The reason that hate crime laws are supposed to be necessary in the first place is because hate crimes allegedly spread genuine fear throughout the identity group that the victim belongs to. By that logic, hoaxes like this and the ones where students fake violence against the are hate crimes, plain and simple.

The very fact that universities don't automatically expel a student who perpetrates such a hoax is proof enough that most universities are more interested in attacking the white majority, and white men in particular, than creating an environment where minorities are not exposed to serious racism. For all of their bluster and rhetoric, they can't seem to muster much outrage when a student fakes such racism in a manner that is so convincing that it causes serious anguish to minority students.

Proving once again that the Capitalist spirit is indomitable, Constitution Arms has created a handgun specifically targeted toward the elderly and the crippled. They call it the Palm Pistol. The best part? The device has been classified as a medical device by the FDA because it is specifically designed for users who are too frail to use a traditional firearm. This thing actually makes me feel not so bad about paying for others' health care costs, as hopefully people will be able to get this covered since it's a "medical device," and I would bet that most insurance policies have nothing in their contracts that mention devices like this on the list of things that aren't covered. It's a far cry from the days when the states used to buy military-grade weaponry for their militias, but I actually wouldn't mind paying Medicare taxes if I knew that they were being used by some elderly people to exercise their second amendment rights.

The NRA should set up an insurance fund to provide coverage for anyone who requests one of these, but cannot afford one.

Lord Brajerian stepped into the training room where Sara waited for him. The Talian's steps were deliberate and self-assured. For the first time she saw him as a soldier, not her ocassional instructor. Behind him, another soldier walked into the room. He wore no armor and carried no weapon other than a short sword. In fact, the only things he wore were his gray sparring pants and the sword which was strapped to his side. She wasn't sure what her trainer had in mind, but it wasn't exactly as it appeared.

One hour ago, Lord Brajerian had given her an order to suit up and arm herself as though she were going into an actual battle. She wore the exposed exoskeletal version of the armor that was standard issue for inductees into the Special Defense Corps and had a sidearm, a battle rifle and all of the bladed weapons that were normally issued to her service. She stood there, rigid and at attention awaiting her lord's next command.

Declan McCullagh did a great write up for CNET describing the myriad problems with Eric Holder as our next Attorney General, but one of those issues deserves a lot more exposure. That issue is that Eric Holder is a supporter of the creation of a data retention policy at ISPs to make it easier for the government to track what people do online.

In a speech in Vienna in 1999, he was quoted as saying:

First, we must take steps to ensure that we can obtain the evidence necessary to identify child pornographers. That means certain data must be retained by ISPs for reasonable periods of time so that it can be accessible to law enforcement,

Some privacy activists have tried to give him the benefit of the doubt that he was only referring to retaining records that have been requested by the government, but there was no context for that in his speech. Lacking that sort of nuance, we must simply take him at his word that he wants ISPs to get into the game of retaining records of their customers' activities for long periods of time. Whether that is through the government leaning on ISPs until they "voluntarily" adopt such policies or through naked force is immaterial.

A lot of people assume that the Internet is a "public place" and that you have no reasonable guarantee of privacy. To some extent that is true, but the real policy issue here is why should the government take actions which are absolutely guaranteed to diminish what privacy we do have. That's precisely what a data retention policy/mandate would do, as it would leave copious amounts of information about everything from instant messages, to emails, to web site visits exposed on an ISPs network. Such information is ripe for abuse, be it from law enforcement, criminals looking to score a big heist on personal information or curious employees.

Long-term data retention has been the norm in Europe for a while now, and according to one survey, it's already changing the behavior of some non-criminal segments of the German population. That is one of the natural side effects of living in a society where everyone knows that a significant amount of information about all of their electronic communications are stored and possibly monitored by third parties. It goes without saying that raising future generations of America under such a regime is going to have the result of making them generally accept such systematic surveillance as the norm of modern life. Such a thing does not bode well for the long term defense of liberty.

Between technologies like deep packet inspection and the steadily decreasing cost of storing large amounts of information, the technology barriers against large scale, systematic surveillance of Internet activity are almost gone. Compression algorithms like Bzip and 7zip would allow several terabytes of logged activity to be compressed to fit onto a single hard drive that costs less than $100.

Efforts to make ISPs retain data on their users' activities for several years are not only feasible now, but not even very expensive to mandate. They will also be the first, and probably most important, battles that civil libertarians will fight against the future of government surveillance of the public. As more and more communications are consolidated into Internet-based communications, the possibilities that will be opened up for spying on the public will be unprecedented.

