January 2007 Archives

Some miscellaneous geek stuff. I have updated my VMWare virtual machine of HaikuOS to the latest build from Sikosis as of January 30, 2007. Not much difference, just easier for people to use if they don't want to tinker with VMWare. Download it here. The screenshot you see there is me playing around with ping in HaikuOS. I'm pinging the loopback IP address just to see how well something that basic works now. So far, so good for the guys who work ceaselessly to bring us the resurrection of BeOS. With any luck, the networking system will be usable for general purposes within a few more months. Why does this matter? If you don't want to buy a Mac, HaikuOS is going to end up being the most practical way for you to run an open source-based operating system. It's already got the makings of being better than desktop Linux, and it has nowhere near as much popular support since most of us BeOS fanboys had to go to different platforms when Be folded and sold its assets to Palm (who idiotically abandoned most of them).

Also, my PHP script for exporting WordPress posts to the Movable Type export format has been updated. Think of this as version 1.0.1. It doesn't seem to have any problems with WordPress 2.0.X, but I haven't tried WordPress 2.1 yet. I'll get around to that in a little while.

:-D

Be careful about rape sob stories, there can often be more than meets the eye:

TAMPA - A 21-year-old Florida woman who sought help from police after reporting that she had been raped instead was arrested and spent two days in jail for failing to pay a three-year-old restitution order.

And what was the crime that she had to pay restitution for? Sounds like a violent felony to me:

The arrest warrant was based on an unpaid sum from a 2003 auto theft and burglary case, which the woman reportedly thought had been resolved.

The police arrested this rape victim because apparently she was involved in victimizing someone else and failed to pay her due to the victim. The fact that she was raped does not negate the fact that if she is indeed guilty of said felony, she has done her part to actively contribute to the "culture of victimization." Then again, we'll probably never know because the media refuses to identify rape victims sometimes, lest they be subjected to "stigma." In cases like this, that doesn't sound like it'd be entirely undeserved.

My question is this. If you have something as heavy as a court-ordered restitution for a felony like auto theft and burglary, how do you "not know" when you've finished making good on it. What kind of idiot doesn't track that sort of thing, considering how much of their life, liberty and property is at stake for failing to obey the guidelines of the sentence?

I thought I would take the time to share some of the more amusing Google searches that got people to my blog.

• looking for a poor good looking women
• pissing in the country
• girls trap and raped
• monkey raping girl
• stop paying social security
• rape of monkey
• extreme whipping women severes
• lion and tiger have sex
• hot sexy websites of bengladesh

I used to get some bad ones, especially on a post that I had where I talked about how wrong it is the way younger girls are often allowed to dress. Use your imagination on that one because it got taken down when I "reset" my blog. Knowing the way the Internet works, you shouldn't have to try too hard for that...

***Update 2-5-2007***

• fine monkey pussy

Islam, with all of its laws, rules and regulations, does seem to work wonders on making its menfolk behave in upstanding ways toward women, doesn't it?

According to a new study from the Crime Prevention Council, Brå, it is four times more likely that a known rapist is born abroad, compared to persons born in Sweden. Resident aliens from Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia dominate the group of rape suspects. According to these statistics, almost half of all perpetrators are immigrants. In Norway and Denmark, we know that non-Western immigrants, which frequently means Muslims, are grossly overrepresented on rape statistics. In Oslo, Norway, immigrants were involved in two out of three rape charges in 2001. The numbers in Denmark were the same, and even higher in the city of Copenhagen with three out of four rape charges. Sweden has a larger immigrant, including Muslim, population than any other country in northern Europe. The numbers there are likely to be at least as bad as with its Scandinavian neighbors. The actual number is thus probably even higher than what the authorities are reporting now, as it doesn't include second generation immigrants. Lawyer Ann Christine Hjelm, who has investigated violent crimes in Svea high court, found that 85 per cent of the convicted rapists were born on foreign soil or by foreign parents.

I can just hear it now! "Rape is unIslamic!" Well, then why aren't the Allah-fearing traditionalists that Dinesh D'Souza thinks we need on our side coming out and taking matters into their own hands if necessary to stop these men? Where are the mujahadeen who risk life and limb to slay those who profane Islam's name by viciously attacking infidel women? Where are the dashing modern Saladins who ride into the rescue, sword in hand, to bring the supposed peace and justice of Sharia to areas where lawless men rape and murder with abandon? I can speak for most Jews and Christians when I say that if the roles were reversed, we would put the fear of Yaweh into the heart of a "coreligionist" who we knew was doing such things while the state refused to act. Right or wrong, we'd do it to protect the non-believer women and defend our god's honor.

There is only one solution that I can think of here, and that is for private citizens to act according to their religion's laws. Jews and Christians in Europe ought to fall back on the Mosaic Law for handling rapists where the state won't deal with it. I know this may seem like a departure from an old stance of mine, but it isn't. I never said that religious law cannot be enforced when the state refuses to act. I said that you cannot enforce it when the state is capable and willing to act. If the police won't even investigate a rape claim, let alone bring it to court and lock up the perpetrator, I see no evil in private citizens punishing rapists according to the Mosaic Law or Sharia. This is the last resort, the last civilized response. The amount of crime and violence that will be caused by people reacting to the lawlessness and the pervasive fear of knowing that every woman around them could be brutally raped without any state retaliation would make the occassional use of religious law to stop lawlessness seem idyllic by comparison.

I for one will not hold out for such an uprising from the Islamic communities because of attitudes like this:

"A man can marry a girl younger than nine years of age, even if the girl is still a baby being breastfed. A man, however is prohibited from having intercourse with a girl younger than nine, other sexual acts such as foreplay, rubbing, kissing and sodomy is allowed. A man having intercourse with a girl younger than nine years of age has not committed a crime, but only an infraction, if the girl is not permanently damaged. If the girl, however, is permanently damaged, the man must provide for her all her life. But this girl will not count as one of the man's four permanent wives. He also is not permitted to marry the girl's sister."

Who wrote this, after having sexually abused a girl who was 4-5 years old at the time? None other than Ayatollah al-Khomeini, the original Grand Ayatollah and founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran. A man of great authority and influence as a spiritual leader. Chew on that one for a moment, and think that if a man who could lead such a large uprising, while openly making statements like that, there must be popular acceptance of his ideas.

The irony is that for all of their bluster about how Sharia makes Muslims righteous before God, it has a funny habit of being permissive about what everyone knows in their heart is part of the spirit of the moral requirements of God. There is no holiness in a religion whose law can condemn a man for having consensual sex with a grown woman, but whose law can be convincingly construed to permit all sorts of sexual deviancy with small children. This is not an academic point, like how some people talk about "tolerance" in Judaism and Christianity, but a fundamental point. This is why I say that Islam is illegitimate among the abrahamic faiths. Its laws were clearly made by man to justify certain behaviors, including its founder's fondness for very young, pre-pubescent girls.

If you want to make it sound like a dire problem, you'll have to try harder than this:

Staton cited statistics on dozens of teens who have been molested - or murdered, in some instances - by people they met through MySpace.com, according to law enforcement officials.

Dozens, eh? Let's up that to 100 teens instead of a few dozen, and let's say that there are only 2.5M MySpace users (don't laugh, I'm be very generous to law enforcement and the politician who wants this bill). That means only 0.004% of MySpace users have been subjected to sexual abuse as a direct result of their meeting a predator on MySpace and going to meet them in person.

Sounds pretty... tame... considering how large the number of users is.

There will always be idiots in the herd. These are, for example, the teenage girls who will always insist that they are smart and couldn't possibly be making a mistake by hooking up with an older man who has a singular obsession with teenage girls.

Dozens? Heh, I bet more kids are molested everyday at school in an area like Fairfax at school by their teachers than the ones who got hurt by their mistakes on MySpace...

Staton said the bill does not tell the companies exactly how to ensure that minors don’t log on without parental permission. The companies can figure that out on their own, he said.

“They can find a way to do this,” Staton said. “That’s my challenge to them.”

And I'll be blunt. People like this are the reason I believe in ending universal suffrage and ability to run for office. He doesn't even have a reason to believe that this is even technically possible for them to accomplish without shutting down their service, but hey, that's their problem, right? What's next? Cars that won't turn on if a minor without a learner's permit or a driver's license gets in behind the wheel?

Malicious prosecution? Perish the thought...

Ballistics reports, used in the trial of Ignacio "Nacho" Ramos, one of two Border Patrol agents convicted of shooting fleeing drug dealer Osbaldo Aldrete-Davila, do not support the prosecution's claim the bullet was fired from Ramos' gun, according to documents provided to WND from Andy Ramirez, chairman of the Friends of the Border Patrol.

Despite the conclusion of a laboratory criminalist that he could not conclusively link the bullet removed from Aldrete-Davila with Ramos' service weapon, a Department of Homeland Security agent swore, in an affidavit of complaint filed against Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean, that Aldrete-Davila was hit by a round fired by Ramos.

"Johnny Sutton and his assistants are guilty of malicious prosecution," Ramirez charged to WND. "The prosecutors lied to the jury and he twisted evidence to make it fit his case. And when he couldn't twist the evidence, the government demanded that the court seal evidence which would have been exculpatory to the defense."

Nearly two years after the conclusion of the trial, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas has yet to release a transcript of the trial.

WND asked Ramirez if he was aware of the seriousness of his charges.

"I am very aware and I am accusing Mr. Sutton of a felony," Ramirez told WND, "but I am basing my conclusion on the evidence I have examined in this case and the refusal by the government to provide evidence to substantiate its claim to the Congress and the American people."

And you thought it was just something that happened to poor blacks and rich Duke students. Malicious prosecution is a lot more common than we would like to think it is because it is the final stage of truly pernicious behavior on the part of our government. Prosecutors enjoy a large degree of discression in the sorts of cases that they take on, and can have a singificant degree of power over whether or not a case is brought forward or not. They can even take actions such as dropping charges that they don't think are suitable to the case, without even having to run through a maze of bureaucracy to justify their actions. If a prosecutor looks at the evidence and says, "what else could he have done," they can conclude that the situation was so extraordinary as no decent, law-abiding citizen could act otherwise and thus show mercy to the defendant. In cases like this, however, they get so caught up in getting convictions that it never even occurs to them that they are behaving in a way that is as evil and society-harming as any criminal could behave.

Prosecutors who willfully mislead and deceive juries, through such means as withholding evidence that would disprove their case, deserve no mercy. That is not human error or ambition that got a little bit out of control. It is a gross injustice and personality flaw that must be bitterly punished by the government. It would not be unjust to sentence them to serve the exact sentence they would have gotten for the innocent party. Whether that is a day in prison or the death penalty is irrelevant. The government should regard this sort of corruption as tantamount to treason because of how much it undermines the moral authority of the criminal justice system before the public.

I do not consider myself to be a "law and order" type of person for the same reason that Thomas Jefferson did not consider himself to be a law and order type of person. The law itself is amoral. It has no inherent knowledge of goodness, virtue, evil or depravity. "The law is the law" is in fact not a moral statement, but a statement in favor of amorality. It is the suspension of rational thought that says, "what is the good?" It is unconcerned with justice and social stability and harmony. You can't hide that behind the "rule of law" because the rule of law implies "the rule of good law." Society would be better off without the rule of law altogether, than being ruled by law which is systematically unconcerned with truth, justice, wisdom and mercy. At least then, that which is evil, corrupt and profane would not be institutionalized.

Conservatives and others who tend to support the War on Drugs love to point to Alcohol Prohibition (1920-1933) as an example of prohibition of intoxicating substances working well for America. Quotes like "Prohibition resulted in startling reductions in alcohol consumption (over 50 percent), cirrhosis of the liver (63 percent), admissions to mental health clinics for alcohol psychosis (60 percent), and arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct (50 percent)." -- p.311 are all too common, though generally not true to history. Click on the graph to the left to take a look at what Cato's researchers have brought to light about the actual consumption rates during prohibition. You will notice something very interesting. Prohibition only worked for a very limited period of its ignoble history, and there is a reason for that.

