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 posted in defense of his position after being roasted by most of the commenters up until that comment:

Hospitals, for example, don't hire fathers or mothers. They hire
doctors, nurses, administrators, and technicians -- who might or might
not be fathers or mothers. The hospital staff are paid for the job they
do, not for the children they have or don't have at home.

Right, I understand, and it is precisely that to which I object.
What I am suggesting is that hiring 'functional units' as opposed to
human beings is immoral.

For someone who seethes at the rhetoric and positions of modern liberalism, this is an awfully left-wing view to take. It remains to be explained why an employer would want to hire a "human being" as opposed to a INSERT_JOB_TITLE. Why would my employer want to take me on "as a human being," instead of as a Software Engineer? Would it really be to their advantage, and to my peace of mind, to have that much involvement in my life from my employer?

There is a fine line here of freedom for employees that Zippy Catholic has clearly missed. The more involved the employer becomes with the "human being,"  and not the "employee" (as though these are two separate categories!) the more they will encroach on the employee's life. This approach would invariably lead an employer to become more controlling, more paternalistic in its employees' lives.

Those sneaky Germans and their research into the Koran are showing strong signs that the Koran's claim to being the unaltered Word of God are completely bogus. The forces of multiculturalism are rallying behind Islam, trying to shield it from honest academic inquiry, but eventually someone will get ahold of those microfilms, even if they have to break into the archives to steal them.

Between the personal character of the religion's founder, and the signs that the Koran is just a hodgepodge of rhetoric from Mohammed and plagiarized text from other sources, the future doesn't look too good for Islam.

This case should have every remotely honest atheist and agnostic fuming that Islam is being protected from evidence that could very well systematically damn it. It will be interesting to see how they react to this protection of an organized religion.

**UPDATE**: You know an update is serious when I post it at the top of the post... I post this update for the benefit of clarity because I know that patriotism can lead otherwise sensible people to insensible conclusions. My beef with Frum, in case it is not obvious, is the fact that he acts like a petulant child when it comes to what happens to the United States when it uses its armed forces abroad. He seems to have a hard time accepting the fact that one way or another it is natural that our troops will be targeted when they are ordered to go abroad and get anywhere near an area filled with conflict and war--which Lebanon was in spades when these events happened. Regardless of how you feel about the situation, the fact remains that Hezbollah only did what it did on Lebanese soil, not American soil. You can make a good case for why we should have responded with harsh military force against Hezbollah, something I would have agreed with, but the fact remains that these were armed attacks against us when we stuck our noses into a very bloody civil war. You simply cannot do that and act surprised. Regardless of how you feel about Hezbollah, Americans probably would have responded as harshly to European intervention in our own civil war that was perceived as being allied to one side or another, as Hezbollah did in its own small capacity to the United States.

They whine about armed groups killing our troops abroad as though it were not a natural part of war, and are unable to distinguish between a group that kills Americans on their home turf, and ones that kill Americas on our soil:

Terror denial: In his column of December 26, 2002, Robert Novak attacked Condoleezza Rice for citing Hezbollah, instead of al-Qaeda, as the world's most dangerous terrorist organization: "In truth, Hezbollah is the world's most dangerous terrorist organization from Israel's standpoint. While viciously anti-American in rhetoric, the Lebanon-based Hezbollah is focused on the destruction of Israel. 'Outside this fight [against Israel], we have done nothing,' Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the organization's secretary-general, said in a recent New York Times interview." The sheik did not say, and Novak did not bother to add, that Hezbollah twice bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, murdering more than 60 people, and drove a suicide bomb into a Marine barracks in October 1983, killing 241 servicemen.

It may be part of modern international law that embassies are the sovereign territory of their respective states, but as a matter of practicality in a time of war, they are nothing more than targets of opportunity connected to the regime in power. This is simply part of the danger of having an embassy abroad. I don't like the bombing of America targets anymore than the next American, but it requires a serious intellectual dishonesty to conflate bombings that happen abroad, when our government is involved with a regime fighting a civil war, with bombings on American soil. Even the bombing of the Marine barracks was simply another facet of the danger that is inherent to any foreign power that intervenes militarily into a civil war.

These things, even taken together, do not demonstrate a willingness by Hezbollah to come to real American soil, such as our territories or one of the fifty states, and carry out acts of armed aggression against us. The last thing that Hezbollah would want would be to drag the United States into the ongoing strife in Lebanon, pinning it between American troops in Lebanon, and the IDF along the southern border.

As a sovereign military power, the United States had every right to carry out reasonable, swift and deadly retaliations against Hezbollah in response to those attacks. The United States did not choose to go down this route, in part because the Reagan Administration wisely understood that these losses did not amount to even a sucker punch to the United States, and that there was little good that could come to the United States from getting more involved by carrying out reprisal attacks against Hezbollah.

If Frum had any grasp of history or conservative philosophy, he would know how ludicrous his argument sounds.