Ever since former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez first seriously raised the issue with ISPs and Congress, there has been bipartisan support for data retention mandates. The Democrats were more modest in their proposals, but that can be more readily attributed to them distrusting the Bush Administration's potential use of a data retention mandate than principled opposition. Pushed under the guise of yet another "will somebody please think of the children" piece of legislation to help fight child pornographers, it didn't get much outrage despite being a far more devastating proposal than anything the NSA was caught doing these past several years.

Holder's views are not very far away from those held by Gonzalez on this issue and others regarding police powers and surveillance. For one, he has a very spotty record on encryption technology in the hands of the average person. We take powerful encryption for granted today, but during the mid to late 1990s, it was considered to be a very dangerous tool, often called a military technology, that shouldn't be left unchecked in any civilian's hands. Holder was typical of the Clinton Administration, which was no friend of encryption technology and tried to get backdoors put into encryption products. Taken together, his positions on a myriad number of privacy and Internet-related issues give civil libertarians good reason to believe that he will jump at the first chance to get a long-term data retention scheme either voluntarily implemented or mandated.

Perhaps Holder and Obama have bigger fish to fry, and will not actually do anything on this issue, but events of the last year or two combined with Holder's early calls for a long-term data retention scheme should give us reason to be vigilant. There wasn't much principled opposition when it was being debated by both parties under the Bush Administration, and it's even less likely that a Democratic Congress will challenge Holder if he wants to raise the issue. Despite superficial outrage over the privacy and constitution violations of the Bush Administration, the Democrats have largely shown themselves to have little inherent opposition to the sort of surveillance that this issue presents to the public.

In trying to debunk Johah Goldberg and Ed Feser, Heather MacDonald only shows how little she understands Judao-Christian theology:

I wonder to which science Mr. Feser is referring. There was the Templeton prayer experiment, and that didn't work out too satisfactorily, did it? Granted, the research design was laughable, in a charming sort of way (the people praying for the recovery of cardiac patients, for example, were only given the patient's first name and last initial, on the assumption presumably that God would know to which Jim G. they were referring). Perhaps Mr. Feser could propose a more scientifically rigorous design to show the efficacy of petitionary prayer or any other religious practice of his choosing.

That experiment, and all like it are doomed, because they treat God as though he were a machine that can be used whenever someone feels like accessing his power for any given purpose. I wonder if MacDonald is just flat out ignorant of the New Testament to such an extent that she doesn't even know that during the temptation of Jesus by the devil, when the devil tried to make him prove his power, he simply responded "do not put the Lord to the test." That is precisely what a scientific experiment that treats prayer and God's power as though they were mere forces of nature that can be called down, reliably, based only on the will of the caller. The Bible makes no such claim which makes this experiment, and all like it, as theologically ludicrous as it is scientifically ludicrous. People have also tried to prove that there is demonic influence in the world in a similar manner, as though demons were things that we could pop out of thin air, put on a table for observation and dismiss without incident.

The allegedly rational attempts to prove or disprove the supernatural have always been based on a very crude and childish understanding of just what the supernatural is. Let's say that there is a spiritual world, filled with sentient beings whose normal state is incorporeal. They can come and go as they please, leaving only a certain dark je ne sais quoi in their wake. What makes us think that we can prove or disprove their existence, since we have no ability to isolate them and bring them under observation if they do in fact exist? That conundrum doesn't make questions about their existance irrational, but rather merely outside of the realm of what science can answer.

The curious thing to me is why the idea of secular conservatism is so "appalling" to Mr. Feser and others.  We are only proposing that the basis of conservatism  can be broadened beyond revelation to rest on an understanding of human nature itself.

This statement assumes that we share a common understanding of human nature. The traditional view of human nature held by conservatives is based on the Judao-Christian understanding that human nature is essentially flawed. It's very essence is tainted by evil and destructive qualities that must be controlled, and religiously speaking, redeemed. It's from this basis that conservatism has always derived its understanding that utopia is unconditionally impossible on this side of eternity, and has had a skepticism about power, especially government powers. The reason that the political left was generally doomed to be the domain of violence and tyranny was because of the opposite belief, namely that human nature is essentially good. This is the foundation of our disagreements on most things, left and right.

From a secular point of view, it's difficult to say that human nature is essentially flawed because a secular world view accepts that many of the negative traits that we have are things that allowed us to evolve to this point. For example, cases have been made that rape was used by alpha males to spread their seed far and wide. How then, does one automatically make a convincing argument that rape is inherently wrong, when rape served a biologically useful role that allegedly made our species healthier? The very essence of sin and evil is that it is intrinsically destructive and harmful, but strictly speaking, rape is only harmful and destructive psychologically in most cases. Rape that results in a healthy child is physically no worse than normal sex in this context, since our basis for determining the good is so heavily influenced by what got us to where we are now. It could even be better if the father is a healthier father.

