March 2007 Archives

Bitch lied, her loved died:

(March 30, 2007)--A Fort Worth man who killed his wife's lover after finding them together has escaped murder charges from a grand jury.

Instead, the Tarrant County grand jury indicted Darrell Roberson's wife, Tracy Roberson, accusing her of causing the shooting by claiming she was being raped.

The 35-year-old wife is charged with manslaughter in the death of Devin LaSalle.

I actually feel a bit sorry for her "lover" because of the fact that she clearly invited him into the situation with a text message (read the rest of the article) and then immediately accused him of a serious crime against her when she got caught. For all intents and purposes, she dumped the guy out in the trash the moment that things got too hot and heavy for her to be able to handle. This sort of accusation is loaded enough that it's great to see the government prosecute her, and try to secure for her a very stiff prison sentence. What she did was, in effect, manipulate the situation so that her lover would be murdered so hopefully her husband wouldn't find out that she cheated on him. Bad enough that she wasn't honest about it ("I don't love you anymore") but she had to trick her husband into murdering her lover!

Funny thing is that this is precisely how this should be working out. Her intention was on some level murderous; she clearly intended to allow her lover to lose his life at her husband's hands to clean up the situation for her. Now if only we would add the principle from the Mosaic Law, that if you use the courts for the same reason, that you will be sentenced to the punishment you would have falsely imposed on another, we'd be all set!

Gotta love their priorities:

FLINT, Mich. (AP) - Flint children under the age of 17 will be banned from public places during daytime hours under a new ordinance approved by the City Council.

The curfew will be in effect from 9:00 to 2:00 on school days. It goes into effect in about a month.

Councilman Sheldon Neeley says statistics show that more than 60 percent of Flint ninth graders will not graduate.

The ordinance allows police to arrest a child who is supposed to be in school. Parents who do not pick up their child within three hours of being notified would be guilty of a misdemeanor.

Parents also must pay the cost of arresting and detaining the child if he or she is convicted. A proposal that would have allowed police officers to return truant students to school was defeated.

Shades of the Islamic habit of not allowing women outside of their home without an adult escort come to mind. So, I wonder where this leaves homeschoolers and emancipated minors. Most likely they are going to be fair game for any police officer who is looking to make his quota, thanks to the far-sighted legislation passed by the esteemed city council of Flint.

It is really nothing more than a way for them to rip off the public, to make more money at the expense of young people and their parents. If a school system has a sixty percent failure and drop out rate, that is a problem that goes well beyond truancy. At that point, it is a cultural and institutional problem. What the city would be better off doing would be to ramp up law enforcement of other criminal activities and scaling back welfare benefits for those who don't even bother to graduate from high school. Taking away the "safety net" from people who don't even care about being productive citizens would help.

This will definitely make for the old "Ver are yoor pahpaz" situation. Even people who look young, but who are in fact over eighteen will be harassed by the police as they try to enforce this law. And just remember, the city council clearly doesn't care about simply forcing kids to go to school; if they did, they wouldn't have passed up on sending the kids and teens back to school instead of using them to ransome some cash out of their parents.

Note: Normally I don't post an entire story out of respect for the original writer, so that they can get a hit, but this one was too small for me to not post the entirety of the article.

Naturally, I cannot and will not identify my employer, team, product, etc. because that is one of the cardinal sins of blogging. However, it would appear that we have successfully cajoled and coerced one of our critical Weblogic servers to actually work with a myriad number of configuration changes. Oh, I am still going to be working here tomorrow for the better part of the day, but things are starting to look up now. Hell, we might actually make the deadline, despite having the testing hardware for only a few days. The one thing I am learning from all of this is that the J2EE world really is often too complicated for its own good. We need something that is more lightweight, something that doesn't require a lot of administrative skills to be comfortable with getting to work. I can't help but think that Python would make a far better language for rapid enterprise development than Java. If even half of the resources that went into Java, went into Python, this sort of development would be a lot easier.

Okay, accuse me of being a fanboy and suffering from an affliction of low expectations, but I am happy to see that HaikuOS is not only continuing to mature, but that at least one bug that has vexed me as a tinkerer, the inability to restart the terminal after you close it, has been apparently fixed. I have actually booted HaikuOS natively in the past on my now dead Compaq Presario which used to be my whipping PC for whenever I needed to do something experimental. It's got a ways to go, but HaikuOS may be really usable on some meaningful level in another six months to a year now that it has become part of the Google Summer of Code. Why should non-geeks care? Because Linux suck as a desktop, and Vista, while beautiful, is suffering from a control freak mentality and I/O performance problems. HaikuOS is open source, it's fast, and like BeOS, it just works (when HaikuOS works since it is still technically in an alpha state).

You don't need to install any new operating system to try it out. Just get the VMWare Player, and download my zipped copy of HaikuOS. VMWare Player will let you try it out without even restarting your PC. It won't be running as a native operating system, since it's in a virtual machine, and it will be slower than it is when booted natively, but it's still an interesting OS to try out. And one of the best parts about this is that you don't need to worry about whether or not you break anything ;)

It's good to see the Rutherford Institute take on a case involving the pernicious double standard between law enforcement and the general public:

On November 6, 2006, Sgt. Hale, a 25-year-old Virginia resident who served two tours of duty in Iraq and was honorably discharged the previous January with a service-related injury, was in Wilmington to participate in a "Toys for Tots" event and housesit for a friend. At approximately 4:00 p.m., three unmarked law enforcement vehicles with DSP and WPD officers pulled up to the house and numerous officers stormed the porch where Sgt. Hale was sitting with a mother and her two children.

The complaint alleges that even though Sgt. Hale was unarmed, offered no resistance and made no threatening motions, he was tasered three separate times by the officers, rendering him immobile. While paralyzed from the electric shock, Sgt. Hale was allegedly ordered to put his hands in the air; when he failed to do so, he was subsequently shot three times in the chest. The lawsuit alleges that law enforcement agencies had no evidence that Sgt. Hale was violating the law or was wanted on any outstanding warrants.

I wonder where that mother and her two children were when an unarmed man was tasered three times and then fatally shot. Think about that one for a second. You have a case where not only did the police brutalize and murder an unarmed war veteran, but they probably did it fast enough that the mother was not able to shield her children from the violence that was being unleashed against an innocent man in front of them. Probably a good lesson on one of the facts of life that even many adults will not embrace, that we have a system of government in this country that is for all intents and purposes out of control.

The reason I bring this case up is that it is the closest thing I have seen in a very long time of a pure example of law enforcement out of control, when it comes to these sorts of raids and uses of force. I don't need to bring up the existence of systematically screwed up departments, officers who act like thugs outside of work, etc. Those are things that have existed since the beginning of professional law enforcement in the United States. What stuck out to me about this case is that not only do you have a clean-cut, honest, law-abiding war veteran with no history of violence of criminality or violence getting murdered by the police, but it happened in a way that simply cannot be justified. The headline could literally read, "police officers murder law abiding citizen for no reason" and it would actually be an appropriate headline.

