September 2007 Archives

Hmmm, I wonder why:

The amoeba typically live in lake bottoms, grazing off algae and bacteria in the sediment. Beach said people become infected when they wade through shallow water and stir up the bottom. If someone allows water to shoot up the nose -- say, by doing a cannonball off a cliff -- the amoeba can latch onto the person's olfactory nerve.

Researchers still have much to learn about Naegleria, Beach said. For example, it seems that children are more likely to get infected, and boys are infected more often than girls. Experts don't know why.

"Boys tend to have more boisterous activities (in water), but we're not clear," he said.

This comes pretty hot on the heels of reading another story of researchers not being able to see what should be obvious. They observed in this case that certain activities which are boisterous tend to stir up the amoeba, causing it to infect a human. They also observed that boys are more likely to get infected than girls. They even acknowledge that boys are more likely to engage in boisterous activity in the water than girls. The answer is right in front of them, they just can't see it because it falls onto more basic reasoning skills.

• Boys tend to engage in boisterous activity.
• Boisterous activities tend to stir up the parasite.
• Boys tend to stir up the parasite.

QED...

What problem?

The Navy decided to alter the buildings' shape following requests this year by Anti-Defamation League regional director Morris Casuto and U.S. Rep. Susan Davis.

"I don't ascribe any intentionally evil motives to this," Casuto said of the design. "It just happened. The Navy has been very good about recognizing the problem. The issue is over."

The US Navy is going to spend $600,000 to change the shape of a building that looks like a swastika because people are offended by the design? How many of the people who think that spending $600,000 to change the shape of a perfectly good building, will turn around and complain about fraud, waste and abuse in the military? Most of the bleeding heart liberals who are at the forefront of those upset by this design.

The irony is that they are worried about the shape of this building, and the "message" it sends, when this is the same country that allows native born citizens whose parents were from every ethnic group killed under that symbol to legally run for the highest offices in the country. It is one that not only doesn't harass the Jewish people, but has frequently taken on the status of pariah for openly defending them, and Israel in particular.

Of course, the ADL and it's supporters could volunteer to pay $600,000 of their own money to help the Navy make this change...

Halo 3 is causing major productivity drops now that it has been released. From the article:

It's not just the tech guys who might be in short supply this week. Farther back in the GameStop line, Brian, a government economic analyst, was wondering about the wisdom of Microsoft spending more $10 million to promote Halo 3.

"All these people were going to buy the game anyway," he said. "I have no idea how they're going to get $10 million more in revenue. I have to hope that their marketing people know something I don't."

Apparently the fact that Halo 3 has now reached the status of the biggest entertainment event in history, went right over Brian's head. $170,000,000 in sales on the first day that the game was out for sale. Over 3.5M people preordered the game. Call me crazy, but I think Microsoft recouped that $10,000,000 in marketing costs within the first day of people going into the buy the game when they hadn't preordered a copy of it. Add to that, that part of the reason the game had so much hype was the fact that Microsoft paid $10,000,000 to put advertisements everywhere from on TV to in movie theatres. Yeah, really dumb move on Microsoft's part.

A federal judge read the constitution and discovered that the USA PATRIOT Act has more unconstitutional provisions. Huh. Apparently the U.S. Constitution says that the police have to have probable cause before they search and seize. Who would have guessed?...

NRG is about to start construction on additional nuclear reactors at one of its sites in Texas. It's going to cost a lot of money, to the tune of about six billion dollars to add those new capabilities and it will take several years to get operational, but it's another small step toward not having to rely on fossil fuels. Of course, the environmentalists are already up in arms over this, but what else is new? A more misanthropic lot never existed.

Should Microsoft abandon Vista? I don't see why not, considering the amount of damage that has been done to their upgrade path by this monstrosity. The only practical reason for any normal home user to ever upgrade to it in the first place is the new user interface, which is built on Direct3D. I have to admit that Vista RC1's user interface was generally faster and more responsive on my laptop than Windows XP's, but that's about it. What should Microsoft do to compete against Leopard?

They should bolt the new user interface onto Windows XP, get rid of the digital rights management software which was only good for slowing down I/O performance, and offer a free upgrade to every Windows Vista user. Then they should cut the retail cost of new licenses of Windows by at least twenty five percent, and pray that they can generate substantial interest from people who were turned off by Vista.

And just for the sake of ingratiating themselves to developers who had to use Vista as a deployment platform, they should throw in a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Standard with every copy of Windows XP Part Deux that the sell. Oh the wailing and gnashing of teeth I have heard from .NET developers who had to deploy onto Windows Vista!

Amy Alkon makes a weak attempt to use moral relativism as a defense of abortion:

Don't bother accusing me of "moral relativism." I'll admit to it freely, and you should, too — because there's no definitive answer on whether it's right or wrong to eat meat or on when a fertilized egg becomes a person. There's only my opinion and your opinion, and the opinions that shaped them.

Aside from specific religious moral considerations, there is no secular argument for declaring the consumption of meat to be an immoral action. The vegetarian that she cites could argue that it is inherently wrong to eat an animal's meat, but that would logically lead to the ludicrous assertion that entire species' existences are immoral. Would it then be the "moral duty" of a wolf to commit suicide, rather than eat a deer? If not, then why would it be immoral for a human being to eat an animal? Humans are by nature omnivores.

There is a simple reason why it is equally moronic for someone to say "I don't know when someone becomes a human being." The essence of humanity is not some philosophical bullshit like when we become sentient, draw our first breath, or when we become more free agents. It is as the moment of conception, when both gametes merge together and form an organism that is genetically homo sapien. Genetics, not philosophical claptraps, is the basis of what defines a human being. I have yet to see anyone successfully argue against this from a scientific, rational point of view.

It is not an opinion that someone becomes human at conception. It is a scientific fact. Deal with it, you bloody sophists.

Keep telling yourself that:

So, when Mossberg says, as he did the other day, that Linux is not ready for the average "mainstream" user, it's a lot like Robert Parker giving the thumbs down to your favorite Bordeaux.

Mossberg always makes it clear that he writes for the tech-averse computer user - that is, the "mainstream" user. As a Linux enthusiast, I believe people use the term "mainstream" as a codeword for "Microsoft Windows". That is to say, since 90% or more of the world computers run some form of Microsoft Windows, then something that isn't Windows isn't mainstream. That's the idea I got out of Mr. Mossberg's column the other day. And when I first read it, it got my Linux-loving dander up, though I couldn't dismiss it as your typical FUD piece. I am familiar with Mr. Mossberg and I have read his columns and he's quite a bit more intelligent and most certainly more sincere than FUD purveyors like Rob Enderle.