Rachel and I found these videos when she was watching some video clips of funny/stupid kids on YouTube:

Apparently the former CEO of Tesla Motors, the guy who really built up the company, has been keeping a blog about what's going on with the company these days. Some recently fired employees have given him a list of who has been culled from the company as of late, and the list doesn't look good for the company. There are a number of management firings to balance things out a bit, but most of the firings are on the engineering team. You know, the people who actually build the product and get it ready to go to market. These are the very last people who should be on the chopping block, and from the looks of the list, these aren't minor engineering positions either. We're talking about people who will be very difficult in the best of circumstances to get solid replacements for.

Looks like Tesla is going down the path of failure and irrelevance. If they're lucky, they'll get an honorable mention in the history books.

Salvation by good works makes many people feel good because they consider themselves to be good people, and it's meritocratic. It just doesn't make much sense upon deeper examination. Salvation by good works relies on the belief that we will be "good enough for God" when we die, and that those who are essentially good will make it, and the rest, well, who knows. The problem is, how does God decide who is good enough with this approach? Where is the cut off? Do we have a sin record equivalent to our traffic record, where good works negate bad works, and if we go long enough without doing really bad things we get special points for that too? How do you weigh the full ramifications of an evil act? Which is more evil, a lie that you know will probably end up causing someone to commit suicide, or raping someone? Is that lie just a lie, or is it worse because of the weight of everything connected to the lie? That's a serious question that you have to answer definitively when talking about salvation by good works.

What is the cut off? That is the ultimate question here. Where does God magically cut off the line of who is acceptable? At 1,000 evil points on our soul? What is the real difference between someone who has 999 and someone who has 1,001? Would we even notice such a slight difference? Would we care if we did? Would God care about such a pathetic distinction? I suspect that He wouldn't.

This post at Maggie's Farm comparing "then and now" regarding public schools really is scary if you've been paying attention to what's been going on with stupid local government actions. Goes pretty well with my previous post about the need for intelligent people to firmly denounce stupid ideas and actions carried out with politically correct motivations.

Regarding number eight on the list, it'd be a bit more realistic if "Johnny" were to find himself in a sexual relationship with the social worker.

Judgmentalism is a loaded word. It has acquired a similar amount of emotional and rhetorical baggage to the word Fascist, making it one of the worst words that a purveyor of political correctness can use to denounce someone. This word conjurs up images of a bigot in many people. A hateful curmudgeon who viciously attacks well-meaning, good people for having the wrong ideas, beliefs, behaviors, etc. This image is wrong, of course, for many reasons, some of which are obvious to everyone, and some that may only be obvious to those who have given it some thought already.

The origin of non-judgmentalism is Christian, not secular. In the transition between scripture and secular understanding, the very meaning of non-judgmentalism was largely lost. It was a call to humility, to focus on perfecting one's own behavior and a move away from sin, not living in peaceful tolerance of people whose behaviors are quite intolerable. It would never have made sense, in the context of the Christian sermon it was delivered in, to use "judge not or you shall be judged" as a cover for cultural habits that are objectively abominable, such as tolerating the prediliction that Islamic immigrants to Britain have for mutilating the genitalia of their little girls.

The prevailing, predominantly multicultural, "non-judgmentalism" is a very twisted, dare it be said, evil, bastardization of Matthew 7. It is taken out of context on at least two levels. First, it was taken out of the context of being preached in a Jewish society, a society that embraced a universal standard of morality in the form of the Mosaic Law. Second, it ignores the New Testament context which includes many firm teachings that even if one never does anything that even remotely smacks of judgment, one is still under the judgment of God. Therefore, it requires either a breathtaking ignorance of history, culture and scripture, or a malicious dishonesty to read Matthew 7 and conclude that it in any practical way supports modern notions of non-judgmentalism. The more accurate, scriptural understanding of Matthew 7 might be read as "live and let live, within the limits of God's law."

Now, lest there by histrionics about theocracy, executing homosexuals and things of that nature, there are two distinct ways of "judging" that are lumped together. The first form of judgmentalism, as society is often prone to calling it, is a steadfast refusal to abandon one's principles, coupled with a strong belief that they are better and ought to embraced by everyone. The second form of judgmentalism, is true judgmentalism, as it is based almost entirely in arrogance and hatred. The difference between these two is the difference between a preacher firmly standing behind scripture that says that homosexuality is immoral, and Fred Phelps, a "preacher" who would have everyone believe that IEDs are God's answer to America's "embrace" of homosexuality.

The first form of judgementalism is sorely lacking today, especially among those who value individual liberty. It is precisely because intelligent, educated men and women who value liberty and traditional American values have become more tolerant of beliefs because they are beliefs, irrespective of their connection to reality, that America has lost control over much of its own government. How many people are willing to actually stand up for common sense, and demand face-to-face that government bureaucrats show some of it?

This unthinking disease has infected every corner of our government it would seem, and yet many people are unwilling to chauvinistically stand up and boldly declare "you are behaving stupidly, you damn well can do better." No better example exists today than the overuse of SWAT units by law enforcement. Cases such as this are all too typical. It would be a genuine mercy to work on the assumption that this small town police force is run and manned by people too stupid to see the ludicrous nature of deploying an assault team against a citizen's home over a minor injury to a nearly teenage child, rather than suggest that these Keystone Kops have a fantasy of playing English-speaking Gestapo jackboots. Such deployments are so routine in many areas that it has become accepted practice to SWAT a fly with a machine gun, rather than use ingenuity and cunning to preserve peace and limit the danger to others.

