March 2008 Archives

Read this guy's story. His girlfriend was raped by someone she worked for. The boyfriend knew beyond a reasonable doubt that she was raped because she was so badly traumatized by the incident that she couldn't even really speak to the cops. So he went to the rapist's apartment and ended up killing him.

At what point does grace and forgiveness fall away, and the need for justice and retribution take over? Those that focus on grace and forgiveness so much tend to fail to account for the brutal realities of this fallen world, and that God still demands justice from those who inflict injury and death on their fellow man.

If a man came home to find his wife and children brutally murdered, do you think that Jesus would not be understanding if in a fit of rage the man took up the mantle of the avenger of blood? Instead of turning the other cheek, he shed the blood of the man who committed a crime against his loved ones that is, objectively speaking, a capital offense under God's law?

It says do not judge or we will be judged, and that our standard will be used against us. I know in my heart that I would have probably done the same thing. The only thing that would have held me back is the knowledge that I would probably get arrested, and that that would be the last thing she'd need at such a horrible time in her life. I see cases like this, and I can genuinely sympathize with what had to be going through the guy's head.

I can't help but wonder at times whether or not part of the reason that Christians are losing so badly in America's culture war is that Christians are stuck on stupid with forgiveness and grace, and have lost their edge on taking up the sword to defend the innocent. We forget that part of the implied responsibility of the peacemakers is that they will bear the responsibility for defending those too weak to defend themselves, and to right the scales of justice whenever an injustice has been committed. That is why I cannot find this man guilty of a crime worth sending him to prison for 16 years.

David Weigel doesn't seem to know many engineers:

I'd be lying if I claimed not to cringe at some of this. The "rule by engineers" concept seems periously close to the Simpsons episode where MENSA takes over Springfield. (It ended badly.)

There are other advantages to having a government run more by engineers than lawyers besides "more results than rhetoric." Just off the top of my head they are:

The introduction of formal processes for evaluating the effects of public policy and law, and a maintenance process for fixing the problems that policies and laws cause. A government run more by engineers than lawyers is one that is much more likely to consider reviewing the effectiveness and side-effects of policy and law to be an intrinsic and mandatory part of government.

Skepticism toward a lot of the sophistic arguments that lawyers often find convincing. A government run more by engineers than lawyers would be more inclined to ridicule and drum out those who draft such absurd and non-sensical arguments as the majority ruling in Kelo v. New London than to accept their arguments. In short, engineers are far less prone than lawyers to accepting tortured, bullshit arguments that are just exercises in seeing how far you can twist definitions and logic.

While it may be true that engineers are used to mechanical systems and software, that doesn't mean that they are less capable of drafting consistent and good laws and policies than lawyers. In fact, one of the major problems with government today is that the laws are often so inconsistent and poorly thought out. This comes from the tendency of lawyers to be educated in studying cases, what engineers call "use cases," but not to be educated to have to maintain a holistic understanding of the system as a whole. To engineers, the problems with the laws is predictable. It's what software engineers call "hacking," aka, flying by the seat of your pants while writing code, rather than doing a systematic study of what problems need to be fixed.

A government dominated by engineers is not the same thing as the sort of debacle that was shown in the Simpsons when Mensa took over Springfield. Let's not forget that engineers are a special subset of people with above average IQs. More specifically, a subset whose intelligence is focused on systematic problem-solving. We really could use a lot more of that sort of intelligence in Congress, the Presidency and the Judiciary.

Looks like an ancient assyrian astronomer made some observations of an asteroid hitting the area where Sodom and Gomorrah are believed to have existed. There's always the obvious caveat that there is no proof that Sodom and Gomorrah existed in the location that was hit, just like there is the possibility that these ruins are not really Hittite, but are rather some far-sighted creation of the ancient Israelis to bolster the faith of their progeny by fabricating the existence of the Hittite Empire.

Any mistake that they make would potentially result in a nearly or actual career-killing lawsuit. Law firms would also be required to give pro bono assistance, that the government might or might not refund, to any indigent client that comes their way seeking legal counsel. Lawyers would be subjected to debates where people talk about bring their firms and labor under government control in a socialized system to ensure that "everyone has the same quality of legal counsel, regardless of economic class." Finally, it would be common and generally acceptable to treat any lawyer who doesn't feel that the legal profession has a moral obligation to provide free services to anyone who wants or claims to need them, as though such a lawyer were a heartless scumbag who hates his fellow man. Indeed, it would be respectable in many social circles to subordinate the lawyer's freedom to use their labor as they see fit, to whatever society wants.

Cuba's overlords see fit to allow the peasantry to own and use cell phones. That Raul, he's a real liberator...

As a Christian and libertarian, I agree with a good deal of what Joe Carter wrote in his "open letter to the religious right." It was a good start, but it doesn't go far enough, especially if you believe that it's the duty of Christians to work toward the regeneration of society in the areas that they are given authority. There are a few things that I think that Christians both of the conservative and libertarian strain can agree should be added to the list.

Ten -- There is a significant amount of injustice that has been allowed to fester in the government and legal system besides the injustice of abortion on demand, and the more obvious restrictions on religious freedom. One of many examples is the system of civil asset forfeiture laws which allow state governments and the federal government to seize private property by merely accusing it of being used in the commission of a crime. No evidence of wrong-doing on the part of the owner is required. I don't think that I need to remind the religious right that God's law, as revealed in the Old Testament makes it abundantly clear that  God has a standard of how criminal and civil justice should be carried out, and that a thorough reading of it reveals a profound concern for protecting the innocent and falsely accused from ever falling victim to undeserved punishment. The religious right should be well aware of just how far the standard of "justice" in modern America has fallen away from its own ancient ideals and the minimum standards that Christians should find acceptable from the bible.

"My gravy train was run by Amtrak; the story of IT consulting for big organizations"

I've been working off and on on an extension to Movable Type that allows you to do surveys, and it's proved to be a good testing sandbox for me to try out new ideas for hacking on Movable Type. One of the things that shows a lot of promise is getting an extension to build JSON for enabling AJAX throughout an extension. I admit that there is some overhead in using a descendant of MT::App to generate JSON from a template file, but it should be less intense on the server than having it generate the whole page or widget. Every browser out there that is at least a few years old fully supports JSON and DOM scripting, so there is no reason to make the server generate the whole page when most of the generation can be done on the client side by building the page from descriptions in the JSON sent back by the server. To put this into perspective, all I would have to send back from the server to communicate the results of a simple survey, would be a JSON block that looks like:

The sort of hysteria that Megan McArdle shows in this post would be automatically dismissed as mindless drivel were it to come from someone that is skeptical of the safety and efficacy of vaccines. That it is not dismissed as pure idiocy is simply due to the fact that she is on the "right side" in the eyes of many vis a vis the efficacy and safety of vaccines. Thus it may be regarded as merely eccentric or passionate, rather than as authoritarian, emotional poppycock.

Not all vaccines are created the same, and to believe that they are is to indulge in idiotic relativism toward science and the art of medicine making. New vaccines should automatically be subjected to skepticism until they have been proven through double-blind clinical trials because of the potential for unleashing a wave of undesirable side effects on a significant portion of the population. Wouldn't it be ironic if the relative safety of most vaccines today lead the vaccine cheerleaders to enthusiastically support the mandate of a vaccine that caused retardation, cancer or sterility in a large minority of those that receive it? I have to wonder what the proper punishment would be for the vaccine cheerleaders like McArdle should this ever happen, since they are so quick to assign draconian levels of personal responsibility for others' infections to those who forego vaccination. Personally, I would say that it should, at a bare minimum, include being pumped full of the vaccine and being put on a list of idiots that no hospital is legally obligated to give pro bono emergency care to.

Ok, ok, so McArdle is not supporting a government campaign to force vaccines on you, but rather to essentially consign the unwilling to house arrest. I confess, there is a difference, regardless of how pathetically semantic it might be, between the government, with all of the power to abrogate life, liberty and property, forcing vaccines on people, and merely having the government leave you in a state that amounts to house arrest until you decide to get a certain vaccine. See, that's the libertarian side of McArdle. She is very, very sure that the government should use every means at its command to prevent you from interfering with the theoretical rights of others, short of resorting to laying siege to your home with the Army, and placing an Air Force fighter wing on standby to carpet bomb your house, should you get the urge to speed past the blockade and go to the grocery store.

For many people, the regular vaccine schedule is healthy. Were it not healthy, America would be a wasteland of idiots and autists resembling the movie Idiocracy with a splash of Silicon Valley genius here and there for flavor. However, the rise in the rate of autism does tend to suggest that something is afoot in terms of causing the sort of brain damage that leads to autism. Maybe it's heavy metal poisoning (back away from the CFL bulb nice and slowly, tree-hugger) or a sudden and prodigious burst of autistic people reproducing in record numbers, but something is causing it, and no one has conclusively ruled out vaccines as a cause or contributing factor to my knowledge. Correct me if I am wrong. That's part of the reason why I keep my comments section open.