There are some very good reasons about why Linux is not ready for the mainstream user:

• Every mainstream distribution that is "good" is pretty damn bloated today. Even Ubuntu. I couldn't believe it when I realized that a fresh installation of Ubuntu was using significantly more RAM than Windows does on my laptop. The bloat hurts, like when you are trying to run a lot of software at once.
• To configure Windows XP or do any administrative tasks like installing software, I never have to use clunky packaging software or drop to the command line. Just run setup.exe as a user with the right permissions, and everything is taken care of for me.
• The chaos that comes from having no authority on what the basic Linux desktop is has resulted in there being no consistent experience between distributions, and even between desktop environments. A user may have to also run multiple GUI widget libraries which adds to the bloat that they must deal with.
• Then there is the fact that a lot of things are just easier on Windows. Need to install new device drivers? Just run the installer and reboot. That is the extent of your concern about whether or not the kernel will be able to deal with them without intervention on your part.

Linux kicks ass for a lot of things. Competing against real desktop platforms is just not one of them. It is outclassed, deal with it! If for no other reason than the fact that many Linux fans severely underestimate the difficulty in making a desktop OS that every Tom, Dick and Harry can use on a daily basis. I remain dubious as to whether or not it is even worth it, when there are other open source platforms like HaikuOS which show much greater potential.

I got my copy of Halo 3 last night, and I have been playing it for much of the day. I'm at the point where you are about to storm the citadel to attack the Prophet of Truth. It's an amazing game, and a fine ending for the trilogy. In fact, it makes you wonder what Microsoft is going to be able to do for an encore. Gears of War 2? I'm not entirely sold on that one, though Gears of War is a very good game. For those who are wondering, yes, it is a very good reason to go out and buy an XBox 360.

A quote from Lee Harris on freedom, self-control and the War on Drugs (read the whole thing):

The policy of harm-reduction, which Dalrymple assails, may do little good for the addicts, but at least it preserves the humanity of the society that adopts it; the same cannot be said for a policy of letting people die unnecessarily from HIV and hepatitis.

Harris makes many good points about weakness and lack of self-control. Many of us have experienced this in some fashion, as there are very few of us who are so strong willed by nature that we can resist every vice that is thrown at us. Be it as it may, this logic displayed here, while noble in principle, is problematic in practice. It assumes several things about society, none of which can be taken for granted. First, it assumes that society is motivated by a genuine desire to gently help addicts, rather than a combination of fear, loathing and pity. Second, it assumes that society is wise enough to safeguard the powerful institutions put in place to engage in harm-reduction from those who would expand them and abuse them for their own interests. Finally, it assumes that society cannot appeal to other, more indirect means to curb the excesses of immoral activity.

Much of the rhetoric put forward to defend the War on Drugs is based on fear of what addicts would do without drug agents prowling the streets looking for users and dealers to bust. As an opponent of the War on Drugs, I am often asked by social conservatives how I would feel about having potentially more intoxicated users on the road, drugs in school (as if they aren't already there in spades), and how I feel about drug users committing crimes to fuel their habits. However, none of these public safety concerns are tied to the drug themselves. A badly sleep-deprived driver or one using a cell phone can be as much a public menace as one who is high or drunk. The War on Drugs has taken away most of the controls that we put in place to control alcohol sales to minors, thus making it easier for them to get crack than beer. Finally, the issue about violent crime committed by drug users falls into several areas that exacerbate it ranging from bleeding heart sympathy for violent offenders, to laws that ridiculously and tyrannically limit the right of self-defense, to the basic fact that black market premiums will make drug habits far more financially crippling than they should be. In many cases, the pity aspect is a thin sugar coating to hide the fact that many, perhaps most, of the supporters of the War on Drugs are far more concerned with their own safety, than they are with the well being of drug users.

It is also worth mentioning that many of the problems with our criminal justice system we face today are due to the fact that we have a large population of drug users and dealers in prison. Social conservatives frequently will lament the fact that judges and prosecutors will give violent offenders less time in prison citing overcrowded prisons and jails as the excuse. Now, if the prisons were only filled with people who committed violent crimes or economic crimes, there would be plenty of room for robbers, murderers, rapists, etc. In fact, there would be so much room that we could even "go soft" by abolishing the death penalty because of the surplus room we would have for giving every single last convicted murderer life in prison without the possibility of parole, without facing any conceivable difficulties.

One of the things that social conservatives frequently forget is the fact that the War on Drugs has spawned many laws which are profoundly unethical, not the least of which are the very weak protections that property enjoys now under asset forfeiture laws. We have reached a point now where merely possessing a large volume of cash on you is probable cause to suspect a drug crime is being, or has been, committed and to seize the assets. There is also the issue of the militarization of local police forces, the dramatic increase in the role that SWAT units play in basic law enforcement, and the general evolution of local and state police forces to something that more closely resembles a gendarme than an American peace officer. The potential for abuse is very real in these changes to our system of government. Ranging from the obvious damage to basic property and constitution rights, to the ability of the government to bring even more lethal firepower to bear on the American people, in many cases in areas where the public has been legally disarmed. In many well-documented cases, this is not even a theoretical or academic issue; there is an appalling number of citizens who have suffered grievous and even violent injustice by their ostensible "saviors" who often render far more life-altering effects than the substances themselves.

One of the things that Lee did not seem to take into consideration when he was discussing the issue of self-mastery was the ability of society to create indirect controls on behaviors such as drug use. There will always be drug users, just as there will always be poor people. This is an immutable fact about living in a civilized society in a fallen world. However, society has means at its disposal that are not only liberty-enhancing, but effective at discouraging bad behavior. The problem is, it just chooses to not use them. A far more pitiless policy toward violent offenders would be a good start, as would severe penalties for even a first time offense of driving under the influence of a controlled substance of any sort. Eliminating gun controls on law-abiding citizens, and at least toning down excessive force laws would enable law-abiding citizens to exercise a rather sweeping right of self-defense that would have a deterrent factor on crime in general. Finally, stripping the addicts themselves of the legal excuse of intoxication would do wonders to create an environment where many people would find it absolutely necessary to gain that self-mastery they lack.

