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.

This is what happens when the law selectively infantilizes young people while in other situations holding them accountable as adults. Instead, society would be better off if there was a legal expectation that by the age of twelve, that any non-retarded individual could sufficiently understand the moral imperatives against most bad behavior to be held guilty of any felony that a full adult could be held accountable for committing.

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 th