January 2008 Archives

A few exceptions notwithstanding, it never fails that when you have a woman writing for a newspaper about the State of the American Male (SAM), it will be astoundingly hypocritical. Kay Hymowitz didn't waste any time in jumping right into this cookie-cutter by offering this picture which is, not coincidentally, two sides of the same coin:

With women, you could argue that adulthood is in fact emergent. Single women in their 20s and early 30s are joining an international New Girl Order, hyper-achieving in both school and an increasingly female-friendly workplace, while packing leisure hours with shopping, traveling and dining with friends. Single young males, or SYMs, by contrast, often seem to hang out in a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo 3 and, in many cases, underachieving. With them, adulthood looks as though it's receding.

One has to wonder whether or not she has actually stepped outside of the professional circle that writers and journalists run in to notice that there are still plenty of men who are achieving just fine, and men still dominate the fields which matter like engineering, medicine and law. You are not likely to see a strong gravitation to journalism from men who are prone to actually thinking for themselves and holding firmly to their own ideas and identities because of the overwhelming left-wing group think that dominates the mainstream outlets. Should it then be a surprise that any man who doesn't fancy himself a herd animal would avoid such fields?

Notice that it is perfectly fine for women to make material consumption a hobby, to constantly travel and hang out with friends with impunity, but similar leisure habits are verboten for men. Even the most prodigious video gamer's budget probably pales in comparison to the amount of money that these women that she is writing about spend shopping, traveling to the well-beaten paths of the world and eating out. With both of these generalizations, we are a far cry from the ideal that Hymowitz has from the responsible halcyon days of 1965.

Speaking of irony and hypocrisy, she laments the responsibility of white men in 1965, and their former willingness to commit, but conveniently ignores the fact that white liberals were building a welfare state in that same era which paved the way for the destruction of black family life.

That sound you hear is women not laughing. Oh, some women get a kick out of child-men
and their frat/fart jokes. But for many, the child-man is either an irritating mystery or a source of heartbreak. In contemporary female writing and conversation, the words "immature" and "men" seem united in perpetuity.

We keep hearing such groaning laments about the SAM, but what about the State of the American Woman (SAW)? If American men are subconsciously thinking American woman, stay away from me American woman, mama let me be, at least insofar as it relates to marriage and commitment, chances are it has much to do with the SAW, not a resurgence in the popularity of The Guess Who.

There are a few things we do know about the SAW, and one of which is that American women are laid back about commitment, but not so good at actually keeping up with it. With as many as seventy two percent of all divorces being initiated by women, it's a bit specious to argue that women have their end of the deal figured out. It's all well and good to say that men should man up and take responsibility, but then men don't get the consolation prizes in the divorce courts that women routinely get for making an effort so half-assed at commitment that even a public school teacher would be forced to give it a failing grade in red ink.

Modern men are stuck between the SAW and a fun place: booze, drugs, video games, guns, nice cars and working only for themselves. This is only complicated by the sheer number of women who fancy themselves, even partly in jest, to be princesses or goddesses. I suppose in fairness, in the event that paganism ever becomes mainstream in America, many families will be able to save money by counting every purchase from Godiva or Starbucks as an offering to the household god(dess), provided it is ordered with the right sort of supplication.

Granted the greatest flaw in the SAW is the belief that a woman can have it all--and enjoy it. There can be little doubt that a woman can have a family and a career, but the question is, will she enjoy it? Often the answer is that she won't, and one of the components of having it all will have to suffer so that she can enjoy herself and feel fulfilled. Can you guess which one it is?

Marriage being a traditional role for men, it is only fair that men get to expect that if they are going to be forced to be a husband, that they get many of the things that used to come with it. Unfortunately, for men, this is an infringement on the autonomy of the normal marriage-minded woman, something which cannot be even asked of her, let alone stated as an outright condition of getting married in the first place. After all, only a cad would tell a woman that he fully expects her to give up her career and focus on the children that she wants.

It's also worth noting too that many men seem to actually be paying attention to the divorce issues and learning from them. For many men, the map of life has a dark land that makes Mordor look like a romp through Disney World, marked "here be harpies, vampires and man-eating legal eagles."

Naturally, women wonder: How did this perverse creature come to be? The most prevalent
theory comes from feminist-influenced academics and cultural critics, who view dude media as symptoms of backlash, a masculinity crisis. Men feel threatened by female empowerment, these thinkers argue, and in their anxiety, they cling to outdated roles.

Female empowerment is largely a way of saying that they have the backing of major institutions to insulate them from pressures common to men while they build themselves up. Here's a thought experiment for the skeptical reader. Get a highly intelligent, educated man who is a high achiever to roundly diss a woman of lesser intelligence and education in the office so badly that she storms out crying. Reverse the roles. Who gets fired? Who gets supported? Who gets laughed at? "Female empowerment" is the corporate equivalent of releasing a house cat onto the African Savannah, putting a team of crack shots off in the distance behind it, and having them discretely protect it from the predators and shoot-to-wound prey, all while letting it become sure of itself as a fearsome predator that instills terror into the hearts of lesser animals. There are women who by nature are fully capable of traversing a male-dominated world on its terms, but these are not the sort of women who have ever really needed "female empowerment" anyway.

There are men who are afraid of women who are more intelligent and bolder than they are. There are more men who are afraid of confronting women in the workplace, academia and government because to do so can be job, or even career, suicide if not done with the finesse of a ballerina crossing a flaming bed of nails.

(I'd like now to mention, just to jam the stake into this feminist nosferatu a little harder, that I am 24, happily married to a woman who makes more money than I do right now, a video gamer and a software engineer.)

One of the benefits of not having cable is that you don't actually have any opportunity to stay abreast of what MTV is cooking up today. This show, where they send rich celebrities to third world countries to lecture us on how much better their lives are than ours, I guess in a moral sense, is just sick.