The War on Drugs illustrates the contradictions of social conservative thought. On the one hand, most social conservatives are not content to allow people to be foolish, and then hold them responsible for the consequences. Yet on the other hand they will turn around and bemoan the lack of accountability and responsibility in society. This is epitomized by the social conservative who simultaneously cannot allow someone to use even marijuana in their own home, after work, but who insists that society has some sort of duty to protect people from behavior that they knew in advance would seriously mess up their lives. In this sense, social conservatism often bears a more than passing resemblance to socialist nannystatism, and the disasters that result from that still echo loudly from the 20th century. It is not like they even have the excuse of saying "we didn't know." The impulse of saving people from themselves has many terrible implications, and it is an open-ended mindset which cannot be limited based on personal prejudices. The future of a society that believes in saving those who are neither dysfunctionally insane nor severally retarded from themselves is a dark one because it is one where the public has opened pandora's box as far as government intervention into civil society is concerned.

Ilya Somin raises some great points about how mandatory national service for the young not only makes little sense, but is very unfair:

One of the most interesting (and in my view sinister) aspects of proposals for mandatory "national service" is that they virtually always target only the young, usually 18-21 year olds. This might be understandable if the proposals were limited to military service. But most current proposals (including those by Charles Rangel, John McCain, Bill Buckley, the DLC, and Rahm Emanuel noted in my last post), incorporate civilian service as well. When it comes to office work and light menial labor, there are many elderly and middle-aged people who can do the job just as well as 18-21 year olds can, if not better.

Indeed, the moral case for conscripting the elderly for civilian service is arguably stronger than that for drafting the young. Many elderly people are healthy enough to perform nonstrenuous forms of "national service." Unlike the young, the elderly usually won't have to postpone careers, marriage, and educational opportunities to fulfill their forced labor obligations. Moreover, the elderly, to a far greater extent than the young, are beneficiaries of massive government redistributive programs, such as Social Security and Medicare - programs that transfer enormous amounts of wealth from other age groups to themselves. Nonelderly poor people who receive welfare benefits are required to work (or at least be looking for work) under the 1996 welfare reform law; it stands to reason that the elderly (most of whom are far from poor) can be required to work for the vastly larger government benefits that they receive. Middle-aged people are also not obviously inferior candidates for civilian "national service" than the young. I know I could do most kinds of service better today than when I was 18. To be clear, I am not arguing for imposing forced labor on the elderly or the middle-aged; but I do believe that doing so would be no worse than imposing that burden on the young.

From a practical standpoint, the blustering rhetoric about mandatory national service is ludicrous. It is little more than a form of slavery that is imposed blindly on the citizenry, as it is a mandatory confiscation of a few years of a citizen's freedom without being the punishment for a crime. The value of the labor that is unfairly confiscated by the federal government, both for the military and service groups, would be of dubious value. The last thing America needs is a flood of angry conscripts who would rather be working or going to college, and an equally large number of people forced to work for the benefit of people they would never choose to postpone their life plans for. If you think social services and welfare agencies are bad enough in their bureaucracy, put in legions more of people who would never in their right mind have chosen to be there in the first place.

If we are going to mandate national service, then it is only fair that the elderly be forced to join in alongside the young. It only makes sense, as most of the elderly can no more be said to have "paid their dues" to society than the young can. What is worse, is that many elderly people today are enjoying government benefits that they never paid for during their "productive years." What's more, for the sake of international competitiveness, it only makes sense to not create any barriers that would decrease the professional experience of young Americans. In some areas, such as many of the engineering fields, those first few years out of college can be very, very important.

What I propose is a very simple compromise. The vast majority of elderly people who are living off of any government social benefits should be kicked off of the public dole and be required to go back to work. There can be little doubt that with millions more elderly people working today, that the economy would not need illegal immigrants to do many jobs. Perhaps many elderly citizens' brains would not have prematurely atrophied if they had gone to work as a greeter at Wal-Mart, to work at McDonalds, or some similar job. Retirement is a luxury that one acquires from a lifetime of unusually productive work that allows one to live entirely off of the saved up wealth one has created; pensions and similar funds should be tied to a lifetime of genuine public service.

In fact, dare I say, there is a moral case for making any able-bodied elderly individual work. Idle hands (and minds) are the devil's workshop.

Maybe this is only valid for my installation of Movable Type, but Privacy won't protect search results. I tried putting the <MTPrivateEntry> tags in the appropriate location in the Entry Summary module, which the Search template uses, but it wouldn't password block the search results, meaning that the built-in search engine could be used to get around the password protection. Therefore I was left with no choice but to run chmod -x on mt-search.cgi for the time being.

For anyone who hasn't read it, I highly recommend that before you read anything on the Jena 6, you read this article written by Jason Whitlock.

What is wrong with America when six young thugs can sneak up on and beat up an innocent man, and then be considered "victims" because the legal system lashes out harshly at them? Before we begin, though, let's call a spade, a spade. The vast majority of the black people who are coming out in outrage over this are bitter racists, and are different from the white racists who hurt their ancestors only in the superficial matter of being born with brown skin and African heritage. Most of the rest, primarily their white sympathizers, are a pathetic, miserable lot who feel the need to repent for racial sins they themselves did not commit, would not commit, and would fight if they witnessed white people committing them against black people today.

Perhaps the charge of attempted murder is ridiculous. It is possible that Mychal Bell only intended to beat Justin Barker into a coma or paralysis, at which rate we could not good conscience charge him with attempted murder. No, his only goal would have been to lash out in hatred, even if it is a purely generic hatred, toward another human being, and render serious physical harm to him. There but for the grace of God is Justin Barker not a quadriplegic because of what those six thugs attempted to do to him, and might have done had they caught him under circumstances more favorable to them.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, from 1976 to 2005, 94% of all black murder victims were killed by black people. Having a record of violent behavior toward others, culminating in this most recent incident, it boggles my mind how any black person who cares about the safety of their community can take up the banner of these six thugs. The statistics speak for themselves; if one of these six continues "maturing" in this path, it will be a black person who will pay the price. Sticking it to whitey now will only have the result of increasing the likelihood that a black person who will be maimed or killed later by one of these individuals. The white liberals who take up the cause of these six refuse to see the fact that they are pouring salt into the healing wounds left over from past racial strife; the blacks who do this have been taken over by a sick, satanic variation of Stockholm Syndrome.

