February 2007 Archives

And this is supposed to make us more sympathetic, not less sympathetic, to law enforcement's need for more data:

As digital evidence increases in importance, authorities seize anything that can hold data. This includes computers, CDs, USB keys, MP3 players, cell phones and game consoles, Jim Christy, a director of the U.S. Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center, said in a presentation at the Black Hat DC Briefings & Training event here.

"This is everything that you got and gave for Christmas," Christy said. In one case, investigators found child pornography on a modified Xbox, he said. "The challenge is that with digital proliferation, the data volume is tremendous these days."

A single terabyte of data equals about 8,333 old-fashioned, five-drawer file cabinets filled with papers. "That's an awful lot for an examiner to go through," Christy said.

Remember this the next time that you hear an argument for data retention. The same people whose software is so primitive that they often have a hard time handling a single criminal's personal electronics are the ones who say that preserving the log files on your activity at your ISP for years is absolutely essential to getting the evidence they need to prosecute criminals and of course, stop terrorists. If the DC3 has this sort of problem, one can only imagine how bad the problem must be at an agency like the FBI or a local or state agency which would likely have far, far fewer resources than a major federal agency.

Another interesting facet of this argument is that they don't even know what they're looking for or where they're looking for it. That's why they seize so many devices and so much storage media. I'm surprised that the judiciary hasn't started nailing them hard for that. I guess I don't understand why none of the companies out there that have sell forensics software haven't made reliable software for scanning volumes for certain types of files. It shouldn't be that hard for them to scan for the common file formats.

Don't let the 1TB number be taken too seriousl, either. 1TB is, at this point, well outside the bounds for most people. We're getting there, but most of that is still going to be free space. Law enforcement does not deserve the pity of having to scan multiple TB of actual data at this point.

It blows my mind that anyone hired to write code full time would struggle with this. It took me two minutes to write the FizzBuzz quick from that page, and about 85% of that time was typing :)

public class FizzBuzz
{
     public static void main(String[] args)
     {
          for (int index = 1; index <= 100; index++)
          {
               if (index % 3 == 0 && index % 5 != 0)
                    System.out.println("Fizz");
               else if (index % 5 == 0 && index % 3 != 0)
                    System.out.println("Buzz");
               else if (index % 3 == 0 && index % 5 == 0)
                    System.out.println("FizzBuzz");
          }
     }
}

And this just scares the hell out of me because I know how true it is:

If you can successfully write a loop that goes from 1 to 10 in every language on your resume, can do simple arithmetic without a calculator, and can use recursion to solve a real problem, you're already ahead of the pack!

Now, the only language I know "like the back of my hand" is Java because I use it everyday, but I am comfortable with C, C#, PHP and Python. I can not only write loops in all five, but write at least fairly useful code in them. Despite having a math learning problem, I can do basic arithmetic without a calculator and can use recursion when I need to. For example, it never occurred to me in college that many of my peers would struggle with this:

public void getFullListing(File startPath, ArrayList list)
{
     list.add(startPath);
     File[] contents = startPath.listFiles();
     for (File file : contents)
     {
          if (file.isDirectory())
               getFullListing(file, list);
          else
               list.add(file);
     }
}

In 12 lines of code, I just listed the contents of an entire folder in rough order (listFiles() doesn't return an ordered array). I've seen code like this, turned into two-two and a half page monstrosities:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <ctype.h>

int main()
{
     FILE *alphas = fopen("alphas.txt", "w");
     FILE *digits = fopen("digits.txt", "w");
     FILE *miscel = fopen("miscel.txt", "w");
     FILE *inputf = fopen("inputf.txt", "r");
     
     while ( !feof(inputf) )
     {
          int c = (char)fgetc(inputf);
          if (isalpha(c)) fputc(c, alphas);
          if (isdigit(c)) fputc(c, digits);
          if (!isalpha(c) && !isalpha(c)) fputc(c, miscel);
     }
     
     fclose(alphas);
     fclose(digits);
     fclose(miscel);
     fclose(inputf);

     return 0;
}

Woohoo! Law and order! That'll teach them to not break and enter, and commit property damage!

Litchfield - Two police officers admitted vandalizing the Litchfield Fire Department last weekend and have been suspended, the Attorney General's office said Friday.

Fire Chief Tom Scofield had said that food and drinks were thrown on the floor and carpet, insulting messages were written on a whiteboard, and a nasty note about Scofield was taped to a cookie jar.

The two officers admitted they did the damage while they were on duty. They have been suspended, Scofield said. They will not be charged with a crime, he added.

Anyone want to argue that the system doesn't protect its own? These two pigs would have been locked away and had the key thrown away if they weren't police officers. What's even worse about this case, though, is that the fire department actually asked the attorney general to conduct a criminal investigation of the officers, and nothing happened. I guess that means that firefighters are just too much like the average person out there to warrant protection for their property and persons against police abuse.

If there were any fairness in the system, this would set an awful precedent by allowing teens to vandalize government property without facing any serious criminal prosecution. Unfortunately, the system still makes pretenses of working, so it has to lift the nominal finger and prosecute private citizens who commit the same crime.

There's something that cases like this make me wonder when I'm feeling extra cynical, and that's if many prosecutors don't actually feel that these police are mentally incapable of understanding what they're doing. It sure would seem to fit the mold of the double standard that allows the police to commit all manner of heinous abuses of the public with barely a slap on the wrist, but that gets John Q. Public in bars for anything half as bad. So, who wants to disarm the police since they seem to be too immature to handle firearms these days? (Should that be in <tongue-in-cheek></tongue-in-cheek> so no one gets confused?)

Hat tip, The Agitator.

A.C. KLEINHEIDER offers a very feeble defense of Al Gore's use of 20 times the amount of electricity that the average home must use.

Those on right are busy today comparing Al Gore's energy consumption to the average American. Well, Al Gore is not the average American. He comes from power and money and he has achieved power and money in his own right.

Al Gore lives a life different from most folks. I'm not one to defend elitism, not as a matter of practice, but some elitism is inevitable. There must be a leadership class. There always has been and there always will be. Even societies organized around the principle of the equality and preeminence of the proletariat have had an elite class. It is the natural order of things. The key for a society is to create a responsible, responsive and fluid elite.

Could Al Gore do more to be "Green" in his personal life? No doubt. I'm sure we all could. Regardless of your position on global warming, none of the steps greens suggest you take in your personal life are gonna hurt anything. It may be unnecessary but not detrimental.

He claims to drive a hybrid, which is certainly an improvement in some respects over a Hummer, but then a man of his wealth could do the environment better by driving the Tesla Roadster. Hell, he could buy two of them, and use one of them to smooth talk other local rich guys into buying them to help out the cause of buying an actual electric vehicle.

Now what I want to know is why he doesn't have his house powered entirely off of solar energy. I have yet to see anyone bring this up against him or for him, so I will be the first to say that it doesn't matter one bit how much power he's consuming if he's got a backyard full of solar panels sucking up ol' Sol's energy-producing goodness.

But I am not going to hold my breath on it anymore than I am going to hold out for him to come out and say that he's a hypocrite if he isn't doing any of that. Gore has come out asking us to make sacrifices, but what are his sacrifices? What has he done, except bloviate on the need of the average person to give up some portion of their lifestyle?

It is the natural order of things to have a ruling class. It's also the natural order of things for the ruling class to fancy itself not burdened by the rules it wants imposed on the rest of us.

I am noticing a trend here, and it's actually kinda pissing me off. I can write a string of great posts about things like data retention, and no major blogger is willing to link to them. I write something like this, and I get a link like this. What is this... Murphy's Law of Blogging? If a blogger can link to a post and abuse your tone, they will link to your post and abuse the tone? Do I need to start putting <tone></tone> and <irony></irony> around every potentially controversial, but tongue-in-cheek, post of mine? Sheesh. I can't win for losing with these people most of the time...

This is one of the problems with the blogosphere that knocks the wind out of the Army of Davids' sails. It's easy for the bigger bloggers to just pull out a single post, roast a smaller blogger then say "let's move on with the conversation." I mean, let's face it. Anyone who reads my blog will see that I attack conservatives and even my fellow libertarians about as much as I am prone to attack liberals, but you wouldn't know that from Cathy Young' post. In fact, I'd probably sound a lot like a Republican Party hack, which'd be ironic since half of the candidates I have ever voted for were independents or Libertarians. Hell, in 2004, I wrote Cthulhu in the write-in slot for the House seat in the Virginia 6th district election because of how much I didn't like conservative Republican Bob Goodlatte.

*Shrugs* C'est la vie...

Maybe when I get a chance to learn Perl, I should write a HyperText Snarkup Language plugin for Movable Type and WordPress to make things clearer >:)

Larry Sanger, one of the cofounders of Wikipedia, is working on a more realistic Wikipedia which will ultimately end up being a real boon to the public. Wikipedia has been fraught with problems for a while now, the lastest one was this one that score a lot of diggs on Digg. The anonymous, partisan childishness is actually pretty extreme, as can be seen in cases like this one where a Wikipedia group was going after bloggers with Wikipedia entries. I know of at least one equally "asinine" profile that should be deleted, in fact it was written by a guy I went to college to describe his aim username, but I won't get it into that here.

If Sanger has the right people and resources, it shouldn't be hard for his project to eclipse Wikipedia in two to three years. The balance of having expert opinion weigh in and things like user-approved pages that are child-safe should prove to be very valuable factors in differentiating the two. Maybe it'll actually help take away from the legitimacy battles that are common on any Wikipedia page that is a "controversial" subject. That and the lack of anonymity just might mean that the contributors are actually held accountable and a certain degree of academic integrity will be the norm.

Your Dominant Intelligence is Linguistic Intelligence

You are excellent with words and language. You explain yourself well. An elegant speaker, you can converse well with anyone on the fly. You are also good at remembering information and convincing someone of your point of view. A master of creative phrasing and unique words, you enjoy expanding your vocabulary. You would make a fantastic poet, journalist, writer, teacher, lawyer, politician, or translator.

I took an IQ test in 5th grade and this was the sort of reaction I got. The administrator said I screwed up severely on one of the logic parts by moving slowly, but precisely rather than quickly, even if the answer wasn't as correct. Apparently it was enough that he said that the overall score was dropped down enough to not be useful, but he said that my "verbal IQ" was 142, and that he estimated that my overall IQ was closer to that than the 131 I was officially scored at.

Via El Borak

So James Cameron is attempting to "debunk" the resurrection of Christ. He even now claims to have possession of the body, an audacious claim that neither the Jewish authorities nor their Roman counterparts made. I have a few problems with this latest attack on Christianity:

• The Jewish authorities had every interest in crushing the early "heresy" of Christianity; they had the resources to secure the body and the motivations to not only secure it, but prove after three days that this man who so many of them wanted dead, was in fact dead. Guess what? They couldn't produce the body.
• This site does a good job of rebutting several of the major theories of what happened to the body, some of which are tied into Cameron's claim. The record in the gospel, which was an account of events, not a series of religious metaphors, hails from the same era and most of it was written by eye witnesses to the events described.
• None of the apostles fits the profile of a cult leader. In fact, the majority of them paid in blood to spread a message, to build a church, that they would never see any financial, sexual or authority benefit from. If you think that because people are willing to suicide bomb for religion or political causes, and that that explains away the willingness of Peter to die by crucifiction, then you clearly don't grasp the full extent of the horror they were suffering, and unlike modern Islamists, they had a chance to know if it were right or wrong. If they never saw Jesus again after three days, they would have gone back to being "good Jews," not followers of Yeshua.
• There are too many "little things" whose validity is demonstrated daily. For example, Christianity itself, the message, not even the followers, is hated by a lot of people. It was like that even in the beginning. No other religion has been so violently persecuted for a message that compared to other religions, is as genuinely peaceful, tolerant and that teaches people that it's ok to enjoy the material world, just not certain ways. Jesus said that the world would hate the gospel message, and He is proven right daily in the sort of persecution that third world Christians face. You can blather on and on about evil that was done by men in the name of the church, but there is no message as hated as that of the gospel and no religion that has produced as many people willing to suffer or die at the hands of evil men and women out of faith as ours.

