Utilitarianism: the ethical doctrine that virtue is based on utility, and that conduct should be directed toward promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number of persons.

Many atheists base morality on utilitarianism. However, I am confident that I can defeat the argument that a meaningfully consistent code of morality can be based on a doctrine whose standards shift as much as utilitarianism. The problem with utilitarianism is that it leads to situations where an action may be unequivocably wrong in one situation, but "morally necessary" in another. For example, it is immoral to allow for the murdering of small children in the abstract according to utilitarian theory, however, if you had to murder a small child to save a community, it would be moral. That's because by murdering that child, you'd be doing the most good for the most people which is the litmus test of utilitarianism. Since this is the way it works, you cannot create reliable moral rules for living by looking to utilitarianism. It is simply not workable for an action to be heinous in one case, and the proper course of action in another, and for that to be called a consistent point of morality

I have now had the flu twice in one month. In previous generations, I would probably have died from this. I got it last time on 5/10 according to the last time I posted something about being sick, and I caught a light case of it yesterday from Rachel who was in extremely bad shape from Sunday night until this morning. I was out of work yesterday because of it, but now I'm basically fine. Usual stomach problems, headache, chills and all that bullshit, of course. I drank a lot of liquids the moment it started, including some organic fruit juice which has enough nutrients in it to jump start the immune system of a dead person. That stuff is potent, and I mean potent. One 12oz bottle of that stuff is like dropping a MoaB on the flu.

I've been having to clean up a lot of spam on my blog lately. The pattern I have noticed is that they use a blank link as the body of the comment or trackback ping and then put the spam link in the field that goes in with their name into the header for the comment/ping. I think I'm going to be left with little choice but to create a content filter that automatically moderates any comment with a blank link in there in order to shut these people down.

Stories like this are one of the best reasons I can think of to host your own blog. LiveJournal has admitted that they didn't even really review most of the journals before flushing them down the digital toilet for reasons that LiveJournal admits were probably neither illegal nor a violation of their terms of service. That's why it's important to host your own blog; you have control over the data so even if your host dumps you, you can easily move to a new one since you have the data for your blog in your possession.

Apparently a bunch of American Indians want to get compensated because cell phone signals pass through their land. That's a great idea. While we're at it, they can compensate the United States for the clean air that flows from Alaska into their territories, that was filtered by American trees. Come on, let's be fair here. They're tangentially benefiting from our excess clean air here.

Shrek 4 and Shrek 5? How much longer can they drag out the Shrek series before it implodes the way that the Matrix did? I haven't seen Shrek 3 yet, but apparently it's not as good as the previous two movies. Can't Hollywood let good series finish off before they ruin the public's perception of them with horrible sequels?

Power corrupts, any power corrupts morbidly obese, useless government bureaucrats absolutely:

The District Judge Elizabeth Halverson saga is starting to creep beyond the borders of Nevada and into the California news media, while locally the docudrama is the first thing many of us read each day. When they make a TV special of it, I'd like to suggest a name: Power and Paranoia.

Halverson spent nine years as a fairly lowly law clerk. (I always assumed the 425-pound woman, according to her driver's license, stayed as long as she could for the county's health insurance coverage.) After she was fired, she ran for one judgeship, lost, but in 2006 won on her second try.

Before long, stories started coming out of the Regional Justice Center about her contemptuous behavior toward her staff, particularly her bailiff, Johnny Jordan. Halverson, who had never had real power, was relishing it, throwing a pencil on the floor and ordering him to pick it up. Jordan was ordered to give her foot rubs and back massages. He has since filed a complaint against his former boss alleging discrimination based on sex and race. He is black and says she treated him like a "house boy."

Her court clerk, Katherine Streuber, said the judge's behavior was "vile, angry, degrading to anyone within her path." Streuber also objected to being called "the evil one" and "the anti-Christ" by the judge.

Word has it that George Lucas has already tapped her to play the role of Jabba the Hut, saying "we have yet to meet anyone more uniquely qualified to play this role. We were going to use computer animation, but when I cracked open my morning paper I knew that we could save a lot of money by bringing her onboard. Not only does she naturally look the part, but her personality is so similar to Jabba's that we feel it will be a natural job for her to fill on a moment's notice. Time is short, but we feel confident that she will only need a few days to rehearse for this role because let's face it, she was born for it."

When LucasArts Human Resources were contacted about how there might be potential problems between Samuel L. Jackson and Halverson, regarding her treatment of black men at her previous job, the response was pretty succinct. "If he can handle poisonous snakes on a muthafuckin plane, we feel confident that Mr. Jackson is capable of handling himself in any professional situation, regardless of how uncomfortable it becomes for him."

...

Ok, I'm through with the satire. Read the rest of it. It only gets more interesting from there.

La Shawn Barber is in touch with her wild side:

And here's the kind of death a pedophile should face: After he's found guilty and sentenced to death, he should be tied to a pole in the public square. Every day, all day, until he's dead, people are allowed to throw at him whatever they can lift. They can spit on him, throw rocks, cans, glass, shoot him with arrows (but no bullets), baseball bats, knives - and he stays tied to that pole in the heat, wind, rain, or snow with no food and only a little water to prolong his misery. And he receives no treatment for his wounds. How long can a person survive that? Days? Weeks? Who cares? His suffering is the focus. People who rape children should suffer a painful, humiliating death.

There is a delicious irony in someone simultaneously going atavistic about the rape of a child, then calling for a punishment that is so cruel and inhumane that carrying it out would make you a posterchild for Romans 1:18-32. Don't get me wrong, I don't think stoning someone who rapes a child is inherently cruel or unjust, I just think it is a wee bit ironic that someone can flip flop between denouncing someone for a heinous crime, then call for a punishment that is based on appealing to barbaric, depraved instincts in human nature.

Ah, but she said she'd do it somberly, so that changes everything. With tears in her eyes, she would hurl glass bottles at them; her lips quiver as she pulls another arrow from her quiver. Ok, so I'm pickin at her there.

I've had two of my comments deleted and two more partially or completely edited. The best part is, she tells me to "lighten up." Reminds me a lot of this Dilbert comic, actually.

And for the record, I have argued that execution for child rapists is not only humane, it is actually significantly more civilized than what we put them through today with all of the contemptible legal restrictions from sex offender registries, to "sex offender-free zones" that make them live like lepers rather than just get the punishment right the first time.