Do we really need to ask how this might have ended up if six young white thugs had beaten the tar out of a black man who had a tenuous connection at best to the black men they had animosity toward? The Duke Lacrosse incident should have put to rest any hypothetical scenarios about how government might react to such a scenario. We have allowed our system to try to correct past racial injustices not by reaching back and punishing the guilty who have gotten away with crimes from the past, but by inflicting injustice on new people. Many people seriously believe in their hearts, even if they will deny adamantly with their mouths, that the way to make up for the bitter past is to screw over people who have no connection to the crimes of those who came before them other than the color of their skin. The pendulum keeps swinging, and yet we, as a nation, seem to be too chickenshit to cut the rope that it swings from.

The fact is, America still has serious racism problems. However, they do not include the spectre of roving gangs of hooded white men burning crosses in the yards of law-abiding, decent black folks with impunity. They are based in the racism of low expectations first and foremost. America is unwilling to admit the fact that we expect more out of African Gray Parrots in our research centers than many able-minded, "African-American" students. That minority violent offenders of all stripes are regarded all too often with a condescending, superficial pity that one might hold for a dog that got infected with rabies, then was compelled by its disease-addled brain to maul its family's children, rather than with the open contempt that one can and should hold for a man or woman who was perfectly capable of choosing to do good than evil. The list of ways that America is racially warped are legion, but most of all, it is the racism of low expectations.

I say none of this with hatred, only anger. I am friends with and work with black men who are living proof that there is nothing biological, but rather something quite cultural, that causes these explosive failures. It is time to face the distinct possibility that in cases like this that maybe the reason that young black men are disproportionately represented in prison is because of the fact that there is a very real sickness in many black communities. It is a sickness that has caused the illegitimacy rate to rise to nearly three quarters, and as Whitlock observes, where was Bell's father in all of this before his son found his fatherless life being railroaded into the big house? When America finally starts asking that in cases like this one, and many others involving offenders like Bell, and then demand accountability from the absentee fathers whose sons grow up to become criminals, maybe then our country will start to see part of the big picture about where the problem lays.

**UPDATE** 9/25/2007: For the sake of clarity, I want to make a few things clearer. I fully acknowledge the fact that there is a lot of white racism in Louisiana. In my opinion, the racist activities of the white people here do not justify any sympathy for these six here. I am pretty sympathetic to the attempted murder charges on the grounds that if you aren't trying to beat someone into a coma or to death when you ambush them, then proceed to stomp their body, then I don't know what else could really be the motivation. If it be true that Bailey, one of the six accused, was assaulted in a similar fashion by a bunch of whites at a party, then by all means I say prosecute those sons of bitches with the same harshness that these guys, save for Mychal Bell with his record, would get.

<a href="http://cheerfuliconoclast.blogspot.com/2007/09/jena-shotgun-incident-i-knew-there.html">As to the shotgun incident</a>, the third parties that witnessed that allegedly racist event said that it appeared to them that the black teens were trying to rob the white teen who pulled the shotgun on them. So in this he-said, she-said situation, if we are not going to believe the official report as presented in the Jena Times, it is best to just let sleeping dogs lay.

Beltway Traffic Jam.

References are a cool programming language feature, but I am not so enamored with the way that Perl implements them. With Perl, you have to put the symbol that represents the data type next to the reference when you dereference it. For example, in the following code you need to use two dollar signs because $two is a reference to a variable, $one:

use strict;

my $one = 1;

my $two = \$one;

print $$two;

So you have to use two dollar signs to deference the value. Now, in the next example, I have created a scenario where you have a reference, to a reference, to a reference to a subroutine. In the real world, I don't think there would ever have to be a reason to do something like this, but it illustrates why I find this to be a weird way of implementing this language feature.

use strict;

sub printText
{
    print "Testing....\n";
}

my $x = \&printText;

&$x();

my $y = \$x;

&$$y();

my $z = \$y;

&$$$z();

So, at the end, you wind up with three dollar signs and the ampersand in order to deference $z. My C is pretty rusty, but this makes more sense to me:

#include

int main(int argc, char **argv)

{

    int w = 1;

    int *x = &w;

    int *y = x;

    int *z = y;

    printf("%d\n", *x);

    printf("%d\n", *y);

    printf("%d\n", *z);

    return 0;

}

You initialize the variable w, then initalize the pointers x, y, z to memory addresses that ultimately link back to the variable w. When you dereference them in the code, the compiler knows to just chain them back to the data in the memory address for the integer w. You don't have to do *, ** and *** to deference. It just knows that that is a pointer that needs to be dereferenced to get the value that it points to. Since Z points to Y, which points to X, which points to the memory address of W, it knows that they are just pointers and to follow the trail back to W when you dereference the variable Z.

Pointers and references are similar enough that there isn't a good reason that I can think of that this syntactic sugar from C couldn't have been applied to Perl's references. I'm no expert, so enlighten me if there is a reason for it. It just seems to me that it would have made a lot more sense to newbies to make &$$$z() be &$z() instead. I could see the argument that it forces a programmer to keep track of the relationship of $z to the things that it points to, but in the event that someone is use multiple levels of references, this might cause a lot of headaches, so I don't see any real gain there.

Joe Carter doesn't seem to think too much of federalism. He seems to be letting his conservative ideology get in the way of actually following the Constitution as a framework for government.

Federalism also can disappoint those who believe that justice trumps ideological concerns. One of the most disheartening and shameful scenes of the last decade was to see so-called conservatives claim that the Terri Schiavo case should have been left solely to the state of Florida. The charitable view is to assume that had they known that a woman was being killed by the state without due process of law, they would have sided with justice over judicially mandated involuntary euthanasia. The less generous opinion is that they simply haven't considered how federalism relates to conservative principles.

A lot of good things can disappoint us. Each part of the Bill of Rights has at least one scenario that could make conservatives disappointed. The first amendment allows for all manner of non-violent religious practices, the fourth, fifth and sixth amendments provide for many powerful protections that protect the rights of the accused, often to the detriment to victims of crime because of the distinct possibility that the accused might be an innocent, law-abiding citizen or alien. Yet there is little debate about how these things can disappoint, and many conservatives would be uncomfortable if the Bill of Rights were subjected to similar criticism.

It may not seem to be a fair comparison because federalism is assumed to be a set of principles, and not a concrete thing. That is not the case, thanks to the tenth amendment. In our system, federalism is actually clearly defined as any area of jurisdiction not enumerated to the federal government by the United States Constitution. Some can try to weasel their way out of this by bringing up absurd arguments like questioning how the US Air Force's existence is constitutional since the power to raise one is not listed (though it can implied based on the power to raise ground forces and fund a navy), but the fact that the system has grown without explicit supporting constitutional framework in some areas does not negate the fact that federalism is quite clearly defined. At the bare minimum, federalism is defined to such an extent that it can be broadly understood in a consistent way with only minutia being up for debate by those who want to debate the minutia.