The disciples' reaction to Christ's death was like that of a follower watching a cult leader unceremoniously die. It broke their spirits and made them walk away. It takes a cynical bastard to believe that these men turned around and decided to pay such horrible sacrifices for something that broke their spirits and never came true; especially after they apparently knew it wasn't true.

***UPDATE***: El Borak points out that it's absurd to think that Jesus' family would also have been buried there. Unfortunately for Cameron, the archaeologist in charge of the project for the Israel Antiquities Authority, agrees that it is just not realistic to think that this tomb is what it's being made out to be:

"It is just not possible that a family who came from Galilee, as the New Testament tells us of Joseph and Mary, would be buried over several generations in Jerusalem."

And the cultural libertarians wonder why many political libertarians are not enthusiastic about open borders and easy immigration:

Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Soliman was sentenced to four years in prison yesterday in a Cairo court. He will sit in jail for three years for the crime of "contempt for religion" and one year for "insulting the president".

For those of you who haven’t been following the case, welcome to the Middle East. They do indeed have crimes like that around here.

Almost as disturbing as the sentence was the public reaction. As the court hearing ended, the media moved to the street in front of the courthouse and started interviewing people about what they thought of the trial. With the exception of human rights activists and bloggers, the Egyptian public seemed satisfied with the verdict, if not disappointed it wasn’t longer.

Many people expressed the view that Abdel Kareem should be killed for what he wrote, and each of them shared their preferred way to kill him: stabbing, hanging, and of course, the classic beheading. One actually asked a lawyer if it was legal to now kill him, since this verdict clearly brands him as an apostate, and the Sharia punishment for an apostasy is death. People were talking about killing him in the most casual manner, as if he was no longer a human being to them.

Cases like this are truly eye-opening in that they can essentially damn an entire country aside from its (classical) liberal exceptions. It's not as though the Egyptian government is being propped up by American military power the way that the Warsaw Pact states were by the Soviet Army; the internal struggle in Egypt is largely between secular totalitarians and religious totalitarians. Just reading those popular opinions and the way that they were expressed should make any libertarian nauseated at the thought of allowing many of them to not only come to their country, but gain voting rights.

It's very simple. If you import thousands or more of immigrants from collectivist countries, you will be brining in thousands of collectivists into American society. Cultural libertarians have a socialist-like inability to learn from history on this count. As the demographics of America changed through mass immigration in the past, the political culture changed as well. That happened because immigrants do not simply abandon all of the habits of their old culture as a general rule.

For the sake of liberty, we should close our national door off to countries like Egypt and other countries like it. Whatever economic input Egyptian immigrants would contribute to our economy will be negated by the collectivist mentality that they will bring with them.

After reading this post of Difster's, I was sickened by the degree of power that the Italian legal system gives parents over their children. I know his main point was about atheism and the morality of forced abortions, but the part that I cannot help but notice here is that this is a perfect example of how collectivism is almost invariably a wellspring of evil. Virtually every great, hard to fight evil has arisen from the group controlling the individual.

Parents should not enjoy any legal authority over medical decisions affecting their children except where reasonable, life-saving measures might have to be taken. It would be one thing to allow a parent to override their minor child's decision to not have an abortion in the case of a ectopic pregnancy or some other weird exception because the parent has to safeguard their child's life. However, there is no greater good that can ever come out of giving them final authority over every aspect of their child's body and health. It smacks too much of that vile institution, Pater Familias for my tastes.

Of course, as Amynda is quick to remind us, abortion is a moral good. Ideas do have consequences and the idea that abortion is good for society has the consequence that sometimes the ends justify the means in the heads of those who are less dedicated to freedom. Abortion is a moral good, it's a moral good that teenage girls not have children out of wedlock. It's not a stretch, if you use your head.

Some states are now working on legislation to address the ominous "threat" of cyberbullying. The bill from Washington State doesn't even make it a crime, just "another issue" for schools to be responsible for. I just don't get what the problem is, really. Every behavior that falls under "cyberbullying" is already illegal. Most of it falls under harassment laws, and a quick call to the local police would put an end to those malicious text messages. If they create a website that is full of derogatory statements, and as is often the case, most of them are false, just contact the hosting service and inform them or file a lawsuit for libel.

It's cruel, but it can be handled. I have no sympathy for the teens who get lot's of abusive messages on AOL Instant Messenger in particular. How hard is it to just block a bully on AIM? It's just two clicks separating you and complete silence from them on AIM. If you have to block several usernames, you now have a legal case for going after them for harassment.

It's the schools' fault that this is even an issue because victims of bullying cannot fight back. Bullying was much less of an issue before the schools became so pussified that self-defense was equated with aggression. The fastest way to stop a bully is not to simply ignore them, but to stand up to them, and sometimes that involves violence.

The problem exists because school bureaucrats are slow to actually punish anyone, unless they stand out. The whole system operates on the Japanese principle that, "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down." The bullying victim that stands up for himself and knocks around a bully gets in deep trouble. The advice that they give victims of bullying is simply rubbish for most students. Ignoring them makes the problem worse most of the time, and trying to outwit them rarely works either, especially in environments that are favorable to the bully.

I'm reminded of Heinlein's derision of the social bureaucrats as pseudo-scientific individual who couldn't not accept the proper solution, the threat of corporal punishment, because it was too simple. The schools have taken away the threat of violence against bullies, which is why they are more and more fearless. The threat of violence is the most potent way to convince someone to not engage in anti-social behavior. Funny that when that fact of life was recognized by the legal system, schools and society at large, there were much, much fewer problems with bullying and school shootings like Columbine were unheard of.

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From Slashdot:

"SETI@home is a distributed processing client from UC Berkeley that installs on the volunteers' home computers and harnesses their processing power in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So far nothing noteworthy has come out of this massive project... that is until today! One of the volunteers was able to track down his wife's stolen laptop using the IP address that SETI@home client reports back to the server. After getting back the laptop his wife said, 'I always knew that a geek would make a great husband.'"

This is why I do Folding@Home which is devoted toward medical advances, not finding alien life. In other words, my measly clock cycles might actually contribute a tiny bit toward helping increase the quality of life for someone, rather than bringing on an alien invasion. Maybe the next thing they can find is the event horizon of the resource black hole at the heart of the SETI@Home network.

More of that pernicious double standard:

What Dix did to Martha Bledsoe was criminal. It cost him his job, and cost the taxpayers of Escambia County $250,000 in a settlement. And this after Dix cost the taxpayers $150,000 in a previous settlement for using a Taser on a man who was trying to comfort his wife after an accident.

Dix inflicted apparently permanent damage on Bledsoe, who had called the Sheriff's Office to report an alleged case of child abuse.

Her reward? The deputy who responded -- Dix -- ended up blasting her four times with his stun gun, after, for reasons that remain unexplained, he became agitated with Bledsoe.

It's undeniable that the system protects its own when you look at cases like this. It's the one extremely self-destructive feature of the "criminal justice system" that could very well end up bringing it down one day. The tendency of prosecutors and judges to forgive or lightly punish monumentally felonious conduct by police officers will only serve to erode public trust in the system's integrity, which is not exactly at a high already.

There was a case that the author of that piece pointed out that reminded me of an even worse double standard. In Florida, a police officer was only lightly busted for coercing a sixteen year old girl to do jumping jacks topless in order to get out of a ticket. Now if any non-governmental authority figure did that, they would be in pretty much any jurisdiction looking at several solid years behind bars and being labeled as a dangerous sex offender.

The solution to these problems is very simple. Take away all of the qualified immunity. If the agents of the system have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear. Their own actions will be found to be lawful and vindicated by the light of public scrutiny. There is no reason for a police officer to ever be allowed to use a level of force against a private citizen's person, that one private citizen could not use against another. In such situations where they exceed that, the color of law should not protect them; it should protect the private citizen who retaliates with force in self-defense.

I know that that solution scares the hell out of liberals and many law and order conservatives, which is something of a feature I suppose. It would work for a simple reason. The courts are by design there to sort this sort of thing out. You shoot a cop who was doing his job, the jury convicts you, game over for you. People read about your conviction for a poor choice on using force, and they learn to refine their critical thinking skills. However, the cop is tasering a woman half to death and you blow his head off like you would a common criminal, the jury finds you to be a good neighbor to the poor woman and it's case and casket closed.

Hat tip: The Agitator.

The National Education Association and Think Progress have a hard time groking differences:

Last night on Fox News's Hannity and Colmes, right-wing radio host Neal Boortz claimed that teachers unions are "destroying a generation" and are "much more dangerous than al Qaeda." He stated, "Look, Al Qaeda, they could bring in a nuke into this country and kill 100,000 people with a well-placed nuke somewhere. Ok. We would recover from that. It would be a terrible tragedy, but the teachers unions in this country can destroy a generation." Sean Hannity agreed, noting, "They are ruining our school system." Watch it:

The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, represents more than 2.7 million of America's teachers and educators. In 2004, then Secretary of Education Rod Paige similarly called the NEA a "terrorist organization." NEA responded to Paige's remarks, saying it is "morally repugnant to equate those who teach America's children with terrorists."

Man, what a listening comprehension problem. The unions are not the same thing as the teachers themselves, who range from abysmally incompetent to extremely gifted instructors (the distinct minority). The stupidity is further compounded by making the accusation that they equated the unions with terrorists, which they did not. This is one of those "you must be this smart to have an opinion" issues. If you cannot see that the comparison was abstract (two ways to damage America) rather than a direct equation, you are clearly too stupid to have an opinion on the matter.

I've said it before and pissed people off for it. The NEA is a worthless institution that parasitically attacks the teaching profession, which is a noble line of work. It has done much to reduce the quality of education by giving unqualified teachers job security that they don't deserve. The results speak for themselves when you talk to the average person whose education is overwhelmingly from the public education system.

Reason Hit and Run touches on a subject that really needs to be given more public exposure, namely the pseudo-scientific nature of "social science." They mention that these self-proclaimed scientists have a problem with predicting outcomes based on their research, which is at the core of what is wrong with the "social sciences." A major requirement of science and derivative fields such as the engineering and medical professions is the sort of repeatability that eludes social scientists.

I see the biggest problem that these fields face is that they face an open-ended, almost completely non-deterministic system for observation. All other systems that scientists study and engineers work on are for the most part discretely-defined systems ranging from experimental physics studies to computer systems. A software engineer can in most situations reproduce any given bug provided that they have sufficient criteria to narrow down the behavior of the defect. "Social engineers cannot" because in general they cannot agree on the variables that might be the cause, let alone agree on how and why they cause problems. This is essentially a scientific mask for ideology.

The biggest grievance that should be held against the social sciences is that their practitioners generally just don't learn from history or their mistakes, nor consider multiple outcomes as part of causality. People who work in actual engineering positions know that changing one variable may have a cascading reaction on an entire system; this is often a foreign concept to the social sciences. Tightening up gun control in a city might save some lives, but cost other lives where gun ownership might have lead to successful self-defense, increase the lack of respect toward the public from less professional police officers and contribute to a crime increase that has a damaging impact on the economy. Three outcomes from own variable change in crime policy, each of which may in turn spark many more changes.

