May 2008 Archives

A lot of people fall back on an Old Testament-like approach to punishing the hell out of people for crimes, rather than trying to be more moderate and ease reformable offenders back into society. I should qualify that point by saying that the Old Testament at least has good reasons for what it does, which is more than can be said about a lot of law and order conservatives. This is why I've come up with a simple response to law and order conservatives who draw on the Bible to justify their approach to law and order:

"What would Jesus do? He'd demand to see your two witnesses."

During the early days of the Republican primary, I was reluctant to support Mike Huckabee because of what conservatives from Arksansas had to say about him. They accused him of being the Republican Party's answer to Bill Clinton, just without the sex scandals. That's the sort of thing that makes a conservative-leaning libertarian like myself think twice about a candidate. In a new interview, Huckabee has shown that if he were elected, chances are he would have been part of the problem, not the solution, as he clearly does not represent conservative positions:

Republicans need to be Republicans. The greatest threat to classic Republicanism is not liberalism; it's this new brand of libertarianism, which is social liberalism and economic conservatism, but it's a heartless, callous, soulless type of economic conservatism because it says "look, we want to cut taxes and eliminate government. If it means that elderly people don't get their Medicare drugs, so be it. If it means little kids go without education and healthcare, so be it." Well, that might be a quote pure economic conservative message, but it's not an American message. It doesn't fly. People aren't going to buy that, because that's not the way we are as a people. That's not historic Republicanism. Historic Republicanism does not hate government; it's just there to be as little of it as there can be. But they also recognize that government has to be paid for.

It wasn't obvious just how out of touch Huckabee is with the rest of the party until he started making comments like this. One can only surmise that if you think McCain is going to lead the Republican Party down a bad road if he gets elected, Huckabee would lead it right off the cliff! The primary reason why the Republican Party's base has been alienated from the party is because of the fact that under the last seven years of Republican "leadership" in the body politic the party has flat out rejected any pretense to libertarianism or limited government politics. This is the party that gave us the Medicare drug package, the farm bill, the Bridge to Nowhere^tm and the extremely expensive campaign in Iraq whose sole beneficiaries have been contractors like Halliburton and KBR.

One of the things that is extremely aggravating about people like Huckabee is that they are intellectual lightweights when it comes to hard subjects like how, exactly, America is going to pay for those "Medicare drugs" and other expensive programs. The Federal Reserve's claims to the contrary, money does not grow on trees. People like Huckabee from both parties have created a system between Social Security and Medicare that has about fifty to sixty trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities. He, and those like him, can engage in emotional hand-waiving and rhetoric about how rich America is, but the fact, as officially admitted by the federal government, is that all of America's combined wealth is not enough to pay even half of the unfunded liabilities just from Social Security.

Let me put it more bluntly for the people who don't understand economics at all. If the federal government nationalized every single piece of property owned by every single American, it would not cover even half of the debt that we have gotten ourselves into for just Social Security. That doesn't even cover military, civil service and state/local pensions.

If you have a breakdown in the social structure of a community, it's going to result in a more costly government ... police on the streets, prison beds, court costs, alcohol abuse centers, domestic violence shelters, all are very expensive. What's the answer to that? Cut them out? Well, the libertarians say "yes, we shouldn't be funding that stuff." But what you've done then is exacerbate a serious problem in your community. You can take the cops off the streets and just quit funding prison beds. Are your neighborhoods safer? Is it a better place to live? The net result is you have now a bigger problem than you had before.

This is an area where social conservatives tend to just not even listen to the arguments that libertarians make. Taking police off the streets is the last thing that libertarians support; policing is one of the few things that libertarians unequivocally support the government doing to the best of its abilities. Furthermore, libertarians tend to not favor many of the laws that conservatives like Huckabee support that end up creating the need for more government in the first place.

Most of the people in prison right now are in there because of drug-related offenses. If libertarians had their way, none of them would be in there for the drug crimes. Why, just imagine how much cheaper it would be for us to run government in America if drug users and drug dealers whose only offense is selling drugs weren't in prison! Why, there would be a whole lot of room for violent crimes in our prisons, and there would still be room for cutting budgets!

My experience in Arkansas was, a lot of the so-called conservatives said "Let's cut the budget." But they wanted to add prison sentences, they wanted to eliminate parole, they wanted to have harsher sentences for various crimes. And I said "OK, that's fine, but that's going to be expensive. So which do you want?" You can't have both, or you do what the federal government has done, and this is where I think Republicans have been especially irresponsible. Their approach has been [to] just kick the can down the road and let your grandkids pay for it.

Here Huckabee starts out with a good point, and then does not connect it to the very positions he supports. Let me say this again: Huckabee is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Following his approach on social spending issues, the Republican Party was forced to kick that can down the road in order to not get in even deeper trouble with its base by raising taxes. If the Republicans had actually run the government like libertarians while they had the resources to do so, the federal government would have been running a budget surplus, there would be fewer people in federal prisons, and the national debt would be shrinking, not growing substantially.

So they run up huge deficits ... but they've pushed those costs down to the states, and the states have to eat it, because they have to balance their budgets, they don't get to print money or borrow. Or the federal government just runs up more deficits and let's the next couple of generations worry about paying for all this stuff.

Either way, it's irresponsible, and I think people in America are smarter than that and they know that's not the responsible way to approach governing.

And this is key to why many of us rejected Huckabee. The man can see the trees, but not the forrest. He can point to every point in a graph, but remains unable to see the lines connecting them. On a meaningful level, Huckabee understands what is fundamentally wrong with the Republican Party on individual issues, but he is just incapable of actually stepping back and seeing how they come together. Fundamentally, he is a doctor who can rapidfire identify the symptoms without having a clue as to what the disease is.

Huckabee's positions just don't come together. You cannot coherently go off on fiscal discipline issues and then demand more government money be spent on the poor. The very reason that the federal government has such a flimsy operation today is due to the fact that the majority of its annual budget is spent on social welfare programs. About $1.8T of its $2.7T budget is social welfare spending. That ranges from education, to welfare, to food stamps, to Medicare. Yet that isn't even close to what continuing these policies over the next twenty years will require.

