February 2008 Archives

I am not a very principled libertarian, and make no pretension of being one. In fact, I generally regard over-adherence to principle as form of irrational, dogmatic behavior. That's why I tend to try to tweak the parameters of what it means to be a libertarian, to take into account where the pure ideology fails in real life. The following are some observations, even if theoretical, on how cultural libertarianism, though not necessarily purely political libertarianism, tends to fall down at addressing issues that can have deep ramifications.

Scenario 1. The Elusive Wapiti brings up the possible dangers that having a large amount of estrogen and other female hormones might have on public health. If it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that such chemicals have these effects, then it would make sense from a rational biological perspective to ban birth control for women who don't have a compelling case for why they need it. Three good examples that come to mind would be women who cannot safely have any more children, women who are too poor to care for their own children, and women who need it to correct for a hormonal imbalance. Banning it for those who just want to control their ability to get pregnant would cause a dramatic reduction of the chemicals in the water supply over time, but would represent a serious reduction of sexual freedom for women. However, if it can be proved that this freedom is causing physiological harm to others, on a utilitarian basis, if nothing more, it should be restricted. Yet many cultural libertarians would have a very hard time accepting such a decision, even if it were proved to be necessary for public health.

Scenario 2. Not all religions are created the same. With Scientology you have an abusive cult that makes probably billions of dollars by sucking the life out of its victims. It is also an entity that has such unusual practices as suing critics for copyright infringement for distributing its "scriptures." In many areas that matter, it is a business that operates under the guise of religion, and has a sordid history of compliance with the law.

Then there is the issue of groups like Wahabists. These Muslims are working actively to sabotage the traditional freedoms of every Western country they infect. They are nothing less than violent and devious subversives whose goal is to eradicate the very freedom that libertarians of all stripes want to preserve or restore. There is no negotiating with them, and even down to individuals, it is dubious how any remotely free society would be better off having such people inside its borders, operating freely.

In both of these cases, cultural libertarians would be quite upset with a systematic attempt by a government to rationally crackdown on such dangerous groups, and remove their influence from society. This is despite the fact that it would be a small move to protect freedom to crackdown on their activities, as they are often focused on breaking down what freedom is left through means ranging from systematic legal harassment of critics, to fomenting violent extremism in our own borders.

Scenario 3. The media betrays basic operational security for our military, or one of our allies, in a way that doesn't get anyone killed, but that shows a deep-seated lack of concern for the lives of military personnel operating abroad. A good example recently was when the media revealed the location of Prince Harry in Afghanistan. By doing this, not only was Prince Harry's life endangered, but so were the lives of everyone in his unit because killing him would be a significant symbolic victory for the Taliban. No harm has come from this, but there was no public good served by revealing his location. However, if he, or people in his unit, had been killed soon after this because the Taliban immediately went into action, many cultural libertarians would have a hard time accepting moves by the government to prosecute and serverely punish every member of the media responsible for such a brazen, needless and harmful act against operational security.

Scenario 4. Children tend to do a lot better in many areas when they come from a two-parent household. That said, cultural libertarians see no evil in allowing single women to conceive based entirely on IVF, couples to spawn entire families out of wedlock, and homosexuals to have their own children through various medical practices. It is understandable that they would be hesitant about outlawing these things, as the Law of Unintended Consequences can have severe implications, especially when it gets into such a fundamental area of human life. However, cultural libertarians tend to refuse to acknowledge that these individuals are placing their reproductive freedom over nearly every aspect of the security and well-being of another human being's formative years. In effect, they are treating them like property, not like they are another human being whose rights matter, and who they are bound by natural bond to protect and sacrifice for until they are an adult by virtue of bringing them into this world. In general, cultural libertarians place no importance on the well-being and development of children in a libertarian society because to do so would be to limit the sexual freedom of their parents.

This list is mostly just a starting point. It's intended to be more of an honest critique of how cultural libertarians react in practice, rather than an attack on libertarianism itself. Anyone else have scenarios they think fit the bill?

As always, I am aware of the Law of Unintended Consequences, which is why I am hesistant about the government intervention in these cases except for number three. However, I think any rational person in the libertarian movement can step back from their prejudices and realize that all of these are problematic scenarios for at least one party involved, when it comes to their rights versus the more "immediate rights" such as sexual freedom, that libertarians tend to reflexively protect against any limitation.

The Air Force brass has taken some very strong measures to block as many blogs as possible from its network. They seem to think that sites like the New York Times are the one media sources that should be visited, for many reasons, including security. I'm guessing that they missed that whole scandal a while back involving national security and NYT reporters... Then there is the Army's own audit which shows that the Department of Defense is its own worst enemy with respect to OPSEC.

It is understandable that the Air Force might want to make all of its personnel register their blogs with it, so that it can periodically sweep them for actual security violations or conduct regulated by the UCMJ. However, the military in general is moving toward a repressive system for regulating its personnel that is needlessly destructive of their first amendment rights.

It may be just an anecdote, but a friend of mine who is a serious Christian in the military was shocked at how debauched the people he was in basic training were. We both knew that drinking and screwing were normal, but as he said, even the wildest frat parties at our university were pretty tame by comparison to what many of them would do on the weekends. It's probably a lot better for the military to encourage its people to spend time on MySpace, YouTube and blogging, than going out and doing their thing...

This one is called "Looter xp 1.0." This is the original version for Wordpress.

This one is called "I'm Okay ;-)." This is the original version for WordPress.

I've got some cleanup to do with the stylesheets, and I need to create the thumbnails for the Movable Type style selector to use. Constructive feedback is welcome, but remember that I am an amateur when it comes to doing CSS, and I am having to work within the limitations of Movable Type's default templates. Unlike WordPress themes, Movable Type styles are just stylesheets, instead of a complete set of markup and stylesheets, which means that a 100% conversion is in most cases impossible without modifying the Movable Type default templates.

