After a weekend of work, it's basically done. If you can't tell what I mean, then that's a good thing. It means that most of my work on this blog has been successful so far. I've got a little more work to do, then I think I will email my battered and abused template files to the blogger who originally wrote them.

You read stories like this and you can get one of three things out of it. What you get out of it will tell you what kind of person you are. Do you see an example of how SWAT culture has begun to pervade general police work to an extent that cops are increasingly prone to make "shoot first, ask questions later" mistakes? Do you see a simple, honest mistake, even though the police should have noticed that they were raiding apartment #36, not #38? Or, do you see a complainer? Maybe he was a drug user, maybe he hates the cops.

This is a good example of how the groups that can be called the political right can be broken down. It is increasingly obvious that left-right doesn't work anymore. I don't even pretend to know enough about the practical nuances of the left, but I do not some about the groups that get lumped into the right. The left-right spectrum has not been valid since the French Revolution, and it's time to switch to something more appropriate. I propose the liberal/libertarian-authoritarian spectrum between a "presumption of individual freedom and conscience" and "collective control of the individual."

Let's not pull any punches, there is no ultimate difference between anyone who comes down hard on the latter, whether they think they are a God-fearing conservative or are a flaming Communist. It is within this context that it is painfully clear these days that the right is not even remotely close to a melting pot of aligned-ideals, but rather is a hodge podge tossed salad of groups that are sometimes better off with members "the other camp." There are many conservatives who are, quite frankly, no more practically supportive of individual rights than your average state socialist. Many political social conservatives fit into this camp without even the slightest mental friction.

I used the example above to illustrate the divide because I am in the first camp, as I am a classical liberal (I call myself libertarian only because calling myself a "liberal" today would not be pleasant in mixed company). There are two value sets here. Those who lean toward the authoritarian end of the right do so here from a mixture of fear of moral degeneracy and fear of harm. All societies succumb inevitably, as collectives, to the former. It cannot be prevented. However, the one thing that the War on Drugs has done is increased the militarism of police forces without increasing the standards of conduct and common sense in police.

Many, probably most, drug raids that go bad do so because for one reason or another, there are fundamental barriers toward a culture of intelligence gathering. The military does not suffer from this problem not only because of the inherent danger in attacking the wrong target, but because the military also comports itself with a generally much higher regard for civilian safety and pride in its accuracy and efficiency. No one in the military would ever want to admit that they ordered a series of deadly raids on bad civilian targets because they were afraid of taking light casualties. Yet, that is precisely the justification that the police use in many cases to justify SWAT deployments against suspects who aren't very well-armed and known to be very violent. Better a "civilian," than a cop.

The fear of moral degeneracy, which is a significant reason why many "on the right" allow such far-reaching state power, even when it is abused at an alarming rate and there is a high probability that statistics are under-reported, is a legitimate fear. A society that is morally rotten at its core cannot maintain civic virtue, but the state is a function of the society that produces it. A corrupt society will yield a corrupt government. This fundamental truth is where the political right has started cracking. Those of us who lean toward the liberty end of the right, accept this, whereas those on the authoritarian end do not. It is increasingly clear, though, that the differences between these two "right-wing" tendencies are as night and day in their own right as Communism versus Capitalism.

One need only look to Senator Rick Santorum to see a perfect example of the authoritarian right. Having eschewed individualism for collectivism, openly, he espouses moral plattitudes that seek a subjective "greater good," while steadfastly refusing to accept that the "greater" is composed of the "individual lesser." Just as the state is a function of the society that created it, society is a function of the individuals within it.

Whether or not individuals can and should be "autonomous," and that is a deceptive and loaded word, is non sequitor. It is a strawman that is used in a cowardly fashion to escape a few obvious flaws in the logic of the authoritarian right, as well as the paternalistic left. I will, for the sake of brevity, simply enumerate them:

• True autonomy is the goal of an insignificant minority. The vast, truly overwhelming, majority do no seek autonomy from good laws such as prohibitions against murder, theft or laws that obligate parents to support minor children.
• It is irrelevant whether an individual knows what is in their own interests. A person who acts against their own interests may not in fact do any harm to others or themselves.
• It is statistically unlikely that a bureaucrat could know what is in someone's own interests, if they do not know it themselves. Since we are talking about public policy, statistical probability here is the only way to gauge the effects on the aggregate.
• Most immoral actions have no empirically provable impact on the life, liberty and property of others. The only way to provide justice is to enforce matters of morality that simultaneously have a demonstrably (and typically reproducibly) destructive effect on others against their will, are not such that enforcing them causes more damage to the victim than failure to do so does and do not have a propensity for victimizing only the individual who does them.
• In many cases, trying to end an immoral behavior that does not meet the criteria of the previous point causes worse problems for the greater society than they prevent.
• Civic virtue can only be freely chosen. Forcing the issue has never worked in the past, and has always served as a distraction that has enabled, rather than prevented, the decline of societal morality.

I blame a lot of the divide between libertarian and authoritarian leaning people on the right on the unease by which my of the latter have with the concept of "spheres of sovereignty." They are uneasy about the idea of the church and family reassuming some meaningful degree of actual control over their roles in society. For example, many authoritarian conservatives do not like the idea of a renewed church that has sufficient influence over its members that its leaders can actually persuade businesses to not hire individuals who are drug addicts, adulterers and generally prone to immoral conduct. They don't like the idea that in a free society, the church, not the state, might be what keeps them from getting a job or that the church might be able to put its foot down and say "your second spouse is not legitimate."

Many liberty-minded individuals on the right are uneasy with this too, but consider it to be the lesser of the two evils by a wide margin. In fact, it usually is a healthy arrangement. It distributes the use of power throughout society so that it doesn't end up in one section's hands, it allows for non-coercive control of anti-social behavior such as dysfunctional drug addiction (drug addicts who refuse to support their families and work, for example) and it increases freedom--for free.

There has been a report of a nasty new security flaw in the WordPress community. I have taken the appropriate steps toward stopping it for now, but it got me to thinking about why I am using WordPress. It mostly has to do with the fact that Movable Type 3.2 didn't have even remotely decent spam filtering and I wasted an inordinate amount of time with deleting spam because Movable Type Blacklist didn't work with it. I like WordPress, don't get me wrong, but I am a little bit disturbed by the blame-game that has gone on on the WordPress hackers mailing list. If it is what I think it is, it's a major problem, not a minor one. I don't know much, as I haven't looked at it ver hard because everyone is being coy about the details, but I am not sure it I want to keep using WordPress if people on the list are going to downplay and attack like what Dr. Dave of SpamKarma has been on the receiving end of over this issue.

So, what am I going to do? I'm going to install Movable Type 3.31 alongside my WordPress installation. I am going to get it configured just like my WordPress installation, then I am going to write and open source a conversion utility that will convert WordPress data into Movable Type's export/import format if a usable one doesn't already exist. Then, one day, if I get it the way I like it, it'll be Movable Type. There are things that are new in MT 3.31 that sound cool and quite frankly, I am starting to miss having static PHP pages instead of relying on the good graces of MySQL's stability to feed basic content on a regular basis.

