Such bluntness from this judge is refreshing. It's not every day that you see a public figure like that separate the believer from the beliefs like this:

The man told the court the sex was not about fulfilling his desires but about teaching his daughters how to behave for their husbands when they eventually married, as dictated in scripture.

In sentencing, Judge David Lovell said the misrepresentation of scripture used to justify the abuse of the girls "defied belief", and that he had "hypocritically betrayed" his religion and principles.

Apparently the guy plead guilty, and will probably be out in a few years because he is remorseful and all that. His wife and church also support him, which is good, but I hope there is a very clear understanding there that the man should never be allowed to preach again. It's bad enough that he committed adultery while he was a preacher--it's even worse that not only were the "partners" underage, but his own daughters! A man who has that sort of moral record has no business remaining in any leadership role, no matter how much he repents, and should probably never be allowed to resume one for the rest of his life. If that sounds harsh, consider 1 Timothy 3:

1Here is a trustworthy saying: If anyone sets his heart on being an overseer,[a] he desires a noble task. 2Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. 4He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him with proper respect. 5(If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God's church?) 6He must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil. 7He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil's trap.

8Deacons, likewise, are to be men worthy of respect, sincere, not indulging in much wine, and not pursuing dishonest gain. 9They must keep hold of the deep truths of the faith with a clear conscience. 10They must first be tested; and then if there is nothing against them, let them serve as deacons.

11In the same way, their wives[b] are to be women worthy of respect, not malicious talkers but temperate and trustworthy in everything.

12A deacon must be the husband of but one wife and must manage his children and his household well. 13Those who have served well gain an excellent standing and great assurance in their faith in Christ Jesus.

I just watched the episode called the Simpsons Bible Stories on the third disk of Season 10, and Bart was supposed to be King David for part of it. If you look at how he is dressed in the first part of his part in the episode, he looks like a Roman, not a Jew. Just like something out of the TV series Rome, complete with the leaf crown associated with the Imperator.

By making this ruling, the judge has effectively given the green light to teenage girls to purport to be of legal age, thus technically committing fraud, and then get out of it when the relationship no longer suits them or their parents. The judge might as well have ripped down most of the laws that punish minors for using false IDs offline while he was at it.

Be careful when hooking up with other "adults" online--even if they say they're 18, you'll be the one in hot water if they turn out to be 14 instead. That's the opinion of a federal judge in Ohio, who dismissed a suit last week against SexSearch.com, a web site that hosts personals ads by people who are looking for sex. The plaintiff, who went by John Doe due to the very personal nature of the suit, accused the site and its owners of negligent misrepresentation, fraud, and breach of warranty, but Judge Jack Zouhary ruled that the site and its alleged transgressions were protected under the 1996 Communications Decency Act.

Was the guy stupid? Probably. He may have not wanted to know if she was lying because she may have been pretty attractive, and let's face it, he probably felt he couldn't do any better otherwise as witnessed by his use of SexSearch.com. The fact is, the girl violated the terms of service, lied about her age and should herself be serving prison time for lying to him in such a fashion that would effectively be soliciting a crime. I can't see any good reason why she isn't an unconvicted criminal for soliciting sex with a grown man, since that is a crime in every state in the union.

Double standards.

Gotta love them...

...

or not.

A worker with a pellet gun, who was shooting at pigeons, shut down a chunk of a city.
A bomb squad in New Mexico blew up two CD players, in the off chance that they were bombs.
Then, there's the Mooninite invasion.

If it is this easy for our security forces to be called into action and create an uproar, no terrorist will even have to go for the gold to win big.

One thing I have never understood about the theory of evolution, even back when I used to believe in it with little question, is how it is supposed that homo sapien existed for so long without making the basic discoveries that lead to permanent civilization on relatively recently. Anthropology is not a hard science--not even close--but I have yet to see any good explanation for why our ancestors suddenly learned the basics of agriculture out of nowhere. Who really believes that out of an alleged two hundred some thousand years of our species' existence, only "recently" did people get the bright idea to try to create their own reliable food supplies? For people who have to struggle daily to get food, it would be a no-brainer to realize that it would be really convenient if they could figure out a way to get the food to grow around them instead of hunting and gathering.