Difster clings to his previous assumptions:

Apply this to a resurrection. We are, in a material sense, nothing more than the elements of the Earth, assembled together by some formula we truly don't understand and imbued with the ability to replenish the ever dying parts of our system by eating, drinking water, etc. Lazarus was no different. When he died, he was a complete living machine. Is it beyond conceivable that Jesus was able to take what already existed and reconstitute it and return the life and soul of Lazarus to him without breaking the rules of the universe? Remember, right now we're not concerned with the "how", just the "what". The material Jesus needed to make Lazarus whole again was already there! Obviously, God did not create new material to bestow upon Lazarus since creation ended the 6th day. There is a finite amount of building blocks to work with. God created this universe and the physical rules by which it's governed. I would contend that God doesn't likely distinguish between the spiritual rules and the physical ones not to mention the inter-dimensional rules that extend beyond our ability to observe but that's a completely different discussion. Adam was created from the dust of the Earth, not new material; creation was finished on the 6th day.

It is true that the universe contains the materials needed to reconstitute Lazarus. However, the process of bringing Lazarus back to life would be significantly more complicated than that. At a minimum, these are the steps that I would expect would have to be done on a physical level to bring him back to life:

• Repairs and reconstruction of the DNA in Lazarus' body.
• Purging his body of all of the toxins from decomposition, as well as all microbes that had taken up residence and were feeding on his corpse.
• Repair of all organs and systems to a functional state; this might be damn near at the point of having to reconstruct many from scratch.
• Repairing the brain, including restoring all of the synapses to the state they were in prior to him dying and his brain starting to decay.
• Restarting all organ activity in a coherent way.

I will grant Difster this one only on the grounds that the human body more closely resembles a machine than anything else, and as such can be repaired and modified without violating the laws of physics. My point here, though, was to highlight the fact that it would be a tremendously unnatural operation at work here. However...

There are lots of miracles in the Old Testament. The pillar of fire that the Israelites followed in the wilderness was some advanced technology that we do not understand. So much of what we take for granted now would cause us to be executed for sorcery in the not too distant past. Hey, how did those tiny people get in that glass container you call a television? Imagine how cell phones would have been looked on a couple of hundred years ago. Most of our modern comforts would have been deemed scientifically impossible back then yet now they are ubiquitous.

One thing you don't read about in the Old Testament is the "Road of Glass Leading to the Holy Lands." That is because this self-sustaining thermal reaction did not scar the landscape at night time. In fact, the only way that we can conceive of such a thing being physically possible would be a nuclear reaction akin to the way a star works. If it were just a regular pillar of fire, it would be a violation of the laws of physics because the pillar of fire would burning an infinite supply of fuel.

Another thing, an atomic reaction would have left some very visible scaring along the path that the Israelites traveled. To my knowledge, none exists.

Long Day of Joshua - strong gravitational field from some other entity essentially neutralized the gravitational forces that currently move our planets around the sun.

Said strong activity would have to be so strong it would exert a terrible force on our own sun, possibly causing a draining effect on the matter and energy as often seen when a blackhole ensnares a star. Game over over for this solar system.

Walk on Water - Manipulated the density of the water below him.

If Jesus manipulated the density of the water enough that he could walk on it, that would make the water under his feet sink into the water that was at normal density.

My alternate suggestion of how God does this stuff is that God just breaks the laws of physics and biology when they are not convenient. You could argue that since God says, "I'm not a man that I should change my mind" that they are eternal truths as well. However, some of the miracles performed are pretty well outside of the realm of the laws of physics being eternal truth when confronted by God's needs for a particular situation.

Hinduism, a most peaceful religion indeed:

Sources within Nepal, the mountainous nation sandwiched between India and China that holds Mt. Everest, have told the Voice of the Martyrs that the persecution campaign encompassed all parts of Rajan's life when he became a Christian.

"Hindu neighbors have dug up Rajan's cauliflower and potatoes," the VOM reported its sources confirmed. "He has lost his whole year's income."

Villagers took every opportunity to make life difficult for him, including their response when some water from his field inadvertently spilled onto a neighbor's land, the sources reported.

"He was recently fined 6,000 rupees (about $100, a large sum in Nepal), after water from his field spilled over into a neighbor's field," the VOM sources reported. "Normally, this would not be a problem, but the neighbors consider water from Rajan's field unclean because he is a Christian.

"Normally, we wouldn't fine you, but because you changed your religion and became a Christian, you need to pay 6,000 rupees," the villagers told him, according to VOM.

They even turned Rajan's wife and family against him, and he was forced to leave his home, to stay with a pastor briefly, and then to move to another village.

"When Rajan left his home to live with the pastor he was sad, but said his experiences had made Jesus more precious to him than before," the Voice of the Martyrs reported. "His pastor told us that as persecuted believers, they have learned that one of the results of persecution is that Jesus becomes much more precious to them."

There is virtually no difference between hardline Hindus and Muslims in their ability to use violence and commit crimes against Christians. Stories like this from across the border in India are sadly common with Hindu-on-Christian violence becoming a regular occurrence in some states of India. It's a sobering reminder that Jesus wasn't kidding when he said that he came to bring division, not peace, and that those people who follow him and call him Lord would invariably find themselves on the receiving end of all manner of evil for his sake.

As I have said before, on the issue of religious violence we can safely excuse most religions their violent pasts in "pre-modern times" as being more of a product of ignorance and primitive culture rather than the work of the religion itself. That past, however, has no bearing on the present day where there is no excuse for toleration of religious violence and persecution.

I used to be a message board junkie. I would go on sites like FreeRepublic, Kuro5hin and others to raise the flag of libertarianism time and again. Did that from my my mid teens until I was about twenty, when I started blogging. Today, when I actually go back to that, it just strikes me as a load of bovine excrement because of stuff like these responses to my comments. A lot of people who participate on message boards are the sort of people who can neither read for comprehension nor follow an argument to save their lives. It really is just a waste of your time to duke it out in comments sections most of the time. I look at some blogs and boards that get linked and my god... the drivel that spans pages of comments! Doesn't matter what idea or group is involved, I've seen it. It's an ideology-neutral phenomenon.

By now I'm sure a lot of people have heard of this case where a sixteen year old girl has been denied bail on charges of having committed a hate crime. While the hate crime charge is contemptible because hate crime laws are thought crime laws, the fact is that this girl does deserve to be prosecuted for harassment. She specifically targetted an individual that she knew, and distributed possibly libelous content about him in a way that if nothing more could come down as a malicious attempt at character assassination. While "God hates fags" is protected speech, specifically targetting one individual in a campaign of harassment like that, is not free speech. Hopefully she will beat the hate crime charge, but any other charges will stick to her and this event will kick her ass a little. She's sixteen and has already had at least thirteen run-ins with the law. Not exactly the best posterchild for anti-hate crime speech sympathy...

