Zimbabwe needs to be purged:

A baby boy had both legs broken by supporters of President Robert Mugabe to punish his father for being an opposition councillor in Zimbabwe.

Blessing Mabhena, aged 11 months, was seized from a bed and flung down with force as his mother, Agnes, hid from the thugs, convinced that they were about to murder her.

She heard one of them say, "Let's kill the baby", before Blessing was hurled on to a bare concrete floor.

Blessing, who may never be able to walk properly, was one of the youngest victims of atrocities against the opposition party Movement for Democratic Change in the run-up to last Friday's sham presidential election.

There is a time for peace, and a time for war. Mugabe's faction has passed into a new frontier: a time for extermination. Zimbabwe will not know peace until every person who actively helps this man has been sent to the gallows. You cannot support a man, and be freely associated with men like these, without crossing a line which effectively revokes your right to live.

The danger of content filters hits the American Family Association. Hilarious results ensue.

Two reasons why I say that you should always be very, very cautious about trusting anyone in law enforcement whose job is drug law enforcement. Ain't a whole lot of difference between the average drug cop and the average drug dealer when it comes to upholding the law and doing what's right. **UPDATE**: Make that three reasons. Whenever drug criminality hits close to home, the drug warriors' hearts begin to beat again.

Another important breakthrough in quantum computing. No, it doesn't play Doom or Quake.

Leave it to the Irish to tell nature what's what.

If I ever get enough time to myself, I may have to read some of these references on compiler design.

An admin who ran a major Bit Torrent site just got busted. For their sake, I hope the guys who run the Pirate Bay never come anywhere near U.S. territory as they'll be shot on sight.

One of my best friends worked the last month or two as an intern for his state's senator after having spent the previous few years working as a very well-paid mechanical engineer. His experience as an intern caused him to make the observation that one of the fatal flaws of our government is that we pay these people and the staffers so little. Like barely a few thousand dollars for the average intern for their entire internship, and the staffers largely make $25-$35K. He wagers that our country wouldn't even have to spend more than an extra hundred million dollars to fundamentally restructure the paige/staffer system so that they could be paid a lot better. As it stands right now, the paiges are usually paid so little that all a lobbyist has to do to curry subtle favor is to serve good catering at a presentation. Sick, isn't it?

One last thing. I have a new spam filter in place. It's the TypePad Anti-Spam system that's part of Movable Type 4.2. If anyone notices problems with anonymous commenting, please create a user account or log in by TypeKey or OpenID and let me know.

Jews are among the most highly educated minorities in America. More than half of all Jewish adults (61 percent of men and 50 percent of women) have received a college degree, and a quarter (29 percent of men and 21 percent of women) have earned a graduate degree. Jews are almost twice as likely to hold a college degree than Americans generally and four times as likely to hold a graduate degree.

Unfortunately, their academic and professional success decreases their dating pool since, as Cohen says, "men want to 'marry down' and women want to 'marry up.'"

Although no one is advocating that women avoid graduate school, Dr. Michael J. Salamon, a psychologist and the author of The Shidduch Crisis: Causes and Cures, says "the problem [in the Jewish dating scene] is that women are overeducated and find the men boring. The men are intimidated. And the women are not getting what they want."

The rate of Jewish men holding a college degree is a little over twenty percent higher than that of Jewish women, and the rate of Jewish men holding advanced degrees compared to Jewish women is even higher than that. Yet we are still expected to believe that despite such a disparity there that is clearly in favor of Jewish men, that the real reason that Jewish men tend to be skiddish today about marrying Jewish women is because they are "boring" and "intimidated by Jewish women." Could it possibly be that Jewish men are instead increasingly just not interested in putting up with the behavior of much of the female segment of the Jewish population (as alluded to in the article at least once)?

Nah... that couldn't possibly be it! As we all know, the male ego is fatally fragile the moment it comes into contact with even the most modest female accomplishments. Why, if a woman has accomplished more than brushing her teeth, putting on her clothes and being able to roughly carry on an intelligible conversation, it sends men of every sort running to the hills for the soft, non-confrontational, plasticy embrace of blow up dolls, video games, porn, maxim, bachelor pads and all that.

The moral of this story is that if you are going to regurgitate the old talking points, at least have the good sense to not do so while presenting numbers that invalidate the talking points after no more than a moment's contemplation.

Leave it to Dr. Helen to put it so beautifully:

Katherine Berry at Pajamas Media discusses social networking: "Having just spent another morning of my life reading the most boring details of other people's mornings, I've realized how very little things like Twitter, FaceBook, or FriendFeed actually contribute to one's life: it's more like sitting in a room full of over-caffeinated narcissistic Tourette's patients with ADHD who are all trying to be the most entertaining. And, really, what's so social about a monologue?"

I think I check my facebook account maybe a few times a month. Maybe. I think the last time I checked it was when I needed to add a coworker to my list so that we could keep a steady business contact going since he was rotating off of our project and going to work for a different group. The majority of these services just strike me as utterly inane, especially Twitter and any service similar to it. Penny Arcade did a wonderful job dumping all over Twitter in a comic published about two months ago.