You have celebrities who common between fifteen and twenty million dollars per movie talking about how great it is to go take a dump in the woods, to use animal crap to plaster the walls of your house, and to have none of the modern "luxuries." You know, those luxuries like indoor plumbing and clean running water which played a key roll in increasing the life expectancy and public health in the first world countries.

As always, everyone has a moral mandate because some bimbo from Hollywood thinks that we should redo our civilization from the ground up to be more environmentally conscious like mud hut dwellers in rural Chile. Let's forgive them the irony that the South American poor are one of the leading reasons why the rain forests are being destroyed in large numbers.

Here's a thought. At $50/inspection, Drew Barrymore's salary of fifteen million dollars would provide a one time health inspection for 300,000 rural Chilean children. At $50/pill collection, Cameron Diaz's salary of twenty million dollars per film would provide basic antibiotics to 400,000 rural Chilean children. They don't even need to be rural Chilean children; they can be children from any developing country.

They're such compassionate, humane people that you won't see them donating all of their take home money from a single movie to charity because really, they need that money more than the families in the developing world that they are so enthralled by. It's just important they raise awareness of the issue. Taking initiative to solve the issue is for the little people who work nine to five.

The sociology paper published last November, which has been making rounds over the Internet and was recently picked up by The Atlantic, uses illustrative statistics and qualitative data to conclude that there is a strong relationship between an engineering background and involvement in a variety of Islamic terrorist groups. The authors have found that graduates in subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world. The authors also note that engineers, alone, are strongly over-represented among graduates who gravitate to violent groups.

However, contrary to popular speculation, it's not technical skills that make engineers attractive recruits to radical groups. Rather, the authors pose the hypothesis that "engineers have a 'mindset' that makes them a particularly good match for Islamism," which becomes explosive when fused by the repression and vigorous radicalization triggered by the social conditions they endured in Islamic countries.

But what is the engineer's mindset?

The authors call it a mindset that inclines them to take more extreme conservative and religious positions.

A past survey in the United States has already shown that the proportion of engineers who declare themselves to be on the right of the political spectrum is greater than any other disciplinary groups--such as economists, doctors, scientists, and those in the humanities and social sciences.

The authors note that the mindset is universal.

Whether American, Canadian or Islamic, they pointed out that a disproportionate share of engineers seem to have a mindset that makes them open to the quintessential right-wing features of "monism" (why argue where there is one best solution) and by "simplism" (if only people were rational, remedies would be simple).

Normally I wouldn't quote the entire article, but this one all but begged to be posted in its entirety in order to preserve the context. The author missed several key points about Islamic terrorism, which is not surprising, given the lack of depth that it went into on the subject.

Islamic terrorists are generally reasonably well-educated individuals who come from the middle and upper classes of the Islamic world. There are plenty of radicals from the lower classes, but aside from being fodder for suicide bombings and acting as gunmen, they are of little value to Islamic terrorist groups. It takes intelligence and education to be able to plan a serious terrorist attack, and as such there is a premium for people who have the analytical skills necessary to critically design and carry out an act of terrorism. Engineers are obvious targets for this sort of recruitment because they are at the top of the educated classes when it comes to designing practical and thorough plans of action.

Anyone who has spent time around engineers knows that they do not tend to view things in the sort of simplistic way that sociologists, political "scientists" and others tend to view them. In fact, engineers are more likely to understand and appreciate complexity than these professions which are criticizing them here! If engineers are more likely to be right wing, or conservative as Americans understand conservatism or libertarian, it's because engineers tend to have an easier time appreciate the fundamental flaws of socialism than most people. The engineering mind quickly realizes how structurally flawed the socialist state is, and how impractical it is to have a society with a single point of failure for everything ranging from law enforcement, to trash collection, to putting food on the table as large as the socialist state. This is why engineers tend to seek simplicity in design and arguments; simplicity is easier to manage and work with than complexity.

Arguably the simplest explanation for the large presence of engineers among Islamic terrorist groups is that highly intelligent and educated young men tend to be easily embittered and frustrated. Couple that with the fact that there is a great deal to be bitter about if you are a young man in the Islamic world, and you have a recipe for terrorism. The reasons may range from the absurd and quixotic like the "tragedy" of the Spanish retaking Al-Andalus (God forbid the infidel reassert his right of home rule), to the generally understandable like being pissed off by the presence of foreign troops on one's homeland.

"I can't say that I'm totally pleased with the package, but I do know that it will help stimulate the economy. But if it does not, then there will be more to come," said Pelosi, D-Calif. (Or how empires spend themselves onto the trash heap of history)

For El Borak's benefit

Or how "good people" end up doing evil, and lay the foundation for a totalitarian state by "just doing their job:"

A PARKING attendant sprang into action when a man collapsed outside
Altrincham General Hospital - by trying to slap a ticket on the
victim's car.

The diligent warden came upon the scene after the man, who is diabetic, had keeled over in a car outside the hospital entrance.

Nurses ran out to help the man after his driver had dashed into the hospital to ask for assistance, and an ambulance was called.

But the intrepid meter maid spotted that the driver had pulled up in an ambulance bay - and was not about to show any leeway.

No doubt a lot of people would have reacted differently in the same situation, as they would have knocked on the window and tried to find out why a guy happened to be slumped over in such an important area of the hospital. However, most people are not naturally attracted to positions which give them the ability to hand out tickets, make arrests, etc. There is a small variety of people attracted to such positions, but a number of them are not wired the same way that most people are wired. They're prone to be petty, unconcerned for the safety of their fellow man, and even to be there to have some power that their pathetic little self can lord over others. Obviously, this meter maid fits that latter characteristic to a tee. Just read the article and see that she didn't immediately stop even when paramedics showed up and started treating the guy in the car.