If you like to play video games with your significant other, and have a XBox 360, you can't go wrong with Fusion Frenzy 2. Rachel and I have been playing that a lot lately. Last night we played through several rounds of it together. It's a good game for casual gamers because it doesn't require the sort of strategy and committment to learning that games like Gears of War and Halo 2 require. You can actually pick it up and just go with it. Still, I do plan to push her into getting good at Halo with the split screen enabled for when Halo 3 comes out. She's got the controls down, which isn't that common for women in my experience. It's mostly that she's not used to playing on a split screen. That screwed me up when I first started playing Halo because I was used to the whole screen as a PC FPS gamer.

By now it's pretty obvious that I've taken to sort of abusing the random thoughts meme that Pablo started. Unfortunately for me, my thoughts often just stream out like this, so it works better for me than writing several little blog posts. That, and I haven't had the need or creativity to wax eloquent about a subject worth waxing eloquent about lately...

I'm reposting/continuing this argument here for the sake of others who may not visit Difster's blog:

God created the physical laws of the universe and I don't believe that he can break those laws (or won't). Whatever miracles the Bible lists or that you might have personally witnessed have a scientific explanation for them. They are still miracles but God sticks to His boundaries in performing them.

How then did God impregnate Mary without violating all kinds of laws of the universe? First of all, just like the rest of us, Jesus has a body and a spirit. So, all God had to do is rearrange some of the existing matter in Mary to fertilize an egg just like he created Adam from the dust of the Earth. After/During the fertilization (I can't even speculate on the timing) God imbued the egg with the spirit of Jesus. Thus, Jesus was given his human body.

I don't think you can really argue that God made a claim to treat the laws and processes of nature in the same way as the revealed Law. In fact, there are a few examples that immediately come to mind to suggest that God has a tendency to dramatically screw with the workings of nature to achieve his goals. The ones that come to mind are the flood, the pillar of fire that lead the Israelites through the desert, and the death and resurrection of Jesus. Let's face it, a self-sustaining, spontaneously created thermal reaction in the middle of nowhere that moves with distinct purpose through a particular path with intelligent purpose is not a natural phenomenon. For that matter, neither is it naturally possible for a man to be brought back to life three days after rigor mortis has set in and decomposition has begun.

An interesting look at the history of Nintendo's game consoles and offerings. The only one that I didn't know about was their weird tennis game that sounds like a knock off of pong that preceded the original NES.

It's nice to read a story like this, where people who behave violently and unprofessionally end up getting busted. These two punks deserve the arrest and prosecution that they're getting now for the way they behaved. From the sounds of it, they ought to be lucky that neither of them were killed in self-defense by the people whose car they were repossessing. The way they handled it was a recipe for disaster.

Apparently people who are type A can change into type B people and vice versa. That is good news for me, I suppose, since I am generally very type B about most things, including my job.

Jim Bovard has been posting on behavior of the police at the National Police Week rally in DC and he's gotten some real fan mail from one cop who made a semi-indirect comparison to the dangers that police face and the current situation in Baghdad. Excuse the hell out of me, but the average cop will never in their lifetime face organized, armed resistance aimed at systematically eradicating their presence from the city. They'll never face the threat of having explosive devices strategically placed throughout civilian areas to blow their cruisers apart. They won't have to worry about randomly getting shot by snipers. In short, most cops will only face the possibility of becoming random victims of violence, rather than victims of systematic, pre-meditated and highly organized violence which is what's to be found in a warzone. It is sickening and offensive to our military that any police officer in the United States would compare policing to soldiering in terms of daily danger when both are sent to really do their jobs.

With a car like this one, Honda is no doubt going to end up owning the market for fuel cell cars! It may not be as sexy as something like the 2007 Civic Si Coupe, but the FCX's new version looks like the start of a great new line of vehicles from Honda that could end up further kicking our otherwise good for nothing domestic car companies' asses harder into the ground. Found this baby from a link at the Advice Goddess. As a side note, after looking at the pictures of her Honda Insight... I just don't understand how someone could feel safe in one of those. They make my 2007 Civic Ex Coup look like a SUV.

I think I may end up liking this JavaFX thingy after all. Here's a simple script written in JavaFX:

package test;
   import javafx.ui.Button;
   import javafx.ui.Frame;
   import javafx.ui.RootPane;
   import java.lang.System;
   Frame
   {
      width:200
      height:60
      visible: true
      title: "JavaFX example"
      onClose: operation() { System.exit(0); }
      content: RootPane
      {
         content: Button
         {
            text: "Click me!"
            action: operation() {
               System.out.println("Goodbye!");
               System.exit(0);
            }
         }
      }
   }

I'm a long way away from knowing how to use JavaFX the way that Flash developers can use Flash, but JavaFX has some pretty cool capabilities that could be tapped to make interesting applications. It is geared toward making applications that are delivered through a web browser, through the Java Web Start system, but it can be used to make purely desktop applications as well. Some of the demos are really cool, such as the one where some of Sun's developers used JavaFX to partially recreate the website for Tesla Motors. All you need in order to run those demos is to go here and download the Java Runtime Environment for Windows. If you use a Mac, you should already have everything you need to try them.

Yet another example of why the mainstream media is doomed to obscelecence:

Google is supposed to make it easier for newspaper readers to find content online. But some in the industry are questioning whether it makes business sense to allow Google to use their material for free.

"If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?" Sam Zell, the new owner of the Tribune Company, asked reporters during a speech at Stanford University last month. The Tribune Company operates the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.

Zell didn't wait for the reporters to reply, according to The Washington Post. "Not very," he said.

At a time when anyone with a blog can compete against vast media empires for readership, newspapers may be taking a harder look at their relationship with search engines and sites that aggregate headlines. The question some analysts are asking of media companies is: what's taken so long?

They have a very loose definition of what it means to steal, if they honestly call indexing their content and providing a small excerpt stealing. Not only is that not stealing, but it is the sort of behavior that adds value to their content by providing just enough of it to validate that it is what the user wants, without giving it away for nothing. Content that is not easily accessed is naturally going to lose a significant amount of its value as a good to the company that produces it, so it makes no business sense for them to discourage Google from providing the public with an effective way to find the content they are looking for.

Would Google be profitable without the content published by the mainstream media? Absolutely! They would still connect people to blog posts, academic papers, product reviews, help people find businesses, and a whole lot more information. The information provided by the mainstream media is only a subset of what Google indexes that people value. Google would certainly take a hit, but it would be a drop in the bucket compared to how bad it would be if Google simply dropped certain greedy media outlets from its index.