Chalk it up to simply assuming that our ancestors were all but too stupid to function?

Isn't it ironic that in the "land of the free" the technical ability to wiretap would be the most sophisticated in the entire world?

The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.

It's a "comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems," says Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor and longtime surveillance expert.

All of this was brought to you by CALEA a law that was pushed forward by the Clinton Administration that has, in a stealthy way, laid the foundation for total surveillance of the United States' communication infrastructure. You have to hand it to them, not only did the Clintons pioneer this loss of civil liberties, but if (or should I say when) Hillary Clinton wins in 2008, they'll inherit far more than any official in our history. Stroke of the pen, law of the land as Bill Clinton said. Point and click, see and hear everything going on in the land, Hillary Clinton will say.

Those remote wiretapping capabilities are just asking for being broken into by interested third parties. This has already happened in Greece. There is no such thing as a "government-only backdoor" except on paper. Once the government has it, the criminal element will eventually have it. It's only a matter of time before well-connected criminals are as good or even better at wiretapping as the government is.

Does this remind anyone of a certain type of "logic" used in the War on Drugs?

One of the arguments the RIAA has made in every file-sharing lawsuit it has ever filed is that making a song available on a P2P network is the same as distributing it, therefore violating the record label's copyright on the song. So far, judges have been favorable to the RIAA's interpretation of the Copyright Act, with the latest victory for the RIAA coming in Atlantic v. Howell.

Sounds an awful lot like the argument that mere possession of a certain quantity of drugs is automatically enough to make you guilty of trafficking. Throw that intent and actual action out the window, boys. The copyright cartels are going to assume that just because the songs could be shared that damage was done! Granted, no honest person could ever claim that the copyright holders actually lost any money when no copyright infringement occurred. But then, this is the RIAA we're talking about...

Though this particular situation is from Israel, the mindset is shared by the leadership in the United States government in both major parties, and by most of the Western countries in general:

JERUSALEM - Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told the Egyptian government the Jewish state is willing to forfeit control over the Temple Mount - Judaism's holiest site - to the management of Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, according to an Arab media report.

Capitulating to your enemies, especially enemies who have a pathological, homicidal hatred of your people is not a winning strategy. It is national suicide. People who want to put your people's collective neck under their boot while they rape your women and enslave your children do not have legitimate concerns or points of view. They have only one legitimate position in life: on the receiving end of a bayonet the moment they enter your territory.

Roci has been doing some posts on why they hate us, and by "they" he means Islamic terrorists and their sympathizers. In the spirit of that, I have at least one example that shows why we suck at killing these menaces to our people and the world in general:

"You see powder [flour] connected by arrows and chalk, you never know," she
said. "It could be a terrorist, it could be something more serious.
We're thankful it wasn't, but there were a lot of resources that went
into figuring that out."

I have taken the plunge and am now running the new Movable Type 4.0. The upgrade is from the previous version, 3.35. I don't have really any of the old plug-ins installed or anything like that, but I do have stuff like the blogroll backed up so that stuff will be fixed incrementally. Please post a comment or something like that to make sure the software is working :)

**UPDATE** (9:45AM 8/27/2007): Ok, so I am 99% certain about what's wrong here. I'm going to fix it shortly when I can take a lunch break and get on a machine that will let me get to my blog suite.

Another thing too worth bringing up. We just got all of the photos back from the photographer for our wedding and they look great! We haven't been able to sign the intellectual property transfer yet, so we don't have full legal right to post any of them yet, but when we do, I think we'll post a few of the good ones. Rachel's ones in particular came out really well!

**UPDATE** (2PM 8/27/2007): Everything should be working now. Please give it a shot!

When it comes to education, politicians are especially good at just throwing money at the problem. Give universities what amounts to a blank check, and watch the problem get even worse!