Again, how often do people stand up to the police and judgmentally declare them to be cowards and idiots for such actions? Not that many people, aside from those who are ideological prone to simply hating the police because they are the police because most of America has been convinced that no one is really fit to examine the evidence, and damn the judgment call that anyone makes (unless they're a prosecutor, at which rate it's expected that they hen-peck every decision a private citizen makes in their use of force). In a society that was more judgmental, that was quicker to call a spade a spade, without concern for whatever face someone might lose, such abuses would be rare because of the merciless ridicule that the police, and the larger law enforcement system, would face.

Going back to that story once more, who would be willing to stand firmly in the face of the paramedics and call them what they are, egotistical, petty fools for fighting with the father of the child when the father happened to have military training as a combat medic? Knowing that the father was qualified to make the same diagnoses that they are, any reasonable person could only conclude that their efforts to report the family were driven by pride and a desire to see people suffer. Yet who would condemn them for using the state as a weapon like this? Not many people because they have been conditioned to see such actions as misguided, not a combination of evil and stupidity. Evil for being willing to hurt them out of pride, stupidity for not recognizing the pointless nature of arguing with the father, since he has their same expertise.

In this case, and many more like it, including but not limited to cases as petty as a child being suspended for drawing a picture of a gun in a public school, there is at least one common problem. Intelligent people are unwilling to risk being declared judgmental by denouncing the stupid action or argument, and demand that the person who was responsible for it be held accountable as though they should have known better. Yes, fire the police chief for using a SWAT on a non-violent offender. Fire the teacher for reacting hysterically to a mere picture or some other harmless childish antics. Fire the social worker for not being convinced that the child in front of her is really telling the truth that they weren't molested or abused. Fire and disbar the prosecutor who has been shown to go after people whose case against them is weak at best. Be judgmental, stand up for common sense, and demand accountability from those who lack it and who have power over everyone else.

Remember this, and be prepared to cite it, when someone argues that the left really cares more about the poor, than it hates capitalism:

Mayor Thomas M. Menino embarked on a highly public campaign yesterday to block CVS Corp. and other retailers from opening medical clinics inside their stores, an effort that exposed a rift between Menino and the state's public health commissioner, a longtime ally.


Menino blasted state regulators for paving the way Wednesday for the in-store clinics, which are designed to provide treatment for sore throats, poison ivy, and other minor illnesses.


The decision by the state Public Health Council, "jeopardizes patient safety," Menino said in a written statement. "Limited service medical clinics run by merchants in for-profit corporations will seriously compromise quality of care and hygiene. Allowing retailers to make money off of sick people is wrong."

The argument that one member of the opposition in Boston brought up was that without a regular, full-time doctor, patients wouldn't get the "continuum of care" that they need to stay healthy. Nevermind the fact that these small clinics will allow parents to unload a lot of the burden that exists on primary care practitioners. Additionally, the creation of new medical care facilities will increase the number of medical care providers competing for Boston's poor's dollars. Many of them might be able to buy cheap, affordable healthcare for the first time in a long time, or even ever for that matter.

I can see the argument (though I disagree with it) that the drug stores have a conflict of interest here in that they may try to push drugs on their patents that they don't need. However, the better way of dealing with that is to enforce existing medical ethics rules at the state level, and to expand or refine them where necessary, instead of just legal carpetbombing a viable source of healthcare treatment.

The New Jersey legislature, having solved all of the state's major problems, is now getting around to feel-good problems like apologizing for slavery. I'm not sure exactly what they're apologizing for, considering the fact that most of the Northern states' roles in American slavery were at worst mild. However, there were many attempts to disarm black people, some of which continue on today, in order to deny blacks, especially black men, the means of fighting back against attackers. Therefore, I think the New Jersey legislature should do something useful for blacks, something to really put its money where its collective mouth is. Give every black resident of New Jersey who is at least 21-25 years old, and who has no felony record, a handgun, box of ammunition and training lessons on the state's dime.

After all, what better litmus test to prove that they really aren't racist and are repentant for their fathers' and mothers' sins, than by arming potentially hundreds of thousands of black people, and training them to use their new weapons efficiently?

⁸Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable-if anything is excellent or praiseworthy-think about such things.
-Philipians 4:8

Before you click on the "continue reading" link, I have a few things to say. Rachel loves to quote Philipians 4:8, and not without good reason. It is one of the best verses in the entire New Testament when it comes to practical advice. I've said before in passing on my blog that in many respects my life is not going all that well right now. My job is pretty bad these days, my prospects for being able to easily change jobs to one that pays better, and that is in the same field are limited right now, both Rachel and I are feeling increasingly worn down by where we live, and various little frustrations are nipping at my heels.

It's easy to despair, and even now there's a little part of me that is trying not to feel that way. I don't know if it is his original quote or not, but Vox said it best when he said "Despair is the natural state of the thinking man." I think too much, and it causes me to lose sight of what matters. Little things become bigger and more fearsome barriers to life and happiness. Sometimes I'm inclined to revert back to the way that I used to feel about happiness, which is that mental anguish, sorrow and frustration with the status quo are the only truly authentic, intelligent feelings a thinking person can have toward the state of the world.