And here is what makes it so ironic for them to question whether or not it makes business sense:

Observers note that with newspapers receiving about 25 percent of their traffic from search engines, losing Google's traffic had to sting.

If you lose twenty five percent of your audience, it doesn't take a genius to realize that your ability to command high advertising rates and revenues is going to drop accordingly.

Orin Kerr gets it partially right:

Most users think of computer searches as occuring at the virtual level, because that's the user experience. But computer forensic software works at the physical level: it treats the hard drive as a physical device that contains millions of zeros and one, not as a virtual "box" of information accessed through an operating system. User profiles and most password protection operate only at a virtual level, so a goverment forensic analyst operating at a physical level wouldn't even notice the difference unless he was specifically looking for it.

It is true that user profiles and passwords only exist as virtual constructs useful to the operating system, but then so do the contents of a file system, which is where that data is stored. Files are another form of virtual construct useful to the operating system, as they are typically implemented as a series of linked blocks of data on the storage device (those blocks are called clusters). The data itself seems to be only a stream of binary data until it is interpretted by software that can understand the file system layout present on that storage volume. So, in that sense, the difference between files and settings such as user profiles is more of a semantic one when you are trying to differentiate between physical storage of data and logical storage of data.

So, it has begun?

The student, 19-year-old Mark D. Uhl of Amissville, Va., reportedly told authorities that he was making the bombs to stop protesters from disrupting the funeral service. The devices were made of a combination of gasoline and detergent, a law enforcement official told ABC News' Pierre Thomas. They were "slow burn," according to the official, and would not have been very destructive.

"There were indications that there were others involved in the manufacturing of these devices and we are still investigating these individuals with the assistance of ATF [Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms], Virginia State Police and FBI. At this time it is not believed that these devices were going to be used to interrupt the funeral services at Liberty University," the Campbell County Sheriff's Office said in a release.

The Phelps clan, that miserable pack of scoundrels that has made a name for itself by testing the civility of mourning families, was clearly a target, if not the target here if there is any truth to what Uhl said. I'm not buying it 100% myself, but I am inclined to believe that given the Phelps' propensity for making people seeth with rage over their actions, that there is a distinct possibility that Uhl may have intended to use this to stop them, regardless of the cost. It's bound to happen, and I'm surprised it has taken this long before someone actually even seriously considered using force to maim or murder them. Perhaps all it took this time was for them to hit a funeral with a large enough following that someone thought he could sneak into the group and stick it to the Phelps.

I might have to adjust my speculation as to how long it will take before someone makes a serious attempt on their lives at a funeral, since the first potential act of serious violence against them is ahead of my earlier predictions.

Yes, yes, I know that I can be one sick dude from time to time, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that my first thought after reading this post at Billy D's blog was "cry havoc and let slip the chimera werepigs of war!" Think about that one for a minute there. Yes, it is playing God, but the one thing that we would have going for us is that an army of human-pig chimera would be literally untouchable in an Islamic country. In hand-to-hand combat, just touching their skin would be equivalent to touching a pig!

Again, I know I am sick sometimes. I just thought it was an amusing silver lining in an otherwise very black cloud. Onward porcine soldiers! Defend the republic!

Surely there are better arguments for restrictions on immigration than this:

Critics fear a flood of recruits lured solely by the promise of legal status. "A very large number of non-citizens could change the purpose of the military from the defense of the country to a job and a way to get a foot in the door of the United States," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates restrictions on immigration. "It becomes a kind of mercenary thing."

The "mercenary" argument was used against the establishment of our professional, all volunteer military by the sort of people who see the draft as a "civic duty" rather than as a desperate last resort. It didn't apply there, and it most certainly does not apply to the immigration debate. While it would be undesirable to have an immigrant-heavy military for the same reason that the Romans were later crippled by their dependence on germanic legionaires, having a healthy flow of immigrants into our military would benefit our society. Not only would the immigrants who do this be more likely to care about their citizenship once they gain it, but a willingness to join the military can be a useful way to separate desireables from undesireables when classifying immigrants.

I would be curious to see whether Mr. Krikorian shares this same view about the GI Bill. Given the fact that an immigrant would be risking his life for the possibility of simply changing citizenship versus receiving a large cash grant, you would think that there would be more cause for concern about the quality of people whose primary motivation is a college education versus becoming part of our society...

Enforcing the law by day, violating it in an orgy of drunken debauchery by night? You know it's bad when the DC police chief has to come out and remind the visiting police officers that the law applies to them, and that the city will arrest and prosecute police officers who make menaces of themselves. Normally government officials at that level are not prone to being so blunt about their willingness to bust other government employees, especially in law enforcement circles.

The other night there was something on tv about a thirteen year old being hit by a car after the moron ran out in front of his school bus into oncoming traffic without looking. The part that stuck in my mind about it, though, was the fact that the media referred to him as "the little boy hit by a car." You read that right, they referred to a thirteen year old as a "little boy!" There was no other context such as, "he had the IQ of a little boy because he was retarded." You treat thirteen year olds like little boys and girls, and it's no wonder that they behave so stupidly...

We got Rachel her combination wedding band/engagement ring this weekend. It took us a good five and a half months to find something that we liked enough to find something that we were willing to pay the big bucks for. It's three quarter carats of diamond divided among seven diamonds that are set in a channel in the band. The diamonds are part of a series that is exquisitely cut and that really added a premium, but it was worth it!

One of the regulars at Right Wing News proves why conservatives always lose elections:

Then (if you get your way) all the Democrats and all the Liberals vote for the Liberal Democrat, most Republicans and some Conservatives vote for the Republican, some Conservatives vote Libertarian, some Conservatives vote for the Constitution Party guy, and the rest of the Conservatives realise the Constitution party is nearly as bad on foreign policy and the war on terror as Ron Paul and vote for some other third party. Congratulations! The Democrats win an overwhelming plurality!

-CavalierX

Which was a response in part to this, from me:

Let's say you have three candidates:

1) Liberal democrat
2) Squishy, barely anything Republican
3) Charismatic, principled, charming conservative running for the Constitution Party

This was from an exchange on one of John Hawkins' posts about why you should support the Republicans, even if they run the second coming of Karl Marx for President because the Democrats are automatically worse. Now, my point was that Hawkins' post was stupid in some elections because in some elections you will have a third party candidate who is clearly a better candidate, all things being equal, than the others. Hence my saying a "charismatic, principled, charming" conservative (or libertarian) as opposed to "he just has all the right views." A candidate who not only has the right platform, but who could eloquently advance it in a debate between candidates.