Vox Day brings up some great points about vaccines. The study involving the monkeys that he links to is the sort of thing that lends credence to my belief that there is a minority of children whose bodies have a severe reaction to the mercury in thimerosol. Something is causing an increase in the rate of autism, and it sure as hell isn't more autistic people getting their freak on.

The vaccine cheerleaders, who have yet to prove their case methodically, could argue that if they are proved right, then every unvaccined, dead child is blood on the hands of those of us calling for restraint. That same argument would also implicate environmentalists who oppose the use of DDT in areas where malaria is a problem, among many other examples. After all, if we are implicated by sheer reluctance and skepticism, then how much more would others be implicated because they dogmatically refuse to use a proven solution for unsound reasons? If we are guilty of child abuse, then the environmentalists are guilty of genocide, based on that counter-argument.

If vaccines are proved to be harmful in a subset of children, then the vaccine cheerleaders will find some way to backpedal out of that situation. They'll probably hide behind the ignorance that existed in the scientific community, claiming that the lack of obvious evidence was seeming proof enough that it worked (ironically, they'll castigate creationists for the same logic). One thing is for certain, and that's that while ideas may have consequences, it won't be the tireless, evidenceless supporters of systematic, mandatory vaccination that will bear them.

Glenn Reynolds has a pretty fair review of the nine inch Asus Eee PC up at Pajamas Media. Now, I have not used this version, nor have I tried to use the seven inch model extensively, but this is my take on it from playing around with it in a store.

The seven inch model was all but unusable if you don't have small hands. Add onto that the problems with trying to run a regular desktop environment on such a small screen. The nine inch model is probably bearable in both respects now, but it costs $550 and sports ridiculously underpowered hardware. Take a gander at what $550 will buy you at Dell.com. If you are willing to spend twice that much, you can get an entry-level MacBook with free shipping, that is significantly more powerful than this mini laptop, and that isn't particularly big either at thirteen inches.

This is more of a novelty for those with the dispoable income to buy a laptop whose primary claim to fame is being tiny. In terms of usefulness and longevity, you would be insane to buy a current generation Eee PC for your primary computer, especially if you don't have a lot of money to throw around.

I am nearly halfway through Jonah Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism, and I highly recommend it to every one of my readers. Not only is it well-researched and well-written, it is as devastating, if not more so, than the Irrational Atheist in how systematically it attacks its intended targets. Ironically, having read about the Wilson era, I have actually come to have a sort of appreciation for the freedom that we have today. Believe it or not, but America was actually significantly less free during the days of the Wilson Administration than it is today. Imagine an era in which America actually had a propaganda ministry that could function on the level of a major totalitarian state and where we had a bona fide secret police force. Throw in where criticizing the government, not sedition, but criticizing, the government could get you sent to prison, and where there were at least 175,000 political prisoners.

I took yesterday off from work because I just needed to have some time to relax with Rachel. She got a chance to work on her new hobbies around the apartment, and I got to watch a lot of anime that I hadn't had a chance to catch up on thanks to some free time and my AppleTV. For fans of vampire movies, I recommend the series Trinity Blood. It's about four humans who are genetically and cybernetically enhanced with nanotechnology until they are seriously advanced vampiric beings called Cruzniks. 1,000 years after the UN and the Martian colonists fight a war that brings down world civilization on Earth, the Earth is divided between the territories of the Roman Catholic Church and the vampire's empire. The Cruzniks are divided basically between these two sides. Anyway, great story IMO. Also, I got a MacBook Pro from the Apple Store using an education discount. Saved ten percent that way. Amazing laptop, far superior to anything I've used among PC products lately, and I am glad to be a Mac user again (three out of four of my laptops over the last nearly nine years have been Macs).

Typical liberal thinking about censoring hate speech:

This focus on the Internet is significant. Just last week, the U. S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs released a report confirming that Internet Web sites remain the most important recruitment tool used by violent Islamist extremist groups to cultivate "the homegrown terrorist threat." While Section 13(1) is obviously incapable of ridding the Internet of such content, the Zundel case demonstrates that it can deal with the use of Canada as a base for such activities.

Except that Canada does not have a track record of going after Islamist speech. In fact, the free speech restrictions have hitherto been primarily used by the fellow travelers of the Islamists to shut down those who have the audacity to speak out against Islamism and the Muslim "moderates" who are often sympathetic to it on some level. It is much easier to go after a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier because they are fewer in number to begin with, and no self-proclaimed moderate in their right mind who has sympathies for their goals would admit as much. Hence, for it is easy to target Holocaust deniers with the Orwellian-named Human Rights Act because in general, to target them is to target an unsupported individual, whereas to target an Imam for preaching jihad is to target most of a congregation. We simply cannot have that because that would explode the myth that most Muslims are just as peace-loving by nature as the average religious person in Western society.

Freiman, the author of the linked article, does not seem to be a real student of history. The movements that unleashed actual genocide did not need mass media to gain the foundation that they used to rise up into politics. Rather, groups like the Nazis built their movements organically on the street. The only way to deal with that sort of hateful, totalitarian politics with censorship would be to create a truly repressive censorship regime which in all likelihood would only serve to provide an alluring mystique to its targets in the eyes of many.

Ironically, the Canadian Jewish Congress is a major supporter of laws whose primary effect has been to give their enemies a means to attack the Jews' natural allies on the conservative, Christian right. Then again, as history has shown, the relationship between Jews and state power has been akin to that between insects and bug zappers (ever drawn to it for protection, always hurt by it, never learning their lesson as a group).

How China may end up perfecting the sort of surveillance state the British have been working on:

As China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen, Klein continues, "is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of a vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range - a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world."