Justice did fall down in the Schiavo case, but then justice routinely falls down in a myriad number of areas, many that are every bit as severe as Schiavo's case. I have yet to see conservatives calling for federal overrides over local SWAT deployments, when such policies often harass, injure and kill law-abiding citizens because of actions by the police that are in essence criminally negligent to say the least. I am curious as to why they are silent about cases like that of Cheryl Lynn Noel, a completely innocent woman, who was shot point-blank range in the head by a local government agent. If we are going to say that pursuing justice is the key that overrides all of our constitutional frameworks, then why limit the scope of our pursuit of justice to just vegetables, and not to those who have been unequivocably subjected to serious injury or have been outright murdered by their state or local government?

Are the policies that allow state agents to get away with killing the catatonic really any worse than those that shield sloppy, unprofessional state agents who wield force in ways that would result in felony prosecution if done by a private citizen? Should we not be equally troubled by what seems to be a number of prosecutors who are either guilty of actively causing injustice in order to score another political victory for themselves, or who robotically enforce the law without the slightest concern for whether or not their actions will lead to justice? All things considered, though, I fail to see how federal intervention would do more than spot check the corruption and damage. Most of the problems in our government today are the result of negligence, apathy, poor design in the framework of the government, a complete lack of vigilance to weed out undesirables from positions of power, and a wholesale lack of concern in the legislature for making laws that consistently function well. The only things that can fix these problems are hard work and minds focused on genuinely engineering a good system of government. Then, there is the matter of keeping that system from collapsing as time goes on; entropy must never be neglected.

The world is imperfect and filled with corruption. That is why we do divide the jurisdiction in a rigid way in many cases. Centralization brings about its own set of issues, not the least of which is the near unaccountability of large bureaucracies spread over vast jurisdictions to local concerns. We have to pick the lesser of the two evils, and allowing the police in Baltimore to get away with murdering Noel, and to allow the state of Florida to take Schiavo off of life support against her parents' wishes is less dangerous to the pursuit of justice than giving the federal government even more veto power over local decisions. Joe seems to miss this point in particular, despite his support for subsidarity and spheres of authority. The power to override in the Schiavo case would naturally give the federal government vast authority to override Florida on other issues, and that in turn would only create new opportunities for corruption and injustice.

Allowing conservatives in Florida to resort to the federal government would also allow them to ignore obvious, gaping flaws in their own state system. This is unacceptable. If they find the problems to be that terrible, then they should work hard to pass the appropriate reforms at the state level so that in Florida, the next Schiavo family will have the legal protections they need. Again, I don't understand the conservative argument here. For people who frequently shriek in fits of rage about activist courts, they seem awful quick to have a cavalier attitude toward genuinely fixing the legal system through legislation, as opposed to quickly resorting to the courts to get their goals accomplished.

For if conservatives are willing to give the state the power to kill an innocent woman, willing to let adherence to procedure trump our dedication to justice, willing to put the rights of the government ahead of the rights of the individual, then we have lost all sense of what it means to be conservatives.

The tenth amendment says that the powers not enumerated to the federal government are reserved to the states and people. This would naturally mean that the people of Florida have chosen, as a sovereign body, to allow the the state to take this action. Disagree with it all you want, but it is as much a question of how far can the people exercise their right to vote as it applies to the life, liberty and property of their neighbor, as it is a matter of "government rights." Granted, in recent years, in the name of the War on Terror, conservatives have shown a remarkable ability to put the "rights of the government" ahead of the rights of the individual, therefore conservative hurt feelings in cases like this are suspect.

Federalism can be useful in drawing legitimate lines of Constitutional authority. But when it is allowed to transfer power to the states from other societal spheres, the philosophy merely creates 50 separate laboratories of liberalism.

Conservatives have no problem with the states transferring power over such important issues as marriage away from their proper societal spheres. It would be quite easy for conservatives to side-step the entire issue of legalizing homosexual marriage by returning all authority over marriage to the church, synagogue, mosque and temple where it belongs in any traditional view of marriage. Most conservatives are guilty of supporting the very policies that have effectively destroyed the other societal spheres. Does Joe not see the disconnect between societal spheres of authority and a federal marriage amendment? The very reason such an amendment is needed in the first place is not because of flaws in federalism, but because conservatives could not leave well enough alone, and made the states usurp the natural authority that religious bodies have over marriage.

In practice, the policies that have whittled away at federalism have ended up forcing a sweeping left-liberalism on the country. Those pursued by FDR and many of the black-robbed high priests of dubious constitutionalism euphemistically known as our judiciary provide copious examples of this. Most of the policies that have usurped serious power from other societal spheres were the result of people trying to make an end-run around federalist principles and the U.S. Constitution in order to use the power of the federal government to fix local and regional problems.

It is not as though conservatives, as a rule, even strongly respect the other societal spheres of authority. How many conservatives would really tolerate a church government that firmly asked everyone who remarried after a divorce to not partake in communion or to not get in any leadership role in the church? How many are really willing to scale back the power that the state has to intervene in families in the name of "protecting the children," knowing full well that they might be stripping the state of power to stop some cases of abuse? Finally, on that note, how many of them are willing to actually scale back the government in general so that it has a fixed role, rather than whatever role we the people decide to assign it this election cycle?

That is the biggest hurdle. Many conservatives no longer feel bound to limited government principles. They are down with the liberal vision for government in principle, just not in degree. Do you support social welfare policies? How can you, as a conservative, reconcile that with the natural role that private organizations have for providing that function? How about education? Medical services? You don't need to be a libertarian or a generic minarchist, but if you find yourself perfectly comfortable with the existence of many programs which clearly infringe upon other societal spheres of authority, then you need to ask yourself whether you are more enamored with the rhetoric, than you are with the principle. (That is an "editorial you," not an attack against Joe)

If conservatives want to fix things, to really make the spheres of authority strong again, here are some simple things:

• Stop getting divorced.
• Start strengthening your own family and church.
• Obey your church leaders as though God actually did give them some authority.
• Vote for politicians who want to make the government simple and effective.
• Most of all, actually believe that other institutions beside the government have authority over you and your actions.