The biggest, most glaring mistake made by people like CavalierX, and it's common on the right, is the assumption that the left votes monolithically. If it did, then Ralph Nader would never have gotten more than a handful of votes against Gore in 2000. It would almost be a worthwhile investment for conservatives to fund opposition left-wing parties like the Green Party to the tune of $1 for every $2-$3 they give to support parties like the Constitution, Libertarian and some Republican Parties, just to further divide the left.

My point still stands regardless. When you have a scenario similar to what I showed above, it makes no sense to just play it safe when you have a candidate who could trounce the Republican and Democrat, if only given the chance. With enough effort from conservatives who normally support the Republican Party, a Constitution Party candidate in the mold of #3 above could easily go from being a fringe candidate to being the one who turns the Republican into a fringe candidate. The real reason that minor parties typically fail is that people will note vote for them, regardless of the quality of the candidate.

After some reflection on what Ron Paul said during the debates, it's clear to me that the man is unfit to be our president because he is incapable of choosing his battles and understanding when and where to say certain things. Setting aside the merits of his argument, which are few, he should have known that his views would have been ripped apart on this issue, and he walked right into a trap of his own making. That is the sort of basic thing that you expect a president to not do.

I see two sides of this debate. There are those who, like Paul, blame the United States for getting itself into trouble through wreckless deployment of its troops, and there are those who refuse to believe that the United States has ever created legitimate, deep-seated hatred through its behavior. "Blame America First" and "Blame America for Nothing" are the two camps, and both of them are undeserving of holding power. The latter, however, is very strongly accepted in the Republican Party and it is a virulent strain of nationalism that is going to end up seriously hurting our country one day.

What angers me about this issue is that many shit-for-brains Republicans and conservatives will denounce Paul, without hearing a single word of criticism on this issue for Giuliani, who is actually working off and on for the Saudi government. Given the reputation of the Saudi government on the issues of Islamic extremism and terrorism, that should automatically taint Giuliani, but it won't because most conservatives and Republicans will be too busy spittling over Paul's comments to notice that the man who "showed him up" has been on the enemy's payroll.

I think it's well established by now that I am not in the least a fan of Tony Blair. In fact, I think that he is so bad that he makes George Bush look like a bonafide civil libertarian. Some may not know why I hold these views of the man, so I say read this article from Reason Online to get an idea of what has been soooo wrong about this man's tenure as Prime Minister. This particular paragraph, which is about halfway through, could easily set the tone for why Blair is, IMO, a real monster as a leader of a Western nation:

Turning children into instruments of government policy is reminiscent of totalitarian regimes. Indeed, by coating Britain with cameras and effectively recruiting child spies, the Blairites have gone some way to making George Orwell’s dystopian nightmare of 1984 a reality. Winston Smith was tormented by the telescreen which monitored his every movement and also spoke to him; he hated the "horrible children" who spied on everyone, and the fact that "it was almost normal for people over 30 to be frightened of their own children." When sanctimonious 12-year-olds start telling off we Britons over loudspeakers later this month, I think we’ll know how Smith felt.

A large part of my attachment to Christianity is based on it being a religion that is actually in synch with the human condition. While it does regard human nature as warped and evil, it is actually very humanistic in some respects compared to other major religions because it teaches that we must repent of evil, not forsake the material world and possessions like some religions. I think I will expand on this thought later, when my mind is being less random.

When I was perusing the WorldNetDaily, I noticed this story and this story situated next to one another. What most stuck out to me was the fact that the woman in the second story is not even going to be facing a serious criminal sanction because she is ostensibly insane rather than certifiably evil, whereas the man in the first story will probably face serious criminal charges.

I have a new job in the works now. We're talking about doing an internal shift in the company that I work for. If and when (now it seems only a matter of when) it goes through, I'll be going from maintenance coding to doing real product research and development. It also brings with it a promotion to software engineer level two and a pretty big pay jump as well. I'm very excited about it because it's an opportunity for me to make something of myself by doing my own work rather than fixing others' mistakes.

The one thing I have never seen an atheist be willing to contemplate is "what if I am wrong, and there is a God and this God is just like the God of Israel?" Maybe the thought is just too scary because I have yet to see any atheist talk about that possibility, though I have seen people talk about what would happen if they came to have good reason to believe that their faith was based on something that didn't exist.

There is a lot of crap in the media. No, scratch that. The media is crap. The thing that has made me come to truly loath the mainstream media is the way that it acts like agents of chaos. It agitates and screws with people like in the case of Rodney King (total jackass of a human being right there) and the Duke (non-)rape case, but it is silent in the case of this guy, where the cops actually murdered an unarmed man and in murder cases like this which might offend racial sensitivities in the "wrong way." They're like traffic cops; always there to create trouble, never seem to be there to prevent trouble.

It's scary how much I agree with this post from Vox's blog. In fact, I have been thinking more and more like that, which is part of the malaise that has been happening here. I've basically come to accept the fact that most people are barely sentient and incapable of logic or changing their beliefs when confronted with hard truth. That, and I've been trying to avoid reading the news because I already have enough to be depressed about, since much of my day to day work consists of maintenance coding...

And on that note, all I can say is we have officially 4 months, 9 days now before the productivity of all sectors dependent on young male labor take a nosedive.

Since it didn't seem to be so clear last time, I'll make it a little clearer this time. When I was talking about marriage in the previous post, I was saying that Christians should encourage people to get married with the same understanding that we have of it. To some extent, I do think that a Christian who just says "get married!" without qualifying what we believe marriage is, would be party to that person's sin if they did not explain to them that what "get married" means to a Christian. Without that explanation it would be very easy for the person to be lead astray by advice that they didn't understand. So that is where I am coming from.

In practicality, there is no difference between adhering to secular standards on marriage and living in sin with your significant other. After that first divorce and remarriage, the effect is the same thing. So in that sense it would not be an issue to say that it is better that they not marry, if they don't intend to take on marriage in the way it is supposed to be regarded, so long as you make it clear to them that the only good choice is to marry and do it right.