Evil cannot be carried out by a system of people without each person doing their own part. In many cases the evil may be small enough that most people would call it just petty and ridicule it, but in the greater context, it takes on a much more sinister tone. Even in places like the gulag, this was the case. The guards were just guards, the cooks were just cooks, the secretaries were just secretaries, etc., but taken collectively, they formed a system of total tyranny and torment for those in the gulag.

The devil is getting envious of modern American banking:

For the hundreds of thousands of Americans at risk of losing their homes because they cannot pay their mortgages, associations may be their last chance to keep them.

"I can't believe I signed it. I didn't accept that," Stephen Vasek, 40, says, his voice trembling as he refuses to even look at the mortgage contract he signed in 2006 and its towering interest rate.

Mark Seifert, executive director of the East Side Organizing Project (ESOP), a non-profit grassroots organization in Cleveland, Ohio, where Vasek is seeking help, seems unfazed.

"Sorry, but it's your signature, any judge will agree with the bank it's valid," Seifert says.

Your mortgage, if you have one, is one of the most important documents that you will ever sign. If you cannot take the time to read it, try to understand it, and ask for educated clarification of what certain confusing things mean, then you are probably better off without one. Scratch that, if you cannot be bothered to read the entire mortgage or pay an attorney to do that for you, you don't deserve the house.

This is a perfectly good reason why I believe that ownership of real estate should be one of the criteria used to determine whether or not someone can vote. Anyone who cannot be bothered to read a document like their mortgage, is not someone that I, or any other rational person, would want to be participating in politics.

It's called "Mass Effect" and it allows its players - universally male no doubt - to engage in the most realistic sex acts ever conceived. One can custom design the shape, form, bodies, race, hair style, breast size of the images they wish to "engage" and then watch in crystal clear, LCD, 54 inch screen, HD clarity as the video game "persons" hump in every form, format, multiple, gender-oriented possibility they can think of.

YouTube has a listing of all of the sex scenes in Mass Effect. Suffice it to say, they are probably a lot tamer than many ads for beer and ads for soap sold to women, but who am I to question the insight of a man who has apparently never even played Mass Effect (and confuses it with Hot Coffee/GTA)?

Starting with the disgusting idea that one can "create" their own versions of what people look like, removing warts, moles, and bald spots while enhancing - shall we say - the extended features of the game's characters tends to objectify women, sex, and human relationships. Right? We can all agree on this?

Role playing games are disgusting. I hear Tokyo is going to have fire and brimstone rained down on it from heaven because of the ongoing sin of producing Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Jesus reportedly said in one of the gnostic gospels: "for I say to you, it shall be better for Soddom and Gammorah in that day than for Square-Enix." (Yes, I know Mass Effect is made by Bioware)

Then there's the dishonesty behind the game' title. "Mass Effect" sounds like a war game with a deadly virus that is spreading unless the GI-Joes are able to defeat the evil and deadly substance and it's covert war plan. By it's design, kids could ask for it, or for their parents' Best Buy Card to go purchase it with nary a raised eye-brow. Generic, non-descriptive, and relatively harmless.

By design kids could ask for Playboys, automatic rifles, bombs, booze and the keys to the car. A parent that gives a child any of these things is a parent in biology only. According to Kevin McCullough's argument, the makers of the movie Seven should be run out of town because a parent might have bought it for their kid thinking it was an educational video about basic math.

But it IS marketed for the X-Box 360, perhaps the most visually stimulating gaming system ever made. The software for such allows the blending of DVD video, component graphics, and the manipulation of actual pictures so that an alternate reality engulfs the fifteen year old boy playing it without much objection.

Rated M for mature. Mature in the ESRB rating is 17+. Fifteen year olds are not the target audience of this game.

Now if I have trouble with my son taking his James Bond 007 games a little too emotionally, imagine the powerful effect that hormones add to the mix when the player's own character is copulating like jack rabbits with super-models, actresses, and anyone else they can spend the patience to create, name, and "put into play."

What he doesn't inform his readers of is the fact that these sex scenes are accessed through knowing the right combination of interactions, most of which are never going to be chosen in the right order. See, in Mass Effect, your actions have consequences, and they cut off entire parts or add on new parts of the story depending on how your character behaves.

I hear the libertarian Ron Paul's answer already, "Government has no business censoring freedom of expression." Figures, he's a libertarian.

It's harder to tell who McCullough has a bigger hard on for: the designers of Mass Effect or Ron Paul.

If a pre-teen, teen, young adult, or adult male plays such a game in which the women DO submit without choice, are made to appear as Barbie streetwalkers, and perform whatever act can be imagined, what's to stop that same male from assuming that the women in his "other world" shouldn't be forced to do the same.

Grand Theft Auto, Mass Effect, Wii Sports. Ehhh when you've played one, you've played them all...

Yes there will be many snickers that I decided to bring this issue up in the Presidential cycle of 2008 but how refreshing would it be for a President to prove to the nation that his own manhood was not in question and put his pen and signature to a bill that dealt with such simulated sex excess in a way that was punitive to its creators to such a degree that they would never recover from it?

How about we have a President sign into office a bill that makes fact checking a legal requirement for professional columnists and journalists? It wouldn't be constitutional, but it'd be a lot more fun to watch than a bill banning sex scenes in Mature (R)-rated games that look kid friendly compared to an issue of Maxim magazine.

Of course, he's a real way to prove you're a real man. You come into your home, and see a game that your kid bought behind your back that is inappropriate for them. You pick it up, break the DVD in half, and throw the shards away. You then tell your kid that you're the father, and if they ever pull a stunt like that again, it'll be the console that gets that treatment next time. Either that or you'll take away their console and put in your room for your enjoyment at their expense. Real men control their households, and don't require legislation to police the intellectual property that comes into it.