The consent and individual autonomy paradigm that is as close as secular conservatism can get to traditional conservatism's Judao-Christian moral code is fatally flawed because without a common, imposed moral code, human beings must intuit the good on fundamental issues. For a religious conservative, the fact that God said rape is always bad is good enough to condemn it even when it might produce offspring of such health that their DNA can be used to cure diseases and increase the life expectancy of the whole species.

Secularists have to start from the ground up and say here "is rape always bad" in order to understand it. Before they can do that, they have to come up with a common definition of what "bad" is, and that's nearly impossible to do when each person is supposed to use pure reason to determine what bad is. Reason, being not just the devil's whore, but the whore of human intellect and data, is subject to manipulation in ways that are not obvious to people like MacDonald. One person may reason that psychological harm cannot be quantified, therefore it cannot be rationally considered. Therefore, they might judge the morality of rape in large part based on the health of the father, the quality of life that the child enjoys and other factors that can be emprically determined and thus fed through the reason machine. Another may start from the perspective that psychological harm must be minimized, therefore all acts which could inflict serious psychological harm must be stopped. Lastly, another could easily prefer a positivist worldview with respect to authority and ability to act toward others in ways that control them or do things to them.

We still live in a society in which Judao-Christian memes are reasonably influential, which is why they influence the thinking of secular conservatives. They have not yet been so divorced from the culture, that their influence has been lost on what we assume about morality, justice and other subjects that science cannot give us a definitive answer. They still inform the thinking of a lot of secularists, as witnessed by the fact that our society still largely conforms to distinctly Judao-Christian values on issues ranging from torture, to marriage, to how to conduct war.

Reason and the evidence of history show the crucial importance of parental responsibility, self-discipline, limited government, and free economic exchange in creating a society in which individuals can most thrive.  Do religious conservatives believe that only religious belief grounds conservatism?  That position strikes me as rather an admission of defeat.

It's a matter of how much these things can achieve their fullness within a secular society. Secularism has hardly been good for conservatism, as witnessed by the fact that most secular parts of the West are the most staunchly left-wing. Going purely on observation here, it seems highly irrational to say that conservatism and secularism have any real natural affinity for one another.

Secular conservatives applaud the virtues put forth in various Holy Books, we simply claim them--proudly-as the creation of human beings, to which all have access.

That's all well and good, but utterly simplistic. One of MacDonald's commenters said that "thou shalt not kill" (which was actually "you shall not murder") was a moral commandment before it was given in the 10 Commandments, but that's not true in the least. From a secular point of view, there are times when murder is not only moral, but virtuous. To murder Hitler, Mao and Stalin would, in that context, be a mitzvah if there ever was one. In the utilitarian calculus that underlies secular thinking about universal moral statements like "murder is always wrong," to murder three people to save nearly 100,000,000 people from being slaughtered by their governments would be effectively impossible to declare immoral on any level worth discussing because the the result is an unqualified good. The slippery slope begins there, once one realizes that doing acts that we used to believe to be evil, can actually result in truly good outcomes.

Once one rejects the premise of the Holy Books, namely that they come from the Creator of the universe, they lose their authority. Any moral code that lacks authority is one that is toothless since there is no incentive to learn it, commit it to one's heart and live by it other than some generic desire to better oneself. Take away God and Hell, and the Holy Books are just incoherent rantings about morality by people who were surrounded by pathetic degenerates. Reject Jesus' claim to being the Son of God and you find yourself listening to a man who is either a devious son of a bitch or a lunatic. In either scenario, you have to be on guard lest you be lulled into stupid, self-destructive behavior.

The issue of torture serves as a good example of the moral divide between conservatives. While many religious conservatives were opposed to the policies, many secular conservatives were not. Just because the virtues that are taught in the Holy Books are accessible to secular conservatives, doesn't mean that they will embrace them. The torture issue is a good example of that with mainstream conservative Republicans tending to support Bush, while many religious conservatives took the issue itself as a sign of the moral decay of America.

Cases like this are a perfect example of why I am so critical of prosecutors as a profession. To summarize, a sixteen year old boy has sex with a girl who he thinks is his age, but turns out to be thirteen. The girl's parents admit that they know she lied, don't want to press charges and just want him to steer clear of their daughter from now on. An honest man who cares about justice would take one look at the case and see that the families resolved it in a perfectly amicable way according to the norms of society. No reason for the state to get involved.

