September 2008 Archives

I just put a blogroll back up. I doubt most people even realized it had been taken down. Back during Movable Type 3.3, there was a blogroll plugin that worked really well for generating blogrolls, but it didn't carry over to 4.X, so I had to stop using it. Long story short, the plugin's author created a new plugin for this sort of thing, and I put the blogroll back up.

If you're missing from it, want to be on it, etc. leave a comment.

That's a screenshot of my next Wordpress to Movable Type project. It's called Green Light. This is what the original version looks like.

H/T: El Borak.

If you subscribe to my news feed, please update to the feedburner address. If you aren't already subscribed, maybe you should ;)

Apple's getting more flak from developers, and deservedly so, for the way that it's been handling the App Store. MacWorld has a pretty blunt description of what's going on, and their take on it is spot on, in my opinion. For a mainstream publication to bluntly call Apple out like that is important because Apple's been able to ignore its developers because this issue, so far, has not really gotten far beyond the ranks of people who had been considering iPhone/iPod Touch development.

The iPhone may be the "it" product right now, but all it takes is for one or two killer applications to arrive for Android, and the market may begin to shift. If I were part of the Android development process, I would definitely be taking a sober look at the platform, and identifying ways to bring its capabilities squarely up to par with anything the iPhone can do.

Obama shouldn't be blamed for what Ayers did when the candidate was 8 years old, as Obama says. By the time the two met, Ayers was a University of Illinois professor in Chicago, deeply involved in education reform, a topic of interest to Obama.

Can't say that I agree with this position. Had their attack on the Fort Dix's NCO club gone as planned, it would have constituted a crime so serious that no amount of repentance on the part of the Weathermen could have absolved from them having to pay for the crime with their lives. As one of the leaders of the Weathermen, Ayers shares a deep responsibility for the actions of his subordinates, and they were such that cannot simply be dismissed as "sins that took place a long time ago." Furthermore, it's not like Ayers is even repentant, and to condemn Obama for associating with him is not at all unlike the criticism and condemnation that "moderate Muslims" get when they are caught associating with their wild-eyed, blood-thirsty coreligionists.

It's bad enough that the woman is an irredeemably pathological liar when it comes to politics, when she's not finding creative new ways to libel Milton Friedman, she's essentially apologizing for tyrants. From Reason:

By Klein's account, China is another country that violently imposed Friedmanite reforms. To make this case, she rewrites the history of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, claiming the protesters were primarily opposed to economic liberalization, instead of one-party dictatorship. According to Klein, the Communist Party, led by Deng Xiaoping, attacked them to save its free market program and advance yet more sweeping reforms while people were still in shock.

If the students were indeed protesting economic reform, they seldom expressed that grievance at the time. Instead, they demonstrated in favor of democracy, government transparency, and equality before the law, and against bureaucracy and violence. The protesters first gathered to mourn former Secretary General Hu Yaobang, one of China's most important economic reformers. The protests soon grew to include everybody who wanted liberal democracy-both those who wanted more economic reform and those who wanted less. Klein equates the second element with the whole protest.

There may have been violence involved with the implementation of liberalization in the Chinese economy, but it's nothing on the order of violence used to implement the Maoist policies that can be directly attributed to deaths of tens of millions of workers. Any violence used to liberalize the Chinese economy can at least be excused by the fact that Mao so thoroughly botched the Chinese economy and agricultural system, that the need for liberalization was so extreme that it was a matter of life and death for many Chinese. Still, nothing need be conceded to Klein on this point, as history has shown that on the matter of state-directed violence, China returned to something resembling sanity once the liberalizes took over from Mao.

Everytime that Klein tries to see a capitalist boogeyman behind the crimes of a country ruled by a Communist Party, it becomes more and more obvious that she is a modern day Walter Duranty.

Most libertarians like to pretend that things like national sovereignty don't really matter much. It's a key part of the reason why they are so dismissive, often in bitter and vitriolic ways, of people who raise concerns about issues ranging from immigration restrictions, to how much ethnic diversity is good for society.

Much of this tendency in libertarians comes from an irredeemably presentist view of the world. Issues like how to maintain a free society almost invariably get short thrift; they're up to the individuals that compose society, not the libertarian proposing a libertarian policy. This is a lot like looking at an engineering design or a business plan and finding a lot of blank spots toward the end, where implementation and support finally start getting figured out. No wonder that mainstream libertarianism is largely irrelevant today; a lot of people can sense that it is a short-sighted, incomplete philosophy.

Modern Africa is seeing a new round of colonialism, this time from the Chinese. The Chinese import labor in droves, exploit weak governments and are just generally starting to take over. Africa has its own problems, and many of them are its own fault, but that doesn't mean that China isn't creating many new problems either. China is exploiting Africa's structural, governmental and cultural weaknesses for its own benefit, and not in the benign way that most libertarians think happen as a result of international trade. After all, China has been a major source of the antagonism in Sudan, and they have no problem arming the Mugabe regime while exploiting it to gain economic advantage in Zimbabwe.

What many libertarians fail to realize is that the Chinese are doing to Africa, precisely what many Americans who want immigration restrictions fear would happen with an open borders policy in place. It's a simple fact that under a libertarian immigration system, there would be nothing in place to stop the People's Republic of China if they were to sponsor the emmigration of twenty or thirty million of their citizens, and distributed them strategically. Combined with the automatic citizenship of their children born in the United States and it would represent an existential blow to our country as a free society.

Some might argue now that immigration and citizenship are technically two separate issues, and that immigration should not be dependant on citizenship laws. A similar relationship exists between tax rates and government spending, yet it's unlikely that any libertarian would argue that taxes should be cut to a minimum when there is no possibility of cutting spending. While separate issues, they are deeply interdependant. Most Americans are rightly upset at the idea that all a foreigner has to do to make their children citizens is to give birth to them on some piece of land that is claimed by the federal government, especially since that confers political power on them.

One of the few dynamics that we know that does work with reasonably free societies is that they must be vigorously maintained, and they must be choosy in who they accept within their borders. There is precedent of any successful society, let alone a free society, simply inviting anyone that wants to work and contribute to the economy to come live within its borders and surviving. Even modern America, with its slowly failing economy and political system is an example of this as it has become so diverse that the only thing all fifty states have in common are the English language and federal rule. Xenophobia is an extreme to avoid, but all successful, especially free, societies have always maintained a healthy skepticism of the motives of foreigners who want to come within their territory. Africa, in its relationship with the Chinese, is showing just what can happen when a society does not resist a politically-driven influx of immigrants.