David Bernstein does make some good points about the problem of civil liberties in many universities today, but I wonder if a lot of the problem is not due to the fact that many of the programs which are bastions of radical leftist activism exist in the first place. I remain unconvinced that programs such as "Women's Studies" can ever produce anything of value that justify their inclusion in the list of majors at any respectable university. In fact, I would go so far as to say that by abolishing all of these "** Studies" programs and scaling back other majors such as Sociology and Political Science to a mere pittance of what they currently are on many campuses, that a lot of the problems could be naturally corrected. These programs are generally for those people who could not cut it in any other degree program.

Students also suffer from academic intolerance. Undergraduates frequently report to researchers that they feel intimidated into endorsing the political positions advanced by their professors. Many U.S. universities, though banned by the courts from enacting overt "speech codes," nevertheless enforce severe restrictions on freedom of expression under the guise of "anti-harassment" policies. UC Santa Cruz, for example, bans any speech or writing that "maligns another individual or group of individuals on the basis of age, creed, ethnicity, race, gender, gender identity, physical ability, political views, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status or other differences."

Primarily because of such policies, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit that promotes civil liberties in higher education, has ranked 16 of the 19 California state colleges it measured "red" -- the lowest rank -- for freedom of expression.

What is and isn't maligning is a matter of opinion. There is very little objective truth to this. One need only look at how thin-skinned many minorities and women are when forced to defend any belief or failure on their part to see the truth of that. It would, for example, require a finesse approaching that possessed by an Olympics gymnast to engage in any open debate with many of these people without deeply offending them because they use the political to explain away their personal failings. Ironically, the very people who need to be torn down to make them tougher, intellectually, are the very people who are protected by these sensitivity guidelines.

As always, freedom gets shot in the back of the head because some nebulous greater good must be served. Dr. Johnson was wrong. Patriotism is not the last refuge of scoundrels, the "greater good" is the last refuge of scoundrels.

H/T, Arielle

Rachel's score:

Last night I was sifting through Sitemeter statistics, and I found the following entries.

• Jailbait Girls
• wife avoids bedroom
• what is that site with people cutting their balls off?
• evel desire sex
• reasons to hate sony
• blogging illuminati

FROM:Jackass Spammer
ADDRESS: Dakar  Senegal
West Africa.
 
ATTN
 
GREETING!!!
 
Dearest One,
 
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Though his sudden death was linked or rather suspected to have been by one of the top diamond merchant in our country also who financed rebel to attack the country during the war,However after the death my mother discovered some documents which he use to deposit this subtancial amount with funds fudiciary under my care been the only loving son as his inheritance,then my mother advice me to locate for a trustworthy foreign partner and of good faith to help us secure the release and the transfer of the funds for better investment and now i am seeking asylum in dakar senegal of which with out your help there is nothing i could do due to the United Nation's law which the oppose on asylum seekers.
 
 Therefore,the funds in quetion is US$7.2 million dollars(Seven Million Two Hundred Thousand United states Dollars)please your urgent attention is highly needed to enable us commence towards securing the release of the funds and a change of ownership will remade on your name hence my present statue does not permit me to handle the nature.
 
I am just 21 years old and a university undergraduate and really don't know what to do,this is because I have suffered a lot of set backs as a result of incessant political crisis here in Liberia.The death of my father actually brought sorrow to my life.I am in a sincere desire of your humble assistance in this regards.Your suggestions and ideas will be highly regarded.
 
Now permit me to ask these few questions:-
1. Can you honestly help me as your child?
2. Can i completely trust you?
3. What percentage of the total amount in question will be good for you? 
 
Please,Consider this and get back to me as soon as possible.
 
Thank you so much as you read this mail comprehensively.
 
My sincere regards,
Jackass Spammer

No one skewers a self-righteous bitch better than Jon Stewart.

We were watching a Bond movie last night and I got to thinking at one point when Bond was about to get his freak on with one of the many women in the movie. How is it that James Bond has had sex with that many women and not fathered at least a few kids outside of marriage? One would think that if he has had that many, that sooner or later he would have struck out and gotten at least a few pregnant.

The law says that anyone who is a public figure can be attacked by the media. They can be probed and subjected to all sorts of criticism that private citizens are normally at least somewhat immune to. However, if the media can make people into celebrities by focusing resources on them, then doesn't that mean that the corporate media should be somewhat regulated when it comes to some things like criminal cases? Why should they get away with blasting some poor schmuck's face all over the news, making him out to be a monster, then when he's acquitted, not have to run (at their own expense) full page or prime time retractions? There comes a point in time where enough is enough, and I think that the press should be civilly liable if it does not print a retraction to help a man proved innocent get back the reputation that the media was largely responsible for stealing from him.

For those that haven't noticed yet (meaning probably pretty much all of you), I have installed some new blog software that allows you to do replies to specific comments easily. Check it out--by leaving a comment!

Block online ads may not be entirely legal. I'm not sure how that's going to end up working out, but one of the avenues that was tossed around was to use copyright law. The idea is that people are modifying the pages without the copyright holder's permission. That is not necessarily how it actually works, though. That is contingent on a plug-in changing the data transmitted by the server. However, if the browser is designed to not render certain data at all, that is a process of discriminating over data, not modifying data. I understand that that can be seen as semantical, but the legal profession is nothing if not semantical and legalistic.

This is what happens when you have a system that is too quick to believe a plaintiff in a rape case. In this case, it was a child molestation case, and the amount of suffering that the poor man went through is sick. What is intolerable, though, is the fact that the police did everything they legally could to make the charges stick, even though at the time there were ample reasons for them to be suspicious of what was going on. For example, the child's latest fabrication was that a bald, white man was the one who molested her. How on earth do you justify berating a black man into nearly confessing to a crime he didn't commit when the "suspect" is white?

They shield the identities of minors who commit crimes in order to protect them from the consequences. Personally, I think this girl's identity should have been plastered all over the New York City papers, not the man she accused. Even though she is eight years old, clearly she knows what she is doing because this is not the first man that she has gotten into serious legal trouble for whatever twisted reason her sadistic little mind has. Maybe she is demon possessed or something, but the fact is, she is a public menace, and it is in the best interest of every man who might come into contact with her to know that she is a lying psychopath.

I have been starting to learn how the Movable Type APIs work as I learn Perl. One of the extensions that I want to write for Movable Type requires you to get some of the configuration data for the database and embed it into the PHP code of each page generated by Movable Type, so this is how you would get it. Nothing too big and fancy, and partially stolen from the documentation on the MT:ConfigMgr, but it's a practical example of how to get the configuration data.