And about those curved borders. I used a combination of browser-specific CSS and CSS3 to get that result without adding image tags into the template. The only people right now who will see those curved borders are Firefox and Safari/Webkit users. When the other browsers support CSS3, and its border-radius properties, they will appear as expected in all browsers. I did this more in anticipation of the future.

Firefox 3 is showing some very significant progress on the JavaScript/ECMAScript front. The nightly builds of Firefox 3, pre-Beta 4 have kicked both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 squarely in the pants, then doubled them over, and kicked them in the face like they were a football at the Superbowl. The optimized nightly build of Firefox 3 was almost ten times faster at completing the JavaScript benchmarks than IE 7! Even Opera was beaten by Firefox 3. The benchmarks are coy about whether or not Tamarin was included in the optimized build, but either way, those are some very serious improvements in Firefox.

I have not read the book yet (it's in the mail, but tied up with a backorder of The Irrational Atheist, so it'll come in a while from now), but one critique I have seen of Liberal Fascism that made me chuckle, then sigh in pain was one where the writer tried to argue that modern Left-Liberalism and Fascism cannot be tied together because they don't clearly have the same historic roots. As a code monkey, I can think of an obvious reason why this sort of thinking is bullshit. You have two systems that arrive at the same protocol through different means, one by studying the other. No one can empirically prove, with God's eye on the facts, how much American progressivism studied and borrowed from Fascism and National Socialism, but history has shown that it is reasonable to say "a lot." It doesn't matter whether or not these different political factions had somewhat different outcomes because in practice, their ideas, goals and cultures are similar enough to be compatible. Libertarianism and traditional conservatism are not at home with Italian Fascism, but "liberalism" most certainly is, and that becomes obvious when you compare notes between the two factions' platforms.

FreeBSD 7.0 is now available. For those of you itching to work on Unix, it's a good way to get into the swing of things. It's not as popular as Linux, but BSD and its derivatives are very good operating systems in their own right. One of the advantages of FreeBSD is that there is only one FreeBSD. It doesn't have distributions the way that Linux does. There are derivatives of FreeBSD, such as PC-BSD, but FreeBSD is FreeBSD. It's another good platform for doing server-related work ranging from file and print services, to web hosting.

Zero tolerance policies and the War on Drugs collide to bring us to a UK-level of stupidity when it comes to how students can now be treated. A weight-lifter was punished for bringing vitamins, yes, vitamins, to school.

One of the things that I have learned from being in a church small group is that the saying "you can't choose your family" applies to the spiritual side of things. Sometimes you get into a case where you want to fall back on the old habit of just treating them like they're a regular stranger, but they are, for better and for (often) worse, our brothers and sisters in a spiritual sense as well. Doesn't mean you have to cast your pearls before swine, but it does mean that you can't just write them off as though they're just another stranger and jerk.

 

"Cybercrime" is a problem, but if you are going to fight it, which is the more fundamental problem: the nature of the Internet, or the fact that most government bodies are not culturally capable at this point of effectively doing their job of enforcing the laws online?

If we accept the fact that the greatest hurdle in arresting international cyber criminals is that various legal systems just aren't prepared to address the speed at which these crimes occur or the various nuances that are unique to computer crimes, then the question is: What can we do to fix the problem?

It's obvious that the Internet requires some type of governance. But it is just as obvious that trying to establish this governance through the numerous legal systems might not be practical. The other possibility for governing the Internet, and, more specifically, the criminal activity that occurs on the Internet, would be to change the structure of the Internet. Although I don't support ideas like the "national firewalls" put in place by some countries, this type of solution does afford some level of control over Internet traffic flowing through said country.

However, knowing all the possibilities with disguising or "spoofing" one's information on the Web, I'm not sure that there is a way to truly "protect our borders" when it comes to the Internet. The solution might be to establish two Internets -- the current Internet and a new, more secure Internet where users would be required to register prior to gaining access. Once again, though, we're confronted with the issue of what would be the governing body that would manage the user registrations? Would it be an organization similar to the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) or InterNIC that would manage user registrations on the "new" Internet, or do we need to establish an entirely new entity to manage a more secure Internet?

Ironically, there is already a new, research-oriented Internet 2.0 in existence. So far, you can't find any good references to crime being committed on Internet2 because it is a walled-garden network that's not open to just anyone who wants to get in. This makes perfectly good sense when you think about it. Instead of acting as a replacement for "Internet 1.0" (at least at this point), Internet2 is a network aimed at meeting the needs of a specific group of people that doesn't interfere with the rest of us.

To some extent, the military has already done this for a while with Siprnet. There is no excuse for the departments of Justice, State, Treasury and Homeland security to have not followed the example of Defense in this respect. No excuse other than business-as-usual for government agencies. The state governments with the resources should implement similar systems at their expense, which allow all fire and police departments in the state to work together and communicate within a walled-garden that has no outside access to the Internet.

Argument's like Dempsey's, that the network, and not the governments, should change are tiresome because it would be so easy to get rid a lot of the common white collar crimes committed online by simply passing a few new laws. Make the banks totally responsible for validating the identity of the person applying for an account. Why is it legally possible for me to sign up for a credit card online, instead of having to go to a local bank, show two or three forms of ID, and send a notarized note of intent to open a credit card account? Just making that the legal requirement for opening a new line of credit would wipe out most identity theft in the United States within a few years. How about pass a law requiring online bankers to issue key fob security tokens to their customers, on the penalty of failing to do so results in the bank being civilly liable for loss of personal data?

You can reengineer the network until the heat death of the universe or the second coming all you want, but it won't change the fact that a significant chunk of the human race (between Russia, parts of Eastern Europe, Western Africa and China) live in functionally lawless environments when it comes to this sort of crime. The only way to "engineer" around that is to cut the backbone lines to those countries, connecting them to the first world countries.