Given that this post is categorized as a "random musing," I shall and should endeavor to limit it to one or two paragraphs. After talking to Rachel it has become clear to me that there is a problem with some of what I was saying. In order to be succinct, I'll just relay my newer thoughts on the matter. Christians should encourage people to marry because as much as I and others who comment here and blog elsewhere might believe otherwise, marriage is an institution that predates religion and so it is built into the human condition. We cannot argue that non-religious marriage is a historical fiction because marriage has come in some many forms, from so many cultures ranging from barely religious by our standards, to fanatically religious. The marriage meme is that old and adaptive, which is why God makes no claim to say that the marriages of non-Jews and non-Christians are any less valid than those of Jews and Christians. Even if we took away the secular state's say in the matter, it would be legitimate for two secular-minded people to marry anyway with some sort of respected person overseeing the wedding, even if it's just the parents.

There is also the pesky fact that we know what will happen if we encourage them to not get married. They'll behave like they were married if you know what I mean. The catch is, we should instead make it clear to them that marriage is something that God holds dear and won't allow to be dissolved lightly, regardless of what the state says. We should encourage them to marry, but make that go hand-in-hand with the knowledge of what the Gospel says about divorce. They have a choice. They can get married now, and risk divorce and all that the Torah and Gospel say comes with that. They can choose to continue to live in sin now, and repent later. In the latter, there is the distinct possibility that if they do that, they will go to Hell. However, it is their choice, and it is one that they must decide upon based on what they value. The problem is, in some cases, exacerbated by modern laws, the latter will seem like the rational choice. That is something that we need to think about and that has deep ramifications for our future.

Maybe now we'll see Asian men start to talk about the "Wisdom of the West" the way that hippies and new agers talk about the "Wisdom of the East:"

The physical changes are largely the result of an increasingly Westernized diet, say nutritionists. Meals that used to consist of mostly fish, vegetables and tofu now lean heavily toward an American-style menu of red meat, dairy and indulgences such as Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Cold Stone Creamery ice cream.

All this extra protein and calcium has led to longer, stronger and fuller bodies. Shinichi Tashiro, an endocrinology professor at Showa Pharmaceutical University, says the intake of extra fat tends to go to either breasts or hips in adolescent girls.

Marketers say they first started noticing more women with hourglass figures a few years ago. One of the first people to act on the change was apparel wholesaler Kazuya Kito.

At this rate, we will have the men of every Asian country begging the United States to invade and conquer them the way that we did Japan. Look at what we did for Japan! We set them up to become a phenominally successful economic power, and today their women have grown on average to be two cup sizes bigger than their mothers by giving in to American culinary imperialism. Oh the lamentations among the nationalists that their women have grown bustier and more voluptuous under the watchful eye of the American cultural hegemon. Have we no shame that we would impose ourselves on them like this?

It has come to my attention that some Americans might not understand why the French chose Sarkozy over having a woman for a President. After all, it sounds like a historic thing to do. Since we in the West seem to have reached the point where choosing leaders is no longer as necessary to the functioning of our civilization as electing people primarily on the basis that they allow us a sort of sociological catharsis, the election doesn't make sense.

Or does it?

From what I have read, Royal didn't have an economic program. Well, most politicians don't. They are still grasping at understanding that the law of conservation of mass and energy represents a hard, physical limit on their ability to use popular will power to create wealth out of nowhere, so that's no surprise. Some are reported to be working hard at lobbying God to repeal this law, but our divine government seems unmoved and set to ignore further petitions for redress of (non-)grievances of this sort.

The problem is Segolene Royal is so weak that even pacifists look warlike next to her. If the center-right coallition had run the corpse of George the Jack Russel Terrier against Royal, he would have inspired more confidence on the increasingly important domestic and foreign security issues coming home to roost in France. In fact, the only way that she could have beaten George would have been to disqualify him as a foreigner.

So, it should come as no surprise that Sarkozy won.

This is what happens when you run a candidate who is such a weak-willed pacificistic coward that people are more inspired by a small dog, than your candidate's prospects as a leader.

And that is George, the dog who could have been President.

And a cry was heard from everyone who thought that dieting was the way to go:

"Being thin doesn't automatically mean you're not fat," said Dr. Jimmy Bell, a professor of molecular imaging at Imperial College, London. Since 1994, Bell and his team have scanned nearly 800 people with MRI machines to create "fat maps" showing where people store fat.

According to the data, people who maintain their weight through diet rather than exercise are likely to have major deposits of internal fat, even if they are otherwise slim. "The whole concept of being fat needs to be redefined," said Bell, whose research is funded by Britain's Medical Research Council.

It's easy to see how people could have thought that just watching what they eat would be enough to keep themselves in good shape. If they don't eat too much fatty food, and eat generally in moderation it might seem like an appropriate assumption that they were safe. My cynical side, though, never saw the point in just dieting because very few people can keep up with it, and it's not as effective as eating moderately and working out on a regular basis. The idea that just dieting alone would do it always seemed too easy for me. Well, I guess this is another unfortunate victory for my cynicism...

Nothing like coming down with a case of the stomach flu to make you feel like going to work and blogging. Last night I was so sick I barely made it home because I was feeling so sick I had difficulty keeping my eyes open. I spent the better part of today on my couch, just vegetating and sleeping. I never knew how wonderful that could be until today.

Cathy Young didn't get a chance to take her argument far enough:

Yet prostitution is perhaps the ultimate victimless crime: a consensual transaction in which both parties are supposedly committing a crime, and the person most likely to be charged-the one selling sex-is also the one most likely to be viewed as the victim. (A bizarre inversion of this situation occurs in Sweden, where, as a result of feminist pressure to treat prostitutes as victims, it is now a crime to pay for sex but not to offer it for sale.) It is sometimes claimed that the true victims of prostitution are the johns' wives. But surely women whose husbands are involved in noncommercial-and sometimes quite expensive-extramarital affairs are no less victimized.

Actually, it would be reasonable and logical to suggest that men who have to go for noncommercial means to get sex are going to end up hurting the relationship more than men who can simply buy the services of a prostitute. It might be more financially expensive to do that, but it would greatly reduce the emotional attachment that is a likely biproduct of a man having to forge a new romantic relationship in order to get sex. Since romantic intimacy is something that cannot be divided without being compromised and left inferior, it would be in society's best interests to provide a purely physical experience bought with cash, rather than have whole new romantic relationships start up.

As far as the moral issues go with prostitution, it is all well and good to say that it is immoral and that people should not be doing it. However, the hookup culture that encourages cheap relationships is far worse because of the abuse that it inflicts on people's emotions. On a somewhat different note, one commentator said that Cho, the shooter at VTU, was driven to his shooting in part because of the hookup culture. If he could have paid a beautiful woman $50-$100 for twenty minutes of her time, maybe things would have been different. We'll never know, but it is worth thinking about since what we have is a high pressure hookup culture, without a pressure release valve in the form of legal prostitution.