There are those who would defend them as being still useful for statistical study of current problems, but even that is dubious for a few reasons. First, with surveys the methods used and questions asked must be extremely good if they are to have any value as usable data on complex issues. Second, statistics themselves are not necessarily going to yield worthwhile information about why a social phenomenon is occurring. Finally, when you look at the first two issues, it is highly unlikely that the data yielded will be reproducible to the same degree, which essentially negates the possibility of making informative, verifiable theories that explain complex social phenomena.

Let it never be said that state legislators give a damn about ensuring that the laws they write always result in logically sound legal situations. I have been waiting for a case like this ever since the specter of this scenario was brought to my attention about ten years ago while I was in high school.

Salt Lake City - Utah Supreme Court justices acknowledged Tuesday that they were struggling to wrap their minds around the concept that a 13-year-old girl could be both an offender and a victim for the same act - in this case, having consensual sex with her 12-year-old boyfriend.

The Ogden, Utah, girl was put in this odd position because she was found guilty of violating a state law that prohibits sex with someone under age 14. She also was the victim in the case against her boyfriend, who was found guilty of the same violation by engaging in sexual activity with her.

"The only thing that comes close to this is dueling," said Associate Chief Justice Michael Wilkins, noting that two people who take 20 paces and then shoot could each be considered both victim and offender.

The whole thing is an exercise in pure, unadulterated stupidity. In other cases, other jurisdictions have adopted the attitude that we must "prosecute and imprison the child to save the child." It's nothing less than a real perversion of justice to use laws that were intended to be used on full-fledged pedophile sex predators to prosecute tweens and teens caught having sex. If anything, it is more likely to cut off their future possibilities, which is going to give them a further inclination to break the law.

As if the evidence that playing video games has helped our military fight wars weren't enough good news for the video game industry and ammo against its critics, a new study shows that video games also help surgeons hone their hand-eye coordination in ways that make them more efficient:

Playing video games appears to help surgeons with skills that truly count: how well they operate using a precise technique, a study said on Monday.

There was a strong correlation between video game skills and a surgeon's capabilities performing laparoscopic surgery in the study published in the February issue of Archives of Surgery.

If you doubt any of these studies, just play a game like Gears of War where strong hand-eye coordination and thought are requried to get anywhere in the game. A lot of games out there today are much more demanding in these areas than anything most of the anti-video game crusaders are used to, like the games from the 16-bit era of gaming. So take that, Jack Thompson, Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton.

I went to see my family in Harrisonburg (Virginia) this weekend, and toward the end of my time there I went to Target while Rachel was shopping in the adjacent shopping center. I just wanted to hit the Starbucks there to get a double shot of espresso. I order it, and the girl behind the counter asks me what size, so I tell her a double shot. Then she says what cup size, so I tell her a "tall" one which is of course, ironically, "small." Foamy did a good rant on that one, anyway... I go over to get the milk to make it nice and smooth, and lo and behold the moron is filling my double espresso up with regular coffee!! WHAT THE HELL?! She ruined two perfectly good shots of espresso with regular drip coffee!! I nearly staggered out of there in disbelief that I had witnessed such a bumpkinesque behavior in a town where I know for a fact the the average barista know better! Seriously, that's like ordering two shots of a good liquor and then having the bartender fill the rest of the glass up with tap beer. I am just at a loss for words as to how much my day was cheapened by that act of raw stupidity.

**UPDATE**:While this post was not intended to be taken seriously (apparently it has been), all I can say is extremism in defense of good coffee is no vice!

Steve Jobs knows when to push the envelope:

The report says that Jobs' words were quite strong, noting that the Apple and Pixar CEO "lambasted" teacher unions and likened schools to businesses with principals serving as CEOs. Teacher unions, he said, that the unions have directly contributed demise of public education.

Dell, on the other hand, came in like a rowboat in the wake of Jobs' Man O' War:

The report says Dell also blamed problems in public schools on the lack of a competitive job market for principals.

Neither of these things will happen until the public education system as we know it is brought down. The fastest way to force this reform would be for religious parents to withdraw their kids from the system and put them in private schools or in homeschooling programs. That would be eminently possible were it not for the fact that many of them are attached to the idea of using their kids to reform the system from within. Unfortunately, that tactic has never been shown to work at reforming broken government bureaucracies. The only solution is to take away the funding and resources of the group until it capitulates, and losing 10-15% of the school kids would do that in most states.

Unionization would not even be an issue if it were not for the fact that we have a government school-dominated system. No private school worth a damn would ever allow itself to be so thoroughly crippled because it would go out of business. Again, this is only possible because the public schools have so crowded out the competition that they don't need to worry about efficiency.

Hello, possible referral from Cathy Young's blog! Here's a helpful hint. Before you nod your head in agreement that I am just another liberal-basher, you might want to ask yourself two questions: 1) Does this tone really sound super serious like others who write constantly against the left? 2) Why would a political libertarian be sympathetic to a group whose beliefs are based on those detailed in F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom? While I normally don't stray into liberal-bashing like some conservatives do, I make no bones about it that I am not sympathetic to them like many of Cathy Young's colleagues and readers at Reason for reasons described in part here.

Two samples of moonbattery up for disection:

Exhibit A:

sgo said...

It may be your blog, but the comment is attributed to someone else. You have no right to change the content except to make it age appropriate or remove it.

Who says? We can do anything we please and if you don't like it then you just don't have to comment at all. The problem here was that the editor forgot to put in the strikeout and italics to set the edit apart from actual comment.

And for your information "carlito's" edited comment was deleted less than a few hours after it was edited. (see here) It's really a shame that you right wingers have archived it for perpetuity thus undermining my (the liberal avengers webmaster) attempts to keep the offensive edited comment from being offensive to carlito forever.

Good job assholes, you really owe carlito an apology.

Exhibit B:

weeziejefferson said...

LMAO!! You wingnuts get funnier and funnier.

A CHILLING effect, eh?

LMAO!!!!!

Notice in Exhibit A that you have several normal characteristics of a normal left-liberal caught with his or her pants down. First, you have the "nuh uh!" behavior, that quintessentially childish form of redirection that mindlessly asserts something else that no mature human being would accept as an explanation for the behavior that is under fire. It is your blog, but the comment is attributed to someone else. Putting words into someone's mouth in a way that seriously makes others believe they said it is libel, which is indefensible from a free speech point of view. second, you have projection of blame and the customary, "sorry, but..." which is obviously no apology at all. A normal, sane, mature person would ask why the editor was even editing someone else's words except to correct formatting or to censor profanity. A typical left-liberal on the other hand, finds it entirely acceptable to edit a "wingnut's" words to sound "more intelligent," which is to say, more agreeable with the left-liberal's beliefs. Then, when all else fails, the left-liberal shouts indignantly about how they should be regarded as the hero of their own catastrophe. Then, when that is done, the final charge is that the person who called them out is in fact the one who is guilty of victimizing the person who was libeled or slandered, no the person who observed that what they did was tantamount to libel or slander.

Now, in Exhibit B, you have the comment that is completely lacking substance. It makes unsupported assertions that the opponent is stupid, ridicules what they are saying without even attempting to explain why and then ends with some sort of asinine, poorly worded finale.

Not every leftist is like this, but then not every Nazi had a stomach for genocide.

Time to move on from toddlercidal directives to something more fundamental. Daldude did a very good job of illustrating the pitfalls of secular, atheist thinking. Now, I was never truly bound by such things when I wasn't yet a Christian. I had a lay nihilist understanding of the natural order, which included a deep understanding of the moral ramifications that arise from "God is dead." Secular, naturalistic "morality" is an oxymoron because morality answers the question of what must you do, not what you should not do.

It is not an opinion, but rather a fact that appealing to the survival of the human race as a logical behavior and the basis for why murder is wrong only goes as far as the should, not the must. The human race will not be destroyed by a spree of ubermenschen killing off their weaker neighbors. Throughtout history, the strong have preyed on the weak with devastating results, reaching as many as millions upon millions of people systematically murdered yet the human race continues to thrive. This whole explanation assumes that such behavior is insane, which it is not. The weak of more predatory species are known to be killed off by the stronger members of that species in the wild with no demonstrable impact on the survival of the species.

The must is where things get interesting. Let's say that humanity was held captive by an alien race that demanded that you do the following. Find a small, loving child. Brutally rape and sodomize her until she is badly traumatized, cut her extremities off, then string her up over a fire, roast her alive and eat her flesh. If you don't do that to her, the human race will be wiped out with advanced alien weapons of mass destruction and resistence is impossible. Based on your own morality, Daldude, you should acquiesce to their demands. It would be illogical for you to refuse because the survival of the species is at stake!

Could you suppress your inner moral disgust and do all of that to her, in order to save the human race? See, this is a question of ethics versus morality and moral order. I would sacrifice the entire human race if I were in that situation, and do so freely. Call that my former nihilist raising a fist in defiance and observance of its will to power, to not submit to such demands if you wish, but I would not, knowing full well that humanity would be exterminated. This is the difference between theistic and atheistic morality.

Your own morality eventually contradicts itself because it is based on a utilitarian purpose. You can explain why murder in general should not be permitted, but it is not hard to come up with a scenario, whether extreme like the one I provided (admittedly for shock value) or a simple hostage situation where you must murder an innocent person to save another person's life. All I have to do is look at your utilitarian purpose and probe it a little, to find a situation where I can turn it on its head, to where your purpose justifies, nay, mandates murder and unspeakable cruelty! Put another way, the reason your "moral code" fails is that it is entirely possible to find a realistic moral situation wherein your code would turn on itself and mandate the exact opposite position from the one you originally said was the moral one. And that's really a problem, you see, because that makes all morality situational which means that nothing is immutable except the survival of the species.

But as to the question of atheists being moral, this is not even an issue. Of course you can do moral things, but that is non sequitor and just a way of distracting people. Few people actually believe that all atheists are psychotics waiting to snap. The question is about the limits of atheist morality, and ultimately it is hollow and a bastardization of religious morality. You don't want to admit that in a purely naturalistic setting you can privately carry out the scenario I mentioned before and there is no universal authority that can condemn that since all morality is reduced to a matter of human opinion.

All of this is quite understandable if you already believe that morality is relative and such. The question that theists are concerned with is creating a lasting, universal, authoritative morality that is not subject to whims or the zeitgeist. If you cannot understand any of that, then you have failed the abstract thinking challenge.

A judge shows remarkable common sense:

Judge Sam Sparks of the U.S. District Court for the Western district of Texas granted MySpace's motion to dismiss the charges of negligence, fraud and negligent misrepresentation.

The high profile suit was filed last year by the family of the Austin, Texas girl, who was attacked by a 19-year-old man she met on the Web site.

The suit and reports of other victims of predators made the popular service a target of child protection advocates. MySpace users share information about their lives by posting photos, blogs and videos.

In dismissing the suit, Judge Sparks said that as an "interactive service", MySpace was protected from materials posted on its site by the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996. Sparks explained that the CDA is aimed at allowing Internet and other interactive services to continue to develop.

"To ensure that website operators and other interactive computer services would not be crippled by lawsuits arising out of third party communications, the Act provides interactive computer services with immunity," Sparks' ruling said.

Sparks noted also that the girl lied about her age, posing as an 18-year-old when she was only 13, and registered for an account. MySpace's minimum age requirement is 14. The girl's name was not divulged because of her age.

This case should serve to teach the young lady many valuable life lessons such as not being held responsible for her own mistakes, since her parents see fit to reserve the right to refile the case in another court. If anything, MySpace was victimized here by parents that did not do their job to protect their daughter from this guy, and then in turn had to pay the court costs associated with this lawsuit. The parents should not only be forced to pay their court costs, but be barred from refiling this case in the future because it is pretty clear under federal law that MySpace is not responsible for what its users do.