A little while ago, I wrote a long blog post about how the Virginia Pilot wrote an amazingly unbalanced report on the initial events surrounding the case of Ryan Frederick. If you haven't read it, check it out because it is such a perfect example of media bias and irresponsibility that it's worth having around to prove how much the 4th estate often acts like a government attack dog, rather than a watchdog for the people against the government.

Kerry Dougherty, writing for the Virginia Pilot, has gone to great lengths to condemn Frederick, even though there is ample reason to sympathize with his situation and feel that he is a victim of systematic injustice. For more background that gets into the nitty gritty of how things have morphed on the government's side of things, read some of The Agitator's posts about the case.

She writes:

In a jailhouse interview, Frederick said he was in bed when the police came to his door about 8:30 p.m. Awakened by his barking dogs, Frederick said, he thought his house was being invaded. He didn't know the police were the cause of the commotion, he said.

Even so, it's troubling that a man charged with first-degree murder - for allegedly killing a cop, no less - has generated an ardent fan club. If you Google "Ryan Frederick" and "Jarrod Shivers," you'll get more than 1,000 hits and an eye-opening lesson in wild Internet rumor-mongering and misplaced hero worship.

Here are some facts that have caused the public support for Ryan Frederick. Three days before the raid, he was the victim of an incident of burglary. There is reason to believe that the police not only confessed to him that they knew about this before unprofessionally executing a raid that could be easily misconstrued as the burglar returning to the scene of the crime, but that the burglar might have been their informant. I don't need to remind any decent human being out there that not only was raiding his home at night so soon after a burglary stupid and unprofessional, but if it is true that their informant was the perpetrator, then that condemns the ethics and professionalism of the team who executed the raid.

By any reasonable standard, Frederick was fearful of his life.

Oh, please. Ryan Frederick is right where he belongs - in jail. Until the matter is adjudicated, anyway. Even so, some are begging the system to spring him, fueled by the half-truths and outright lies spreading through cyberspace that portray Frederick as a "drug war victim."

Later in the article, Dougherty will tell us that we need to wait until the facts have been sorted out. Many of the facts that have been sorted out are sufficient to give good reason for sympathy. It is ironic that Dougherty condemns him, while his neighbors and associates are saying that he was a stand up guy who is no cop killer. Who are you going to believe? The people who knew him as a man, and knew his character from regular interaction with him, or an editorialist who only knows a police report? Given the shifting nature of precisely where Shivers was when he was shot, the outright lies so far are coming from the police department and prosecution, not Frederick's supporters.

When was the last time you heard a defense lawyer, in a highly publicized murder case, no less, say that he does not want a change of venue?

"No, no, he has too much support here," said Frederick's attorney, James Broccoletti, when asked if he'd like the trial moved.

If it's unfair to have a jury pool skewed toward conviction, it should also be unfair to have one awash in sympathizers.

If you believe in the rule of law, and constitutional principle of "innocent until proven guilty," this is not the case. Many of his supporters sympathize with him because they know him, and have said that based on the man they know, they know he is no murderer. This is a far cry from the rent-a-mob that goes to whatever location a black thug gets the support of cretins from the modern "civil rights movement." Not only that, but there is no proof that he even had the grow operation that he was accused of running in the first place. To put that in a more recent perspective, it would be akin to finding out that the Jena 6 not only didn't beat up Justin Barker, but had merely warned him that he would get his ass kicked if he brought a bunch of his friends around to beat up the Jena 6. Simply put, when you read up on the case of Frederick, it becomes clear that the man is not the dangerous drug dealing cop killer he is made out to be in the media, but rather is a casual drug user, who was the victim of very bad circumstances that no professional cop should have put him through.

We can all agree that this is a sad and troubling case, one that raises serious questions about Chesapeake police procedures. Yet it raises equally vexing questions about the duties and responsibilities of private citizens who choose to exercise their Second Amendment rights.

Serious questions? You think? The department might want to splurge on some credits from a nearby university for Human Psychology 101 if it has no idea what went wrong that night. This case raises no vexing questions about the role of guns and gun rights in our society, either, as this could have happened to any other regular citizen. What happened that night was pure human nature in action, and if Dougherty would not have shot at unidentified men bashing in her door at night, then shame on her for taking the risk of becoming a victim of a violent crime.

Here's the plain and simple truth about how the police conducted the raid. It was unprofessional, and dangerous to the public. All they needed to do was send a uniformed police officer to his house after he left for work to search his garage for the alleged grow operation. If they found it, all they had to do was wait for him to come from work, or show up at his workplace and arrest him. The reason we are supposed to trust police with greater firepower and lattitude to use it than the public, is that they are, on paper, supposed to be intelligent and professional in how they use it. What they did was not only inappropriate and dangerous, it smacks more of testosterone-high teenage boys with guns reenacting a scene from a war movie on a minor criminal's house, than what one would expect from seasoned law enforcement professionals. 50 years ago, that level of idiocy and inability to discern when and how to use a loaded weapon in public would have had the police chief personally filling out the termination papers of the entire group responsible.

The tragic part of this story is not that this young man is behind bars. He'll have his day in court. The true tragedy is that a young woman has been widowed. Three children are fatherless. And Chesapeake lost a cop in the line of duty.

A widow can remarry. Fatherless children can get a new father. A police force can hire a new police officer. Yet, how can a man who behaved as any normal man would in that situation, get his life back if he spends most of it behind bars or is executed? What is at stake here is the life of a man who did not behave in a way that ought to bring him before a court on murder charges, and who very well may lose his life figuratively by spending most of it behind bars, or by being put to death.

If you believe marijuana should be legal, call your state legislator and demand that it be decriminalized. Don't blame the cops for enforcing Virginia's laws.