Like Cathy, I'm not going to suggest that it is good work, honorable or anything like that. However, prostitution does serve a useful function for society in that it dampens the psychological and emotional impact of sexual sin in at least some cases. By keeping sex outside of marriage on a physical and financial level, it does leave more room for repairing a relationship that may have caused a man to seek sex outside of marriage.

We don't know how we would do it. We don't even know if we can do it. But by God we know that we want to do it which is just about as good as knowing that we have a fool-proof way of getting it done!

Now, after years of exponential growth of such Web sites and dozens of high-profile cases of criminal activity stemming from them, politicians in a half-dozen states are pushing legislation aimed at protecting children by requiring sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com to verify the age of every user and require parental permission for those under 18.

But while the proposals have earned praise from worried parents, those who run the sites and independent technology experts say they are little more than grandstanding and would be impossible to enforce.

Indeed, MySpace already requires that users be at least 14 to create profiles, and limits access to those belonging to anyone under 18, while Facebook requires that users be older than 13 and shows profiles only to other members in the same social network.

Neither set of rules has stopped children like those in North Carolina from lying about their ages or blocked adults from masquerading as teenagers.

It's that last line that says it all about what is really wrong with the issue. You can create the most comprehensive system out there short of a draconian system that uses a combination of government-backed biometrics information from several parts of the body (retina scan, finger prints, dna, etc.) and it won't do any good if someone decides to create a profile for someone else and let them use it for nefarious purposes. It would require the sort of policy that has resulted in teenagers being prosecuted as child pornographers and branded as sex offenders for videotaping themselves having sex, to scare even a handful of the sort of idiots who would engage in this behavior in the first place. The "you have to burn the village to save the village" mentality.

Getting people who are real sexual predators off the street would of course be the best solution, but that's never going to happen because many people are squeemish about the idea of hanging someone who molests a child (someone younger than the Age of Accountability). These people don't have the guts to execute someone who would do that to a child.

I bought Command and Conquer the First Decade over the weekend, and I reinstalled Windows so that I could play it. Even though a Radeon X300 is not that great of a video chipset, it should be able to handle a game like C&C: Generals! Unfortunately, no it can't. Even at 800x600 resolution with low texture detail it was choking my laptop. I don't know that I want to go back to Linux, either. Dammit. I wish I had the money for a new Intel MacBook.

When a man who did this to a woman who was trying to get to her probably dying father would have had much more to fear from the rest of society than being suspended from the job for a few days:

He gets Langston out of the car, put her in an arm lock that left bruises, spun her around, and slammed her against her car's hood hard enough her feet leave the ground.

Such gentlemanly behavior. Makes you think that in another life, the man might have been at home firebombing villages in Iraq while the active duty Marines have to pick up the pieces.

You know the culture of corruption runs deep when an officer who does this to a woman in a hospital parking lot, rushing in to see her father who has suffered a heart attack, gets a few days suspension and the sheriff says "both sides could have handled it better." There is no excuse for this behavior on the part of the deputy. The sheriff should have kicked this power-hungry loser to the curb for showing such poor judgment.

The problem has to be nipped in the bud before it becomes something like this. I wouldn't put it past someone who would do something like this under the color of law to treat a woman like that.

***UPDATE***: Since we're already talking about cops behaving like cads, here's another one that just blows my mind:

WINDSOR -- A former Windsor police officer who was fired following an investigation into an incident in which police say he held a .50-caliber pistol to a woman's head and pulled the trigger has been reinstated by the state labor board.

Granted, the pistol was unloaded, but if a private citizen did that to another one, they'd have been doing serious time in prison on probably a grab bag of charges. What's worse is that in this case, the police department doesn't even want the guy back, but they're being forced by the do-gooders in the state labor board to take back a guy who has violent, borderline if not outright, psychopathic tendencies! The only reason I even qualified it as "borderline" is that this incident happened over a case of adultery.

Recently someone I know has taken exception to me saying that I would recommend that any non-religious man living in the United States not get married. Her objection to this was that I was encouraging others to sin because I was encouraging them to have sex outside of marriage. See, my view on the subject is that a non-religious man stands to gain nothing of substance from a legal point of view, while gaining a great deal of legal liability from getting married.

I recognize that it is true that getting married would negate the sinful aspects of his sex life and having kids, but one of the problems that comes with that is the fact that he would stand a good chance of getting divorced. Statistically, non-religious marriages don't stand a very good chance of working out, which means that he could be very well left with a situation wherein he gets divorced way too early, then according to biblical teachings cannot find an outlet for his sexual needs that is not sinful.

So you could say that my stance on this is that it is better for him to sin until he becomes a Christian by having sex outside of marriage, then get married as a Christian, rather than "do the right thing" as a non-religious man and be unable to get married as a Christian. It is not a particularly good situation, but I see no long-term solution other than to recommend this approach to non-religious men. The alternative would end up putting them in a situation where if they get into the wrong marriage, their later possible Christian life will be dominated by sexual hardship.

For me this issue is part of a larger one where many Christians worry about things like marriage to the exclusion of all other things. There needs to be some soul-searching about why we often encourage people outside of the church to the adhere to certain standards, without first trying to bring them to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. I worry that the church forgets that these things are mere trappings of faith and holiness when divorced from Jesus, and that they are impotent on their own.

The major downside to capitalism is that when you establish a market for screwing over your fellow man and surveilling his every move, it won't be that hard to find people who are eager to make a quick buck by supplying innovative ideas on how to implement tyranny:

HP today announced a new data retention solution for telecommunication service providers that are being asked by governments to join the fight against global terrorism, organized crime and drug trafficking.

The HP Data Retention and Guardian ONline (DRAGON) solution goes beyond conventional storage. It is a comprehensive solution designed specifically for service providers that need a scalable system that enables them to capture massive volumes of voice and data traffic on their networks, retain it for months and years, and retrieve selected records - almost in real time - if asked by government agencies. The system also has robust security features to protect individual privacy.

They always talk about the security features in place to protect the public from abuse of power whenever a new law or technology is introduced to help the government do something that is more invasive, but the media never bothers to find out what those so-called safeguards really are. All I see is a one stop solution for data retention needs that would make it far less painful for the government to implement its data retention desires. As much as I love capitalism, it has a pernicious habit of living up to what the Communists used to say about how shorted sighted it is: "the capitalists will sell us the rope we will use to hang them."