When I look back at these pictures from our wedding, they epitomize Philipians 4:8 to me. I only posted a few of them because I want Rachel to have some input in any additional ones that get posted (and we have many more where these came from), but these remind me of several things which brighten my face and spirit. First, there is happiness and hope for this lifetime. Second, you don't have to sell your soul to Mammon in order to enjoy a good life. Finally, and I think most importantly, they're a solid reminder to me that whatever is in front of me, that is upsetting me and causing me to despair is not the authentic, final word in anything. It too shall pass and be replaced by something good and wholesome to my spirit and being, if I try and have faith.

Alright, serious stuff aside, I have a few more things. I promise I'll shut up momentarily, so please bear with me a little longer. This wedding was all Rachel, with only a little help from me. It had to be. It couldn't possibly have ended up being as classy and great as it was, if she didn't have the lion's share of control over it. She moved through each detail like an artist, and the results speak for themselves. Everything from the cake, to her dress and jewelry, to the tuxes that the menfolk wore had her mark on them. No nasty girly colors, or anything else that seems to besmirch many weddings. As her husband, I am grateful--and proud--that she chose the way she did. I don't think I've ever felt so well-dressed in my life, as I did in the tux that she chose for me, nor as honored to have a woman on my arm as when she was walking with me in that dress.

And last, but not least, the wedding cake was actually good cake. If that doesn't tell you all you need to know about her ability to make good selections, nothing will.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even though they were half-way retarded and thirteen, it's the boys' fault, not the fault of a public school which allowed them to be alone with a somewhat more retarded girl:

A teacher found three students from William Dandy Middle, a special
education school, engaging in what officials would only classify as
"inappropriate behavior" in the parking lot, back on Dec. 19. According
to police, however, the inappropriate behavior was actually all three
kids, with their pants down, having intercourse. The incident involved
two 13-year-old boys, and an 11-year-old, mentally handicapped girl.

Although all three are in "exceptional student education,"
authorities say the boys were well enough mentally to know what they
were doing.

It is patently obvious that they should not be having sex, especially not at that age, and in public. That said, it requires a certain perverse way of covering one's posterior to try to dump all, or even most, of the blame on half-retarded minors when the school has in loco parentis obligations and authority it must exercise--which it didn't seem to in this case. One minute the schools will exert all manner of nearly totalitarian authority over people's kids, and the next, they'll act like it was never their responsibility or within their ability to control things.

That last line I quoted is particularly rich from a legal point of view. I thought it was the official state position that a thirteen year old boy is not mentally capable of making informed decisions about sex that made the case for statutory rape statutes in the first place. So which is it?

My name is Perro Negro, you killed my father, prepare to die...

Or should I say, Ecco Canessa Fascista? This sort of behavior is enough to make me support any of the others over Clinton:

If the roles were reversed, can you imagine how fast the Clinton campaign's volunteers would have been to call the Ron Paul campaign a bunch of Fascists? The mainstream media would be all over this, soundly denouncing the "extremism" of the Ron Paul campaign in a New York nanosecond.

I'm sure the response here is naturally that they were just idiot college students who "obviously don't represent the campaign." Some sort of honorable mention for the assumption of the basic goodness of all people, assuming that it is almost axiomatically true that she could not possibly have surrounded herself with people who would behave like this and recruit others for the same. Funny, the same people who would naturally defend this as an isolate incident would find no irony in that their argument ultimately boils down to saying that it is really an "alpha sheep" leading a pack of wolves, instead of an alpha wolf in sheep's clothing.

The fat lady is singing, but will Toshiba listen?

Microsoft's Xbox video game unit still fully backs Microsoft's Xbox video game unit still fully backs Toshiba's high-definition DVD format but could consider supporting Sony's rival Blu-ray technology should consumers want it, an executive said Tuesday.
"It should be consumer choice; and if that's the way they vote, that's something we'll have to consider," Albert Penello, group marketing manager for Xbox hardware, said when asked whether Microsoft would support a Blu-ray DVD accessory in the event that HD DVD failed.

First Warner Brothers, then Paramount, and now even Microsoft is making noises about at least dividing its loyalty. The last five days or so haven't been good for the HD-DVD camp. According to Wikipedia, Blu-Ray exclusive studios also include Lionsgate, Disney, 20th century Fox, New Line Cinemas, MGM and obviously Sony. That's the majority of the distribution market now for home movies, firmly in the Blu-Ray camp.

What would suck for Sony, though, would be for Microsoft to officially support Blu-Ray, and then announce that it would allow for the creation of "two tiers" of XBox 360 games. Developers could either distribute their content on several dual layer DVDs or a single Blu-Ray disc, allowing the XBox 360 to compete even more directly with the long-term capabilities of the PS3.

Punch line: one of the co-authors of the book "Pro Drupal Development," the definitive reference on the package, helped launch and maintain the Ron Paul web site using Drupal.

