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: 

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.

This is what a post with a comment and trackback link would look like.

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