(I was thinking about submitting this to PajamasMedia, but didn't get a chance)

National service is all the rage today in D.C. Even Democratic politicians who are ostensibly opposed to war-making have begun to occassionally call for a draft to make sure that as many Americans have a stake in our country's military future as possible. Obama and McCain have also called for massive service programs to get the young out to volunteer. Joe Biden even called the prospect of paying more and more taxes a patriotic duty of those who can do so.

H/T: Rachel Lucas

Obama seems to have an uncanny ability to get his supporters to use dubious methods to shut down his critics and avoid serious debate on his policies.

I don't know what's more pathetic. The fact that Obama's supporters are resorting to these attacks, and thus announcing loud and clear what 2009-2012 would look like under Obama to the fence sitters, or the fact that they actually believe that they're cutting through a sinister web of lies, fiendishly crafted about one of the best statesmen of the last 100 years.

Kerry Dougherty manages to once again go off the deep end in her efforts to protect the Chesapeake Police Department from scandal:

In a front-page story in The Pilot last week, Turnbull not only claimed to be one of the confidential informants Chesapeake police relied upon to get a search warrant for the address of suspected drug dealer Ryan Frederick earlier this year, but he said the cops knew in advance that he and another thief were going to burglarize Frederick's property.

Ryan Frederick - as everyone in Hampton Roads knows by now - is charged with capital murder for the death of Detective Jarrod Shivers, who was shot while trying to execute a search warrant at Frederick's house Jan. 17.

Because Turnbull has gone public, Chesapeake police Chief Kelvin Wright says he's now free to ignore departmental policy that would preclude him from talking about informants.

Turnbull is lying, the chief told me Wednesday.

Here's what we do know:

• His home was burglarized.
• In two interviews, Turnbull shows a remarkable amount of knowledge about how the burglaries went down and familiarity with the chief suspect behind them.
• The police conveniently left out that their probable cause evidence for the search warrant for Frederick's house was based on tainted evidence obtained through a crime.
• The prosecution has acknowledged that burglars were involved.
• The police acknowledge that they had been working with their primary "informant" for many months before the raid.
  
• The prosecution has put forth no evidence suggesting that they got their probable cause evidence through licit means.

I think it's pretty safe to say that when you add up the fact that the burglar(s) seem to have an uncanny knowledge of the marijuana that Frederick had, the fact that the "informants" had been in contact with the police since a few months before the raid and that the police have actively denied a relationship between the burglary and the informant, you get good reason to believe that the Chief is either misinformed by his subordinates or outright lying.

The Democrats try to once again stitch together the Coalition of the Bitching [classes]:

"If Sarah Palin isn't enough of a reason for you to get over whatever your problem is with Barack Obama, then you damn well had better pay attention," Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida said at a panel about the shared agenda of Jewish and African-American Democrats Wednesday.

Hastings, who is African-American, was explaining what he intended to tell his Jewish constituents about the presidential race. "Anybody toting guns and stripping moose don't care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks. So, you just think this through," Hastings added as the room erupted in laughter and applause.

History is full of examples of gun-toting, hunting enthusiasts oppressing and murdering blacks and Jews in droves. Oh, right. In the real world it was the gun grabbers who systematically dehumanized blacks and Jews.

There's another industry bailout in the works right now that you probably haven't heard of. It's the Senate's attempt to make the Department of Justice get heavily involved in the litigation game being played by the RIAA and similar groups, so that they don't bare all of the costs themselves. As Ars Technica puts it:

In polite but unmistakeable language, the Departments of Justice and Commerce yesterday told Congress that the new Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008 (EIPRA) was a monstrosity so horrifying that only a stake through the heart of several key provisions could make it palatable. This is the bill, remember, that would give Justice the power to bring civil (not just criminal) lawsuits on behalf of groups like the RIAA, seek "restitution" damages, and then turn the money over to the private groups.

In other words, the DoJ could become a pro bono lawyer for the RIAA, freeing the trade group from all that bad PR and the millions of dollars it has spent filing tens of thousand of lawsuits in the last few years. Plus, the RIAA would still get all the money. Shockingly, the DoJ didn't think this a really good use of taxpayer-funded resources.

The Department of Justice is not exactly known for its tendency to refuse new jurisdictions and police powers. It was a smart move, though, because if this legislation goes through the DoJ will end up having to spend considerable resources to protect private business interests in cases that in a more honest system would be barely actionable offenses. The responsibility rightly rests with the industry trade groups like the RIAA and MPAA because that is one of the key reasons they exist in the first place!

It's interesting to see how the video game industry is not suffering from the shaky economy, compared to the movie and music industries. No small part of that is the fact that the video game industry provides better value for the price paid. A game that lasts 10 hours and that goes for $60 costs $6/hour of enjoyment; a new Blu-Ray movie at $30 for an average 1.5 hours of play time is $20/hour. Regular DVDs aren't much better, and most CDs are stuffed with filler that few people really even care about. The reason these industries aren't doing well is that they provide a terrible price/value ratio, and a lot of people have wised up and realized that. At 18 hours of game play (1 completed game, 1 game halfway finished) of playing Too Human, I've paid an average of $3.33/hour for the game. By the time I'm done, I expect that to be between $2.25/hour and $2.50/hour.

*This comment from Digg was the inspiration.

Apple is now placing an NDA on even its rejection notices! You would think that someone at Apple has been watching a little too much Fight Club with the way they're behaving. You can't talk about the development kit, you can't talk about getting rejected. Pretty soon it's going to become a matter of you can't even confirm or deny that you're even an owner of an iPhone who knows Objective-C.

Seriously, fuck Apple. If they want to have the App Store fill up with toy apps, then they can go right ahead. No business in their right mind would ever spend money developing for the iPhone, unless they are big enough that Apple won't have the stones to reject them.

Someone needs to get an Android-based phone, like the G1, running on CDMA networks so us Verizon users can have a powerful, open phone.