Now that Akismet is available for Movable Type, not nearly as much left keeping me loyal to WordPress. Nice product, but I switched mostly because of a fault in Movable Type rather than an honest love of something other than Movable Type.
No disruptions. Yeah, yeah. It'll just happen. Like a frickin thief in the night if I go through with it. Even my current theme will be recycled. I'll stew, I'll hack and I'll plot my exit plan and then one day... GONE!

Yes, I know it's incredibly ironic that I am saying this right after I have spent a little time hacking away at WordPress to make it more usable for my tastes. C'est la vie. If and when I make the jump, I will relinquish control over any plugins that I have written for WordPress and let people hack away at them to their hearts' content.

If a washed up heart-throb comes out of the closet, does a teenage girl's heart break?

Lance Bass, a singer in the boy band *NSync, has revealed that he is gay and in a relationship with a former star of a U.S. reality television show, People magazine said on Wednesday.

Bass, 27, said he had kept his homosexuality a secret because he did not want to hurt *NSync's popularity and cripple the careers of his bandmates.

Republican leaders announced that they would open a series of congressional inquiries into the sexuality and messages of all "boy bands" in order to protect the children being potentially exposed to homosexual pseudo-musicians and lip-syncers. As a show of good will, following his open desire for an armistice in the culture war, Pat Buchanan announced that he will be buying all of *NSync's albums.

Comparing radical Islam with revolutionary anarchism is a dubious comparison. For one thing, radical Islam shares a degree of support or toleration in the Islamic world that anarchism did not share with the public in the countries that it was a problem in. Another major difference is that radical Islam does not seek to impose a purely theoretical system on society. Rather, there have been successful Islamic theocracies in the past, so there is an inherent seductiveness for many Muslims to the possibility that the goal of the Islamists is in fact attainable.

The Islamists enjoy popular support because they are not purely wild-eye zealots like the revolutionary anarchists, but rather they provide many services that protect the poor and at-risk members of their communities. There is a charitable face, a compassionate face that exists alongside the face that is capable of unleashing a horrific violence upon others. By doing so, they have muddied the waters and have introduced a question of relatvism into the conflict with them. It is not hard to see how they have often gained an almost Robin Hoodesque reputation, albeit one that trades tights for C4-strapped jackets.

It's common for conservatives to be so self-assured about the strength of the United States and other liberal democratic states, but there are critical differences that exist between the hayday of revolutionary anarchism and today. For starters, America and its allies--except a few of our Asian allies and Israel--are crippled with self-doubt and a loathing of their roots. Another thing, millions of common people are genuinely unconvinced of not only the importance of the war against all non-liberal manifestations of Islam, but the legitimacy of placing the burden of "human rights violations" on the enemy and those who even tacitly support them.

One need only look at the conflict that Israel is in right now to see what I mean. Here is a democratic state, that despite its flaws, provides a clearly liberal and tolerant atmosphere for virtually all citizens. Arabs enjoy more rights and potential for advancement in Israel than they do in any Islamic country. To be an Israeli citizen is the best hope for the good life that the vast majority of Arabs could ever achieve if they stay in the Middle East. Yet Israel is constantly condemned while brutal and backward states are defended by many of the people who should be defending Israel as a champion of modernity in the region. There is a real parallel between people who condemn Israel and those who would condemn say, Britain in World War II in its fight against Germany, because it had serious flaws such as an empire.

There is a lot of disingenuous rhetoric from those who claim that Islam is "one of the great religions," a "religion of peace" and that it is only a minority involved. Austin Bay's comparison (linked above) between Hezbollah and the KKK does hold up in one respect: both enjoy(ed) popular support where they held/hold sway. It is an unfortunate fact that such groups cannot operate on the level that inspires the terror that they have brought without systematic support from a large minority or a majority. A few percentage of sympathetic Shia would be insufficient to hide or defend Hezbollah from the Lebanese and Israeli armies. Hezbollah would certainly not hold a meaningful chunk of the Lebanese Parliament if it were supported only by a small minority of extremists.

Unlike anarchism, Islam contains inherent exhortations to violence. It is possible to be a genuinely peaceful anarchist and principly so without harboring the slightist bit of support for revolutionary and violent anarchism. I think that this is where the two fall apart. Islamism has its roots in Islam, a religion whose on scriptures contain passages that advocate persecution and violence toward non-believers. While other world religions have used violence against unbelievers, I do not know of a single world religion that contains passages in its scripture that advocate generalized violence toward non-believers. Even Judaism's violent passages are directed at a specific place and specific time, and all excuses for Judao-Christian terrorism and persecution are overridden by very clear and rigid passages against such behavior. To be blunt about it, when other organized religions do these things, they are typically betraying scripture. When Islamists act this way, they are being observant to at least a small degree.

Accepting Muslims as part of society because not all of them are violent is beside the point. No one is advocating the outlawing of Islam. However, multiculturalists in particular have been extremely dishonest about all of this. What matters is how many Muslims are willing to actually condemn these violent individuals and support efforts to eliminate them. Merely hypothetical support is worthless. You are either sympathetic on some level to the Islamist guerrillas and terrorists or you are not. It is black and white, for or against. Unfortunately, while we have made a lot of noise grandstanding about "he who is not for us, is against us," we (especially the Bush Administration) have been conspicuously uncritical of the Wahabi Lobby and infiltration within our own borders!

There is unfortunately no easy way to solve this. There is no morally satisfying method for modern elites that doesn't amount to self-destruction. If we continue the genuflection before the altar of multiculturalism and insist that it's a passing fad with little support a la revolutionary anarchism, we will be destroyed from within. That route will lead to a build up of supporters, emotional sympathizers and terrorists within our borders and we will be blind to that reality until it becomes painfully clear to the average citizen that terrorists cannot openly operate without popular support. By then, it'll be too late. The other options, involve soft or hard collective responsibility that could degenerate into outright bigotry as people are deported for merely being Muslim in an area known to harbor sympathies, even if they are very slight.

I don't think that Islamism is going away. It hasn't gone away for 1,400 years. For 1,400 years, Islam has waged a literal war against non-believers and it has shown no capacity for reform that transcends borders. And we shouldn't expect it to. One cannot ask the Islamists to rewrite scripture to washa way the passages that preach violence. It is too old as a religion for them to be simply washed away as though they never existed. Instead, it is time to face the fact that there are no convenient comparisons between past struggles and what we face with Islamism. For all of its similarities, it has many differences that are sufficiently fundamental to invalid old tactics.

The fact that Islam has carried a sword into non-Islamic lands since its beginning, and that that was nearly 1,400 years ago, should serve as sufficient proof that Islamism is not like Communism, Fascism, Anarchism or any other "ism." It won't be stopped through containment because it is first and foremost a religion at heart. Its utopia exists on both sides of eternity. Kill the one, and the other will still exist in the minds of many around the world. So please, enough with the triumphalist rubbish. America very well may lose this war because many other countries that were far more self-confident fell to Islamist expansion. Iran, the remains of the great and officially Zoroastrian Persian Empire, is proof of that.