The fastest way to make these problems go away is to pass a law that fines anyone under the age of eighteen for lying about their age online in an official statement, such as signing up for a free website account. Make the teen have to either pay $100 or perform five hours of community service per incident with no limit on how much they get charged. There is no technology that can handle this problem, but the legal system is more than capable of handling it.

(Side note: the video is Copyright Jonathan Ian Mathers, the guy behind Foamy and Ill Will Press. I am mirroring this video to save him the bandwidth. I recommend you go to the site and buy a DVD or something if you like it. I have the first DVD and it's great.)

--Morally, law and order cuts both ways. The police and prosecutors don't get the "rule of law" argument when they enforce laws that are unconstitutional, just as it is no defense for a private citizen to claim that he or she shouldn't be prosecuted for breaking one law because they observed fifty other laws. Enforcement of a single unconstitutional law, even if you enforce fifty constitutional ones is no morally different than obeying fifty laws and breaking one. "Just doing your job" is not an excuse, just as ignorance and being otherwise law-abiding is not an excuse. If you enforce an unconstitutional law, you are a law-breaker, and you deserve to lose your job and go to prison. No more mercy should be extended to the agents of the states or the political classes than would be extended to a private citizen who broke the law. The Constitution is easy to read--if you aren't dishonest and/or an imbecile. Every bad ruling based on it that hurts the public has come out of a sophist's understanding of the document.

--Is it a good sign or a bad one that major bloggers have all but ignored the most fundamental threat to privacy online, data retention legislation? After the way that so few of them got it right on network neutrality legislation, maybe we are better off, rather than having the sort of technically illiterate schmucks that thought that REAL ID would solve our problems, cheerlead the creation of vast repositories of data to "assist" law enforcement.

--It never ceases to amaze me the number of atheists who simply cannot fathom a world without religious morality. They go through great pains to take the morality of those around them who are religious and make up secular justifications for them. Well, the parts that don't require much effort on their apart to abide by. I have yet to see an atheist moral philosopher who is willing to come up with something as bold as the system revealed in the Bible. What we end up with in practice is just a self-serving patchwork, and I say self-serving because there is no real challenge. What good is a moral framework that for all intents and purposes asks nothing of the average man that he isn't already capable of giving in spades, such as not murdering his neighbor, raping his wife, taking his daughters as concubines and his sons as slaves? (Why choose such an extreme example? Read this.)

--Blogging and reading other blogs has been fairly light this week because I have been having to work longer hours out at another office. This is my old office, which requires about a thirty minute commute in bad traffic. To avoid this, I have been working from home for a while, then going there, but that's been eating into my time. I have also been reading Starship Troopers, which I am now about halfway through with. An amazing book, totally ruined by Hollywood. I think so far that the only things that they share in common are the names and some of the personalities of most of the characters, races and governments.

So far, these are my two favorite sections:

"Of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; t remains a mud pie, value zero. By corollary, unskillful work can easily subtract value; an untalented cook can turn wholesome dough and fresh green apples, valuable already, into an incredible mess, value zero. Conversely, a great chef can fashion of those same materials a confection of greater value than a commonplace apple tart, with no more effort than an ordinary cook uses to prepare an ordinary sweet."

****************

"Never mind. Long enough. It means that such punishment is so unusual as to be significant, to deter, to instruct. Back to these young criminals-They probably were not spanked as babies; they certainly were not flogged for their crimes. The usual sequence was: for a first offense, a warning-a scolding, often without trial. After several offenses, a sentence of confinement but with sentence suspended and the youngster placed on probation. A boy might be arrested many times and convicted several times before he was punished-and then it would be merely confinement, with others like him from whom he learned still more criminal habits. If he kept out of major trouble while confined, he could usually evade most of even the mild punishment by given probation-'paroled' in the jargon of the times."

"This incredible sequence could go on for years while his crimes increased in frequency and viciousness, whith no punishment hwatever save rare dull-but-comfortable confinements. Then suddenly, usually by law on his eighteenth birthday, this so-called 'juvenile delinquent' becomes an adult criminal-and sometimes wound up in only weeks or months in a death cell awaiting execution for murder. You-?"

He had singled me out again. "Suppose you merely scolded your puppy, never punished him, let him go on making messes in the house... and occasionally locked him up in an outbuilding but soon let him back into the house with a warning not to do it again. Then one day you notice that he is now a grown dog and still not housebroken-whereupon you whip out a gun and shoot him dead. Comment, please?"

"Why... that's the craziest way to raise a dog I ever heard of!"

"I agree. Or a child. Whose fault would it be?"

"Uh... why, mine, I guess."

"Again, I agree. But I'm not guessing."

"Mr. Dubois," a girl blurted out, "but why? Why didn't they spank little kids when they needed it and use a good dose of the strap on any older ones who deserved it-the sort of lesson they wouldn't forget! I mean ones who did really bad. Why not?"

"I don't know," he answered grimly, "except that time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to a pre-scientific pusedo-professional class who called themselves 'social workers' or sometimes 'child psychologists.' I twas too simple for them, apparently, since anybody could do it, using only the patience and firmness needed in training a puppy. I have sometimes wondered if they cherished a vested interest in disorder-but that is unlikely; adults almost always act from conscious 'highest motives' no matter what their behavior."

Stuff like this is why I no longer subscribe to Reason magazine:

But why should bloggers subject each other to the same treatment? I mean, do bloggers really want their future opportunities to be dictated by whether they used their medium to hurl some spur-of-the-moment insults? Blogging reveals more of what its practitioners think than traditional journalism: This is a feature, not a bug. Marcotte (more so than McEwen) makes some mistakes (Glenn notes that she airbrushed controversial posts once conservative bloggers linked them, which is damn sleazy), but the damage from this silly episode will fall on every ambitious blogger who dared not to write like a political hack all the time.

Cathy Young consequently politely nailed David Weigel for making such an asinine defense of a clearly deranged blogger. It says a lot about the "cultural libertarians" of groups like Reason that they find such pity for shrill, viruently anti-political libertarianism leftists like Amynda. This sort of behavior was, and is, one of my greatest criticisms of cultural libertarianism. In a lot of respects, Amynda represents the very sort of Fascism that she accuses others of, and that should be obvious to cultural libertarians. After all, this is a woman who is not exactly well-known from her writings about her love of judicial fairness, due process, evidentiary procedures and other (classical) liberal values. If anything, what she received is her just deserts; a real world example of what her own behavior looks like when inflicted upon her, instead of by her.

Now, the reason Amynda got booted was that she made herself a target. She is political; she knows the way the game works. You don't hire people to be Campaign Propaganda Minister who have shown such a staggering inability to control a habit of frothing at the mouth, and Cathy Young's followup post provides some good reminders to that effect. She was doomed from the start because she is not just tactless, but brainless, when it comes to much, if not most, of her writing when it comes to watching the tone and knowing when she is running out into moonbat left field. I seriously doubt that David Weigel would be so nonchalant about Tony Snow, for example, if it came out that Snow wrote a blog ranting and raving about blacks, Jews and women the way that Amynda rants about men, white men in particular in many cases (and that's the oft ideologically fatal left-liberal core peaking through the cultural libertarianism).

I see a lot of fallacies creeping in from the atheist attacks on Vox's position that if God were to tell you to murder all of the two year olds in the world, that it would be the moral thing to do. It's not a hard thing to logically prove if you think about these factors:

• If you concede that the God described in the Bible is the true God, then you concede that a single, omnipotent deity created the universe and literally every law of physics and the basis of the way that humans see the world. Put another way, you concede that God created everything from the laws of physics, to humanity, to the very concepts of right and wrong.
• By conceding to this world view, for the sake of argument, you also concede that what the Bible says about human nature, that it is fallen, corrupted, out of line with what God declares to be holy and is in fact in active rebellion against the Will of God.
• By sheer fact of being fallen, corrupted and out of line with what God declares to be holy, human nature is not a reliable standard for understanding how things ought to be by the standards of how this creator god intended them to be.
• By extension, this puts human nature at odds with the way that this creator god wants things to be run.
• Ultimately, that brings us to the final point: if the above are true, and they are true in the context of the Bible, then it would not be immoral to do an act that your human conscience tells you is wrong, but that you know for a fact that the creator god, Yaweh, is ordering you to do.

These people clearly lack the abstract thinking skills to understand where we are coming from here. Judaism and Christianity are both amoral outside of the context of God's revealed Will. In fact, from the perspective of these religions, morality only exists in God's nature because God is the creator of all that is. We believe that God created morality, right and wrong, just as He created humanity. It is simply not possible for a deity to be omnipotent and yet be bound by universal laws of morality because that implies a force outside of the deity that can restrict the deity. That in and of itself negates omnipotence.

The bottom line is that atheist appeals to morality generally come down to emotion, which is generally itself not rational. They cannot explain why it would be immoral to kill all of those toddlers except in terms that are rich on emotion and poor on logic. This is worse than faith; it is foisting your opinion on the public and demanding that it be taken seriously as though your own opinion should be regarded as a universal truth. That is the problem with opinions, they have no legitimate claim to being universal except where their foundation is based universal truth that can be verified or assumed from a context such as Christianity, Hinduism or Islam. An atheist's personal disgust is no legitimate basis to make a case for what morality is, or if it even exists at all because it is just an emotion, and emotions vary often significantly from person to person.

**Update**: It has occurred to me that since most atheists have never bothered to do more than a cursory study of Christian scripture or philosophy, that they may not understand some of the actual teachings about this subject. First of all, this morality is not actually subject to change. Numbers 23:19 says that God is not like man, that He should change His mind, and the system of morality in the Bible is based on God's nature, which is also eternal. In this sense, biblical morality is neither arbitrary nor based on fiat; it is based on an unchanging nature of an eternal creator god, and is not subject to human opinion. The point here is actually very simple, though. If God exists, then God is the creator of right and wrong because God created the framework in which philosophical ideas are knowable. 2₁₀ + 2₁₀ = 4₁₀ because God says so.

Once again, a leading Republican comes up with a way to sacrifice liberty without any appreciable gains in security:

(a) Regulations- Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this section, the Attorney General shall issue regulations governing the retention of records by Internet Service Providers. Such regulations shall, at a minimum, require retention of records, such as the name and address of the subscriber or registered user to whom an Internet Protocol address, user identification or telephone number was assigned, in order to permit compliance with court orders that may require production of such information.

(b) Failure To Comply- Whoever knowingly fails to retain any record required under this section shall be fined under title 18, United States Code, and imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.

I have written extensively before on data retention and why it is just a bad policy in general, but here's a simple reminder. You are creating a huge repository of personal information that can be easily compromised by criminals. Every unencrypted thing that you do online is vulnerable to data retention policies. That means every username, every password, every blog post, every email, every IM conversation. The whole motherload of what you do online that doesn't involve serious encryption. There are two obvious threats from this. First, you have the temptation on the part of government agents to abuse the data repository, and second, you have the fact that it represents a real coup for an identity thief.

The way that this bill is worded is such that the Attorney General can basically surreptitiously get everything that he wants, which does in fact include tracking your online activities, not the basic information you use to connect with your ISP. He has "tried to be nice about it" with the major ISPs before by trying to convince them to voluntarily join in on the surveillance program, but that has failed. If Lamar Smith gets his way, the first step toward total communications surveillance will be in place. That is not paranoia, but a simple fact of how the Internet works. Once the system is in place, adapting it to new protocols won't be that difficult. That's why I just don't get why so few people seem alarmed by this.