-Comment on the previous post about RedState.com's conversion to Drupal

RedState is complaining (HT: Firedoglake) that they cannot get the support they need to fix their website from the developers of Scoop, a product that is connected with that cesspool of leftist politics Kuro5hin. Here's the full post, where they beg for money to help them make the transition to Drupal in its entirety:

When we started RedState in May of 2004, we used a website program called Scoop â€" the same program a lot of similar sites on the left used. But, as the number of visitors to our site grew, Scoop kept crashing on us.

If we’d been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren’t really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us. We kept crashing and were out of money. We had to close down or take drastic action.

Well, we didn’t close down. We ditched Scoop and moved to the best alternative at the time, a program called Drupal. But, in accomplishing the switch, budget constraints forced us to sacrifice some popular site features in order to alleviate the strain on our overused servers.

Needless to say, we always regarded those “downgrades” as temporary, and we hoped to restore the eliminated features â€" and to add new and even better ones â€" as soon as we could afford to.

Unfortunately, we still can’t afford to. But we’re convinced that America can afford even less to have us operating at anything less than our absolute peak potential during the coming presidential election season.

So we’ve decided to move ahead with our upgrades without delay, and despite not having the cash on hand â€" hoping and praying that RedState.com readers like you will help us make up the shortfall with a generous donation.

Drupal, WordPress and Movable Type were around, all with robust communities in 2004. It's not like Scoop was the only game in town back then if you wanted to start a blog. There have been plenty of open source possibilities for getting a site like this set up, but they always required you to get your hands a little bit dirty integrating them in a way that makes sense for your needs.

If Daily Kos were to use the same software that FreeRepublic uses, you had better believe that they would be hard-pressed to get much tech support from FreeRepublic's more capable members. That's the name of the game. RedState itself is no bastion of political civility either. Recall the ban on Ron Paul supporters. No matter how civil they would be, merely talking about him in a positive way would get you banned if you were a new user:

The post on Redstate, “Attention, Ron Paul Supporters (Life is *REALLY* Not Fair),” begins, “Effective immediately, new users may *not* shill for Ron Paul in any way shape, form or fashion. Not in comments, not in diaries, nada. If your account is less than 6 months old, you can talk about something else, you can participate in the other threads and be your zany libertarian self all you want, but you cannot pimp Ron Paul. Those with accounts more than six months old may proceed as normal.”

Adding to the irony, Ron Paul has attracted a great deal of following among people who are skilled in things like software engineering and programming. There are a lot of Ron Paul supporters who could have easily come to RedState's aid and helped it to make the transition nearly painless.

**UPDATE**: It gets worse. Read on to see the contents of a fundraiser/begging email they sent out to their mailing list that I received (I forgot that I had signed up a long time ago).

In the coming weeks (or months, depending on how many kindly give to the effort) we will, with no doubt, be launching Red State version 3. We can, and we will. You know those teaser screenshots of Erick's? Those are not mockups. They are from a real, live, functioning development site we have up. It's just not done, and we need to get it done.

The new site is so close, I'm excited. I'm grinning from ear to ear. I'm not hyped up for any of the reasons that generally get talked about at length, though. In a sense, I think the coming transition is emblematic of a greater change for the better coming to Red State.

But, we need you to open your wallet to make it happen.
 
Since its founding, Red State has been great at two things: community and commentary. However the one thing we've never consistently done is make the step toward activism. Yes, we've had some fundraising success (helping Egland drive out Doolittle comes to mind immediately), but in my time here the site has never been focused on going out and effecting change.

I believe there is a reason for this: our software has not matched our proper model. By using first the software of Daily Kos, and then a one-size-fits-all package made for ease on the installer, we forced ourselves and the whole community to try to conform to the software, and the activism here suffered.

The Scoop model works great at Daily Kos because of the nature of their ideology. They are the left. They are levelers, they are equalizers, they seek to bulldoze all natural distinctions to force everyone into some Marxist utopian mush. We though, have what Russell Kirk praised as the diversity appreciated by the conservatives. We live in different places, we have different priorities, and we have different needs for activism success. Further, we have loyalties to established order when the institutions have proven themselves; we're not crashing gates and formenting revolution.

Red State 3 will give our wonderful community the opportunity to go in this new direction we need. Using other peoples' software and trying to use other movements' models has not worked, but going our own way once and for all will let us find our own Republican model of activism. I find this idea deeply exciting, and that is why I am committed to seeing it through.

I want it done, and fortunately I have ten years experience in website front end and back end development to make it useful. Erick knows this, too, and our efforts are being scheduled accordingly. The money given to the effort by our readers will be spent wisely. It first goes to getting the system in a functional state, such that we can get it launched, and so that I can begin doing the extra work that needs done to give Red State the functionality and polish we need and you want, to ensure our community is not held back. This way, the things I can do for us for free, can be done for free.

All the best,

Neil Stevens

Contributor, RedState.com

P.S. -- A fully armed and operational RedState 3.0 will be a powerful tool for the right in 2008. To donate, simply click here and give as generously as you can.

Modern women defend their office with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why they do office work so well and that is why they ought not to do it.