My my, how much our standards for "heavy casualties" have fallen over the years:

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Israel on Wednesday suffered its heaviest losses in Lebanon in its offensive against Hezbollah, with militants killing eight soldiers in a battle for a key town. A top Israeli commander said he expected the campaign to last "several more weeks."

Wow, that sounds really bad, right? Those jihadis are really kick Israeli ass, aren't they? Wait till you see the casualty count. It'll make your eyes pop...

Hezbollah spokesman Hussein Rahhal and Al-Jazeera gave a different toll, saying 13 Israeli soldiers were killed in the town. Another Arab broadcaster, Al-Arabiya, reported as many as 14 had been killed.

At how small the Israeli casualties have been so far. A whopping fourteen killed in a ground campaign against a dedicated guerrilla army. Better go ahead and call off the invasion now because God knows how the Israelis are going to survive this one. Not even the mighty People's Liberation Army.

If this is the best that the anti-Israel propaganda machine can come up with, then the Hezbollah needs to start shopping around for more bang for its buck...

It is "staggering" to consider that the $2.4T will be paid over the next fifty years to heirs, charities and estate taxes by residents of the Washington D.C. area. It must then be impossible to even conceive of the fact that that number will be approximately 3.64% of the liabilities that those "fortunate" heirs will have to pay in liabilities to the baby boomer generation for Social Security, Medicare and pension plans.

Make your money now, put into gold, land and guns and hide it. Interesting times are ahead of us.

I have a simple challenge for those who think that Israel is overreacting in Lebanon. If you are not an anti-semitic Jew-hater, then none of you should have any problem agreeing that the following things must be done regarding the stability of the region immediately surrounding Israel and Lebanon.

1. Israel is not obligated to cease operations in and around Lebanon until Hezbollah agrees to an immediate and permanent cease-fire.
2. The identification, disarmament and barring from all public service of all members of Hezbollah. No other militia, including Muslim, would suffer this fate. Only Hezbollah due to their hostile connections and loyalty to Syria and Iran that have caused them to undermine the sovereignty of Lebanon and to provoke the current war with Israel.
3. The unconditional withdrawl of all Syrian and Iranian weapons and personnel from Lebanon.
4. Permission for the Israelis to periodically conduct surveillance, coordinated with Lebanese intelligence, along Lebanon's borders for foreign agents and weapons entering Lebanon from Syria or Iran.
5. Obligation of Israel to assume partial responsibility for the defense of Lebanon until the Lebanese government and military are strong enough to repel foreign intrusion from hostile Islamic and secular states. This should last up to three years after the first three criteria have been met by Lebanon. During this time, Israel would also be partially responsible for rebuilding damaged infrastructure and training the Lebanese Army to act as a self-defense force modeled on Japan's Army.

How could anyone have fundamental objections to a plan that would disarm a dangerous militia/terrorist group with foreign loyalties and the construction of a modern self-defense force to keep Lebanon safe from foreign influence while keeping Israel's northern towns safe?

I have never pretended that I am a big fan of what law enforcement has become these days. Ironically enough, for a lot of my life, to a lesser degree, even now, I wish I could be a cop, but the laws are so corrupt these days that I could never look myself in the mirror every morning without feeling like I had become the very sort of monster I was paid to hunt. When I read things like this, and realize that being a cop is not about protecting the community, but about enforcing the laws of the state, even if they are brutal, inhumane and Godless, I realize I made the right decision:

"He said, 'No, I will come to your house with a uniformed officer, and I will take your son by force if he resists. And I will take him to somebody who will do that.'

"And I said, 'I don't think I can let you do that.'"

He added there have also been other threats to take Abraham away from the family.

"They told Abraham that if he did not go and have an X-ray, they would put him in a juvenile detention center with drug dealers. They told him that if he did not do that they would put him in a foster home. ... We never thought that people could actually say that to a young fellow like that. We've been surprised by lots of stuff but we have a strong faith and we believe that we'll prevail. We think there will be a judge that will use common sense and compassion and grant a stay on that [mandated chemotherapy] order."

This began with the War on Drugs, and has only gotten worse as the ruling class has added to the list of things that we cannot do with our own bodies. At sixteen, he is no child. He is one year away from being able to serve in the military with his parents' permission. Yet, the state treats him like a child and forces him to take a treatment that was torturous for him to go through the first time and that he adamantly does not want to go through again. It failed the first time, and it shows no signs of working again, but that won't stop the officious fascists in Virginia's "social services" agencies from making such a fundamental decision as getting pumped full of radiation for him.

It is bad enough that they are forcing him to undergo this treatment. It is even worse that these social services cretins don't even have medical degrees and professional experience with the same. They are no more qualified to make such decisions than he is, and what's even worse, is that they won't even have to live with the consequences of his decision. And... society won't even suffer. This is not mandatory rehab, this is just a question of whether a near-legal-adult should have to undergo a painful treatment that probably won't buy him anymore time on this rock.

The cop who is brought along to enforce this law should look at himself in the mirror, and ask himself "am I protecting this guy, or am I do nothing more than enforcing a policy of the state?" The obvious answer is the latter. His parents haven't neglected him; they got him the very treatment that the social services people want to force on him--and it failed. The cop should refuse to escort them, and if that is not an option, if the cop is a decent human being who loves his country and community at all, should resign from his job.

America, proving once again, that countries do not learn from their own history:

As one friend of Culosi's told me, "To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends...none of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting $50 bucks or so on the Virginia-Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation."

Apparently, it was. Fairfax police detective David J. Baucom met Culosi in a bar one evening last October, befriended him, and was soon making wagers himself. According to those close to Culosi I've spoken with, it wasn't long before Baucom began upping the ante, encouraging Culosi to wager larger sums than what the friends were used to. Baucom would later report in an affidavit that he'd wagered close to $30,000 with Culosi over a three-month period, and had lost nearly $6,000.

Baucom eventually encouraged Culosi to wager at least $2,000 in a single day, the lower threshold under which Culosi could be charged under state law with "conducting an illegal gambling operation." On January 24 of this year, Detective Baucom assembled the Fairfax County SWAT team, and marched off to Culosi's home to arrest him.

By their own admission, Fairfax County Police abuse the privilege of deploying a SWAT force by bringing it to bear on a myriad number of offenders who are simply not sufficiently threatening (or threatening at all, as was the case here) to justify their use. It happens, though, for the most banal of all reasons: laziness. It is easier and safer to rush in with the full SWAT effect and so thoroughly terrify people into just surrendering to the police. Unfortunately, this has also proved terrify people into shooting cops in situations that would not have happened if police forces could not legally use military-style weapons or armor except in extreme cases.