Apparently the media only reports the race of a minority criminal when the criminal happens to be a minority who was otherwise a successful part of society:

"The preliminary information that we're getting is - there was a board meeting. This male, who we believe is the shooter, was actually inside this meeting. ... It appears as though he was upset about something that was happening in the company. He got in an argument with several other people in that meeting and, subsequent to that, he fired several shots at these males," said Deputy Police Commissioner Richard Ross Jr.

Ross said the apparent shooter was a black male in his 40s, and the victims appeared to be two black males and one white male.

Police believe it was an investment firm but were unsure of the business name, and they were still investigating the gunman's role in it.

That's the only conclusion I could come to after seeing this. The media is normally loathe to actually release such information for fears of "fanning the flames of racism," but for some reason in this case, the reporter decided to let slip all of the gory racial details of the case. Pray tell, why is that? Is it because a black a man strayed too far from the plantation and made something of himself?

Granted, he could have been a disgruntled employee, but that's not the way that the media is letting this one play out. Instead, he's being portrayed as part of the board meeting. Who knows, but it's funny to see that the only time they are willing to break their silence is when there's a possibility that aside from the one crime, the guy was at least a somewhat successful businessman.

Lately I have been thinking about how to fix the system, as my engineering mind is often wont to do. One solution that I think is promising is private prosecution, a system like tort law, except where private parties can hire their own prosecutors to bring criminal charges against anyone ranging from a beat cop to the President provided that they can arrange for a proper Grand Jury and secure an indictment by normal standards. The idea is that instead of having to rely on the ideal world fallacy of having a "good system, run by honorable, ethical people" you have a system that can be policed by the public through private enforcement, through public courts, of criminal law.

Any thoughts? Comments?

These are the people who are "keeping you safe." They are the ones that you are sacrificing your freedom for the illusion of security everytime another anti-terrorism bill is passed. Gawk in awe that this agency even functions:

The Boston field office reported a stolen laptop containing software for creating identification badges. The laboratory division at Quantico, Va., said that a stolen laptop contained names, addresses and phone numbers of FBI personnel. The New Orleans field office reported a stolen laptop that had been used to process surveillance-related electronic digital imaging.

"Perhaps most troubling, the FBI could not determine in many cases whether the lost or stolen laptop computers contained sensitive or classified information," said the Justice Department IG's stated. "Such information may include case information, personal identifying information or classified information on FBI operations."

I know that every agency has some problems like this because the law of averages is against every agency and corporation being able to clean shop on such stupidity, but then, this is the FBI. Still, you have to wonder how in the hell someone was allowed to put the software necessary to make perfect identification records and tags could end up on a laptop, let alone get swiped. That right there takes a true talent at screwing things up. It's practically begging to be stolen.

Growing up in a law enforcement family, I heard many a grumbling from family and friends of the family about how the FBI had a rare skill for not only stealing cases from other agencies at inopportune times, but then proceeding to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Things like these only make the anecdotes more believable.

Hat tip TechDirt.

The Czechs clearly know how to elect leaders ([backup link]) who can not only call a spade a spade, but know when a load of bullcrap is being foisted on their countries:

It's not my idea. Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It's neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment. Also, it's an undignified slapstick that people don't wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the "but's" are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses.• This is clearly such an incredible failure of so many people, from journalists to politicians.

I know some people who are pretty strong on physics (not PhD level, but one with an astrophysics undergrad degree) who are very skeptical of global warming as well. In fact, I have heard from them that their professors were equally skeptical of it, but then global warming is likely to turn out to be the environmental science version of phrenology anyway. I have yet to meet anyone with any sound scientific background that actually buys into the man-made global warming crap. Even the secular-oriented ones will point out that the Earth was, according to naturalist history, hotter millions of years ago. You can't believe in that secular history and then conveniently eschew the Ice Age without sounding like a complete idiot.

There is so much religiosity behind the supporters of man-made global warming that you know it has to be based more on faith than science.

She had me from the moment she said she was raped, until the moment she implied that she is pro-censorship:

Sarah, a freshman at the university who asked that her last name not be used, said she was raped when she was 15. She said all the hard emotions of her attack came flooding back to her - the shame, the rage, the despair - as she read an article in the campus newspaper, The Recorder, headlined "Rape Only Hurts If You Fight It."

"I couldn't believe the things I was reading," she said Thursday, a day after the article appeared. "I couldn't believe anyone in this day and age would write something like that, and that other people would let it be published."

You know what I like about cases like this one, with all of the hysteria and hoopla on this campus? It shows very powerfully what free speech supporters mean when they say that the first amendment exists to protect unpopular speech because popular speech does not need legal protection. You could actually cite this sort of thing as a perfect example of that, so near perfect that you could cite it in a dictionary as a reference source.

I don't think that anyone with any intelligence debates whether it is Youtube's legal right to arbitrarily censor videos to keep some of its users happy. That is precisely what happened with Nick Gisburne. It doesn't do any good to even pretend that there was a reason here for this action other than to placate Muslims and left-liberals, nor does it do any good to pretend that there is nothing dangerous about this sort of thing. Presumably, he was flagged because his attacks on Christianity "were fair" whereas his attacks on Islam were "racist and bigoted." At any rate, Youtube cravenly caved into its thin-skinned users and silenced him. It is their legal right, but they should not exercise it.

Cases like this are dangerous because it fosters a culture that is intolerant to anything that can be considered offensive or hateful. The outright ostracism that is put on hate speech is often borderline fascistic. I see no point in pretending that free speech is anything other than a legal fiction if those in control of the means of communication are firmly in agreement that certain legal, yet offensive, speech should not have access to the means of communication. At this point it's just theoretical, but suppose telecoms were to start refusing to sell bandwidth to groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Black Panthers, Nation of Islam or La Raza. While free speech would exist on paper, it would mean that the right would not be able to be exercised in practice.

Again, I know that these points are mostly theoretical right now. What I think needs to be done instead is that those who support freedom of speech need to use moral and emotional coercion against companies like Youtube and Google, to punish them for choosing to play referee. They are contributing to a culture of lesser freedom when they take on that role. Using moral and emotional coercion, such as systematically demonizing them and promoting the competition is the only non-governmental way short of building alternative infrastructure that can be used to make them not contribute to a loss of freedom in the greater culture.

In Soviet America, "children" molest themselves:

Combine unsupervised teenagers, digital cameras, and e-mail, and, given sufficient time, you'll end up with risque photographs on a computer somewhere.

There's a problem with that: Technically, those images constitute child pornography. That's what 16-year old Amber and 17-year old Jeremy, her boyfriend, both residents of the Tallahassee, Fla., area, learned firsthand. (Court documents include only their initials, A.H. and J.G.W., so we're using these pseudonyms to make this story a little easier to read.)

In this case, there was only one judge on the appellate court who actually had the wisdom to recognize that the law was being applied in a cruel and idiotic manner. In this case, the sixteen year old girl is actually being regarded as a sort of victim here, even though the "big bad pedophile" who "abused her" was in fact her boyfriend who was only one year her senior! One of the judges even went so far as to insinuate that they should be locked up because of the fact that they could have had a profit motive in revealing these pictures to others, even though there was no evidence that they had made any efforts to actually sell the images. Now there are two people in their later teenage years who are about to be, if they aren't already, sitting behind bars as child molesters for basically, well, molesting themselves.

To a large extent, making the laws fit reality has never been part of the overall effort to enforce sex crimes. The people who draft these laws are often the sort of people who will in one breath refer to a sixteen year old as a mere child with respect to sex, but will have no problem holding them accountable as an adult for violent crime such as murder. Teenagers are not children, and it does our society no good to pretend that a non-retarded teenager is incapable of grasping at least the basic moral, biological and sociological arguments against them having sex. A teenager is plenty old enough to grasp that even if an authority figure wants to have sex with them, it's still not acceptable. As with a lot of things, the lowered standards and expectations have actually exacerbated the problem.

There is also a flat out discriminatory aspect of this case which makes it revolting. The boyfriend is being charged not only with the crime of production of child pornography, but also possession even though his girlfriend is equally responsible for the crime of possession. He is now looking at additional, very serious charges that should rightfully fall on the girl involved as well, if the system is going to make them fall on anyone's head.

On a side note, I have caught flack and been called nasty names by some of the morons that infest the comments section at Right Wing News because I have the audacity to suggest that the states should resurrect the Bible's age of accountability, which is about 12 to 13 years of age. I think the real reason they don't like the idea is that it has ramifications for the way that these selectively moralizing adults handle their own sex lives. For example, if we hold a thirteen year old accountable for his or her decision to have sex, this switches the question to whether or not it is right for two people who consent to sex to have it outside of marriage. This leads them to either condemn sex outside of marriage or to say that it is ok for two consenting people to have sex outside of marriage, and I don't think that a lot of social conservatives want to reach a point where they have to either genuinely regard extra-marital sex as a real sin or condone it.

The best part is this, where the judge shows a blatant "sometimes you must destroy the village to save the village" attitude toward the almost legal adult teens:

As previously stated, the reasonable expectation that the material will ultimately be disseminated is by itself a compelling state interest for preventing the production of this material. In addition, the statute was intended to protect minors like appellant and her co-defendant from their own lack of judgment...

Appellant was simply too young to make an intelligent decision about engaging in sexual conduct and memorializing it. Mere production of these videos or pictures may also result in psychological trauma to the teenagers involved.

Further, if these pictures are ultimately released, future damage may be done to these minors' careers or personal lives. These children are not mature enough to make rational decisions concerning all the possible negative implications of producing these videos.

Yeah because as we all know, having to put "Convicted of Production of Child Pornography" on an employment application has no statistically-proven tendency to reduce one's odds of gainful employment. Do people like this prosecutor-turned-judge even bother to think about what they are saying most of the time? Hello, Judge Wolfe, you will be the reason why these teens cannot get a job in the future. You could have turned this case around and injected some common sense into it, but no, you just had to "save the children," didn't you? There are even more contradictions like the fact that he says that the girl didn't have the maturity to understand the ramifications of what she was doing, but he saw fit to punish her with one of the most severe felonies on the books! On top of it, apparently her boyfriend's one year age difference makes all the difference in the world when it comes to understanding this sort of thing.

So yes, we will "protect you" from yourself by ensuring that you bear a stigma that will keep you from living in many parts of the country legally, seeking gainful employment in most reputable establishments and will generally reduce you to the social status of a leper. And we'll go on with our lives feeling good about ourselves for having taught you a lesson.

Ignore the fact that no crime was committed. These men from from Gideons were clearly up to no good on a piece of "public property" and the officer just had to make stuff up to get these fiendish men away from the impressionable youth:

Two men who are members of Gideons International, the Christian organization that is famous for, among other ministries, placing Bibles in motels and giving them to children, have been arrested after trying to hand out Bibles on a public sidewalk in Florida, according to a law firm.

"Neither man entered school grounds," the law firm said. "After the school's principal called police, a Monroe County sheriff's officer asked the men to leave immediately or face trespassing charges. As the men prepared to leave, the officer decided to arrest both individuals."

The officer quite clearly had no legitimate right to place them under arrest because no crime had been committed. They were on public property, not making a nuisance of themselves, freely handing out material that is protected under the first amendment to people who were interested in it. This behavior is abusive and flat out inexcusable. I don't want to "hear the other side of the story" because if they were on the sidewalk, there is no other side to the story. There is only ass-covering by local law enforcement officials as to why Dudley Do Right arbitrarily denied them their basic civil rights.

This is why I do not support any notion of sovereign immunity for law enforcement, prosecutors or judges. While I would not advocate that Christians behave this way during ministry, every private citizen should enjoy an unfettered right to knock a cop's lights out if he or she tries to arrest them like this. There was no law violated, so it should be good old fashion kidnapping.