Seeing yet another notch on his belt in the making, a state prosecutor went after the boy and tried to ruin his life over a lie. No mercy, no understanding, just the cold, iron fist of the state coming down on him. A just prosecutor would have told him that if he stayed away from the girl and didn't get into any more trouble until he turns 18, the prosecutor would rip up the case and forget about it.

Cases like this are the natural result of a system that is charged with imprisoning as many law-breakers as it can, rather than separating out the habitually criminal, the sociopathic and the generally just plain evil from those who just got caught up in a bad situation. As long as society rewards police and prosecutors based overwhelmingly on statistics, it cannot expect them to exercise discernment and seek justice because society has made it in their best interest to not do those things. In a way, the system itself is a victim of the statistic-obsessed society that spawned it.

It's offensive to the sensibilities of most normal, decent people to even think about executing a child, and with good reason. We tend to find that most serious criminal conduct on the part of children can be traced very easily back to their parents. When they're as young as eight years old, there's also the good question of whether or not they can even understand what they did.

That said, consider some of the news reports about the eight year old who recently shot his father and his father's friend. For example, here they ruled out the possibility of abuse by the father:

An 8-year-old Arizona boy charged with premeditated murder in the deaths of his father and another man shot each victim at least four times with a .22-caliber rifle, methodically stopping and reloading as he killed them, prosecutors said Monday.

Although investigators initially said they thought the boy might have suffered severe physical or sexual trauma, they have found no evidence of abuse, said Roy Melnick, the police chief in St. Johns, Ariz., where the shootings occurred. Psychologists say such abuse is often a factor in the extremely rare instances in which a small child murders a parent.

Then, there's this evidence and testimony:

Each man was shot several times with a single-shot, bolt-action .22-caliber rifle.

His grandmother told police that if any 8-year-old was capable of the crimes, it was him. Police reports say the boy told a state Child Protective Services worker that his 1,000th spanking would be his last.

Let me break it down for those who don't know much of anything about firearms. The boy used a single-shot, bolt-action rifle. That means that every single shot that went into his victims had to be loaded methodically. There was no semi-automatic "bang, bang, bang" that allowed it to "just happen." Rather, he had to load a round, take aim, fire, repeat, at least four times.

A .22 caliber rifle is also not a weapon that is good for hunting anything bigger than a squirrel or for defending yourself against anything other than a small or medium-sized dog. It's closer to a CO₂-powered pellet gun than the man-killing assault rifles featured breathlessly in the media. Put another way, the average sidearm carried by a cop is like a portable canon in close range quarters like in a house, compared to a .22 caliber rifle.

Suffice it to say, if this boy hunted down and killed two grown men with a bolt-action rifle, chances are pretty good that he's a sociopath and so messed up in the head that it's more of a matter of when he will kill again, not if.

This one caught my eye because it looked like it would be pretty easy to convert. Sometimes the low-hanging fruit is a good target. Here's another one I am working on. It's called Metamorph Cell.

As Black Friday dawned on Long Island, 2,000 shoppers waited in line outside a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, New York. The anticipation of low-priced flat screen televisions and children's games too much for them, they pushed and shoved their way past the locked doors before the store even opened. In the ensuing madness, a temporary Wal-Mart worker, a 34-year-old man, was trampled. As he lay on the ground, the bargain crazed shoppers stomped over him, and continued to shop even as the shocked Wal-Mart workers tried to get them to leave the store.

Is this what Christmas has come to be? Have the media and society in general turned us into such consumerists that we eschew any sense of human decency in order to save fifty dollars off a flat screen monitor? As someone on Twitter said: "Dear Jesus, We honor the memory of your miraculous birth by offering you this sacrifice, a 34-year-old temporary Wal-Mart employee. Amen"

This was a nicer version of my original reaction to the report of the work being trampled to death. I can be vindictive person when it comes to demanding that justice be done, but even I can't really find a way to really condemn this as a sign of some serious moral decline in and of itself.

As Dr. Helen brought up, there is a lot that Wal-Mart and other stores can do to prevent situations like this. They could start by changing the way that their doors are designed, so that unlocking and opening them can be done from inside the store, away from the incoming shoppers. Another option is to make the crowd line up and have armed security guards with handcuffs ready to detain any shoppers that are behaving in an unruly fashion and turn them over to the police. The police shouldn't mind, since such people can create a nastier, more complicated situation for them to deal with later if they are allowed to incite others into a panicked mob.