What cases like this prove, and it's not the first time that SWAT and similar methods has been horrendously abused in Northern Virginia, is that local governments cannot be trusted with heavily armed police. That is why I think the only solution to this sort of problem for Virginia is for the state to disband all local SWAT units and build its own SWAT units for the state police that may be called on by local governments when the need arises, similar in concept to the National Guard. At the bare minimum, what we need is a law that allows SWAT to only be used in cases where there is a very high likelihood of extremely violent behavior that cannot possibly be resolved with normal police methods.

The point that matters about Culosi's case is that it proves the danger in letting the police bring such force to bear in non-exigent circumstances. No one in their right mind can look at this case and actually believe that a SWAT was necessary, given how little criminality was involved. If the police are willing to bring a SWAT to bear on such a case, how long before the only crimes that one does not risk facing a SWAT for are common traffic violations? It's bad enough that the cop practically created this case through deliberate and malicious manipulation of Culosi, it's even worse that they saw fit to turn it into a three-ring circus by treating him like an extremely violent criminal.

The Boy Scouts are learning the hard way, the same lessons that churches around the country typically still haven't learned:

PHILADELPHIA - The city said it will evict a Boy Scout council from its publicly owned headquarters or make the group pay a fair rent price unless it changes its policy on gays.

The Boy Scouts' Cradle of Liberty Council, the country's third-largest, has been battling with the city for more than three years over the policy, which like the national Scouts organization forbids gays from being leaders.

There is no constitutional right to use public property for a non-governmental function, however that is beside the point. The real issue at stake here is whether or not the Boy Scouts will give in and surrender to those that want them to change or not. It would no doubt inspire a lot more confidence in their supporters and parents in general if they would peacefully, and respectfully, bow out and stop using the public property. That would speak highly of their commitment to the two traditional American values: God and liberty.

Not being able to use public property might actually teach many of these boys a good lesson about politics and government in general. They might get a good look at the true nature of government and be able to appreciate the importance of the individualism that is so often down-played by "traditionalist" groups.

Big Brother always hones his skills with the superficially best of intentions:

Fund a series of pilot programs, lasting up to three years, to tag sex offenders with tracking devices that would let them be monitored in real time. The devices would include a GPS downlink (to provide exact coordinates), a cellular uplink (to transmit the coordinates to police), and two-way voice communications.

Here's a thought. We tag wild, predatory animals precisely because we want to know where they are and what they are up to. It's a not so subtle admission that maybe these people are too dangerous to be released, if we feel the need to tag them in a higher tech version of the way that we tag wolves.

James DeLong, like other open source critics, doesn't seem to get it when it comes to the role of RMS within the "greater community:"

The GPL contains a phrase whereby someone using covered software also agrees automatically to be bound by any later version of the license. It is hard to imagine these commerically-savvy companies going further down this road.

The Linux kernel itself is indeed threatened by such language, but it remains to be seen if the kernel developers, with a concerted effort, could not muster the sort of legal consent from all of the affected contributors to switch Linux to the BSD license or another, more sane license.

DeLong, like a lot of open source critics, gives the GPL way too much prominence. A lot of open source users won't even be affected by Stallman's antics. On the other hand, what the FSF will end up doing is causing people to move away and rewrite the few useful programs such as GCC that it has written to finally get these moonbats away from the mainstream for good.

And somewhere... a FreeBSD programmer is cackling maniacally as the GPL Nazis finally get their comeuppance. The FreeBSD guys already want to dethrone Linux as the posterchild of the open source movement, and this could finally give them enough popular support to really kick Linux and Stallman squarely in the pants.

As for whether we developers will acknowledge GPL 3.0, that's our prerogative. I own the source code to my GPL-licensed plugins for WordPress, not Stallman. If I want to keep using GPL 2.X, that's my right as a copyright holder. If he disagrees, then he can go pound sand until his little hippy hands are numb. Something tells me that a judge will not be sympathetic to the idea that a copyright holder is legally bound to change the terms on their own copyright license because a third party arbitrarily says they have to. Last time I checked, the GPL is a license between me and my users, not me, my users and the FSF.

Sometimes agitating for the enemy does come back to haunt you:

A RADICAL Muslim cleric had his bid to evacuate Lebanon aboard a British ship rejected when officials blocked his return to the United Kingdom.

The next time you see one of those true believers ranting and raving in broken English about how "we teach them a lesson" or "we attack furiously" or "we bring hell to the infidels," remember this. If half of them weren't armed to the teeth, it'd just be so pathetic that it'd make great stand up comedy material.

In the words of Trent Reznor:

Just how deep do you believe?
Will you bite the hand that feeds?
Will you chew until it bleeds?

After reading this, I have backtracked a little in my support of the Israeli campaign in Lebanon. Three soldiers' lives simply do not justify that level of attack against Lebanon, but considering Israel's situation, I understand where they are coming from on this. It would be indefensible, were it any other country.

At this point, I think Israel needs an all-out ground war with Hezbollah. They need it for their reputation in the Middle East. The quality of the average Hezbollah fighter and his equipment is generally considered to be very inferior to Israel's army, so it could have been a short and extremely bloody reminder to other Muslim groups that Israel is not a paper tiger.

If I were in Olmert's shoes, I would have told the Prime Minister of Lebanon that if he is sincere about wanting Hezbollah to no longer be a threat to Lebanon's sovereignty, that he will stand down as the Israeli Army invades southern Lebanon, circles around Hezbollah and makes them fight for their very existance. I would have them cut off, and have the army go door-to-door and root them out. Fight them and butcher them in the streets.

There would be no relenting until no Israeli Arab or Jew feared having Katsuyah rockets raining down on their home at night. Instead of worrying about the lives of three men, I would order the army to give Hezbollah the apocalyptic battle they so desparately want and if any should beg for mercy, I would order them to be shot in the stomach and left to bleed to death in the hottest time of the day, in the middle of the desert.

If I were in Olmert's shoes, Hezbollah would be in its death throes as an organization right now. Southern Lebanon would be littered with the corpses of Hezbollah fighters, and they would be so badly, so horrifically killed that even 7,200 virgins would not be enough to make most young men dream of martyrdom.

If I were in Olmert's shoes...

In honor of the sacrifices of feminists everywhere for the sake of male-female equality, I would like to sing an ode to the sacrifices of feminists everywhere. Here, sing along with me.

Do you ever wonder why America is so despised in Europe? This is an example of why the Europeans are quite right to be bitter about America sometimes:

Prosecutors appear to be getting tough in reaction to a bill passed by the House of Representatives last week that would prohibit Internet gambling sites from knowingly accepting money from United States citizens. In addition to arresting Mr. Carruthers when he touched down in the United States on a flight from Britain to Costa Rica, the prosecutors charged 10 others who worked with his company.

But... but... it's gambling. It's immoral. What a great justification for allowing any country to simply arrest people who land in transit because they violated a local law while back home where it was legal to do so. Maybe China should arrest Bill Gates the next time he goes to China if they feel that Microsoft isn't doing enough to censor "state secrets, subversion and immoral content."