- G.K. Chesterton

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the men who thought that women's suffrage was a great idea, could have seen what the Western world looks like today. Especially the corporate world, where often all it takes is a mere accusation from a pissed off or unhinged woman to get a man's job in the crosshairs of Human Resources.

Huckabee, pretty typical of social conservatives, thinks that there is a "moral issue" exception in the United States Constitution that allows any issue to be federalized if it is more moral than political:

WALLACE: Now, Thompson and McCain both talk about leaving abortion and gay marriage to the states, the way, in the case of abortion, it was before Roe vs. Wade ever became the law of the land in the first place.
Why isn't that good enough, basically making this a federal issue and leaving it up to each state?

HUCKABEE: Well, it's the logic of the Civil War. If morality is the point here, and if it's right or wrong, not just a political question, then you can't have 50 different versions of what's right and what's wrong.
Again, that's what the whole Civil War was about. Can you have states saying slavery is OK, other states saying it's not?
If abortion is a moral issue â€" and for many of us it is, and I know for others it's not. So if you decide that it's just a political issue, then that's a perfectly acceptable, logical conclusion.
But for those of us for whom this is a moral question, you can't simply have 50 different versions of what's right.

Murder is a moral issue as well, and in many states it is not enforced consistently. Social conservatives should be equally worried about the fact that so many people are getting taken off of death row by the Innocence Project. There is no moral distinction between a system that is often systematically sloppy about handing out convictions that lead to the execution of innocent men and women, and one that allows private citizens to murder their unborn children. The distinction, if it exists, is purely one of emotion that comes from the fact that children are considered, as a group, considered more easily victimized than adults. In fact, there are so many "moral issues" with the way that the so-called "criminal justice system" handles things ranging from evidence discovery, to handing down sentences, that Bible-believing Christians ought to consider our system almost fundamentally broken from a moral point of view.

Yet, as is often the case, there are only a few areas where social conservatives (not all of whom are Bible-believing Christians, so don't think I'm conflating the two) consider there to be a moral case that is worth trashing the constitutional separations of power between the states and federal government. Right now, the only three major ones, in order, are abortion, homosexual marriage, and the drug prohibition (damn those pesky states that found it illogical to outlaw marijuana for terminal cancer patients, while doping them up on harsh, addicting, artificial opiates). All that results from these, in practice, is to end up empowering the federal government to provide the least desirable outcome for social conservatives. The simple fact is, social conservatives are living in the reality of the federal government usurping the states and deciding on the moral issue of abortion. That is precisely what Roe v. Wade is. There is little doubt in my minds that a future Supreme Court will rule homosexual marriage legal under the full faith and credit clause at some point in the next ten to twenty years, barring a constitutional amendment that unimpeachably declares against that sort of interpretation.

The "moral issue" argument is, ultimately, an appeal to emotion, not to reason. Anyone with a lick of sense can make a "moral issue" argument that, while mostly sophistry, is plausible enough to give it legs. In many jurisdictions, there are already enough laws against self-defense, gun ownership, property rights, among other things, to fit equivalent arguments to the one that "if even one state allows abortion, that is morally unacceptable." That, to me, is dangerous, and I say that any social conservative who says that abortion is a moral exception deserves to be called an idiot and a coward for refusing to face up to the obvious consequences of their distaste for strict constructionism.

It would be a lot easier to argue the "slippery slope" in discussions about government power and liberties if there were a timeline for the 20th and 21st centures showing what liberties were regulated or lost as of:

• 1900
• 1920
• 1940
• 1960
• 1980
• 2000
• 2010

I think that if people saw an actual "changelog" of the legal system, it would freak out the common man because it would put things in terms that are too stark for them to ignore.

Any thoughts on this? I originally posted this as a comment on Samizdata, but I think it has merit as a project.

Warner Brothers recently announced that they are going to go only Blu-Ray. Another blow for HD-DVD. Personally, I'm rooting for Blu-Ray because I think the Disc itself is better for the average buyer since it can hold about twenty more gigs of data than a HD-DVD, and a Blu-Ray victory would be a good balancing act for power between Sony and Microsoft. Apple also appears to be moving into the Blu-Ray camp, as it may begin shipping Macs with Blu-Ray drives this year. It's looking more and more like Sony may edge out this time, and get its way in the format wars. That's fine by me because as much as we all may be antagonistic toward Sony these days for their rootkit shenanigans, among other faux pas and devious behaviors, they are still needed as a counterbalance in the video game market against Microsoft. Without Sony in the picture, it's unlikely that Nintendo could last more than a few years against Microsoft's longterm plans.

I've released my first Movable Type plugin. It's called the Blog Policy Link plugin. It's on my new plugins blog, which I created to host the Movable Type and WordPress plugins that I've written. It was written mostly to give me a way to learn some of the practical ins and outs of writing Movable Type plugins, but it is still kinda useful. It allows you to define a post or page on your MT 4 blog to be a policy page, and then you can add <$MTBlogPolicyLink policy="Comment"$> to your templates (where Comment is the policy name) to create a standardized way of linking to whatever page you are using as your policy page for that type of policy.

I've linked to his blog before, but once again I'm reminded of why I have Isaac Schrodinger in my rss feed on Google Reader. I know most of you guys would appreciate his blog a lot as well. Check it out and add him to your news feed.