#!C:\development\xampp\perl\bin\perl.exe -w

use strict;

my ($MT_DIR);
BEGIN {
        if ($0 =~ m!(.*[/\\])!) {
                $MT_DIR = $1;
        }
        else {
                $MT_DIR = './';
        }
        unshift @INC, $MT_DIR . 'lib';
        unshift @INC, $MT_DIR . 'extlib';
}
use MT;
print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";

my $mt = MT->new(Config => $ENV{MT_HOME} . 'mt-config.cgi', Director => $ENV{MT_HOME});
my $cfg = MT::ConfigMgr->instance();
print "Host: " . $cfg->DBHost() . "<br/>";
print "Database: " . $cfg->Database() . "<br/>";
print "User: " . $cfg->DBUser() . "<br/>";
print "Password: " . $cfg->DBPassword() . "<br/>";

People say Ron Paul is a kook and thus unsuited to be President, but I ask you whether this infamous front runner is then qualified to either. Yeah, that Ron Paul. He's a real weirdo. We need more real leaders like Mr. Giuliani, who can be the President or First Lady depending on how he feels in the morning when he wakes up and gets dressed. Sheesh. The sort of things that constitute "respectability" in Americans these days really belong in a very brave, new world.

And people wonder how I can think that vice squads are often as guilty of perpetrating sin and evil in society, as they are of catching people committing sinful acts. This story is a perfect illustration of why I believe that vice squads are, in general, the sort of thing that society would be better off without due to how they catch a lot of the people they arrest:

It was Rocio Palacios who first noticed the woman who appeared to need help.

It was 8 a.m. when she and her husband, Erasmo, dropped their 6-year-old daughter off at school and had picked up their 22-year-old daughter to go out for breakfast when they saw the woman waving her arms at 53rd Street and Kedzie Avenue last November.

The Palacioses, of Chicago, claim the woman approached their car, parked outside Manolo's restaurant, leaned in to the passenger side where Rocio was sitting and asked Erasmo if he wanted oral sex for $20 or sex for $25.

The couple laughed, realizing this wasn't a woman in distress after all.

But within seconds, Chicago police swarmed the family car, hauling Erasmo Palacios out in handcuffs. He was charged with solicitation of a prostitute

Ok, so it only gets a lot worse from there. This raises the obvious question of how many people have been caught up in similar pranks played by the police (I refuse to dignify this as a legitimate approach to law enforcement). There are obviously serious concerns that need to be addressed by a police force that is either so stupid, or so corrupt (or both) as to arrest a man who is clearly with his wife and college-age daughter on charges of soliciting a prostitute. I cannot think of any profile that is farther outside of the list of possible johns than that, and any cop who would try to ram that one into the list doesn't belong on the police force, period.

Sleazy techniques like this are frequently used by vice cops because vices are almost always consensual, victimless crimes. Neither party has any good reason to comply with law enforcement. That is why law enforcement must get dirty, and when the cops get dirty and skate around the edges of socially accepted behavior, well, we know what tends to happen...

70%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Mingle² - Free Dating Site

All we need is to regulate the Internet a little more and the threat of terrorist bombs will magically decline:

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Internet searches for bomb-making instructions should be blocked across the European Union, the bloc's top security official said on Monday.

Internet providers should also prevent access to any site giving instructions on how to make a bomb, EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini said in an interview.

"I do intend to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector ... on how it is possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism," Frattini told Reuters.

Meanwhile we will maintain full-blown relations with countries that have or do maintain terrorist training camps that train militants in every facet of modern bomb-making known in the Islamic world. We will allow immigration from those countries, and our own citizens to go there without question because to restrict those things in any way, shape or form would offend the sensibilities of many ethnic groups that are filled with people who hate us and want us dead. It is easier to just ignore the fact that the real terrorists get a comprehensive training in killing people and breaking things in places like the border region of Pakistan, than it is to do something about it.

I know at least some of you (*cough*El Borak*cough*) are Youtube junkies, so y'all will appreciate this. The new version of the Real Player allows you to easily rip videos from sites like Youtube. I haven't used it for anything other than that so far, but it seems like Real has finally learned from some of their mistakes and made a much more solid product. The cool thing is that it embeds a button on top of a streaming video in your browser, asking you if you want to download the video. I've grabbed quite a few videos with this so far :)

Why it is imperative for good policing that the public be able to videotape the police while they are doing their jobs:

ST. GEORGE -- A car-mounted video camera -- more commonly used by police than against them -- captured a loud and threatening confrontation in this tiny St. Louis County community that left an officer on suspension and the whole world able to listen in.

The picture doesn't show much, but the audio part of the recording, posted on Google Video and YouTube on the Internet, brought more than 300 protest calls to St. George Police Chief Scott Uhrig.

"I was very displeased when I saw the actions on the video," Uhrig said. "My officers are not trained and taught to act like that."

He put Sgt. James Kuehnlein on unpaid suspension pending further investigation.

This is the officer who made his claim to Internet fame as the police officer who openly threatened a motorist with having charges just made up so that he could arrest him. If the law was set up to "protect" the police by not allowing the public to videotape them while they are doing their job, then there would have been no evidence that Kuehnlein had acted so unprofessionally toward someone that he had stopped. Now, a cop who doesn't belong on the street has been shown to be what he is by the evidence put online, the police department has gotten him off the street, and he very well may (and hopefully will) lose his job.

Corruption and evil fester when there can be no scrutiny. That is why it is imperative that the public be allowed to videotape the police.

Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the agency was acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups [Emphasis is mine]. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, "discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize."

Notice that the spokeswoman did not actually specify which religions other than Islam are producing radicalized adherents and militants who pose a threat to the well-being of American citizens. Such a weasely way of getting around the fact that the only group that is proselytizing in our prisons for the purpose of raising up people willing to shed blood for their religion are the Islamic fundamentalists. Banning all Islamic proselytizing in prison would represent a concrete step toward cutting back at the recruitment of Americans for terrorism, especially among the black prison population which is actively targeted by Islamic fundamentalists looking for new terror recruits.

The only thing that they are going to accomplish with this policy of not stepping on the toes of Islamic preachers, by working against all other religions, is to create a real spiritual vacuum in prison.

There is the old saying that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. In America, we have refined this with a deadly precision, as can be seen in Iraq today:

AMERICAN forces are paying Sunni insurgents hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to switch sides and help them to defeat Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The tactic has boosted the efforts of American forces to restore some order to war-torn provinces around Baghdad in the run-up to a report by General David Petraeus, the US commander, to Congress tomorrow.