Ars Technica has an interesting piece on some legislative activity aimed at controlling the sale of stolen goods online. Some of it actually comes off as half-way reasonable, such as requiring online marketplaces to keep the contact information of the people who sell products through them. Then, the proposals go off the deep end by not only making it illegal for the accused seller to be contacted about the matter by their marketplace, but they go so far as to place an overwhelming burden of guilt on the seller and marketplace at the mere accusation of any retailer.

An unaccountable process wherein someone can merely make an accusation, and the burden of proof is then placed on the accused. What could possibly go wrong?

Yet, Dr. Dobb's makes a good case for why it might be, maybe even should be.

Traditional COBOL is indeed a terrible, terrible language. It's unstructured, and extremely verbose, making it complicated to get anything done right. While it has gotten better, truthfully, it really should be replaced by another language.

A lot of the code that is written in COBOL is for business applications, and that's fine. However, you will be hard-pressed to convince me that today it's not a lot cheaper for the average user of such a system to find an off the shelf product, than to maintain custom code written for the company many years ago. A lot of these business apps are commodities today, and it's time that businesses started treating them like that.

They say that hindsight is 20/20, but I'm pretty sure that the lenders' sight was around 20/20 when they were bluntly told to take risks in order to achieve political and sociological goals favored by the left:

In a nutshell, Liebowitz contends that the federal government over the last 20 years pushed the mortgage industry so hard to get minority homeownership up, that it undermined the country's financial foundation to achieve its goal.

"In an attempt to increase homeownership, particularly by minorities and the less affluent, an attack on underwriting standards was undertaken by virtually every branch of the government since the early 1990s," Liebowitz writes. "The decline in mortgage underwriting standards was universally praised as 'innovation' in mortgage lending by regulators, academic specialists, (government-sponsored enterprises) and housing activists."

Later,

A New York Times article from Sept. 1999 states that Fannie Mae had been under increasing pressure from the Clinton administration to expand mortgage loans among low- and moderate-income people and that the corporation loosened its lending requirements to comply.

The Clinton Era "prosperity" that people remember was an illusion that was bound to get blown away at some point. At some point, you have to pay the piper, and that's what we're doing now that many banks are collapsing as a natural consequence of being forced to ignore basic banking risks in order to achieve some very dubious social engineering goals.

This is the reason why I am so vitriolic toward sociologists and sociology in general. They dragged millions of people down with them in a social experiment, and in the process actually made things worse off than they were before. Now, with the bottom of the housing market starting to crack, the debacle that they created in the name of remaking and reengineering society and the economy has lead to a crisis where many minorities and less affluent whites will just outright lose their homes.

The dark irony of this situation is that the tendency of banks to be conservative in their underwriting standards was a market mechanism to prevent them from making bad choices. Here you had a somewhat self-regulating industry that was forced to stop self-regulation, and now it's free market capitalism that is being blamed for the lack of self-regulation. Truly Orwellian, that argument.

Anyone who pays attention to the War on Drugs knows that the mentality that causes cops to bend or outright break the law to get a drug conviction is not an isolated issue:

If the unthinkable turns out to be true, that police officers really did send criminals to break into private property or they looked the other way and allowed them to do it, Chesapeake prosecutors will see more than their capital case crumble.

Confidence in the city's justice system will collapse.

This is a deadly serious matter. One man died in this mission. A young woman was widowed. Three children were left fatherless.

And the man charged with killing the detective will be on trial for his life.

It is illegal for police officers to allow individuals to commit felonies and violate the constitutional rights of other citizens. It's the sort of reckless behavior that turns cops into criminals.

It's not reckless behavior. Rather, it is blatantly criminal behavior on the part of people who are charged with upholding the law. One of the things that is ironic about this is that we are told that cops need more latitude to protect us from drug criminals, and yet in many cases they actually foster criminality themselves. No reasonable person would ever buy the argument that in this case, the petty offense would be the breaking and entering of Frederick's house and the major offense the possible sale of marijuana.

The reason that this behavior doesn't surprise me in the least is that there is a culture of corruption and shortcuts in the world of drug law enforcement. Despite claims to the contrary, drug cops frequently operate on the word of a single informant, and don't even corroborate the information before attempting a bust. Scratch the surface of any report of a SWAT unit hitting an innocent person's home, and you'll almost invariably find that it was because the police didn't do any "police work" like they were supposed to do.

As Milton Friedman pointed out a long time ago, these problems are inherent to victimless crimes like alcohol or drug prohibition because neither buyer nor seller has a nature motive to work with the police against the other. It is only natural that the police have to turn to less reliable sources of information to break up this economic relationship.

Jailhouse interviews make great news copy.

If you're a fan of fiction, that is.

The guys behind the glass, with rap sheets as colorful as their jumpsuits, share at least one trait: They're accomplished liars.

And lying is usually the least of their transgressions.

And yet this doesn't stop the police from using informants with extensive criminal backgrounds. It would probably break the author's heart to read about the House of Death scandal involving American drug cops and a Mexican mafia enforcer who they allowed to commit about a dozen murders. It'll be interesting to see what happens when the "confidential informants" have to appear in court, and if Turnbull is is one of them. Regardless, in the larger scheme of things, the principle that goes "if you lay down with the dogs, you'll catch fleas" applies in spades to the relationship between many police officers and their drug informants.

A previous thread got this ball rolling, and so it's time to start a new thread.

Objectivists cling to a distinction that divides human life into potential and actual human beings. This is simply a starker version of the developmental definition of human life that just simply writes off all of the potential negative, statist arguments for ending the lives of others on developmental/deficiency grounds.

The first problem with the potential-actual divide is that it is not based on biology. At some point in the development of a baby inside its mother's womb it becomes capable of surviving outside of the womb with modest life support or on its own with normal motherly care. Yet it is still technically dependent on the mother's body for support. So, at this point, the potential-actual argument reaches a crisis. How do you recognize the fact that biology has made the baby dependent on the mother's body, but the baby is capable of surviving with minimal care, with the argument that a woman should have complete control over her own body.

In that scenario, in every meaningful sense, there is an "actual" human being inside of her, as it is not particularly in need of her body for support. Do you prevent her from having an abortion on demand, and demand that she instead release the baby, or do you allow her to take the life of an infant that could easily survive in someone else's care? In this case, someone's ability to control what happens to their body is going to have to be restricted. Will it be the mother's ability to get an abortion, or will it be the baby's right to live?