The primary concern is how they enforce them. She even admits that there are "troubling questions" about the police procedures used in cases like this. What bothers many of us about this case is the willingness of the police to use military-levels of force on petty criminals, but their unwillingness to conduct proper reconaissance before the operation. This case was predictable because they were quick to use outrageous levels of force, but didn't have the time to make sure that their target warranted it.

I don't know if Ryan Frederick is guilty of murder or of anything else. Neither do you. None of us has all the facts.

I do know this. He is not guilty of murder 1, as there was no premeditation, and he probably can't be legitimately declared guilty of murder 2 either because he had no intent to kill anyone except in normal self-defense when he thought it was a burglar coming straight at him.

So here's a thought: What do you say we all hold our fire until the defendant goes on trial?

Read: "I've already declared him guilty, and damned everyone who supports him. I've been long on accusations, and short on evidence, whether in the text, or in citations. But hey, let's not jump to conclusions. After all, hell might freeze over and prove my wild accusations and inuendos total bullshit."

After the aforementioned publication at the Virginian Pilot, which was overwhelmingly slanted in favor of the police side of the story, this comes along. It's pretty clear that if Virginian Pilot does not have a bias against him, there seems to be people at the Pilot who are keen to see him hung. Given the left-wing bias of the mainstream media, I would not be surprised by either of these things. To them, it'd only be natural to assume that anyone who shoots a cop is a violent extremist unfit to live in a peaceful, tolerant society.

The people at the Pilot who are doing these things ought to be ashamed of themselves, and recuse themselves from further reporting on this case. They have shamelessly made themselves an uncritical parrot of prosecutorial and police propaganda, rather than a voice for critically analyzing the case from both sides.

**UPDATE** 7:30 12/26/2008: Roger Chelsey has a more balanced opinion piece in the Pilot here. Still, that one editorial doesn't excuse what has been done already.
**UPDATE** 5/29/2008: As more information has come out on this case, the Pilot seems to be doing a better job now of calling some of the facts of this case into question. More here.

It's only a coincidence that two of the three governments of North America have recently signed an agreement to allow each other to use their military forces to assist civil authorities in each other's countries. Canada and the United States can send their troops into each other's countries whenever there is a "civil emergency" that the local civil authorities cannot handle. This, of course, makes no sense in a non-sinister way with the United States, as the United States has approximately three million people in, or capable of being immediately in, uniform between the active duty military, reserve forces and National Guard. Any domestic crisis that the U.S. Department of Defense cannot provide support for on our own soil is likely to be so catastrophic that to the United States that Canada won't be able to do any good anyway.

In a few years time, they'll try to expand this to include Mexico as well. It'll probably happen if McCain or Obama takes office. God forbid that she wins, I don't think Clinton would waste any of her time trying to continue here, when she has to invest her political capital very wisely.

Let's not forget that a more integrated approach to security for the continent is part of the SPP's purpose. Economic integration in North America is slowly underway, and now we see the first early warning signs of military integration as well.

None of this will convince those who refuse to even consider the idea that there is an elitist goal to rewrite the relationship between Canada, Mexico and the United States on every level. Those of us who know a little history know how ironic it is, since the very process that lead to our current system of government, the United States Constitution, was essentially the stuff of conspiracy theories.

A typical politician would never understand:

Writing in The New Statesman, British parliamentarian John McDonnell, the Right Honorable Gentleman from 1968, offers high praise for Cuban communism and demonstrates a level of credulity not seen since John Reed vacationed in Moscow. But don't mention Moscow, because, as McDonnell bizarrely writes, "unlike Stalin's Russia there have never been any Cuban gulags."* What's not to like, he asks, about a country that provides "free prescriptions, free care for the elderly, free university education."

You are reasonable healthy, have something at least vaguely resembling a real education and have all of that provided to you at a nominal cost to you. The only catch is that you do not have the freedom to produce with that education that el jefe maximo so generously gave you the opportunity to pursue. Cuba is progressive in the communist world in that it has the most educated and healthiest proletarian labors in the world. Not unlike the wait staff in Austin, Texas**.

True political animals tend to have never had any serious ambition to get wealthy through any means other than being a powerbroker or by being an advisor to one.

*Of course the Cubans wouldn't have gulags. Ellos hablan espanol, no ruso! However, they most certainly do have labor camps.

**Not that I have ever been to Austin, but that's the reputation, anyway.

I'm starting to wind down on my new plugin for Movable Type. Most of the features are in place now, and have proven to be stable. It is not quite as pretty as I might have liked it, but it serves a purpose that Google Reader has not done for me: integrate news reading into my blogging software. Now, whenever I log into Movable Type, I can get a status update on all of the blogs that I read, and can directly import text from their posts into my next posts.

Throughout this whole process, I have come to gain an even greater disgust for Internet Explorer. As a development platform, it is a joke compared to Firefox. Microsoft may have some tools for debugging web page errors that you can download, but it doesn't include them by default in every standard installation of Internet Explorer the way that the same sort of thing gets put into Firefox. All Internet Explorer gives you is an error dialog showing you the message, line and character numbers. Did I mention that Internet Explorer also has a really bad habit of not supporting standard JavaScript?

Getting most of this done was a lot easier because of how powerful and robust Movable Type is as a development platform. While you might not have as much control over things because you cannot directly access the underlying database, the built-in object-relational-mapping capabilities and template system more than make up for that. As I've said before, the only thing that needs to be changed here is that there needs to be a lot more documentation written for some of these things because not all of them are intuitive. The worst offender I can think of there was I had to specify two parameters in order to override one parameter when creating a new listing view. I thought that just passing it a parameter for limit (a SQL command that limits the number of result sets a query returns) would override the built-in default. Hah. I should be so lucky.

Apparently it is now a crime in Oregon for a woman to let a teenage boy's head rest on her breast in any fashion.