Unlike the author of the article that Dr. Helen was talking about, I realized a while ago that paying attention to most blogs and social media in general was a waste of time. I used to have probably a good 50 RSS feeds in Google Reader, and I've narrowed that down to probably about half of that now. The reason for that is that I realized that I was wasting an enormous amount of time consuming meaningless rubbish. As a general rule, if I comment on your blog, it's because I have your feed in my Google Reader list. Life is too short to waste on blogs and social media that mainly revolve around meaningless personal minutia.

In honor of Penny Arcade, I suggest we start calling such bloggers "Twitter Shitters."

Ilya Somin points to property rights law and rulings as a basis for reminding those of us who were celebrating this decision that this is absolutely by no means a decisive battle in the right to protect firearm ownership:

Unlike in the case of the Second Amendment right to bear arms, the Supreme Court has always recognized that the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause and other property rights provisions in the Constitution protect individual rights. However, since the 1930s, the Court has defined the scope of these rights so narrowly that they get very little protection in practice. For example, the Court has always held - as it reaffirmed in Kelo v. City of New London - that property cannot be condemned unless the taking is for a "public use." Purely "private" takings are - and always have been - forbidden by the Court. However, the Court defines "public use" to include virtually any conceivable benefit to the public, even ones that might never actually materialize. As a result, the Court still lets government condemn virtually any property for virtually any reason. In theory, there is an individual right here; in practice, not so much.

Similarly, the Court has long recognized that some regulations of property that don't involve physical occupation of land by the government might might still be onerous enough to be considered "takings" requiring "just compensation" under the Fifth Amendment. However, in cases such as Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Commission and Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, the Court decided that such regulations are only presumptively considered takings if they permanently wipe out 100% of the economic value of the property in question. If a regulation wipes out 98% of the value permanently, or %100 of the value for a period of twenty years, the property owner is probably out of luck. In practice, government officials can almost always draft regulations in such a way that their impact is not quite permanent and/or allows the owner to retain some tiny percentage of his land's value. Thus, property owners have little or no real protection against regulatory takings - despite the Supreme Court's recognition of an individual right.

You know that it's very rare that I say "read the whole" thing, that common blogger saying indicating that a post is actually worth dropping what you are doing and reading, so when I say "read the whole damn thing," you know you ought to do that. While I agree with Triton that there ought to be celebration, and there are supporting precedents that may prove useful to gun rights supporters, Somin makes many important points about how the Supreme Court has been able to recognize that a right exists, while using legal mumbo jumbo to effectively wipe out the practical enjoyment of that right. That's part of the reason why I referred to (In)Justice John Paul Stevens with such pure, unadulterated disdain in a previous post. It is amazing that such sophistry is tolerated by society, even while it shows absolutely no mercy for defective thinking and work in industry, but I digress.

Most Americans do not have the slightest clue as to how unfree America actually is because they have never paid attention to the battles that civil liberties groups have fought and lost. They are entirely unaware of the fact that in many practical respects, and I say this with no exaggeration, private property is largely unprotected in our country now. In fact, I daresay that many people who be abjectly horrified if they had any idea how easily, in so many cases of law, the government can simply rip their property away from them with the thinnest of justifications. We have not reached the "just because we want it" stage of the relationship between the state and private property, but it is getting very close. That's why after all of the celebration and hoo-rahs over Heller, I feel like a hung over partier now that I'm brought back down to reality the next day.

The one thing I do know about Heller is that now that the D.C. gun ban is down and out for now, every resident of D.C. that wants a gun should come to Virginia and buy one. Big ones, little ones, scary ones. I recommend a variety of guns for the defense of the home for the man of the house, and maybe one of these for the little lady, and maybe even one of these for any man whose daughter is starting to date. Lock and load before the other gang in blue gets called out to enforce D.C. Gun Ban Part Deux: Every gun must be kept in a 5'x5' block of cement encased in six inches of Titanium.

Bruce Schneier may be exaggerating here, but he has a point about where a lot of companies and government agencies would like to take us. However, I think defeating this fear may be a lot easier than he realizes.

OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your engine remotely. Buses are getting the same capability, in case terrorists want to re-enact the movie Speed. The Pentagon wants a kill switch installed on airplanes, and is worried about potential enemies installing kill switches on their own equipment.

Microsoft is doing some of the most creative thinking along these lines, with something it's calling "Digital Manners Policies." According to its patent application, DMP-enabled devices would accept broadcast "orders" limiting capabilities. Cellphones could be remotely set to vibrate mode in restaurants and concert halls, and be turned off on airplanes and in hospitals. Cameras could be prohibited from taking pictures in locker rooms and museums, and recording equipment could be disabled in theaters. Professors finally could prevent students from texting one another during class.

The possibilities are endless, and very dangerous. Making this work involves building a nearly flawless hierarchical system of authority. That's a difficult security problem even in its simplest form. Distributing that system among a variety of different devices -- computers, phones, PDAs, cameras, recorders -- with different firmware and manufacturers, is even more difficult. Not to mention delegating different levels of authority to various agencies, enterprises, industries and individuals, and then enforcing the necessary safeguards.

Obviously you can't explain that the easiest way to dissuade companies and agencies from this path is to simultaneously disseminate the information used to lock down the private property, and then encourage people to act on it. I think it would be not only a great act of civil disobedience, but an interesting experiment for an enterprising Computer Science or engineering student to make a transmitter that can broadcast the shutdown code to every car on a busy highway during rush hour traffic. That way, no one is likely to be hurt (except by road rage, maybe), but it is likely to create one heck of a powerful public backlash should this technology every actually be put into mainstream use by government mandate.