Another thing that the potential-actual divide suffers from is that it is dependent on present technology. In a world in which unwanted pregnancies can be easily transfered to an environment which can sustain and develop them independent of the mother, a "potential" human life will no longer be dependent on biology at all. The argument that it is potential because it is dependent on another person's womb will be largely irrelevant.

The danger that Objectivists tend to ignore with the potential-actual argument is that it opens the door to make it acceptable for someone to terminate the life of another. Ideas have consequences and there are demonstrable points in history which show that seemingly innocuous ideas mutated into devious and sinister ones that prepared societies to accept incredible violations of individual rights. That is why it is imperative that the definition of humanity that conservatives, libertarians and objectivists use should be as expansive as possible. Ideally, it should provide no support for any argument that any person, at any stage of their life, is not human or an individual.

This one looks to be a really fun story. If Miniter is right, it'd be hilarious to see this tied back to the Obama camp. It would really set the tone for the next four years if Obama gets elected. Vox Day has been predicting Obama theatrics should he win...

Before I begin, I'd like to point out the irony of an Objectivist actually acknowledging the natural obligation that a parent has to the well being of their children that they have brought into the world. For a primer on why the development of a human life is not a viable criteria for determining whether or not someone is a human being or not, go here.

Like many, I am troubled by the implications of Alaska governor and Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's decision to knowingly give birth to a child disabled with Down syndrome. Given that Palin's decision is being celebrated in some quarters, it is crucial to reaffirm the morality of aborting a fetus diagnosed with Down syndrome (or by extension, any unborn fetus)-a freedom that anti-abortion advocates seek to deny.

A parent has a moral obligation to provide for his or her children until these children are equipped to provide for themselves. Because a person afflicted with Down syndrome is only capable of being marginally productive (if at all) and requires constant care and supervision, unless a parent enjoys the wealth to provide for the lifetime of assistance that their child will require, they are essentially stranding the cost of their child's life upon others.

A similar argument could be made for the poor, especially the very poor. It's no secret that the poor are the primary reason we have government in the first place, as they are the ones who use most of the public services and are the majority of people who run afoul of the law. Furthermore, it's not clear as to how one can really distinguish most unskilled laborers from someone with Down Syndrome, as they are only modestly more productive, but certainly not so much more so that the distinction is really worth making. The average person who works minimum wage or near minimum wage jobs, without having someone else to help support them (as in the case of a typical student), almost invariably is as reliant on government aid as those that have Down Syndrome.

Provenzo's also tries to say that this isn't eugenics, but doesn't really offer a concrete explanation for why that is. Fair enough, it's not literally eugenics, as it is not a formal scientific campaign to weed out those deemed weak and inferior from the gene pool. It's just a coincidence that the purposes and end result are almost completely indistinguishable, since the parents are motivated by a desire to keep genetically inferior children from being born into their family.

This issue just serves to bring to light how little value the right to life gets from objectivists and many libertarians. Indeed, the right to life only extends in their eyes to those whose mothers are sufficiently magnanimous to not kill them in utero. In principle, this attitude is a complete negation of human rights, as it gives another person an arbitrary veto over the liberty of another. The distinction here between normal modes of authority, such as a parent reasonably infringing on a child's liberty to enforce rules upon them, and this is that the parent is given a right to simply wholesale, without cause, abolish the child's right to life altogether. The right of a woman to control her womb without medical cause in order to achieve abortion on demand, essentially turns the child within her into a non-human, even to such a point as the child is no longer strictly dependent on her womb for life support.

The pro-choice libertarians and objectivists have largely missed the bigger picture here. There can be no doubt, just from casual observation of the last 100 years, that the attitudes toward the value of human life and individuals has gone down tremendously around the world. It would behoove libertarians and objectivists to reject the minor "liberty" of abortion on demand, and instead embrace a comprehensive, genetics-based view of the individual. The result of that view is a comprehensive rejection of the idea that anyone, anywhere, for any reason, has a right to preemptively take an innocent human life. Such a cultural value would, ironically, serve as a bolster against statism by expanding the scope of protection and respect for individual lives and fundamental rights. Too often, libertarians and objectivists forget that violent collectivism first gets its foothold on society by suggesting that it is morally permissible to deny fundamental rights, including the right to life, to other groups because while they may be genetically human, "they're not people."

Looks like the big three are being lined up for a bail out. Instead of doing that, how about the federal government buy 5,000-10,000 Tesla Roadsters for local police forces to use as short distance interceptors? They're small, they're agile, they're green, they're fast and they're American. Not only would that sudden influx of capital enable Tesla to expedite its work on new lines of electric cars, it would probably cost less than ¹/₁₀ of a percent of a bailout of a single member of the big three.

The latter reason is probably why it's not being considered.

See if you can figure out what's missing from the bill:

Sanchez's bill would bring more routine to the search process. The bill requires the government to draft additional rules regarding information security, the number of days a device can be retained, receipts that must be issued when devices are taken, ways to report abuses, and it requires the completion of both a privacy impact study and a civil liberties impact study. Travelers would also have the explicit right to watch as the search is conducted.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use lib ('./lib', './extlib');
use MT;
use MT::Author;
use MT::Notification;

die("Specify an author name") if $#ARGV eq -1;

my @author = MT::Author->load({name => $ARGV[0]});
unless(defined($author[0]) and defined($author[0]->id())) { die("Couldn't load !" . $ARGV[0]); }

open(NOTIFILE, "<notifications.csv");
while (<NOTIFILE>)
{
    my @parts = split(/\,/, $_);
    my $notification = MT::Notification->new();
    $notification->blog_id($parts[0]);
    $notification->created_by($author[0]->id());
    $notification->created_on();
    $notification->email($parts[1]);
    $notification->modified_by($author[0]->id());
    $notification->modified_on();
    $notification->name($parts[2]);
    $notification->url($parts[3]);
    $notification->save();
}

close(NOTIFILE);

A modest proposal for General Motors in light of their unveiling the Volt:

• Start a new company based in the South.
• Provide that new company with enough funding to build at least one plant in a right-to-work state in the South.
• Sell the intellectual property rights for the Volt to that new company.
• Build the car using non-union, well-paid Southern workers.
• Restructure GM into General Motors Research and Development Labs and General Motors Manufacturing Corporation.
• Sell GMRD to the new company based in the South for peanuts.
• Shutdown GMMC, liquidate its assets, and distribute them among the shareholders and union members (if applicable).