The reason that Prohibition worked in the beginning is that there was no major black market compared to what would come in a few years. The only targets for "alcohol warriors" were legal businesses that made and sold alcohol. These targets were weak and easy because they were law-abiding men and women who had no desire to lose their lives, liberty, property or families to make a few bucks selling booze. Shutting them down, and thus killing the existing distribution system was an open and shut case. It was a legal massacre of a previously legal market.

And of course, nature abhors a vacuum and the black market expanded very, very rapidly to accommodate the booze needs of the public. By virtue of being an illicit substance that was in popular demand, there was inherently much profit to be had, and the criminals in the trade showed a remarkable habit for responding as violently toward the system as the system did to them. Fancy that.

So, there are two lessons to learn from this:

1) The size of the black market will tend to vary indirectly with the ability of the "white market" to operate.

2) The only way to control drug or alcohol use is to reduce the demand, not the supply. The only effective, moral and constitutional way to do this is moral persuasion and religion. $400M a year of private money spent on printing religious tracts and Bibles for drug and alcohol addicts would do more than our current $40B a year of tax dollars to reduce drug consumption in America.

Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.

John Hawkins makes a weak, emotional argument for continuing the War on Drugs. It is weak for a few reasons. First, it gets its facts wrong. Every stat that drug warriors cite from alcohol prohibition is, in essence, a lie. As the Cato Institute shows, murder rates went up greatly during prohibition and the argument that alcohol consumption went meaningfully down is an urban legend if the whole period, rather than the initial years, is looked at.

As I have observed before, there is no public safety argument with drug legalization. Intoxicated driving is already a separate issue that must be dealt with, regardless of how and why the driver is impaired. The crime associated with drug distribution would naturally go away as did the crime associated with alcohol distribution once prohibition was repealed. In addition, cheaper, legal drugs would be easier for addicts to afford, which would make it easier for them to support their habit. This is always the rut that drug warriors get into. They have never explained how it is that if drug legalization cuts the cost of drugs significantly, why it would actually increase drug-related crime. Perhaps it is because they have never been around functional drug users, and cannot conceive of people who can get high at night and go into work the next day.

National security concerns with drug crime, however, are real. If you drive out all of the casual drug dealers, you will leave only the hardened ones. The profit margins will be so ridiculously high that terrorist groups can and will exploit them to fund their operations. The opium trade in Afghanistan is the best known example of the direct involvement between terrorists and drug dealing. Will it finally take a nuclear bomb going off in America to make drug warriors realize that drug prohibition empowers terrorists and organized criminals? Not likely, since they won't admit that there are down sides to their efforts already.

But, some people may say, "so what if drug usage does explode? They're not hurting anyone but themselves." That might be true in a purely capitalistic society, but in the sort of welfare state that we have in this country, the rest of us would end up paying a significant share of the bills of people who don't hold jobs or end up strung out in the hospital without jobs -- and that's even if you forget about the thugs who'd end up robbing our houses to get things to pawn to buy more drugs. Even setting that aside, we make laws that prevent people from harming themselves all the time in our society. In many states there are helmet laws, laws that require us to wear seatbelts, laws against prostitution, and it's even illegal to commit suicide. So banning harmful drugs is just par for the course.

It is ironic that a conservative would cite mandatory seatbelt and helmet laws, laws which treat adults like children, as support of positive evidence for supporting any other policy. One might begin to think that John actually has a distinctly left-wing streak in him. Another area where this particularly odious serious of arguments falls down is that if you want to get rid of the welfare state, which is what any real conservative or libertarian would want (if you don't, your sympathies lay with Socialism lite), then this theoretical stress on the welfare state would be a boon! Nothing would make the system collapse under its own weight than having all of those drug users on there. The only catch is, John hasn't actually explained why it is that Wall Street businessmen can use cocaine recreationally, but mere common folk cannot without becoming welfare parasites.

And let's not even get into the costs that the public has to pay in terms of militarized police forces, bad raids at 2AM and the asset forfeiture laws that have all but annihilated private property rights.

Ironically, the most odious limitations on sexual and marital autonomy come from one of the most liberal states in our country, Washington. The restrictions would do serious damage to the career of any healthcare worker who had a sexual or romantic relationship with a current client or a former client who was a client less than two years prior. In some cases, the restrictions remain in effect if there could be any way that the health care worker would be able to influence medical treatments of the individual, and that even goes to such relationships as the doctor or technician dating a family member of the patient!

It is not even based on legitimate moral disagreements, such as the status of homosexuality in American society. Rather it is based on flimsy sociological arguments about power disparities. The only case where that might apply in a serious way would be in psychological or psychiatric cases for the obvious reason that the patient is there due to some sort of mental condition. Even then, it often not necessarily the case. Should someone receiving treatment for anxiety be regarded as being as "vulnerable" as someone who is suicidally depressed or schizophrenic? Of course not!

The overreach into sexual and marital issues is probably the last frontier of paternalism and authoritarian government. Orwell wrote extensively about it in 1984, and unfortunately, there are a number of people from different political persuasions who believe that the state has an inherent right to intrude in these areas between consenting, normal, non-related adults. Scalia was unnerved to think that the state might not be able to regulate the sexual practices of consenting adults in private, and the legislators in Washington State clearly feel they have the right to make similar judgement calls. Oh how they'd probably howl about how it's different. Consenting gay sodomy and consenting sodomy between reasonably mentally-sound patient and doctor/technician are approximately the same thing.

Now, there are a few factors that make me call shenanigans on the power disparity arguments. First, patients are more likely to know what is in their interests better than a panel of government regulators, and are more likely to act on them for obvious reasons. Second, a health care worker who is sexually or romantically engaged with a patient who is reasonably mentally sound is more likely to have a vested interest in seeing to that person's needs. Even a doctor who is madly in love with his or her patient's sibling is far more likely to worker harder to provide good care, not less likely to do so. Why? It hits closer to home. Finally, the only meaningful area of medicine where a client could be easily controlled, coerced and victimized would be psychiatric. In other cases, it would be very easy to bring medical malpractice charges and ethics complaints if services are withheld, unnecessarily performed or botched.

Stuff like this makes it painfully obvious that local government bureaucrats all too often have the same child-like inability to accept responsibility for anything they do that they had when they were five years old.

When 60-year-old Cynthia Roberson got a citation to for having snow on her sidewalk, she could not believe it.

And it's not because the disabled woman can't physically move the frozen-over mess, but because she already paid someone to shovel her walkways.

"It was clean. It was done correctly," Roberson said.

However, she said overnight Denver city plows scooped the snow back and buried her sidewalks. Now, the city has given her 24 hours to remove the snow or else she faces a fine of $150 for the first offense, $500 for the next one.

One heck of a scenario right there. The woman complies with the law, the government comes along and totally, unapologetically wrecks her efforts that put her in compliance with the law, then warns her to get back to work and get back in compliance. If that does not put the lie to the "public servant" title and reveal the "public master" mentality, then I don't know what would in a case like this. They did offer to throw her a bone by giving her more time to be in compliance again and to call the city government for help from a volunteer snow plowing team.

The only way to fix this is to put a sort of failsafe into the state legal system. I think we need a "failure to do right" statute that shifts the entire burden onto the individual government employees who created the situation, and that makes it illegal to enforce any laws against the private citizen that are violated due to the employees' screw up.

The Shiites are not going to be taking any unnecessary risks with the stakes being so high:

Baghdad/London: Palestinians living in Iraq have been warned that they will be killed by Shiite militias unless they leave the country immediately.

Iraqi police say the immigrants, who are mostly Sunnis, are the target of a backlash by hardline Shiites, including members of the Mehdi Army led by the cleric Moqtada Al Sadr.

More than 600 Palestinians are believed to have died at the hands of Shiite militias since the war began in 2003, including at least 300 from the Baladiat area of Baghdad. Many were tortured with electric drills before they died.

Now Shiite militias are stepping up their campaign to drive out Iraq's 20,000 remaining Palestinians -half the estimated 40,000 living in the country at the start of the war, all of whom were welcomed by Saddam Hussain and provided with housing, money and free education.

Who wants to bet that a number of these are beneficiaries of Saddam's suicide bomber payment program? It is a well-established fact that for years, Saddam Hussein bankrolled a lot of the terrorism against Israel, and made suicide bombing a very lucrative way to make money for families who didn't particularly value the lives of their loved ones. While there is no doubt internecine hatred between Sunnis and Shiites that figures heavily into this, a lot of Palestinians have not exactly shown a lot of good sense in who to support and when to show it. The Palestinians are commemmorating Saddam Hussein at a time when a lot of Iraqis are extremely happy to see the man dead. The Shiite hardliners clearly have no love for them as a group because of their close relationship with the nominally Sunni Hussein.

Collective responsibility is never fun, but I am not going to extend a whole lot of sympathy off the bat to any of these Palestinians. The Palestinians have experienced too many problems with other countries in the region to give them the benefit of the doubt. I would be very surprised if the majority of these people were honest, decent refugees rather than people who profited handsomely (by Middle Eastern economic standards) from Saddam's terrorism funding activities.

Laugh it up, chuckles:

Illustration by Bob Aul With a horrified suspect watching, Huntington Beach police planted evidence-a loaded revolver-in the man's car during a DUI accident investigation in January, the Weekly has learned.

The controversial revelation is not now in dispute although cops, prosecutors and city bureaucrats attempted to keep the incident a secret by sealing records and stalling discovery of related documents.

Despite those efforts, the gun incident became an issue during an obscure misdemeanor trial last week at Orange County's West Court in Westminster. Police officers were forced to admit under oath that a snub-nosed handgun had been tossed like a Frisbee about four feet into the trunk of a Hyundai belonging to Tom Cox, the suspect. The loaded gun bounced twice and slammed up against the driver's side of the car's trunk. No bullets were discharged.

Not only did they toss the gun in there, but they laughed their ass off as the guy they had in custody got a horrified look on his face. What would you expect from a man who watched half a dozen cops deal nonchalantly with a loaded weapon being dropped into his vehicle to set him up? Nothing that I have seen lately comes even close to such a brazen act of corruption and lack of professionalism in local law enforcement!

The most telling part, though, is that the prosecutor and the judge both jumped in and tried to protect the police. Certainly puts the lie to the civics class claims that we have separate, independent branches of government, and instead adds weight to the argument that when the chips are down, the state is the state regardless of which part you're talking about. The system looks out for its own, regardless of which part of the clique they're in. If the system were truly concerned with enforcing the law and seeking justice, the prosecutor would have brought charges against the police involved in this.

And they wonder why more and more Americans just don't trust the system to work anymore. Well, that's what happens when you have the prosecutors and judges looking out for police who clearly are breaking the law and any sensible standard of ethical and professional conduct.

After the trial, the public defender shook her head in frustration. "How would you feel if you watched police officers throw a loaded gun in your car, laugh at you and then yell in your face?" said Bartholomew. "You'd be scared out of your mind."

And you would learn to distrust and possibly even hate them. You would hate the feeling of knowing that they can mock you, trump up charges, even beat you, and if you fight back they can shoot you in the head and be untouchable in front of pretty much any prosecutor. Sounds like a perfect way for police and the judiciary to keep good relations with the public.

Heidi and I seem to disagree here:

I find that quite interesting. On several levels. Firstly, the law of the land does not, in my humble opinion, supercede the moral and even more importantly spiritual law of right and wrong. To which "law" is MikeT referring, I ask?

Biblical law calls for the death penalty for those who indulge in the abuse of the innocent in the area of sexual immorality. Incest, homosexuality and bestiality being among those behaviors deserving of death. As a side note, that same passage, Leviticus 20, also applies to those who engage in "spiritism" and would call themselves "mediums".