As technology continues to push the limits of imagination and interaction more and more the brain, the emotions, the feelings will integrate with physical responses in reality. And while the makers of such trash seem to be pushing our next generation of young men through the gates of hell as fast as is humanly possible, it needn't be that way.

Here's hoping that as the next President will be forced to deal with this continual emerging reality - and enemy that has set its site to our destruction from within - that we will have elected a man of such character that he will have precision in the clarity of his response.

Foreign wars, a faltering economy and dollar, weak civil liberties, a Congress that acts like a crackwhore with a CEO's corporate card... ehhhh these aren't the big issues. Keeping role playing games with tame sex scenes out of the hands of an audience they aren't even marketed to is really the issue that will decide the future of America.

As best as I can tell, this editorial was pulled from Townhall. I was only able to find it through a Google search where someone had posted the entire thing to FreeRepublic. If I had to guess why, I'd say that it was probably due to the fact that Fox News, being all fair and balanced, with an eagle eye for accuracy in all of their reporting, took this and ran with it, pissing off EA in the process. This commentary from McCullough is so far off base in terms of describing Mass Effect that in all seriousness, it is borderline libel, and that's being conservative toward him.

I'm glad to see that for once, a major video game publisher is fighting back in the media, and playing hardball with the media. It's about time the video game industry stopped laying down and taking the abuse from the media.

**UPDATE**:McCullough has written updates on his Townhall blog here and here. The first part is just a whole series of ass covering on his part, with this truly amazing piece of logic:

5. The major criticism the Gamers had for me in their reaction was this challenge: "Unless you've spent the 20 hours of game time it takes to get to the explicit scenes, keep your fat mouth shut!" Many challenges stated that unless I played it myself then I had no business pointing out its objectionably content. Would they say the same of a strip club at the end of their block or hookers knocking at their door? Normal people would not. There is an innate instinct that tells us right from wrong, it's called a conscience. Did I play the game? No. Did I talk to some gamers who had and who knew the possibilities of the game. Yes! Does it make the lesbian, alien, hetero, homo sex that a player arrives at in the game a proper thing for teenagers to be tantalized by? Absolutely not!

I'm sure they would say the same thing about a book review where the reviewer had not bothered to read the entire book, and instead decided to take a few interesting or colorful parts out and review them instead. McCullough's original editorial made no allowance for context, nor does this defense of it even attempt to cover the fact that he had no personal experience with the game. This puts him into the same category of reviewers that have gotten their panties in a knot over the cover of Liberal Fascism, without having actually read the book.

The over-arching point of the entire piece, was not even to encourage censorship - though we ARE allowed to censor smut in this nation, and it has been defined already by the Supreme Court. (Thus why we are not Europe with our "blue" channel running on broadcast television nightly.) The real point of the piece was however to say that in the election coming up the next President will preside over a society that does more to push the envelope than any that have come before it.

While this is entirely true, it also forgets the fact that the overwhelming majority of the game has nothing to do with sexuality, unless one attributes a certain degree of sexuality to heroism. Mass Effect more closely resembles real life than most games, its sci-fi content aside, because it changes with the way that you behave in the game. You can be a paragon of virtue or a renegade.

McCullough is a flat out liar when he says that he didn't want to encourage censorship of content. That is precisely what he called for in this:

Yes there will be many snickers that I decided to bring this issue up in the Presidential cycle of 2008 but how refreshing would it be for a President to prove to the nation that his own manhood was not in question and put his pen and signature to a bill that dealt with such simulated sex excess in a way that was punitive to its creators to such a degree that they would never recover from it.

I could be wrong, but punishing the publication of content of some sort with the loss of liberty or property through the initiation of force by the state is the classic definition of legal censorship. Perhaps he really doesn't want to encourage parents to take responsibility by censoring what comes into their housholds (I wish I could say this entirely tongue-in-cheek). His own words call him a liar.

God didn't design it that way, and no matter how many gamer-nerds spam my inbox with profane dreams of seeing my dead corpse sodimized...

Call me legalistic, but I can imagine God being rather unenthusiastic about a defense of His morality that has to resort to wild, blatantly not true accusations that ultimately are defended by lying about their substance.

In the second part, he takes a much more conciliatory tone, so it's probably best to just assume that he realized eventually that he was making a complete ass out of himself. This is precisely the sort of behavior that makes socially conservative values hard to defend in modern America. As I have said before, I am a libertarian who voluntarily embraces biblical morality, with the obvious caveat that I have broken the entire law like everyone else. It is extremely difficult for me to stand up for biblical morality when people like McCullough go off on tirades about subjects that they really know nothing about. That creates an environment of guilt by tenuous association.

Ironically, Mass Effect is probably one of the best games out there right now for teenage boys to play through, provided they play it more or less on the paragon mode. Playing it through like that makes your character behave like a real hero who is always clean and above board in everything he does. There might even be a biblical parallel in there about character, but surely that has already been missed by McCullough.

Rather than try to sue me into oblivion for commenting on an article written by the media, The Judge Rotenberg Center has decided to make use of the comments section of my blog, and apparently others, to present their side of the story. Good for them, as this is the way that they should be dealing with their critics when they deal with what appears to be a monumental failure on their part to validate orders that affected those in their care. I will leave their comment with the link in it up on the post because it's only fair that they have a right to respond to criticism they get here.

I stand by my original statements that if they destroyed the tape(s) as the media claimed, then someone should go to prison if for no other reason than destruction of evidence is a crime.

"Chris is a very aggressive young deputy," Hanson said.

Investigators don't know if they will be able to connect the money to a drug operation, Hanson said, but the important work already has been done.

"The big thing is he grabbed 69 (thousand dollars) and took it away from them," Hanson said of the money seized. "That's going right straight to the heart of the matter."