I'm not a lawyer, but that's what I would do.

It may be an obvious point, but it really gets to the heart of the matter:

Second, as a department's use of this independent source of funding grows, its dependence on, and accountability to, the town's taxpayers goes down.

Nothing good can come out of making revenue raising a normal activity for street cops. The more that they are pressured into making lucrative busts, the more that they will focus on crimes that have a potential to bring in a windfall profit for their department over other crimes (murder, rape, armed robbery, home invasion, etc.)

This sort of thing doesn't help the public's perception of the police, but it is especially harmful in poorer areas which are often made to feel like the only time the police show up is to bust them for petty offenses rather than keep the peace. When you combine this problem with the militarization of most police forces, you get a recipe for bloodshed in the pursuit of revenue raising. As the article makes clear with the case of Donald Scott, sometimes the distinction between the police and armed robbers is not anywhere near as clear as it should be.

About a year and a half ago, I had a conversation with a guy I knew about racism in his workplace. He was upset that a new hire was throwing around racist words about blacks, but before you agree with him wholeheartedly, here's the catch: there were no blacks in his small company at the time. So this guy continues to go on and on about how this one new guy (who probably didn't last there long, being dumber than box of bricks) was throwing around racist words and how it upset him.

To add further complication, the new hire was physically aggressive, and this guy I knew wanted to confront him about being offensive. So, in a nutshell, you had a white guy, in an office of white guys with a few token dark-skinned hispanics, getting upset about racist words spewed at a race that wasn't even represented in the office, and going to tell the thuggish employee what's what. When I pointed this absurdity out to him, he just blinked, almost like on some level he identified with the non-existent blacks who were getting offended by "their word" being used by this white trash.

Too many people are like this guy, today, especially among whites. They'll get offended at things which don't even apply to them or hurt others in their presence. Rather than mind their own business, and just let people be flawed people when it's not hurting others (white people getting offended and "hurt" by racist words that don't apply to them, or anyone around them doesn't count), they have to get in the middle of it and become censorious and puritanical.

Puritanical.

You read that right, puritanical. The puritan spirit is alive and well; all that's changed is the objections of scorn and recipients of censorious behavior. Like the puritans, those that exhibit this behavior think they are behaving righteously, and punishing a sinner for thinking the wrong things, and doing the wrong thing. In modern America, the modern puritan will let you screw whoever you want that's over the age of consent, but don't let them catch you nursing a prejudice toward anyone.

That will get you sent to hell (also know as Human Resources).

My grandfather and I were talking about this prophecy over the weekend. He wasn't familiar with it, but I thought it would be interesting to share with others here:

49 The LORD will bring a nation against you from far away, from the ends of the earth, like an eagle swooping down, a nation whose language you will not understand, 50 a fierce-looking nation without respect for the old or pity for the young. 51 They will devour the young of your livestock and the crops of your land until you are destroyed. They will leave you no grain, new wine or oil, nor any calves of your herds or lambs of your flocks until you are ruined. 52 They will lay siege to all the cities throughout your land until the high fortified walls in which you trust fall down. They will besiege all the cities throughout the land the LORD your God is giving you.
 
 53 Because of the suffering that your enemy will inflict on you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the LORD your God has given you. 54 Even the most gentle and sensitive man among you will have no compassion on his own brother or the wife he loves or his surviving children, 55 and he will not give to one of them any of the flesh of his children that he is eating. It will be all he has left because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege of all your cities. 56 The most gentle and sensitive woman among you-so sensitive and gentle that she would not venture to touch the ground with the sole of her foot-will begrudge the husband she loves and her own son or daughter 57 the afterbirth from her womb and the children she bears. For she intends to eat them secretly during the siege and in the distress that your enemy will inflict on you in your cities. -Deuteronomy 28

and now from the Gospel of Luke:

20"When you see Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, you will know that its desolation is near. 21Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let those in the city get out, and let those in the country not enter the city. 22For this is the time of punishment in fulfillment of all that has been written. 23How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! There will be great distress in the land and wrath against this people. 24They will fall by the sword and will be taken as prisoners to all the nations. Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.

It's interesting to note that not that long after Jesus spoke these words, a mere three decades later, the Roman general Titus laid siege to Jerusalem and ruthlessly destroyed it. Cannibalism was also fairly common toward the end of the siege. Not that it's the best source, but even Wikipedia has a reference to the fact that cannibalism was a problem in Jerusalem toward the end of the Roman siege here.

Perhaps it is just a coincidence, but I find it very interesting that Deuteronomy so clearly predicts the events of the Roman siege of Jerusalem, and Jesus warned those listening to Him that events had been set into motion that would fulfill the prophecy of Jerusalem's destruction as foretold in the Torah.

**UPDATE**: This comment thread certainly has proved to amusing. It's related to the subject of this post, though the one commenter "Javelin" really takes the gold for being such a superb troll.

Right now SiteMeter's new site is the posterchild for bad reimplementations of software that worked. While flashier, thanks to a user interface that looked like it had been built with Flex, it just flat out sucked for the job that it was supposed to do, which was display stats. When I first looked at it, I just shook my head in disgust because they managed to slap on about six flashy panels that didn't provide even basic information like how many hits I had gotten today, and how many is my average per day. Maybe it did, but I couldn't find it, and I generally have a very strong ability to figure out what's what on a user interface.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. This wisdom is lost on a lot of people. Engineers hate it because we like to tinker with things and change them. Business people are afraid that if they keep selling the same service or product, people will think it's old and stale. Even end users themselves have a tendency to want something new just because they want things to be bigger and better.

Where Sitemeter went astray was they didn't keep thing simple and evolutionary. They had a rock solid service, and they should have focused on updates to the style that make it look a little more "Web 2.0" to appease those hungry for something new and flashy, and then added the Flash/Flex-like panels as optional components. Now, it appears that they overstepped and have had to go back to the tried and true user interface that we have all come to love--or at least accept.

On a personal note, I feel for the guys who built Sitemeter's new look and had to do a 180 degree turn because it hits home. The project that I am working on at my 9-5 is in a potentially similar situation because of a severe disconnect between our client's users and the program management from our client who are responsible for giving us our requirements. We had a demo last week, and the actual user apparently hated the work that we had been ordered to do.