If the national law allows a pedophile to get away with writing an essay is he or she any less deserving of death? I suppose that all depends on whether or not one would choose to acknowledge the relevance of the Torah and the Tanakh, eh?

I stand by my statement. If I am aware that a person has abused my child, I will defend my child to the full extent of my ability to do so. There's no free pass.

......

And to take a life in the spur of the moment as being somehow forgiveable while the pre-meditated and methodical variety being less acceptable? How so? I believe those who prey on the weak forfeit their right to basic human dignity. They show they are incapable of allowing their victims that right.

This is what I said that brough this on:

I don't think I could kill someone like that if I didn't catch them in the act. It's one thing in the spur of the moment, but if you really sit down and think about it, you're no better than they are. If the law has failed you, then you have to accept that as God's will and move on.

I fail to see what the Torah and Tanakh have to do with our secular legal system. If you "give the death penalty" to someone for molesting your small child, and by that I mean commit pre-meditated murder, you are going to be put to death under both God's law and American law. It's that simple. Private citizens are simply not allowed to regard the legal system as entirely optional. A jury might find you not guilty through nullification or insanity, and a priest or God might find your actions in line with scripture on some level, but simply eschewing the legal process which provides remedies for such criminal offenses is not an option.

My point is very simple. Two wrongs don't make a right. If Chester the Molester gets your son, he will be held responsible for that, and if you murder him several days after the fact, you too are guilty of a sin--murder. The people of God are not supposed to indulge in situational, flimsy morality such as saying, "the Law says he should die, so I think I'll put a 9mm bullet through his head." This becomes extremely problematic when talking about gentile nations because there is a consensus in the New Testament that gentiles are not bound to the Mosaic Law, but rather to avoid basic immorality such as sexual immorality.

I do not debate your right to use force, including deadly force, to stop someone in the act. I do not debate your right to use force to haul them before the authorities to stand trial. However, to seek them out and simply shoot them dead fails the self-defense or "other-defense" exceptions to murder. I could not do this to someone who would do that to my kids, when I have them, because how could I ever say to them that murder is wrong if I believe myself, a mere man, to be exempt?

Part of the difference here is that I am a very liberal Calvinist. My thinking on a lot of this is influenced by the concept of total depravity, which basically states that apart from God's grace, there is no righteousness. Even the good we do is purely from God, as it is only possible through God's grace. Naturally, I fully embrace that while I may like to kill someone who molested my kid well after the fact, I am on my own no better than him because I am a sinner. By sheer fact of being a sinner, I deserve death no less than the person who victimized my child. Part of our submission to God is trying to realize that we unworthy recipients of mercy, and that we deserve God's wrath no less than those who hurt us and our own.

Someone finally gets around to studying whether or not bad parenting tends to create mean girls and finds out that lo and behold, it does!

"The initial causes of violence are found in the early learning experiences in the family, which includes weak family bonding, and ineffective monitoring and supervision," its report said. "The exposure to and reinforcement for violence in the home, including physical abuse, has a tremendous impact on the potential for later adolescent female violence."

So basically what they are saying is that young women, like young men, tend to become nasty, violent hooligans when their parents won't lay down the law with them from an early age. This should only come as a surprise to you if you are a hippie idealist who believes that children are born basically good, wholesome and innocent, the way they tend to naturally treat one another without parental supervision notwithstanding, naturally.

In Jones' view, it is the adults responsible for guiding girls to adulthood who are at least as much to blame as the girls themselves.

"Kids will be kids, but adults have to be adults," Jones wrote in his report. "Sadly, in this saga, I was struck by the reticence of many adults to accept the role of being the grown-up.'"

The very language that many adults use today reveals a distinctly juvenile attitude toward a lot of important things like family life. There are too many people who put their own "quality of life" before their significant other or their children. With numbers like these on how few women would stay in a relationship for their kids' sake, it's not hard to wonder why Jones found it hard for people to accept responsibility for their kids. These aren't even stats for abusive relationships either.

It's not like the government makes it any easier on parents, though. With legislative geniuses like this who by a pitiful application of the transitive property of equality equates spanking children with animal abuse, it's no small wonder why some parents are recalcitrant to be tougher with their kids:

But Lieber is optimistic that lawmakers will find her proposal hard to resist. For the record, she does not have children and says she was not slapped as a child. But she does have a cat named Snoop, which her veterinarian told her never to hit.

``And if you never hit a cat,'' Lieber said, ``you should never hit a kid.''

Speaking as someone who grew up around a lot of cats, loves cats and knows cats... this is a bunch of crap. Spanking never hurt a cat, nor did it ever hurt a child. Cats, like children, need to be disciplined and believe it or not, but cats that are routinely disciplined and held in check are well-behaved animals just as consistently disciplined kids tend to behave well.

This is the power of principle:

Clarence Thomas has borne some of the most vitriolic personal attacks in Supreme Court history. But the persistent stereotypes about his views on the law and subordinate role on the court are equally offensive - and demonstrably false. An extensive documentary record shows that Justice Thomas has been a significant force in shaping the direction and decisions of the court for the past 15 years.

That's not the standard storyline. Immediately upon his arrival at the court, Justice Thomas was savaged by court-watchers as Antonin Scalia's dutiful apprentice, blindly following his mentor's lead. It's a grossly inaccurate portrayal, imbued with politically incorrect innuendo, as documents and notes from Justice Thomas's very first days on the court conclusively show. Far from being a Scalia lackey, the rookie jurist made clear to the other justices that he was willing to be the solo dissenter, sending a strong signal that he would not moderate his opinions for the sake of comity. By his second week on the bench, he was staking out bold positions in the private conferences where justices vote on cases. If either justice changed his mind to side with the other that year, it was Justice Scalia joining Justice Thomas, not the other way around.

Pragmatism is often nothing more than an excuse for standing for nothing beyond what is momentarily convenient. Rather than being a foil for ideology, it is just the mere absence of any firm convictions. The power of principle coupled with a rational, observant mind can propel people quickly into influential leadership positions once they are standing in the doorways of the halls of power. It's obvious why. You either lead, which is what principle drives you to do, or you follow, which is what pragmatism forces you to do by subordinating your thoughts to the present.

And for the record, I have always had the highest respects for Clarence Thomas. He is undoubtedly the most conservative-libertarian thinker on the Supreme Court, and the one most willing to put his foot down and stand for something. I'd rather disagree with a man like that, than agree with a man who just goes with the way the wind blows today.

For once, the porn industry might have met its match in the form of a new technology:

Pornography has long helped drive the adoption of new technology, from the printing press to the videocassette. Now pornographic movie studios are staying ahead of the curve by releasing high-definition DVDs.

They have discovered that the technology is sometimes not so sexy. The high-definition format is accentuating imperfections in the actors - from a little extra cellulite on a leg to wrinkles around the eyes.

Hollywood is dealing with similar problems, but they are more pronounced for pornographers, who rely on close-ups and who, because of their quick adoption of the new format, are facing the issue more immediately than mainstream entertainment companies.

I'm not sure how much this would really be a problem for most guys who are into porn because let's face it, most men are realistic enough to accept that even the best looking women are going to have some flaws here and there. Perhaps some men would be turned off to realize that some of these women actually have small amounts of fat or dimples or whatever, but what are the odds that that would actually change anything in terms of sales? In fact, the high definition DVD formats might make this guy's prediction fairly realistic:

The technology makes the experience more intimate, he said. "People look to adult movies for personal contact, and yet they're still not getting it. HD lets them see a little bit more of the girl."

But not all of the womenfolk are so sanguine about having minor flaws in their otherwise gorgeous visages exposed to the common man:

"Men are all about outdoing each other, being up with the times, being cool, having the latest technology," she said. "They're willing to sacrifice our vanity and imperfections to beat each other" to high-definition, she said.

Sony may have ended up doing some serious damage to its Blu-ray format by excluding pornographers from its format. According to the article, there are companies that will create Blu-ray disks for pornographers, but Sony has officially come down hard (hehehe) on porngraphers who want to use their format. Given the fact that family-friendly and Sony are not usually associated with one another, and that Nintendo already claims that ground in the video game market, the decision really just didn't make much sense.

This news should make the harpies who screech about exploitation of women and "artificial beauty standards" happy. Nah...

It's no secret that Google has been working hard to build a large number of new datacenters around the country. These behemoths are filled with as many 100,000 servers each, and that represents some serious processing power. Bob Cringley sees something sinister behind this, something that could remake the Internet in a really bad way:

It is becoming very obvious what will happen over the next two to three years. More and more of us will be downloading movies and television shows over the net and with that our usage patterns will change. Instead of using 1-3 gigabytes per month, as most broadband Internet users have in recent years, we'll go to 1-3 gigabytes per DAY -- a 30X increase that will place a huge backbone burden on ISPs. Those ISPs will be faced with the option of increasing their backbone connections by 30X, which would kill all profits, OR they could accept a peering arrangement with the local Google data center.

Seeing Google as their only alternative to bankruptcy, the ISPs will all sign on, and in doing so will transfer most of their subscriber value to Google, which will act as a huge proxy server for the Internet. We won't know if we're accessing the Internet or Google and for all practical purposes it won't matter. Google will become our phone company, our cable company, our stereo system and our digital video recorder. Soon we won't be able to live without Google, which will have marginalized the ISPs and assumed most of the market capitalization of all the service providers it has undermined -- about $1 trillion in all -- which places today's $500 Google share price about eight times too low.

It's a grand plan, but can Google pull it off? Yes they can.

I see a few things that are problematic with this. First, Google may be becoming a true behemoth in some areas such as advertising, but most of the other Google services are largely useless for generating revenue. Second, each new data center that it brings online will add a large new set of bills to Google that will have to be figured in as a basic cost of doing business. Electricity, property taxes, manpower and things like that will keep adding to the cost of just doing business for Google. Third, and this probably the worst challenge that Google faces, is the remerging of the old telecoms under AT&T. If at some point AT&T and Verizon merge together, that would create a force that probably not even Google could stop.

Cringley also underestimates the telecoms when it comes to the way that they are investing their resources. While Google may be tying resources up to get more power, the telecoms and cable companies are not standing still either. They telecoms in particular are going to be pushing hard in this direction as they work to roll out IPTV services. Google stands to really get its butt kicked here by the more established players who have much to gain by continuing to reinforce their existing broadband services with more infrastructure. It is not inconceivable that within another few years of investing that 1-3GB per user, per day would be quite feasible in most mid-sized or larger areas of the United States.

There is one last thing that could end up causing serious damage to Google, and that's their nonchalant attitude toward copyrights. YouTube has caught a lot of grief from copyright holders around the world, and Google's book indexing and search project has provoked the ire of many publishers. Knowing how hefty the statutory damages for copyright infringement can, Google might end up with the legal equivalent of an armed nuclear bomb in its midst.

If raped definitions could scream, this democratic legislator would get no sleep:

A. An individual or group of individuals commits domestic terrorism if the individual or group of individuals are not affiliated with a local, state or federal law enforcement entity and associate with another individual or group of individuals as an organization, group, corporation or company for the purpose of patrolling to detect alleged illegal activity or to individually patrol for the purpose of detecting alleged illegal activity and if the individual or group of individuals is armed with a firearm or other weapon.

And you thought it was only the Republicans that wanted to declare all and sundry that they personally dislike as terrorism! To a rational person, the worst that you could call the Minutemen, who she is trying to target, would be vigilantes. That is, of course, not true as they are not taking the law into their own hands, but rather are operating within the legal framework and merely playing a large-scale neighborhood watch role. Still, apparently they are scary, evil men, unlike the roguishly handsome and dashing members of the Mara Salvatruchas aka MS-13:

"I've been monitoring the Minutemen for a year now," Sinema told vigilantewatch.org at the time, "and they're just scary."