I'm not convinced that the government will really get very far with this sort of thing just because of the fact that it will be so easy to abuse. Like the backdoors that government wanted in all encryption products in the 1990s, these technologies that are supposed to "help law enforcement" will invariably fall into criminal hands, making them useless for the public and law enforcement. As we know from history, the government simply had to stand down over encryption because the measure of control that it gained over private information was outweighed by the sheer volume of crime that was a likely outcome of forcing the public to use crippled encryption algorithms to protect their data and financial transactions.

Still, we may be in for interesting times...

(In)Justice John Paul Stevens proves why anyone who can read the law as written and memorize it can be a lawyer or a judge:

In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the majority "would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons."

The second amendment reads:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

I think it's pretty obvious that there might be just a teeny weeny little restriction there in that bold and italicized part...

H/T to Rachel Lucas for bringing this mind-numbing level of sophistry from Stevens to my attention.

I remain torn about this ruling. While I don't personally have any problem with executing child molesters, I share Balko's concern with the fact that not only is our legal system seriously flawed, but there have been too many cases of false accusations to implement this right now. In the context of a system like the Mosaic Law, this would make sense, as those who are falsely accused under the Mosaic Law have far more protection than those accused under secular American law. To implement this, we would need:

• Dramatically increased penalties for perjury.
• Make it a "stop, don't pass go, lose your license to practice law" offense for any prosecutor who taints or withholds exculpatory evidence from the defense.
• Provide some mechanism where an innocent party may compel the prosecution of any government agent or witness, against a prosecutor's wishes, by proving to a judge that it must take place for justice to be obtained. Call it a Demand for Punitive Redress of Grievance or something, but a defense attorney should be able to file a court order to secure the prosecution of those that inflict injustice on their client.

**UPDATE**: The two listed below are early versions of a consolidated version that I just got working that I think y'all will find works even better:

RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/([^/]+)(/?|/trackback|/trackback/)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1/$2/$4.php

Old ones:

RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.+)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1/$2/$4.php

RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.+)/$ http://www. yourdomain.com/$1/$2/$4.php

This is the text of the 5th through 8th amendments:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district where in the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

It has always been recognized that there are certain wartime privileges that the federal government enjoys, one of which is to take enemy prisoners of war when off in foreign lands waging a war. I don't dispute that, and in fact think that is a necessary part of the federal government's war powers.

That said, I think you will find nothing in the Bill of Rights that supports the notion that there are separate basic rights between citizens and non-citizens when it comes to being detained and brought before a court, civilian or military. In fact, nearly ever clause is written in an abstract way to specifically not authorize the government to behave in the proscribed way toward anyone. Part of this is because the very notion of an "American citizen" didn't even exist when the Bill of Rights was enacted.

The Bill of Rights is abstract, and not intended to be more than the framework on which court procedures and the law are written. I understand the concerns that Wes and others have, but I think these can be mitigated by court procedures aimed at keeping the spirit of the Bill of Rights while working under the realities of a military occupation of foreign lands. Also, as I have said before, since Congress has not formally declared war, I see no reason to indulge the President in the pretense that he has wartime powers at his disposal. Since there was no formal declaration of war, I see no reason to regard the detainees as prisoners of war, rather than as criminals.

The point about the distinction between a time of declared peace, and a time of declared war is everything to the Bill of Rights, Habeas Corpus, etc. If the President can simply deem a campaign against a terrorist faction as tantamount to a war, any act that brings the terrorists on our soil can be used to meet the definition of "invasion" in the Constitution that allows for the suspension of Habeas Corpus. If war is dumbed down to that point, then war powers will become normal powers.

For a few years, OpenID has slowly, but steadily, built up momentum. If you've never heard of it, it's an open, distributed authentication system for websites. In other words, OpenID allows you to get single sign-on at any site that supports it, and it's open to being bridged to many other services that can authenticate your user information. There are privacy concerns about it, but those are not what really bother me that much about it. Rather, the security issues are what I am concerned about.

See, OpenID allows you to enter your credentials into a website's authentication page, and then bounce them off against another site's authentication framework. Using this, you can hit Google, Yahoo, AOL, and many others. These sites, in turn, give feedback to the OpenID framework at the site your are logging into. Now, if you use OpenID at a less-than-honest website, they can grab your credentials and use them to log into OpenID-enabled websites as you. The same problem exists in a more limited form with services like TypeKey.

The Achilles' Heel of OpenID is that it is dependent on the integrity of the sites that people log into using it. Granted, much of the concern about OpenID could taken care of by a two-pronged assault by the OpenID provider. First, expire a user's password every thirty to ninety days; second, make the user's contact information unchangeable  That way, if the user gets hacked in between password changes, they can at least hopefully request a new password to be sent to their hopefully more secure email address or by text message.

Many of Hillary Clinton's supporters find it incomprehensible that many Americans would find it insulting to claim that it's as big of a deal to elect a white woman as it is to elect a black man to public office:

They are mad that everyone believes them to be old, white and racist. They are mad at the people they thought were supposed to be progressives for treating them badly.

Well, there are consequences to all but equating the "historical plight" of white women in America to what blacks have been through.

A chocolate shop denied use of their bathroom to a little girl who had diarrhea.