After reading through this list of the top ten reasons it doesn't pay to be the "Computer Guy," I was left thinking about the top few reasons why it sometimes doesn't pay to be a software developer. Unfortunately, I realized that they are pretty much the same. Heck, you could just replace "computer guy" with "code monkey" and you'd have a pretty adequate list. The only real difference is that you will get strange looks from people when you explain to them that you write software, and that you only troubleshoot the software that you write.

I think one of the biggest problems that non-developers in IT face is the expectation that they'll just help anyone with their computer problems because that's the nice thing to do. Imagine asking a car mechanic you know to do the same thing with your car. Oh sure, you'll supply the parts, he'll just spend two hours on Saturday doing free work. How about a doctor? Surely they can sit down with you for no good reason and address every health issue you think you have. It's one thing to deal with quick advice. Every skilled profession or trade goes through that. It just gets abusive when it goes from advice to free labor.

Osama Bin Laden and Ahamadinawhatshisface are already drafting our terms of surrender for us:

The map the boy designed mimicked Clements High School. And, sources said, it was uploaded either to the boy's home computer or to a computer server where he and his friends could access and play on it. Two parents apparently learned from their children about the existence of the game, and complained to FBISD administrators, who investigated.

"They arrested him," Chen said of FBISD police, "and also went to the house to search." The Lin family consented to the search, and a hammer was found in the boy's room, which he used to fix his bed, because it wasn't in good shape, Chen said. He indicated police seized the hammer as a potential weapon.

"They decided he was a terroristic threat," said one source close to the district's investigation.

In the Walking Dead, a hammer was used quite effectively to dispatch people. Oh wait, those were zombies. Sorry, I was trying to follow the school officials and police investigators' train of thought and missed the last stop in the real world. I can only imagine that if they find a good student, who makes a FPS map and owns a hammer that he uses to fix his bed to be a terrorist that these people would wet their pants and cower like beaten dogs in the face of a kalashnikov-toting, bomb belt-wearing jihadist. Sort of makes me think of the kind of person who torments small animals and children, then wilts in the face of serious opposition... A pathetic coward who is beyond contempt.

I've been working on learning Perl now off and on for a few days. Nothing very serious, but it's an important language to know if you have to automate things or write web applications. What makes the language hard to learn is that there seems to be an infinite number of ways to do the same thing in Perl. It's probably no coincidence that the guy who wrote it, Larry Wall, is into Aikido (according to the last interview I saw with him) because like Aikido, it's as much a style of doing something as it is a specific way of doing something. Despite being so open-ended, it's got some really simple features like the XML::Simple package for XML processing. I couldn't do something like this in Java:

use XML::Simple;

my $xmlsim = XML::Simple->new();

my $xml = $xmlsim->XMLin("./test.xml");

print $xml->{question}[0]->{text} . "\n\n";

print $xml->{question}[1]->{text} . "\n\n";

print $xml->{question}[1]->{response}[1]->{weightTo} . "\n\n";

<poll>

     <author>MikeT</author>

     <startTime>5/1/2007 12:58:00</startTime>

     <endTime>5/1/2007 15:58:00</endTime>

     <title>Where should you live?</title>

     <question>

          <text>Do you like your life to be complicated, serene or halfway in between?</text>

          <response weightTo="Big City">I love living life in the fast lane!</response>

          <response weightTo="Suburbs">I like working in big cities, but wouldn't want to live there.</response>

          <response weightTo="Beach">I like a more relaxed environment, but still need some surprise to be happy.</response>

          <response weightTo="Plains">I like life to be no more complicated than knowing what I'm going to do today.</response>

     </question>

     <question>

          <text>Do you need to be surrounded by nice things?</text>

          <response weightTo="Big City">Yes!</response>

          <response weightTo="Suburbs|Beach">Not really.</response>

          <response weightTo="Plains">What? I ain't greedy!</response>

     </question>

     

     <result>

          <for>Big City</for>

          <text>You need to live in the big city. You can't stand a lifestyle that isn't fast paced and exciting.</text>

          <graphic>/graphics/bigcity.png</graphic>

     </result>

</poll>

I'd prefer to be using DOM for this plugin for Movable Type that I am slowly working on because DOM is more object-oriented by design, but this is close enough. There are many reasons to complain about Perl, all of which really have to do with how open-ended the language is, but you have to give the Perl monks credit for creating APIs that are this simple and accessible to newbies.

And yes, I did base that XML on what I would imagine you would need to recreate one of the polls from blogthings.

Why I give the utmost respect to our professional military, and tend to have the deepest contempt for the posers in militarized police forces:

There's a telling scene related to all of this in Evan Wright's terrific book Generation Kill. Wright was embedded with an elite U.S. Marine unit in Iraq. Throughout his time with the unit, Wright documents the extraordinary precautions the unit takes to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties, and the real heartbreak the soldiers feel when they do inadvertently kill a civilian. About 3/4 through the book, Wright explains how the full-time Marines were getting increasingly irritated with a reserve unit traveling with them. The reserve unit was mostly made up people who in their civilians lives were law enforcement, "from LAPD cops to DEA agents to air marshalls," and were acting like idiot renegades. Wright quotes a gunnery sargeant who traveled with the reserve unit:

"Some of the cops in Delta started doing this cowboy stuff. They put cattle horns on their Humvees. They'd roll into these hamlets, doing shows of force-kicking down doors, doing sweeps-just for the fuck of it. There was this little clique of them. Their ringleader was this beat cop...He's like five feet tall, talks like Joe Friday and everybody calls him 'Napoleon.'"

The unit ends up firebombing a village of Iraqis who'd been helping the Marines with intelligence about insurgents and Iraqi troops. Yes, it's just an anecdote. But it's a telling one. It suggests that to say some of our domestic police units are getting increasing militaristic probably does a disservice to the military.

I've said in the past that there is a major difference between the way that the military treats civilians and the way that the imposters in modern militarized police forces treat civilians. Actually, that should be "other civilians" since despite what some of them may think, the police are also civilians in the United States. Just looking at the way that police officers often conduct forced entries, and their "stuff happens" attitude toward botched raids that injure and kill innocent people speaks volumes about the general cultural difference between the military and modern police forces. Militaristic is not the word that I would use to describe the attitude and culture on display by these law enforcement types. I would say that it is simply "lawless."

The biggest problem facing the system in general today is that the police and legal system simply do not police their own. The military seems to be generally capable of doing this, but there is a culture of protection that pervades the civilian system. The result is that many police forces are compromised by corruption and criminality that would never be tolerated by the military or in the civilian population.

With people like that "policing" the public, I can't understand why anyone would be in favor of gun control. It would terrify me to live in an area where only criminals and badge-toting psychopaths could wield that level of force.