"Race-based tactics always lead to violence," she insisted. "Remember, the Ku Klux Klan was the first-ever group to patrol the border between the U.S. and Mexico back in the '70s."

It's very telling that the first thing that comes out of her mouth on this is race. Sorta makes you wonder if she's not in fact herself a racist because she sees racism in something where race is not a factor. Mexico, like America, is not a racially homogenous country. And funny how she's eerily quiet on how Marvin Stewart, a black member of the Minutemen who spoke at Columbia University, was called things like "nigger" by a lot of the students in the audience. Maybe the racism aspect has more to do with groups like La Raza (The Race).

And in related news, a member of MS-13 was arrested while doing contract work on an Air Force base. Yep, no danger here with illegal immigration. Those Minutemen are clearly the ones we need to be worrying about!

After reading some of Ilana Mercer's latest stuff on South Africa, I found a somewhat old, but still important article from the BBC. It is the sort of thing that can make any remotely civilized human being wanted to grab those responsible for what is depicted therein and hang them from the nearest tree with their own entrails. I am not kidding when I say that I would wholeheartedly support resurrecting the Romans' favorite method of execution, crucifiction, for people like this:

It is the latest in a series of rapes of baby girls - some of them involving children less than one year-old, which has left South Africans reeling with horror.

Every day the newspapers bring awful revelations: a nine-month-old girl gang-raped by six men; an eight-month-old raped and left by the roadside.

What is most deplorable about this situation is that according to Ilana Mercer's postings, the conviction rate in South Africa is about 2.96%. To put it bluntly, black baby girls had a higher expectation of basic security under the apartheid regime by an extreme margin, than they do today.

Rape statistics from South Africa are so shocking as to be almost unbelievable - women's rights activists say one South African is raped every 26 seconds.

And by rape, they aren't talking about the sort of college community "rape" that pissed off college girls frequently report (post-drunken sex regret). No, my friends, they're talking about unadulterated, hold you down, beat the living shit out of you, ravage you while you kick, scream, cry and bleed like a f$%^ing animal caught in a bear trap type rape.

What will be interesting about the demographics of South Africa is the effect that the rape culture will have on the black population. I would hazard to guess that the bulk of the baby girls that are raped are still black, due to the easier access to black girls for many black men with AIDS who believe in that rubbish about sex with virgins curing AIDS. It is not inconceivable that within a generation, the percentage of South Africa's population that is black could plummet from the lawlessness and spread of AIDS. In fact, it probably wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that within two generations it could by default be nearing parity between whites and blacks.

Senate Bill 1 has had that odious restriction that got everyone upset about it struck down. All Republicans voted against it, according to Slashdot, and seven Democrats actually joined in as well. Apparently there were seven Democrats who actually wanted to continue pretending that their party is going to change the way that things are done in DC. That said, I am not surprised in the least that Jim Webb, Mr. "I've been a fighter for the little guy since my conception!" voted to keep the provision. No good populist can support a bill which actually allows the little guy to side with fat cats every now and then at the fat cats' urging.

So yeah, my internet access was getting schizo for a few days and I called up tech support because my router was getting crazy IP addresses. All private stuff, like 192.168.0.105. For those that don't know, 192.168.* is reserved for private networks like what you'd have behind your router. It ain't what your router is supposed to be getting from your ISP... So here's the basics of the conversation I had with the "tech support" (TS) guy.

Me: My router is getting strange IP addresses. Like 192.168 addresses.
TS: Yeah, that sounds right. That's what your computer is supposed to be getting.
Me: No, I mean my router is getting 192.168.*. That's what your network is assigning my router, not my PC
TS: Are you running Windows or Macintosh?
Me: Ummm Windows... but I want to know why my router is getting 192.168, but my PC gets 72.* something when I connect it directly.
TS: It sounds like you're getting the right IP address...
Me: Yeah, but why is my router getting assigned 192.168.*, but my PC isn't?
TS: Have you tried doing a DHCP release/renew on your PC?
Me: Nevermind... goodbye...

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) is one of those organizations that really doesn't get quite the publicity that it deserves. Radley Balko has a new Reason commentary on them that illustrates some good points about why LEAP was founded and why they serve such an important purpose in fighting for civil liberties:

Tony Ryan, one of LEAP's newest member and a well-decorated, 36-year Denver police officer recently wrote in an op-ed, "the huge lure of money is always there, either through bribes by drug dealers, or during busts where piles of money are lying around. Corruption of law enforcement was at its highest during alcohol prohibition and we see it now with drug prohibition."

Any Lexis or Google News search will confirm Ryan's warning about corruption a dozen times over. That's not an indictment of police officers. Rather, it's an indictment of policy that puts police officers in situations where temptation and corruption come begging. But it's still a difficult argument for someone without law enforcement experience to make. Coming from a retired cop - in fact from dozens of them affiliated with LEAP - it becomes impossible for drug war proponents to ignore.

LEAP's message is powerful. I've now heard or seen four of its speakers' presentations. They use tales from the front lines to illustrate their broader points on public policy. Their delivery is authentic and gently persuasive, not didactic. They come from all political stripes, from hippy-ish liberals to live-and-let-live libertarians to law-and-order conservatives, the latter having come to the realization that the drug war consists of bad laws that cause much disorder.

I grew up hearing stories that lend some personal credence to this, such as drug agents taking money off of piles of seized goods to discretely hand over to drug informants. The corruption of law enforcement by the War on Drugs is a very real phenomenon, and one that cannot be solved with naive beliefs about things like needing to have better ethical standards imposed. It never ceases to amaze me sometimes how many of the defenders of drug prohibition who aren't liberals, engage in the same sort of fuzzy-minded idealism about human nature with police and drug assets. The fact is, you can't entirely blame the police for the corruption because they are only human, and drug prohibition gives them far more opportunities to violate ethical standards than should be tolerated in a society that purports to be free.

A lot of the laws that have come out of the War on Drugs really have ultimately undermined the rule of law, which is, I think, the single biggest reason why conservatives should not support it. The social cost of the extraordinary level of discressionary power and judgement that is given to police and prosecutors has basically created a system where property and persons are no longer reasonably secure from government abuse in a constitutionalist point of view. For example, the asset forfeiture laws have been so loosened that the police can effectively wipe out a person's assets before the trial even starts, which dumps them squarely onto the lap of a public defender.

The single biggest reason that a lot of people support the War on Drugs is the perception of a risk to safety, but that can be easily refuted by this post of abe's. To a large extent, there is no security risk by fully legalizing drugs. If society has not collapsed, but continues to function smoothly while simultaneously allowing people to drink hard liquor, own firearms and have easy access to heavy vehicles, that alone demonstrates that most people are sufficiently responsible to make legalization possible. The odds are simply not in favor of the prohibitionists that a society that couldn't handle legalization of narcotics, could handle all of the aforementioned things being legal--especially at the same time.

I just love this stuff...

Hargrove said in the interview that slavery ended with the Civil War and added, "I personally think that our black citizens should get over it." He also asked how far back apologies should go and wondered, "Are we going to force the Jews to apologize for killing Christ?"

The good Baron goes on to repudiate the last part, which is one of those genuflections before the altar of grievance and political correctness that I refuse to make, personally. Look, it does no good to pretend that the Jewish leadership of the day did not have Jesus killed. This is not a historic fact that is in dispute. This does not rub off onto all Jews, making them guilty by association. It just does nothing to fight anti-semitism when you blame anyone other than the Jewish establishment of that era. I think that was what Hargrove's point was. If you keep blaming white people today for slavery 140 years ago, eventually it'll become fashionable again in polite society to blame the Jews for everything.

The point is, however, a good one. At what point do we stop tolerating people dredging up past grievances? I would say that once the living memory of them is gone would be a good starting point for that.

Black people who make an issue of things like 19^th century slavery do need to get a bloody grip and get over it. I see no eagerness on the part of such "black leaders" and their ilk to address the problems that racist blacks have created, such as the racist attacks against Korean home and business owners in the 1992 LA riots. Why should I feel apologetic about my ancestors' deeds, none of which I would personally tolerate, when black leaders don't feel apologetic about current anti-asian and anti-white racism prevalent in many black communities?

Rachel and I got engaged just before New Years. It has been a long time in coming, but it has finally happened. We're two misfits who really do seem to be made for one another!

Most of the time, it's best to just steer clear of the whole issue of the gender gap in the IT business because like the "digital divide," it is largely a politically-motivated issue with little practical effect. This, however, deserves some credit for at least being more honest and informed than the typical feminist crap about eeeevil sexist pigs who salivate at the thought of denying women, who ironically might be potential significant others, a fabulous career in the IT business. Still, it misses some important points and contradicts itself.

My observations for the reasons behind the self-taught engineer gender gap lead me to conclude that individual women are not taking advantage of the opportunities available to them to retrain themselves through self-study of programming and possibly participation in the Open Source movement. For whatever reasons - and they are probably far more complex and multivariate than I could possibly touch on here - women are not self-training themselves as software professionals at nearly the rate of men.

Faced with this unpalatable conclusion, we can choose to blame the individuals; we can choose to put our faith in long-term efforts; or we can choose to treat the symptom without necessarily fixing the root causes. By "treating the symptom", I mean we should simply attempt to help as many women as possible become paid professional members of engineering teams. I believe that the best way to accomplish this goal is for the denizens of Silicon Valley to start a small school or certification program. It would not be a degree-granting program, but something closer in spirit to one of those post-baccalaureate programs for aspiring medical students who did not choose a pre-med major.

The candidates would ideally receive a combination of classroom tuition focused on new technologies not yet taught well in universities - currently that might include Web, mobile, and IM - plus on-the-job training for which they would be paid as an intern by the hosting company. At the end of a year, the student would receive a certificate showing demonstrated competence in one of the engineering subfields, and with a modicum of job placement assistance she would be ready to take her place as a junior engineer. She would be able to rise or fall to the level of her own competence from there.

Ok, let the critiquing begin...

The author of this piece deserves credit for recognizing that the lack of self-taught female engineers is at the center of the issue, if one wants to call an issue. However, this is not an issue that can be overcome by merely tossing in some new educational formulas or pushing for more internship opportunities to be made available. The important question is why do girls really not like to do these sorts of things on their own, without the "loving support" of authority figures behind them. That is where men and women part ways on this. The men tend to naturally just go explore, whereas women will not without having help and support behind them.

As she noted elsewhere, women tend to be very credential-oriented which is a personality trait that runs counter to the do-it-yourself mindset that is behind men and women who are self-taught in engineering fields. Formal education is built around a rigid structure, and unfortunately engineering is a very fluid, dynamic sort of profession to be in. The information that you can get from a formal education or from the equivalent on your own is invaluable, but it is only the first step. Much of what I have had to routinely use on the job were skills that I had to learn on my own, without support from others or only the support that should inherently exist within the context of a team working toward a final product. No mentor, no professor, no instructor, nothing that formal or pervasive. If you aren't prepared to have to be a "lone-wolf," you are not going to make it when you have to go find answers to nebulous questions on a deadline.

The reason I choose to blame the individuals is that we are no longer living in the 1950s. Feminism has won the majority of its battles, and the only ones left are the ones that run up against human nature itself. There has never existed a society like ours that so thoroughly embraces the idea that women can enter "male professions," and that provides them with the supplemental education and assistance needed to get started. Countless books have been written on how in many, maybe most, areas of the country, boys are now being neglected by teachers who focus intensively on preparing their female students.

There are those who blame sociological factors such as the claim that men don't want intelligent, educated women. My own experiences being around large numbers of intelligent, educated men put the lie to this absurd claim, and I have yet to see any concrete proof to suggest larger trends to the contrary. Rather, I could far more easily envision other women being to blame for this, as girls are much easier targets of bullying than boys in general, and "geeky" subjects are very target-rich environments for "mean girls."