While we're at it, there is a push now to include any sex offender, fourteen and older, on a national registry of sex offenders. In that article, it describes what the family of a sixteen year old went through when he had a sexual relationship with a thirteen year old girl. She said she was sixteen, and he had no way to verify that, but that didn't stop him from becoming a sex offender, and having all sort of vigilantism committed against him and his family. If they were my neighbors, and I witnessed that, I'd have gone over there and put the fear of God into them for behaving like that. The son's no pedophile, just a horny kid who got lied to. You behave like that toward him and his family, you deserve to have some pain come your way.

This has got to be one of the best quotes ever to describe how messed up the way that universities handle sex can be:

The baby boomers who demanded the dismantling of all campus rules governing the relations between the sexes now sit in dean's offices and student-counseling services. They cannot turn around and argue for reregulating sex, even on pragmatic grounds. Instead, they have responded to the fallout of the college sexual revolution with bizarre and anachronistic legalism. Campuses have created a judicial infrastructure for responding to postcoital second thoughts more complex than that required to adjudicate maritime commerce claims in Renaissance Venice.

There is something to be said for the argument that if you just wait until marriage, you probably won't face these problems. For most people that actually works, but the system does not have enough failsafes built into it to protect young men who are the victims of a lying teenage girl or woman. Where is the recognition that if a woman cannot consent while drunk, that a man cannot understand consent either? How about the punishment for the girl in the case mentioned above? She deceived him into committing a crime. At 13, she is old enough to be expected to obey the law, and be held accountable for it.

I find myself being increasingly pushed into a sympathy for the legal system created by the Old Testament. Modern secular America is often truly godless in the way that it metes out "justice" to criminals. It executes people on circumstantial evidence, convicts men of rape with no evidence whatsoever of coercion, and provides no meaningful punishment for corruption in the legal system or perjury. Despite its harshness in many areas, the Mosaic Law at least is not as blood-thirsty or outright cruel as modern secular law can be in the way that it often prefers to turn offenders into social lepers, rather than punish them severely and get it over with.

Apparently, my blog was not accepting anonymous comments until this morning when I made the fix. See, if more of you had and used a registered account on my blog, this wouldn't be an issue. Someone could have logged in, commented, and told me what the problem was!

The more I think about what's going on with Obama and his position gun control, the more I think that he might end up turning off a lot of the voters that the Democratic base ends up relying on to shore up its support like blue collar white voters. A lot of Democrats might be still enamored of him, but when he reaches the general election and it comes out that he is a flat out gun grabber with no remorse for how his policies would affect law-abiding citizens, he'll end up turning off a lot of voters that might have otherwise considered him. In that respect, Hillary has been smart because she has tried to gain some ground on this issue before it becomes a serious problem for her.

Anyone else starting to feel like Obama is running a pavlovian campaign, where he is trying to see how much he can control the senses of voters by uttering certain words like "change" and "hope?" The women swooning for him at his rallies make me think that if he is, it's working like a charm.

This is one of the only immigration proposals that makes sense. I would love for just once the sort of elitists who think that the only real reason to be upset over the illegal immigration is because of latent racism to answer the question of how upset do they really think the average opponent of illegal immigration would be if we were actually flooded by twelve million Mexican doctors, engineers, mechanics and such. It's because most illegals bring nothing more than unskilled labor with them, and are coming here illegally in droves, that people get so upset about them.

It won't come as any sort of surprise to libertarians and conservatives, but Hugo Chavez has been maintaining a blacklist of his political opponents. I've had to sit through a lecture by at least one left-liberal about how this man is the last, best hope for Venezuela, and then later had to hear about how evil things like the blacklisting that occurred during the McCarthy era were. Not that I am surprised because the left still has an unapologetic sympathy for many totalitarian regimes because they represent the "right ideas" even if in practice these regimes make the worst excesses of America look like a trip to heaven. The ironic revulsion toward Hitler for the Holocaust, while completely ignoring the equal evils of the Soviet Union is just one of many examples.

Tim is pissed that God killed 2,700,000 some people over the course of about 1,500 years according to the Old Testament. This is the same Tim who thought that this was a good rebuttal to my review of the Irrational Atheist. According to the statistics in the Irrational Atheist, the atheist Soviet Union murdered 61,911,000 of its own people (or people under its influence). The Soviet Union existed for about 69 years (1922-1991). Even if you put every person listed on Tim's site into the same category as those murdered by the atheist Soviet Union, you get 1800 deaths per year versus nearly 1,000,000 per year for the Soviet Union.

Obviously this ignores the philosophical question of why it would be wrong for the supreme creator of the universe to destroy his creations as he sees fit.

A while back, I blogged about a weird case of a woman getting back at teenage girl that had been a bully toward her own daughter. She did that by creating a MySpace account and pretending to be a sixteen year old boy who was interested in the girl. Well, most of the dust has settled, and it's not pretty.

Tina Meier was wary of the cyber-world of MySpace and its 70 million users. People are not always who they say they are.

Tina knew firsthand. Megan and the girl down the block, the former friend, once had created a fake MySpace account, using the photo of a good-looking girl as a way to talk to boys online, Tina says. When Tina found out, she ended Megan's access.

MySpace has rules. A lot of them. There are nine pages of terms and conditions. The long list of prohibited content includes sexual material. And users must be at least 14.

"Are you joking?" Tina asks. "There are fifth-grade girls who have MySpace accounts."

Some background information. Megan was severely overweight. At 5"5 and 175 pounds when you're 13, you're going to have some major issues right off the bat with how you see yourself. This is what makes no sense from a mother who acted like she was semi-responsible. She had a very overweight 13 year old daughter with a serious history of depression problems, and she allowed her daughter to get involved with an older guy who seemed to be just way too good to be true for her at that point in her life. The only responsible and obvious thing to do would have been to tell her daughter that this Josh guy was way too old for her. It may not have been true, but it would have been a good cover story to prevent having to admit that the guy seemed too good to be true. Parents should always be wary when a guy who is out of their daughter's league show a lot of interest in their young daughter.