The first provision calls for providing a full scholarship to any high school graduate majoring in math, engineering, science or technology. The scholarship would apply to any university, but students must work or teach in a related field for at least four years after graduation to qualify, Baucus said.

There are a lot of things that universities could cut spending on that would make them more efficient. For example, they could provide minimal student housing and food services, rather than the low-end hotel sort of feel that is increasingly common. They could stop spending money on student activities, encouraging students to go off campus and outside the university for recreation and entertainment. How about having a policy of doing only hand-me-downs from IT-intensive majors like Engineering and Computer Science for the majors that largely use computers for typing papers and Internet-based research? Why should Psychology and Political Science majors need anything more than a $300 used PC from the College of Math and Science or Engineering? How about only using endowments and such for doing beautification projects for campus buildings?

There are so many things that universities could do to cut out bloat from their budgets, but a lot of it is driven by parents. They want lavish furnishings for their kids. Many are convinced that without "the latest technology" their kid will fail even if their major has no practical need for a computer or any computer-based device made in the last five years. Let's start there before handing out any blank checks...

**Title reference:

I won't lie, the irony made me snicker...

You haven't seen anything until you've seen a British woman, all brash and independent when speaking with you, merely a humble man who accepts her equality as her inborn right, then turn around and silently walk with her head bowed a step behind her cocky Muslim boyfriend who forbids her to speak until he nods his head.

I hope this doesn't surprise anyone. I've seen it plenty of times myself. Some women will be more than capable of ripping apart the men they know and/or consider to be no threat to them, but will submissively kowtow to any man who won't put up with such behavior. What man more exemplifies the former, than most Western men today? Is it really so hard to see Vox Day's burqa or brothel future coming into existence now? Me thinks not!

For my part, the reason I find them to be contemptible human beings is that all they really are are pathetic bullies at best, psychic vampires at worst. I use the latter term with such disgust only because of the times that I have had such women get aggressive with me, then back down in fear when I politely informed them that I have no innate moral qualms about punching a woman in the face if she insists on attacking me like a man.

Rachel and I were out having lunch today when we overheard a few businessmen talking about the HBO series Rome. One of them asked when it took place, and one of the three responded that it took place around 1,200 A.D. Another commented that that was too recent, so it must have been something like 200 A.D. Now, for those that don't have any context here, Rome is about the rise and death of Julius Caesar and the series ends with the defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra by Octavian. Ergo, it takes place in the middle of the first century B.C., about 250 years before these guys assumed.

America gets its first taste of internal passports:

The cards would be mandatory for all "federal purposes," which include boarding an airplane or walking into a federal building, nuclear facility or national park, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the National Conference of State Legislatures last week. Citizens in states that don't comply with the new rules will have to use passports for federal purposes.

It's going to get very interesting for people in states that have gone against Real ID. Step three of the process of getting a passport will prove to be very difficult for people who are living in a state that isn't party to Real ID. According to the process as it currently exists, you can have someone vouch for you provided that they meet the requirements, but in a state that doesn't follow the guidelines of Real ID you are going to need someone with a military ID card or some other federal ID card that is accepted. This sort of process could be useful for them to strong-arm many of the smaller states into coming into the fold and complying with Real ID.

In the end we may not have real internal passports, just a system of driver's licenses that are so harmonized that they can function as a national ID card. Same difference.

While we're on the topic of free movement throughout the country, I thought this was appropriate:

Capt. Vasili Borodin: I will live in Montana. And I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pickup truck... maybe even a "recreational vehicle." And drive from state to state. Do they let you do that?
Captain Ramius: I suppose.
Capt. Vasili Borodin: No papers?
Captain Ramius: No papers, state to state.
Capt. Vasili Borodin: Well then, in winter I will live in... Arizona. Actually, I think I will need two wives.
Captain Ramius: Oh, at least.

