot be contained, and does continue to grow increasingly dangerous, the US and its non-Islamic allies will have to consider destroying the Ka'ba. The Ka'ba is the great mosque in Mecca that forms a key part of the Muslim hajj, one of the five pillars of Islam. Though it is architecturally beautiful and a world history treasure, it is not worth the human life that continues to be lost around the world to armed incursions between Islamists and their conservative Islamic ideological sympathizers and everyone else. Visibly reducing to mildly irradiated ash, the most sacred site in Islam would do more to end the threat of Islamic terrorism in the long run than any occupation, and ironically, it would also save significantly more lives among Muslims and non-Muslims than any policy currently up for consideration.

After seeing the attacks on Ann Coulter from The Anchoress, Captain Ed, Right Wing Nut House and other blogs, I have come to realize that the political blogosphere has finally become as trite and mundane once you get above the "B-listers" as the political publishers out there. It was inevitable, but I didn't expect it to devolve into such a killjoy this quickly.

The political blogosphere is basically dead and stale. It has come to mince words a la the mainstream media and has never shown itself to be fundamentally different from the mainstream media. In fact, in the scheme of things, the takedown of Dan Rather can be seen more as the blogosphere equivalent of the few suicide bombings that actually gets passed Israeli security than as genuine evidence that it is better at fact checking than the mainstream media.

It began when these people started attacking Vox. He is a far more interesting blogger because he actually makes you think if your tendency is not to go attavistic at the first sign of disagreement with your cherished prejudices and beliefs. Ann Coulter is the conservative counterpart. She is offensive, and in politics that is a good thing. We ought to be offended by politics because politics should never be something we enjoy and feel comfortable with.

I am starting to share Matt Welch's disillusionment with the political blogosphere. There is hardly any difference between most bloggers that make it big in the political blogosphere and the hacks that make up the bulk of the professional commentariat on both sides of the spectrum.

It's not about civility anymore, but rather about attacking words instead of ideas. People are uncomfortable with the idea that maybe Ann is right, maybe the widows have assumed an inordinate level of respect due to having husbands in the wrong building at the wrong time. Those of us who at least try to think clearly about politics can appreciate their loss, but find their grand-standing asinine. And I say this as someone who actually (for mostly libertarian reasons) shares their disgust with the Bush Administration. Cindy Sheehan, for example, is a nauseating bitch who has taken her grief and turned it into an extreme narcissism. There comes a point where it becomes absurd and they must be called out for being such petulant and pathetic self-promoters.

If Rall, Vox or Coulter get under your skin, you are an overly-sensitive person. You take politics way too seriously. The only people making things lively and entertaining are the extremists who say what everyone knows to be true on some level, to some degree, but can't say. Come on, did you people really think that you were fooling anyone by denouncing Vox over the Nazi comments, Coulter over her latest comments or Rall over his usually deranged (but sometimes mildly realistic) cynicism toward the Republicans? These ideas don't scratch the surface, they cut right through, and reveal a subcutaneous layer of merda del toro.

The MercuryNews has a good article on the subject of the new federal push for data retention policies at ISPs. As I have written in the past on the subject, there are a lot of security and privacy implications because the data that can be gleaned from raw packet dumps or proxy logs is enough to attract unscrupulous cops and criminals. It would be the ultimate repository of information for identity thieves.

It's not hard for your ISP to keep a record of all of the HTTP (web) traffic that goes through it. The logs would not be too big, and a 50GB-100GB hard drive would be more than enough for them to use for storing the logs for at least a few months in between backups. One of the problems is that unless you send a username and password to a website that is using SSL, your username, password and all other personal information will go unencrypted into that log file.

One of the security risks here is that the police could potentially in the name of national security or "emergency" do the Internet equivalent of a no-knock raid on your accounts using this information. If your webmail provider doesn't use SSL, they could read all of your email without having to get the provider to comply with their demands. There would be simply no way for them to get caught unless somehow the provider notices something funny while checking access logs for errors or something like that.

The slippery slope gets very steep here, very quickly because log files are not very difficult to parse and do simple, regular analyses on a regular basis. In fact, a 50GB HTTP proxy log that is stored in plain text could be processed on a weekly, or even daily, basis with a ten year old computer running Linux using a simple Python script.

As long as the DoJ does not ask for packet dumps, I have a suspicion that they will be able to make headway with this. Packet dumps would cause them to record everything that goes through their networks, and would give the ISPs basic business grounds to complain to Congress. Simply logging HTTP transaction data, IM protocols, email and usenet would not be such a burden on the average ISP that the DoJ would face an insurmountable obstacle in getting what it wants.

Bill O'Reilly is apparently pissed off at the iPod generation as he calls it for devaluing his investments into Napster and Microsoft:

Research shows that news consumption amongst Americans under the age of 50 is drastically declining. TV news ratings skew old, and newspaper circulation is generally plummeting. One explanation is that Americans can now get the news online. Okay, fine. But those internet headlines barely skim the surface of complicated matters, and many websites have absolutely no editorial standards. They print rank propaganda and libel all day long.