Security cameras are part of a much broader high-tech surveillance and censorship program known as the "Golden Shield" adopting the latest people-tracking technology - generously supplied with the latest American "homeland security" technologies from giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric - to create Klein observes: an "airtight consumer cocoon: a place where Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cellphones, McDonald's Happy Meals, Tsingtao beer and UPS delivery (to name just a few of the official sponsors of the Beijing Olympics) can be enjoyed under the unblinking eye of the state, without the threat of democracy breaking out."

In Shenzhen one night, Klein has dinner with a U.S. business consultant named Stephen Herrington. Before he started lecturing at Chinese business schools, Klein writes Herrington taught students concepts like brand management. Herrington was a military-intelligence officer, ascending to the rank of lieutenant colonel. What he is seeing in the Pearl River Delta, Klein relates, "is scaring the hell out of him - and not for what it means to China."

A while ago I realized that the reason that so few people are really willing to play hardball in American politics for their liberty is that consumerism has made many of the attacks on our liberty tolerable. As long as the people have their consumer goods, and relative comfort, human nature is quite resiliant to government abuse. Not only that, but the fear of losing one's comfort and wealth in a fairly wealthy society is ample motivation for most people to just toe the line without much complaint.

Acts of civil disobedience like shooting out security cameras would only go so far if the government truly invests itself into becoming a surveillance state. You can only destroy so many sensors before someone or something discovers you and punishes you quite severely for stepping out of line.

None of this is really a threat to American "democracy," as the majority of the people will quietly acquiesce to the changes being proposed in order to keep their homes and wealth secure. As always, what we will lose is not democracy, but rather liberty. The one quality about this sort of tyranny that will make it tolerable is that it will prove to be short lived because a tyranny that relies on consumerist decadence relies on people who value consumer goods over transcendental values such as liberty and family. Demographics will, over a few generations, tend to bring such a society to its knees one way or another.

Show him an iPhone with this theme. I decided to give Vista another try on my laptop, and so far it's working out very well. It actually feels like an upgrade so far, rather than the downgrade that most people call it. Then again, I'm a console gamer, so YMMV...

The Agitator has an excellent update on the case of Ryan Frederick. It is increasingly looking like yet another case of drug police using any excuse they can whip up to use a forced entry into a private home in the middle of the night. Some may find that comment extreme, but here are the known facts, and the facts that appear to be emerging in this new phase of the case:

What we know:

• Ryan has no prior record as a drug dealer. In fact, aside from a few driving violations, he's as clean on his record as the average citizen.
• No signs of a drug dealing outfit were discovered at his premises, unless you count a small amount of recreational drugs as a sign that he was a drug dealer.
• He had been burgled a few nights before the raid, and police indicated that they knew this, thus admitting that they knew they were creating an unnecessarily violent situation.
• His neighbors all have good things to say about living in the same neighborhood with him. In fact, they are some of his biggest supporters.
• There was no surveillance of his property to verify any of the claims made by the informant.

What is starting to come out:

• The informant had a grudge against Ryan.
• The informant was a arrested for serious financial crimes.

This is Law Enforcement 101 material, or it should be. The only time it is acceptable for the police to take the risks associated with going in guns blazing without much evidence is in an extraordinary situation like a hostage crisis. There, they can't easily corroborate evidence, and the risks to innocent lives are high enough that something must be done immediately. In cases like Ryan's, there's no reason they couldn't have grabbed him on his way to work, and executed a search warrant on his house.

There are simply no grounds to defend the cops here. They knew when he went to work, and could have had an unmarked car down the street ready to pounce on him as he walked to his car. If there is anyone who deserves to rot in prison for Detective Shiver's death, it is the officer who acted on this information in the way they did.

It's almost as if the government cares more about spewing data out to the public to make it look like it's doing its job rather than go through all of the trouble of creating lists that are actually usable:

According to a Belleville News-Democrat investigation, 11,473 people have appealed to strike their names from the state record. The list has a 27 percent error rate of parents falsely accused of abuse. Once on the list, people are required to remain there for a minimum of five years.

With an error rate that high, the list is useless in practice. Just like the TSA no-fly list is useless today because it has so many thousands of people on it that shouldn't be on it. Just like how sex offender registries are often poorly updated, and cover so many crimes that they are barely usable for sorting the harmless from the harmful with respect to known offenders.

One of the real differences between engineers and social engineers is that being a social engineer means never having to say that you are sorry or pay for the consequences of your actions when your work hurts people. If a bridge collapses, a civil engineer loses his license. If faulty software ends up killing someone, the software developer can often be sued despite what any EULA says. How many social engineers get sued because they create policy and law which flat out doesn't work and hurts people?

None.

Jesus McCain? Nothing like a blasphemous comparison of a politician to Jesus to start the day off, right? Granted, I'd see some of the similarity and even enthusiastically support him if his first actions as President would be to chase the New York investment bankers and plebian beggars out of the Federal Reserve with a whip. Then again, I'd also enthusiastically support almost anyone whose platform included liquidating every lobbyist in DC in the first 30 days, so YMMV.

How does a 82", 2160p resolution TV sound? One thing is for certain, it will be another blow to the porn industry because it will be impossible for them to hide flaws and imperfections on a screen that high resolution. Less skin, more violence.

Some interesting comments about using C for two semesters in college today. C is a great language to learn first because basic C is very simple stuff. It would take a while before you could do anything complicated with it, but it's a pretty gentle language and can interact well with other languages.

Forced smiling is bad for your health. I had long suspected as much. This probably explains part of why it can be so stressful to work in a corporate environment, with all of its fake courtesy and niceness.

I posted a new Movable Type style. Check out the demo here.

It would be much easier to send the guilty among these to prison:

Through the existing Fairplay system, investigators log onto peer-to-peer file-sharing networks as any other person would and search for files containing certain keywords that are likely to indicate child pornography is involved. Then they download files--frequently videos, sometimes as long as 20 to 30 minutes, with names like "children kiddy underage illegal.mpg" and much more obscene--to their own machines. The Fairplay software allows the investigator to obtain the IP address of the file's sender and, in some cases, display its geographic location in map form.