This is a good followup to the discussion about Romans 13 and the legitimacy of the authority wielded by the state. Before I go on, there's one point that is important to remember about the story behind this quoted text: the police had no evidence or basis to assume that that money was in anyway connected to a crime, nor was it seized as part of a court conviction.

Theft by any other name (asset forfeiture) is still theft. The system of asset forfeiture laws easily intersects in many cases with the area that some say the state institutionalizes, through its laws, that which is evil. There can be no legitimate debate that taking money from someone who has committed no crime is pure theft, and what this deputy did was to commit what amounted to armed robbery.

For many Christians, this is another aspect of Romans 13 that is just no real to them. It is the fact that many less severe moral issues get swept under the rug by such excuses as "I was just doing my job," "you don't like the law, blame the politicians," and "I just enforce the law." You would probably be hard-pressed to find even a quarter of a percent of police who would buy this line of thought if the law mandated that they go out and murder or rape people they suspect of a crime because their consciences could not ignore the fact that something to that effect can never be legitimized by law.

It probably never even occurred to this deputy that he had no moral authority to seize that cash, and that he would have had no mercy for someone who wasn't a police officer who did the same thing in, let's say, a traffic accident to "cover the cost of the damage done to them." He'd call shenanigans on that argument, and rightly so. You can't just go taking property away from someone because you believe that they have done something wrong, and that's something that most civilized people from all backgrounds would agree about.

The heart of the matter here is that a grand theft was committed under the guise of lawful authority. You can call it whatever you want, but the deputy no more deserves his gun and badge than an armed robber deserves his liberty. If there were justice in the system, this deputy would be sharing a cell with the armed robber right now, and the police chief would be humbly returning the money in person to its rightful owner.

You have a right to be a freak, and even in most cases be a freak in public. You just don't have a right to get upset over the fact that people don't accept you and your freakiness:

"It is definitely discrimination, almost like a hate crime," 19-year-old Miss Maltby said yesterday.

The music technology student had this defence of her lifestyle.

"I am a pet, I generally act animal like and I lead a really easy life," she said.

"I don't cook or clean and I don't go anywhere without Dani. It might seem strange but it makes us both happy. It's my culture and my choice. It isn't hurting anyone."

The bus driver, however, has obviously not been listening.

He has repeatedly refused to allow Mr Graves, 25, and his "pet" on to his bus in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.

It would have been just beautiful if the driver had said "get that bitch off my bus." I mean, how exactly do would a woman not look like an idiot for being offended about being called a bitch when she is allowing herself to be walked like a dog on a leash in public?

The children and the animals are always the first to know...

Wow, I am starting to get on a roll with this Defending Minarchy category/series. That said, before I begin, I suggest this essay by Dave Black as a context for where I am beginning with Romans 13.

It is often repeated by Christians that any law which does not violate God's laws is one that we must obey. This argument, however, does not make sense once it is carried to its natural conclusion. Politics and law, being what they are, are more complicated than such simplistic directions.

There are a few problems with this "obedience" model for the law. The Bible's command here is to submit to the state, not obey the state. Colossians 3 makes a distinction between these two when it tells a wife to submit to her husband, and a child to obey his or her parents. Submission is a voluntary decision to follow the will of a lawful authority, obedience is a commandment.

If an agent of the state is breaking the law, should a Christian obey the agent of the state? If the state itself is in rebellion against its constitution, should a Christian obey the unconstitutional dictates of the state? If someone tries to overthrow the system entirely, why would it be immoral for a Christian to fight back, and even kill the usurper in order to restore the old regime?

To blindly obey the state, and to say that it can dictate as it pleases without regard to the law, is to foster lawlessness, which is itself a sinful state. Would it be any less of an act of rebellion against God's established authority for the state to defy its constitution, than it would be for a citizen to break a legitimate, constitutional law? These are real questions that the simplistic takes on Romans 13 go to great pains to avoid.
 
It is the duty of Christians to defend the constitutional order, for in this way Christians uphold Romans 13 by ensuring the least amount of moral conflict in submitting to the state. By refusing to submit to the state when it violates the constitution of the state, Christians are in fact upholding Romans 13 by standing firmly beside the underlying law that the state rests upon.

Normally I am not a fan of the Weekly Standard, but one of their writers wrote an incredible expose on the Jena 6 case. It is a long read, but goes into detail such as I have never seen given to this case before. This case just goes to show that the mainstream media really is not only generally useless as a "watchdog," but it is often a social agent provocateur that creates strife in order to profit off of the public interest that it generates.

Those who read my blog know that I very, very rarely ever have it in me to suggest that a restriction or punishment for speech is acceptable. However, in the case of Jena 6, I could make an exception. I wish there were some way to send Alan Bean, the man who started this for some crazy reason to expose barely existent racism, to prison for at least a year or two. Once you read the article, you'll understand why I say this, but suffice it to say, the narrative he concocted was to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, what the Mona Lisa is a to kindergarden finger painting.

You know you're breaking the glass ceiling of stupidity when your comment on a single post on zdnet makes headlines at Digg:

Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?

That sounds preposterous to me.

If it were true (and I doubt it), then companies would be selling computers without a windows. This clearly is not happening, so there must be some error in your calculations. I hope you realise that windows is more than just Office ? Its a whole system that runs the computer from start to finish, and that is a very difficult thing to acheive. A lot of people dont realise this.

Microsoft just spent $9 billion and many years to create Vista, so it does not sound reasonable that some new alternative could just snap into existence overnight like that. It would take billions of dollars and a massive effort to achieve. IBM tried, and spent a huge amount of money developing OS/2 but could never keep up with Windows. Apple tried to create their own system for years, but finally gave up recently and moved to Intel and Microsoft.