The reason I am not giving the police any benefit of the doubt is that the Rutherford Institute is a very conservative group. For them to take on a case like this is an indictment of the situation; they are not cop haters like the ACLU.

What would help in a situation like this, though, would be if they could bring private prosecutions to bear. If the Rutherford Institute could not only sue the hell out of them, but secure the death penalty for the officers involved via the same lawsuit, we might see more justice in cases like this.

Stuff like this is why not a single major talking point on the evangelical Christian agenda has been advanced. Dobson won't support Fred Thompson, not because he has political views that are hostile to the political goals of conservatives, social conservatives in particular, but because he is pretty sure that Thompson isn't a Christian.

Call me naive, call me anti-Christ, but I could have sworn that we are choosing a political leader for a secular state, not the next emperor of Christian Constantinople, an American evangelical pope or something along those lines. Isn't it just a little more important to have a President with solidly conservative and at least mildly libertarian credentials, who is a secularist at heart, than have a President who is a professing Christian, but has an affinity for Socialism and globalism? Apparently not according to Dobson.

I'm not familiar with Thompson's voting record when he was a senator. Apparently a lot of people think he is a principled conservative, which makes him sound a lot better than most of the other Republican contenders at first glance. Considering the fact that Dobson is down with George Bush, a man who has been largely repudiated by actual conservatives, I just don't trust anything that Dobson has to say about endorsing politicians.

Truer words about the relationship between the people and the government have rarely been spoken:

The real reason is simple: Where does the government, the corrupt ministers, the ruthless SS officers and their soldiers come from? Aren't they egyptians? Don't they come from egyptian families and households? Aren't they born and raised here like the rest of us? Well, what does that exactly say about us? Whether we like it or not, the government is a reflection of the people. So if the government is ruthless, corrupt and dictatorial, what does that say about the people? What does it say about the parents of the police officers that order their soldiers to beat up and sexually assault women? What does it say about the families of those corrupt government officials who sign away our future and that of our children for a bunch of dirty money? What does it say about a nation that produces such a government, and accepts it, even as it plunders the country and enslaves its people?

It's a depressing thought, but it's the way that things work. This is why I say that if we cannot trust the common man with powerful weaponry, how can we trust the police and military to use them responsibly? The government is a function of the people that it is derived from; it has no life or moral direction outside of that. It's a hard truth to realize, but every people gets the government that it deserves when they have a government of their own.

Clearly, Egypt is much farther along the path of having a violent and depraved government than we are in the United States, but it is a warning for us to watch. In cases like this, the people don't really want law and order. What they want is power and authority. Things like this are only possible when a nation has given up on the rule of law at the core of its culture, and allowed a semblance of law, that can be used to conveniently justify whatever one wants to do, to rule in the place of real law and order.

Stuff like this is quite possibly the single hardest to defeat argument that the governments of the world could create to bring a big police presence to the Internet and regulate the hell out of everything. A bunch of nasty, pornographic and violent comments about an innocent blogger. While I think her fearfulness is, quite frankly, approaching the point of hyperbole (get a gun and learn how to use it, if you're that scared!), it does illustrate how fear and danger can be created online in a way that has offline consequences. That's part of the problem. It's all on display, and you have no idea whether these guys are serious. Only the law of averages is on your side. Still, there are so many people who just throw crap like that out there, that she shouldn't worry. The odds are not against her that these guys want anything more than to make her cower in her house, which is what she seems to be doing.

The simple solution that would work is to become a good shooter, and let it be known that she will terminate anyone who comes after her with extreme prejudice. There is nothing that has been shown to be better than that at getting people with violent inclinations to behave like civilized human beings.

Well, some good news for the family of Julie Amero, a woman who was arrested and prosecuted for failing to stop popup porn ads from being displayed on the PC that she was in her classroom when she was a substitute teacher at the school. After much grief, it appears that the system is finally starting to back down and concede partial defeat. The local media, on the other hand, is continuing to fullfil its role as a good defender of Der Staat by attacking her for being just plain dumb:

Whether Amero was purposefully exploring pornographic Web sites, or was the victim of a technological assault, is irrelevant. She was the adult entrusted with the safety of those children, and she failed.

The simple explanation for the rest of the behavior they accuse her of is that she was embarrassed and terrified of what was going on. Ever seen someone who knows nothing about how computers work get hit by an unholy shit storm of popups? The look of helplessness alone is enough to evoke sympathy in most civilized people. If we prosecuted people for being stupid and technological neophytes, that alone would see the demise of the mainstream media overnight, but I suspect that that point is lost on the editorialist.

Who happens to be anonymous. Go figure...

A woman who doesn't have the basic sense to just rip out the power chord in a case like that shouldn't be teaching. That part they have right, but not the reason. If she is not able to evaluate the situation and just do something like that, it's dubious what sort of value she brings to the school anyway, is it not? Still, that doesn't make her a malicious skank out to corrupt the morals of the yooots of America. It just means that her intelligence and powers of reasoning are sufficiently suspect that she probably shouldn't be teaching.

Funny thing too the editorial conveniently left out while trying to smear this poor woman's good name. What was going on in her classroom while she was on break? No doubt, the same computer scientists who are smearing her, would hang this guy out to dry. This is why we need the blogosphere, I suppose.

Read this and this and tell me that Gotwalt isn't guilty as charged by the family of the man he shot and killed. The guy destroyed almost all of the evidence of his involvement, hid the weapon, lied his butt off to the police when they initially asked him what his involvement was, and... no investigation into whether or not he is a cold-blooded killer.

His behavior is not that of an innocent man. Innocent men do not cover up the evidence of their actions the way that Gotwalt did. It's just that simple. Maybe he actually is innocent, but his behavior should have sent off a red flag to the police investigator that there was more to this story than what he was telling them. To me, that lends credibility to the claim that the Fairfax PD and the prosecutor, Robert Horan, known for his weak treatment of government agents who use excessive force and hurt "mere civilians," were trying to protect the guy. Either that, or they're just flat out dumb as hell.

What I want to know is why the police did not treat the shooting as a homocide when it was obvious that Cornejo was shot in the back. That is pretty much always a homocide, and the sort of shooting that should make them beat the bushes for corroborating witnesses. Seems to me they didn't look too hard to find contradicting witnesses, now did they?

Allegedly, my ass!

At 5'4" tall and 115 pounds, Karolina is half the size of Police Officer Anthony Abbate, who is 6'1" tall and 250 pounds. Abbate allegedly went behind the bar, threw Karolina to the ground and then repeated punched and kicked her. A security camera caught the attack on tape.