Personally, I think there were a lot of warning signs that the mother ignored in the whole thing. She should have been suspicious that a really good looking guy who was 3 years older was so interested in a relationship with her overweight barely-a-teenager daughter. He was coy about contact information, so he could never meet her face-to-face or talk to her over the phone. Then when she saw the excrement hit the oscillating device for her daughter, she gave her grief and let her be alone for a while. It's kinda ironic that she was quick to point out that the perpetrator knew all about her mental problems and exploited them masterfully, but it didn't occur to her that her daughter might be pushed over the edge by such a broad and public assault on everything about her.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that she's a terrible mother. I don't know her, and I feel sorry for her daughter because her daughter was very mentally ill and got that used against her perfectly. It's just that this story leaves a lot unanswered. I find it hard to believe that the other mother would have gone after this girl without her starting something to spark it. The full truth is needed here, not to point fingers or assign sympathy, but just to give perspective on the whole thing.

If you go after someone you know beyond a reasonable doubt is innocent of a crime, and try to charge them with it anyway, you clearly have a black heart. This seems to be a serious problem with prosecutors today, many of whom see their position as prosecutor as a gateway to a bigger and better political career, and not as one of the keystones of the legal system. Take a look at this, and you'll see why as bad as many police departments are, they are not guilty of the sort of cold-blooded evil that infects many prosecutors:

An Ingham County prosecutor and a detective knew before trial that video evidence showed Claude McCollum was in another building when a Lansing Community College professor was killed, according to a state police report obtained by the Lansing State Journal.

Still, prosecutors went ahead with the case, and McCollum was tried and convicted of murder.

McCollum, whose conviction was thrown out last year, is suing multiple agencies for damages. County prosecutors have always maintained they did not know of a 2005 report that described exonerating video evidence until after the trial began.

I'll be blunt and say that in a more just system, this prosecutor would be sentenced to execution for attempted homicide. There is no room for splitting hairs here. Even if the prosecutor does not seek the death penalty, it is such an egregious violation of every human right and basic human dignity, that society cannot afford to forgive even the most penitent perpetrator of this sort of thing. As they used to say in the Old Testament, "You must purge the evil from among you. The rest of the people will hear of this and be afraid, and never again will such an evil thing be done among you."

TheAgitator has a post up about this right now about two doctors who have a long legacy of aiding and abetting injustice that has wrecked havoc on the legal system in Mississippi.

When things like this happen, let's be clear about the impact that these people have. They ruin as many lives as any criminal. In fact, there is absolutely no moral difference whatsoever between a prosecutor who is too proud to stop prosecuting a murder defendant he knows is innocent, and someone who commits cold-blooded murder. In a just system, both of them would be swinging from the gallows.

Cue the SWAT team in 3... 2... 1...

**UPDATE**: Most of the commenters on Digg seem to think that this kid is psychologically unbalanced. I think he sounds much more like he's possessed than someone who has tourette's or something similar. The most likely explanation is that he is just a little jackass like most little brothers, but who knows where his problems really are. What do y'all think?

I had never read any of this guy's columns before, probably because the only WorldNetDaily commentary writer I read unless someone sends or posts something is Vox Day. That said, he makes some good points about how dialog inside and outside the church has gone to hell:

Many of those who took issue with my strong language are caught up with a type of religiosity that is not helpful to the kind of genuine, robust, biblical Christianity that is needed in today's culture. And if my critics feel that I have been "worldly" in my approach, then they will need to defend their position with sound reason and biblical principles.

My experience, though, is that people are pretty selective about what they choose to get "offended" about. For example, the Bible says that only God is "good." At one point, Christ Himself told a rich young ruler not even to call Him good. Another example is the word "awesome." Common usage of that word should equally "offend" the "nicer-than-Jesus" crowd because in Scripture, only God is awesome. Yet the fact is that none of the people who criticized my use of the word "hell" has ever objected to my use of "good" or "awesome" in any of my previous columns.

We Christians need to keep in mind that the sanitized political environment we find ourselves in today, the politically correct culture, is very unique. This is a culture that cares nothing about real polite conversation and the real meaning of words, which is why it is so troubling when Christians spend so much time worrying about minor issues - like whether or not the audience might get offended at the use of strong biblical language.

The essence of political correctness is to accomplish through a warping of language and culture what cannot be easily imposed overtly on society. Anyone who has read 1984 and remembers the purpose of Newspeak will recognize what political correctness really is all about. It's about closing off entire ways of thinking and speaking so that prohibited ideas cannot be expressed.

Political correctness is not about civility. In fact, political correctness is at its heart extremely uncivil. Those who go against it are treated more like pariahs than people who are merely rude and inconsiderate. Consider the way that people are treated for making an offensive comment at work in most workplaces. Even if they apologize, that is rarely enough. Almost invariably, they must go through an entire humiliating repentance process.

Christians need to be wary of claims of being offended by the things they say because Jesus warned His followers that they would be hated for His sake. More often than not, that "offense" is really nothing legitimate.

I just realized that I broke the comments when I reinstalled everything. The comment script was not in the location that the config file said it was. See, yesterday I rebuilt my blog. That means I reinstalled a fresh copy of Movable Type Open Source 4.1 and rebuilt the database. The reason I did this was that there was a lot of stuff that wasn't right with the templates that were hold overs from when I used Movable Type 3.3. In order to more easily fix those problems, I had to reinstall everything to get the new templates.

The Supreme Court has let stand a decision by a lower court that the ACLU didn't have standing to sue over warrantless wiretaps because it could not prove that anyone affiliated with it was affected by the program. Fair enough, in and of itself, I suppose, but the catch is that you cannot obtain a list of people who have been subjected to this treatment because that would be a violation of national security.