See, this is why America has a bad reputation around the world. We do unto others exactly what would drive us through the roof in a nationalistic fit of rage. This is one of those cases where I wish the federal courts were empowered to summarily terminate the employment of federal agents and prosecutors who act outside of the bounds of decency in bringing charges.

Freedom of speech is a concept that is lost on liberals these days. Ironically, some of the very people who are often quick to say that unpopular speech is what needs to be protected by the law, are the first people to have no idea how to actually practice that idea:

But that is not how the Ninth Circuit treated Harper's appeal. Instead, in a 2-1 decision, Judge Reinhardt used the case to articulate a new concept of free speech regulation. Focusing on the specific anti-gay content of Harper's T-shirt, he ruled that schools may restrict "derogatory and injurious remarks directed at students' minority status such as race, religion, and sexual orientation." In a footnote, he wrote that the court would "leave ... to another time" the question of limiting derogatory remarks aimed at gender.

I have a sneaky suspicion that the Supreme Court will strike this ruling down because it would invariably be impossible to enforce without doing major damage to the Constitution, legal system and precedent. The Ninth Circuit appellate court, though, needs to have impeachment charges drafted against the two judges who voted for this ruling. It is clear from the statements of the judges in question that they allowed purely personal politics to guide this and were unswayed by the actual text of the first amendment.

Gay activist groups will hopefully recognize that this ruling, if upheld, will not only not win over supporters, but will further antagonize the public. They couldn't have asked for a worse ruling in this case because it just made a martyr out of the student whose free speech rights were curtailed.

The irony of this case that will be lost on the homosexual group whose protest started it is that it arose out of an intolerance for those who disagree non-violently with them. These people don't care about freedom, they're just petty rainbow-wearing brownshirts, not freedom fighters. Ideas never hurt anyone. Free speech never killed anyone. Silencing, them, however has lead to violence in the past. When the pendulum swings back, I think I will laugh when it slams hard into the gay activists' faces. They'll deserve it.

I just had a conversation with someone about the "god of the Old Testament." Seems the individual cannot reconcile Jesus with the "god of the Old Testament" who is oh so judgemental. A lot of it had to do with the "putting of human attributes on God." Well, I have a little rejoinder to that sort of thinking.

Humanity is quite capable of evil, and in a grudging sense is often capable of doing good. Now, ask yourself this. If humanity behaved the way that Jesus behaved in the New Testament, would it be bad to "put human attributes on God?" Loving, forgiving, wise, just, self-sacrificial out of a pius love for others? I think any sane person would agree that saying that we are created in God's image and that we relate to God through shared psychological traits wouldn't be bad at all.

Yaweh, the God of Israel, is a jealous and judgemental god, but then all conceptions of deities with a moral pulse are judgemental. The crucial difference is that he offers us a way out that is in line with our nature. God knows our weakness and did all of the work himself. That's what amazes me continuously about God. He knows us, is similar to us and yet sacrificed so much to bring about an end to evil in the world in a way that is honorable.

Is God judgemental? Of course, but then so is all of humanity. However, with only one extreme exception, he will forgive anything and wash away the stain of the evil. Anyone may come to him and be forgiven. There are extremely few people who can come even within the same sport, let alone league or ballpark of that level of forgiveness. Keep that in mind the next time you read or think about the Old Testament and think, "damn this god is a judgemental ass." That same god foreshadowed in numerous places the degree of forgiveness that he was going to extend to humanity. It's a very simplistic reading that sees only fire and brimstone instead of the nuanced, loving god of the New Testament.

In this day and age of "anything is a good excuse for limiting civil liberties," there are times when you can't help but look at other countries and think that it's still good to be an American. Take this lovely bit of legislation that is being proposed by Blair's government, that lovely cadre of fascists and thugs that rule Brittannia.

The proposed Serious Crime Prevention Order is intended to combat organised crime where the police do not have enough evidence to bring a criminal prosecution. It would enable civil courts to impose the orders on individuals, even if they had not been convicted of a crime.

I don't want to spoil the rest of it, but suffice it to say that it's basically the closest thing they can get to a Minority Reportesqu "Department of Precrime" without getting ahold of some clairvoyant crack babies. It fits in well with Tony Blair's existing antipathy toward the rule of law and due process, which has been made quite clear in the past.

The good part in the article, though, is when they point out that this legislation would be thrown out on its face in the United States if it even made it out of committee in Congress. And the Brits wonder why we actually wrote down and organized our constitution in one document...

In all fairness, though, both our chief executives regard our constitutions, regardless of their form, as just "G$% damn pieces of paper." (Hey, even if they haven't been that profanely blunt, their actions cuss out our traditions and constitutions like drunken sailors.)

Too many Americans compare this country to others. It's especially ironic when Christians do it. Proudly hold ourselves out to the world as a standard to pursue while we do many of the things that we criticize others for. Can anyone honestly deny that the political process today is any cleaner than most countries' processes? We criticize China for its police-state tactics while we allow drug cops to smash in someone's door at 2AM over a few joints worth of pot. Violent extremism? Quite obviously to any sane person. How about our much vaunted first amendment which is restricted by speech codes, zones and bills like McCain-Feingold? Don't forget the sneering at the "robotic communist societies" while we allowed officious bureaucrats to micromanage our society.

What we have become is a nation of pharisees. We used to be the tax collector who stood outside the temple and said "Lord, forgive me, for I am a sinner." We were free because we were focused on America, the land of the free. Now, we're the pharisee in the temple talking up ourselves and how we're not scum, oppressed and all that jazz like them. Many, maybe most, Americans' national pride regard the majority of the world the way that Canadians' often regard America. "We're better than you because we're not like you." I can't tell whether that makes our hole in the ground that we've been digging look even deeper or whether it just means that Canada has been digging overtime and is now looking back up at us.

So what if America is better than other countries? Will we not as a nation be held to our own account by God for what we have done? It is not enough to be different by degree. A robber has no moral authority over a murderer. Stop telling the rest of the world to live until we can say that America is genuinely, undeniably an unfettered, free country like what we had when our founders were still alive.

Topics like this are why Christians cringe everytime that non-Christians try to weigh in on what "Christianity is all about." The average "progressive" believes that it is about a moral path on this side of eternity, and that is partly true, but the path that Christianity lays out in front of us is one that is chiefly concerned with correcting our relationship with the God that created us. The "golden rule" only provides part of the framework for this, and as such cannot be considered to really be that important. It is important, but nowhere near as much as the two commandments (in order of importance) that are considered the most important teachings of Christianity:

²⁶"What is written in the Law?" he replied. "How do you read it?"

²⁷He answered: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.

-Luke 10

When you divorce the deity of Christ from Christianity, all that you are left with is an arrogant and insane (or quite evil and ambitious) cult leader who occasionally had a few wise things to say about treating others. Very few of the things that Jesus said that were recorded in the gospels could even be construed as general moral teachings, as most of them were directly geared at either bringing the old Hebrew scriptures back into a deeper focus or adding new teachings and prophecy directly related to them.