We can talk about "opportunity costs" all day, but the fact is that there is no way to determine how much an influx of new female engineers would contribute. There is no way to determine how well they will be placed, how well they will be utilized by management, how well they will grow as engineers and any number of other variables that affect the productivity of the industry. The most likely impact it would have in the short term would be to dillute the wages of all IT workers and engineers, men and women alike.

I don't know if this is a national trend, but in the DC area, it is common for women to be railroaded into management positions if they have strong technical educations. It is this sort of approach, the practice of really pushing women where their interests, talents and experiences may not yet be, that does a real disservice to women who want to be engineers. It is precisely why you don't want women to be given the special boost, if you want them to succeed. Managing engineers requires engineering experience, and if that experience is cut short by management fast-tracking, the women who are targeted will enter management with significantly less experience than their male counterparts which will, not surprisingly, make it harder for them to advance in the long run.

Personally, I don't think it would contribute anything to the profession or the women in it already, to bring more women into software engineering or any other engineering profession in order to "correct" the disparity between men and women. If anything, it'll probably just make more women miserable and irritable at work because they were pushed into a profession that is not for them.

So one in eight British men would give up their woman for a hot gadget? That's not too hard to understand when you factor in some of the "hidden costs" that come with some of the ladies these days in Britain. Can't say that I blame them for choosing a gadget that will entertain them, never nag the hell out of them, and will actually not pose a significant risk to their future. On the bright side, this will give them a chance to celebrate their newfound freedom as single women.

Man, you can practically hear the caterwauling, the wailing and gnashing of teeth, as the sisterhood laments how those eeeevil young men devalue women so much. Couldn't possibly have anything to do with the quality of the woman that many of these guys are dating, now could it?

So, you didn't think that being a practicing Mormon was enough of a reason to disqualify Mitt Romney from being the next President (I'm actually half kidding)? How about the fact that he is an anti-gun politician who is trying to weasel his way out of his own track record as governor to dupe people into voting for him:

And as the GOP gubernatorial candidate in 2002, Romney lauded the state's strong laws during a debate against Democrat Shannon O'Brien. "We do have tough gun laws in Massachusetts; I support them," he said. "I won't chip away at them; I believe they protect us and provide for our safety."

Today, as he explores a presidential bid, Romney is sending a very different message on gun issues, which are far more prominent in Republican national politics than in Massachusetts.

He now touts his work as governor to ease restrictions on gun owners. He proudly describes himself as a member of the NRA -- though his campaign won't say when he joined. And Friday, at his campaign's request, top officials of the NRA and the National Shooting Sports Foundation led him around one of the country's biggest gun shows.

I could at least respect him and his supporters if Romney came out and said that what he has supported in Massachusettes is where he stands. There is nothing at all unhealthy about honest disagreement like that, but the man is a weasely, conniving, typical politician and I have the sneaky suspicion that if he wins office, it'll be like Bush all over again. A man who is conservative in his rhetoric, but irredeemably liberal in most of his domestic policies. Combine this with his mandatory health insurance program, and he should be all but immediately disqualified from getting conservative and libertarian votes.

You know it's a sign of the apocalypse, though, when the two leading contenders right now for the Republican candidacy are anti-gun candidates, but the New York Times of all places, actually publishes something that is unreservedly pro-gun ownership:

To some degree, this is rational. Criminals, unsurprisingly, would rather break into a house where they aren’t at risk of being shot. As David Kopel noted in a 2001 article in The Arizona Law Review, burglars report that they try to avoid homes where armed residents are likely to be present. We see this phenomenon internationally, too, with the United States having a lower proportion of "hot" burglaries " break-ins where the burglars know the home to be occupied " than countries with restrictive gun laws.

To a large extent, there are two types of people who support gun control: tyrants and the naive. The former are those people who know that their actions would never be peacefully tolerated, therefore they seek to disarm the public. The latter are those who typically have grown up in a nice, clean environment and are so sheltered that for the life of them they can't imagine why anyone would behave like a sociopathic predator, doing such things as breaking into a family's home and robbing them at gun point. The thought that the police would probably need at least twenty minutes to respond, more than enough time to rob and/or murder the family, and thus guns are the only practical line of defense, is likewise problematic to their sheltered little minds.

All of this is why I say that Mitt Romney cannot be trusted. A man who hides his true intentions, which are anti-freedom and self-defense, at a time when America faces tough decisions that require forthright leadership and a strong deference to self-defense is going to bring with him more of the same problems. Mark my words, if you can't trust him on something this simple, you can't trust him on anything related to terrorism or immigration.

Law and order mean nothing when it comes to sex crimes:

"We faced 10 years per count, there were nine counts," said Novak. "If Matt was convicted, those sentences would have to be served consecutively. In other words, he would have been sentenced to 90 years in prison. He would have served time until he died."

In this case, a sixteen year old faced 90 years for allegedly possessing nine "sexually suggestive pictures of minors" as the article puts it. What is clear about such laws is that they exist not to provide justice, but to simply use the courts as a method for maiming and destroying. I have no problem with outlawing possession of child porn, and indeed completely support it being outlawed, but it is ridiculous that a person can be sentenced to life in prison for merely possessing nine pictures that they did not even take or buy. I'd be willing to bet good money that the state of Arizona has given people guilty of pre-meditated murder, armed robbery, rape and other violent crimes lesser sentences in the same time period!

And the real pisser of the case, came when a computer forensic tech took a close look at the family PC:

Loehrs went into the Bandys' computer and what she found could frighten any parent - more than 200 infected files, so-called backdoors that allowed hackers to access the family computer from remote locations, no where near Matthew's house.

This is the one thing that actually makes me sympathetic to the police. Law enforcement rarely considers in these cases the distinct possibility that spyware is to blame. It ought to be a very terrifying thing to the cops charged with enforcing these laws because it means that the risk that they will be nabbing innocent people is only going to increase as these people get more sophisticated.

But of course, the politicians will never consider that because most of them are technological dumbasses that don't care about justice or writing good law. It is far more important to them to have a bill that is "tough," rather than a bill that actually addresses the extremely important nuances that have been creeping into these cases for some time now.

Still, situations like this take away a lot of my sympathy toward the system when it's all said and done:

"I have to stay away from children," said Matthew. "I cannot be around any area where there might be minors, including the mall, or the movies, or restaurants or even church. To go to church I have to have written consent from our priest, I have to sit in a different pew, one that doesn't have a child sitting in it."

Incarcerate them or let them go. If society doesn't have the cajones to actually lock up dangerous criminals until they have been reformed or have "done their time," then it deserves the recidivism that comes with releasing known dangerous criminals.

**Update**: Jacob Sullum makes some good points about this case. One of my grievances, that he shares, is that we treat the possession of mere pictures of a sex crime worse than we often treat bonafide rape. That and the deployment of a SWAT unit and attempting to get the teen labeled a sex offender for showing his buddies a Playboy is just wrong.

There are a lot of people who say that homosexual attraction is just a matter of biology. I think most people generally begin this from the premise that sexual attraction is inborn, when they argue it. That leads up to an important question. If homosexual desires are the result of biology and not social conditioning and trauma that suppresses heterosexual desires, then what proof is there that truly deviant expressions of human sexuality are not equally inborn? Sorry, you don't get to play both sides of the fence. That's called intellectual inconsistency and it's the marker of a weak mind.

I think all such expressions of human sexuality are born of original sin first and foremost because it is the sin that cuts deepest into what it means to be human. If people are born a way, it's a curse from that, but that doesn't take away the need for Jesus. Enough of the legalism. Law never made a heart change for the better.

Eric Scheie calls out Dinesh D'Souza over some of his recent claims about the cultural left. Anyone familiar with these events in the Islamic world can tell right off the bat how absolutely ridiculous his claims are.

"In this book I make a claim that will seem startling at the outset. The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11. ... In faulting the cultural left, I am not making the absurd accusation that this group blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world. The Muslims who carried out the 9/11 attacks were the product of this visceral rage--some of it based on legitimate concerns, some of it based on wrongful prejudice, but all of it fueled and encouraged by the cultural left. Thus without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.

I have a few major concerns with this sort of thinking. First, it inherently extends a sort of victimhood to the Islamic community. It's the meme of evil, secular America is forcing its depraved values on righteous Muslims which is not the case. The Islamic world does not need America to have major problems with sexual abuse ranging from pederasty to rape. Second, it ignores the fact that the global jihad has been at play since nearly the beginning of Islamic history. Finally, it draws a simplistic conclusion based on completely false assumptions, that the cultural left, rather than the Clinton Administration, was responsible for not nabbing Bin Laden and thus at least theoretically preventing 9/11.

As much animosity as I may feel toward the "cultural left," it is unfair to them to blame them in any way, shape or form for Islamic terrorists' motives and/or actions. While there are legitimate concerns about Hollywood and the moral climate of modern America, there is no legitimate connection between Hollywood and Islamic terrorism.

Here are some previous blog posts of mine on the subject of Islam and sexual depravity:

• Jihadists abduct woman and rape her until she converts.
• An all out of sexual riot in Cairo.
• Defending gang rapists in Australia.
• Explosion of incidents of rape in Oslo due to Islamic immigrants.
• Pakistan finally takes rape seriously.

D'Souza's explanation can't account for basically any of the pre-20^th century violence committed by expansionist Islam against non-Muslims. I'd be curious to know what sort of excuse he would give those that conquered Persia, the ones who raped and pillaged the non-Muslim communities in the Middle East and North Africa, or the many other communities that came under the sword of Islam.

This is the reason that I largely despise the legal profession, and am glad that I never went down the law school path:

The district court judge also found, in ruling against the chaplain, that in the military "public worship" is different from "worshipping in public," so that the Navy's punishment could move forward.

"Worshipping in the public" is "worshipping in public" since the first amendment provides no exemptions for the military or anything else for that matter. If I had to deal with this sort of addle-brained idiocy, I think I would end up having to switch to another profession--like software engineering!

I think there are only two valid conclusions about a judge like this. Either the judge is a blithering idiot who cannot intuitively grasp what the meaning of "is" is, or the judge is a scumbag. Public worship is public worship and the first amendment makes no exceptions. Learn to read and get a conscience.

Ohhhh boy...

ure, the Mac OS was light years ahead of Windows 1.0, and it took Microsoft until Windows 3.1 or even Windows 95 to get to near feature parity. Did that translate into the immense marketshare and "big profits" for Apple Mr. Lee's theory would predict? Funny enough, no it didn’t.

In fact, it took Apple nearly 7 years to sell its first 5 million Macs. On the other hand, Microsoft sold 10 million copies of Windows 3.0, "a usable, less expensive alternative to the Macintosh platform," in less than 2 years!

There were several good reasons for this. For the sake of brevity, I will simply enumerate them:

• A Macintosh cost A LOT more than many PCs back in the days of Windows 3.0 and 3.1. Apple really badly priced themselves out of the market for most users until their last few iterations with the PowerPC processors.
• There was perception among many developers at the time that Microsoft was a more open company to work with when it came to developing third party software.
• Apple's products relied on a lot of proprietary hardware, and that alone made it harder for them to fight against the IBM PC clones which were steadily getting cheaper.

There is simply no getting around the fact that Apple's hardware, not software, was to blame. If a good Macintosh cost only a few percent more than a PC back then, then Apple probably would have gotten better marketshare. However, Microsoft was handed the market because not only did Windows run on a greater variety of hardware, but the hardware itself was far more accessible to the average computer buyer. There may be cases for software patents, but Apple's one here is not one of them. The reason they got their lunch eaten by Microsoft was simply that they had horrible execution and made some technical decisions that greatly limited their potential customer base.

Apple has long been stuck in the role of creating markets, while others come in later to dominate them. They spend millions in R&D innovating. They spend millions market testing each product. They take on all the risk that consumers might not even WANT a GUI-based operating system. In the end, their competitors take advantage of all their hard work and gobble up marketshare.