Once armed with an IP address and date and time of the download, investigators can subpoena the Internet service provider for more information, such as name and address of the subscriber who was assigned it at that moment. It's not clear whether any wiretaps are also conducted to monitor ongoing file-swapping.

Through that process, investigators have identified more than 600,000 unique computers allegedly trafficking in child pornography and traced them to the United States. But Biden and others have voiced dismay that they're only equipped with the resources to investigate about 2 percent of those potential cases.

If the ATF and DEA were dismantled, their investigators merged into the FBI and their budgets put toward this, just think of how many investigations they could perform every year. The prisons wouldn't be overflowing with drug offenders, but rather with sex offenders. Granted, many of these cases, probably most of them, are not actually guilty of breaking the law because you cannot go on the file name to determine guilt. Stuff on P2P networks is misnamed all the time, as pretty much everyone who has used the software has seen from time to time.

This problem is a serious one, and I would hazard to guess that this statistic is only the tip of the iceberg of the problem in America today. Fighting the pornography aspect of it doesn't fight the root cause of the issue. The root cause is child molestation, which has been proved time and again to create new generations of offenders. The key to fighting it, I think, is to find a constitutional means of executing people on their first offense against a prepubescent child, and to execute them quickly.

In a perfect display of mob justice, federal prosecutors are going after Lori Drew for what she did to Megan Meier. This story exploded pretty quickly once state prosecutors announced that they couldn't find any state statutes to charge Drew with for the way that she manipulated 14 year old Megan Meier into a state which ultimately resulted in her killing herself. A terrible case, but as they say, hard cases make for bad law.

So now federal prosecutors are stepping in and charging Drew with violating federal anti-hacking laws because she gained "unauthorized access" to MySpace's services by violating the MySpace Terms of Service in order to inflict emotional distress. While it is a somewhat tortured definition of "unauthorized access," the sort of thinking at work here is damning in so many ways because it elevates breach of contract to the status of criminal offense. Here is a perfect example of how it could be used in other ways.

Take the case of Vilmar, the Right Wing Howler. His blog was shut down for some pretty nasty anti-Muslim commentary due to breaking his hosting service's contract. This all happened after CAIR singled him out and went after him and his hosting service. It would certainly not be hard to argue that a Muslim could feel emotional distress after reading an argument about killing all Muslim children, and then leverage this case's precedent to argue that that emotional distress coupled with the violation of the Terms of Service is sufficient to argue that federal law was violated.

Think of this as a potential backdoor into the first amendment.

It's hard to believe that Lori Drew cannot be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, child abuse or something to that effect. However, the fact of the matter is that justice will not be done in this case through the means that are being sought by those who, come hell or high water, want to see Drew sent to prison at any cost.

Whether or not Drew goes to prison or not is not even relevant to the matter of justice. Drew and her family will probably never live this down. In that sense, she is like a typical sex offender. The moment that someone in any community she moves to gets a whiff of this case, her efforts to start over will be rendered moot. Given the severity of what she did, and the possibility, nay, probability, that she will be a social leper for the rest of her life, I think that is good enough.

The largest illegal immigration raid in American history happened at a Kosher meat processing plant. It also turned out to be host to a meth lab. For additional information, read this.

A professor was fired from a black college for failing too many of his students. Nothing fights racism like not expecting blacks to attend class and make up for lost time if they're underprepared, right?

India is now blaming American eating habits for the world's food shortage. You know, because our biofuel policies are too environmentally-sound to criticize...

If you use Charter Cable for your Internet access, watch out because your web browsing habits are potentially about to be monitored.

Bruce Scheier has some tips on how to evade laptop searches at the border. The only problem that I can see with purging everything is that since they don't need probable cause to begin with, the standards are so low that they could argue that you had something to hide because your laptop is pristine clean coming across the border and obviously not new.

Amazon has caved into NY's sales tax demands; Overstock has told NY to go f$%^ itself by cutting off all of its NY-based affiliates.

Marxism works! Mugabe has created an unprecedented number of billionaires in Zimbabwe.

Normally I don't tag team people on blog topics, but this one was too good to resist:

I think I'm in trouble over at Snoop's place, or at least with Mrs. Snoop*, who after I asked "If women were really doing exactly the same work as men and getting paid significantly less, who would hire a man?" informed me that:

Uh let me answer that for you - another man. I don't care what you think on this one Bill, I truly believe that most women are paid % less then men for the same work. The reason some people still don't therefore hire women instead of men is b/c there are still employers (mostly in the private sector) who do not like/trust a woman for the job. That is, in part, because we (the younger women) can get pregnant. And that is a huge loss to employers, in terms of time and benefits. But I have seen study after study that shows that women's salaries, for the same jobs, are almost always below men's. There has to be some reason for that... Unless you think ALL the studies are skewed?

Why did I emphasize the phrase for the same jobs? It's because the idea of the "same job" only applies to lowest common denominator jobs like your average minimum wage jobs or ones that require no heavy lifting like being a receptionist in a corporate office. Any job that requires even a most amount of real intelligence, education and experience is going to be wildly variable in how competent people are for similar tasks.

Work experience matters. Knowledge matters. In many fields that require people to continuously build on those, such as engineering, law and medicine, there is a real wage premium for keeping up and advancing. Many women just flat out don't get this. They actually think that a woman who has been out of the workforce, and hasn't worked as an engineer for ten years while she was raising her kids, should get a salary even in the same tax bracket as a male engineer who worked all ten of those years and really built up his expertise.

The very notion that people can be regimented into neat little boxes for matching up salaries to fight discrimination is laughable because no one is identical, and companies pay based on the value that they perceive in an individual worker. If you have two people fitting similar job reqs, but one of them knows more or shows a stronger aptitude in the interview, the company will perceive them as more valuable than the other one.