Christian conservatives, reflect on this point from the Book of Isaiah 64:6

All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags [the Hebrew is generally meant to mean menstrual rags]; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.

Whenever I see social conservatives talk about promoting this or that latest "for the greater moral good" claptrap, I think about this. It's God's warning through his prophet Isaiah that righteousness apart from him will never buy mercy. Now, think about what happened the last time that humanity sought something of God's, together (as in "common good"), the Tower of Babel. Even if it is pure fiction, it is a cautionary tale. Together the two could easily be interpetted as, "I am the Lord, and you dare to conspire against me as a people to seek what is mine. For this, I will strike you down, divide you and set you against one another."
The first time, it was an attempt to seek the heavens so as to be a little bit like God, after having been cast out of grace. Now, many conservatives seek a grace and righteousness divorced from God and they call it the "common good." They do not mean that it is good to allow families and individuals to live free of violence and fraud, but that they should be strengthened through the state (usurping the Holy Spirit who sustains us in our weakness) and that virtue should be promoted while vice visibly punished for its own sake by the state.

The truest sign that it is an usurpation is that people like Rick Santorum who promote this agenda are operating through the state, and not to end the state's sovereignty over other social institutions. Families and churches are voluntary groups. One can leave either of them in most cases, but one cannot leave the state easily (sometimes at all). The voluntary institutions' health is the surest sign of the health of a society, and things look pretty bleak for the United States. That's why Christians who are concerned with the rise of depravity in all of its manifestations should be concerned with the way that people flock to the state, away from the voluntary institutions.

Fleeing to the state for these things is tantamount to fleeing away from God. Christian conservatives would do well to remember that God requires that each person freely seek him and that coercion cannot revive the institutions that are sacred in the eyes of God. Instead of legislating a false decency and fumbling through attempts to rebuild a battered and nearly destroyed family, how about pray for and work towards a community and individual-level renewal?

The law of unintended consequences strikes again:

McElhenney was arrested May 25 and charged with having an improper relationship with a student. The Spanish teacher and former Miss Texas contestant faces up to 20 years in prison, if convicted.

McElhenney's arrest was for allegedly having sex with an 18-year-old student and it has raised questions about the age constraints of the state's three-year-old law criminalizing student-teacher sexual relationships.

But some lawmakers say the Hebron High School student's status as a legal adult should exempt McElhenney from the felony charge. State Rep. Helen Giddings, D-Dallas, wrote the Texas law in 2003 that criminalizes sex between educators and students.

But she said she wanted the law to apply only to students 17 and younger - uncomfortable with making sex between two legal, consenting adults a felony.

It probably fits pretty well once you look beyond the surface. I'm sure that the school system she worked for did a fine job of so thoroughly infantilizing this guy that he had the emotional maturity of a late 19^th century twelve year old. That clearly justifies the charge in and of itself. We can trust him to fight in a war at his age, drive and vote, but we can't trust him to be able to have consensual sex with a woman who is only seven years his senior. You just have to draw the line somewhere and I think I speak for everyone when I say that wielding political power is something that requires a lot less emotional maturity than sexual intercourse. If Kim Jong Il can manage a country, I think it goes without saying that even a child can do it.

And the legislatoress speaks truth to power once more:

"I feel differently about 17-year-olds than I do about 18-year-olds," Giddings said. "I don't necessarily believe the penalty for the two should necessarily be the same."

Please, don't change this outstanding law. We need to send a message to these perverts that even if they are having sex with other consenting (barely) adults that it is not acceptable because they are still in a student teacher relationship. What bearing that has on their ability to consent is anyone's guess right now, but we're absolutely sure that it is important!

Another busy day at work and all of that good stuff. Finally got some time to sit down and work on my WordPress security plugin. A lot of little bugs got worked out of it. I'm thinking that a 1.0 release will be in order for tomorrow afternoon. Whether or not anyone really uses it is anyone's guess, but I've already got a small set of new features ready for a 2.0 release. Tomorrow will probably entail a bit of geek blogging about what I have learned about WordPress from playing around with its guts through my efforts to write a WordPress plugin.

So now, without further ado, I will do the unthinkable. Parakeet blogging. Yes, parakeet blogging. I am watching over my aunt's parakeet for a while and am almost getting the hang of having a bird in my apartment. Her name is Beverly and she's about four to five years old. It's only taken a few days to break her in a little to where she'll actually get on someone's finger and go around the room with them a little.

2006 and 2008 will be interesting election years for the Republican Party because they've finally done it. They've become Democratic (as in Democratic Party) hawks with social conservative tendencies. They've achieved the perfect balance while their opposition has crumbled before them like a bunch of incompetent clowns. This is a list of some of what they've managed to do, have tried or are trying to do, and what they've also managed not to do or even tried to do. I hope this will serve as an eye-opener to conservatives and liberals alike.

What they've done:

• Increased the role that the government pays in health insurance dramatically.
• Increased the role of government in education.
• Increased the strength of the military.
• Broken down many barriers between the intelligence and police agencies.
• Created dangerous exemptions to basic civil rights when terrorism is invoked.
• Created the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), which is the foundation for a North American Union government modeled on the European Union.
• Gone after gambling online.
• Appointed two lack-luster, statist (neither conservative nor liberal) SCOTUS judges.
• Put the first serious restrictions on political speech in place.

Tried to do:

• Create legal exemptions for their Democratic colleagues caught in corruption scandals. (Directly against the "Contract with America" points 1 and 2)
• Put backdoors into every router in the United States.
• Institute mandatory data retention.
• Bring more economic transactions under federal scrutiny.

Have not done:

• Made any credible attack on Roe v. Wade. ^*
• Restructured the tax code to be fairer and more enforcable.
• Solved any corruption problems.
• Instituted term limits.
• Made any credible attempt to end federal gun control laws.
• Genuinely deregulate anything having to do with the economy.

Political blogger triumphalism is one of those things that I've never really understood. There are so many politically active people that hate the blogosphere that it comes under attack from every angle constantly. It may seem like it's directed only at social networks, but I think things like this will pose the greatet longterm threat to the blogosphere. Getting tied down in nit-picky, stupid legislation to protect people from themselves. God forbid that parents be responsible for making sure that their little darlings aren't posting X-rated pictures on social networks or blogs. It ain't their fault that little susie is chummin' the sexual predator waters. No siree.

It'd be astounding, were it not so predictable, that most political bloggers don't cover the technical attacks on the blogosphere. Yeah, there have been noises about network neutrality, but little about things like this and data retention policies. It's a shadow issue that threatens to bite them squarely in the posterior.

Blogs will be the next big target. They're already partially included in these nearly 100% Republican attacks on social networks. All of you Republican partisans wake up and smell the coffee. Your own party has become the menace to the Internet that the Democrats were under Clinton. In fact, I can't tell the rhetoric apart anymore. It's always something about giving parents new "tools," which is a political eumphemism for new regulation aimed at making parents less responsible for their kids.