Its just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer fron start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of windows. Not possible.

I think you need to re-examine your assumptions.

My installation of Ubuntu, despite my gripes about it, would beg to differ. Apparently this guy has an unofficial fan site that is collecting his nuggets of wisdom and insight. If this is any indication, this Jerry Lee Cooper is either dumber than a  box of bricks or a troll so amazingly talented that he deserves an award and citation.

This article is a perfect example of how the news media is almost always terribly irresponsible when it comes to questioning the government's actions the way that a self-styled "watchdog" is supposed to. Read the article for yourself to see how sympathetic it is to the cops involved, but notice a few things that are largely buried around a larger sympathetic article:

• The officers involved raided the house at night.
• The police admit that the officers were probably in plain clothes, making it extremely difficult to identify them as legitimate law enforcement officers.
• The man who shot the cops was in bed, probably asleep or at least dozing off, when the raid started.
• The man who shot the cops had just had his house burglarized a few days ago. (Huh, might explain why he had an itchy trigger finger around men who enter his home in street clothes in the middle of the night)
• The man who shot the cops had no prior criminal record that most people don't already have.

Now, look at the pictures that are presented of the two men, the dead cop and the man now being charged for his death. The officer, who participated in a raid of dubious value and got killed in the process, is shown in a picture that makes him look like a pillar of the community. The man who shot him, who could be just like any other typical guy on the street, is given an unflattering picture, that appears to have been taken from jail, that makes him look like a criminal.

Maybe the writer of this article, which appears to be all but a cover-their-ass hit piece on the defendant is privy to information that I am not, but this article as-is is a perfect example of the media's deriliction of duty. It does not ask hard questions like why the man would be reasonably expected to believe that the undercover cops were law enforcement officers, nor does it show any sympathy to the man after it is revealed that his home was burgled not long before the raid took place. They say there are two sides to the story, and that often the police don't get theirs heard, well this article is the exact opposite of that. It is an unquestioning account of the police department's side of the story.

Both men deserve sympathy in this case, and I am not writing this post to criticize the officer. His death is the result of idiotic training and policies that caused him and his team to create a situation where most people would respond with lethal force to defend their home. If anyone is responsible for his death, it is his police department for making him carry out an armed raid in the middle of the night, rather than having a policy of catching the man offguard at a more easily controlled time and place such as when he was driving to work.

Previously, in Defending Minarchy, Israel was only discussed in passing, but now the subject deserves a little more attention. Before that happens, these are some basic facts about the modern state of Israel:

GDP: $232.7B
Per Capita Income: $33,299
Active military personnel: 186,000
Men fit for military service: 1,226,903

Now, for a reference point, Switzerland has the following equivalent statistics:
GDP: $264.1B
Per Capita Income: $32,300
Men fit for military service: 1,375,889

Switzerland is a very wealthy nation that has a long history of independence. It also does not maintain an active duty military anywhere near as strong as the Israel Defense Forces, preferring instead to rely on a large body of reservists. Their economies are similarly robust, and Israel even has a slightly higher per capita income than Switzerland.

From an economic and military point of view, Israel is significantly more powerful than its neighbors. Even accounting for population disparities, Israel has the key advantage of being able to design its own modern weapon systems. With a modern economy, modern military, and modern defense industry, Israel has much of the key components needed to maintain its own national defense without any American assistance. In fact, Israel is one of the few allies of the United States that is able to provide for all of its own defense needs.

None of this is to say that Israel should be thrown to the wolves, but it is an important reminder that Israel is not like Western Europe or South Korea. It has not grown soft under the protective umbrella provided by American military protection. Israel is not in existential danger from its neighbors because Israel has the military means to unleash a conventional and nuclear holocaust on them in retaliation in a worst case scenario.

Most of the arguments for "standing by Israel" are purely emotional. They are not rational from either a strategic or a religious perspective, nor are they are even reflective on how American "support" for Israel has actually manifested itself. The United States may vote against meaningless actions conducted by the United Nations against Israel, and provide it token foreign aid, but the United States has also encouraged Israel to enter into an unacceptable relationship with the Palestinians. If Hispanic terrorists from Mexico were to launch as many attacks on Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico as Israel has been expected to stomach from the Palestinians, Mexico would have faced fierce military retaliation from the United States. However, presidents from both parties, have essentially told Israel to "just deal with it" with respect to attacks from Gaza and the West Bank. Seeing as how this has been the norm now for the better part of nearly sixteen years, and it shows no signs of changing, Israel is indeed better off with a less involved, or not even involved at all, United States.

The simple fact is, aside from foreign aid and access to American military technology, the United States has done little to show its true support for Israel, and much to make life easier for its enemies. One might say that the United States has been, especially in the past sixteen years or so, as much of an enemy of Israel as a friend of Israel. Supporters of Israel need to stop thinking about abstract principles, and face reality. With the sort of engagement they have gotten from the United States under Clinton and Bush in particular, it is best for Israel to have the United States simply walk away and just trade with them.

The patriarchy is entirely responsible for its sexist laws of physics and high expectations that caused this to happen.

They should have known better, and hopefully they will pay the price:

A special education school destroyed videotape showing two of its students being wrongly given electric shock treatments despite being ordered to preserve the tape, according to an investigator's report.

One student was shocked 77 times and the other 29 times after a prank caller posing as a supervisor ordered the treatments at a Judge Rotenberg Educational Center group home in August. The boys are 16 and 19 years old and one was treated for first-degree burns.

Social engineering is a big problem in many areas of information security, and cases like this prove that it can be a serious problem whenever you have stupid and/or gullible employees who don't verify credentials. The school obviously destroyed this tape in order to hide the evidence of what they did to the students, and that alone should get the administrators sent to prison. If they were so concerned about the safety and dignity of the students, as they claim, then they would have verified the orders that they had been given before carrying them out. That alone would have prevented this situation from ever happening, but because they were too lazy and/or incompetent to do such a thing, here we are.