Our criminal justice system is a farce, and this post from David Boaz provides one of many, many good reminders of why you cannot really talk about concepts like justice in our system today. This is what happens when you entrust the creation of the legal system to people who are as self-serving and prone to change with the direction of the wind as the average politician.

What kind of state allows someone, regardless of the mental state they are in, to shoot someone who is sleeping in the back with a shotgun and get not even one year in prison, while giving ninety three years in prison on the original term to a man who grew a lot of marijuana to treat his chronic pain? By any objective measure, in light of there being no evidence beyond hearsay that Mary Winkler was abused, Winkler should have been sentenced to death and Will Foster shouldn't have even been arrested for possessing a drug he used to treat his own pain.

The criminal statutes in effect today can not only be changed too easily, but they are generally not informed by any meaningful philosophy that would form a solid foundation. Murderers often get not even close to a life sentence, while people who use drugs can have their lives ruined by arbitrary and moronic laws that accuse them of crimes like trafficking without any proof that the person really was engaging in that activity. The only time a system like that can serve justice is by accident.

The solution is that there needs to be an open session, wherein all basic criminal laws are designed and debated in detail with the maximum effort to protect the innocent, the innocently accused, to prosecute the guilty and provide all manner of effective contingencies to fix mistakes. Then rather than get added to the legal code of the state, the criminal statutes are amended to the constitution so that it would take significant effort to tweak with them (ie mess with them to score political points).

A while back I got into a discussion with someone about Christianity and Buddhism and said that one of the reasons that Christianity is clearly better is that its teaching on the human condition is more peaceful and realistic than Buddhism's as expressed in the 4 Noble Truths. I understand the appeal of the Four Noble Truths. They sound very profound until you consider a few things...

1) All life is suffering

2) Suffering is caused by desire

3) To eliminate suffering, eliminate desire

4) To eliminate desire follow the Eightfold Path

The first of these "truths" is manifestly not true. Anyone who has ever seen a parent hold their newborn child knows this; everyone who has become happily married knows at least several days where their life is nearly the polar opposite of suffering. Christians often disprove the argument that death is suffering. Many Christians go into death serenely and blissfully. Muslims, while often not serene about it, likewise tend to go into death blissfully (and often bombastically, it would seem). In short, birth is not suffering (it is a mix for the mother). Death can be peaceful and happy. Everything in between can also be a mix. Suffering one minute does not negate peace and joy in the next or summarize the nature of life.

The second of these "truths" is pure rubbish. People suffer for many reasons. If you take away everything that a person desires, that will cause suffering. If you give a man everything he desires, that can cause suffering. If you deny a basic human need that can cause suffering; if you fulfill it incorrectly that can cause depression which likewise causes suffering, or rather unpleasantness. Even if you give someone all they desire, thus satisfying every desire, that won't be enough to cause many people to not suffer.

The third of these "truths" can be disproved by killing a loved one of an advocate of the Four Noble Truths. Assuming they have a purely agape relationship with that loved one, there is no desire component to it. Therefore suffering was caused by a factor other than desire, and the only way to not experience suffering at this point is to stop loving that person.

The fourth I leave it up to you to decide.

They would kill these little monsters before they have any chance of becoming adults with the same sort of attitude toward human life. I would submit that since they took the time to rip the little boy's clothes off, they clearly premeditated the crime on the aggregate.

Obviously the point about "if Canadians really believed in science and natural selection" will be lost on a number of people. That jab is appropriate because basic materialistic evolutionary thought would suggest that these children are natural predators who attack their own, and that we cannot rely on supernatural means to cure this fundamental personality flaw. The only solution is to fall back on artificial selection, and purge the personality flaw as it is extremely serious and dangerous to every child these three come into contact with. Putting them down is the logical solution for a society that believes that origin of human beings is through a process of refining undesirable attributes out of the population by either allowing the weak to die off or eliminating those who display behaviors that are destructive to the preservation and advancement of the species. I can think of nothing more undesirable as a personality trait than three marauding boys who attack and murder other children.