In a previous thread, the following point was made:

Making drug abuse illegal is a morally responsible way to teach young people that such behavior is wrong.

So, if the law is a morally responsible way to teach kids that such behavior is wrong we need laws against:

• Fornication
• Drinking to any excess, even at home
• Chain smoking
• Conceiving a child freely (not rape) out of wedlock. (This oughta be a felony)
• Getting married many times
• Screwing over your business partner, even if it only happened because he was a total idiot and you didn't lie, cheat or steal
• Looking down on others
• Saying things that hurt people. Sorry, this one technically already applies. It just needs to be expanded.
• Being disrespectful to old people
• Looking at porn
• Masturbating
• Lusting
• Gluttony
• Envy
• Greed
• Irrational anger
• Buying a car to impress women into sleeping with you

So, let's stop sending mixed signals. Who wants to sign up for the People's Kommisariat for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue?

If religious social conservatives would accept not legislating their religious views on unbelievers, I think that state-level libertarian parties could offer them a lot of major benefits. State-level libertarians could probably win away a lot of these voters by offering the following points as key libertarian priorities:

• Ending all eminent domain and taxation threats to organized religion.
• Ending all restrictions on private citizens' rights to freely express religious views on government-owned land.
• Repositioning law enforcement away from morality issues like drugs and toward violent and property crimes; offer a true "law-and-order" alternative to the Republicans.
• Establish state laws affirming that society and private institutions shall not be required to render social services to addicts of any kind.
• Establish state laws that reaffirm the right of private property owners to use reasonable force, including deadly force if it gets to that point, to prevent drunks and drug users from attacking their property.

The main barrier I see is that the average social conservative approaches elections like a popularity contest. When they don't get what they want, they just go away. When they do that, their voice is cheerfully ignored by everyone else in politics. The only way that religious social conservatives are going to be able to make a difference is to throw a massive protest vote in a bad election. Several million votes going to a third party in one or more elections would send enough shockwaves through the system to reinvigorate change.


But again, they'd rather just pray that the world just end now if they don't get their way. I think Jesus said it nicely about this behavior when he said, "do you not know that it is written, 'do not tempt the Lord your god?'" These people are basically playing chicken with the almighty, and well, the Bible and even American history are rife with examples of how well THAT ends...

Sooo, this weekend I was just a little too busy between a semi-hectic Saturday and running back and forth between Northern Virginia and Harrisonburg to help family move to really have time to do any real blogging. That and when I did have some free time I worked on a WordPress plugin that I have been toying with. It's just about done for version 1.0. It's a plugin that overrides the password for a particular post by sending a SHA-1 checksum of a string of various bits of data concatenated together to a reader's email address. They can use that SHA-1 checksum to get through the password protection for a limited number of times.

I just had a crazy idea about how the United States can deal with its illegal immigration and help Europe with its Islamification problem. Why not deport our illegal aliens to Europe? Set up a labor program with the Western European governments to allow Mexicans and other hispanic illegal immigrants to legally get a one-way ticket to a European country to work full time there as a replacement for the Middle Eastern and African immigrants. I know it wouldn't solve the demographics problem, but it's a hell of a lot better to have Spanish-speaking Mexicans in Italy, France and Britain than their Islamic counterparts.

With the kind of money that the illegals cost us, I can't imagine it would be that expensive to fine their employers and use the money to hand them a cheap ticket to Europe.

Once again the Christianists are on the move. They have the audacity to desecrate lady liberty! Could it get any worse? I don't think even a burqa and a bigger statue of a male relative holding her in chains could quite top this. How dare those religious zealots recast a symbol of secularism into a religious symbol. Didn't anyone ever tell them that liberty and religion are mutually exclusive? All educated people know that religious conservatism always means that you have to force your beliefs at gun point on those who disagree with the will of almighty God. God is impotent and needs us to wage war against the unbeliever. Sorry, wrong religion.

The problem with Andrew Sullivan is that he cannot accept a simple fact of life: scripture is the set of rules and beliefs for a religion. The moment that you start making stuff up as you go or blatantly disagreeing with it is the moment that people who do believe in it have a legitimate right to question you and your committment. "Christianist" is just a way of avoiding this. It's a false dichotomy. Either you are a "sensible believer" like him, or a wild-eyed zealot who likes to do harm to those who don't believe in your religion.
A lot of the people that get Sullivan and others angry are not Christians. They are just run-of-the-mill social conservatives. If people like Sullivan had any meaningful standard of intellectual honesty, they would see that there is an incredible degree overlap between moralizing social conservatives and many other groups. Where do people like Lieberman, Hillary Clinton, Tipper Gore and other leftists with moralizing bents fit into his little worldview? Are their efforts to legislate morality less severe because they are not religious, mostly observant Christians?

I think what really gets under Andy's skin is the knowledge that there are a lot of conservative Christians, mainly Protestants, that don't want force their religion on others because their religion cannot be forced on unbelievers. Christianity is unique in that its scripture teachs that unbelievers cannot be saved through coercion. By not trying to force him to change and believe, we are telling him that not only is he different from us, but that we cannot save him. It's easy to play victim when one is faced with a Muslim who gives a homosexual two choices: become a good, heterosexual Muslim or have a brick wall collapsed on you. It's impossible to play victim when a Christian just sighs and dolefully says, "if you truly believed in God, you would repent and live."

We "religious extremists" account for only approximately 11% of the population. We are not a force to be reckoned with in politics. If the religious right seems so powerful, it is only because it has many social conservative allies who, though not religious, have a cultural attachment to a vaguely Christian spirituality. Even if we wanted a theocracy, there are simply not enough of us to make it happen, and I can assure you, Andy, that a Christian theocracy would be a lot kinder and more liberal than the fascist, paternalistic state that we are stuck with thanks to "progressive secularists" who are unabashed at limiting freedom in the name of the Great Cause Du Jour^tm.

I've been doing a little code monkey thinking about the SWIFT records scandal involving the New York Times and it's kinda sad how offbase many conservative commentators really are about this program. Vox got it right in his reluctant defense of the New York Times. This program couldn't be trusted to really do a lot of good. Now, I don't know how many economic transactions go through it on a daily basis, but from the sounds of it, a minimum of tens of millions sounds like a good start.

Problem number one: tens of millions of real-time records flying in and out is hard to process. Very hard to process. That's assuming that the number isn't closer to a billion transactions, a number that is not entirely unlikely. With that much data, it would take forever for a program to process all of it, and the records would just keep coming in.

Problem number two: patterns take time. The system would have to let the records pile up in order to have enough data to start coming even remotely close to seeing behavior patterns except in extremely suspicious cases. Unfortunately, terrorists are not likely to use a Visa or MasterCard (or write a check) for a nuclear bomb, so all bets are off on that being a regular occurrence.