Would you like some mandatory data retention with that?

WASHINGTON--The Federal Communications Commission on Friday said it wants to auction a section of wireless airwaves to buyers willing to provide free broadband Internet service without pornography.

I don't think they will have many interested buyers because the potential cost of building up such a free network would be huge. Probably a lot more than the spectrum that is being sold is really worth. I would imagine the cost to cover just the South would be well into a few billion dollars, and the majority of the space between the coasts would be just a blackhole of investment like it is for most telecoms.

Of course, if this sort of thing were to succeed, the FCC would, no doubt, quickly slip in a data retention mandate in there to make it easier for law enforcement to spy on the public. This is one of the reasons why I have never been a fan of municipal wifi. Any network that closely tied to a government authority or mandate is bound to be easily monitored by every Tom, Dick and Harry on the government's payroll.

Glenn Reynolds is exactly right here when he says that the Supreme Court has a lot more riding on D.C. vs Heller than it may think:

But the Court, too, has something at stake-its legitimacy. If the Court ignores millions of Americans' belief that the Amendment protects some individual right while continuing to invalidate laws infringing on unenumerated rights, the Court might hazard its de facto interpretive supremacy. As Laurence Tribe reminds us, when there is "a deep national dissatisfaction with the way constitutional law . . . has . . . resolved a matter," "We the People" seek constitutional amendments.15 Four times in the past, Article V has been used to reverse Supreme Court cases deemed deeply flawed. Heller could occasion a fifth.

Most people are not lawyers and do not think like lawyers. For that very reason, most people are disposed to read the phrase, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" as an explanation for the second amendment's purpose that has no practical bearing on the second half: "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." The same would hold true if the first amendment were to say, "free speech being necessary for the health of our republic, the Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press." Most people would instinctively read that first part as a rhetorical flourish, not a statement of law that limits the first amendment to political speech that is spoken in a political setting.

I think Reynolds, true to his reputation, is being too mild-mannered here. If the Supreme Court does not recognize an individual right, it will actually do far more damage than any other incident in the history of the court to the court's legitimacy in the eyes of many millions of Americans. Unlike abortion, which can be sophistically handled under the 9th amendment, there is no doubt that the second amendment guarantees a general right to the public every bit as much as the first amendment. Most people would rightly see such a ruling as a power play by the Supreme Court to rewrite the text of the Constitution to mean whatever it wants.

I'll go a step beyond Reynolds and say that if the Supreme Court gets this case wrong, one amendment won't do the trick. Instead, a new constitutional convention will be in order.

In some jurisdictions police go around looking for unlocked doors and garage doors that are open late at night. While they generally just leave a friendly reminder that you were an idiot who was just begging to have your property stolen out from underneath of you, in this case they went further by actually walking inside some houses and talking to the home owners.

Obviously, this is dangerous for both the cops and the people inside the home. When the police woke that guy up at 3AM, they stood a chance of being mistaken for robbers and shot at. Ironically, Quebec has shown more intelligence than our system usually shows when it comes to handling law-abiding citizens who shoot police mistaking them for criminals entering their home.

The police are in a sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't situation here. While their tactics were wrong here, there are a lot of loud-mouthed fools in our society who just look to complain about the police; the police just can't do right in their opinion. When they're not being proactive, they're not doing enough. When they're being proactive, they're a danger. There is a lot of overlap between these people and the sort who either leave their doors unlocked at night or sympathize with those who do.

Maybe the approach the police need is a "stupidity penalty" for gauging which cases to give priority to outside of homicide and certain extremely dangerous sex offenses. If you leave your door unlocked in a city and get robbed, or even raped, I think the police should be able to relegate that to the bottom of the list of cases to tackle first because that's the best that can be done to demand that people take some responsibility for their own safety these days.

Question for those who know anything about Washington D.C. Would you really think it's the police department's responsibility to make it a priority to go after the robbers who mug a drunk white guy who was walking through Anacostia at night wearing fancy clothes and $10,000 worth of expensive stuff like a Rolex watch?

Let's start a pilot program where all 17 girls from that "pregnancy pact" get one of these as a baby shower present. If that works, then I propose that they be used in place of condoms and birth control pills in public schools.

Ross Perot is back on the political scene with a new website.

Kuwait gets a new democratic system, and along with it comes a surge of Islamists in its government.

A case so ridiculous that even Child Protective Services won't touch it with a ten foot pole. A public school accused a woman of allowing her daughter to be sexually abused based on the word of a psychic. A psychic.

John Stossel makes a great case for ending the War on Drugs that most Americans can follow.

The Volokh Conspiracy does a good job of showing how the "gay threats" to religious liberty actually come from older anti-discrimination laws, but at the last minute sort of splits hairs about how anti-discrimination laws that apply to the provision of services to the public by their very nature can constitute an unconstitutional assault on religious liberty.

This Canadian judge--a French Canadian judge--gets what many cops just don't get about the proper way for the police to use force when enforcing the law:

A search warrant for "dynamic entry" should not, on the evidence, have been issued in this case. Police could have arrested Parasiris under calmer circumstances. [Emphasis mine]

By now most of you have probably heard about the AP's use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against the Drudge Retort. While I think that their use of about twelve percent of the AP's stories was probably fair use in the strictest legal sense of the term, I am actually a bit sympathetic to the Associated Press. Not for the reasons shown in this case, but rather because there are still bloggers who have a habit of reproducing most, if not all, of a mainstream media story on their blogs without adding much of anything to it.