What is the point of even trying to say that he is the suspect, when they catch it on videotape? I know all of the politically correct justifications, but there is no allegation here, it's caught on tape; the perp was caught red-handed (pun intended). This crap that the media pulls where they give people who are caught in the act the benefit of the doubt is absurd. It's like they're honestly expecting us to believe that despite all evidence to the contrary, it really could have been the evil doppelganger who committed the offense.

Now, that little rant aside, there is an educational matter here for those who choose to see it:

"It was disgusting. It was despicable conduct. Nobody should have that done to them and the fact that he is a police officer is even more damning," said Supt. Phil Cline, Chicago Police Dept.

According to court records, Abbate did not have a clean record. He was arrested for DUI in 1992 and named in a federal lawsuit for beating a man under arrest in 1999. The man later died.

This is the natural consequence of how the system looks out for its own. The man was shown to be a true menace by beating up someone who was already in custody to the point that he died from the injuries. It should have ended there with the officer being arrested, charged with manslaughter or worse, and then convicted. The system could have nipped this in the bud by taking care of the problem when it first arose, and now there is another victim and the reputation of the department has been further smeared by this lowlife trash.

I have heard that many police departments do psychological examinations of their applicants, which if true is a good sign, but it can't end there. The only way for police departments to protect themselves and the public from people like this guy is to treat any police officer who "breaks bad" the way that a responsible homeowner treats a dog who does the same: get rid of it, and ensure that no more harm can be done. The department should always err on the side of caution, and treat any officer who shows the warning signs of criminality with the suspicion and distrust that any sane person would treat an attack dog that has bared its fangs at children without cause.

Hell has frozen over:

NEW YORK (AP) - A judge sentenced a man to 240 years in prison Wednesday for taking hostages in a bar and telling patrons that "white people are going to burn tonight."

State Supreme Court Justice Maxwell Wiley told Steven Johnson, 39, who is black, that he had forfeited his "right to live in society."

Johnson, 39, was convicted March 1 of attempted murder, assault and other charges, including some designated as hate crimes.

A black man has actually been charged with hate crimes against white people? Such a thing is normally unheard of, but there you have it. Whether or not these will stand on appeals is anyone's guess, knowing how the judiciary can often pull crap explanations out of its posterior, but it's still an interesting development nonetheless. It's the sort of thing that might actually bring about some racial reconciliation if carried out enough. As I have said before, until minorities are held to the same anti-racism standards that white people are, namely "hate breeds hate," there will not even be a hope of a genuine second breakthrough in race relations in America, like the first one that people like Martin Luther King brought about.

The defense attorney is trying to pass this off as a mental illness, and the result of sexual abuse, rather than what it is, pure racism. By his own words, he was motivated by a pure hatred of white people. He might be able to be legitimately called insane if he thought that white people should all die because his dog got run over, as that would be a firm warning sign that he is detached from reality. This, however, smacks of nothing less than cold-blooded, pre-meditated murder, something that is evil, not insane.

(Disclaimer: I do not support hate crimes laws, but I do support equal suffering under them while we have them.)

I found this hit while I was looking at my sitemeter stats. Since when did the Palestinians' territory get called a country? Is this just more political correctness that is starting to seep into the geographic information used for online statistics? I am also somewhat surprised to see this hit because of the number of Palestinian internet cafes that have been hit by suicide bombers for various, stupid Islamist reasons ranging from pornography, to "just because we can," to "we hope we can blame this on the Jooz."

Now that the FBI has actually admitted that it has systematically abused the USA PATRIOT Act, where are all of those defenders of the USA PATRIOT Act and the Bush Administration who scoffed that it has never been abused? Hello Mr. Goldberg, et al. You ask for evidence that it has been abused? Well all you had to do was wait long enough to give the FBI some time to get familiar with how the process works to find ways to abuse it:

update WASHINGTON--Widespread abuse of the FBI's authority to secretly obtain Americans' telephone, Internet and financial records drew pointed questioning on Tuesday from a key U.S. House of Representatives panel.

As promised by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), the panel chided U.S. Department of Justice Glenn Fine and FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni about an internal audit released earlier this month that detailed the FBI's missteps and illegal use of an investigative tool known as national security letters.

"The department has converted this tool into a handy shortcut to illegally gather vast amounts of private information," Conyers said, "while at the same time significantly under-reporting its activities to Congress."

This article from the Wasington Post goes into even deeper detail about how the FBI's agents often acted as though the emergency circumstances requirement was nothing more than an optional guideline for them to follow. Even if there are no egregious violations of the law in this case, such as using the powers the USA PATRIOT Act bestows on the FBI for personal gain, there is the fact that there was, and still is (how many of the offenders have been fired?), a prevailing atttitude within the agency that they are not in fact required to keep detailed records and be conservative in how they use these quasi-unconstitutional methods of gathering evidence.

The first rule in defining a proper security policy is to give only as much authority as is needed to get a job done. Anything beyond that, what you would call discressionary authority, is a potential security risk.

***UPDATE***: There is another angle to this that I didn't quite realize at first, until I read this article:

The Justice Department report rebuked the FBI for improperly obtaining customer records from telephone companies, internet service providers, banks and credit card issuers.

I have in the past pointed out that one of the greatest dangers that the data retention policies that the Bush Administration is pushing, is the possibility of law enforcement abuse of them. Now they have already shown that they cannot use the powers granted to them by the USA PATRIOT Act responsibility, and they want us to trust them with that much information at their disposal? I think not! If they are already willing to fudge here and there, and sometimes outright break the law with these powers, the abuse of data retention policies will invariably be more realistic of a concern than even I previously expected it to be.

Two weeks ago, I learned a good lesson in patience and trusting God. I had to buy a new car because my Honda CR-V was starting to show its age in various ways. It was a toss up between getting a Scion tC and a Honda Civic coupe, the catch being that I could not get a Civic at a decent price in Northern Virginia because of the types of dealerships we have around here. Rachel told me that I should wait on buying a car, and that there was just something about the decision to buy the Scion tC that I had all but made that just didn't sit that well with her. So I prayed about it, waited, and ended up finding what I wanted about an hour and fifteen minutes away from where I live. I finally got the Civic coup a day later. $18,699 (well below MSRP), pin stripes, 17" alloy low profile wheels (like what the Si has), door guards and wheel locks. All of which came for free on top of it because the dealership that traded that car to the Honda dealership that I bought my care from didn't do a thorough inspection of what they were letting go. So, I ended up paying little more than invoice for my car, got probably at least $1,000 of free upgrades and it all worked out.