Justin Raimondo writes far better than I could on the fifth column nature of the beltway libertarians. It is getting very obvious that many of these "libertarians" have spent too much time in D.C. and absorbing its culture.

The quickness to denounce the Ron Paul campaign is solid evidence that these "libertarians" are establishment creatures, with establishment values. For all of their vaunted talk of tolerance, a disturbing number of libertarians were savagely hawkish in coming down on Ron Paul. This is inability to stomach ideas they find offensive long enough to even hear someone out, is decidedly non-libertarian. The alacrity that they displayed, and the natural ease of the denunciations are strong signs that their libertarian views are simply bolted onto the modern secular ethic for all human interactions, "say no hurtful thing, screw no child." Indeed at times, I think they are far more concerned with racism, sexism and anti-homosexuality than such passe' goals as bring about an end to the welfare-warfare state.

It's patently obvious that the libertarian movement is now divided between left-libertarians, as represented by the beltway crowd, and right-libertarians which are the base of supporters that Ron Paul is drawing from. This is a contest for who will define libertarianism, and the left-libertarians are losing because most "small l libertarians" are either right-libertarians or close enough to be just not left-libertarians. In many respects, this is just like the neoconservatives scrambling to delegitimize small government conservatives of all varieties from their think tank and publishing perches. We all know that conservatism has been a "big tent," but it has not been so obvious until now that libertarianism has worked in a similar way.

Ironically, it will be "right-libertarians" that will give the libertarian movement the shot in the arm that it needs to become a force unto itself, if it is ever to really become one, because we have a better connection to common American culture. Unlike left-libertarians, we have, as a faction, at least a vague notion that outside of the major cities, there is a real American culture, and that the mulitcultural major cities are the exception that are not to be emulated. If any faction is qualified to take over, and embed libertarian ideas into the culture, it will be the Ron Paul right-libertarians, not the beltway left-libertarians.

Lee Harris has an interesting explanation for why many reject Darwinism:

At the same time, those who accept Darwin (as I do) need to understand the true origin of the revulsion so many people feel against his theory. For the basis of this revulsion is none other than "the civilizing process" that has been instilled into us from infancy. The civilizing process has taught us never to throw our feces at other people, not even in jest. It has taught us not to snatch food from other people, not even when they are much weaker than we. It has taught us not to play with our genitals in front of other people, not even when we are very bored. It has taught us not to mount the posterior of other people, not even when they have cute butts.

Those who are horrified by our resemblance to the lower primates are not wrong, because it is by means of this very horror of the primate-within that men have been able to transcend our original primate state of nature. It is by refusing to accept our embarrassing kinship with primates that men have been able to create societies that prohibit precisely the kind of monkey business that civilized men and women invariably find so revolting and disgusting. Thou shalt not act like a monkey-this is the essence of all the higher religions, and the summation of all ethical systems

Agree with it or disagree with it, it's a great article and a good example of why Lee Harris is a brilliant writer among a sea of useless pundits.

Genesis 1 speaks only of the materials that God used to create man. There is an awful lot that can be reasonably assumed to have happened that was not brought up in Genesis. Clearly God gave humanity a complex design and genetic code from the outset, and Genesis 1 states that animals--including monkeys and apes--preceded humanity. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that God could have drawn heavily from the genetic code of chimpanzees when creating the humane genome. This is no way conflicts with the revelation that humanity is made in the image of God because prior to the manifestation of the Word of God in the form of Jesus Christ (John 1), God had no physical, human body. God was, at the time of Genesis, a being purely of spirit. Those two things, taken together, clearly show that it is compatible with the Genesis account to believe that God based the genetic code of humanity on chimpanzees.

Aside from the theological angle, Harris is absolutely correct when he states that it is not clear that ending the belief in Genesis' account, or similar accounts, is beneficial to humanity or civilization (which is a necessary foundation for science to survive). Humanity can take its cues from one of two places: nature or the supernatural. The former is obviously problematic, as there is no shortage of examples of uncivilized behavior thriving in the wild from theft, to rape, to killing for amusement. Nature is fundamentally amoral, and thus logically it cannot provide a basis for a society that tries to transcend nature into morality.

Authorities are investigating the death of a 29-year-old Fridley man shot with a Taser by state troopers, who said he had become "uncooperative'' after a rush-hour crash Tuesday evening.

The victim was identified by his father as Mark C. Backlund. Gordon Backlund said his son was on his way to pick up his parents at the airport after they had taken a short trip to Florida.

You know it's bad when the police won't even explain what the "uncooperative behavior" was. Tasers are not appropriate weapons for officers to use unless the individual becomes violent. They are, after all, classifed now as "less lethal weapons," not "non-lethal weapons." With them, there is always a nontrivial possibility that using them will result in the target dying of heart failure. Therefore, it's pretty safe to say that the police are now in full CYA mode over this because they know that any normal person would probably have been charged with some form of murder and/or use of excessive force in the same situation.

Let's face it. As a profession, police are not shy about defending themselves in the public spotlight. If this weren't a bad case, they'd be making sure we knew that it wasn't a bad case.

Trust a socialist to be totally enamored of the OLPC XO-1:

Yes, it was One Laptop Per Child's XO. The owner, who was being
interviewed by some Web publication, told us that he "really liked" the OLPC and thought it had "great potential" to change the lives of children in the developing world. Then he went on a tangent about how the MacBook Air was too expensive and all we really needed was the OLPC because we could all load free software on it and then the world would be a better place. Then he started talking about how great socialism is. Welcome to San Francisco, but really, isn't he at the wrong conference?