Lastly, it doesn't help things for women that if they decide to get pregnant and leave the workforce that the company has to fill that slot and replace the domain experience lost. In many fields this loss is real and it costs the company money longer than many women like to admit. It costs money to replace the worker. It costs money to get them up to speed on the basic requirements of the job. It costs money to get them productive to the point that they can get the momentum back up to what it used to be.

Despite rumors of danger, I installed Windows XP Service Pack 3 today and haven't had any issues with it so far. I'm going to go out on a limb here, and assume that most of the dangers associated with it were due to a combination of the usual culprits: broken installations of Windows, badly configured installations from OEMs and general bad luck. Mostly the first two. I am not necessarily recommending it, unless you have something like Norton Ghost for quickly restoring your hard drive in case your PC happens to be one of those described above.

Our lead tester is living this week. She's quit. Flown the coop. The cat is out of the bag, and hitch-hiking cross country. There was a joke that INSERT_MY_PROJECT drove her to quit. After looking at the code, I can't say I blame her. I fully suspect that most of my team will leave within six months if we don't get permission to rewrite most of the crap that the previous group delivered, without knowledge of Java, using a badly implemented RAD environment. Rapid Application Development, or RAD, tools should be more accurately called Requesting Absolute Defeat when in the hands of people who don't firmly know the language and libraries that they are built on.

So here I am testing out Movable Type 4.15 while waiting on an oil change, and I notice that the Privacy plugin is, once again, broken. It seems to be broken because some of the callbacks that it relied on have changed. If that be the case, fixing it shouldn't be terribly difficult. Shouldn't. Famous last words.

I have a project proposal. More of a Request For Comment (RFC) as we call them. How about a new Wiki called the "Liberty Changelog?" I threw the idea out before, but I think it might be an interesting project. Very hard to define in practical terms, but starting at some point, say 1776, track changes, good and bad, for economic, religious, political and bodily liberty, with a summary of changes for every 25 years of America's existence. For 1973-2008, I can think of a few things to get us started if anyone is interested:

Losses:

• National Security Letters
• Selective Suspension of Habeus Corpus
• McCain-Feingold restrictions on political speech within 60 days of an election
• Kelo vs. New London redefinition of 5th amendment "Public Use."
• Digital Millennium Copyright Act's restrictions on publishing details of and distributing tools that can circumvent structures meant to restrict access to copyrighted materials.
• No Electronic Theft Act allows not-for-profit copyright infringement to become a felony offense.
• Addition of civil asset forfeiture laws for copyright infringement cases (coming soon via PRO-IP Act if not already signed into law now).
• Torture policies.
• Hudson vs. Michigan ruling against exclusionary rule.
• Drastic increase in the use of no-knock raids on suspected drug users.
• CALEA's requirements on manufacturers of networking and telecom products.

It looks like NBC and Apple may be mending fences. It's about time because I want to be able to buy episodes of Battlestar Galactica on my AppleTV!

Europe may also be heading into a credit crunch in the near future. I know there is temptation to laugh at them for this, but seeing as how Western Europe is one of our biggest trade partners, this could hurt us too.

At the rates that it costs to send a single text message over a cell phone network without an unlimited texting plan, it costs more money to send 1MB of data by SMS than from the Hubble telescope!

He does have a point in principle, if not on this particular issue. If American auto makers followed Schwarzenegger's advice, they wouldn't be losing marketshare to the Japanese left and right for reliable, fuel-efficient cars.

One of many reasons why Hudson vs. Michigan deserves to be regarded as a travesty of justice for the common man.

More proof that drug warriors tend to be amoral, sociopathic scumbags. I'm sure her completely avoidable death is just soberly called another "casualty" by the police involved in this case.

Playboy seems to not be doing so well these days.

I saw an effect in a WordPress theme that was pretty novel, so I thought I would share here how to reproduce it on a Movable Type theme using JQuery.

<script type="text/javascript">
function fadeHeader()
{
     $("#header").hide().fadeIn(5000, undefined);
}
</script>

The code is straight forward (provided you understand JQuery at least somewhat). It grabs the <em>header</em> &lt;div&gt;, hides it and then fades it in over five seconds. If you want to do this automatically, rather than having to call a JavaScript function, just do:

<script type="text/javascript">
$(window).load({
     $("#header").hide().fadeIn(5000, undefined);
});
</script>

Quick note: <em>undefined</em> is passed there because I didn't want to use a callback function. If you have a function that you want to execute as a callback when fadeIn completes, just pass it as a parameter.

Try it.

Since many schools now routinely deal with things like drug search lockdowns where the students are controlled similarly to prisoners, this shouldn't surprise anyone as it is just a logical next step in the evolution of the school-as-prison meme in vogue today:
 

DALLAS - Jaime Pacheco rolled out of bed at dawn last week to the blaring chorus of two alarms. Then Jaime, a 15-year-old high school freshman, smoothed his striped comforter, dumped two scoops of kibble for the dogs out back and strapped a G.P.S. monitor to his belt.

Dave Leis, a spokesman for NovaTracker, which makes the system used in Dallas, said electronic monitoring did not have to be punitive. "You can paint this thing as either Big Brother, or this is a device that connects you to a buddy who wants to keep you safe and help you graduate."

Just like the CCTV system in Britain that now has the loudspeakers attached to it is just a system that allows you to be reminded by a good-natured civil servant to obey the law before a police officer catches you littering. It's not Big Brother, it's just a friendly lookout from a fellow citizen who is charged with your well-being, regardless of what you think about that.

Ten years before these become mandatory in some school districts for every student...

The writer of this article should probably be forgiven his ignorance of the advances in technology lately when it comes to energy consumption. After all, he writes with the sort of triumphalist tone so common to those who take it as just a foregone conclusion that the United States' days as a world superpower are numbered, and rapidly failing.

I wonder how many Britons smugly assured themselves that they would never be the target of their country's CCTV network because they are not criminals. So, it's always amusing to read that those people who earnestly declared that they had nothing to fear because they are not criminals, now face the prospect of having their dog walking habits monitored by the government.