My sympathy is largely [clarification: all but entirely] abstract. I can't count the number of times I've clicked on a link from Instapundit to another blog and all I found was a few pithy comments below a large chunk of excerpted text. It's a writer of rare talent who can pull that sort of thing off in a way that adds any value, and the closest thing I've seen with that is when Vox Day takes a potshot or two that is just amusing at a story.

**UPDATE**: And this would be why I so strongly qualify my sympathy for the mainstream media as something more abstract than real. While the AP plays the saddest song on the littlest violin in the whole wide world, it gets caught doing not only the very thing it is upset about, but does it even worse than those it targeted!

Anyone notice how much unnecessary salt there is in pretty much everything that is sold at the grocery store, fast food places, etc.? I think that has far more to do with our country's rate of heart disease than obesity. It's also one of the reasons I am so cynical about the FDA. Despite the severe health problems associated with Aspartame, it's still on the market (though drugs of modest value are often kept off!) and the amount of salt in much of our food supply is downright poisonous. I'd much rather see the FDA establish legal limits on sodium in our food supply to bring it back down to healthy levels than do most of what it does with regulating experimental drugs.

We're getting ready to move into a new townhouse. 1330 square feet, fireplace and garage for about two grand a month. Sounds outrageous to most people, but then it's actually the safe way to get a fairly big living space around here these days.

I can think of several small dogs I've known that are deserving of this fate.

Tragedies like this are bound to happen when the police try to tempt people into committing a crime. "Bait cars" make sense when the police have a specific suspect in mind, but when they are just used as bait you've got a problem. It's the same deal as when attractive female cops pose as prostitutes. Sure, you may catch a repeat offender, but chances are equally high, if not higher, that you'll just tempt someone into committing a new crime in the process, and that's immoral for reasons obvious to most Christians.

Then:



Now:

At a time when we can't get a balanced budget amendment or any other amendment that would help fix some of the mess in our government, Senator Lindsay Graham is leaning toward proposing an amendment to blunt the recent ruling in favor of giving military detainees Habeas Corpus rights. Seems that the normally broken part of the Supreme Court has at least enough intelligence to realize that if Congress has not officially declared war, that our government should not be able to employ war powers. Too bad Graham is neither smart nor honest enough to see it that way either.

The next release of Mac OS X will probably be boring for most people based on this information. However, it looks like Apple is really going to work on the guts of the operating system to make it work even better on new hardware, and OpenCL sounds very interesting. It's a C-based programming language designed allow you to make use of the GPU for things other than simply drawing the interface. Look for interesting future applications of this like Adobe Photoshop plugins that are able to offload a lot of processing to your computer's underused and powerful GPU.

I have published three more Movable Type themes for download lately. Get them here, here and here.

I got to thinking about Romans 13 again because it was one of the two chapters that we covered at this week's bible study. One area that we covered was how Christians often suggest that we should follow Jesus' example and meekly submit ourselves to unjust punishments. I disagree with this sort of thinking because while Jesus was innocent, his trial was not entirely unfair either by the standards of the old covenant. Jesus was charged with blasphemy, and committed what sounded like blasphemy before an assembled portion of the Sanhedrin, as recorded in Mark 14:

⁵⁷Then some stood up and gave this false testimony against him: ⁵⁸"We heard him say, 'I will destroy this man-made temple and in three days will build another, not made by man.' " ⁵⁹Yet even then their testimony did not agree.

⁶⁰Then the high priest stood up before them and asked Jesus, "Are you not going to answer? What is this testimony that these men are bringing against you?" ⁶¹But Jesus remained silent and gave no answer. Again the high priest asked him, "Are you the Christ,[f] the Son of the Blessed One?"

⁶²"I am," said Jesus. "And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven."

⁶³The high priest tore his clothes. "Why do we need any more witnesses?" he asked. ⁶⁴"You have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?"

Obviously what Jesus said was not blasphemy because He is the Son of God, Messiah, etc. However, we forget that Jesus' trial actually did fall into an area that was considered acceptable by God for the state to act in Israel, which was to punish blasphemy. God allowed them to remain ignorant of the truth, something which would have completely turned the trial on its head, because God had His own purposes at work here. Had the truth been revealed by revelation immediately after they initially condemned Him, and they continued on with the punishment, it would have been an entirely different matter of justice, role of government, etc.

It is important to keep these facts in mind because many Christians seriously believe that the trial of Jesus was nothing more than a show trial by a kangaroo court, when it was a far more complicated thing that actually did intersect with clearly ordained functions of government. In other words, Jesus was not put to death by government fiat, but rather under a law that had clear authority. So when the government simply does as it pleases, and legislates its way into legitimizing any criminal enterprise it pleases, that is not a fair comparison at all with the way that Jesus was tried and sentenced to death. A government that simply eschews the rule of law altogether or that legislates its way into a state equivalent to that is not legitimate under Romans 13 because it is not acting as God's agent the way that even the Sanhedrin was in Mark 14.