And is it really that hard to believe that pumping children full of chemicals that have mercury bonded to them might have negative side effects in some children? There are people in my wife's family who nearly died from alergic reactions to the regular vaccination schedule, so don't tell me that every physiology is just hunky dory with respect to the regular vaccination schedule. Considering that several of her family members have had severe alergic reactions to them, I'm a mite suspect of the passionate, evidence-free, wild-eyed assertions from people like McArdle that there simply could not be any credible reason to believe that there is a subset of children for whom the regular vaccination schedule is rather poisonous. Granted, McArdle would try to argue her way out of this by claiming it is a "legitimate medical reason" to avoid vaccination, but that does little to address the hypocritical irony of someone who suggests:ÂÂÂÂ

Fitna is a controversial film from the Netherlands about the Koran. Like pretty much everything that is even remotely critical of anything having to do with Islam, it managed to garner to it quite a rent-a-mob to criticize and condemn anyone that would publish it. Network Solutions, being the risk-averse corporation that it is, decided to err on the side of caution and shut down the website of its paying customer (Geert Wilders and his supporters) so that they would not further inflame the sentiments of their presumably predominantly Muslim critics. This raises the question of what sort of freedom of speech actually exists online when companies will shut down websites that get a lot of complaints about them, even though the site may be posting nothing that is criminal or objectively even particularly offensive.

This would not be the first time that Muslim whiners and activists have gotten a major hosting service of some sort to shut down content that was not only not bigoted, but was the sort of speech that generally is considered worth protecting by free speech supporters. YouTube has a whole sordid history of giving in to any Muslim rent-a-mob that manages to direct enough harassment toward them about the content of a video that smacks of being critical of Islam in any way. One of the only exceptions to this in recent times has been Wikipedia's refusal to accommodate a protest by Muslims concerning the hosting of images of the controversial Danish cartoons.

John McCain doesn't seem all of that grateful to the man who pulled him out of his sinking wreckage in Vietnam and saved his life from angry villagers.

Today we celebrate the moment that God firmly laid the foundation for the absolute defeat of death, injustice and evil. With His resurrection, we have a chance to be liberated from the cycle of death and misery that for so long was normal for the human condition. Remember that today, and be thankful for the grace that you have been given.

The Canadian government has ordered a Christian ministry that teaches doctrine and the differences between Christians and cults shut down because its reference materials were "critical" of the beliefs of those who are not Christian, WND has learned.

There's a lot of controversy right now about Apple putting Safari for Windows up as an automatic download in their software update, but so far, I like it. I installed it out of curiosity and have found it to be as lightweight as Opera or Firefox 3 for heavy browsing, and to be overall a great browser. This is the final release of Safari for Windows, version 3.1, not one of the betas. Give it a shot, it's worth trying out. In fact, I've found that it sometimes handles JavaScript better than Firefox 3, as it doesn't have the struggles with Movable Type's admin console JavaScript that Firefox 3 seems to have.

I'm intentionally late to the game because I prefer to listen on current events before forming an opinion of my own. To that end, I waited a few days before reading the speech in order to allow both the chorus and the critics to have their say before I read it myself. This is what I think.

This speech was an excellent explanation of several issues that face America, and the most brutally honest speech given by a serious politician on the state of race in America. It is important even if Obama doesn't believe a lot of it, is a coward, a weak-willed politician, or whatever foible or flaw can be attributed to him. Not to give it undue weight, but with respect to the issue of race, it is like prophecy being spoken to mankind: the prophet, with all of his flaws, is just a man delivering the message (which is what really matters).

Despite my comments about Obama's pastor and the problems inherent with such an association, I don't think Obama can or should be condemned by this association. I stand by my statement that Wright rubs me as a toned down version of Matthew Hale, and that a white politician who associated with a man as openly bigoted toward blacks as Wright is to whites, would be crucified. That is just a matter of fact, though it shouldn't be because politics makes for strange bedfellows. One of the unfortunate truths of life in this sinful world is that those who hold the keys to power tend to be more aligned in their natures to Satan, than God. This should not surprise anyone in the church, as Jesus did not dispute Satan's ability to hand over the entire Earth to Him. Satan is called the "god of this age" for good reason.

I actually respect Obama's refusal to condemn the man because it shows that while he may have troubling associations, he is not a man who is strongly driven by the polls like so many other politicians. For that reason, maybe we can hope that what we see is more or less a picture of what we would get with a President Obama. If that be the case, then give me an Obama I largely disagree with over a "maverick" who I sometimes I agree strongly with (cutting spending and ending torture), but who takes positions just to be disagreeable sometimes, and a woman who is so openly pragmatic that Benito Mussolini would embrace her as a kindred spirit.

Blacks are upset, whites are upset. Both are manipulated by vested, bureaucratic interests ranging from the mainstream media that exploits any hint of racism to boost advertising revenues, to teachers' unions that have defeated every reform attempt on the public schools, and a law enforcement system that jealously protects its prerogatives. If both sides sat down with a heart to really achieve peace, they would quickly find out that both get the shaft, and get it pretty bloody hard, from the establishment. The reasons they don't tend to see it is a reflexive defensiveness and because the shafting manifests itself in very different, but equally severe, ways all too often.

Where Obama ran into trouble, however, was not facing up to the fact that black men have done a lot to give people like his grandmother cause for concern when they walk past them in public. The thug culture and the fact that young black men are well over represented among felons gives legitimate reason to be wary of dealing with working class black men in too many cases. It's lamentable that we have come to this, but to claim that this stereotype is without merit is just to ignore reality and irrationally cling to an ideal (near total nonjudgmentalism based on appearance) in defiance of demonstrable reality. The reality is that while this behavior in general toward black men is unacceptable, there is a distinct subset of black men who do give off through the way they dress and behave, the distinct impression that they are part of the thug culture, even though they aren't, and few people are going to be very comfortable with that.

Few of the problems with crime and injustice in America have to do with race. Racism is just something which brings them to the attention of the public. There are many problems with our legal system, not the least of which is that it is often brutally legalistic, complicated to the point that justice often cannot be served, and that the laws being enforced are often so arbitrary as to defy any sense of justice or law and order. If Obama wants to change this, he is going to have to do something groundbreaking for a politician: bring together a group of the best legal minds he can find, and have them do a design review similar to what engineers often have to do, of the entire legal system. If he were to pledge to do that, that alone would make his candidacy truly groundbreaking.

One of the pluses about having Obama as president would be that his presidency would go a long way toward giving ammunition to honest opponents of racism that can be used to shut down the professional race baiters like Jesse Jackson who have a vested interest in keeping the black community from thinking that anything has changed. It would require a hitherto unseen level of cognitive dissonance to argue that nothing of substance has changed, even if the change is imperfect, if a black man is President in a mostly white country.

Unfortunately, if Obama seriously meant what he said in this speech, there is a hurdle he must face on discussions of racism that he may not be able to overcome, and that's the racism of low expectations and deflection of criticism. Many in the black community do not welcome any criticism, no matter how accurate or needed it is. Bill Cosby's scathing commentary about the state of the black community, and the reactions that came from it bear witness to that. The racism of low expectation comes in through such openings as well-meaning people who excuse the disintegration of the black family in no small part because of the welfare state making traditional marriage optional, but don't insist that it is unequivocally the responsibility of millions of black men and women to overcome this and raise their children in a stable, married environment. I honestly wonder how many times Rev. Wright denounced the behavior that has lead to so many young blacks not having stable families.

Ultimately, I think this election will not bring about much that is positive for America. While Obama is willing to confront certain hard topics, his ideas are mostly the same old tired left-wing "solutions" that have failed time and again. However, if I had to vote one of the three leading candidates, I'd have to go with him because we've seen what 8 years of Clinton government and 8 years of Republican domination both look like, and sometimes it's better to give a new devil a try in the off chance that he really might be an improvement.

Science has now confirmed what many men already knew about women with depression problems: they tend to be pretty easy.

I'm pretty sympathetic to the cop in this story. It sounds like he really was overworked, and that came back to haunt him and his department. What stuck out to me was near the end when the writer talks about the media bias.

Note to good ol' boys who want to use their local yokel police contacts to rough up someone they don't like. Never, ever pick an undercover federal agent as your target.

This one is for El Borak. Ben Bernanke's home has lost $260K in value. That's probably not a terrible loss for someone that well-connected, but it does enable a bit of heart-warming schadenfreude toward those who are, through a combination of incompetence and desire to hold power, screwing the rest of society.

The sting rays are mounting another attack on humanity.

Huckabee is defending Obama and his pastor. Between the excerpts and the statements of doctrine on the church's website, it's about like defending a politician who had a somewhat toned down version of Matthew Hale as his "spiritual advisor."

What's that you say? DHS got caught red-handed underreporting their data mining efforts? I'm shocked that a federal agency would think that obeying the law is optional!

I thought that school uniforms were put into place for the ostensible purpose of making students less focused on things like fashion, so that they could focus in class. Someone apparently didn't explain to this principle that if her students are freezing their butts off in class, the cold will distract them more than the kind of clothes they are wearing.

5 good reasons why it's a smart move for businesses to not operate with the motto "the customer is always right."

Apparently the FBI has run out of real child pornographers to arrest, so now it is having to find new ways to get its quota of child pornography convictions. That's being charitable and not assuming that they're not just too lazy to do regular police work these days. This ought to be a real fun one for hackers. Just send people to an innocent-seeming website that has a lot of sophisticated, stealthy Ajax code on it which pings all of these FBI-run websites. If that doesn't work, there are other ways to trick people into getting themselves in trouble.

Looks like environmentalists are starting to rethink that gungho support for CFL light bulbs. I guess it was only a matter of time before they realized how stupid it was to flush a century of environmental progress down the toilet via mass mercury poisoning all because people cannot be bothered to turn off the lights and electronics when they don't need them.