I may just be a little too skeptical for my own good, but I would hazard to guess the O'Reilly is just pissed off over the idea that he might be subjected to a little fact-checking a la Dan Rather. Can't have any competition, now can we, Billy? Free speech is just such a threat to civil society when it is not being exercised by the corporate media. Clearly, we need "truth in blogging" regulations.

This is what your tax money has been buying you lately. More copyright legislation. The newest betrayal of the citizenry on the computer front, the "Section 115 Reform Act of 2006" would severely hamper your ability to make copies of the music that you have bought for your car, computer, etc. A who's who of conservative Republicans are behind this, proving once more that this corruption is not something limited to the Democrats.

"(1) IN GENERAL.The compulsory license for digital phonorecord deliveries shall be governed by this subsection, in addition to subsections (a), (c), and (d). The license under this subsection covers"

• "(A) the making and distribution of digital phonorecord deliveries in the form of full downloads, limited downloads, and interactive streams;
• "(B) all reproduction and distribution rights necessary to engage in activities described in subparagraph (A), solely for the purpose of engaging in such activities, including
  • "(i) the making of reproductions by and for end users;
  • "(ii) reproductions made on servers owned or controlled by the licensee; and
  • "(iii) incidental reproductions made in the normal course of engaging in activities described in subparagraph (A), including cached, network, and RAM buffer reproductions; and
• "(C) other activities constituting a digital phonorecord delivery.
• "(2) BLANKET LICENSES.�A person may obtain a compulsory license to engage in activities subject to this subsection only from a designated agent under paragraph (4) and only if the person is a digital music provider. A person may engage in activities subject to this subsection under authority of a compulsory license only.
  • "(A) if such license was obtained by a digital music provider and
  • "(B) with respect to end users with which such digital music provider contracts or has a direct economic relationship.

Shocking news from Jack Thompson, video game grand inquisitor at large:

Published reports that Neher told detectives he and Everette killed Gore because Gore would not let them borrow his car followed the same scenario in (the video) 'Grand Theft Auto', claimed Thompson.

Coppers who carried out the search say they did find several 'm' rated computer games on the property, although it is not clear of GTA was among them.

You would think that the felony charge of Grand Theft Auto first appeared with the video game based on the reaction that you see here. How many GTAs are committed every year by people who have not played the video games? Now that might be an interesting story. No, wait, it wouldn't for the same reason it wouldn't be interesting to know the number of murderers who had played a first person shooter before.

Fortunately, at least one high-ranking cop ended the nonsense by pointing out that in this case, the question of their being video gamers was not relevant to the investigation. It says a lot about the police involved that they even wasted their time looking at the video games, as though they might constitute legitimate evidence of a crime having being committed when they had the body, suspects and presumably the murder weapon.

Libertarians frequently bemoan their lack of influence on government, but the open borders stance that many of them take is a perfect example of why most people don't see libertarianism as a viable ideology. It's an unfortunate fact about libertarians that many of us lack any concept of the importance of priorities and social consequences from our beliefs. Even worse, many libertarians in practice combine the worst of the left and the right in their approach to communication. The tendency to moralize and selectively appeal to tradition from the right, and the tendency to use offensive, almost hateful extremist statements that insinuate bigotry on the part of the skeptic for daring to question an aspect of libertarianism.

I am a libertarian, but I won't be voting Libertarian in 2006 and 2008. Instead, I'll be voting for the Constitution Party wherever I can because the Libertarian status quo has no sense of priorities and mindlessly grabs at freedom without thinking through the consequences of when and how it gets it. Drug legalization, without the proper safeguards like ending excessive force laws, immigration liberalization without comprehensive enforcement of voting security and liberalization in business and property laws. All of these things will hasten, not stall, the demise of what little freedom we have left.

The fatal flaw of secular libertarianism, is that it doesn't have any time for social costs. To secular libertarians, every person ought to live as one of the robotic characters that Ayn Rand created who can perfectly, rationally, accept being displaced by a cheaper competitor from an impoverished country. It just doesn't work that way in real life. There is nothing that will make most men accept the status quo faster than being barely able to feed his children. Without any liberalization in the tax and business regulatory codes, all immigration will mean for many workers is wage depression and increasing dependence on others, a trend that has been proved to result in an increase in left-wing voting patterns.

At a time when popular control of the government is spiraling out of control, open borders libertarians get indignant about allowing millions of foreigners to flood our shores. There is serious opposition to identification requirements for voting. Open borders libertarians would, in essence, subject the citizenry to the very realistic possibility of being displaced in their own country as immigrants discretely break the law and vote.

But why not just allow everyone who wants to live in the United States, come here and do so? Wouldn't America be just as well off with a wave of fifty million more low-skilled or unskilled workers? Hey, they just want to work for a living, right? How about a hundred million? Two hundred million? At what point do we say stop and control the flow of people?