That is a screenshot of the new theme that I have, from my desktop which is running Opera. I've tested this theme out in IE6, Safari, Opera and Firefox 3 RC2. In all of those, it looks fine with the text clearly readable in my opinion, but Pablo complained that that "black text on a brown background" is hard to read giving me reason to believe that for some people, the black text is spilling over to the brown on the side. I've not seen this, but I know how awful browsers can be at getting the same experience for everyone, so I'm asking you guys to click on that thumbnail, look at the screenshot, and tell me if that is how you are seeing my main page. Please leave feedback in the comments to let me know if there is some sort of deviation from this because I really like this look and want to make this style available on my themes blog.

I saw this comment on a post at The Agitator, and realized that it does a pretty good job of explaining, albeit indirectly, one of the critical problems that libertarianism has today:

There's no moral objection to the violation of an unjust law, and restrictions on the free movement of people inconsistent with private property ARE unjust laws. "Illegal immigrants" - those who cross the arbitrary, tyrannical borders of governments in search of a better life in opposition to unjust laws are _heroic civil disobedients_. Anyone who counsels obedience to the law because it's the law, regardless of its virtue, is either a moral infant or coward.

The Consumerist has a story about a couple getting the police called on them when they refused to show their receipt at Wal-Mart as they were walking out the door; fortunately the police didn't take Wal-Mart seriously. There are plenty of other stories about this sort of thing happening with Best Buy. In fact, they of all places are notorious for doing that to their customers, though I've never had a problem with the ones in Northern Virginia so far. At Costco you expect this because they make it clear that you can't get in without an ID, and you can't get out without showing their staff your receipt, so it's always obvious there and they're always quick to give you the benefit of the doubt that if you have a receipt you're a good customer.

What I do at these stores where I know that they may try to pull this on me, and pretty much everywhere else is I swing my bags through the detectors in front of the door. That way, if they go off, security has no excuse to ever search my person. I can cheerfully tell them to piss off because clearly whatever set off the alarm is in my bag, not on my person. The reason I do this is because I tend to trust store security even less than I do the average cop. Actually, a lot less because there is a more serious hiring process in place for the police.

I agree with the sentiment here in the article. If they don't make it painfully obvious in advance a la Costco, then if they want to search my bags for no good reason, the next place I'm going is to customer service to return everything I bought unless it's too good of a deal or I'm in a rush.

You see me walking out of a line, with bags and a receipt, and just decide to do a random check? I don't think so. Go ahead. Tell me to take my business elsewhere if I don't like it. I'll be more than happy to, and so will the plethora of other struggling retailers who will be practically rolling out the red carpet in mockery of your store if you make me go to them.

Besides, there is always Amazon.com...

This article has some good points about the trouble that conservatives will face when fighting for limited government, but there are a lot of areas that conservatives could win political capital that they aren't even trying to get. The most significant one that comes to mind is attacking the "expert culture" that liberals have foisted on this country. There are many jobs that don't require professional licenses ranging from interior decorating, to hair styling, to many of the basic routine procedures like performing x-rays on medical patients. It's not that these jobs are by nature open to every Tom, Dick and Harry who wants to get into them, but rather that the threshold to get into them is set unnecessarily high for those who, with a little bit of training at a community college, or demonstrated personal expereince could perform them admirably.

Scaling back the licensing requirements would open up new business opportunities for many people. Imagine, instead of having to go to the hospital to get a x-ray taken, a poor medical patient could go to "1-hour X-Ray" with a note from their doctor's office explaining what he or she needs, the work is done for $20-$25, and the patient gets to shop for their groceries while the picture is developed. Conservatives should attack the left based on how its approach invariably cuts down on choice, which naturally tends to cause inconvience and higher prices. Instead of attacking Medicare, conservatives should be putting forth a plan to allow for a 50% increase in the enrollment at all medical schools, and the accrediation of many new medical schools so that competition for students can increase (hopefully cutting down on their tuition) and more doctors can enter the market.

Blue collar workers could also benefit from this if conservatives would take actions like eliminating taxi medallions and replacing them with a special driver's license that costs a thousand dollars a year (as opposed to the outrageously high costs of a taxi medallion in most cities). If done right, this is an issue that conservatives could use to cut a broad swath across class lines in appealing to the public.

People who don't pay attention to the way that law enforcement often behaves whenever there is a sliver of a chance of getting some bling as a part of an operation don't realize just how much of a racket police work can be. With civil asset forfeiture laws that allow the police to "arrest" your property, without you enjoying most normal due process rights to protect it, stuff like this is not only bound to happen, but to flourish:

The ATF had ordered Leatherman tool kits, engraved with the words "Always Think Forfeiture." Sali learned of the issue after a constituent brought the purchase to his attention. ATF said the tools were to be used as part of its Asset Forfeiture Program, which provides training to federal, state and local law enforcement. But Sali said the "Always Think Forfeiture" motto engraved on agent tools sent the wrong message to law-abiding citizens.

"Americans have a right to keep and bear arms. We have a right to private property. But ATF, through its engraved motto, sends a message that these rights are secondary to the government's apparent goal to 'always' seek forfeit of private property. Of course, we all want our law enforcement agencies to pursue and prosecute criminals fully. But I have a problem with a federal agency sending a message, even an unintended one, that law-abiding citizens will apparently 'always' be treated the same as criminals." said Sali.