It's understandable with the latest releases of JavaScript engines from Google and Mozilla that some people would fear that their favorite languages and toolkits would take a backseat to JavaScript. In my opinion, it's nothing more than a natural correction away from the over-emphasis that has existed for quite some time on using the server side for everything. There's still a lot of room for things like Ruby on Rails, which provides a strong foundation for the web application itself.

One of the things that I look forward to with these JavaScript engine updates is that they will make it even easier to make applications that use a lot of JavaScript (for perspective, a compressed copy of JQuery, with no plugins, is about 30kb of source code). By taking away the fear of performance, it'll be eaiser to encourage people to move away from hand-coded DOM manipulation and things like that, and move over to established JavaScript toolkits. If nothing more, it'll provide a very good argument for why it's unacceptable to keep reinventing the wheel.

The SQLite open source library implements a significant amount of database server functionality in a tiny library that is about 250kb when compiled. It's everywhere, from powering Movable Type-based blogs, to Apple's iPhone. The C/C++ APIs are incredibly simple compared to most commercial offerings; six basic functions and that's it! I was surprised to find that it was such an incredibly simply toolkit when I first got interested in using it for some practice exercises in C (we didn't get enough C in college, and I haven't had to use it on the job). Oh, and it's also built into Adobe's AIR development environment.

The moral of this story is that open source software is used in a lot of places where people wouldn't expect. For one thing, it forms the foundation of the majority of blogs. It's used in mobile phones, and as a cheap plaform for high-intensity web applications like Google's search services.

The coexistence of open source software and proprietary, closed source software benefits everyone. The dynamic that they create together balances out the need for a commons, with a need to provide a healthy outlet for ambition and even greed. One could argue that open source software dilutes the value of the commercial market; SQLite definitely has the potential to replace Microsoft's Access database engine, for example. However, many other companies can take that open source software and create products and services that they may not have considered if they had to pay royalties or be tied down to a closed, one vendor product.

As I said, it balances itself out in the end.

Ross Douthat makes a very good point about why the left is so very upset over the way that Palin has been received since the news of her daughter's pregnancy. It's a point similar to the one I made earlier about how the left has a caricatured view of social conservatism, a group that is very diverse.

There are legalists who will, no doubt, condemn Palin on the grounds that if she were a better parent, didn't have a career, etc., her daughter would not be pregnant. However, most social conservatives derive their conservatism from the Christian tradition which emphasizes forgiveness, the sanctity of life and an understanding that the parent is not guilty of the sin committed by their child.

If the roles were reversed between Palin and Obama, the condemnation would come from the fact that social conservatives would rightly view one of Obama's daughters getting pregnant as the fruit of the left's values on sex and abortion. Since most of the left teaches the attitude "teens will be teens" with respect to sex, and consider it a foregone conclusion that they'll have sex, it practically invites insinuations that it does not teach responsibility and expect its children to rise above their hormones and operate on a higher level. However, unlike the left, if Obama's family had an identical reaction to their daughter getting pregnant out of wedlock, while they may not garner the political support of social conservatives, the Obamas would at least get their respect.

If some paleoconservative or libertarian were to advocate something similar for Mike Reagan, one can only imagine how apoplectic Mike Reagan would get.



And yet, the FCC is very, very concerned with people cussing on air and very bad nipple slips...

From Flopping Aces:

"The record clearly indicates a serious and concentrated pattern of unacceptable, and at times, illegal activity occurring over a lengthy period, which establishes a course of conduct totally at odds with the ethics of our profession," Col. Julia Grimes, then head of Alaska State Troopers, wrote in [a] March 1, 2006, letter suspending Wooten for 10 days. After the union protested it, the suspension was reduced to five days.

The conduct of the officer was well known and punished by the state police of Alaska. By the admission of the head of the agency, the officer was guilty of some serious violent crimes. This just goes to show how politics can make for strange bedfellows, since many of the people who are complaining about Palin's intervention would be calling for the officer's head if the only news reports about the matter were that an officer had been suspended for five days for tasering his own preteen son.

Palin did act in her own family's interest. No one denies that she was using her power as governor to protect her sister, but that's not relevant since there is no other known case of a similar incident coming to her attention and her doing nothing about it. If she removed several thug-cops this way, and none of them were connected to her friends or family, it's doubtful that anyone would be criticizing her over this. Since there is no basis for comparison, any comparison is based either on optimism about her character from her supporters or cynical aspersions from those who disagree with her.

Due process is a bogus issue here; the officer was not removed for personal reasons, but rather professional reasons. God help us if we reach the point where a governor can be made aware of conduct by their subordinates that is unprofessional to the point of being criminal, and they are powerless to do anything to end that subordinate's career in public service. That is precisely what her critics on this issue would do in order to attack her candidacy because objectively speaking, her brother-in-law did get put through the system and was guilty of offenses which should cost a cop their badge.

Saw this online and thought that I would share:

1. Scrub toilet and flush several times.

2. Fill toilet with warm water and add a squirt of pet shampoo.

3. Drop cat in toilet and slam lid shut.

4. Sit on lid - cat's efforts to free itself will generate a good deal of sudsing and washing motions. Drink beer while waiting.

5. Flush toilet a couple of times to rinse cat.

6. Leap off toilet seat, dash out door and slam it securely shut because kitty will erupt from the bowl as if jet engine is lodged up their ass.

7. Leave kitty to sulk and dry itself. Drink beer while waiting.

* This is fiction - You couldn't get a man to scrub a toilet.

On a different note, Rachel Lucas, like many people, doesn't like cats because she thinks they're assholes. I like cats, but chances are, I'd despise your cat and the feelings would be pretty much mutual. See, I grew up with a dog and several cats, and our cats either thought they were a dog or were socialized around people from an early age making them like a non-pack animal version of a dog. Our first cat, who was raised by our dog, behaved so much like a dog that for years it was like we didn't have a cat in the house. Nothing like seeing your cat, sitting next to your dog, begging like a dog for scraps from the table.