Immigration is not a right, it is privilege, and it is extended by the host society, not an employer. If open borders libertarians wish to change this arrangement, then they ought to be real men and women and personally assume all legal liability for the actions of the immigrants that they bring over to employ. Part of the contract that keeps them immune is the notion that society agreed to this, but if open borders libertarians do not feel that society has a right to impose limits, then the only alternative is to make them personally liable for restitution for any damage to society that they cause. There is no reasonable alternative.

If you ever needed a good argument as to why antitrust law is in practice a very dangerous weapon, then this case should settle it for you. Microsoft is getting in legal trouble with Adobe because the next version of Microsoft Office allows you to export an office document to Adobe's PDF standard. Why are they getting in a spat over this? No one can really grok Adobe's motives other than they are pissed off that Microsoft might co-op their baby. They provide their own Office to PDF conversion tools, and actually, get this, want Microsoft to have to charge for this functionality as a separate product!

So why aren't they going after OpenOffice which makes its own end-run around Adobe's products and allows for a direct conversion to PDF as well? Here's what I think. They're getting increasingly worried that the companies that are implementing PDF are doing it in a way that makes Adobe Acrobat superfluous. When office suites can save directly to PDF, web browsers can save whole web pages to PDF (on OSX this already is easy and standard), who needs a special, expensive conversion tool?

Move to Canada! What a great idea! Surely it is a land of freedom, milk and honey. Well, maybe not if you include comprehensive protection for freedom of speech. No doubt, some leftist goon is going to get on me about how corporations censor free speech and other rubbish. Still, this serves as a sobering reminder that democracy and freedom are in no way connected, as even many Western democratic states are as illiberal as their Eastern counterparts.

Ladies and gents, this is a good example of why I cannot get excited about the "spread of democracy" around the world. If this were done by Communist China, people would be outraged, but because it's Canada "the people" said it was ok. Just like racist whites said that it was ok to use their numbers to keep blacks from enjoying due process of law, engaging in lawful commerce and basic civil liberties like the right to keep and bear arms in the United States.

Is it possible that California's Democrats actually got something right for a change?

California's Democratic-dominated Assembly passed a bill on Wednesday that could increase competition among cable television providers and make it easier for telephone companies to enter the market

The bill by Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez would eliminate city-by-city franchises, which he said made it nearly impossible for rivals with new technologies to enter California's market for television entertainment services.

It passed by a rare unanimous vote of 70-0 in the often-divided Legislature, with 10 members not present during the Wednesday night vote. "We need to set a framework that is technology neutral, and we don't have that currently," said bill co-sponsor Lloyd Levine.

There are a lot of arbitrary rules that have been put into place over the years to protect the established cable companies from competition. The Technology Liberation Front guys have written a lot on the need for reforming the franchising rules to make way for competition. I for one, cannot see any positive effect for the community from rules that would create barriers to competition. Especially with the Network Neutrality issue rearing its ugly head, it would be disastrous for the government to provide a framework that is hostile toward competition in data delivery services.

These investments could be the beginning of a major effort on AT&T's part to really build up more Internet infrastructure. There will, no doubt, be a lot of overlap between AT&T's IPTV service and any broadband Internet offerings they have available in an area. The more, the merrier. This is the only way that people are going to get access to high-speed Internet access that goes beyond 3mbps cable and 768kbps DSL.

If I had a dime for everytime that a blogger or talking head in the mainstream media misstated or completely fubar'd the network neutrality issue beyond all reckoning, I would be buying a Ferrari:

The companies fighting net neutrality have been waging a misleading campaign, with the slogan "hands off the Internet," that tries to look like a grass-roots effort to protect the Internet in its current form. What they actually favor is stopping the government from protecting the Internet, so they can get their own hands on it.

Remember the old days when domain name registration used to be "democratically controlled?" It cost something like $70/year to register a domain name with Network Solutions, the federal government's official contractor for providing domain name services. Now, a free domain name is often part of the package when you buy a hosting account with a larger hosting service, and they can be bought for as little as $15 from a reputable and reliable registrar.

But the other side of the debate has some large corporate backers, too, like Google and Microsoft, which could be hit by access fees since they depend on the Internet service providers to put their sites on the Web. It also has support from political groups of all persuasions. The president of the Christian Coalition, which is allied with Moveon.org on this issue, recently asked, "What if a cable company with a pro-choice board of directors decides that it doesn't like a pro-life organization using its high-speed network to encourage pro-life activities?"

Now, the question that few bloggers have asked, is why should they get by for basically free when they use audio and video? These things take up tremendous amounts of bandwidth. A 25MB video downloaded by 15,000 users would be 360,000MB of data transfered, and that would be only one user sharing the data! Imagine a hundred customers sharing that and having the same rate. The amount of bandwidth that would be needed to support such a large volume of transfers would require tremendous sums of money to build up.

Again, this is why I support metered bandwidth as an alternative. If broadband users had to pay $0.25-$0.50/GB, they would actually be responsible with their Internet use instead of trying to "drain it dry." That would, in turn, get rid of the free-riding by people who commit massive copyright infringement and it would serve to provide ISPs and telecoms with the extra funds needed to build up these networks.