What you have is, in short a legal exception to the rule of law, which allows the federal government to do what it wants with impunity under certain circumstances, without the risk of judicial review short of new legislation being passed.

That thing you probably heard growing up about America being a nation of laws, not men... just forget you ever heard it because it most certainly does not apply anymore.

One of the joys of writing code that parses some markup language, or any parser for that matter, is when you run into people and groups that think that following standards is entirely optional. We're not perfect, and I get that loud and clear. Sometimes we mix in HTML 4 into a XHTML document and FUBAR it. Stuff happens. We're human.

Shit like this is just unacceptable:

<entry>
    <title>Meow!</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://isaacschrodinger.typepad.com/isaacschrodinger/2008/02/meow.html" />
    <link rel="service.edit" type="application/x.atom+xml" href="http://www.typepad.com/t/atom/weblog/blog_id=94901/entry_id=45883510" title="Meow!" />
    <id>tag:typepad.com,2003:post-45883510</id>
    <issued>2008-02-20T07:24:38-05:00</issued>
    <modified>2008-02-20T12:24:38Z</modified>
    <created>2008-02-20T12:24:38Z</created>
    <summary>This photo reminds me of Michelle Pfeiffer.</summary>
    <author>
        <name>Isaac Schrödinger</name>
    </author>
    <dc:subject>Pop Culture</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>USA</dc:subject>

    <content type="xhtml" xml:lang="en-us" xml:base="http://isaacschrodinger.typepad.com/isaacschrodinger/">...
    </content>
</entry>

I am not picking on Isaac in the least here. This entry taken from Isaac Schrodinger's "Atom" feed is something I noticed when I used his feed to test out TypePad with some new RSS/Atom software I have written for Movable Type.

This is the Atom spec from the IETF. It's been in place now in RFC status (Request for Comment) and stable since 2005. Three of those tags in there, modified issued and created, are not Atom tags. On top of that, SixApart couldn't be bothered to use the standard Atom tag <category> instead of using the <dc:subject> tags. I am not sure why they felt the need to bring in Dublin Core elements when there was an existing tag in Atom that does the same thing.

The world would be a much better place if the makers of all markup language parsers colluded to make their parsers very brittle in the face of nonstandard markup. Bad markup should break a document or web page, not get interpreted.

**UPDATE**: I concede Su's points here. Occam's Razor would suggest that I should have given SixApart some more benefit of the doubt that this might have been a custom edit job on the template.

Remember that cop who I posted a video of a little while ago? Well, it should come as no surprise to anyone, that this is not the first time that he has been caught on tape bringing shame to his badge and uniform (assuming it were possible to shame such an ugly uniform) and further reinforcing all too often well-deserved stereotypes of the police.

In cases like this one, I have mixed feelings. What you have is a case of a man who was wrongfully convicted of a crime he didn't commit, but who was released because the government got the right guy eight months later. The state compensated him for $5,000 for his time lost, and nearly $19,000 for his attorney fees, and it's obvious that $5,000 is not enough compensation for that much humiliation and loss of liberty while innocent.

That said, what do you do in cases where there isn't any corruption in the process that lead to the conviction? Personally, I think the government should be required to buy a large ad in the local newspapers, and pay the local radio and television stations to broadcast the news that the innocent party was wrongfully convicted and the prosecution and police want everyone to know that they have the right person now. This is especially important in cases like child molestation cases, where people have a habit of going vigilante on the innocent and guilty alike, without regard for the truth. I remember one case where they picked on an old man who happened to live in the apartment that a child molester used to live in, and no one bothered to find out if he still lived there. (As I said before, if that were one of my relatives or just my neighbor, blood would have been spilled without mercy if they kept it up and the police didn't take care of it. In my opinion, vigilantes who get it wrong deserve to have their blood shed.)

I have updated the style sheet file a few times now, and so every default blue link should be like the rest of the links now. Either the light bluish turquoise, or the other greenish color. If you see a page where this is not the case, have refreshed it, and are still getting that problem, please post a comment somewhere and let me know what page is an example of where it is still screwed up. I'm trying to fix this up in part because I want to start up a Movable Type style gallery on my website.

Speaking of Movable Type, the RSS/Atom work that has been consuming a lot of my hobby time is nearly completed for a 1.0 beta release. I know I keep saying that, but I'm now cleaning up the code, and will probably work on playing with it on my blog tomorrow night. I just want you guys who use WordPress to know that your RSS feeds are a bit funky compared to the ones that I was used to parsing from Movable Type. Just so you guys know, I've received a few reports from WordPress users who have tried to use the WordPress exporter functionality to export their content to Movable Type, and they are reporting abysmal failure, primarily because it doesn't seem to be generating truly valid XML. I'm not sure why that is, but that's what's been said so far.

When your government caves in like this, you know it no longer serves the interests of the people. It has come to the point where every decent, remotely sane Brit should consider whether or not their system needs to be, as we Americans used to say, "altered or abolished:"

Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday.

Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.

Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE.

A sane government would have immediately rounded up all Saudi foreign nationals, including diplomatic personnel, and deported them from its soil over a threat like this. It would be perfectly reasonable for the government from that point on to consider any act of terrorism committed on its soil by Saudi nationals, or foreigners financed by Saudis, to be acting as proxy fighters operating under the implicit or explicit guidance of the Saudi government. In short, any act of terrorism committed by such people would be quite rightly considered an act of war.

The Blair government was more concerned with creating a neofascist state in Britain than providing for the basic security of the people of the United Kingdom.