Everyone seems to be doing it, so I'll add a few new words of my own about the movie 300. Great movie, and it lives up the hype in every respect. Yada, yada, yada. You've seen that several times over from others already, no doubt. I'm going to try to not get into the "me too!" game here. Anyway, you know how a lot of pundits and assorted mental giants have compared the movie to blatant Bush Administration propaganda? I can't even begin to see how someone could suggest that George Bush is Leonidas. Can anyone see our illustrious Manager-In-Chief bucking the Congress, going in with a contingent of heavily armed Secret Service agents and Green Berets and fighting an intractible enemy himself when no one else is willing to fight them?

It would be great if we actually had a leader like Leonidas, but all we have today are managers. Yes, management, not leaders. These are people who run the government like it's a Fortune 500 corporation, not a government. Olmert is another good example of what I mean. Cautious like a risk-averse CEO, not a king who understands the stakes to his country of being defeated militarily or being forced into a humiliating, dishonorable stalemate with an enemy that should have been crushed within days of the opening of hostilities.

I read some of the negative reviews first, then saw the movie. What I noticed is that if America were Sparta, and Iran were the Persian Empire lead by Xerxes, we'd be having to say, "stick a fork in America, she's done for" with a "leader" like Bush. If I were going to draw any philosophical lesson, I'd just say that it's an indictment of the state of our governments today that it is more concerned with not offending foreigners' sentiments than defending the West and its allies.

This mini-review inspired by Arielle and Isaac Schordinger.

Being an English professor, surely she'll appreciate this lesson on the dangers of irony:

A professor at North Idaho College, who defended saying "anyone who's ever voted Republican" should be executed by noting she delivered her opinion to students "with a smile," is now reportedly the target of e-mail death threats and offensive comments from people across the country.

"She's an excellent teacher when she stays on topic. I feel bad for her because this is a woman with a gift. She motivates kids who might not otherwise be interested in English composition."

What was that about "what goes around, comes around?" Karma run over your dogma? Wow, I would never have thought that I'd have a chance to use both of those phrases in succession ;) Needless to say, I love that caveat. She's a great teacher, when she's teaching English. She has a gift, but has a hard time choosing how to use it.

The lesson from this woman's debacle is that at NIC you can say anything about killing people, so long as you have a smile on your face. This would be good for many groups, who now need only draw a fiendish pleasure from mental imagery of the wanton slaughter of their enemies to speak their minds on campus.

Joe Carter has done a fine job of explaining the consequences of a biological cure for homosexuality. This is an issue that I have talked about before, and have gotten some rather heated comments in response to suggesting that it ought to be cured if there is a way to change sexual orientation genetically.

Until I read Joe's post, it hadn't occurred to me that there might be a significant opposition from religious conservatives to a biological cure for homosexuality. It would seem that they are afraid that reducing homosexuality to a "mere" mental disorder is somehow taking away individuality responsibility for sin. That is beside the fact that the manifestation of sin is often biological in some way. I see to recall there being some mention about physical death being the result of sin, so why couldn't there be a feedback cycle between sin and mental disorders?

You remove homosexuality as a temptation by curing the "gay gene" and what do you have left? A sinner. People are born sinful, all you would be doing is taking away on particularly problematic area from that person's life. Anyone who has struggled with sexual sin, like most men have, knows that the real reason that sexual sin is so much worse is not really morality, but the depth that it can cut into you.

As Joe pointed out, there are in fact many cases where otherwise heterosexual men engage in homosexual sex. Curing a natural inclination would in fact force greater accountability because each act would be an incontrovertibly deviant act. Literally deviant, in the sense that they would be deviating from their own biological drives to something that is unnatural for their biology to desire. Homosexuality is unnatural from God's perspective, but it is not unnatural from the perspective of someone born homosexual, as it is their nature to seek that sort of sex. Take that away, and well, it becomes a purely unnatural act for them.

What is so quaint about the appeals to biological determinism is that human physiology can be rewired. The cowards who hide behind it are in essence arguing that what it means to be human is static, which it demonstrably is not. Factors from microevolution (intra-species evolution) to spiritual salvation prove that it is not, and genetic engineering ups the ante greatly.

Others:

Danny Carlton has an interesting idea about some of this. He raises the possibility that a significant amount of the pull for some people may be the sense of community that is provided by being a member of the "homosexual community." That does make sense, especially when you consider the fact that there are otherwise straight women who will experiment with bisexuality in order to impress men, among other things.

Holy law and order and justice served, Batman!

SARASOTA -- John Coffin won't spend any more time in jail for beating up two sheriff's deputies inside his house, striking one in the head with a Taser gun he took from the other.

Circuit Judge Rick De Furia said at Coffin's trial Tuesday that he doesn't condone the violence against the deputies.

But Coffin, 56, had a right to defend his family and property because the deputies had no right to be in Coffin's house in the first place, De Furia said.

I saw this on Friday, but didn't get a chance to post it until today because I have been busy all weekend. I know this doesn't apply outside of any part of Florida, but damn, what a ruling. A judge actually ruled that "color of law" does not "color away the lines of the law." Contrast this with another state normally associated with rugged individualism.

There is much to like here, and it's the sort of thing that should be pushed for in every state. The ability of private citizens to use force in self-defense against law enforcement officers who are breaking the law is a powerful incentive for law enforcement officers to obey the law. It's really not that hard, when you think about it. These things are generally not so vague that there is any excuse for crying "Wild West!" If an officer shows up at your door with no warrant, and tries this sort of crap, it's pretty obvious that they are breaking the law. A few good knots on their heads would teach them respect for the law.

Mark Steyn was recently a target of some people who couldn't bring themselves to allow the facts of life to get in their way. It's easy to believe that the average third worlder is just like the average American, European, East Asian or Israeli. We respect non-violent protest, why shouldn't the same work in the streets of Khartoum, Baghdad or Riyad? Aside from the fact that there seems to be a surplus of people there who have a pernicious habit of inflicting violence upon peaceful protestors.

I suppose I am most intolerant of people like this because of the fact that they are convinced that they are so worldly, so educated, when in fact they are not. In that vein, it's only fitting that they would not even known that one of their favorite alleged archetypes of pacifism, Gandhi, was no peacenik, rather, he actually advocated violence (even systematic violence) as a means to an end. "Violcen never solves anything?" Gandhi wouldn't have agreed with you, as his own writings show:

I do believe that where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence I would advise violence. Thus when my eldest son asked me what he should have done, had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908, whether he should have run away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defended me, I told him that it was his duty to defend me even by using violence. Hence it was that I took part in the Boer War, the so called Zulu rebellion and the late war. Hence also do I advocate training in arms for those who believe in the method of violence. I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honor than that she should in a cowardly manner become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor.