You would have to be daft beyond all reason to just blithely dismiss the ramifications of a culture which encourages "seize first, ask questions later" as its "unofficial" policy*. Such an indiscriminate approach is not unlike the way that an armed robber views private property: ripe for the picking. What makes the criminal more tolerable in this situation is the fact that he knows that he is a criminal, and typically doesn't have the audacity to puff up his chest about how much society needs him and how "it's the law" or some other bovine excrement. Sinners who know that they are sinners, and who don't apologize for their sin, are always far more sufferable than the insufferable hypocrite who has created a systematic defense in his or her own mind.

Does the ATF do some good? Of course. Then again, Al Capone used some of his filthy, filthy lucre to feed the poor during the depression. Capone's charity no more wipes away his criminality via humanitarian action than the occasional bust of serious criminals changes the fact that the ATF is more aptly described as amoral mercenary outfit working on the tax payer's dime.

*The scare quotes are there because something like this is just like the tip of the iceberg; the tip you see is only 10% of what lurks beneath the surface away from sight.

My response to Difster's post in part 2 didn't address a point that needs some consideration, so I'll do that here. Christianity and libertarianism are compatible because of the way that God structured the New Covenant, but God is not a libertarian. What this means is that God is only a libertarian if your criteria for being a libertarian is allowing a significant amount of political and economic freedom on this side of eternity in relation to human government. However, it should be clear from my previous posts that the way that God rules is not libertarian except in some areas. Then again, God is not a liberal or a conservative either, so all things being the same, which they aren't, but we'll pretend that they are, God's no more a libertarian than He fits any other human philosophy.

Christianity and God are separate. Do not mistake the two. One is a religion, a system of beliefs and rules. The other is an actual deity. The qualities of the former do not necessarily correlate to the qualities of the latter.

Difster takes exception to some of my arguments against God's alleged libertarianism:

Libertarians object to other, very flawed people making it their business what you do behind closed doors. Christian libertarians (like myself) believe that since God made us He can do as he pleases in regards to our lives. Those libertarians that are not Christians have bigger things to worry about than individual sins that others are not privy to.

Others more qualified than I have pointed out that you have to be careful about the way that an adjective modifies the meaning of a noun. "Christian libertarians" is no exception to this, as the modifying adjective "Christian" has significant ramifications for the noun "libertarian" that alter its meaning in some ways that the average, non-Christian libertarian would consider to be profound. In short, this is a bait-and-switch argument that Difster is making here. The vast majority of libertarians, being secular, not only do not agree with this notion of authority over the individual, but would vehemently despise it, thus rendering his point moot as it applies to the majority of libertarians.

Note: I don't want to sound like I am accusing Difster of deliberate intellectual dishonesty here, as I actually do think that he believes that Christian libertarianism is actually a respected, normal part of the libertarian movement rather than a splinter movement that, while very similar, has some deep philosophical differences with normal libertarianism.

Only the most ardent follower of Ayn Rand would believe that we have no obligation to the poor. Libertarians assert that giving to the poor is, as the Bible says and individual responsibility and that giving should be from one's heart. God says nothing about having your wages forcibly taken from you and handed over to the poor. Libertarians have no objection to voluntary charity.

Actually, what the Bible establishes is the notion of a non-governmental (human government) moral mandate that applies to all believers. The consequences of this mandate are measured by God, the ultimate sovereign, not by man, but God clearly did establish a mandate for believers. Furthermore, most libertarians would again disagree with Difster when it comes to a moral obligation to a poor because most libertarians, like liberals, rarely, if ever, acknowledge natural obligations. Conservatives are far better than libertarians at recognizing the existence of such natural mandates, but are generally quite off when it comes to understanding how they interact with human society and government.

I suspect that once again Difster is reading statism into my position where I have not actually argued this. It is true that God does not ever legitimize the forcible redistribution of wealth except as part of a judicial sanction against a criminal. It is also true that there are mandates that are not optional, that while not enforced by the state on this side of eternity, are every bit as real in their implications for us as though they were enforced by the state. Just because we will not be punished here and now for failing to ever provide for the poor, does not mean that there will not come a point when God will hold us to this failing and reduce our standing before Him (in keeping with Paul's discussion of the judgment of the believers).

By all means, show me where in the New Testament that the death penalty is applicable. I go back and forth on this issue to be honest. On the one hand there are some people that just need to die. On the other hand, I don't really trust the state to have the power of death and use it wisely or judiciously.

The undeniable fact is that God is not in the least inherently opposed to the use of the death penalty. The New Testament represents a new, ideal covenant between man and God, but it does not change God's opinion on basic criminal jurisprudence. After all, as it is written, "God is not a man, that He should change His mind."

Libertarians are opposed to man using that kind of force against other men at their whim. Do you trust others with nukes? I know I don't. God's judgment is perfect, ours is not.

Again, a classic bait-and-switch. The average libertarian, if asked, would be no more comfortable with God unleashing a collective punishment on a city, than with a government retaliating against another with nuclear weapons.

Believing that animals have no rights is not the same as believing that it's OK to be cruel to animals. And yes, God says to let your beasts of burden rest on the Sabbath as well.

That sabbath provision is a clear grant of liberty to the beast of burden. It is tantamount to a declaration that while human beings do have dominion over animals, and may use them as we see fit for our own non-sinful use, that they are something more than just property to be disposed of as we see fit. The mere establishment of certain boundaries that are immutable, especially one as important as the sabbath, does away with the argument that animals are merely our property, while not going into the equally insane realm of animal rights activism.