When you don't control your own manufacturing, it's only a matter of time before you run the risk of having someone mess with your products without your knowledge or control. However, since they are far more concerned with shortterm numbers than keeping control of their business over the long haul, that lesson is going to remain lost on Cisco: 

Counterfeit products are a routine threat for the electronics industry. However, the more sinister specter of an electronic Trojan horse, lurking in the circuitry of a computer or a network router and allowing attackers clandestine access or control, was raised again recently by the FBI and the Pentagon.

The new law enforcement and national security concerns were prompted by Operation Cisco Raider, which has led to 15 criminal cases involving counterfeit products bought in part by military agencies, military contractors and electric power companies in the United States. Over the two-year operation, 36 search warrants have been executed, resulting in the discovery of 3,500 counterfeit Cisco network components with an estimated retail value of more than $3.5 million, the FBI said in a statement.

The FBI is still not certain whether the ring's actions were for profit or part of a state-sponsored intelligence effort. The potential threat, according to the FBI agents who gave a briefing at the Office of Management and Budget on January 11, includes the remote jamming of supposedly secure computer networks and gaining access to supposedly highly secure systems. Contents of the briefing were contained in a PowerPoint presentation leaked to a Web site, Above Top Secret.

The military maintains a large list of IT products that are approved for use by its employees and contractors, and almost all of the products on the approved products list are "American-made." However, one of the areas where this falls short is that very few products are entirely American-made today, and a lot of the products are made by companies that routinely use immigrants heavily such as Oracle and Microsoft. While that shouldn't necessarily be a cause for alarm, it is food for thought when considering the fact that there are employees of these companies who have no clear-cut reason to be loyal to our country when writing code that will go into the products the military uses.

Things only get a lot worse when products like routers, which are small embedded devices that cannot be easily examined for tampering, get made overseas in countries like China. Those who automatically dismiss any suggestion of danger as conspiracy theory mongering may blissfully ignore this issue, but it is one that has potentially devastating security implications because it is so much harder to effectively update compromised embedded systems. While a company with a competent IT staff may be able to quickly roll out updated firmwire from Cisco, that's not the case with small businesses, homes and an enterprise as large and diverse as the military. People tend to forget that the Department of Defense is by a wide margin the largest employer in the United States if you count up active duty servicemen, reservists, national guard, civilian employees and contractors. Its infrastructure is massive on a scale that few can come close to matching, and throwing in compromised, counterfeit routers has a high probability of them not getting discovered.

This is one of the parts of the government that is supposed to keeping you safe from terrorism as part of that "a little essential liberty in exchange for a facade of security" bargain the public made with Bush after 9-11: 

It has surfaced that the US State Department can't account for up to about 1,000 laptops, perhaps as many as 400 of which belonged to the department's Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program.

Maybe we will find out that this part of some super-secret plan that the neocons have been cooking up to scare the terrorists into abandoning their plots via a "shock and awe" display of how much information we have on them. They'll be so shocked and awed that, rather changing their plans, they will just give up.

By now many people have heard of the case of Tracey Roberson being sent to prison for manslaughter for the death of her lover that is said to have been caused by her accusing him of rape. The facts may later vindicate her, as her husband may be proved to have never believed her claim that she was being raped, but on principle, this ruling should not be controversial with anyone.

Rape is a very serious offense, and you don't need to be guilty of it in order for it to hurt your reputation. Even if her husband had called the police to get them involved, Roberson's lover would have had his life ruined by the damage to his reputation. He would have probably gone to a medium or maximum security prison filled with violent offenders, and his family would have lost him for several years if they were lucky. Objectively speaking, her charge was, for this very reason, indefensible.

It may not bother some people that she is being sent to prison for her false charge of rape, but it is a good precedent and one that will serve a lot of women in Texas well. By actually holding women who falsely claim rape accountable in court, it will hopefully discourage women from treating this issue lightly. It may come as a surprise to some, but there are actually women out there who will claim that an equally drunken hookup is rape or will claim that a man they never even had sex with at all raped them, just to be spiteful. About the latter, I would know from personal experience, because I dated one of those in high school (fortunately, she had few friends).

It is true that no one forces a man to behave violently when his wife accuses another man of rape. However, it is a fact of human nature that most men, being neither pathological wimps nor sociopaths, will not be so detatched that they will passively deal with the situation. It is also a fact of nature that allowing women to manipulate this natural tendency in men is a license for vigilante justice. Those who denounced Roberson's husband on principle for "vigilante justice" would do well to consider the fact that a woman who cries rape to cover up her infidelity is far more likely to solicit vigilante justice from her husband than in situations where the woman doesn't try to cover up her infidelity once it's exposed.

Two and a half years in prison for manslaughter is an awfully low price to pay for saying words that most women know are enough to make even most mild-mannered men become homicidal out of chivalric fervor for their wife's well-being and security.

The way that modern law works itself into such a convoluted knot trying to define everything down to the smallest detail possible, categorizing everything in intricate detail will ultimately be our undoing, I think. As a corrollary to Cicero's dictum "more laws, less justice," "the greater the scope of the law, the less freedom and justice there will be." As if our system didn't already suffer from weakened bright lines testing for rape, if this law goes through, it will completely pave over the bright line test for rape altogether, almost completely putting the definition into the hands of the plaintiff and out of the hands of the judge and jury:

Massachusetts is the latest state to consider putting a new crime on the books: rape by fraud. Currently, a sex act only qualifies as rape if physical force is used. We talk to a woman who was tricked into having sex with her boyfriend's brother, who pretended to be her boyfriend - and unable to convict him of rape because of this limited definition.

Under the new law, such forms of deception would be a crime. Some say the law goes too far, however, and could criminalize lies like, "Really, I'm divorced!"