Shades of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? While there are differences between both situations, we armed and trained groups there that were virulently anti-American, and our people ended up paying the price later on because of our government's need for a short-term success. Hundreds of thousands of dollars can buy a lot of supplies in a third world country. It is only a matter of time before we run out of Al-Qaeda in Iraq to fight, and the insurgents go back to bombing and shooting American soldiers. Only then, they will be much richer and more experienced when they go back to fighting us.

John Walsh gives his expert advice on how to keep your kid from getting targeted by a child molester:

Mr. Walsh, host of Fox's "America's Most Wanted,"
began advocating for missing children in 1981, after his son was killed
by a stranger. He knows some men are offended by his advice to never
hire a male babysitter. But as he sees it, if a teenage boy wants to
experiment with sex, you don't want him using your kids.

"It's not a witch hunt," he says. "It's all about
minimizing risks. What dog is more likely to bite and hurt you? A
Doberman, not a poodle. Who's more likely to molest a child? A male."

I had always heard that poodles had surly dispositions, and my personal experience with Dobermans, especially female Dobermans, as a child was that Dobermans that weren't trained as guard dogs were great with kids. Just goes to show that when you profile based on purely superficial factors like personal appearance that you will miss many of the people who you need to be wary of. Take Debra LaFave for instance. The woman is smoking hot as sex offenders go. How many adults would have taken one look at that blond, quasi-bombshell and thought that they could leave her alone with their twelve year old son?

For once I am inclined to give Bush a little bit of the benefit of the doubt here, as this seems to be more of a case of the OMB, rather than the Administration, having issues with the legislation. Some of the justifications are just crap:

As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to vote as soon as Friday on sweeping changes to the U.S. patent system, the Bush administration is registering its opposition to the high-tech industry-backed bill.

A policy statement by the Office of Management and Budget (PDF) sent to the House Rules Committee on Thursday argues that the Patent Reform Act of 2007 proposes a number of "unneccessary" changes to patent law.

The office's biggest beef seems to be a section that prescribes how courts should award damages to patent holders who prevail in infringement cases--a provision that has already become one of the bill's thorniest components.

Under the latest approved version of the bill, courts would generally be instructed to consider only the value the patent brought to the product when calculating damages--unless the patent holder can prove that the patent was the "predominant" reason for the product's market demand.

While it is is understandable that some companies that are dependent on patent licensing would have an issue with this bill, it is sorely needed for our IT industry as a positive step forward to rectifying some of the damage in our patent system today. That last provision would no doubt be bad for some companies, but in the greater scheme of things I think it would, on balance, be a gain for our system by making it more predictable. It is far easier to predict the importance and value of a patent based on a single product than it is to predict how much the damages should be based on how well it might have profited the company in the market in general. By limiting it to a single product, the law would be at least giving it a lot more of a concrete definition for defining how to calculate damage.

The Bush administration argues that such an approach "would introduce new complications and risks reducing incentives to innovate."

If anything, it would reduce the complexity of getting involved in the development of new technology. For example, it cannot be a positive sign that more game companies have to beef up on the legal front. Be that as it may, a system that is simpler and more predictable, and one that is less open to "how high is up" methods of calculating damages would be easier for people without legal backgrounds to navigate. It only stands to reason that the easier it is to comply and plan ahead, the cheaper the cost of the legal system will be on producers.

It's ironic when a cop who is behaving lawfully ends up breaking the law because he got pissed off because he was videotaped doing his job the right way:

Leclair said he was on his way to a friend's house at about 1 a.m. when he noticed a police officer arresting a suspected drunken driver with his weapon drawn.

Leclair said he had a camera and began videotaping the incident until the officer noticed him.

Leclair's friend Rick Weedamen's cell phone camera videotaped the officer running over to Leclair and then forcing him to the ground and handcuffing him.

Police eventually removed the handcuffs and Leclair was allowed to leave.

Leclair, who is a member of the Cop Watch group, said police initially appeared to be acting lawfully during the traffic stop until they turned their attention to him.

"My video could have been used as an asset to their actual investigation until I was detained," Leclair said during a news conference Thursday.

If the officer had nothing to hide, which according to Leclair he didn't, then why would he get so upset? This is a perfect example of where hot-headed machismo can ruin a perfectly good example of police work. Even if you take for granted that the cop may despise people who videotape the police, if the cop is behaving lawfully, there is no way for a would-be propagandist to turn that against him that doesn't fall under libel/slander laws.

Me: All of my MyPoints go to my PS3 fund...
Me: All of my change goes to the Rachel World Domination Fund.
Rachel: To have everyone wear flannel!

(Ironically, she generally dislikes flannel)

Apple could take over this market too if they would jump in soon with their new iPod Touch:

Two new offerings this fall are set to test whether consumers really want to replace a technology that has reliably served humankind for hundreds of years: the paper book.

In October, the online retailer Amazon.com will unveil the Kindle, an electronic book reader that has been the subject of industry speculation for a year, according to several people who have tried the device and are familiar with Amazon's plans. The Kindle will be priced at $400 to $500 and will wirelessly connect to an e-book store on Amazon's site.

If the iPod touch works the same way that an iPhone does, it would not only provide a very large, crisp screen for reading books, but it would also have the same cool technology that allows the software to update the interface based on the angle that you are holding the device at. Think about that for a second. Imagine an eBook reader on the iPod Touch and iPhone that has the ability to spread out a page with diagrams and pictures more evenly if you rotate it lengthwise. Apple already has the platform to do this, so I'm not sure what's holding them back from trying to get publishers to sell their books on the iTunes Music Store.

The FEC shows that it can play by the rules:

The FEC said the Web site, operated by blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, cannot be regulated as a political committee and can freely post blog entries that support candidates.

Conservative blogger John C.A. Bambenek had argued in a complaint last month that the site should comply with campaign finance laws because such entries amounted to "a gift of free advertising and candidate media services."

The FEC disagreed.

The first time I heard of this guy, was on a post at Outside the Beltway. Bambenek seems to be typical of a lot of people in politics these days; he'd rather use the force of law than argument to shut down his opponents. Fortunately, the FEC is being consistent and ruling that what is obviously a blog, the Daily Kos, is not the sort of media platform that is covered under the campaign finance restriction law. That's a pretty big coup for bloggers, especially from an agency that was previously the single biggest threat to political blogging out there in the United States.

Our new symbol in the war against expansionist Islam? You decide.

Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.

Public schools keep reaching for more and more control over their students' behavior, now with one going so far as to take action against a student for behavior that was unequivoca