Cathy Young has gotta be the best writer other than Radley Balko at Reason because she so often shows an understanding and appreciation for political differences that some of her peers miss. It's good to see an acknowledgment on the main page of Reason that there are two distinctly different types of libertarian, political and cultural.

Within the libertarian milieu, there is a tension between political libertarians, whose chief concern is limiting and reversing the expansion of the state and its powers, and social or cultural libertarians, whose central interest is maximizing individual opportunities and freedom of choice.

For some political libertarians, the centralized government is so unquestionably the greatest enemy that they not only oppose civil rights laws banning private race and gender discrimination but reject the post-Civil War constitutional doctrine that state governments must abide by the Bill of Rights. (That was the position espoused by the late Libertarian Party presidential candidate Harry Browne, who opposed Jim Crow laws but felt they should have been fought on the local level. State infringements on individual rights, he argued, posed a far smaller danger to liberty than expanded federal power.) Meanwhile, cultural libertarians are concerned about constraints on individual freedom not only from government but also from traditionalist familial, religious, and community institutions-the same civil institutions that conservatives see as necessary for ordered liberty to thrive.

In a lot of respects, I used to be a cultural libertarian, but as I began to study both scripture and history that position was rendered more or less untenable. Where I think a lot of libertarians go wrong is that they ignore the signs throughout human civilization's history that the state always looms large over society as the other institutions, the ones they rebel against, recede into obscurity. As this happens, freedom is lost because that is the natural course of events when the state moves in as a substitute for the family, religious organizations and other civil institutions. I don't think there any libertarians who would disagree that there is a net loss of freedom whereever the state moves in and assumes a position of authority.

The fatal flaw of cultural libertarianism is myopia. Political libertarians are generally quick to recognize that traditional conservatives of the Burke-Buckley mold are willing to at least hear what they have to say about civil liberties. Cultural libertarians, however, are the ones who are generally sympathetic to the idea of a left-liberal/libertarian alliance, which is ironic because the political left shares precious little in common with libertarians on all practical political agenda items. In fact, cultural libertarians are quick to forget that most of the political left harbors a visceral hatred of any ideology that has its roots in classical liberalism. There can ultimately be no peace between Socialists and their ideological progeny and those who rightfully recognize that Socialism leads to serfdom and an end to freedom. Political libertarians recognize that we may have strong, passionate disagreements with conservatives, but ultimately we are more similar than we are different.

History is also not on the cultural libertarian's side either. The most libertarian society in modern history, the early United States, could hardly be called culturally libertarian, and that's not accidental. There are fundamental functions that any society must engage in and reinforce to perpetuate itself, and those can be provided by either strong social institutions or strong government institutions, but they cannot be simply declared optional. The role that the family played in the early days of our republic was strong enough that much of the bumbling, incompetent and outright authoritarian structure of modern government had no case for existence. Today, the obsession with sexual freedom and personal fulfillment has so badly destabilized the family that the state has by necessity stepped in to assume that role.

The path of cultural libertarianism is liberty's suicide because it is by nature an ideology that is oriented at the present. It consumes without longterm thought because the focus is not on building up a better future, but better enjoying the present. Both types of libertarian may oppose the war on drugs, but the political libertarian will recognize that there is much social harm in encouraging a drug-addicted population based on not only the health issues, but the lessons of the Opium Wars. The cultural libertarian will find this stifling and berate the political libertarian for not being a true libertarian because he or she actually thinks that just because a freedom exists, that alone does not mean it should be exercised.

As long as the Bill Bennetts of the world are intent on using not just persuasion but force (and public funds) on behalf of their favorite virtues-promoting premarital abstinence through federal programs, banning legal protections for same-sex unions, censoring sexually explicit materials, waging the war on drugs-libertarians can be forgiven for hostility toward even noncoercive moralizing on their part. But it's important to remember that cultural progressives have not hesitated to use the government on their side: to promote liberal attitudes toward sexuality and sex roles through public education, say, or to compel landlords to rent to unmarried cohabiting couples even if they have religious objections to such a lifestyle. The backlash from the social right is directed at such social engineering as well as spontaneous cultural change.

That doesn't stop such libertarians from lumping in all noncercive moralizing into that category, even from other libertarians. On some issues, my political libertarianism is actually more extreme than that of many cultural libertarians. For example, I support scaling back all local police forces to their investigative components and replacing all general police functions with private security forces. I also support the idea of eliminating the position of state prosecutor and going to a contracting system, along with creating a system where private citizens can bring criminal charges through private attorneys without any state involvement other than the judiciary. Yet the moment I mention that I think that abortionists deserve life in prison without the possibility of parole if there isn't a clear medical case for the abortion, all of my credentials as a libertarian are shot in the head. C'est la vie.

The Hayekian principle that "neither moral nor religious ideals are proper objects of coercion" is one most Americans will readily embrace. But if libertarians are seen as championing not simply freedom of choice but a rigidly nonjudgmental attitude toward all choices-if we are seen not simply as tolerant but as indifferent to moral questions-then many people who might be sympathetic to liberty will be pushed into the arms of the authoritarians.

Well of course libertarians cannot follow this path because most people are turned off by the left's rigid non-judgmentalism. The "we're so tolerant we're intolerant" crowd. Secular libertarians would do well to appeal to religious voters who might sympathize with them by citing not only the Hebrew culture of the day in the era of the judges (practically anarcho-capitalism for its day) as well as Matthew 10 and Luke 9 which both contain clear passages against the use of coercion to effect salvation. It is a communication issue, and one that libertarians need to get better at because the message of liberty is increasingly falling on deaf ears.

They say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results everytime. I think that a strong case can be made that people who seek technological problems to sex crimes involving children are falling into that category. Despite having no reason to believe that it is possible, Senator McCain is seeing fit to resurrect the ideaof creating a large database of illegal images to help automate comparison between other images that ISPs come across:

A forthcoming bill in the U.S. Senate lays the groundwork for a national database of illegal images that Internet service providers would use to automatically flag and report suspicious content to police.

The proposal, which Sen. John McCain is planning to introduce on Wednesday, also would require ISPs and perhaps some Web sites to alert the government of any illegal images of real or "cartoon" minors. Failure to do would be punished by criminal penalties including fines of up to $300,000.

I have written on this subject before, but for the sake of clarity, I'll rehash some of the issues involved. First of all, it is extremely difficult to accurately compare two images programmatically and determine meaningful (legality) differences. It is not enough to know how statistically different they are, but you have to know why they different and what that difference means. This is not a trivial thing for the purposes of the law. You could have two images from the same softcore porn series that programmatically look dangerously similar because so much data would be similar between them. For example, one with a model taking her top off with her shirt over her head and arms raised, and another with her standing in nearly the identical pose, holding her arms over her head. In a case like that, you would end up with two pictures of potentially polar opposite legality that would nevertheless stand a good chance of looking very similar to one another to a script or program written to analyze differences between them. Automated law enforcement has been shown to be very problematic with copyright issues, and so there is little reason to be hopeful here because of the potential for so many false positives to come up.

Now, all that said, what they could do if they are more concerned with skimming through the obvious targets is create a huge archive of hash codes. A hash code is a "digital signature" that is generated by encrypting chunks of data from a file or some other data source. Done right, it's pretty unique, especially with some of the newer algorithms. If the police were to accept less from the system, it could be used to simply batch process large volumes of files to see if any of them should receive attention from an officer or company representative based on previously recognized pornography. There would be a few catches to this approach:

• It would be dependent on the police registering all of their existing volumes of seized images.
• It would only be as effective as the files previously scanned.
• It would not work on files that had been altered in any meaningful way from the original that the police had already processed.

The reason it would not work on files that had been modified is simply that hashing is a very literal process that cannot account for qualitative similarities between two files. You could take a picture and make a copy that has been darkened or brightened five percent, resized to be ten percent bigger and change the file format to PNG from JPEG and a hashing algorithm would treat the two as completely different files. Even if you came up with a hashing algorithm that worked by first simulating rendering the content on screen, then hashed the data that represented the pixels as actually rendered, it would be hit or miss to a degree that would not allow for an intelligent system, which is what McCain no doubt really wants.

I think the idea would be useful if done like this. The federal government should work with all other governments to compile an archive of illegal pornography, and hash it with very modern hashing algorithms under a publicly-scrutinized process that can be policed. A database dump of these values should then be provided at cost for the media and shipping to any ISP that wants them to police its network, and the ISP should still be covered under common carrier rules provided that it only removes content based on verifying that the content is illegal. That way, the police provide the private sector with the information they need to wage a private war on this content, and that prevents a more intrusive police presence online (which is why the politicians and appointees will hate this idea).

Others:

Right Wing News

Homosexual activists have a loving and caring way of dealing with dissenting views. They shut it down and send the people who are communicating it to prison wherever they can. They couch their efforts in the terminology of freedom and equality, but the truth is that they are the very stormtroopers and brownshirts at heart that they accuse the religious right of being. Everywhere you turn, they are engaging in most of the same behaviors that they attack others for, like forcing their views on children. Some of them would force kids as young as five and six to learn about sexual orientation issues in kindergarten if some of the legislation proposed in California is any indication. They're just sick. Totalitarians the lot of them.

I'm in my assembly language class taking notes (actually, I'm posting this in class) and see one of the potentially more "rebel" students playing Solitaire. When I was at JMU doing my Computer Science degree, we pushed the limit much further than that. I used to play emulated games in CS450 (Operating System, which I got an A in, just for the record), I think even on full screen a few times and I actually sat near the front of the class. Hell, one guy beat all of us with our SNES, Genesis, etc. (only emulators are easily to kill at a moment's notice) by busting out his Playstation emulator and playing Final Fantasy VII in class. And did I mention that he was sitting in the front row during the lecture when this was happening? So yeah, community college still has a ways to go, but I'm hopeful.

I am not Microsoft fanboy by any stretch of the imagination (except where .NET is concerned), but I remain dubious about these diagrams that are presented on ZDNet that claim to show how Windows is fundamentally more complicated than Linux based on the system calls made by IIS and Apache respectively. My reasoning for this concern is that both are user applications and as such have no direct correlation to how complicated the operating system itself is. IIS can be a complete steaming pile of canine excrement, while Windows could be growing much more sound as an operating system. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that last part to be verified, but I think it is fair to give Windows the benefit of the doubt there based on the information provided in the blog post.

While it is true that complicated systems are harder to maintain and keep secure, the diagrams that were provided to support this seemed to rely exclusively on the complexity of the calls within IIS and Apache. You can take both applications out of the equation and still judge how complex the system is. To put it succinctly for those who aren't into programming, judging the complexity of an operating system based on an important server that makes use of its capabilities is about like judging the complexity of the electrical system of a car based on how its stereo system interfaces with it. Like the server software and the operating system, you can remove the stereo system and have a working product that is still just as complex or simple as it is without the optional component.

I got curious to see what the opinions on FreeRepublic were about the Boston "bomb scare" (OMG IT'S A LITEBRIGHT!) and found some very sad examples of how modern conservatism is devolving into reactionary Fascism. While most of the comments I have seen have been cussing out the Boston authorities for not recognizing a litebright when they found one, some of them, well, deserve some attention I think. I present them to you as both entertainment and as a warning that there is always the threat of wolves in sheep's clothing on the right. Here are some samples:

I disagree. Throw the book at them. This was beyond stupid and goes into criminal.

Kids call in bomb threats at schools and disrupt classes, They are held criminally responsible. Whats good for kids is good for adults who should know better.

-sgtbono2002.

This one just defies belief, charging Cartoon Network and all involved with sedition and helping Islamic terrorists study how the Boston PD would respond to a real situation.

Really stupid stunt....How would the perpetrators feel about a stunt where something like letters are sent to their loved ones detailing how they where going to be kidnapped and killed?