Now, with regard to the shoppers, it's uncertain how many of them should have reacted. The ones in the front would have probably suffered the same fate if they hadn't gone forward, and the ones in the middle were powerless to know what was doing on. Arguably, the only shoppers that should have been expected to stop, heed the instruction of the Wal-Mart employees and get out of the way were the ones toward the back who weren't being pushed forward by the shoppers behind them. It's all well and good to argue that the shoppers should have stopped, but it takes a stunning overestimation of human intelligence, independence and nature to believe that a mob of about 2,000 people will behave like something other than a herd of sheep without military training.

Dana Blankenhorn seems to have missed the fact that the Federal Reserve is one of those institutions that one should not cite as an example of success when discussing federal regulatory policy, which is probably why he doesn't get a chill down his spine at the thought of the Obama Administration creating a parallel institution for the healthcare industry:

What makes the Federal Reserve tick is data. The need for accurate economic data, for better collection and better presentation, is a never-ending preoccupation for Fed policymakers.

Data should also be a big part of the Federal Health Board effort. Only when we have a clear idea of where we are can we start managing to results, which is the ultimate aim.

Compare the sophistication of modern electronic payment networks, and the quality of the statistics they generate, with what we know about American health care and you start to see the size of the problem.

This is an apples-to-oranges comparison, in my opinion. The Federal Reserve does not need to know much of anything about the information generated by the transactions from electronic payment systems. Aggregate data, showing the general flow of wealth, perhaps, but the actual details of who bought what are minutia that is of no relevance to it. The Federal Reserve simply has no regulatory need to know what is going on behind the vast, overwhelming majority of economic transactions because they are of no significance to its role in the federal bureaucracy. For them, it might be good to know what my credit card debt is at any particular time, but my spending habits are well outside the scope of their role and interest, but the same could not be said of a healthcare analog.

The different problem that healthcare companies face is finding out the context of the information about healthcare. It's not enough to know whether or not a procedure was done, a bureaucrat (corporate or government) needs to know whether it should have been done and should have been done at that price. The information need of a Federal Healthcare Board would be enormous to the point that they cannot even be reasonably compared to any other regulatory agency in the country.

This is the classic conundrum of a central planner. Obama may not be planning on enacting a typical socialist central planning scheme, but if this agency is to even just aggregate this sort of data about the true state of healthcare, it will run into most of the same hurdles.

My guess is the first job of a Federal Health Board would be to seek better data on both wellness and illness. This implies the creation of vast, interlocking databases on all Americans, matched to medical transaction data.

By seeking to make this "above politics," Daschle gives the work a technocratic base that hides resistance to having our health tracked behind a simple need for accurate data informing policy.

If we could make it a goal to have health data as good as our present financial data within 10 years, we would be guaranteeing a revolution in health IT. It would be the Obama Administration's moon shot.

If information on wellness and illness are all that this is for, then the CDC is already sufficiently equipped for that, which is why I suspect that it's about a lot more than that. It's about getting the government into providing more health insurance coverage, and in a more intelligent, less expensive fashion than it currently is. Finding out what treatments are actually necessary will be dicey, and could very well pit doctors against regulators. It certainly wouldn't be the first time, since the DEA already considers itself to be the arbiter of what is the medically-necessary level of pain killers in all cases.

Practically speaking, it'll be extremely difficult to get private businesses to comply in an effort that works. Compliance will be the biggest problem that they face right off the bat. It'll cost a lot of money, require incredible planning and engineering to get it done, and will be very costly in terms of actually implementing it once it gets down to making the changes at hospitals and private practices to allow the data collection. That's not even counting the amount of money the government will have to spend to build the infrastructure to manage and mine all of that data.

Going back to the comparison with the Federal Reserve, if the Great Depression, which they've accepted responsibility for creating, and the current fiasco are any indication, no thanks! The federal government has already shown that it has an ideological aversion to simply allowing the market to recover on its own, and is convinced that pumping more of the poison into the victim is the way to cure it. This rash, disregard for basic economics, observation and common sense will undoubtedly just get carried over to healthcare under this plan.

Lastly, one reason that I think most Americans can agree is a good reason to be wary of this sort of change is the implications that it has for allowing health insurance companies to get access to a lot of data that they otherwise might not have. For now, any data that is created from a report that isn't filed against an insurance policy is one that stays with the doctor's office. Not so, if data is being aggregated by the federal government. It's also just a matter of time before the federal government wants to collect genetic samples as part of the health data, since DNA could provide federal regulators with a breathtaking amount of information about the state of our population's health.

Insurance companies will get their hands on this data as surely as mass marketers often get ahold of personal information from DMV offices in states that sell that information. One would have to be naive to think otherwise.