It's a dangerously right-wing idea to allow private citizens to carry guns because they are not "qualified professionals" like the police, and you never know what can happen when you let just anyone carry a gun. Yet when regular police are essentially decked out in battle dress uniforms and given assault weapons as standard armaments, this is considered a solution, not a sign of a horrible change in the relationship between the public and the government. When an allegedly conservative Republican like Bush attacks due process rights and other liberties, he's a fascist who is going to destroy our democracy, but when a liberal government all but institutes a literal police state in a major city in order to clamp down on violent neighborhoods, it's just a bad judgment call.

I started this series because of a post on Instapundit about why you need to be a conservative in order to be a real Christian. With this post, I think I can end it.

(Note: this builds on the previous post)

I understand the impulse to mock something like this. After all, it is pretty transparently stupid to ascribe human political ideology to God. However, many liberals wonder why there is such a reluctance to suggest that liberals can be good Christians too. Off the top of my head, I can think of several key points (note: I'm only referring to liberals who claim to be Christians here):

Like Rick Hills, I'm an "anti-intellectual." I suppose this is due to my belief that there are few, if any, true "intellectuals" around today because of the sheer difficulty it is to acquire an ability to speak with justified confidence about a diverse range of topics. Maybe I'm just expecting too much by effectively equating "intellectuals" with those that used to be called "polymaths."

Subjects that are intellectually demanding don't really need any help to make their contents obscured to the average person. The very concepts themselves are just too complicated, regardless of the language, to be conveyed in a meaningful way to those without the intellectual capacity to grasp them. Purposeful obfuscation of language is a sure sign that something is probably amiss.

To obfuscate one's language to "raise the bar," thus preventing the participation of the hoi polloi is as intellectually honest and worthy of respect as simply speaking common tourist phrases in another language and pretending that one has said something profound. It's cheap. It's practically cheating, as it lives and dies based on the breadth of the target's vocabulary, rather than their intellect.

"When you jump a deputy, you can expect to die," Crowder said. "If you attack a deputy who is armed, particularly when it's more than one person, the logical assumable result of that is that the deputy will be disarmed. And chances are he will then be executed by the people who disarmed him. I don't expect them (deputies) to take that chance."

Crowder said Howard would have been justified in shooting anyone who was involved in the attack. "He was on the ground being kicked when he finally resorted to defending himself," Crowder said Sunday night at the scene near the Sears store.

While I agree with this sentiment, too often the police fail to see how it could be applied to the average citizen's use of force in self-defense. There are way too many cases of the police failing to see that they would have behaved in the same way as an armed citizen, and enforce laws on "excessive force" against them when it would be better for the police to just quietly cover for the otherwise law-abiding citizen's actions.

I think this is why I couldn't be a cop in today's government. If I lived in a liberal jurisdiction that punished private citizens for shooting in cases like this, I would feel morally compelled to write up excuses for why it was in fact legally justified.

CNet has a discussion about creating a "commenter's bill of rights." After a little spat that resulted in comments getting accidentally deleted, Robert Scoble apparently began to act like he owned his comments that he posted on a third party site for another blogger. As is often the case, rather than seek a simple rule, there is now some talk about creating a whole new framework of rights which will end up just being a burden on bloggers and the software developers who write their software.

The simplest route for handling bloggers' comments would be to cover alteration of them in substantial ways under existing libel statutes. If someone changes your comments to mean something that a reasonable person would construe as being very much not what you had said, I think it would be fair to allow some sort of modest litigiation over that. Some bloggers are inclined to go so far as to completely rewrite the comments of those they think are trolls, making them say all manner of sexually debauched things, and obviously there ought to be consequences for that if the target is posting under their real identity or an identity easily traced to them.

Lastly, as far as editing one's comments and even deleting them, I think the inability to do so has some real utility for keeping things under a little bit of control. Without the ability to airbrush or simply eliminate embarassing comments, some people will be more inclined to actually think before they post comments or to just not write comments at all.

A police union in Ohio commits blatant witness intimidation, so far with no punishment. This is for the case of a city code inspector who shot at cops raiding his house, thinking that they were armed robbers. The police union is upset because unlike most cases of this sort, the man who they are trying to demonize has established a reputation as a stand up guy with numerous business owners and others that he worked with as a government code inspector, many of whom are openly vouching for his character as a law-abiding citizen.

The ACLU is opposing eminent domain reform in California. Why any libertarian would support this organization, knowing how often it is wrong versus how often it is right, is beyond me.

Things may get nasty for the current players in the mobile device category now that nVidia has fired a very powerful shot across their bows with this prototype.

Movable Type 4.2RC1 has been released. I'm running it right now on my blog. I lost the ability to use the Privacy plugin, but overall it seems to be worth it. The built-in template caching is a major performance booster (I can republish my entire blog in under five minutes with it, and I have about 1,250 entries).

Most of us at one point or another have felt like we've been crapped on by our job. Well, today, I was standing outside talking to my wife, and a bird crapped on my forehead. Fortunately, it was easy to discretely clean up, but I think there might be a powerful metaphor involving my current job that I can't ignore...

It is disgusting that this girl is not being punished in the least for the fraud that she has committed. Girls who lie about their age should be sent to prison for fraud and a conspiracy charge related to statutory rape.