Most people never really play with their cats when they're kittens and discipline them. Imagine how bloody psycho your dog would be if you never laid down the rules when it was a puppy. You'd probably be rightfully charged with child endangerment if you left your kids alone with it! If you establish a dominate relationship with the cat(s) from an early age, you don't have to worry about them being little furry tyrants in my experience.

Newsweek just can't bring itself to lay the blame where it belongs for the death of the American competitor to the Large Hadron Collider:

Not long ago the United States seemed certain to stay on top. In the 1980s and early 1990s, 30 kilometers of tunnel was dug in Waxahachie, Texas, south of Dallas, to house the Superconducting Supercollider-a machine that was to be much like the LHC, but bigger and more expensive. President Ronald Reagan, calling the project a "doorway to a new world," agreed to foot the $8.4 billion price tag without help from international partners. Physicists spent years designing experiments in hopes of grants and big discoveries. In 1993, with $2 billion spent and cost estimates swelling to $11 billion, the project came to an abrupt end. The U.S. Congress, worried about budget deficits, pulled the plug.

Isn't it interesting that one of our country's most ambitious scientific projects in a very long time was started by the icon of conservatism Ronald Reagan, but ended up getting killed by a left-wing Democratic congress and President in order to save money for more important things like food stamps and other forms of welfare programs? Meanwhile trolls across the Internet commenting on this story are blaming religious fundamentalists for something that was done by left-wing secularists to make sure that social programs didn't have to get cut.

The article itself is pure alarmism, as Europe's star is starting to burn out over demographic issues. In 20 years, the economy of Europe will be too badly crippled by pension payments to retirees to host a largescale project of this sort. While America may decline, it will remain one of the most viable environments for scientific and engineering work.

People can blame our decline on creationism and other red herrings, but those are just convenient targets. Creationism and other memetic whipping boys of the secular left have nothing to do with the fact that education standards have been steadily declining in the name of equality and making sure that every student feels special, not to mention the fact that most public school teachers have nothing even remotely passing a mastery of their subject area. What can you expect when you have educators educated in education educating students in fields other than education which, at best, they had as a college minor?

• The Vice Presidency is not a difficult position, as it carries with it, by default, virtually no formal power.
• The salary of the Vice President is $208,000/year, not counting benefits; her husband does not have to work in order for the family to be supported at a very high level of comfort.
• Her husband can easily fill in for her.
• Most conservatives' views on gender roles and child rearing have been flexible for many years to accommodate situations where the wife is capable of significantly outperforming her husband, and they choose to have her be the bread-winner.
• If McCain makes it through two terms, 3 of Palin's children will be adults, and a fourth will be almost ready to start college.

This "controversy" only exists because Obama's supporters and apologists have a completely caricatured view of social conservative views on family life.

The media is terribly naive:

Of course, the material on A-Space is highly classified, so it won't be available for the public. Only intelligence personnel with the proper security clearance, and a reason to be examining particular information, can access the site. The creators of A-Space do not want it to be used by some future double agent such as Jonathan Pollard or Robert Hanssen to steal America's 21st-century secrets.

Security clearances are not a protection against sociopaths like Hanssen, and men like Pollard who are absolutely convinced in their own mind of the righteousness of their cause which runs counter to the laws and policies governing classified materials. You can investigate them until hell freezes over, and wire them up to all sorts of machines to test the honesty of their statements, but the chances that you'll catch them are slim to none. The best that you can hope for is to convince them to not violate the terms of their security clearance by making the penalty for willfully compromising intelligence to a foreign country not only consistently enforced, but terribly painful for those who get caught doing it.

Yeah, I really feel like I've been put in my place:

I just stumbled across a site called Code Monkey. Man that Mike is a MAJOR ASSHOLE! I hope when he has kids, they dump him into a nursing home. Just another of these spoilt little twentysomethings, whose paruhnts could afford his way through school. Typical of the breeder-minded idiots we have running around in this country, Glad to see that some of the people from here told him off.

"Breeder-minded idiot" must be a code word for someone who didn't sleep through biology. I'm much more of a misanthrope than the next guy, but unlike MerlynHerne, I recognize the fact that without "breeders," the human race has no future. This person strikes me as one of those pseudo-intellectuals who uses the word "heteronormative" with a straight face, as though heterosexuality were not the normal, default behavior of most animal life, including humans.

Thanks! I guess he couldn't take the heat so he deleted comments and closed it for any additional ones. I absolutely HATE it when people say that these kyds currenty being born will pay for MY social security, retirement, medicare or whatever. It's not even established yet if any of them will be ABLE to work, with all of their "special needs". A great number of these kyds are already drawing disability via the social security fund and they haven't even reached adulthood yet.

Don't you just love a troll who complains that I shut down my comments and deleted them--only I didn't delete the comments? You have to be a total moron to link to an entry which you claim has been purged of comments.

I don't care if they reproduce. In fact, I tend to agree that these people are on the short list of people who shouldn't dazzle the world with their coital creations. Just don't try to bullshit me about how a pyramid scheme like Medicare or Social Security is viable when the pyramid's population representation starts to become so narrow that it resembles a rectangular prism.

I think this crap about the Social Security is a lame attempt to make us feel guilty for not doing "what society expects of us."

In honor of this particularly amusing trollish comment, I have decided on a new theme song for my blog, brought to you by Stewie Griffin:

A misconception that a lot of non-believers have about Protestant Christianity is that it had no role in laying the cultural foundation for the advancement of science and reason. In reality, some of the key protestant teachings about the nature of God were critical for providing a mass cultural basis for eliminating centuries old superstitions that had held back scientific and cultural development. If one steps outside of the materialistic biases that dominate modern discussion and philosophy, it's plainly evident that Protestantism had a critical role here.

The foundation of Protestantism is a disambiguation of the relationship between man and God within the Christian religion. The church itself was no longer the intermediary between man and God; as originally intended, the church returned to its roots as a gathering of believers before God rather than as a political-religious institution that resembled a government. In Protestant thought, there is a direct line between man and God that goes through Jesus Christ, without any earthly mediation.

Building on this disambiguation is the doctrine of God's sovereignty. While the Roman Catholic Church has never disputed that God is essentially sovereign over the world, it never held the meaning for them that it does for Protestants. According to core Protestant doctrine, God's sovereignty is the ultimate negator of things ranging from bad luck, to curses, to life and death itself; nothing happens without God's action or permission. The effect of this doctrine cannot be understated, as it provided an effective basis for firmly rebutting any argument in defense of a superstition in Christian community that accepts Protestant doctrine.