-Dallas59

I don't think so. First of all, we ARE in a post 9-11 world. People who don't think this is a big deal are not understanding how much things have changed.

In addition, how were the police supposed to KNOW this was for a cartoon? It's a little-watched late night show which I only marginally knew about, and I didn't know who the characters were. Had I see one of these devices, I probably would have reported it myself.

-Miss Marple

and the jihadists are taking notes of the entire contratemps and saying to themselves...hmmm.... use a litebrite toy as the basis of your device and no one will report it after this event...

in this post 9-11 world it is ridiculous that this firm would not have thought this through. I was listening to foxnews in my car before the cartoon aspect was known and the factor that they were fixating on was WHERE the objects were placed-- a medical center, bridges, roadways, in other words INFRASTRUCTURE. in a post 9-11 world, is it a good idea to dismiss out of hand, objects that are out of place just because of harmless they look?

-xsmommy

No, the way you win is NOT by putting your head in the sand and ignoring what's going on around you. Lots of us missed what was going on with all the trial runs the 9/11 terrorists did prior to 9/11. To some, it might have been obvious, but if they'd have pointed it out, people like you would have laughed them out of the room.

Now, at least, the terrorists know that as long as they put a cartoon character (even ones as dubious as these) on their devices, no one will take them seriously. Until they explode.

-MizSterious

The poor womenfolk are cowering in fear about the "post-9/11 world that we are living in" and cannot bring themselves to recognize the idiocy of this situation? One commenter even pointed out to them that the signs that were used here were so thin that they could not possibly have been believed to hold explosive devices. They were quite obviously not explosive devices. At worst, they were simply nuissances, but don't let that get in the way of your fear that you too might be a victim of terrorism. If you are, chances are it will be because your team of crack police ninjas cannot differentiate between a hoax and a threat, which means that they won't be able to handle the real situation properly should it ever happen.

The dynamic is part of the cultural wars. The Liberal socialist whackos think it is funny to beard the police and bomb disposal teams, because they don't take the Islamofascists seriously.

As far as I am concerned its like the kid in school who pulls the fire alarm, just to sit back and watch the engines, firemen, and police arrive, and get time out of class.

There is no difference betweeen these two, both are juvenile activities with risk associated with them for responders.

In addition, intelligence is available as I have stated before, to the Islamofascist enemy.

Now a bomb will have to go off in a City, before anyone will take a threat seriously.That is the price for crying wolf.

-Candor7

The point of this was not to point fingers at conservatives and go "aha! They are all Fascists!" but rather to point out some blatant wingnut behavior. Being generally a right-leaning libertarian, I think I am allowed to point out the stupid behavior of my alleged fellow travelers of the right and viciously mock their fear mongering. Stuff like this needs to be exposed to the rest of the libertarian and old conservative sides of the right because it cannot be allowed to insidiously work its way into the right. Those that would encourage Americans to live like this are traitors to the idea of what it means to be an American, which can be summed up in the New Hampshire state motto: live free or die.

The America I was raised to believe in would stick its middle finger right back in the terrorists' faces and fight right back. That is not the America that was scared to death in Boston by litebrights.

Joe Farah makes some good arguments about why conservatism is largely a dead movement today. These two jumped out in particular because they are problems that I have had in dealing with conservatives who cannot face up to the reality of where conservatism is headed (the trash heap of history). I'm not so confident, however, that they will ever be understood, let alone considered by most conservatives because they tend to lack any sort of capacity for introspection in their beliefs and what they do.

But notice what conservatives did while this war raged - nothing. They didn't buy newspapers. They didn't infiltrate the culture to ensure their ideas could compete on an even playing field. They just kept looking for the next political messiah to lead them to the Promised Land. In other words, they played defense.

They can't help it. It's their nature.

There's another fundamental problem with conservatism. No one can really define it. It means different things to different people at different times. Therefore, the term itself is subject to abuse. Notice that the socialist dictators in Beijing are sometimes called "conservatives." Iranian mullahs who offer the world jihad are "conservatives." In the days of the Soviet Union, those running the Kremlin were "conservatives."

What many Americans do not understand is that the conservative movement is a very new thing - less than 50 years old. It served a purpose during the last five decades, but I suggest it is time to rethink identity and strategy. You know what they say about the definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Conservatives still buy the same cable tv packages that they denounce as being hostile to their family values. They still patronize the mainstream music and movie industries, whose works they constantly deplore. They vote with their dollars against the very things that they hold dear, and why? Because like a stubborn, ideological brat, they insist that world should change rather than their behavior toward the world. They even continue to largely unquestioningly support the public education system, insisting on "fixing it," rather than pulling their kids out and putting them in schools that reflect their values. That's what I don't understand. Why are they so comfortable with subjecting themselves and their kids to things that they know are hostile to their stated values? Is it laziness, fear or are they actually comfortable with the devils that beset them?

Beyond all of that, "conservative" really does lack any sort of meaningful definition. A lot of "conservatives" are in fact nothing more than "moderates." They have fundamentally accepted the conclusions and many of the agenda items of the socialists and their ideological progeny. The disagreement comes in at the extent to which they accept it. For example, many conservatives today accept the welfare state as a "necessary evil" and take issue with efforts to outright abolish it. It never occurs to them that they have accepted values which are uniquely socialist and which have no legitimate heritage in America's traditions, which they claim to want to conserve.

I have mostly refrained from commenting on the appointment of Amynda Marcotte to be Propaganda Minister for John Edwards because I have had other things to write about and do in my personal time, but this post from Protein Wisdom does her selection the justice it deserves:

I don't care that Amanda's working for John Edwards, and you're right, Libby, that I'm not drawn from the pool of potential voters for the Bunnyman. I don't even suppose that it necessarily reflects terribly badly on Edwards that his staff has made such a bizarre gaffe in choosing the Edwardian Blogatrix to run their blog. I simply believe that Marcotte is a delusional bitch who manages to shoehorn by deliberate violence any and all evidence into her bizarre ideology of victim and victimizer.

The very fact that a woman like Amynda was chosen to head up Edwards' public relations campaign among those who read blogs suggests that his candidacy will be short and largely amusing. Besides the fact that he is the ultimate liberal hypocrite, simultaneously living in unrestrained wealth while preaching class warfare and "two Americas," that a woman as shrill and prone to profane name calling was named to be the one to write for him will do wonders for his electability. He already has problems reaching out to voters in the "moderate" camp, let alone anything to the right of that. Now he has a propagandist who is famous for her paranoid, ideological, diseased rants that are straight out of a Marxist screed against everyone to the right of her (which is to say, anyone to the right of Stalin).

I think the whole thing is the sort of situation that is only possible in politics. You have someone who has ranted and raved about the plight of blacks and women of all sorts in the South, yet she is working for a true patrician from the "Southern white male oppressor class." Is there a point of brazenness where it is no longer hypocrisy, but a sign that you were just trying to be ironic? Surely she has reached that point by now, staking out a new frontier in selling out one's principles.

Here's a local copy in case the YouTube download ever gets taken down for whatever reason. You can view it locally with the VLC media player which is also a great thing to have for a variety of movie file formats besides Flash Video (what YouTube uses).

Unlike this woman, the pregnant woman in that video did not do anything severe enough to warrant being placed under arrest like that. If the woman miscarried that child because of the delay in medical attention, not because of the officers' callous behavior toward her, they ought to be held personally responsible for manslaughter.

There was a day and age where "law and order conservatives" would have shat a brick that a pregnant woman in distress would be arrested and thrown in jail over something so trivial while an innocent life hang in the balance. Part of the degeneration of modern America is that what passes for "law and order" today is mindless, pavlovian obedience to the law and reverence of its enforcers. In a more just world, we would be at a minimum seeing these thugs taken off the force and flogged, and if their actions contributed to this miscarriage, getting prosecuted for manslaughter.

Ok, so the pagans of Greece and elsewhere have a great deal of grievances against their "Christian oppressors." This sort of crap can't be allowed to go unanswered, so I pose a simple question. Why is it that the "crimes of the Christian state" are different from the crimes of any state throughout history? More specifically, the Greek pagans are quick to point out that the newly christianized Roman state began a campaign of systematically shutting down the pagan activities. How is this any different from the previously pagan Roman state that did the same to Christians, and far worse such as using them for entertainment in the coliseum? When pagans threw Christian men, women and children to the lions and violently suppressed their religion, I guess that's no big deal.

What history shows those who are willing to learn from it is that the religion of the day rarely tends to impact society in some ways. So the christianized Roman state persecuted Greek pagans. So what? The same government, when paganism was the official religion of the day, did the same to Christians. This whole argument of "which is worse" completely misses the point that functional governments are secular at their heart and only use religion as a way of binding together the governed and to justify their actions. I don't say that as a knock against religion, but simply as a fact of life. Governments exploit any and every powerful idea they can get ahold of to maintain power.

So what you end up with is one of two conclusions. The pagan religions were as bad or worse as the church, or religion was not the primary motivation behind the persecutions (rather, sadism and pointing to a "common enemy").

In Amynda's sick little world, the only reason that the Lacrosse players from Duke University are not sitting behind bars is that in the South, a white man can get away with pretty much anything against a black or any type of woman. Funny how it often ends up that such victimization politics end up backfiring, pitting one protected group against another. That's what happens when you blame one group for the evils of society, conveniently forgetting that the capacity to victimize your fellow human beings is not the exclusive domain of any group except evil people. That's why I point this out to remind everyone that sociological theories that say one group can get away with anything, while everyone else can't, just don't jive with reality:

In a decision that shocked both sides - and left the prosecutor in tears - a Los Angeles County judge yesterday released four black teens to their parents to serve 60 days of house arrest for the severe beating of three young white women on Halloween night.

The attack on Laura Schneider, 21, Michelle Smith, 19, and Loren Hyman, 19, which occurred in in the Bixby Knolls section of Long Beach, was carried out by a large group of black teens - as many as 30, according to reports. The upscale neighborhood is known for lavish Halloween displays and has long attracted crowds.

For my part, I blame much of this on the "cult of childhood." The type of people who want to prolong childhood and don't want to force kids to grow up and start behaving like adults by the time they're about ready to be teenagers. The longer that society allows "children to be children," the longer the acceptance of responsibility is delayed and the more opportunities for turning young people into violent criminals there will be. Teenagers aren't children. There is no reason to show these violent criminals mercy. Those who are their age or old have no excuse to victimize their fellow man.

I was actually trying to watch some TV earlier, and flipped through MTV showing Beavis and Butthead. I watched a few minutes of it and thought about how lame it seems today. It is not even in the same sport as South Park or Family Guy, let alone the same ballpark. At best it could be called tame and just stupid, but people made such a big stink about it in the early 90s. I guess that really shows us something about how desensitized we've gotten as a country over the years. My parents used to get quite upset about me watching that, but I don't think that today it'd even register as a blip on most parents' radars.

By now pretty much everyone who hasn't been living under a rock has heard about the recent case in Boston of the local government making complete asses of themselves over litebrights. They are circling the wagons and seriously prosecuting the guys behind the viral marketing campaign. Anyone feel safer knowing that not only do we have such buffoons in charge of "public safety," but they are so proud and simple-minded that they cannot even admit to their mistakes and learn from them? To me, the very fact that they are not simply saying, "ok guys, you got us, please don't do this again," but really trying to stick it to them makes me feel less safe. Might as well not even have a government in that particular area if that's the sort of government that you have to have.