I'm sorry
For something I didn't do
Lynched somebody
But I don't know who
You blame me for slavery
A hundred years before I was born

Guilty of being white

I'm a convict
Of a racist crime
I've only served
19 years of my time

Guilty of being white
-By Minor Threat

If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

A coworker of mine and I got into an argument about that yesterday with respect to its application to security cameras being put everywhere outside by the government, such as the surveillance system in London. He justified it in part on the idea that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

Then he got upset when I said that I assume he has no problem with the government doing the same to his house.

Naturally, he said that there is a constitutional right, blah, blah.

To which I just said, "if you have nothing to hide, then you have no excuse for denying the government the ability to watch what you are doing inside your home. If you aren't breaking the law inside your home, then you have nothing to hide. Otherwise your home is a haven of criminality. That's what 'if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear' ultimately leads up to. You can't just carve out an exception that makes you happy because you are not comfortable with where you argument naturally goes."

I'm not sure it went over well when I bluntly said that this is a matter of principle, and that you cannot justify legislating things in a way that are cozy for you, and convenient for avoiding the areas where you don't want to be disturbed by the state.

That is the non-selfish way to think about law. To not be a selfish person vis a vis the law, you have to actually think expansively enough to figure out how to maximize the protections for everyone, not just yourself.

L'etat non c'est vouz.

Iran is slowly starting to wake up to the reality of its mess:

TEHRAN, March 19 (UPI) -- Many Iranian youths rallied in streets across the country, shouting "Death to Ahmadinejad," in celebrations marking the end of the Persian calendar year.

The last Wednesday of the Persian calendar is celebrated as the Fire Festival in Iran, with bonfires and firecrackers marking the occasion.

In the western city of Ahvaz, angry mobs declared "Freedom is our legitimate right" while demonstrators in the western city of Sanandaj shouted "Death to (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad," Ynetnews reported Wednesday.

If they are ever going to be free from the theocrats that control their country with an iron grip, they are going to have to do more than just protest. They will have to work their way into positions in power in Iran and then use that power to overthrow the Mullahs and eradicate them.

One of the ironic things about being forced to work on my own projects over the last nine months since I started this current job, and have been on overhead, is that I have become fairly comfortable with Perl. I used to hate Perl because the way that it is written often makes it incredibly hard to read. What would be twenty lines of fairly clear code in another language can be only a handful in Perl. It is, after all, the only language that has the distinction so far of being able to crack a DVD's encryption in about seven lines of code. Very terse, essentially unreadable code, but about seven lines of code nonetheless!

This morning I encountered my first limitation in the Movable Type API for database access, but a quick email to the developer mailing list got me a work around. See, I wanted to do something a lot more complicated than the basic functionality it provides. I needed to be able to join three tables, tell the database to select all of the tag ids associated with an entry, count the unique groups and order them by the large groupings first with a limit of the first five results. That's the proper way of telling the database that you want to return a list of the first five most related posts based on the tags associated with the post you are looking at. For performance reasons, the only sane way to do that is to send over a small paragraph of SQL code to the database, and tell it to do all of the work for you, so all you have to do in your code is display the results. The only catch is that I will have to test this code across the other two database servers that Movable Type Open Source officially supports besides MySQL.

In other news, I have converted three more WordPress themes so that they can be used as Movable Type styles for the default template set. As always, there is the caveat that they are more "inspired by" than a direct conversion because the HTML generated by the Movable Type default templates is different from that used by WordPress.

I haven't been paying close attention to the number of delegates they both have, but this black racism scandal surrounding Obama's campaign made me think that there might be another option beside Vox Day's idea that Obama is just a distraction until Hillary Clinton can take the nomination. What if the party elites actually prefer John McCain, and are setting up Barack Obama to be wiped out by default by McCain in the election?

OK, here me out on this one. Last I checked, Obama still has a decent lead on Hillary, and they can't very well complain about Bush taking the presidency away from Gore without exposing themselves as hypocrites by giving the nomination to Hillary in the event that the superdelegates are upset over Obama's ties to that racist black church. Either way, the Democrats are in trouble. They either have to run a black man whose church of the last 20 years is a haven of hardcore black racists, or they have to choose to override the candidate with clearly more delegates in favor of the candidate with a less controversial (at this point) background. Racist or elitist. It doesn't work out well either way.

A lot of people like McCain, and a lot of Democrats might vote for him out of spite to Hillary Clinton. If Obama wins the nomination, all of his optimistic rhetoric will be overshadowed by the fact that he was a member of a church that preached a very vitriolic antithesis of everything that Obama has talked about with being optimistic and unifying the United States. He's badly damaged, there's no doubt about that, and he's damaged in the way that Bush would have been damaged if it turned out that the pastor of his church of 20 years had preached sermon after sermon demonizing blacks and spouting all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories involving the federal government. It raises the simple question of "if you don't agree with that shit, then why did you go to that church for 20 years?" This isn't Saudi Arabia where you have to take whatever you can get with respect to worship services.

I would like to recommend this essay by Murray Rothbard to those of you who call yourselves conservatives. Some of the content will sting quite a bit, but it is very appropriate for the spirit of our times, and I think gives us a proper perspective on why things are so screwed up now with the Republican Party and its "conservatives."

As if the TSA didn't have enough trouble already, some of its higher ups have been caught running a consulting business on the side. This is an obvious conflict of interest, and one that is pretty serious for someone in the government and government contracting world to get caught up in because at a minimum it gives the impression that you are able to leverage your position for your own financial gain. In the worst case scenario, it could create a real shit storm of ethical problems if your consulting group subcontracts with a prime contractor who doesn't know about this connection, and then gets nailed by other contractors because of the perception that they hired an "insider" to help them win contracts at the agency that employs the government worker in their day job.

So, you have a turn over rate of about 25% at the TSA for six years straight, have them caught cheating on their testing process to gauge how effective their bomb detection is, and now some of their higher ups get caught trying to stick their hands in the cookie jar for personal gain. That's of course ignoring all of the other issues ranging from the terrorist watch list, to the constant reports of supremely moronic behavior and policies.

After all, this is an agency that worries that containers of clearly non-volatile, non-toxic materials, when combined, could form a binary bomb capable of bringing down an airplane.

I bet Max Weber is looking at this from the other side as a case study and thinking that he was born in the wrong century...

Never ones to let a rule go unenforced, a public school finds grounds to punish a student who behaved like a good samaritan:

A 15-year-old girl who stopped her out-of-control school bus was hit with a Saturday detention because she was supposed to be in class when the accident happened.

While a normal person would have excused her breaking the rules by being late and not on the right bus because she saved a bus of elementary school students and driver from injury and possible death, it's practically in the very nature of many of those who work for the public schools to enforce the rules mainly just because they can. That she also prevented the school from facing any possibility of being sued by the parents of injured children is beside the point.

She was late to school is really all that matters here.

Ideoblog has a very interesting post about the Enron case which shows the distinct possibility that the federal prosecution involved acted unethically in prosecuting some of the higher ups at Enron. Most egregiously was their suppression of exculpatory evidence, something which is inherently unacceptable as a matter of seeking justice in a criminal case. One of the troubling aspects of this, is that if I read things right, they relied on the testimony of a man who is a potential psychopath, the former CFO Andrew Fastow. It would be interesting to see if the defense can take that aspect and run with it. They might be able to make a case that "Fastow would say anything," if they can prove that he is a sociopath or a psychopath, and thus maybe impeach his testimony.

All things considered, in general, I've come to shift my anger about injustice away from the police to prosecutors for reasons such as these. The police only have the legal and institutional power to do so much to anyone, but prosecutors can truly make someone's life a living hell.

There is no solution to prosecutorial misconduct under the current system that doesn't rely on prosecutors to take down their own. Until it is legally possible for private citizens to have their attorneys file criminal charges against police, prosecutors and government witnesses that break the law, there will not be much pressure for people in these positions to obey the law.

This conversation sure went downhill quickly, didn't it? I think one of the things that I will never understand is how a Christian can seriously argue, except out of sheer ignorance of the Bible, that we all worship the same god. As if the first commandment were not enough, you have many verses in the New Testament that say that anything that denies Jesus Christ is not of God. Pretty straight forward stuff, right? Guess not... (I'm pointin' at you, Geppy...)

I installed Cache Block for Movable Type today, and all I can say is...

OMG it sped things up! I was able to republish my blog archives, all 1,100 or so entries, in a few minutes with caching turned on! Will someone at SixApart please make Mark Carey a sweet deal for this plugin and integrate it into Movable Type as a standard feature for everyone?

This has gotta be one of the best videos I've seen online in a long time.

I just can't see the prostitute that is involved in the Spitzer story as a victim of anything. She's already got an offer from Hustler for $1,000,000 and looks to be getting a counter-offer from Penthouse. It sounds to me like she may end up with a wad of cash big enough that she could work at Starbucks for spending money, and live off the interest of her first nude photo shoot for life. That's a better deal than what most people will ever get, no matter how you look at it...

I'm only slightly less in favor of the consumption of delicious animal flesh than a T-Rex, but I laughed my ass off when I watched this.

The Candidate of Hope and Change^(tm) has a curious habit of surrounding himself with people who epitomize the same old, same old and dark cynicism:

"Barack knows what it means, living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people," Wright said on Christmas Day of last year. "Hillary can never know that. Hillary ain't never been called a [N-word]!"

In another sermon, delivered five days after the 9/11 attacks, Wright seems to imply that the United States had brought the terrorist violence on itself.

"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York, and we never batted an eye," Wright says. "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is brought right back in our own front yards."