I think it goes without saying that this "risk" is ludicrous. The Macintosh and Amiga were fundamentally more advanced than the IBM PC or its predecessors as far as the public was concerned. This risk was no worse than the introduction of any new platform, and in fact it offered a lower risk because it presented a major jump in usability and ease of use. In other words, this was a "safe risk."

Apple tried using trade secrets and even copyrights to protect their innovations to no avail. In 1998, Apple sued Microsoft and HP to protect the "look and feel" of the Mac OS with copyright, but they failed in the courts. Many believe that if they had patented some of those concepts, Microsoft would not be the dominant player in computing today.

Microsoft did not copy the Macintosh look and feel. The Windows user interface is qualitatively different from the Macintosh user interface in look and feel. This was a no brainer for a judge to shoot down, since Apple did not have a case that they were being ripped off.

The most credible case that could have been brought against a company for copying the Macintosh user interface would have been one against Be, for the user interface of BeOS. BeOS was modeled on older versions of MacOS in order to be a better MacOS than MacOS due to the vision of Jean-Louis Gassée who left Apple in the early 1990s to create a better platform. BeOS shared a lot of user interface similarities with MacOS, but at its core was a radically more advanced platform than MacOS was at the time.

Where Microsoft did not copy Apple was in things like ColorSync and HyperCard. It is undeniable that Microsoft borrowed ideas from Apple on how to build the graphical interface of their operating system, but no reasonable person can call that ripping them off. As much as it pains me to say it, Windows 9x was in some technical areas a better platform than MacOS was. Both of them had stability problems, but Windows 9x had more capable multitasking at the time.

Today, efforts to copy Apple have proven to be largely unsuccessful. The iPod is still at the top of the totem pole, iLife is still doing phenomenally well, no one else has tried to rip off the new APIs in MacOS X such as CoreImage and CoreData. In general, Apple is doing much better as a company, and a lot of it has had to do with the fact that not only are they still building quality products, but they have also become more aggressive at cutting costs and working at interoperability with other platforms.

Had Microsoft not come along and kicked Apple's sorry behind in a price war, which they were only able to do because Apple refused to be aggressive, and had Apple controlled everything through IP controls, prices would be horrible today. A solid PowerMac (probably would never have become the x86 Mac Pro) would still cost in the high thousands bordering on $10K, not as much as a powerful desktop from Dell.

So yeah, it probably would have been great for Apple. It would just have been very bad for the rest of us had they been able to lock everything down like this dreamer wishes they could have.

After all of the posts about police problems, immunity, etc., it has occurred to me that the only meaningful reform that will work is precisely the one that will probably not see the light of day until something truly horrific happens. For the sake of brevity, I present it in constitutional amendment form:

1) No elected official, appointed officer, employee or contractor of the United States or its member states shall enjoy a privilege or presumption of immunity from prosecution under any law in the jurisdiction they reside in or under any law or treaty enacted by the United States. The only immunity that shall be tolerated under the law shall be from prosecution where, under extraordinary circumstances, an individual was compelled to violate a law in order to protect another's life or property from violence.

2) In accordance with section 1, it shall be a crime for any member of Congress or the President to enact law or policy which violates this constitution. Upon conviction for a first offense, they shall be subject to a fine of $500,000, forfeiture of all pay, employment benefits and be barred from proposing any legislative bill for 90 days. Upon a second conviction, the guilty party shall be automatically removed from office, and barred for no less than ten years from ever seeking a position in the same body of government. In such cases, as wanton and flagrant abuse has occurred, by the indictment for three or more such offenses, upon conviction the guilty party shall be sentenced to one year in prison per offense, with no exception made for age or health, and the guilty party shall receive all additional penalties prescribed.

"If it's something that has a potential to hurt students' self-esteem, then I have an obligation not to let that happen," he said. "I don't think it's the job of the school newspaper to embarrass the students."

Source. The issue behind this was a report in the student newspaper about educational disparity between white and minority students, and the failure of the school to address it.

If you've been having problems posting comments, it's because I have been having to periodically reinstall Movable Type while I have been experimenting with some new plugins. Everything should be fine now.

It seems that on the issue of the North American Union there are two sides which have gotten a lot of prominence. There are those who believe, despite a dearth of evidence for some of their specific claims, that President Bush is fiendishly plotting a supranational government for North America and there are those who emotionally, blusteringly dismiss it as hogwash. I wish I could say that I shared the latter's sentiments, but despite the conspiracy theorizing of the former, there are historical merits to the charge that a union is in the future.

The European Union is held up to be the archetype of the North American Union, by some, and that is what should make sober-minded individuals cringe that it might be true. The history of the European Union is a convoluted and obfuscated one that began innocently enough. Conceived of as a common market to encourage post-World War II trade and economic rivalry (as opposed to war-making), it began its existence as the humble European Coal and Steel Community, a sort of 1950s NAFTA. In fact, what is astounding about the European Union's history, from a public knowledge point of view, is this quote from blogger Vox Day:

It is worth noting that the European Union is celebrating its 50th anniversary 14 years after it officially became the European Union and four years after the introduction of the Euro.

One of my personal favorite assumptions from the blustering skeptic crowd is the assertion that it's bogus on its face because the American people would never tolerate such an encroachment on their sovereignty. This, however, is historically untrue as Margaret Thatcher, a conservative leader who is undeniably more politically astute than the average Briton or American was herself completely duped by the European Union in a similar process. On her role in unionization, she has said:

"The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians. Looking back, it is now possible to see the period of my second term as prime minister as that in which the European Community subtly but surely shifted its direction away from being a community of open trade, light regulation and freely co-operating sovereign nation-states towards statism and centralism."

It goes without saying that if a leader as astute and generaly principled as Margaret Thatcher could be fooled by the advocates of the European Union, that those for whom politics is simply pulling a letter for a political party will hardly even notice an incipient union until it is too late. This is no appeal to a gnostic secret knowledge possessed by only a select few conspiracy theorists, but a simple fact of politics. It does not matter what the average American will approve or disapprove if they are neither as observant as their leaders (how else can they see danger?), nor have the gumption to throw out people who are already egregiously damaging American sovereignty through their stubborn defense of illegal immigration.

The involvement of the Bush Administration in the unionization process is fundamentally the red herring of the skeptics. They use it as a way to say that there is no danger, nothing to worry about, move along! The reason that this is a red herring is that it is an attempt to dispove an alleged larger political process by the presence or absence of an alleged group of members, not an attack on the alleged process itself. This too is where skeptics fall down. It is intellectually weak and unacceptable to simultaneously attack the views (and in Michael Medved's case, the persons) of those who claim the existance of a unionization while hopping around shouting "the onus is on you to prove your claims." While it is true that all who suspect a union is slowly occuring must provide justification, those who disagree have an equal obligation to explain why they disagree. In general, those who consider themselves "too good" to explain themselves lack anything more than emotional disagreement.

In general, the skeptics find it very difficult to believe that illegal immigration can play a pivotal role in this, but there are a few good reasons. First, it will have the effect of dilluting the culturally American population with many people who really may not wish for their kids to become "red-blooded Americans." Second, combined with the pervasive identity politics of modern America, there will be greater pressure to dillute loyalty to a sovereign United States, and to split that loyalty between ancestral homelands and America. Finally, when immigration happens in waves, it becomes a migration, and migrations have historically shifted at least some of the native political power into the hands of the newcomers. Rome and its relationship with its germanic neighbors provides a useful lesson here, as the germanic tribes later started becoming true powers within the Roman state.

When one looks at the "state of government" today, and compares it to what existed a century prior, it is obvious that there has been a trend toward internationalization of government. 100 years ago, there weren't any bonafide international bodies analogous to the World Trade Organization or World Intellectual Property Organization, nor was there an International Criminal Court or a United Nations. Europe was brutally, militantly divided along imperial lines. Today, it is tied together under strong confederation to a continental government. One might conclude, therefore, that the forces of history have since the start of the twentieth century, been on the side of unionization.

America's own history should provide a stark reality check to the skeptics who immediately dismiss the idea of surreptitious and eventual unionization. In early 1787, America was weak and divided. It was composed of 13 sovereign republics in loose confederation. What was intended to be a mere "fixer upper" process for the Articles of Confederation turned into a secret convention to write a whole new system of government. In fact, no one outside of the convention knew that the whole nature of the convention had shifted until it was over. That would eventually give us a federation that, through large investments in transportation and communication systems, as well as the Civil War which created a much more powerful national army, fundamentally shifted the balance of power away from those old republican states over the course of a few generations.

Based on what I think is plain in front of us, I think skeptics and conspiracy theorists alike are barking up the wrong trees in their own ways. If--and when--this day comes, it will, like the European Union, be a combination of surreptitious scheming, ignorance, an unhealthy valuing of efficiency over all things by the political class and historic inevitability. It would behove skeptics and conspiracy theorists alike to get a grip on reality and history, and realize that these things are far more complicated than either their dark fantasies or blustering denial will admit because too much is at stake to not be wary of the warning signs.

Previous posts of mine on North American unionization:

Here.
Here.

This post was inspired by this post from Right Wing News.

Via Classical Values, this is one of those bits of historical ignorance that can really blow you away:

Let's start with the title. A lot of liberals who write about the right see echoes of fascism in its rhetoric and organizing, but we tiptoe around it, because we don't want people to think that we're comparing James Dobson to Hitler or America to Weimar Germany. You, though, decided to be very bold in your comparisons to fascism.

You're right, "fascism" or "fascist" is a terribly loaded word, and it evokes a historical period, primarily that of the Nazis, and to a lesser extent Mussolini. But fascism as an ideology has generic qualities. People like Robert O. Paxton in "The Anatomy of Fascism" have tried to quantify them. Umberto Eco did it in "Five Moral Pieces," and I actually begin the book with an excerpt from Eco: "Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt." I think there are enough generic qualities that the group within the religious right, known as Christian Reconstructionists or dominionists, warrants the word. Does this mean that this is Nazi Germany? No. Does this mean that this is Mussolini's Italy? No. Does this mean that this is a deeply anti-democratic movement that would like to impose a totalitarian system? Yes.

You know, I come out of the church. I not only grew up in the church but graduated from seminary, and I look at this as a mass movement. I give it very little religious legitimacy, especially the extreme wing of it.

There are ideological and historical similarities between National Socialism and Fascism. I have to give him that because both Hitler and Mussolini started from a similar ideological perspective as former socialist diehards. There is, however, no excuse for the wanton and utterly profligate abuse of the term "Fascism" here, which he admits in a roundabout way has been abused. First, it is simply moronic to compare two ideologies, using the name for one to describe both of them, then take the other and say that it is purer and more important than the "general term's" namesake. Does it make sense to say, "the Nazis were more Fascist than the Fascists" when it is obvious from reading what they wrote about their stated beliefs, and comparing the actions of both regimes, that the two never competed on being ideologically pure to a common worldview? Of course not.

There is a term that describes much of the "Christian" Right, but it describes most "liberals" as well. It's "statist." In practice, most forms of statism bear a great deal of resemblance to one another. Liberals invariably take on moralistic attitudes that they denounce in social conservatives. There simply is no other way to describe the war on smoking, junk food, caffeine and entertainment that some of their true believers are engaged in, often with overlap from religious rightists.

If there's a historical period that's analogous to the situation we have now, it would come close to being the 1930s in the United States. Obviously we're not in a depression, but the situation for the working class is very bleak, and the middle class is under assault. There has been a kind of Weimarization of the American working class, and there's a terrible instability in the middle class. And if we enter a period of political and social instability, this gives this movement the opportunity it's been waiting for. But it needs a crisis. All of these movements need a crisis to come to power, and we're not in a period of crisis.