Gandhi was not a moron. He would not have advocated "non-violence" toward the mujahadeen who today actively seek to maim and murder innocent Indian civilians. Non-violence is a way to rebuke a civilized opponent by reaching out to what they know are universal standards of civilization and morality. However, it has no real effect in general on tribalist barbarians whose culture celebrates the death and mutilation of non-combatants as an act of piety.

What these "peaceniks" advocate is not peaceful, loving pacificism, but nihilistic, suicidal refusal to use violence to defend others. That is cowardly, not brave. It makes me wonder how they would react if a group of them saw two or three men taking turns gangraping a young woman. Would they kick the crap out of the hooldlums? I don't think it is at all a foregone conclusion that they would be able to bring themselves to defend the rape victim. Cowardice just works like that.

Via Isaac Schrodinger.

**UPDATE**: Speaking of Britain, and being in the same general subject area, I think this is worth mentioning. A mob of black young men in Britain chased down a black A-level student and stabbed him to death, while their little whores stood off in the background chanting "kill him, kill him." No doubt a self-esteem issue; they just couldn't bear the thought of one of their own actually succeeding rather than being predatory, tribalist trash. I could go on and on about this sort of law and order problem in Britain, citing examples of the government practically wooing the criminal element, but I would want to slit my wrists before I had gotten an hour into finding examples to cite. Crimes like this are all too common, but God forbid you have a bloody wind chime that is somewhat loud and annoying. Why that is an intolerable affront to your fellow man that the British state cannot tolerate.

When governments borrow ideas from the private sector, such as making people sign non-disclosure agreements, they might want to reflect upon the context in which they are used:

Officials at Deerfield High School in Deerfield, Ill., have ordered their 14-year-old freshman class into a "gay" indoctrination seminar, after having them sign a confidentiality agreement promising not to tell their parents.

It doesn't really matter because being minors they can tell their parents anything they want to, since they cannot be party to a contractual agreement. Ohhh silly school administrators. Probably the same sort of people who think that their petty policies actually trump state law and the constitutions (state and federal). In fact, I think it would be great for one of these students to discretely smuggle the materials out of class and post them on the Internet for public consumption. That is precisely the sort of thing I would have pulled in high school several years ago out of principle for any sort of secret, fake NDA-backed indoctrination.

What's with America's youth today? Why are there no would-be subversives stealing this content and exposing it just to stick it to The Man for trying to brainwash them any which way?

You could read a lot into this and think that we stand on the precipice of descending into an orgy of racial tribalist violence. It's an easy fear, and I have said before that if things don't change we will end up with screams of "apartheid!" from certain segments of society someday. We have an advantage and a disadvantage here in the source of our problem which is that unlike South Africa, our real problems that cause most of the problems in our minority communities are not the same as South Africa's. They are things that we can easily start fixing now, such as ending the War on Drugs and welfare system which provide powerful incentives for young people to not take their education seriously. Ending welfare would also have the boon of putting these communities back on the path to correcting the destruction of black families that has done so much damage to black communities in the past thirty years.

I have read my fair share of stories from people like Ilana Mercer, and I am quite well aware of the situation in South Africa. A sub-10% conviction and incarceration rate for violent criminals, out of control racial violence (yes, especially black on white racial violence) and many other social ills not the least of which is the AIDS epidemic that has been fostered by outrage and moronic views on sex. However, we are just not there. We stand at a point in this generation where we can prevent our country from descending into that sort of madness, so the question is naturally, will we do that?

That's the part that I am not sure about. There are too many who cling to their political and social views because they like them, not because they have any bearing on the way the world actually works. Left-liberals are extremely guilty of this, so much so that they can be to some extent rightfully demonized as saboteurs of progress, but conservatives are in some ways no better either. How many conservatives, despite all logic and reason, support the Drug War, which creates a black market that allows young would-be thugs to thrive independently of the real free market, and simply respond to criticism, "damn the social consequences, it's the right thing to do?!" Too many.

This atheist is not an asshole:

I think it's a profound mistake for atheists to demand that such religious debates be taken out of the public sphere, since they will never be taken out of voters' minds. Instead, us progressive atheists should be engaging in that faith-based discussion more vigorously, laying out our belief systems and helping make voters comfortable with our viewpoint as part of the menu of "religious" options, not in order to convert them but just to integrate it into the terrain of debate that people are more familiar with.

Otherwise, atheism will just remain the unspoken Other, which voters will inherently (and rightly) distrust because they just won't know what it means personally to the politician involved. So I'm all for a religion in public life debate -- and I'm prepared to argue for why progressive atheism leads to the kinds of public policy voters should want. But if we don't make the case, we can't expect Christian voters to want anything other than what they are familiar with.

That is the sort of thinking that might actually help bridge the gap between atheists and theists in the political sphere. As has been pointed out before on this blog and elsewhere, the primary problem with atheism is not that atheism directly leads to immoral and belligerent behavior, but that it leads to a moral vacuum of epic proporitions. The history of atheist regimes such as the Soviet Union has no doubt put a sour taste in the mouths of many conservative voters who actually do remember that the Soviet Union was an atheist regime. It's good to see an atheist coming out and admitting that good people who happen to be atheists can only establish themselves with religious voters by engaging them honestly and openly. Progress might actually be made there.

The problem I see for people like this guy is that there are too many atheists whose atheism is a profoundly negative influence on their lives. It drives them in politics to tear down the religious symbols and other things of the religious, rather than merely establish its own legitimate area. It is far and away easier for most religions, with the notable exception of Islam, to live in pluralistic environments with those who merely want to be different, than those who rigorously use the state to tear down the values of others. I don't think most atheists of the Dawkins/Harris mold even care to note the difference between atheism that seeks to carve out its own niche, and atheism that is obsessed with tearing down crosses and menorahs on public land, but it's the difference between liberty and tyranny; the difference between a minuteman and a brownshirt.

You know what type of people really, really piss me off when you're having a conversation with them? People like the woman pictured here. You know the ones I'm talking about, the one who thinks that throws out accusations like calling you "hysterical" when he or she detects the slightest bit of passion in your voice... while you are disagreeing with them. Such is never the case when you are passionately agreeing with them. It's a cheap tactic... a sort of grown up way of plugging your ears and chanting "lalalala I can't hear you, can't argue against you, your ideas scare me, I don't want to reevalute what I think, I don't want to admit I might be wrong, so I'm blocking you out!" This happened to me recently on Reason's Hit and Run blog. I accused one of the "libertarians" there of promoting a reviving Pater Familias in the name of "a woman's right to choose." I also suggested that one who thought that America was better off with forty five million terminated unwanted pregnancies of being an elitist who felt that it was his right to judge the worth of his fellow man (or woman)'s life, and that he is unfortunately denied the career opportunities uniquely afforded by a mass-murdering regime. It couldn't go downhill from there, seeing as how it was firmly on terra firma already, but it bloody well tried to dig a hole to China.