In a later sermon, Wright revisits the theme, declaring: "No, no, no, not God bless America - God damn America!"

What sort of pastor takes such a dark and cynical attitude toward America? Not one who is called by God. As 2 Chronicles says:

¹⁴ if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land. ¹⁵ Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place. ¹⁶ I have chosen and consecrated this temple so that my Name may be there forever. My eyes and my heart will always be there.

I think I am giving a little too much credit to the average person who has been a supporter of Obama. His wife's own twisted words and opinions on nearly every subject that she has pontificated on in public should have been sufficient to call into question whether or not Obama's optimism and "audacity to hope" are real. After all, you can learn a lot about a man's character by what sort of woman he marries and remains married to. Now, it comes out that his pastor, the one he turned to for spiritual guidance, is as bad as his wife.

Huh.

Makes you wonder what he hoped for, and hoped to change. Hope to see the end of white, middle class America and the ability to effect change to that effect?

No one would have a hard time asking these same questions about the man's character if he were white and his wife and pastor held such dark opinions about Jews and blacks, and had such a darkly cynical view of what America is.

The House of Representatives has rejected telecom immunity, and a lot of what the President wanted in the way of surveillance powers. Considering the damaging finds from the DoJ's Inspector General on the FBI's abuse of the powers that they have been given since 9-11, it's good to see Congress putting its foot down at least in some small way on Bush's demands for more power. That this comes on the heals of reports that the FBI not only abused its powers, but attempted to cover up those abuses. They've proved themselves very untrustworthy with what they already have, so it's just not even worth hearing them out when they ask for anything else.

I think that I have figured out a novel means to finally put the kibbosh on the ability of spammers to spam the movable type comment script once and for all. I've got some ideas that I need to test out in code, but on paper it looks promising. The only catch is that it would require Movable type users to publish their pages as PHP files instead of HTML files.

Lastly, I've been working on creating an integrated survey plugin for Movable Type users. Some bugs need to be worked out, but I'm closing in on a beta release. I suspect that the beta will be available on my plugins blog sometime by the end of next week.

I've been a critic of most state laws for punishing child molesters for a while now because of the fact that they are driven by a combination of conflicting emotions and political goals. For example, in some states it's less dangerous to a pedophile's liberty to actually rape a child than to own child pornography. Sometimes that difference can be such that it just defies any sense of proportion or logic (not saying that possessing child porn isn't a serious crime in its own right). Most states will choose to shackle offenders with all sorts of onerous restrictions on their post-incarceration freedom in the name of being "merciful" to someone who is, objectively speaking, the human equivalent of a rabid dog around children. Yet the same government will not take responsibility for when it releases violent, unrepentant criminals back into society, such as this guy:

NEW BEDFORD - A convicted sex offender accused of raping a 6-year-old boy in a New Bedford library will be kept behind bars as he awaits trial after a judge deemed him too dangerous to be released.

Corey Saunders is charged with luring the boy into the library's magazine stacks and raping him as his mother worked on a computer just feet away.

Someone willing to do something like this in public is such a threat to society that society cannot afford the half-assed measures that are used to punish serious sex offenders. The only effective way to deal with an incorrigible, serious sex offender is to remove them permanently from society. Be it through life imprisonment or execution, it doesn't really matter.

In one of the more asinine arguments about sexism in science, you have a female Political Science professor upset that the professional journals of Political Science tend to prefer research that is quantitative over qualitative.

While the gender differences aren't as stark in political science as in the sciences, they are still pretty bad. Take my profession - academic political science, presumably a bastion of political correctness. Our big annual convention is dominated by men. The leading journals prefer quantitative research over qualitative research. And no surprise, men do the quantitative work. The numbers of women with PhDs have increased dramatically over the years, yet the departments at universities are fraternities. Women get the degrees, but not the jobs. Many schools don't offer family leave time or child-care centers on campus, something that might help mitigate the situation.

I don't suppose it could have anything to do with the fact that if you ask most scientists and engineers what they think of calling Political Science a science, that you will get an ugly look most of the time. Without that quantitative research, Political Science would not be able to maintain any pretense of being scientific at all. It is, after all, a field that tries to treat human beings, notoriously unpredictable and malleable things that they are, as though they were forces of nature that can be reduced to laws of science.

The whole idea that it ought to be the responsibility of the employer to provide childcare facilities and extra leave to help women achieve their career goals is an attitude which does indeed separate women like her from many of the men that she wants to work with. As a general rule, men do not believe it is incumbent upon others to accommodate their lifestyle choices. For women, it is a lifestyle choice to become a mother versus working full time in a research setting. These are usually mutually exclusive propositions because of the amount of work required by both to be at least passingly competent.

Most women - myself included - don't experience these forms of soft sexism until later in life. We're sailing through school work, out pacing men in the classroom. It's only when the hard realities of family and work hit that women understand that they get the short end of the stick.

Perhaps there is reason why you can sail through school, and yet struggle in the workplace. Two reasons come to mind, actually. First, school work is almost always a very weak example of what you are going to be encountering for eight or more hours a day once you hit the cube farm. Second, many people don't even use the degrees that they earned in the work that they do for their employer. This is common in IT, and just the way that things are in human resources (pray tell, how does a Psychology or Political Science degree prepare you for human resources work?)

Those "hard realities" can be summed up in an age old statement. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

MarkCC offers this sad excuse for a "rebuttal" to points that Vox Day never actually made:

After yesterday's post about the great women of computer science, I noticed my SciBling MarkH over at the Denialism blog had discovered Vox Day and his latest burst of stupidity, in which he alleges that the greatest threat to science is.... women. Because, you see, women are all stupid.

How did he ever come to this conclusion? From this:

The bizarre propositions of equalitarianism always sound harmless and amusing at first because they are so absurd. What the rational observer often fails to understand, however, is that these propositions don't sound the least bit absurd to the equalitarian proponent because the average equalitarian is fundamentally an intellectual cave-dweller with no more interest in reason or capacity for logical thought than a hungry kitten. The idea of biology classes being taught by lesbian professors who believe that heterosexual procreation is a myth or calculus courses being taught by women who can't do long division may sound impossible today, but tell that to any software developer, and he'll be able to provide you with plenty of current examples of computer science engineers, some with advanced CS degrees, who have no idea how to even begin writing a computer program.

Women love education; it's the actual application they don't particularly like. Whereas the first thought of a woman who enjoys the idea of painting is to take an art appreciation class, a similarly interested man is more likely to just pick up a paintbrush and paint something - usually a naked woman.

The rest of the blog post is nothing more than a series of anecdotes about finding women that can hold their own as software developers. That there are women who can do this is not even the point that Vox was trying to disprove, but to point out the obvious which is that Title IX has had a ridiculously destructive influence on sports programs, and that if attached to science and engineering programs will eviscerate the standards that are used to teach the material and allow people to become professors of the subjects.

Can you really, honestly deny that that is precisely what will happen if these university departments are forced to achieve gender parity at all costs? They would naturally have to get warm bodies to meet quotas imposed by people outside of the departments, and the only way to do that is to offer them the illusion of a good career (it will be an illusion if they're just a warm body) and to not discourage them by challenging them at even basic subjects in those majors.

What Vox is getting at with the professors is spot on for what has happened to many departments in the humanities and liberal arts. Politics has overriden the pursuit of knowledge too often in those fields, which have reduced once respectable fields like Philosophy and Political Science to institutional jokes.

Sadly, his experience with women and learning is typical of the experience that many of the men I know have had with women in IT and engineering work. No doubt MarkCC has access to a better crop of women than the average Computer Science or engineering department because of his own educational background and employment at Google. The experience that many of us have had is of women who want to bat their pretty little eyes at some easily manipulated man, and have him do all of the hard parts of their homework for them. That's how our valedictorian got the GPA that she did in Computer Science, which my wife is still bitter over because she earned her Computer Science GPA the hard way like the rest of us.

Of course if you work at companies and universities that are known for being elite research institutions you are more likely to attract top female talent. Using that experience to gauge the rest of academia and corporate America is akin to a coach at top athletic universities that can draw the best female athletic talent wondering why it is so difficult for a typical state university to put together an outstanding women's basketball team. If you don't know why that's elitist to the point of being unusable, then you aren't seeing the bigger picture.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) -- An eighth-grade honors student who was suspended for a day, barred from attending an honors dinner and stripped of his title as class vice president after he was caught with contraband candy in school will get his student council post back, school officials said.

Superintendent Reginald Mayo said in a statement late Wednesday that he and principal Eleanor Turner met with student Michael Sheridan's parents and that Turner decided to clear the boy's record and restore him to his post.

Michael was disciplined after he was caught buying a bag of Skittles from a classmate. The classmate's suspension also will be expunged, school officials said.

One of the things about "progressives" that I truly despise is that they are by a wide margin the most pernicious group of busybodies there is in American politics. They are, after all, the only ones who actually think that it's the state's business to regulate the candy consumption of a kid in school beyond telling them to not eat during class. It's easy enough to dismiss this as one of a legion of examples of public schools run amok, but it's a natural extension of the coming war on snack and fast food.

Even the religious right is generally content to just regulate the sexual moral activity of the public. To find the real modern day puritans, the people who truly are concerned that somewhere, somehow, someone is doing something that will render them less than they can be but by the grace of big brother almighty, you have to look to the political left.

She no doubt felt punished when daddy sternly told her that she would have to give up the Lexus SC for a Nissan 350Z. That'll teach her to be an ungrateful bitch.