There are a few important differences that liberals just love to overlook. First of all, the average American household carries a fairly hefty debt today, that really doesn't seem to have any correlation with necessities such as medical emergencies and emergency repairs on their vehicles. Second, there has been an introduction of many legislative acts and agency regulations which have greatly increased the cost of hiring Americans for many jobs. Union costs alone have contributed to adding a $1,500 "tax" on many American vehicles resulting in foreign cars becoming more competitive on just price alone. Third, many of the new jobs that pay well are not being taken by Americans because they're unqualified! With more Americans dropping out of educational tracks that have secure and growing demand like engineering, the opportunities for Americans to make good money will be fewer.

The one thing that is not getting any discussion in the talks about the rate that wages are increasing is that many jobs today are proportionally not worth anymore than they ever were. Most professions that are not on the cutting edge of science or art simply aren't producing that much more wealth to justify them getting paid substantially more than in previous decades, except with adjustment for inflation.

You saw the same thing in the cafe society in Sarajevo on the eve of the war in Bosnia. Radovan Karadzic or even Milosevic were buffoonish figures to most Yugoslavs, and were therefore, especially among the educated elite, never taken seriously. There was a kind of blindness caused by their intellectual snobbery, their inability to understand what was happening. I think we have the same experience here. Those of us in New York, Boston, San Francisco or some of these urban pockets don't understand how radically changed our country is, don't understand the appeal of these buffoonish figures to tens of millions of Americans.

And like his Balkan counterparts, he too misses what is going on around him. Only so much can be blamed on Bush and his ilk, and he is devoid of any harsh words for the "soft tyranny" of the very liberal cities that often systematically violate individual rights in a way that the rest of America does not. New York City is now even going so far as to make dietary decisions for its residents, and many of these areas are famous for their bans ranging from smoking to firearm ownership. In the case of the latter, they are conveniently very incompetent about providing top notch security to at least assuage concerns about personal safety. The natural outgrowth is a uniformed police presence in such areas that would be unheared of in the areas controlled by the "American Taliban." When I lived in Harrisonburg, Virginia, I could go for a few days driving around town without seeing a police car. In Fairfax County, VA, I tend to see at least a few when I'm driving more than the two miles between my office and apartment.

Those of us who grew up outside of those big areas are the ones who face a true culture shock. We are not accustomed to the idea of being deeply circumscribed in our right of self-defense, having to pay heavy taxes, having our decisions about our children made by bureaucrats with robotically unsympathetic attitudes, being subjected to all sort of bureaucratic intrusion and the larger police presence. These cities are not in fact bastions of freedom and enlightenment, but crowded, congested, over-regulated, heavily-policed mini-states. The only reason that the liberal elitists fail to notice this is that their relative wealth allows them the ability to move around more freely through this framework. Take that away, and the repression would become self-evident to them. That is why I say that liberalism comes from two sources: greed and envy on the part of its working class proponents and a disconnect from reality among its wealthier proponents.

That's one hell of a way to weed yourself out of a technical major class:

FALL RIVER - A college student who mistakenly submitted a compact disc loaded with child pornography images to his professor last week is now facing felony kiddie porn possession charges.

Andrew Erickson, 18, of 57 Lee's River Ave., Swansea, was arrested by Fall River and Swansea police late last week. He has pleaded not guilty to the charge and was released after a family member posted his $500 cash bail.

The Bristol Community College student was to submit his computer information systems final examination on compact disc last week.

But instead of submitting the class work, Erickson allegedly handed in a disc that contained images of children as young as 7-years-old in sexually explicit situations. The disc, according to police reports, listed each youth by age, ranging from 7 to 14.

The difference is, if he were a Computer Science major, he'd have so much other porn on there that the professor would probably have not even seen the directories with the kiddie porn on them. The disk would have been safely thrown out in the thrash, and he'd have heard a real nasty lecture the next class period on turning in pornography instead of an assignment.

Back when I was at JMU, I really do think that some of my peers could have gotten away with something like this because of the sheer volume of legal porn that would have been surrounding the illegal content. It'd have been a drop in the bucket...

Some miscellaneous geek announcements worth mentioning...

Apple has now unveiled the iPhone. Basically everyone was expecting something like this, but this is a whole hell of a lot cooler than anything that most of us were expecting. It looks very similar to an iPod, but runs a slimmed down version of MacOS X with a beautiful interface that covers most of the features from the iPod and then some. It is driven entirely by a touch screen interface, which is one of the reasons it is able to flip back and forth so easily between being a phone and other types of devices like a video iPod. Also, Apple has announced the iTV will now be called Apple TV, and should be available soon if it isn't already. It's a media hub that allows you to connect several computers to your TV seamlessly.

It's about time. EMI, one of the larger record labels, has finally called it quits on their decision to hobble some of their CDs with DRM. They've been screwing around with their customers long enough that maybe, just maybe, it's time to find a new way of protecting the products. You know, something like figuring out ways to cut down on the price and add value to them. Something so novel it might work.

A former Microsoft executive has finally come out and admitted what everyone has known for a while: that Microsoft generally regards its third party developers as mere pawns. I am not sure why this is even news, except for the novelty aspect of it, since this behavior has hardly been disputed before. Microsoft has a horrible habit of encroaching on other major markets, while not working hard enough to secure its existing ones. In fact, were it not for the Windows and Office business units, it'd be largely regarded as a corporate loser. Even their gaming unit is probably still fairly deep in debt, though that will probably turn around thanks to the XBox 360.

And for the anti-environmentalists out there, a MIT researcher has just proved that there really is no environmental benefit to using ethanol, giving current production technologies. Apparently, it takes about as much fossil fuels to make ethanol as it does to make real gasoline. Which reminds me of a funny thing that Rachel noticed. When we switched over to 10% ethanol around here, the gas efficiency of her Acura RSX dropped down by about 10% as well. Dead weight, gotta love it.

The Duke rape case might just be the closest thing to a political Vietnam that the left-wing, reality-based community will allow itself to endure. I put that qualification there because the brownshirts are now going into hiding and MiniTrue is already starting to strain the memory hole to its max. Normally I don't read Michelle Malkin, but I found this was linked to from Instapundit and written by one of her blog's other contributors. It's a good summary of the ways that the reality-based community of the perpetually oppressed, victimized and emotional have gone into disingenuous damage control.

This was one of those things that was linked to, however, that I found particularly amusing:

A team of distinguished athletes at an elite and highly respected university hired two local women to strip at a house filled with men (including those underage) who had been drinking too much. That's sleazy, to say the least. That those women were women of color underscores the appalling power dynamics of the situation.

A truly compelling argument if there ever was one. She was black, female and they are white men. The professor who wrote that little comment apparently has succumbed to the untermensch-ubermensch dichotomy, and this is evidenced by her immediate assumption that a black woman who chooses to bare her flesh in front of paying white men is inherently at their mercy. Those vicious, predatory savages who pay her to bare it all, coercing her with the primal force of their greenbacks! What is a black woman to do?

I must have missed the details published about her being a crack-addicted whore who is under a pimp's thumb or being coerced to work as a sex worker to receive welfare benefits. It would seem to me that the outraged professor is simply angry that a young black woman can make a decent living by doing what amounts to no work, and which might actually be enjoyable on a sensual level at times. All of the outraged histrionics are a cover for the fact that she is just outraged that a woman might rationally decide that selling her body for several times the rate of an "honest job" is more appealing than the alternatives.

That aside, the 88 professors who denounced the lacrosse players and their activist ilk might want to actually think about what sort of damage they have done to their causes. Their quickness to jump in without substantiating claims has done a number of their reputation, and proved that they are no better than angry white mobs who used to lynch black men at the mere allegation of sexual impropriety from a white person. Once again the pendulum has swung to an extreme.

The one question I have for the leftist peaceniks who call Saddam's execution a warcrime, is how can you be surprised or disturbed that he was executed? Let's just be very specific about the facts of the case:

1. The man was linked directly or indirectly to the deaths of more than enough people to warrant guilt of a capital crime.
2. There is no doubt in any sane person's mind that he was guilty of far more than he was convicted for.
3. He actually got a pretty fair trial, considering the facts 1 and 2, and that allowing him to get off on a technicality would probably have plunged Iraq into a fullscale civil war.

I'm no fan of our invasion of Iraq. I think it was a stupid, stupid decision, and I think Bush has handled it like a rank amateur.

But even I can concede that there is simply no way to call Saddam's execution a crime or even a Bad Thing for Iraq^tm. In fact, as generally anti-intervention and pro-traditional military (militia-based system our founders used) as I am, I would buy Bush a drink without hesitation for putting the Butcher of Baghdad to death.

Maybe seeing his corpse strung up like that will actually cause more violent people in the region to think twice about trying to follow in his path. Even if it doesn't, we'll at least have gone on record as saying clearly that while we may have our heads up our collective posterior on how to run a war these days, we haven't lost our edge on putting mass-murdering tyrants to the sword.

Oh Mikey....

The United States has planned a change to its DST observance beginning in 2007. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 mandates that DST will start on the second Sunday in March and end on the first Sunday in November. In 2007, the start and stop dates will be March 11 and November 4, respectively. These dates are different from previous DST start and stop dates. In 2006, the dates were the first Sunday in April (April 2, 2006) and the last Sunday in October (October 29, 2006).

The Java Runtime Environment (JRE) stores rules about DST observance all around the globe. Older JREs will have outdated rules that will be superseded by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. As a result, applications running on an older JRE may report incorrect time from March 11, 2007 through April 2, 2007 and from October 29, 2007 through November 4, 2007.

If you are concerned about application failures that may result from these DST changes, you should update your Java Runtime Environment. The following Java platform versions have correct time rules to handle the DST changes that will affect U.S. time zones in 2007. You can download any of the following Java platform versions to resolve this DST issue

While not as big of an issue as the Y2K date representation issue, this will at least be a headache to many Java developers and users who have stable Java runtimes installed and deployed. The political class never even bothers to think about how "political solutions" can have consequences that reach out into areas like IT. No doubt Michael Medved, after having dissed the Y2K problem as a trivial thing, would think that this isn't even worth worrying about at all.

The reality is that the Energy Policy Act will force software upgrades on possibly millions of machines, some of which may be running mission-critical applications on them. There will be real costs imposed by having to upgrade software, possibly rewrite some code and especially in terms of lost productivity during down time and the cost of thorough testing.

Now, granted this only affects most versions of Java 1.3 and below, but there are still a lot of computers, especially a lot in government agencies and corporations that run Java 1.3 and below in deployment environments. The headaches that this will impose will in fact be quite real for a number of people.

Over the past day or two, gadget geeks have been teased by rumors of a successor to the Nokia N800. Here is a reference to it on LinuxDevices. At $399.99 it might be a good buy if Nokia has really addressed the performance issues that basically rendered the Nokia 770 a pain in the posterior to use. My experiences with the 770 that I bought didn't turn out so well, but that was mostly due to immature hardware and software. Now that the same platform has more RAM and a dual core processor, it might actually be noticeably faster, and I'd love to test one of these things out at CompuUSA if they get them in the area.

The internet tablet platform that Nokia has built has a lot of promise, but they really need to beef up the hardware. As someone who can code when he needs to in C#/.NET, a Dell Axim might be just as good of a buy, provided that the Internet experiences are essentially comparable between the two. Nokia unfortunately chose Gtk and C, while Microsoft had the good sense to make .NET the platform for Windows Mobile.

All of that aside, these devices are really cool, at least in the abstract, and if you see one you should give it a shot.

The DMCA needs to be fixed, and cases like this prove that.

Citing the DMCA, Second Life's biggest land owner, Anshe Chung Studios, has challenged the right for users (including members of the press) to publish 'screen shots' from the game that they claim would infringe on their copyright.

The issue has surfaced after the avatar Anshe Chung (real name Ailin Graef) was attacked by animated flying penises during a virtual interview with CNET news, conducted in their Second Life bureau last month. A video of the attack surfaced on YouTube, and was then taken town after Anshe Chung Studios filed a DMCA complaint. The Sydney Morning Herald and the blog BoingBoing have also received similar notices.