There are many women out there who would love to be able to get back at a lover by seeing him get charged for rape by "deceiving" them about what his intentions about the relationship were. These women will benefit from the law, but every woman who is raped, in the objective sense of the word, will lose in Massachusetts should this law go through because of the way that men and more level-headed women will become even more cynical and skeptical about claims of rape.

At What's Wrong With The World, Zippy Catholic wrote that every type of liberalism must adopt unprincipled exceptions to the political freedom that it claims to advance. That is definitely true of feminism in how feminism is quite willing to undermine or outright destroy basic due process rights in order to make it easier to convict men of rape. This is a truly profound inherent contradiction of modern liberalism, which is why when you combine all of the "liberal issues" together you get a bag of exceptions that effectively rips apart every trace of political freedom that liberalism claims to offer. For this reason, it's important that not only should the personal not be the political, but that in most cases, neither should the sociological be political either.

Read these excerpts from this article, brought to you by El Borak, very carefully and fully absorb the raw decadence that is on display here: 

The last thing Marti Tracy wants to do on a Saturday is clip coupons. But last month the 34-year-old Bowie resident felt she no longer had a choice. She'd already given up organic meat and decided to buy organic milk only for her 2-year-old son, not for the whole family.

Tracy and her partner also stopped buying the cereals they like in favor of whatever was on sale; stopped picking up convenient single-size packs of juice, water or crackers; and, in order to save gas, stopped going to multiple stores. "I find the whole thing a huge hassle, but I've reached a tipping point," said Tracy, a government human resources specialist who is pregnant with her second child. "Clearly, I'm not unable to feed my family. But I just can't feed my family the way I'd like to feed them."

"We are in shocking new territory," said Todd Hale, senior vice president of consumer shopping and insights at Nielsen Consumer Panel Services. "With the exception of the very affluent, everyone is looking to save by altering where they shop, how they shop and the brands they buy."

The price hikes have hit home for Nicole Gindraw-Parrott, a 29-year-old trainer at an Atlanta gas utility and a mother of two. Since January, she said, she's been transformed into a "coupon-clipping, price-matching monster."

Other shoppers, like Kathleen Holly, are coping by visiting fewer stores and shopping closer to home. The Congress Heights senior said she hadn't yet made big changes to what she buys. Instead, she's conscious of "making a circle" when she gets in the car. "If I'm driving, I go to the bank, the grocery store, the cleaners all in one trip. That way, I can save money on gas and keep buying the things I'm buying."

You would think that these women think that they exist in the same universe of financial suffering that the majority of the world lives in, based on the way that they bemoan their now miserable existence of bargain shopping and coupon clipping. Sweet mother of God, you might have to buy at Costco and Giant now, instead of Wegmans and Trader Joes. How ever will these poor ladies ever live with themselves having to condescend to buying mayonaise in large jars, and doing more dishes because they pour juice into a glass now instead of drinking it from small, one-serving size juice boxes.

The main reason that Rachel and I don't get hit badly on our groceries is that we bargain hunt. Lunch costs me $2 a day because I will buy enough Lean Pockets to get me through at least one work wee when they are on sale. When large cases of Deer Park water were on sale for $3.50 each, I bought 4 cases. I rarely go to Starbucks, and most of the time brew my own latte in the morning for a fraction of what it would cost me at Starbucks; $10 buys a tin of Espresso grind and a gallon of milk. I swear, sometimes I think this country deserves a great depression part deux just so that a lot of the American people can finally appreciate the fact that right now, what we call "poverty" in America is called a middle class lifestyle in much of the world.

"Clearly, I'm not unable to feed my family. But I just can't feed my family the way I'd like to feed them." explains pretty much every complaint that Obama and Clinton have about food and healthcare in America. Let me put it another way: "Clearly, I'm not unable to get medical care for my family. But I just can't get treatment for my family the way I'd like to get it and from the doctor of my choosing; having to file for bankrupcy over medical bills is not that different from dying in the third world because the treatment isn't available".

I saw Iron Man on Saturday and thought it was quite possibly the strongest Marvel comic adaptation made so far. Robert Downey Jr really does bring out Tony Stark in a way that I don't think anyone has accomplished except, to a lesser extent, Toby Maguire through his rendition of Peter Parker. The special effects are the best yet of any Marvel movie, and if nothing else, the scene where Stark goes to Afghanistan to personally take care of the problem that his company created over there is worth watching.

If I were brought to this country to screw men that American women won't screw, at a much cheaper rate than American women, and I had a vagina, I would be angry too.

Most Facebook apps are junk. Who would have thought...

There are good reasons for not working at Google. Not only does the commute suck for a lot of its workers, but apparently it is now about as bureaucratic, despite its roots and youth, as any established corporation.

And they say that companies don't prefer H1B workers to Americans... Sometimes I think it really is too bad that we can't just outsource most of our management and lawyers, while keeping the more productive professions native.

Now this is what I call an authentication mechanism! Don't ask for complicated information, just ask the nice browser which browser it is, and if it says that it's an iPhone, then just let it get on the network no questions asked!

Every young woman should read stories like this and realize just how much her safety really is in her hands, and not the government's.

Just think of what you could do if you could trade your citizenship and $2,000 for at least two years of no taxes! The best part (or worst, depending on your perspective) is that you wouldn't even lose any of your rights by losing your citizenship!

It has finally been proved that younger siblings really do get away with just about anything.

I just love it when women write articles telling men to "man up" or "butch up." Nothing reveals the cognitive dissonance that dominates the modern female image of the ideal man more than when they tell you precisely what a "real man" is. If a man wrote about "real women" in similar terms, women would be coming out of the woodwork demanding to know just who he thinks that he is to define a woman's life and personality for her.

When women write about what a "real man" is, they really are writing about what they want in a man. Usually this means that he is the sort of man who lets her do just about anything she damn well pleases, supports her every non-criminal decision, is sensitive to her needs and desires, sacrifices his own needs and desires for her whims, and through all of this maintains a non-threatening strength and grit that makes him attractive like a cowboy out of a 1950s western, without any of the things that might offend her. Yes, it's childish, but then what can you expect from people who have probably never seriously reflected on the personal cost required to "have it all?"