Finally, consider this one little logistical problem. Datamining is useless without metadata. If you don't know what metadata is, then stop and look it up (this might force someone to learn something about computers). What is "Joe's Authentic Soviet Surplus?" Is it a gun dealer, a military surplus store, etc? As far as the computer is concerned, who knows. A human eye might see Mohammed Bin Terrorist from Saudi Arabia using a check or credit card there to the tune of $2,000 and get a gut feeling, but computers don't have gut feelings. You cannot tell a computer to "just know" that that store might sell damaged AK-47s that can be repaired discretely if he takes them to Abdul Al Metalworker. How do you provide the complex meaning that a human might find through intuition? If you can answer that, you better patent it because you'd be the first person to answer a major stumbling block to complex datamining.

The latest, highly ineffective way to think of the children. Yet another worthless service brought to you by attention span-challenged politicians who avoid real issues:

AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, EarthLink and United Online have joined with the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to create what they call a "Technology Coalition" to look for new ways to safeguard children.

Their first initiative is a plan to create a database of the images of child abuse they find, and process each to create a "digital fingerprint".

They will then look at e-mail attachments and images traded over peer-to-peer networks, swapped on messaging services, or posted on websites to try to spot illegal images.

I am going to show you a few pictures. Pretend that what you see is child pornography, not a picture of fireworks that I took from the Barking Moonbat Early Warning System to demonstrate the problems with this program. There are five of them. The first one is a JPEG, the second is a GIF version of the JPEG and the third through fifth versions of the photograph are PNG versions.

When they talk about creating a digital fingerprint, they mean that they are going to create what is known as a "hash" of the file. Hashing algorithms are complicated things. Theoretically, a properly designed hashing algorithm should be able to create a unique fingerprint for a file. SHA1 and MD5 are the most common ones used. Unfortunately, in files as large as a modestly sized photograph, there is more than enough variation to cause a hashing algorithm to create unique hashes for seemingly minor variations in the file. I created a PHP script that can be run here which shows the SHA1 hash or "digital fingerprint" for each file linked above. For those too lazy to click the link, here are the hashes in order:

1. 003bfe829ec80d74d9ea4e4729b77c0661d1ff64
2. 8b21d8f83c70d164d7d973d0b15350af03fa7b12
3. a1ffb4b1114aba4a2824505adfca310126ab15d6
4. 81be5fcd3975a2a9f6a84915a4900869cd70a154
5. 496ea61dc85ac3d0bb7ba274b12e6babf8c08f54

As you can see, there are a number of amazingly simple things that a sex offender could do to bypass these scans. They can change the file format, they can alter the image size, even applying a minor filter such as one that would darken the image a little would be enough to change the hash value for the image being traded. To catch many of these people, the system would either have to be breath-takingly intelligent at analyzing images and hash values or contain the hash value for every possible variation of the image. The only people who would be easily caught would be the ones who trade unaltered images, and that would be increasingly unlikely now that such scanning is being proposed.

Of course, there are other issues at play here. This doesn't even remotely consider the possibility of people using encryption, steganography, even just zipping up the images before sending them. All of these would serve to block the scanning process.

What worries me is the very real possibility that more things like this will be only the beginning. It will ultimately serve to make people accept some degree of being monitored at all times as par for the course. In that sense, it is part of the data retention regime that I have written about in the past. It's the missing real-time analysis component that complements the data retention policies and proposed laws. Don't be deceived by the fact that this is a private initiative. It is only being done because they want to preempt legislation.

Reason does a good job of tearing apart the latest anti-sex offender crusade. Basically, a lot of local governments are pushing for zoning restrictions that would prevent registered sex offenders (including ones who are not bonafide pedophiles) from living anywhere near a park, school, daycare center or a bus stop. If that sounds reasonable to you, then consider three little facts. Number one, the perp has clearly done his or her time. Number two, this includes forcing them to sell off their own homes if their area is redistricted. And finally, there are many cities and towns where this would amount to a "git out of town" order.

I am sick to death of the passive aggressive, feminized asses who cannot bring themselves to execute child molesters and be done with it. Oh, we'll be really merciful by letting them off, making them such bitter outcasts that they cannot function and condemning them for life. But damned if we'll actually execute them for what they did. That, not a long list of passive aggressive crap aimed at making them want to kill themselves or lose all hope for the future, is just inhumane.

See, I have a very simple three stage proposal:

• If the perp is under 18, and the "child" is within three years of his or her age, no charges.
• If the perp is under 18, and it's not particularly severe, five years in prison.
• If the perp is 18 or older, and it's serious (not just basic sexual assault), execution on the first offense.

Look, I don't have any use for child molesters, but they're people. You've got two choices. If you believe the crime is so severe that it warrants a lifetime of stigma and ruin, then execute them. If you don't, then leave them the hell alone. Whatever they did, does not justify you doing evil by them. Same goes for any other type of violent or semi-violent offender.

It's time for Christians to wake up and smell the coffee on this one. Many classes of sex offenders are shunned by the church and society in general. What we have allowed to happen is the creation of a class of sick person that is even more at risk of the devil's lies. It is one thing for us to justly condemn their actions, but we must not lose sight of the fact that sex offenders of all types can change. There is a degree of heresy that is rampant among many churches today that sides with modern psychology over scripture on this point. To that, all I can say is this: the wisdom of God is the foolishness of men. Now, let me ask one little question to the skeptical believers, "do you question whether Christ's sacrifice is sufficient for all sins except for blasphemy of the Holy Spirit?"

Sympathy, mercy, yada yada. These are the things that we are supposed to feel for the poor of the world even if they exercise their right to vote by voting for someone who is completely inimical to their interests. Take the current case of the presidential election in Mexico for example. The very fact that AMLO is polling high on anything other than a few left-wing blogs and forums in first world countries should indicate something rather screwed up about the voting habits of the poor and working class. It happens here too. They often, all too often, vote for the very people whose policies helped tear down the economy in the first place.

Mexico has foreign investment problems that stem from its constitution and legal system and major problems with the government being fair, liberal and consistent. These are the cornerstones of a government that fuels economic growth. No foreign capital, your economy is limited to what it can do with its own resources. In the case of Mexico that would be a problem. No rule of law worth mentioning? The government serves the rich, to the exclusion of everyone else. The socialists and populists make it out to be a middle class barrier to the "common man," but only an idiot would actually think that. Without good law, consistently applying to all classes of society, there is no hope of creating order and peace.

This is why the right to vote was always extended to property owners, not every Tom, Dick and Harry. The poor and working class all too often vote for any despot or demagogue who offers them some free bread and circus. That's why every totalitarian movement from the Fascists and Nazis to the Communist movement has supported extending the right to vote so broadly. They can rely on short-sighted poor people to vote for them. They don't support the universal franchise to genuinely make society freer, just to make it easier for them to exploit the less fortunate. In the end, it's always the less fortunate who bear the deepest wounds for their electoral mistakes. Mexico will be no different if it supports AMLO.