This particular use of the DMCA is nothing short of an attack on the first amendment because a screenshot itself does not constitute enough information to be considered by any rational person as a reproduction of a work like this one. It would be an entirely different matter if it were a screenshot that was almost entirely of a full text or a picture, but with something this complicated, there is no getting around the fact that it is not enough of a reproduction to deny the creator their rights.

The sheer number of bizarre cases that have come out of the DMCA, such as the Lexmark toner case are enough to raise serious concerns with the law. In some respects it is a good law, but there is no doubt about it. There needs to be a legislative revision to the law to make it clearer and more narrow in its focus to avoid such stupid cases in the future.

Michael Medved needs to get a damn Computer Science education before he spouts off on this stuff:

The idea that there's some malevolent, hidden agenda to abolish the USA through working more closely with Mexico and Canada to combat potential flu outbreaks is only slightly less sick and pathetic than the belief that our government orchestrated 9/11, or that Y2K would end civilization as we know it (because Bill Clinton wanted to declare martial law and suspend the election-remember that one?) The same bastards and creeps and jug-heads and drunks and reprobates (yes, they are all of the above) who are now scaring you over SPP or NAU or the Monster Highway were busy 7 years ago peddling the Year 2000 computer bug crapola (which I consistently derided and denied on the air). Did you huddle in fear, expecting blackouts and riots and food shortages on New Year's eve seven years ago? If you did, don't you feel embarrassed to entertain these new fears from the same asinine sources?

If those jerks could be so wrong about Y2K, why should you give the slightest credence to their warnings and alarms over this latest hysteria?

Oh yeah, Mr. Hotshot pundit who knows so much about Computer Science? You think a "simple bug like that" can't have disastrous consequences? How about I put the following code, translated to the appropriate language into a missile's guidance system:

DateTime x = "January 1, 1970";
DateTime y = "January 1, 1970";
x.Ticks / y.Ticks;

Do you know what that would do, smart guy? It'd cause your cruise missile's guidance system to crash, sending your cruise missile God only knows where. In simple terms, what I just did was ⁰/₀, which is known as a "divide by zero error," a rather fatal error that is incredibly simple. The only reason that everything went so smoothly was that a small army of COBOL programmers were brought in at obscene hourly rates to rewrite code to accommodate a whopping four digit year. Does that seem simple to you? If so, then you have never been forced to write any COBOL!

All I can say about these stories is... WHAT THE HELL?!

9 year old hangs himself mimicking Saddam's execution.
10 year old hangs himself mimicking Saddam's execution.
15 year old girl hangs herself after getting depressed that Saddam was executed.

What's next? Hara Kiri for Hitler?

They just can't help themselves:

Scarcely a half day into the 110th Congress's inaugural session, a proposal has resurfaced to collect fees from all communications service providers--including broadband and voice over Internet protocol--in order to subsidize telephone and Internet services in rural and other "high cost" areas, schools and libraries.

Not to sound unsympathetic, which for the most part I am, but one of the tradeoffs of living in a rural area is that you cannot expect many of the luxuries of urban and suburban life. In the long run, these subsidies are bad because they don't even go where they are supposed to. Just take one look at what was promised with the initial waves of subsidies, and what has actually been delivered, to see why it is best to just let the market handle the distribution of costs.

Lee got pissy with a tongue-in-cheek post a while ago, but we agree about Pat Robertson. In fact, I have never really understood why the guy gets so much support from within the church, especially considering how many times he has stuck his neck out to deliver a "prophecy" that later turned out to be at best hypothetically true. Now, read some of the verses in the Bible which lay out the requirements for determining whether or not a would-be prophet is or isn't in communion with the God of Israel:

2 Peter 1:20; But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation

2 Peter 1:21; for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

18'I will raise up a prophet from among their countrymen like you, and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.


19'It shall come about that whoever will not listen to My words which he shall speak in My name, I Myself will require it of him.

20'But the prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or (W)which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die.'

21"You may say in your heart, 'How will we know the word which the LORD has not spoken?'

22"When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the LORD has not spoken The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him.
-Deuteronomy 18

This is what Robertson has recently said:

In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said Tuesday God has told him that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in "mass killing" late in 2007.

"I’m not necessarily saying it’s going to be nuclear," he said during his news-and-talk television show "The 700 Club" on the Christian Broadcasting Network. "The Lord didn’t say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that."

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that given his previous vague prophecies that never seem to manifest in a way that most Christians would agree are divine, that this is just him pulling one out of his ass. It also, in my opinion, fails the 2 Peter test because he is quoted as saying, "I do bleieve it will be something like that." The very fact that he cannot speak with authority and offers his own spin on it means that it is nigh impossible that he is being inspired by the Holy Spirit to say these things.

Here is another good example of his folly. He's quote as saying:

"If I heard the Lord right about 2006, the coasts of America will be lashed by storms."

Which was followed by:

"There well may be something as bad as a tsunami in the Pacific Northwest."

I think that pretty much settles the matter for me. A prophet does not get it wrong, ever. That is something the Lord promised in His word. Of the many untold thousands of would-be prophets in history, not even 100 made the roster for inclusion in the Tanakh or Christian Bible. The fact that this man still has a large religious audience is scary, and a sign that as they say, "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge."

If there were a provable reason why "software sucks," I think someone would already have found it. Be it as it may, this is the sort of technology story that press just eats up, that is ultimately one that no self-respecting software engineer can just let slide:

The problem, says consultant David Platt, lies not with the user but with the programmers, who just don't think like the people who use their products.

Platt is a computer science instructor at the Harvard University Extension School and the author of a new book called "Why Software Sucks ... And What You Can Do About It," published by Pearson Plc unit Pearson Education.

One of his peeves is when a text-editing program like Microsoft Word asks users if they want to save their work before they close their document.

That question makes little sense to computer novices accustomed to working with typewriters or pen and paper, he said. For them, a clearer question would be: "Throw away everything you've just done?"

And just who would these novices be today? Would they be the average person about thirty five and under? I can't personally name a single baby boomer who is so mentally stagnant that they are stuck with the metaphores and habits that come from using pen and paper or typewriters. In fact, I would be surprised if most people from gen X on down have seriously used a typewriter, rather than a computer, for any serious office or writing assignment. Why? When gen X was starting college, computers were becoming widely accessible for school work.

That last comment of his really illustrates how bad and open-ended usability debates can be. "Throw away everything you've just done" is going to be interpretted by most users as "delete my file." I think the current way of phrasing it, something like "save changes before closing" is far superior because it says "you've made some new changes, should I keep them?" Compare that to the other way of phrasing it, which sounds like, "should I just throw out all of your hard work?"

Starbucks Corp. incurred his wrath because the coffee shop chain required him to specify a search radius when he was trying to use its site find the nearest store.

"The Starbucks programmers probably think that having more control over the search is powerful and cool," he wrote. "But in reality it's a useless and annoying distraction. Nobody goes around asking, 'Is there a Starbucks within five miles? How about 10? 15?'"

Has this overpaid talking head never actually gone driving in an area that he wasn't familiar with? How about a gas station? Who hasn't been driving and wondered in some form or another, "is there a gas station within five miles?" Being "overwhelmed" or just irritated by such an obviously important feature is a sign that you're just not smart enough to be driving to Starbucks, let alone using their website to find directions to a local Starbucks store. I can't imagine a single average person I have ever known with an IQ high enough and sufficient education to read a map who would take issue with such a feature; rather I can imagine quite a few who would wonder why it wasn't there.

Here's the real reason why most software sucks. It's not planned well. There, I said it. More specifically, there are a few things that just make it fall apart:

• Feature creep; making it do what it wasn't originally designed for.
• User has no bloody clue what they want in the first place.
• Rushed to market.

It really is just THAT simple. We are often asked to do things that are akin to a customer saying, "you know, that car looks really cool, but I want to be able to add pontoons to it so I can drive it to Hawaii--and I'd really like to be able to add wings to it... maybe hooked to the spoiler or something." The customer is every bit as much to blame for the problem as anyone else involved in the buyer-seller chain, especially with custom-written software. It's their job to know what they want and be able to articulate it. It's our job to take their specific needs and make them work. We... kinda can't do that when you get someone who says "it's your job to know what I want."

Good software is expensive because it's hard to write well. It requires an engineering focus on details. It's just that too many people outside of the profession seem to think that it's like poetry or something, because I swear they think we can make radical changes that easily.

Amynda is too obtuse to notice the obvious:

On this thread the other day, it was repeatedly mentioned how anti-rape discussions tend to fall into victim-blaming, and the people who have the real power to stop rape-men who rape-are rarely mentioned as a target group for actually curtailing rape. Problem is that telling women to give up freedoms in order to stop rape is just more oppression of women.

What sort of world does this woman live on that she ignores the obvious fact that no one denies that the only group that has "real power to stop rape" are the rapists? There is one little problem, and that is that enlightened, "reality community-based" individuals like Amynda refuse to accept the obvious fact that rapists generally are cut from a different psychological cloth than most other human beings. They are not stupid; education will do them no good. Rather, a person who has no moral qualms about holding down another human being and screwing the hell out of them is what used to be called "evil." Now, they're merely "ignorant."

Considering the fact that there have been governments that have unleashed the full spectrum of authoritarian power to mold a number of breeds of "new man," and have always failed, the feminist movement has no chance. Period. Women are not being told to "give up freedoms," but to understand that they live in a world where there are people who, while they are firmly rooted in reality, are vicious, heartless, cruel and evil. These people are not insane, rather they simply have a different moral compass than most people. They are, by nature, fundamentally different on some level in how they perceive their relationship with the rest of humanity.

This sort of utopian rubbish is precisely the reason why I think such people are contemptible. Yes, if we got rid of rapists there would be no more rape, and less "oppression of women." Why stop there? Why not discuss how if we just got rid of all evil habits, the world would be blissfully pristine and free? Oh, is that too unrealistic?

Back in high school, some of the darker years of my life as a non-believer, one of the few memories that I have of anything race-related was when I first moved back to Virginia. I had been going to my new high school for maybe a week at best and still largely didn't know anyone, so I just ate lunch and stuff like that with people who were anything resembling social with me.

Well, one of them was a redneck who really didn't like black people. Now, most of the rednecks I went to school with were at least alright with black people, most of them were as I would say, too heterosexual and horny to be really racist toward any race.

So there is this fine lookin black girl that comes walking past our table. We're talking like a total black beauty for our age that would blow "white beauty standards" out of the water. She was just totally bangin, and every straight guy who knew her agreed, or so I thought anyway.

I point her out to the guy, and his reaction is "dude, she's black" like I had just insinuated that I liked having sex with farm animals.

So I say back to him something like "what, are you are a faggot or something? How can you not want to hit that?"

He was just too stunned after hearing that to even respond. We finished our lunch and parted ways from there on out.

Curing gay sheep? With all of the talk about homosexuality being a product of biology, that gays are prisoners to biological determinism, it seems that few people ever considered the possibility that even biological defects like homosexuality can be fixed using medicine and hormone or gene therapy. The reaction that this has gotten out of homosexual activists has so far been not pleasant to say the least. The usual cries of homophobia, hatred, etc. and all that.

But why shouldn't homosexuality be treated as a disorder to be cured? From a scientific point of view it is a behavior that is not conducive to normal biological activities like reproduction. Even though society has "overcome" this by allowing gays to have sex with heterosexuals or use artificial insemination, homosexuality itself is at least on some level a biological defect. Nature itself is "heteronormative," despite what homosexual activists and their sympathizers might want to believe.

To all and sundry who read this blog, what with its diseased rantings and all, have a happy New Years. Enjoy the libations and revelry.

Because most of us will be back to work sooner than we would like :(