Some Republicans still care about ideas:

The New Hampshire Republican Party dropped their affiliation with a
Republican debate sponsored by Fox News tomorrow night because they
have limited the number of candidates that can participate.

The first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary serves a national
purpose by giving all candidates an equal opportunity on a level
playing field," said Republican chair Fergus Cullen. "Only in New
Hampshire do lesser known, lesser funded underdogs have a fighting
chance to establish themselves as national figures."

Fox News should have known that this might not go over well in one of the most libertarian states in the union. No doubt they were pretty blindsided by this decision, but that doesn't mean that it should have surprised them. Not only was there the obvious New Hampshire cultural issues they were offending, but the Republican Party of the state, where presidential politics really begins, is not about to allow Fox News to dictate to it what Republicans are welcomed in a Republican debate.

It's rare that I would ever consider posting a comment from Slashdot or some other site, but this was worth sharing and archiving:

My mom and I had this discussion/argument over winter break. She was trying to say how my little brother lied to her about the contents of Vice City when he was 13 (he's now 17) and if she'd had any idea what was in it she never would have let him get it at that age, etc etc. She was getting all indignant about how he deceived her, was such a sneaky kid, etc.

I asked if she saw the rating on the game, and she said yes, but he said that he'd played it at friends' houses and told her it was just about blah blah blah... I cut her off and asked, if he'd pointed out an R-rated movie, claiming he'd seen it at a friends' house and it wasn't that bad, would she just believe that and let him watch it with no supervision? Well of course not, she said! Luckily, at that point she had the sense to get a bit sheepish and let me rant to her about how the video game industry wouldn't be under such fire from lawmakers if parents would pay even a small amount of attention to the freaking ratings like they do to movie ratings.

I actually remember the incident in question, because I was home for a vacation soon after he got the game. I remember my sister and I watching him do something involving prostitutes in the game, and running to our mom saying "Uhhhhh.... why are you letting him play this?" and her original indignation when she realized what was going on, and the original version of the same argument wherein I pointed out to her THEN that it was an M-rated game and it was her own fault...

Unfortunately, age is no barrier to this sort of stupidity either, as witnessed by the old case of this dumb-as-a-box-of-bricks grandmother who bought a game called Grand Theft Auto for her minor grandson, then claimed that it never occurred to her that a game named after a serious felony might be inappropriate for a minor. You have to wonder whether there are synapses firing in their brains at all, if they think that a game whose name evokes images of aiming a loaded gun in someone's face while you jack their car is wholesome entertainment for teenagers and children. I'm as much of a fan of raping then beating virtual prostitutes to death with a lead pipe as the next guy, but come on, let's use a little common sense here...

This just in. Hillary Clinton plans to call a follow up press conference where she will announce evidence that there is a vast, left-wing conspiracy to keep her from winning the primaries. One of her staffers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said "we have rock-solid evidence that a coalition of bloggers, media outlets, activists and unions are working together to ensure that Barack Obama wins the nomination."

Meanwhile, the vast, right-wing conspiracy's (VRWC) representatives have contacted the new vast, left-wing conspiracy to congratulate them on their success in attacking Clinton. VRWC Chairman Rush Limbaugh, who reportedly goes internally by the name "Darth Glibbious" has, on behalf of the entire organization, gone on record stating that the two conspiracies have sufficient common ground in their hatred of the Clintons that they may start working together in the near future.

Attack of the killer Christianists...

This, to me, is the critical distinction between a Christianist and a mere Christian. One wants to infuse politics with religion; the other wants to respect both, separately, and to keep religion private. I should add I do not want to banish the word "God" from the public square. But I do want that invocation to be as thin and as empty and as formal as the Founders intended. The current Republican party has reinvented itself as a force on opposite grounds. The party of Huckabee and Romney, the party of Hewitt and Dobson, the party of Ponnuru and Neuhaus is emphatically not a secular party.

Torture was not even up for debate in the United States when America was much more religious, and religion had a hand in influencing public policy. In fact, one need only compare the more religious 19th century, to the secular 20th century to realize that the fruit of a secular society that has eschewed a traditional, reasonable role for the predominant religion in politics, has been a government that is wildly out of control. The level of state intrusion into the lives of and violence against private citizens today would have been unthinkable back then. Think I'm being shrill? Imagine how well received militarized police forces and domestic spying would have been taken back within one or two generations of the end of the War for Independence.

What I think Sullivan fails to see here is that deep down inside, many Americans know that things are not going well for our country spiritually and culturally. Secularism has whittled away at the church, which used to be one of the three major balancing institutions in society. It used to be the church, free market and the state, now the church is a minor force by comparison because most of its real ability to work today, constrained by ingrained secular values, is only through the state. What was once a shark, has been reduced to a remora. The very fact that Huckabee is winning by effectively campaigning as part preacher, part president is because of the fact that the church has no effective power in society today, and the state has stepped firmly into much of the church's old responsibilities ranging social welfare to providing a spiritual guide to the majority of the public.