Clearly the only scientifically-sound solution is to terminate their lives immediately, as there is no empirical evidence that such people can be rehabilitated with any degree of consistency worth basing a criminal justice system on.

Everyone, especially women, who has been told that when confronted by a criminal with a gun that it is effectively suicide to resist needs to watch this video over and over again until it really sinks in. Those women beat the tar out of that armed robber so badly that he had to be carried away on a stretcher with some very serious injuries. The man had a gun, all they had were some sticks and curling irons. He got his ass kicked so badly that he didn't even get a chance to hurt anyone of them.

And because I am such a nice guy, I am hosting a backup copy of the video here for anyone who needs a backup copy of this clip.

A little bias in the media? Nah.... never! Check this out. The title of the story is "Helping enemies in Iraq." Makes it sound like someone in our government, since it's about our government, is actively aiding the insurgency. Turns out that the real story is that the Department of Defense just cannot account for a lot of the weapons that it has turned over to the new government of Iraq. Big surprise there... How are they supposed to keep track of how a fledgling government does inventory, anyway?

Arstechnica has an interesting take on why Apple continues to avoid the "enterprise market." My own theory, which comes from being a young code monkey who's been doing "enterprise coding" for nearly two years, is this. Enterprise software is bureaucratic rubbish. Anyone who has done Java coding in a large, enterprise environment will see that while the vision behind Java 2 Enterprise Edition is good, the practical difference between coding in J2SE (standard) versus J2EE (enterprise) is like the difference between the iPhone and your average corporate crap phone.

(Businesses will frequently make you use bulky, unwieldy "enterprise software" when a custom-designed product would fit into the IT infrastructure more comfortably. I worked on one project where we had to use Enterprise Java Beans where we could have implemented the same functionality in our own really simple, stream-lined RMI-based product. Problem was, it had to be "enterprise," therefore we had no choice but to use EJBs where RMI provided the same functionality that we needed, but with less overhead.)

Instapundit linked to this post on nanotechnology being used in war. A while back I wrote a short story which had some nanotechnology used in it during battle. The application I conceived of (which we are far away from, admittedly) is a soldier carrying a series of vials of nanobots which can be broken or opened to activate. Once activated, the nanobots reassemble like cells into a full-fledged weapon system. The one I used as an example was one of the alien soldiers place a vial's opening up against a keyhole and activating it, turning the swarm of nanobots into a wasp-like killing machine that attacked the enemy combatants inside the locked room. Ahhh imagination!

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This case makes me sick. It is very obvious that the man is innocent, and the prosecutor even went out of his way to concoct the wildest, most absurd counter-attack on an alibi that I have ever heard. A man of modest means, chartering a private jet to fly across the state licketysplit to murder someone and then be home in time for dinner with his pregnant girlfriend? I don't know which is scarier, that this man has not been drummed out of office and into destitution and poverty by every decent person in his jurisdiction, or that the jury actually believed him.

Then there is also this case where a man was prosecuted for having a valid prescription for vicodin that prosecutors and police thought was not medically necessary. Even though the appeals court categorically came down on the side of the defendant, the prosecutors are now moving to try him again!

Lastly, there is the case of Genarlow Wilson where the prosecutor put the poor guy away for ten years for getting oral sex from a girl two years his junior, while both of them were minors. The prosecutor had the ability to just let the case slide since the state legislature had recently passed a law making that go from a felony to a misdemeanor. Instead he chose to go after him without mercy under the old law.

For all of my complaining about police, I have to say that the police are frequently nowhere near as bad as the prosecutors are these days. I think it's a lot fairer to be critical of prosecutors as a profession than police because there are much fewer prosecutors, which makes every bad apple stick out that much more. On top of that, prosecutors are the ones really make the news these days with totally absurd cases that are designed to wreck an innocent person's life. When that's not the case, what they push for in terms of punishment is often frequently outside the boundaries of what is just.