Now, in terms of hypocrisy, this takes the gold medal:

In answer to Difster's questions: 

I understand what you're getting at Mike, but quantitatively, how are these 'lost boys' any different than the boys who grow up in the inner city and are forced to turn to gangs for survival?

I assume he meant qualitatively. That said...

They are qualitatively different in a few ways: 

• They are explicitly abandoned by their family, and thrown into society, without any support or means to support themselves, at an age where they cannot truly legally support themselves.
• They are often abandoned in locations where they have no support network other than the government to draw on. Sometimes, they are just abandoned along a stretch of road to fend for themselves.
• Inner city kids are "abandoned" by neglect, not usually by a conscious decision to simply walk away from the child altogether by both parents. In most cases, the mother will at least make a very half-assed attempt to raise her child. That is better than what most of these "lost boys" get from their families.

Yet, we're not raiding the inner cities and taking away the 'at risk' youth so they don't have to endure that screwed up culture either.

I explicitly acknowledged the due process angle in this story, so I am not sure what Difster's point is here. 

I'm not justifying the expulsions, I'm saying that the government solution really isn't any better.

Parents should not be able to just dump their unwanted children and teens on the side of the road or in a far off city to abandon them, hoping that someone else will pick up the pieces for them. There has to be punishment for parents who do not go through the proper procedures to see to it that they are at least extricating themselves of their parental responsibility in a way that will not be a burden on society or obviously harmful to their child. Since at 13 they cannot work a full time job, drive or sign a contract to even rent an apartment, the parents have a moral and natural obligation to not send their kid packing. Since Difster is a Christian, I doubt that he would have much grounds to argue that a parent has few moral and natural grounds to argue that they have little to no responsibility for their child's welfare.

Someone, somewhere is always going to be harmed in someone way by someone else. That's our sin nature and you can't use the force of government to overcome that prior to an action happening. By necessity, government must be reactive, not proactive when it comes to crime; even abuse.

This is a non-sequitor. If the police find that a FLDS family is dumping its teenage boys onto the lonely streets of Salt Lake City or Las Vegas (or God forbid, just leaving them on a stretch of highway to walk to the nearest city which is God only knows where), then the government must react by arresting and prosecuting the parents. I fail to see the issue here that some have with the government stepping in, if it can be proved that the parents are abandoning children and teens to their own fates when they cannot support themselves. If anything, this is the one behavior that is well-known about the FLDS that is clearly, unequivocally abuse.

So, to recap...

The FLDS is in fact being abusive to many of its teenage boys by abandoning them at an age where they cannot legally support themselves. If they did this to 16-17 year olds only, that might be somewhat acceptable, but many, possibly most, are younger than that and cannot even legally work for a living to feed themselves. As such, the FLDS is deliberately turning many of their children into wards of the state by illegally abandoning their parental duties.

I have seen others try to explain away this behavior by arguing that it used to be acceptable to send a 13 year old packing because they were an adult. That is, however, not relevant in the least to this issue. It would be if there weren't laws prohibiting a 13 year old from working full time, signing contracts, joining the military, etc. However, given all of the restrictions on young teenagers that bar them from accepting responsibility for their lives and welfare, it is a simple fact that unless a government agency or charity takes up their cause, that this teen will be put into a position where their welfare is essentially thrown to the wolves.

Hmmm, if I had supreme power to ram through ten changes to our system of government, I would....

1) Abolish the DEA, ATF without a second thought. For added insult to their injury, I might turn the ATF into a government-run (think ABC store) convenience store, and force ATF employees to work there to finish out their retirement benefits. I would also, as part of the abolition package, prohibit any current or former DEA employee from ever receiving more than 50% of the medically-recommended dosage of pain medication that would be normally prescribed in any injury.

2) Abolish the 16th, 17th and 19th amendments.

3) Put the Border Patrol under the Department of Defense, rename it to the Border Security Force and begin a phased conversion into a formal branch of the armed forces with a small civilian law enforcement component.

4) Establish constitutional parliamentary procedures that allow state governments to issue votes of no confidence in their congressional delegation, including up to when 2/3 of the states issue such votes within a three year period, the entire sitting Congress is deposed and emergency elections are called. The same rule would apply to the President.

5) I would rewrite the 2nd amendment to read:

The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, nor subject to regulation, except for individuals serving a prison sentence or in the employ of any government in the United States. No civilian employee of any jurisdiction of this Constitution shall be issued, or permitted to use, while acting under the color of authority, any weapon that is prohibited to the citizenry. In such situations as may arise where an armed civilian body of a government subject to this constitution refuses to comply with this requirement, the armed forces of the United States shall be charged with enforcing this requirement .

6) I would rewrite the interstate commerce clause to read:

Nothing in this statute shall be construed to imply a general warrant to regulate the manufacturing or sale of any good or service inside a state's borders, or any non-commercial activity which may have an impact on interstate commerce. The Congress shall only regulate such interstate activities that have a direct and meaningful impact on interstate commercial transactions.

7) I would add to the bill of rights:

The practices of abortion without bona fide medical necessity and genetic modification without informed consent of any life form that is genetically human are prohibited in the United States. Each state and the federal government shall adopt legislation to enforce this requirement appropriately. The practice of creating human-animal hybrids shall be punishable by execution, without statute of limitations.

8) I would add a balanced budget amendment.

9) I would strip Congress and the President of the ability to issue executive orders and bills that could create new crimes or police powers. The power to do such things would be held in the hands of an elected and transparent quasi-constitutional convention convened every 10 year to evaluate the functioning of the current federal criminal and police power statutes as they apply to current needs. No one who had ever served in Congress or the Presidency would be allowed to run for election to this convention.

10) Lastly, I would get rid of all welfare programs, going even one step beyond John Hawkins, and taking away VA benefits from veterans who were not injured or subject to illness due to their service in uniform.