There's a pattern with politics, and I've seen it too often. The more you think about current events as presented by the media, the more you risk getting bitter. I've been looking back at some of the stuff I've written since I reset my blog, and I see myself veering off in that direction again. Why? Because it's easy, and it's like whack-a-mole. Bitch about topic X this week, something new about it will pop up by no later than next week. That's the way it goes. An endless bitchfest about the same old, same old. Now, it's different when you're lampooning the stupidity of others, especially other bloggers *cought*Amynda*cough*, but even that can get old and dangerous if you're not careful.

So, I think I'm going to start moving away more from the political shit, and it's that, shit. Were it to materializing, you'd find no truer and more efficient source of heat and (negative) energy than that shit. It would make rocket fuel look like practical utilizations of cold fusion in how much energy it would produce in a reaction.

I'm not going to shut my blog down or anything, but I'm going to make a point of not really thinking about how bad things can really be. I think it's possible to read blogs like The Agitator to keep up with things and not get too involved there, but that's not really possible when you take the time to write about it yourself. I actually encourage those of you who haven't done so already to bookmark The Agitator for some good semi-daily reading on the state of abuse of civil liberties if you care about that sort of thing.

Yes I know all about that fear that if we are not tuned into politics it will control us. I think that it will control us is largely a foregone conclusion by now. We are nearing the end of the two hundred year cycle. It's beyond our control, it's in His control, and that's all that we can know or do about it.

Thanks to Isaac Schrodinger, I am reminded that conservatives by no means have a monopoly on reading asinine political messages into a movie. I have not seen 300 yet, but based on the reaction that V for Vendetta got, I am fully anticipating a great movie despite what shrill, leftwing moonbats have to say about it. In fact, I suspect that it will be even better than the previews make it out to be because of the visceral reaction it got from political lunatics. Remember the golden rule about politicized films (as opposed to ones that bash or promote religion or other things). If it pisses off the right, it's intelligent. If it enrages the left, it will make you feel good about your country and its cultural lineage. These people are the canaries in the coalmine that let you know whether or not it's a good movie.

As far as I can tell, I got my coffee from the same girl at Starbucks in Harrisonburg who committed the nigh unforgivable sin of mixing espresso with regular coffee yesterday. This time she didn't actually screw up my latte so I guess she is learning. Well, maybe, maybe not because I didn't order un doppio from her. I guess it means that at a minimum, she does know how to make a latte and a mocha (what a woman in front of me ordered).

Of course, I didn't stay around to see the other customer's reaction. For all I know she could have been induced into convulsive vomiting in the parking lot... The world may never know...

I don't think there is any other civil right in the United States that brings out the "personal" as much as the second amendment does. Already a lot of people are terribly afraid of the ramifications of the recent appeals court ruling that for the first time showed that someone in government can actually read for comprehension. It's refreshing to see some intelligent people with generally left wing views, realize that this is a very good ruling for the rights they cherish in general, and that the government should not be trusted with a monopoly on ownership of weaponry.

My personal view here is that gun control advocacy is in general a form of personal weakness or a sign that someone is a very dangerous individual when it comes to political power. The fear of gun ownership is inherently irrational on many levels. First, a dangerous person is a dangerous person irrespective of their weapon of choice. For example, many women have had to discover this fact the tragic hard way when they suffered from weapons control and a faulty system that failed to protect them from an abusive, deranged ex-lover who ended up simply beating them to death with his bare hands. Second, no firearm ever killed a child by simply being a firearm. Aside from absolute freaks of nature so rare as to be statistically impossible to reproduce accidentally, all children killed by firearms have been killed by poor judgment, malice or simple tragic, unavoidable events (ricochets for example). Finally, it is quite frankly moronic to think that gun control will disarm the sort of people (murderers, rapists, armed robbers, etc.) that really ought to be disarmed. As much so as it is to pass traffic laws targeting them to slow down their getting to a crime scene.

Really, when you get down to it, gun control is only about the illusion of safety. It provides absolutely no meaningful safety. An armed criminal right now could storm a home in Washington D.C. and kill everyone inside. The gun ban would do absolutely nothing except make it marginally more difficult for that criminal to buy a new gun, and like the drug trade, the weapons trade will fill in the holes that the war on guns has created. In that split second where a gun ban is supposed to save a life, it will cost lives. It will not keep a psychopath off the street, it will not keep an unrehabilitated criminal from getting a gun for the next crime.

**Update**: You know what is also just flat out stupid about gun control advocates' insistence that the second amendment is a collective right, and that our founders intended it that way? They really expect us to believe that people who waged an armed revolt on their legal government who among many things, tried to disarm the population, would want the police and military to have a near or actual monopoly on the ownership of weaponry. This would be akin to arguing that despite founding and commanding the Red Army, Trotsky really was a tsarist and his writings were simply a long stream of irony and devil's advocacy.

It's all a vast right wing conspiracy, I'm sure:

Deputy prime minister Maud Olofsson has added a new twist to Sweden's divisive surveillance debate. The Centre Party leader claims that defence minister Mikael Odenberg's proposed legislation would merely codify practices that have already been in operation for decades.

Previously, at a time when all telecommunications were state-operated, Sweden's National Defence Radio Establishment (Försvarets Radioanstalt - FRA) regularly tapped telephone lines in and out of the country, says Olofsson. Related Articles

It was only when Telia became a registered company that the need for legislation arose, she says.

This is coming out at a time when the government is trying to create ex post facto legalization of what it was already doing. The great thing about Socialist Sweden is that it serves a warning to anyone who isn't already anti-Socialist who might have it in them to be anti-Socialist that behind the smiling welfare state is the iron fist of the warfare state. Even Socialist France has the capacity to bring about a great deal of pain and suffering to people who really get in the way of the welfare-warfare state inside the nation.

The irony that the welfare states that left-wing elites admire in Europe are in fact as bad or even worse abusers of privacy rights in practice than even ChimpyMcBushHitler's regime will no doubt be lost on them at the next "peace rally." It all goes hand-in-hand in practice. The welfare state needs the warfare state to make sure that the money is flowing in from the enfeebled population.

The pit of hell is now a glacier. An appeals court has just shoved Washington D.C.'s gun ban squarely up the city government's ass (hopefully plugging it, thus preventing any additional, similarly brilliant legislation from entering the world in the same way the ban was conceived). The Supreme Court now has the chance to unleash a holy terror on the authoritarian elements vying for control of America, so let's hope they take it and run with it (the right way).

What I suspect they will rule, however, is that D.C. is a special case because they are not a state and thus do not enjoy sovereignty over their own matters. They are thus directly under the U.S. Constitution in a way that could be called subordinate in every respect, being purely a federal territory. You know what? I could live with that, as I would sooner live in Switzerland than live in many of the parts of America that place draconian bans on firearms. To me, they're not really American, at least in the sense that I think of what it means to be part of America.