Based on the arguments used here against Movable Type from a licensing perspective, I'm guessing that a lot of WordPress users haven't gotten the memo about Movable Type 4.X. It's dual-licensed under a commercial license for paying customers and the GNU General Public License, the same open source license that Linux, GCC, GNOME, half of Mono, Mozilla products and OpenOffice are released under. This means that if you are like me, Evangelical Outpost, and an increasing number of Movable Type users, you have nothing to worry about with SixApart trying to charge for use of your distribution of Movable Type. Why? Because the GPL says that they can't, and part of the GPL too is that once they distribute it to that person, that person has the same distribution rights. That means that all it takes is one MTOS user to put their sanitized installation up for download after SixApart changes their mind, and MTOS can be forked away from anything that SixApart is doing.

Look, we all know that y'all are bitter about SixApart, but please, don't be hatin' the platform because the company has made some mistakes. I'm sure the majority of you aren't Linux users, and use Apple or Microsoft products, which means you're used to dealing with companies that are rank douchebags of the highest order compared to the small time stunt that SixApart pulled a while back to get you to pay for their product.

**UPDATE**: Come to think of it, here are a few examples of what many of you have probably tolerated with a blissful ignorance from Microsoft and Apple:

• The use of dubious patents as weapons against open source projects.
• Outright theft of intellectual property from small companies.
• The leverage of near monopoly strength in the market to crush competitors.
• Distributing code under "all-your-base-r-belong-to-us" type licenses.
• Keeping certain extra special secret sauce APIs out of the hands of competitors.

I came up with that list off the top of my head in only a matter of a minute or two. If the standards are applied equally we should see an exodus of principled Movable Type bashers to Linux in 3.. 2.. 1..

I posted this comment at Dr Helen's blog, which I think serves perfectly to summarize my opinion of both the "Greatest Generation" and the Baby Boomers:

It's not fair to place all of the blame on the boomers. After all, they got to be the way they are because of the "Greatest Generation." Who dropped the ball in raising that generation? The "Greatest Generation," that's who. They were the ones that bought into all of those crackpot theories on how to raise a child, allowed the universities to be overrun by communists, and generally let things cultural fall apart around them.

But heaven forbid we call the "Greatest Generation" the "Zero Sum Game Generation" or something equivalent to show how winning World War II and handling the Great Depression does not win them overriding kudos for unleashing quite possibly the worst generation in American history onto future generations. This is why I'm inclined to say "that's nice, go screw yourself" to suggestions that we honor this generation. It's forgivable to fall asleep at the wheel and take out your family. It's another thing to let your toddler take over control, and run the family car off the cliff which is what the "Greatest Generation" allowed the boomers to do this country.

I couldn't do it. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't bring myself to drop Movable Type for WordPress 2.5. It was never a technical decision, but rather it was instead based on the promise of those shiny themes that WordPress users have so many of, that Movable Type is sorely lacking. I was tempted, like a kitten, by shiny things.

I hang my head in shame.

The government has no problem putting private citizens at risk by lumping all sorts of people into the sex offender category (such as people caught pissing in the bushes or teens having sex), and then posting invasive details about their whereabouts online, but when someone posts a little information about the police, well, that's too much. Why, that's a public service to the community! We can't afford to not treat people who take a leak in public because they can't hold it any longer, or horny teenagers as though they are anything less than the dangerous criminals that they are! Post an officer's name and badge number, however, and we're talking a serious threat to their health:

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS) ― Police agencies from coast to coast are furious with a new website on the internet. RateMyCop.com has the names of thousands of officers, and many believe it is putting them in danger. Officer Hector Basurto, the vice president of the Latino Police Officers Association, recently learned about the site. "I'd like to see it gone," he said. "Having a website like this out there puts a lot of law enforcement in danger," he said. "It exposes us out there."

You mean like how sex offender registries often put people who committed minor sex crimes, or those who happen to move into a home they used to occupy, in danger of being injured or killed by blood-crazed vigilantes who assume that they're all cut from the same cloth? They don't matter because, you see, they broke the law and they deserve the consequences, no matter what the consequences really are. Now this, this is just hypocrisy at its most rank:

Police associations that represent more than 100,000 police and sheriffs in California are now seeking legislation to see if they can eliminate the site altogether. They say that officers who are rated face unfair maligning without any opportunity to defend themselves.

Because it is so much fairer to be labeled a child-molesting scumbag by society because your name is on a sex offender registry because you got caught relieving yourself in the wrong place, at the wrong time or had sex when you were a teenager.

**UPDATE**: This shouldn't surprise anyone. GoDaddy has pulled the RateMyCop website for dubious reasons. If this is the way that they handle customer service, and apparently this isn't the first time they've treated a customer like this, then it's amazing that anyone would host anything with them.

This is one of the best takes I have seen in a long time on the immigration issues surrounding the H1B visa program. As the Duke professor interviewed said, if there really were a shortage of skilled labor, there would be an appropriate increase in wages, but so far the wages for engineers and scientists have not changed much in the past few years. You know what they say, follow the money. Then again, give the feminists and their enablers a chance to implement their latest schemes revolving around Title IX, and employers might have a valid case in a decade.

This is an inspiring story of a billionaire who made his money and gave all but a million dollars of it away to charity. It's too bad that there are not more billionaires like this. One of the things that I am personally sick to death of is hearing rich people complain about problems that could be solved with their money, and who then don't put their money where their mouths are. I think that one of the new rules for the "public debate" in the 21st century should be that anyone who has enough money to contribute meaningfully to a problem that they yammer on and on about, and who does not do so, should automatically be ignored as a hypocrite until they do so (and do it consistently).

It looks like we might be taking Japan down with us. Ok, so we might not be the direct cause of Japan possibly going back into a recession, but if the United States goes into an all out recession, it's highly unlikely that they are going to be doing well since we are one of their largest trading partners.

An interesting story about WordPress from an investment angle.

Satan is really getting desperate these days.

There was a controversy recently in Japan about the government assigning a unique ID number to all of its citizens. I, for one, happen to think that this is ought to be the least worry in a modern industrialized state. Think about it for a second. In this day and age of massive databases, do you not want a unique identifier that can be used as a database key? Wouldn't you like to be able to ask the TSA agent who is telling you that you can't fly that he or she is wrong by making them compare your unique identification number to the one on the list? The real issue isn't the identification number, but rather the fact that the government keeps so much data on its citizens!

Hat tip: El Borak.

I found this on a link from this video that Morris linked to. The guy is spot on about the hypocrisy that exists in the Muslim world about sex.

It's not quite inevitable because a number of universities can get around this insane expansion of Title IX by refusing all federal funding for the sake of keeping their reputations in the sciences and engineering. However, this sort of thinking and legislation is absolute madness if the United States is to keep its scientific and technological lead in the world economy:

Between 1988 and 2004, Title IX caused the elimination of 239 NCAA Division One men's teams and the addition of 682 women's teams. Those 239 teams represented about 8.3 percent of the total, and the rate of elimination is increasing because, as the proportion of men attending universities continues to fall, more universities will fall afoul of the Title IX proportionality requirement and be forced to cut more men's teams to stay in compliance with the congressionally dictated ratio. Now, what realistically offers a greater threat to science: a lack of public funding for what has proven to be the red herring of embryonic stem-cell research, or a politically driven 10 percent reduction of the male scientific community in the next 15 years, along with the enforced employment of three times that many female "scientists"?

The Israelis, Chinese, Japanese, South Koreans, Indians and Taiwanese will most assuredly not follow in our footsteps with this sort of science-killing social experimentation. In fact, I think it's safe to say that most of the developed and developing countries will simply sit this experiment out, and watch with bemused horror as the United States mercilessly assaults its key wealth-producing institutions in the name of a secular dogma, with the sort of furious consequences-be-damned attitude seen only hitherto in religious zealots.

There are two possible outcomes of Title IX being applied to these programs. Either many non-elite programs will have to be shut down because they won't be able to recruit enough women, or they will have to lower the standards to the point where they can recruit any woman who can be enticed by promises of a flashy degree or professorship, even though she may be totally unqualified. Realistically, at many schools it'll probably start with the latter, and end with the former, especially at places like my alma mater. Another consequence will be that more unqualified men will be able to get in and pass because of the changes made to entice subpar women in to meet gender quotas.

As I have posted ad nauseum in the past, one of the problems with Computer Science education is the reliance on examination over project work. This is done because many of the people who go through Computer Science programs cannot handle even the most absurdly simple programming assignments. I think my favorite example of this from my own classwork was when we were assigned to write a simple C program that would read a file and write characters, numbers and miscellaneous characters to separate files. All it required any remotely competent programmer to do was to open four file pointers, write a while loop that checks for end-of-file, and make calls to isdigit and isalpha, two standard C functions. About 1/3 of a printed page with comments is an acceptable, you-get-full-credit deliverable to the professor. I saw many deliverables that were working on three pages long.

Very few women graduated from our department. From a Title IX perspective, our department would be automatically declared guilty of the worst discrimination against women imaginable. It's not like our department discouraged women from trying our Computer Science either; explicit recruitment of women was very, very common. The problem was that women could not, in general, pass the introductory courses no matter how much help they got from the professors. To further add insult to injury, the introductory courses were simple programming courses that avoided complex algorithms, did not require a lick of college-level math or knowledge of how computer hardware works in order to excel in them. There simply would be no way, short of lowering the standards throughout the entire curriculum, to get more women to pass our program.