Rachel and I had never heard of Joel Osteen until we saw a reference to him on Tim's blog. We are sort of watching one of his sermons now, and both of us are just shaking our heads at how wrong this guy is. In the last ten to fifteen minutes, he has not referenced Jesus as the solution to any problem even once, but he has probably made a good fifty references or more to the power of positive thinking. He even made a statement to the effect that when God created each and every one of us he looked at us and said that we were good. I could be mistaken, but I only remember that being said about Adam and Eve.

Yesterday I didn't have a whole lot better to do than work on a new style for my blog. I used the Style Designer Assistant from MovableType.org and used the WordPress theme Juicy 2.0 as a guideline. It took me about an hour to get this working like this yesterday, so I figure that if I work on these for most of the day during the week, I can probably crank out at least three new styles for Movable Type every week. I don't know what the legal issues are behind this because I am not using someone else's copyrights, only making something reasonably functionally similar to it. I would assume that my work is as protected in that respect as WINE's is with Windows.

Anyway, I chose Juicy 2.0 because it seemed like a typical Web 2.0 sort of look. It looks a bit different in Safari and Firefox than in Opera and IE. I admit that I used some proprietary CSS in there to give it curved borders. There is some CSS 3.0 mixed in with the rest which is CSS 2.0, so that when IE and Opera fully support CSS 3.0, they'll get curved borders too.

Speaking of web development-related things, one of the things that really irks me is that people are still using HTML instead of XHTML at popular sites. Why does this matter? XHTML is a simpler version of HTML that conforms to XML rules, so it is much, much easier to parse than HTML. Proper XML is much easier to validate and enforce than HTML. That's one of the reasons why I have stopped doing those quizzes that most other bloggers do. They leave a load of craptastic HTML 4 in my otherwise mostly correct XHTML blog.

Here's a language that's cool, and worth trying out if you are looking to get started with programming. F# is a functional language for the .NET platform.  Functional programming can be  weird and frustrating at first, but when you wrap your brain around it a little, it can be cool stuff.

*Wipes tear from eye*. Ain't it great?

These are some good directions for fixing YouTube's HTML that is used for embedding videos into your blog, so that the HTML is XHTML 1.0 compliant.

Yet another reason why there should be no daily overlap between the arming and training of law enforcement and the military. The police here behaved like they were in a warzone, not like they were in control of the situation, and probably going to be facing people who would have voluntarily complied if they had acted like the officers had behaved like they had a single brain cell between the seven of them:

Tedral Thompson claims seven Woodland police officers burst into his home with a search warrant, refused to let his wife put on a blouse - and then stunned him with three Taser guns.

Yolo County court records say only one officer fired a stun gun to protect a colleague, and that it happened as Thompson came at him cursing and carrying a fly swatter.

Thompson has filed a lawsuit in Yolo Superior Court alleging officers used excessive force and falsely arrested him for obstructing an officer as a "cover up."

The officers were completing a search related to Thompson's then-16-year-old son, who was in police custody at the time of the Nov. 28, 2006, search.

"I don't think what happened to me and my wife is in the dictionary," Thompson said in a tearful interview at the Yolo County administrative building. "We were beyond being violated."

This is how it should have gone down, and probably would have, had the police done the right thing:

Officer Smith knocks on the door, and waits about a minute for a response.
"Who is it." It's the suspect's father.
Officer Smith replies: "sir, my name's Officer Smith. I'm with the Such-And-Such Police Department. I need to speak with you about your son."
The father opens the door and steps outside. "What the hell is going on with my boy?"
Officer Smith replies: "sir, we have him in custody on charge of rape." He pulls out a copy of the warrant. "We have this here warrant to search his room and other effects. Please step aside, and allow us in to execute it."
Father grudgingly steps out of the way. Wife gets upset because she's not fully dressed. The police tell her to wait in the kitchen, and ask the father where his son's room is. They go off in that direction, while one officer stays behind to make sure that the parents are not moving around evidence while they are searching his room.
Officers search room, and politely leave.

If the father told them to kiss his butt, the officers could professionally, and dispassionately place him under arrest for obstruction of justice, then professionally search the places listed on the warrant.

This is how a professional police force composed of peace officers, not closet rambos, would have handled it. With that many officers, they had numeric and firepower superiority. There was no excuse for this raid. There was no excuse for their behavior.

This is why we don't need gun control in America. When the police behave like this with the public being able to put their lives at moderate risk, just imagine how bad their behavior will get when the average citizen really is only capable of going after them with a fly swatter.

For a book of its size, the Irrational Atheist manages to do a lot of
damage to New Atheism. Think of it as the polemic equivalent of putting
a city-killing nuclear bomb in a suitcase. If anything proves the intellectual weakness of the New Atheist movement, it's the fact that a single book which is only about 300 pages, can manage to jump from one member of the leading clique after another and deftly annihilate them in such a small amount of space.

What makes the arguments in the Irrational Atheist so strong is that there are so many citations to credible and valuable evidence that is often sorely lacking in books written against atheism. No honest person can get through the parts about atheism's influence on the 20th century, and come away with the idea that religious leaders from prior centuries are still, even at their worst, in the same league. Many people will be shocked to see other myths, such as the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, exploded by this book. In some respects, it is a perfect reminder of why "conventional wisdom" is an oxymoron, as it shows just how much blatantly false data has been shoved down the public's throat for years.

Unlike many books of this nature, the tone is conversational, and neither academic nor pedantic. You won't be forced to read through layers of jargon and similar linguistic obfuscations in order to understand anything that is being said. The Irrational Atheist is, for that very reason, accessible to the majority. It can be appreciated by someone with barely enough education to read their Bible, and someone who has enough education to pursue an advanced degree. It will appeal to different groups in different ways, but the information is useful for everyone.

The tone will put off some Christians and academics who will be offended by the confrontational style used in many parts of the book. This book is many things, but kind to its enemies is not one of them. It does not give them room to retreat, and instead chases them across the battlefield and cuts them down as they flee with white f