A 433Mhz CPU, 256MB of RAM, 1GB of flash memory for storage. That sounds like a very advanced laptop for 2008. Why third world kids might be able to type up text messages, surf the web, and write hello world applications on it after the operating system gives them a few crumbs of resources to play with. I suppose I wouldn't be so cynical about the OLPC were it not for the fact that its supporters bill it as being almost some sort of mystical device that will unleash third world productivity and education.

Julian Sanchez did a pretty bang up job taking on the recent allegations about Ron Paul. Some of you may not have seen this, which is why I am devoting a whole blog post to just pointing it out. Very fair and balanced, and he came to a conclusion that may startle some of you. The man who wrote most of this crap that is now being used to smear Ron Paul is apparently none other than Lew Rockwell.

I suggest that all of you who support Ron Paul read this and circulate it. Link to it on your blogs, and help boost its Google rating as much as possible in the process. Also, if you have a Digg account, here's the link to the page on Digg for this article.

The best way to start the day when you are trying to lose weight is a glass of Kefir, a microwavable sandwich and a shot of Godiva Mocha liqueur. Especially the Godiva Mocha liqueur. Just enough to give you a sweet little kick to start the day off before you hit the gym for some exercise, and not enough to make the exercise be in vain. Gotta love the Kefir too, as a single glass of that has about 28% of your recommended allowance of protein!

Is it just me, or are we starting to look more and more like we're going to have a Republican candidate for each state? I'm not worried about Romney winning Michigan because let's face it. Any Republican who comes to that state, offering to bail out one of their key industries, and the only one that keeps Detroit going, is going to get a lot of sympathy votes. Maybe Ron Paul will end up taking a few states like Montana along the way. My prediction is that Huckabee will be the winner in South Carolina unless he gets hit with scandals that make him like too much like a Republican version of Bill Clinton.

The federal government is getting more serious about being able to coerce private encryption keys from people who are on trial. Their case is not entirely without merit, as a warrant to search a laptop would be analogous to a warrant to search your house. The only thing that worries me about this case, is the distinct probability that they will demand the right to coerce people into turning over their encryption keys before they have good reason to believe they could get a valid warrant.

MySQL has been bought out by Sun Microsystems. So what, you say? Well, MySQL happens to be the most common database server in use by website hosting companies, which means that a great deal of bloggers depend on it. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is probably a good thing for MySQL. It's already a quality product, even if it is every limited in functionality compared to Oracle or Microsoft SQLServer. With Sun's backing, we might see it really start to catch up with Oracle, and it'll probably not have to deal with Oracle's tendency to try to buy out every company that makes a new engine for MySQL.

Fathers should get special treatment according to Zippy Catholic:

But as some kind of categorical employment imperative backed by the force of law, the concept of equal pay for equal work is fundamentally inhuman and immoral. There is a basic difference between treating people as human beings with inherent dignity and treating them as interchangeable fungible productivity units, despite how amusing it is to say "fungible productivity unit".

I understand the objections: it is presently illegal to hire and set pay based on marital status and children, it is difficult to get employers to do the right thing, if fathers are morally entitled to greater pay - a living wage - than those who do not have the garnering of a living wage as their natural duty, well, capitalism as presently consitituted is going to lock fathers out of the workplace, fragment jobs into contract work and piecemeal jobs, and hire the cheapest workers. I get all that. 

Whatever problems fathers face in the marketplace do not justify imposing a belief that fathers are entitled to more pay than their labor is worth. There are many things that have caused a drop in wages that may or may not be hitting fathers hard, but none of them are tied to the concept of equal pay for equal work. While I agree with Zippy Catholic that there should be no legal mandate for equal pay for equal work, as a concept, it is reasonably sound. It is an effective principle that takes the edge off of the natural tendency that most people have toward favoritism, especially in ways that may harm an employer.

Zippy Catholic did not at all make the moral case for why fathers are entitled to anything higher than the maximum value of their labor. I suppose this is a conservative version of the typical nebulous Catholic arguments, (very) loosely based on scripture, that support no shortage of "moral mandates" on participants in economic transactions of every variety.

Now, my heretical intuition (aka Protestant philosophy of sola scriptura) suggests that there is something awry with having an automatic bias to any group. Lo and behold, the Bible agrees with me, not Zippy Catholic. Deuteronomy 25 states:

13 Do not have two differing weights in your bag"one heavy, one light. 14 Do not have two differing measures in your house"one large, one small. 15 You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you. 16 For the LORD your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.

This only deals with buying and selling, but it makes a reasonable starting point for discussion of an employee's wages. It is reasonable to assume that anyone who isn't a father would be furious if they found out that their wages were artificially lowered because they weren't a father. Knowing the way that virtually all employers are hush-hush about their employees' wages, it is reasonable to assume that this bias would have to be kept quiet, especially around young, single men. The moment that most young men realized that they had to work longer, harder hours than their married male coworkers simply because they weren't fathers would be the moment that they'd put their resumes out at a dozen competitors. Deception would have to be the foundation of this policy, and that deception is what is at the heart of Deuteronomy 25. That it is an ostensibly noble cause is irrelevant.

I can feel already that some might object to my use of Deuteronomy 25 on the grounds that allowing employees to negotiate higher wages for "unfair reasons" is unbiblical. The Bible does not prohibit negotiating a better price, even one that is flat out discriminatory to others because the seller prefers one buyer over another. What it prohibits is negotiating dishonestly, where a buyer is deceived into paying more than he or she should. As I said, Zippy Catholic's idea would be a nonstarter in the workplace without deception by Human Resources, therefore it can be reasonably said to run contrary to Deuteronomy 25.

**UPDATE**: I had ignored some of the rhetoric about "fungible productivity units" simply because I thought that that was more of a side issue for Zippy. Apparently I was wrong, based on this comment he poste