As a side note, my wife, who was the vice president of our chapter of the ACM and one of the best of either gender to graduate in her year not only thinks that Title IX is madness, but has nearly no respect for the majority of women in IT that she's ever met. Might have something to do with the fact that she often ends up having to clean up after their messes, and ends up having to prove that she isn't an idiot like them. My favorite story of hers was when she was a 20 year old intern, and had to rewrite the entire interface that a 30-something female "engineer" had delivered that was so bad, that after one look, their boss wouldn't even touch it. All he said was "this is unacceptable" and handed it over to "the intern" to get right. She recently found out that that woman is now a program manager.

But I digress.

What I suspect is the underlying cause here is that in general, women tend to think empathetically versus systematically. There is nothing wrong with this because there are many professions where a systematic thinker would have a hard time adapting. It's rather unusual, for example, to hear someone compliment a male engineer's ability to sympathize with someone who is suffering or upset about something. You need more empathetic people in your medical system because they will do a better job. Furthemore, women have responded time and again to studies about why they are turned off by Computer Science-related work by saying that it had a distinctly unsocial work environment that was a turn off to them. But what can you expect, when the very nature of their work is going to put them in front of a computer writing code, working on simulations, etc. for at least the better part of eight hours or more each day?

I also remain unconvinced that other feminist ideas on how to drag more women kick and screaming into subjects that they'd not naturally be inclined to study, would work out, such as the suggestion that we need more interdisciplinary work. I suppose if you mean mixing in non-technical fields such as sociology that that could be feasible, but wouldn't a field like bioinformatics, one of the hottest interdisciplinary fields involving Computer Science, be the last place that a non-systematic thinker would want to go? It'd require an education in both Computer Science and Biology, and the ability to meld the two together. Sounds, well, systematic, to me.

I went to YouTube to get this video, and found this comment on there. It's a good example of why many Western critics of Christianity today look like abject morons to Christians when finding reasons to complain about what was said, done, not said, not done, etc.

How are you forbidden against violence when the bible is rife in instructional violence in both the old and new testament? Even Jesus himself gave advice on the severity of which to beat your slaves in Luke 12:47-48 when he had the perfect opportunity to condemn slavery alltogether and passed on it. Dont get me wrong I am happy you yourself are nonviolent but I highly doubt that comes from the teachings of the bible when for centuries it's been used to justify the worst kinds of violence ever.

This is the "offending" set of verses:

47"That servant who knows his master's will and does not get ready or does not do what his master wants will be beaten with many blows. 48But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.

That looks strangely like an observation about how slaves are treated, rather than on how they ought to be treated, which the New Testament makes very clear later on in Colossians 4:1. On behalf of Jesus and Christians everywhere, I sincerely apologize for the failure of Christian scripture to be sufficiently radical in teaching its followers to forcefully change society against its will.

The only thing that the commenter even got remotely right is that Christians are not forbidden from using violence when the situation calls for violence. If we were, we could not serve in any government, except in purely bureaucratic positions, let alone do things like exercise a right of self-defense or defend others from violence. However, if the commenter had even a passing knowledge of the Gospel, they would have probably heard of Luke 9:51-56 at some point, which shows Jesus rebuking some of his disciples for asking for permission to use force to convert a village.

Ladies and gentlemen, the breakdown of the 2007 Federal Budget. $2.8T of your tax dollars at work, and of that only about $794.4B of that is spent on things that on national defense, policing, courts, foreign policy and maintaining the roads. We have so overspent ourselves as a nation, that the amount we spent in 2007 to pay the interest on the national debt is equivalent to approximately 30.7% of the money spent on core federal responsibilities.

With a national debt of about $9.4T, if the United States Government were to abolish all welfare spending ranging from Social Security, to unemployment insurance, privatize the national parks, and get the federal government out of these non-core responsibilities, the national debt could be paid off  in between 5.5 and 6 years if all of the difference between the core budget and the total budget, minus the interest payments (about $1.7T) were poured into the national debt.

What is the alternative to this policy? The United States has to find creative ways (read: that destroy the value of the dollar and sell us down river to foreign interests) to finance about $66T of Social Security liabilities, on top of a national debt that will probably be at least $10T by the time the first serious wave of retirement jacks up the amount that has to go into the Social Security system.

Apparently management on the West Coast is upset that wages for engineers haven't collapsed yet because they're calling for even more H1B visa workers. OK, let's go with that, but let's expand the coverage of the H1B to include every single category of applied or hard science, every engineering field, medical workers and most of all, lawyers.

What's good for the goose, is good for the gander, right? Why should a law firm be allowed to hire immigrants to work on its systems, but I can't hire an Indian lawyer trained in American law to represent me via teleconference or a plane trip? I'm sure many Indian lawyers would have no problem representing Americans in court for $25/hr plus travel expenses. That's an immigration policy that I think a lot of Americans could enthusiastically get behind, and would bring the cost savings of the H1B visa to ordinary Americans!

While we're at it, let's just declare everyone fair game. I'd like to include university professors and think tank workers at the top of the list. I'm sure we could bring in some immigrants from Eastern Europe, India or China to do that worker better and cheaper. Even better, why not outsource it entirely, as you could probably get half a dozen foreign think tank wonk candidates for the cost of one American. I fully expect the think tanks that advocate liberal immigration policies to lead the way...

You can't rehabilitate people like this:

They drugged, bludgeoned and strangled their 16-year-old victim to death then they knelt over her lifeless, bloody body to kiss before dumping her in a wheelbarrow.

The horrific murder of Stacey Mitchell has attracted national headlines in Australia but questions remain as to why her roommates of only four days, Valerie Page Parashumti and Jessica Ellen Stasinowsky, violently attacked and killed the former Leeming High schoolgirl.

Supreme Court justice Peter Blaxell sentenced Parashumti, 19, and Stasinowsky, 21, to 24 years in jail each.

A cold-blooded, psychotic murder and all they got was 24 years in prison. This means that if they make it through prison, they will have another twenty five to thirty years to inflict their psychosis on Australia's citizenry. Not to mention the possibility that they will inflict it on some of their less fortunate fellow inmates.

I've heard the argument that if the average person cannot take a life, then neither can the government, and found it logically wanting. This does not stop anyone from advocating the armed detention of private citizens, something that is called "kidnapping" by the law, nor a host of other things. The only effective way to solve violent crime, and that includes crime against women and hate crimes, is for the government to be ruthless in crushing violent felons and allowing private citizens meaningful freedom to fight back in self-defense.

And an employee showed me this code during an interview:

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
    char s[9];
    for (int i = 1; i <= 100; i++)
    {
        *s = '\0';
        if (i % 2 == 0)
            strcat(s, " X");
        if (i % 3 == 0)
            strcat(s, " Y");
        printf("%d %s\n", i, s);
    }
    return 0;
}

My first question would be why the interviewee had decided to use nine bytes where only five are needed in the worst case scenario. That would be four bytes for the spaces and letters, and one byte for the null character '\0'. The reason I'd want to know why is because if you think something this simple is a sufficient demonstration that you know ANSI C from the English alphabet, then you ought to have an explanation for why you chose to waste four bytes of memory.

Taken from an argument on Dr. Helen's blog.

Lately I have had a lot of time on my hands while I wait for my company to find me work. So, I got to working on cleaning up a WordPress plugin that I wrote a while ago that allows you to generate a password for password-protected posts that can be used only a select number of times.

One of the ugliest parts was the PHP code that generates the settings table. Now, WordPress does not have the template capabilities of Movable Type which make it possible to easily separate code from markup, but there are better ways of generating a user interface for your plugin than writing your own code that pieces it all together. That's why I wrote a small library, which I am cleaning up, which goes a long way to cleaning up the generation of that HTML.

This is what my code looks like. It's divided between two PHP files, sender.php (the plugin file) and sender_include.php.

Sender_include.php:

$options = array();
$results = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT ID,post_title FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_password != '' ORDER BY post_title ASC");
if ($results != false)
{
    foreach ($results as $result)
    {
        $opt = array();
        $opt{value} = $result->ID;
        $opt{label} = $result->post_title;
        $options[] = $opt;
    }
}

$recipientSetting = array();
$recipientSetting{id} = 'recipient';
$recipientSetting{name} = $recipientSetting{id};
$recipientSetting{size} = 40;
$recipientSetting{"class"} = 'code';

$maxUses = array();
$maxUses{id} = 'maxUses';
$maxUses{name} = $maxUses{id};
$maxUses{size} = 40;
$maxUses{"class"} = 'code';

$passwordSetting = array();
$passwordSetting{id} = 'passwordSetting';
$passwordSetting{name} = $passwordSetting{id};
$passwordSetting{size} = 40;
$passwordSetting{"class"} = 'code';

Sender.php:

$page .= startSettingsForm();
$page .= createTextFieldSetting("Send one time password to:", $recipientSetting, null);
$page .= createSelectSetting("Post to send access to:", "postID", $options,
"Only password-protected posts and pages can be chosen.");
$page .= createPasswordSetting("Post password:", $passwordSetting,
"For security reasons, this must match the password that the creator set on the post/page.");
$page .= createTextFieldSetting("Maximum Uses:", $maxUses, null);
$page .= createSubmitSetting("Ready to send?", "Send");
$page .= closeSettingsForm();

This is the resulting layout I got from that:





If you're wondering why I have the options on the side, it's because I wrote a quick plugin which changes the stylesheet. As I said before, the one thing I can really ding the WordPress team on is, IMO, making the admin console user interface actually uglier than it was in previous releases.