The best gun control is not new legislation, but zero tolerance for crimes that are committed with a firearm. If you do that, the people who would abuse the second amendment end up in prison. Problem solved without any new laws. Too simple, thus as Heinlein mused, it offends the sensibilities of the pre-scientific, pseudo-professionals amongst us.

I know that Vox Day has already touched on this today, but there is another aspect to it that he didn't bring up today worth mentioning.

The illegal immigrants are sold to the highest bidder for up to £8,000 a time. They are then forced to work in brothels where they can earn up to £800 a day for their "owner".

The chilling reality of human trafficking was spelled out yesterday by senior police officers at Scotland Yard.

Detective Superintendent Mark Ponting, of the Metropolitan Police, said young women from all over the world are trafficked into Britain after being promised well-paid work in bars or cafes.

But within hours of their arrival, they are sold to pimps. The youngest known girl victim was just 14.

In one notorious case, women were openly sold outside a coffee shop at Gatwick Airport.

I know the standard response to this and Vox's commentary is going to be that it is absurd to say that from an atheistic or essentially non-Judao-Christian worldview that there is little rational basis to oppose slavery. History, however, does not seem to support that much. Opposition to slavery may not be a purely Christian notion, but it only makes genuine sense within the Christian context as a moral matter. That one person may be willing to oppose it is irrelevant. The only system of thought that provides a conclusive, universal, moral and spiritual case against it is Christianity. It is only within the context of a Christian worldview that it makes genuine sense to use the full power of the state to force the end of slavery.

Where many Western secularists will go awry is twofold. First, they will not see that their moral worldview was forged within the context of a culture that was thoroughly christianized. They deeply underestimate the memetic influence of Christianity on their worldview, and likewise will not be able to see that outside of that memetic influence, the conditions are not right for a forceful, outraged, intolerant assault on slavery by others. Second, and I guess sort of a corollary to this, the weaker the memetic influence of Christianity is on the population of christianized peoples, the weaker their moral resolve to use force, up to deadly force against slavers, to stop slavery will be.

On that note, it's worth mentioning that one of the fatal flaws of "secular morality" is that it is transparently an individual experience. In terms of memetics, it is a meme that is largely incapable of propogation. This is why in an almost purely secular society, slavery will flourish under the covers of civilization. The religious memes now gone, the secular morality memes will not be able to propogate easily either. The result should be obvious.

Ya'll should see this exchange that has been going on on one of my somewhat older posts. I can't tell whether the guy is a pure lunatic, a lefty troll trying to "moby" one of my posts, trying to play devil's advocate or what. Just read the post, and you will understand why I have actually turned off the comments for that post. Lest I be accused of hypocrisy by closing the comments there, I am doing so because of a partial invocation of comment policy number five before that post goes any further down hill.

Reason's Jacob Sullum brings up some interesting points on how sex offenders are dealt with in some of the harsher states. Some of which are actually quite scary because of the environment that they create. These sections in particular really stood out when I read it:

But it's important to keep in mind that "sex offenders" are a highly diverse group, ranging from teenagers who have consensual sex with younger teenagers to men who rape and murder children. Arizona provides an excellent example of how not to draw the appropriate distinctions.

Under Arizona law, mere possession of pornography involving minors younger than 15 is punishable by a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence. Each picture is a separate offense, and the sentences must be served consecutively. That's how Morton Berger, a former high school teacher, received a 200-year sentence without parole: 10 years for each of 20 images on his computer.

While the production of child pornography involves sexual abuse, Berger himself did not victimize anyone. He arguably deserved criminal punishment for encouraging abuse, in his own small way, by downloading the resulting images (although it's not clear he paid for them). But 200 years?

That's far longer than the sentence Berger would have received anywhere else in the country. It's also harsher than Arizona's penalties for violent crimes such as rape and second-degree murder. For looking at pictures of sexually abused children, Berger was punished more severely than he would have been for committing an actual sexual assault on a child.

Emphasis mine there on the end. It is ironic that the end result of the law would be to create a risk-reward assessment in the mind of a pedophile that it is less risky to actually rape a child than masturbate to pictures of child rape. Way to go, Arizona legislators. You have done a bang up job of making the streets safer from child rapists! Also worth noting while on this subject, it is also less legally dangerous for your longterm life and liberty to rape a child then murder the child in a fit of fear and passion in the state of Arizona than it is to possess three pictures of a young teenage girl having sex with a peer or a grown man. Again, way to go Arizona legislators! You really have your priorities right, and have made sure that the punishments provided for in the Arizona legal code reflects the severity of the offenses.

When guns are outlawed, violent criminals will turn to the next best thing:

The sale of imitation samurai swords could be banned by the end of the year, the Home Office announced today.

Importing or hiring the weapons could also be made illegal following a string of samurai sword attacks in recent years.

Breaching the ban, which is targeted at cheap imitation samurai swords rather than the more expensive genuine collectors' items made by licensed swordsmiths in Japan, would result in up to six months in jail and a £5,000 fine.

"We recognise it is the cheap, easily-available samurai swords which are being used in crime and not the genuine, more expensive samurai swords which are of interest to collectors and martial arts enthusiasts."

I remember making this argument a long time ago, that when guns are harder for many criminals with very violent tendencies to easily acquire, they'll just turn to bladed weapons. The liberals I knew scoffed at me, saying that that was absurd because bladed weapons require you to get closer to your victim, and thus require theoretically more violent, pschopathic tendencies than murdering someone at a distance with a gun. That is complete and utter nonsense of course, since the the level of psychopathic tendency needed to go from one method of murder to another is a moot point because they have already reached the point where they can cold-bloodedly murder another human being. Only a left-liberal would actually be stupid enough to think that someone willing to shoot someone dead over a trivial offense is going to be squeemish about cutting them, especially since it is trivial to deliver a fatal blow with one hit from a bladed weapon if you hit any critical area of their body.

Beyond that stupidity, there is the nonsense about "authentic" versus "imitation" "samurai swords." A katana is a katana, if it is made like one, just like a saturday night special is considered a real handgun. This distinction is meaningless; you're just as dead if shot in the head with a saturday night special as you are if shot in the head with a very expensive, properly bought handgun made by a major manufacturer. Accordingly, even a low quality katana can be a serious weapon if used against an unarmed civilian. I would imagine that one of modest quality would also have no problem slicing through kevlar, knowing the reputation for sharpness that katanas have.

This is the sort of thing that warms my heart a little to hear a police officer demanding of one of his peers:

Hoboken Police Sgt. Peck: Sgt. Peck, how can I help you?