It takes a truly evil individual to concoct some of these really wild stories that are being used to put people away, just to add another notch on a prosecutor's belt. In fact, it is pretty safe to say that when prosecutors are without a real sense of right and wrong, their abuses tend to make those of the police look systematically petty by comparison.

If you predestinationists are correct, and Pharaoh was created before time began as an object of God's wrath, then how is his sin in rebellion to God's plan? Clearly if God created him to have both a function and form that were sinful, oppressive, etc., then for him to be those things would be to be obedient to how God had created him. If Pharaoh lived as he was created, how could you fault him, rather than God, for he was merely doing what he was designed for?

The good professor is onto something here:

John Marshall Law School professor John Gorby has filed a lawsuit against his employer, saying he was improperly punished for what he believes were innocuous comments to a student after class.

The student, who is Jewish, was doing well in class and Gorby pondered whether his religious training -- which from a young age encouraged critical analysis of written Scripture -- explained why Jews pass the bar at higher rates than African Americans.

It should come as no surprise that such an upbringing might serve lawyers better than a religious upbringing which shies away from that in favor of emotion and "the experience." There is also the fact that too that many of these churches are not particularly intellectual compared to their Jewish counterparts, and that would certainly not exert a positive influence on children who would end up pursuing a law degree.

This too would serve as a good example for how why many blacks might not do well:

The student shared some of Gorby's comments with classmates, resulting in an elevator confrontation in which an African-American student asked Gorby if it was true that he said blacks don't do well in his class.

She filed a complaint with an assistant dean. The Black Law Student Association demanded Gorby be suspended for 30 days without pay. Gorby addressed the student group trying to straighten things out.

What this incident does is it shows that there is a remarkable spinelessness in the Black Law Student Association and probably in Gorby's class as well among at least a few of his black students. His remark was clearly not racist, as it was a comparison between two religious traditions. Anyone who is that quick to jump all over him, to try to silence him and push him out of the way simply does not have the sort of intellect capable of functioning in a heated courtroom; all the black student did was prove that she could not handle an intellectual debate that hit a little close to home.

It's just a mite moronic to even suggest that a person who is that psychically weak has the mental constitution to be anything other than an abysmal failure as a lawyer. All her opponent will have to do is spice up his or her arguments with some subtly insulting statements to win whatever case this student and her fellow mental midgets at the Black Law Student Association are assigned to handle in their future positions.

John Whitehead, writing for the Rutherford Institute, proves that there are still conservatives who understand the danger of having a powerful government:

Writing for World Net Daily, Joseph Farah declared, "What we've witnessed is the biggest arms buildup in the history of the federal government-and it's not taking place in the Defense Department. The kind of arms that are proliferating in Washington these days are the kind pointed at our own civilian population and carried by a growing number of federal police forces with ever-larger budgets and ever-deadlier arsenals."

"Good grief," remarked Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America, "that's a standing army." At all levels, federal, local and state, the government and the police have merged. And in the process, they have become a standing army-which is exactly what the Founders feared.

Those who drafted the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights had an enormous distrust of standing armies. They knew that despotic governments have always used standing armies to control the people and impose tyranny. As James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, wrote, "A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home." These "instruments of tyranny" are now in place.

A long time ago, before I reset my blog, I actually wrote a long post saying the same thing. The police have largely become the "standing army" that our founding fathers feared would deprive us of liberty. It's easy for a lot of people to get really stuck on stupid with symbolism, narrow definitions and figures of speech, insisting that the police aren't literally an army, as they are split up between probably at least 1,000 jurisdictions and levels of government aren't legally classified as soldiers. However, the facts often speak for themselves. Outfitted like this, it is simply moronic to even contest the fact that the civil institution of the peace officer is actively being abolished around the country and in many areas, is all but extinct.

In my opinion, the most striking similarity between the armies the founding fathers feared, and the law enforcement establishment today, is the unwillingness to conduct its affairs according to the norms of civil society. People from every angle of the system, police, prosecutor and judge, tend to look out for one another in much the same way that left the standing armies of old largely unaccountable to the law.