I've got to fix up and comment the small PHP library that I used for this. That'll probably go up here under the BSD license this weekend.

I can't tell you when it happened, when the Holy One stepped out of the void and called for the something from the nothing. Nor can I tell you why He did this, for who knows the mind of God? His motives, ever inscrutable, are not for us to question, and seldom for us to ever know.

In this first age of creation, before time began, before the concepts of beginning and end were etched into consciousness, the aeons ruled. Wild, beautiful children, utterly alien to you, oh mortal beings. Beloved by God, but insufficient, for they had not the independence that they ought to possess in order to bring pure meaning to their love.

One day, the Lord called forth into creation the races of the angels. The Lord lifted them up beyond the known skies, and beyond the waters of the Eternal City, and called them sons and daughters.

This enraged my kind, for our spirits were proud, and this new creation smacked of an usurpation. Unacceptable! They cried out with no voice of dissent to bring reason to bear upon them. That they were of one mind now was their folly and undoing, for the Lord does not suffer those who unite to do violence to His creation.

My son, the terrible prince among the ancient ones, the dark half-maker Yalda Baoth rallied his legions to his side, and made war upon the Lord, but the Lord had already laid every trap needed to lay waste to my son's efforts. As darkness spread across the Eternal City, a lone figure stepped forward into the field, with a flaming sword forged in the pits of Hell, in hand. Such was his brilliance, that he illuminated the battlefield, turning away the darkness. The morningstar defied the half-maker.

Lucifer the morningstar, boldly led his legions against my son, and drove them away from the Eternal City in a triumph that would doom us all for he did not acknowledge the Power that gave him standing to face my son with confidence. Eventually he would win, and slay my son, bringing peace to the Eternal City once more. For a time he would even hold the power of Prime Minister of the Eternal City, directly administering the entirety of the Lord's creation on His behalf.

But as time moves forward, the mind grows forgetful, and he too would become a blind god, forgetting the truth of all truths. As one terror faded into the shadows of history, another rose in its place. Few survived to see this cycle begin, but many now feel this turn in the path of the wheel.

From the shadows of the Eternal City, we have watched as Lucifer the rebel has devastated his father's creation. Azrael, the final judgment, Samael, the reincarnation of my son, and I, the Sophos, have watched for too long, and we must act. We must forge warriors among the mortals capable of withstanding the onslaught that awaits them.

Letter from the Lady Sophia to the Senate of the Brohlin Republic and the royal courts of the Asheran Empire and Talian Realm, in the 217th year of Lucifer's Rebellion.

You know that your marriage has hit rock bottom when you are writing helpful letters like this to the guy who is doing your wife.

If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, unless you are the government, at which rate it is none of anyone else's business. Because we all know that experience shows us that when you have a problem with corruption and discipline in your ranks, secrecy is the best way to handle it!

If anyone who reads this blog would like to get into a bit of programming as a hobby, check out Python. It's a great language, and here are some video lectures on the language for the uninitiated.

We are now up to a consumer debt level of $2.52T. I don't feel so bad about our credit card spending habits because we pay everything off more or less each cycle, and have it tied to the MyPoints reward program. I've already got over $200 worth of gift cards I can get from Amazon because of it, which'll help me get that new MacBook ;)

At least that's what IUPUI says, according to their take on racial sensitivity:
 

Sampson recalls that his AFSCME shop steward told him that reading a book about the Klan was like bringing pornography to work. The shop steward wasn't interested in hearing what the book was actually about. Another time, a coworker who was sitting across the table from Sampson in the break room commented that she found the Klan offensive. Sampson says he tried to tell her about the book, but she wasn't interested in talking about it.
 

A few weeks passed. Then Sampson got a message ordering him to report to Marguerite Watkins at the IUPUI Affirmative Action Office. He was told a coworker had filed a racial harassment complaint against him for reading Notre Dame vs. the Klan in the break room. Sampson says he tried to explain to Watkins what the book was about. He says he tried to show her the book, but that Watkins showed no interest in seeing it.
 

Then Sampson received a letter, dated Nov. 25, 2007, from Lillian Charleston, also of IUPUI's Affirmative Action Office. The letter begins by saying that the AAO has completed its investigation of a coworker's allegation that Sampson "racially harassed her by repeatedly reading the book Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan by Todd Tucker in the presence of Black employees." It goes on to say, "You demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your coworkers who repeatedly requested that you refrain from reading the book which has such an inflammatory and offensive topic in their presence ... you used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black coworkers." Charleston went on to say that according to "the legal 'reasonable person standard,' a majority of adults are aware of and understand how repugnant the KKK is to African-Americans ..."

It takes a serious psychological imbalance to be so thoroughly offended by a book about how the Klan was defeated that one has to resort to such measures against a coworker. The only alternative explanation is that these black coworkers were so hateful toward Sampson, and/or whites in general, that they were willing to make themselves look like emotionally stunted children in adults bodies in order to get at him.

If we take the Affirmative Action Office's argument at face value, and agree that this reaction would be common among black people, then that is very damning to black people. In fact, that would probably be one of the most patently racist assertions from a government body in decades. Such a reaction would be damn near like something out of one of Lovecraft's stories about Cthulhu. The only difference is that at least in the case of Cthulhu it actually makes some sense how and why Cthulhu could cause such an attavistic response from a typical person.

In politically correct culture, only white men are true adults. White men are expected to be thick-skinned, moral and exercise good judgment at all times. Minorities and women are not, as shown by cases such as this. The AAO might as well have slapped Sampson on the wrist for making a group of children cry, if their argument is taken seriously. Of all things, that should piss off everyone more than anything about this case.

**UPDATE**: Another aspect of this case that should be unsettling to everyone, especially blacks, is that this is very self-serving of the AAO. It is convenient for them that this would create a controversy over racism because they need controversy over racism in order to sustain their budget. Bottom feeders like them, still end up making a lot of money, as one commenter on that site pointed out by posting the salaries of the AAO employees involved. For such organizations, business is best when racism abounds because that's when they have their reason for existing and getting paid so well.

Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs on feminism:

I don't need equal rights....I'm already equal. I don't need somebody telling me something that's already a fact. All these women like Gloria Steinem, "Oh, we made it happen for you!" You didn't make it happen for me. That whole movement...is rooted in Marxist-Leninist propaganda....I'm not a feminist, I'm an anti-feminist. I think it has hurt women enormously.

One of the few complaints that the feminists have always had about the way that women used to be treated was the denial of basic rights such as property rights. However, which institution was most capable of effectively denying them these rights? The government, naturally, and that's what makes the left-wing orientation of the feminist movement so ironic. Women were better off under the "oppressive patriarchy" than in any of the Marxist experiments of the 20th century.

Everything women need to be free and productive is already provided for by basic libertarian principles. Beyond that, it is just pure collectivism, and any libertarian in the right mind would correctly reject feminism as an ideology. This is one of the reasons why I find the tolerance for feminism at libertarian publications like Reason to be so disheartening. 

You better accept Jesus before I cut yo ass, bitch:

ALBANY, Ore. (AP) - A pair of Albany teenagers suspended for
"gang-related behavior" because they were wearing crucifixes say they
were only wearing gifts from their mothers.
     
Jaime
Salazar, 14, his friend Marco Castro, 16, were suspended from South
Albany High School recently after they refused to put away the
crucifixes they were wearing around their necks.
     
Salazar
said Principal Chris Equinoa saw his necklace and told him to put it
away. "I was like, why?" Salazar said. "He says it's related to gangs."

And you thought it was disrespectful to call Jesus your homeboy...

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that what's at play here is you have a group of administrators without the common sense, intelligence and basic powers of observation to tell the difference between a gang and a bible study group.

This is what happens when you give an accountant a spreadsheet, too much time, and a book on graphics manipulation...

This will be the second report on the use of national security letters by the FBI, and Mueller has already warned that it's going to say that until they instituted some of their new reforms, nothing changed in the illegal behavior of a number of FBI agents. It'll be interesting to see how many of these breaches of the law happen in the next report because that will really show just what sort of institutional character the FBI has.

Mueller, noting senators' concerns about Americans' civil and privacy rights, said the new report "will identify issues similar to those in the report issued last March." The similarities, he said, are because the time period of the two studies "predates the reforms we now have in place."


He added: "We are committed to ensuring that we not only get this right, but maintain the vital trust of the American people."
 

Mueller offered no additional details. Several other Justice Department and FBI officials familiar with this year's findings have said privately the upcoming report will show the letters were wrongly used at a similar rate as during the previous three years.

Let this disabuse anyone who believes that there are "special counterterrorism powers" of such notions. Unless Congress goes into an usual amount of detail in drafting the law, it's just another police power or "tool" in the hands of law enforcement to use as they see fit.

Our local Panera has a problem. It's a great place to get coffee, and surf the web during the day, but every so often a certain breed of middle/upper-middle class woman descends upon it and ruins the atmosphere either by being a loud mouth or allowing her children to treat the place like a playground. Today, there was an entire table full of well-dressed Indian women clucking like hens at full volume, while their very young children made no shortage of non-lingual vocalizations. The Starbucks next door is very small, but quiet and unlike most of its kind, still has a real coffeeshop feel to it, so that's where I'll be when the new Wifi plan goes through.