NYPD P.O. Liotta: Yeah, good morning, sarge. My name is Police Officer Liotta. I'm from the New York City Highway Patrol. I got a question.

Sgt. Peck: Sure.

P.O. Liotta: Of course this is a purely hypothetical situation.

Sgt. Peck: Of course.

P.O. Liotta: Um, if a certain person identifies himself as the City Council president for the city of Hoboken, New Jersey?

Sgt. Peck: OK.

P.O. Liotta: Um, who's name might or might not be Christopher Campos?

Sgt. Peck: Right.

P.O Liotta: Um... would it be a good or maybe a bad thing for him to become a guest of the city tonight?

Sgt. Peck: A guest of the city tonight? I would, uh... OK, I'm sorry, who am I speaking with?

P.O. Liotta: Officer Liotta.

Sgt. Peck: Officer Liotta, I would expect you to do your duty, sir. I would expect you to enforce the law.

You know, that last line is just golden. "I would expect you to do your duty, sir. I would expect you to enforce the law." This would be the same New York City government that has severe rule of law problems in the past when it comes to obeying federal gun control regulations. I bring that up because the culture of special protection begins on the street, as shown here, and goes all the way up to the man at the top of it all in the New York City government.

You know that gang violence is getting bad when the media will actually come out with statements like this:

Cheryl's shooting - allegedly by two 204th Street gang members as she and friends talked on a street in broad daylight - underscored a new reality: that since the mid-1990s, according to the L.A. County Human Relations Commission, Latino gangs have become the region's leading perpetrators of violent hate crimes.

The worst part is that this will probably actually surprise a lot of people because of the indoctrination that many have had that white people are the racists of America. While there is racism everywhere, it comes in many different forms, though one thing this article should make clear is that racist violence is not the monopoly of any race by any stretch of the imagination. This news also brings to mind the anti-Korean violence that was perpetrated by many rioting blacks during the Rodney King race riot in 1992.

The reason that this sort of thing is becoming more common and worse as time goes on is that there is a lot of intellectual dishonesty about racism. The day that racism is treated as a human problem, not a white problem, is the day that meaningful gains against racism in general might be possible.

In 1997, police, the county Human Relations Commission and neighbors organized to fight the gang and the blight.

The city added bulletproof streetlight covers. Residents repaired holes in fences - escape routes for gang members. Girl Scouts, accompanied by officers, picked up trash and painted over graffiti. More than 100 gang members - black and Latino - were sent to jail for parole or probation violations. Police patrols increased. Violence fell.

But the campaign dissipated, and gang members slowly returned. By 1999, the Latino-on-black violence resumed.

Notice the niceties that were promoted here. This sort of campaign is doomed by design because it is a feel-good campaign that ignores a fundamental truth about violent crime. A culture of security will get rid of violent crime, not social programs or neighborhood cleanups. Armed citizens, a regular police presence that can and will respond with force against gang members, and things like that will reduce the crime rate.

The problem with the left-wing solutions that focus on poverty is that they never ask why the people there are poor to begin with. No small part of the reason is that violent crime, allowed to fester, has driven away economic investment and opportunity. Small businesses have too much to lose to set up shop in de facto war zones. If you want to break the poverty-violence cycle, the only solution is the use of coercion and force to stop the crime. That is the only way that private citizens can be encouraged to bring business back to the community and get the employment back up.

The one thing that is repeatedly brought up in the article that doesn't get the attention that it deserves is the role of the drug trade in all of this. The gangs are able to survive and thrive because of the money they make on it. With the support of the Mexican Mafia, it is actually possible for them to benefit, not be harmed, by increased enforcement of the drug laws that drives the value of drugs through the roof. The only solution is full decriminalization. That is the only way to launch a fundamental attack on the revenue of many of these groups and force them to do honest work.

Ron Bailey and his buddies make a girl cry:

In trying to explain to Althouse why private discrimination might be OK, I later pieced together that my tablemates had posed the question of whether or not Althouse would want to have the right to refuse to serve KKK members if she owned a restaurant--say, the KKK members were planning to have a weekly luncheon meeting at her cafe? My interpretation of what happened is that because she didn't want to appear to be hypocrite, she refused to answer and kept asking more and more abstract questions about their example. When she was backed into a corner, she lashed out, suggesting that people who disagreed with her feelings were racists. Eventually, she was so upset that she began crying. Of course, at that point the possibility of civil intellectual discourse completely evaporated.

I was also astonished by the poise with which my tablemates handled Althouse. Our companions did not raise their voices nor dismiss her (as I would have), but tried to calm her down. In fact, Althouse made the situation even more personal by yelling repeatedly at one of my dinner companions (who is also a colleague) that she was an "intellectual lightweight" and an "embarrassment to women everywhere." In fact, in my opinion, with that statement Althouse had actually identified herself. Before Althouse stalked away, I asked her to apologize for that insult, but she refused.

When all else fails, pitch a fit, the time-tested and proved strategy for many a female "intellectual." The reason such doesn't work so well for men is simply that men tend to have a passionate disgust with such behavior, and are generally quite willing to inflict all sorts of mental suffering and anguish on other men who engage in it. Making a man who behaves like that cry is not only socially acceptable, but indeed it is considered by many to be rather amusing to behold. Ironically, Althouse actually conferred respectability on the woman who disagreed with her by highlighting the fact that the woman she called a "lightweight" was in fact willing to explore intellectual territory that is just too icky and scary for Althouse's tastes. Props to that woman for going there, whether she agreed with what was said or not.

The specific example here of private discrimination proves why these sorts of things are in fact not as easy to explain away as "common knowledge, sense and wisdom" (or whatever proletarian bovine excrement you want to cite) would have us believe. The sword is two-sided, not one-sided. Sure someone could say "no blacks allowed" without the Civil Rights Act, but that is socially unacceptable today, and the law has nothing to do with that view. That was successfully won as part of the "hearts and mind" campaign of the civil rights movement. Now, the other side of the sword, that threatens to knick her jugular is that a restaurant cannot legally stop the Klan or any other hate group from sitting down every week to have a polite planning session on how to promote racial hatred. Ironic, isn't it?

I incorporated Jim Carson's bug fixes into the script, and now for lack of a better version number, it's been moved up to version 1.2. So far, so good with the export. I tested it on my fiance's blog without any discernible problems. Obviously, if you encounter any bugs, please leave a good description of the bugs in the comments section.

Download it here.

A quick overview for those of you unfamiliar with what might happen as a result of the data retention policies that the Bush Administration is now pushing. For starters, everything you do without encryption online is fair game. Do you want an idea of how much information HTTP data retention would keep on you for the police and any criminal that breaks into your ISP? Here's an overview. This is also something that individual members of Congress have been pushing on their own, such as Sensenbrenner and Lamar Smith