It's not apparent to most people because they haven't thought too long and hard about it, but most Americans, even staunch evangelicals, don't know what it means to live in an actual Christian community. That would naturally include such things as the church actually having a major influence, on par with the state and businesses. Most evangelicals want religious authority in their lives, but won't submit to it, which is why they turn to the state out of secular cultural habit. That is the real problem in America today. The whole focus in modern, secular, pluralistic America is on the state. There is virtually nothing outside of the state's reach today. Nothing too sacred for a bureaucrat to regulate, and naturally that will have consequences like bringing religion into politics. When the church is annexed by the state, you really cannot complain when it acts like it has a say on the matters that it used to handle.

It's ultimately kind of sad that the controversial person in the race is Ron Paul rather than Huckabee.

- Jonah Goldberg, who is no fan of Ron Paul, discussing 'Liberal Fascism'.

Taken shamelessly from Samizdata.

I couldn't agree more. As much as I want to sometimes give Huckabee the benefit of the doubt that he is a good man with the wrong ideas, there is something about him that just doesn't sit right with me. He reminds me of what Bill Clinton would be like if he cared more about being able to call himself a Southern Baptist, and had better control over his sex drive.

Machiavelli had the following interesting points about the advantages of colonizing a newly conquered territory as opposed to just maintaining a large garrison there:

The other and better course is to send colonies to one or two places, which may be as keys to that state, for it is necessary either to do this or else to keep there a great number of cavalry and infantry. A prince does not spend much on colonies, for with little or no expense he can send them out and keep them there, and he offends a minority only of the citizens from whom he takes lands and houses to give them to the new inhabitants; and those whom he offends, remaining poor and scattered, are never able to injure him; whilst the rest being uninjured are easily kept quiet, and at the same time are anxious not to err for fear it should happen to them as it has to those who have been despoiled. In conclusion, I say that these colonies are not costly, they are more faithful, they injure less, and the injured, as has been said, being poor and scattered, cannot hurt. Upon this, one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.

But in maintaining armed men there in place of colonies one spends much more, having to consume on the garrison all the income from the state, so that the acquisition turns into a loss, and many more are exasperated, because the whole state is injured; through the shifting of the garrison up and down all become acquainted with hardship, and all become hostile, and they are enemies who, whilst beaten on their own ground, are yet able to do hurt. For every reason, therefore, such guards are as useless as a colony is useful.

Colonizing a conquered territory is the most effective way of pacifying it. One of the things that would have made the process of pacifying Iraq easier would have been for the United States to work with Turkey to allow their Kurds to voluntarily move into the areas of Iraq that are predominantly Sunni Muslim Arab territory. A larger Kurdish population, a more diverse Sunni territory, would have been a good start.

If we were to go with Machiavelli's proposal, another obvious method would have been to make the penalty for repeated illegal immigration by those from south of the border to be sent to Iraq. I would hazard to guess that, under such a system, the federal government could get at least 50,000 individuals and families sent over there before anyone realized that it was actually quite serious that that was the punishment for incorrigible illegal immigrants. That might not seem like an awful lot of colonists, but it would have been enough in the right areas to thoroughly disrupt civic life for the Sunnis during their insurgency.

First off, I'm sick today with a pretty nasty cold. My brain has been fuzzy all day, to put it nicely. I deleted the previous post about the rape case in Britain because my brain was so disease-addled that I practically rewrote the whole article as I read it. Yes, in the morning and early afternoon, I was that sick and tired. Therefore, I deleted it because, well, it just made no sense.

This article by Radley Balko brings to mind one of my biggest criticisms of "modernity" and the naive belief that we are freer today than we were a while ago. It is undeniable that life in America today is far more structured, regimented and controlled than it was two hundred years ago. The single biggest thing that we have progressed toward is state control over everything. If you think that I am overreacting, then just consider the way that the state polices the citizenry. The aggressive, domineering and militarized manner that it performs this basic duty speaks volumes about our relationship with the state, and the fact that we have progressed too far away a healthy civil society.

I've never understood why foreign bloggers who fear for their freedom publish under their real names. Having a nom de plume is a time-honored tradition for those who want to express ideas that are dangerous in their country without making it very easy to get caught. I understand "the principle of the thing" argument, but you have to face the facts about countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They are closed, illiberal and corrupt societies. If you want to publish ideas that go against the system, you had better realize that you may very well spend the rest of your life trying to publish your ideas from prison, and that for every Vaclav Havel, there are probably 99 dissenters who end up dying anonymously in prison. Prudence demands anonymity.

Source: Bad Boys II. It's a funny movie. Go get a copy of it if you haven't seen it yet.

This is the first year that I think I've resolved myself to trying to do much of anything other than staying alive.

I resolve to do in the following areas, the following this:

Personal

• Develop my faith and relationship with God.
• Work on being the husband that Rachel deserves.
• Work on not being so easily frustrated and aggravated, especially in traffic.

Reading

• Read at least a few good works on philosophy and history.
• Strengthen my academic understanding of Java and Perl.
• Read enough in the Ruby Way to become fundamentally familiar with how Ruby works.

Programming

• Write at least a few useful little projects or plug-ins.
• Get a new job.

What are your New Year's resolutions, if any?