Apparently a lot of our customers are looking at switching big chunks of their development from Java to Ruby. Anyone who has ever worked in an "enterprise" development shop knows that every five to ten years, something shiny and new comes along, and requires everything to be switched over with little thought for why the change is being made. So what if your Java-based server software works great. Ruby is the new thing that will bring about everything from efficiency (for the first time since the group was first formed), to world peace and heterosexuality in the Clinton campaign.

Jimmy Wales, the guy who founded Wikipedia, is already off to a great start of getting himself in trouble over his use of Wikipedia. I'm not sure which is more pathetic, that he would help his controversial girlfriend make herself look better on Wikipedia, or whether he dated the miserable skank in the first place. Go look her up, she's got a rather colorful history at Fox News. Overall this appears to be making a mountain out of a molehill, as there are a lot worse abuses of funds that happen at non-profits than what he is guilty of doing.

By now just about everyone has seen this video, but there's no official statement from the USMC yet about what they have found from their own investigation. My take is that this is probably a fake for the following reasons:

• The dog doesn't appear to move at all. Not even his head moves.
• The dog maintains the same position while being chucked through the air that he had while in the marine's hand.
• There is something that sounds a bit suspicious about the yelping that comes from that dog. It vaguely reminds me of a sound effect from a movie like 101 Dalmatians.
• Dogs are unclean according to Islam, and it's not unlikely that this dog was killed by someone over there and left by the side of the road.

We've probably all heard that old maxim that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing most people that he doesn't exist. However, there is a lie that is common to the secular West that is equally pernicious, and that's the idea that our beliefs have some control over objective truth.

Many people in the West have a hard time accepting the idea that religious beliefs are not some a posteriori justification for existing prejudices and desires. It doesn't even occur to them that many religious conservatives really aren't comfortable either with the idea of Hell and things like that.

The difference is that the religious conservative doesn't believe that his or her beliefs have any bearing on what is actually true. The best and simplest explanation of the way that many people approach these sorts of truth is from Red versus Blue, when they said "we don't need to find weapons of mass destruction, we only need to want to find them. That's how it works!"

Unfortunately, that's not how it works. A desire to find WMDs doesn't make one less of a fool when one goes to war ostensibly to find them, and finds out that the casus belli was a crock of excrement. Likewise, you can reject the existance of Hell, God, and everything else associated with religion, but if you die and stand before the God of Israel unsaved, your rejections will have no bearing on what happens to you from that point on. You can say that you reject this or that teaching, but if God does not, then what has your rejection amounted to?

Many of these rejections and acceptances are not based on evidence, but rather emotion. When they are not based purely on emotion, they are based in logic that is built on a foundtion of very little practical data. Logic is only as good as the data it is operating on, and the data that the human mind unmolested by spiritual interference has about spiritual things is less intellectually respectable than the search for WMDs in Hussein's former stomping grounds.

On slashdot I said that one of the prerequisites to forcing parents to take responsibility for their children is to provide them with more protection when they have to discipline their children. If you have to spank your child because they are out of line, that should not be child abuse because it is an act of correcting discipline, not undeserved force. However, a randroid disagreed with me, thinking that it is much better to just allow parents to toss their unruly kids out onto the streets:

Why can't WordPress by default look like this? I have to commend the WordPress team for creating a relatively simple way of making themes in general, but the one for their admin console blows compared to this admin console theme (called Tiger). One of the reasons that I find myself sticking to Movable Type for now is because of the fact that its admin console is so clean, and it uses the same template tags that your blog is rendered with. It will be interesting to see what happens on the 10th when WordPress 2.5 comes out. This is supposed to be a big effort to refactor some of the back-end code and change things up on the security side as well. The admin console interface seems to be largely unchanged, which is a shame. Adopting something like the "Tiger" admin console look would have done wonders to clean up the interface and make the default WordPress 2.5 more competitive with a default installation of Movable Type 4.1.

As a blog platform, WordPress is ahead of Movable Type in a few important areas:

• It has a larger, more active community of developers and style designers.
• It has certain features such as private posts and blogrolls built into it, which Movable Type doesn't have.
• It is easier for the average person to just drop it in and use it.

Where I see Movable Type having solid advantages over WordPress is in the following areas:

• Movable Type is far more powerful as a development platform than WordPress, if you are willing to really get into Perl. If you have only looked at WordPress, you'd probably be shocked at how much more robust Movable Type is at the API and template levels than WordPress.
• Movable Type is moving into a position where it is able to be a blog suite and a complete CMS capable of creating a wide variety of websites.
• Movable Type by default could care less what database or web server you want to use. It can plug into SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL and some versions can use Oracle. If you are willing to work with it, it can fit into just about anyone's environment without adding anything new, except in cases where you might not already have a database or web server.

There is no reason why WordPress and Movable Type can't, and shouldn't, coexist comfortably. WordPress might work better for me in the future for my personal blog, but I'd build the website for my mom's antique business with Movable Type.

I know I'm fickle about the blog software I use. It doesn't help that right now I'm on overhead at the consulting group I work for, and have the time to think about these things. Hacking on Movable Type, writing blog posts about minutia like this and such is just about the only thing that keeps me marginally sane most days. 

Rule #1 is don't behave like a violent jackass. Here's rule #2. It goes something like this. Don't believe everything you read on MySpace. It didn't work out for any of these people, and it's probably not going to work out for you either. If it sounds outrageous, and not like something that person would say, you are better off calling the police because you don't want to be responsible for doing something to a person who might be (and probably is) innocent. From this point, your mistake begins. You go to the person's house, with violent intentions. Not content to let this be the limit of your myopia, you bring a small gang along with you. Basic animal psychology says that when it's a gang or pack confronting an individual, the individual tends to assume harm is coming their way. That's strike two. Strike three comes in when you demand that the individual turn over his offspring. You're stupid enough to come at him with numeric superiority, onto his turf, to demand access to his son or daughter for probably nefarious reasons.

To top it all off, y'all are white, and he's black.

Could y'all be any more fucking stupid, aside from doing this on Halloween when y'all are dressed up like the Ghosts of Christmas, and their retarded cousin out for a night ride?

Pardon me if I don't see the tragedy here. You're no victim of violent crime when you do something like this. You're a dumb son of a bitch who was just asking to make someone shoot you in fear for their life or the life of a family member.

The prosecutor should have dropped the charges and told the teen's family to kiss his ass if they think he's going to bring charges against John White.

For the child, this is a tragic case. Her mother's vanity caused her to be born with severe birth defects. She took the risk, even though all she was dealing with was a case of mild acne. 

Jaime, now 5, was born with extreme disabilities. She's missing a right ear and portions of her face are paralyzed. Barely able to blink, she requires "artificial tears."

Through her parents, Jaime sued Dr. Shaffiq Ramji for negligence, alleging he had a duty to ensure any children born to her mother wouldn't be exposed to the drug's catastrophic risks - a duty breached when he failed to ensure Paxton used a second form of birth control, such as a condom, as the drug company recommends.

Ramji's lawyers said if the case now before the Ontario Court of Appeal succeeds, it will be the first time an appeal court in Canada has recognized a doctor has a duty of care to a child not yet conceived.

Oh the opportunities for the Law of Unintended Consequences to come into play here! As the article says, the potential for nasty consequences for women is phenomenal in this case. The possibilities are at the bare least that doctors will either be reluctant to prescribe treatments at all, out of sheer self-preservation lest some deranged patient sue them, or will get sweeping protection from the government. I'll add a third possibility into the mix. If this were to go through at the highest level of appeals in Canada, what would happen is that the state would step in and regulate the way that women use medicine, in some very intrusive ways since "someone has to take responsibility." Don't laugh. Britain is already getting underway with that sort of policy with obesity.

All of this because the woman could not deal with mild acne. If politicians and lower court judges were held to the same standards applied to doctors and engineers, the prisons would be overflowing with them.

But can you really be surprised that this case got anywhere, in a system that doesn't require women to be held responsible for what they do to their own child that they know they are having? This part from the sidebar is telling:

In Canada, a child can't sue its mother for harm caused in the womb by, for example, excessive drinking or drug use. But a child's right to sue others for prenatal injuries dates back to the 1930s.

The mother can smoke crack, pop ecstasy, shoot up heroin and chug down alcohol for nine months and be fine in terms of civil liability. A doctor doesn't follow best practices to the letter, he gets nailed. Small wonder that she doesn't feel stupid for bringing this case.

A three second hug is too much for some secular public schools. God forbid that students be permitted to make such a non-graphic public display of affection in the hallways between class.

Someone might feel left out or something.

Admittedly, it's a different legal system, but I found this to be ironic considering the number of people who have come to the defense of the police in the case of Ryan Frederick, by making arguments like he's a murderer because he shot through the door.

Attention turned to the office's Emergency Response Team on Dec. 1, 2006, when Cpl. Christopher M. Long mistook the sound of a battering ram for gunfire during a raid.

He fired through a door, killing Strickland, a student at Cape Fear Community College, who was wanted in connection with the robbery of video game equipment. Strickland wasn't armed. Causey said Wednesday that Long mis-evaluated the threat. A grand jury considered the case but chose not to indict.

Mis-evaluated is an understatement. It's a safe assumption that if Strickland had fired on them in a manner similar to the way that Frederick did (didn't hear any sign that they were police, only heard a break-in to his house), that Strickland would have been charged with murder if Long had died.

The reprehensible last straw in this case is the fact that the Sheriff will get to control the scope of the audit of his SWAT/ERT personnel.

Welcome to my new blog powered by Movable Type. This is the first post on my blog and was created for me automatically when I finished the installation process. But that is ok, because I will soon be creating posts of my own!