I've been sizing up some hardware for building a new gaming console. I have a bunch of roms that I can play for the Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis and the N64. It's still a little bit crazy when you think that for $400 today, you can build a system that is probably literally 100 times faster than the hardware we had fun with back then with our video games. For about $400 I can build a small, flex ATX-based PC that runs a 800Mhz-1.3Ghz Via C3 processor, 256MB-512MB of slow DDR RAM, 40GB hard drive, two XBox 360 controllers for it and a bluetooth setup for connecting a keyboard and mouse to it for switching between emulators.

How times have changed.

Well, I have started taking my assembly language class at Northern Virginia Community College. It doesn't seem to be so fast paced right now, but being only one night a week, that can be deceptive, I suppose. Thankfully, I have a degree in Computer Science already so so far there has been nothing new for me. I've even seen enough assembly language from my Computer Organization class that I get the gist of the professor's examples right off the bat. It's one of the few times that I have actually wanted to take a class in a while.

I have two good reasons for taking the class. First, I want to learn the material. Second, it'll help me get into a good master's program for Computer Science and/or Software Engineering. I was originally looking at George Washington University, but that was way too expensive for me, even with my employer's tuition assistance program. I don't think a single semester at GWU would be covered by a full year's worth of that grant; I'd be a few thousand dollars short as I recall. George Mason is where I am probably going to go to. That or Virginia Tech's Northern Virginia center. The advantage with GMU is that it has a lot of overlap between its Software Engineering and Computer Science curriculum so I'm thinking that I could actually end up working on two degrees at once.

At some point a PhD in Computer Science or a similar field might be in my future. It would have been sooner if I had done better at JMU. The reasons for that are myriad, many of them environmental, few of them related to the material. Oh well, one step at a time, I suppose!

**Update**: I should point out now that Rachel has also taken Assembly Language and done very well in it. Yes, my better half has taken x86 Assembly and handled it just fine. Maybe that explains why she's so craaaaazy sometimes ;)

Guess who is probably going to end up being the turd in the ol' proverbial punchbowl:

We don't presume to know what happened Wednesday night when Cpl. Keith Washington shot the two men making a delivery for Marlo Furniture at his home in Accokeek. We don't assume that the two men he shot, Brandon D. Clark and Robert White, were angels; Mr. White evidently has an arrest record, and Mr. Clark also has had a brush or two with the law.

But we do know that Cpl. Washington has been the subject of repeated complaints about his on- and off-duty behavior. The common thread is that he turns routine encounters into highly charged, violent incidents. In separate meetings of a homeowners association on whose board he served three years ago, Cpl. Washington assaulted a property manager, shoved the association's treasurer and berated the association's president, it was alleged. Earlier, Cpl. Washington was sued for wrongfully arresting and abusing a man who protested Cpl. Washington's allegedly rough treatment of a motorist involved in a fender bender; an initial $260,000 judgment against him was overturned on appeal.

Cpl. Washington is a friend and political ally of County Executive Jack B. Johnson. In 2004, Mr. Johnson named Cpl. Washington to the newly created job of deputy director of homeland security for the county. At the time, we were among those questioning Mr. Johnson's judgment in appointing someone of Cpl. Washington's evidently deficient interpersonal skills.

While they defend Washington on the grounds that the two men he shot had "brushes with the law" and one had a "criminal record," they have to also admit that the esteemed corporal has a history of having to be bailed out by the local government or judiciary for violent situations that he caused. They range from abuse of his authority to search suspects to "allegedly" beating up on the staffers of a homeowner's association. Just the kind of reputation that you would want in a police officer. Nothing questionable about his background, right? As always, you need not look too far into it to realize that with a buddy like the County Executive back him, he no doubt feels that he can act with impunity.

And to you liberals, I say this is the sort of guy you will end up trusting to have an exclusive right to carry firearms within your community.

And to the conservatives, I say this is the sort of guy who will be busting in people's doors enforcing your private morality on them.

Think about things like this the next time you get too cozy with the system. There are bad apples like him, and the system looks out for its own. Notice how the police department is quick to defend him, and not give any credence to the idea that he may be the weak link that threatens their reputation? Bureaucrats don't hang their own out to dry unless they have to. It should tell you a lot that they didn't include this "colorful jackass" in the same "suspicious" category that they put the guys he shot in.

Was a small amount of speed worth the cost to this kid's family?

Nine-year-old Darrin Davis of Douglasville, Georgia, called 911 after he found a small amount of speed hidden in his parents' bedroom, because, as he told a reporter,

"At school, they told us that if we ever see drugs, call 911 because people who use drugs need help. . . . I thought the police would come get the drugs and tell them that drugs are wrong. They never said they would arrest them. It didn't say that in the video. The police officer held me by the shoulder and made me watch them put handcuffs on my mom and dad and put them in the police car. I always thought police were honest and told the truth. But in court, I heard them tell the judge that I wanted my mom and dad arrested. That is a lie. I did not tell them that."

The arrest wrecked his parents' lives. They both lost their jobs, a bank threatened to foreclose on their homes, and the father was kept in jail for three months. Darrin became so agitated that he burnt down part of a neighbor's house because, he said, he wanted to be with his father in jail. Darrin's parents later filed for divorce, alleging that the strain caused by the DARE bust was a major part in destroying their marriage, according to the Davises' attorney, Jay Bouldin.

There are a few issues here that really piss me off. First of all, a small amount of any drug in the house is not inherently worth the potential social damage that can come from arresting a parent. Under a fair system, the police and legal system would weigh the cost to the family and society for this sort of action. Consequences are not 1:1, rather the consequence of this can be several lives ruined in their own way, such as a child denied a stable family because of an arrest over recreational drug use. Second, I am going to go with the kid here and believe him that he did not want his parents to be arrested and locked away. Little kids just don't think like. It is not normal to encounter a child that young who not only understands what calling the police in a case like this would do, but actually wants his or her parent(s) taken out of the home and prosecuted, especially over something they cannot see hurting anyone. Finally, there is the obvious police state issue with teaching kids to be informants on their parents in the name of fighting the great social ill du jour.

If it were not drugs, it could be something else. It could be guns, which are legal to own under the US Constitution and cannot be banned due to the fourteenth amendment, yet are somehow banned in some jurisdictions. Perhaps it requires too much exercise of mental abstraction, but drug use is itself no more dangerous than the possession of a firearm or a large vehicle. The danger is purely contextual. Left-liberals often do believe about guns the way that conservatives believe about drug use. In fact the details of their arguments are very similar, ranging to the mere possession of them being dangerous to the public. Today it's drug use, tomorrow a liberal government gets them to tell the police about the "illegal" firearm they own in their Washington D.C. apartment. At what point does it become too petty? What is the defining, logical point where children should be encouraged to become little state informants?

This is, in my opinion, the sickest part of all of this:

DARE-caused drug arrests devastate families. Peterson observed:

"I've talked to seven or eight families in which the children informed against their parents. In every single case, the child is now in professional therapy. The intention was to help the child. The net result was that they destroyed the family - and in particular the child is the one who feels all the guilt."

As in the case of Isaac Singletary, the drug warriors won't care about such things. Collateral damage such as children who are traumatized by these arrests and innocent, elderly men shot dead by undercover cops doing drug deals on the old man's property, are just sad stories of the "price we pay" for a "drug-free America." Funny how America is still nowhere near "drug-free" despite all of these tragedies.

Mr. Minority seems to think that the recent power outage in Alaska must be the work of global warming since he can't blame it on Bush. I have news for him, he need only take a closer look at the mugshot of the perpetrator to figure out who is really behind this. Already he has forgotten the age old truth that the Jews are the scourge of the Earth and behind every conspiracy and monstrous deed. Who else, but a Jewish eagle would try to carry an entire deer head? Only a Jew would be that greedy. It's the Joooz, I'm telling you. They're even taking over our national symbol!

It's bad enough that they've taken over our media, now they're stealing our deer heads from garbage dumps. Is there no shortage of fiendish scheming on how to screw the gentile? I'm telling you, there is nothing new under the sun. The Jews are even behind global warming and George Bush. They're behind EVERYTHING!

Since I often bash police officers for double standards, I am going to take the time to link to this story about a police chief who applied his own standards to himself. He passed a parked school bus that was letting kids off. So what did he do? He pulled over, wrote up a full ticket with fine and license points, and issued it to himself. Why did he do this? According to the reporter he bluntly said it wouldn't be fair to the public if he held them to a different standard than he'd hold himself to. He would have pulled someone over and written them up for that, so he did what was fair which was to write himself up. That's the kind of cop we need more of.

After looking through some of the talking points of this anti-messianic judaism website, I am left thinking that there are some basic questions that rarely ever get answered by the "authorities" on why Christianity is a false heir to Judaism:

• If the Jewish leaders of the time following Jesus' death and the conversions of thousands of Jews had the body of Christ, why did they not break the stone at the tomb and invite all of the believers to see the body? The Romans would not have been an obstacle to this, and in fact their military presence and the girth of the stone in place would have provided enough of a reason to believe that the body would have been in their possession were there no resurrection. This is the simplest question. Why didn't they just bring down the people peacefully and say, "Ecco, corpus" and the equivalent in Hebrew?
• Why is it that the most devastating assault in Jewish history short of the Holocaust happened only a generation after Jesus' death and the passing of the first generation of Jews who heard His message? I'm just saying that if that isn't a sign that their leadership made a horrific mistake in the eyes of God, like killing the "suffering servant" of Isaiah 53 who happened to be the Messiah, I don't know what is. If this is not the case, I think a better case can be made for any sane human being who is a Jew to abandon Judaism on the grounds that the Messiah will never come if he hasn't already, and Judaism has a disturbing habit of putting people in the the wrong place at the wrong time and making them pay dearly.

  To back this up, I offer two points. One in the Old Testament and one in the New Testament)
  

  
  
  • 49 The LORD will bring a nation against you from far away, from the ends of the earth, like an eagle swooping down, a nation whose language you will not understand, 50 a fierce-looking nation without respect for the old or pity for the young. 51 They will devour the young of your livestock and the crops of your land until you are destroyed. They will leave you no grain, new wine or oil, nor any calves of your herds or lambs of your flocks until you are ruined. 52 They will lay siege to all the cities throughout your land until the high fortified walls in which you trust fall down. They will besiege all the cities throughout the land the LORD your God is giving you. -Deuteronomy 28; More history on this, including on the Roman army that carried this out here.
  
  
  • 20"When you see Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, you will know that its desolation is near. 21Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let those in the city get out, and let those in the country not enter the city. 22For this is the time of punishment in fulfillment of all that has been written. 23How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! There will be great distress in the land and wrath against this people. 24They will fall by the sword and will be taken as prisoners to all the nations. Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. -Gospel of Luke 21
  
  
  
  I guess you can cop out of that by saying that Jesus did not precisely predict when that would happen, even though it happened in 70AD, only 37 years after His ministry. Jesus' additions to the Deuteronomy prophecy have actually largely come to pass. Even today, Jerusalem is kept out of the state of Israel's hands. It has not been held in earnest by the Jews since the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD; it has belonged to one gentile nation or another, and even today it cannot be said to be firmly under Jewish control.
  


• How do Jewish leaders such as this rabbi explain how Christians can successfully call on the power of the Holy Spirit in dealing with spritual evil, if the Christian scripture on the Holy Spirit being sent to us is a fabrication? Seriously, there are enough cases of this being done that between Jews and Christians, I think you can have a basis for dialog on this subject. How would he care to explain how a Christian, but not a Jew, can call on the Holy Spirit to drive out demons? From a little digging I have done online, the Jewish history of exorcism is barely a blip on the radar. Part of the reason this is important is that there are enough references to dealing with such evil in the Old Testament that it begs the question of how do you deal with it. If Jesus is not the messiah, then why is it that the authority He gave over evil works when a faithful Christian confronts a bonafide demon?