Lastly, just for the sake of argument, it's noteworthy that probably not a single committed Protestant lost sleep over the use of the Large Hadron Collider. Faith caused us to believe that God would not allow the Earth to be destroyed in accordance with scripture; reason caused us to trust the due dilligence of the scientists involved.

they'll just be protesting from a cage...

Over the weekend I dusted off my old WordPress to Movable Type export script and set about to debugging it and upgrading it. The Movable Type export file format semi-recently started supporting tags, so I added support for tags to the export script, and was able to import a pretty thoroughly tagged WordPress blog into a test installation of Movable Type 4.21 without any lost data. If you self-host WordPress and are curious, I highly recommend that you grab a copy of it and see if it meets your needs. As always, if you find anything wrong with it, please post a comment describing what went wrong, including the data that went wrong.

Download it

On a different note, as I have stated here in the past, I have been slowly learning Objective-C and Cocoa. It's a change of pace for me because most of the object-oriented code that I have worked with has been either Java or C#. I've also worked with Python, and have a deep respect for it as a language, though I haven't had much of a chance to use it professionally or personally. Anyway...

Objective-C and its Cocoa APIs are pretty radically different from Java and .NET. Certain things that you can take for granted in those languages, like string objects being able to concatenate any primitive variable type or another string just by using the "+" operator cannot be taken for granted in Objective-C because it's a direct discendant of C. Yet, it also has insanely powerful built-in capabilities that would take dozens of lines of C# or Java to accomplish. For example, this code downloads my Atom feed, puts its contents into a single NSString object, and then tells you where it last found "<feed>":

NSData *data = [[NSData alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.codemonkeyramblings.com/index.xml"]];
   
NSString *str = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:data encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSRange rng = [str rangeOfString:@"\<feed"];
printf("%d\n", rng.location);

So simple it nearly makes me sick. It's slowly coming to me, and it really isn't the language that's the barrier, but rather the Cocoa approach to things. Even if I were using something like CocoaSharp, an interface to develop Mac software with C# via the open source Mono runtime, it would still have a steep learning curve for me.

Despite being someone who appears to be a good wife and mother, Sarah Palin has been getting ripped to shreds by certain groups because her teenage daughter is pregnant, and some have suggested that she was pregnant when she got married. Somehow this is supposed to show that she's a hypocrite on family values issues, despite the fact that among other things, she chose to keep a baby with Downs Syndrome on principle. The incongruence between her principles and actions, and the actions of her daughter, are supposed to make her into some sort of hypocrite who has no standing.

Most of her critics would probably respond that it's some asinine form of irony (a convenient list of definitions), that they're just giving her a taste of her own medicine that they would normally not dish out. However, there is nothing ironic about that--that's textbook hypocrisy in action.

**UPDATE**: Don Surber has a funny take on this issue:

You can be an unrepentant terrorist.

You can be a perjurer.

You can be an ex-klansman (Exalted Cyclops at that).

But Lord help you if you are a conservative and you run a stop sign.

As I get older and think about things more, I find myself taking a more conservative lean in my libertarian views. More of a conservative appreciation for the limits of human nature, truth and that sort of thing. After giving it some thought, one of the things that I've come to realize is that some of the contributors to What's Wrong with the World are correct in their critique of classical liberalism and its evolution, namely that the move away from a conservative view of the world and society has necessitated the dramatic growth of a state and that many modern notions of liberty cannot exist without the welfare-warfare state's intervention into civil society. Sexual freedom is nearly perfectly situated at the top of the list, as one can see in this excerpt from an article on doctors having sex with their patients:

Yet, medical students who were asked about whether they would have relationships with their patients, for a study published in the Journal of Medical Ethics this month, were equivocal. If they were a GP on a remote Scottish island and were asked, by a patient they had just about finished treating for a skin condition, to come to dinner, in a way that suggested her interest was more than conversation, what would they do? Nearly half (40%) said they couldn't see the harm.

Many of us might feel sympathetic. What's a doctor to do on a windswept rock where there might be more sheep than potential partners? But no. John Goldie, an Easterhouse GP and senior tutor at the University of Glasgow, who devised the study, is uncompromising. "There is a power imbalance in the relationship, it is not a relationship of equals and it can never be," he says. It is doubtful, he says, that any patient can ever truly give consent to a sexual relationship with her doctor.

Emphasis obviously mine there. It is interesting to compare the Mosaic Law and modern American law and regulatory policies because it reveals how modern society is in fact nowhere near as free or just as one might believe. Whatever one may feel about the former's willingness to extend the death penalty to approximately sixteen offenses (mitigated by the fact that its standard of evidence is so high that a prosecutor could rarely ever get a conviction), the fact remains that compliance with the Mosaic Law is ridiculously simple compared to modern American law. For one thing, it is a simple legal code that spans a length of print that's probably not longer than most weekly, small town newspapers. Furthermore, it is written in such a way that you are never really left wondering whether or not something is licit or illicit under it.

The Mosaic Law is pretty simple on matters of sex. Most people will understand pretty quickly how to be in compliance with it:

• Don't rape anyone.
• You must be married to someone of the opposite gender in order to have sex.
• Don't engage in sexual activity with anyone other than your spouse.

That's also mitigated by the fact that under the Mosaic Law, if you are falsely accused of a crime, if the accuser does so with malice or perjurious intentions, they are summary sentenced to the offense which they accused you of committing. Simply put, a false accusation of rape carried with it the penalty of rape: execution. No woman in her right mind would accuse a man of rape out of sheer spite under this legal code.

Compare that to the myriad laws and regulations, government and private, governing sex. In order to establish modern sexual freedom, we have to navigate age of consent laws, know the chemical state of a person's body, know their emotional state, understand body language with the clarity of spoken words, stop performing at a moment's notice, and be wary of the fact that in all of this, few prosecutors consider false accusations of rape to be more severe than an act of mischief (even then the law doesn't really treat it as a potentially life-destroying criminal act).

And that's just the subtopic of going from flirting to fucking. The subtopic of sexual harassment has evolved into a legalistic morass of such monstrosity that the Pharisees would have fancied themselves to have returned to Eden were they permitted to take part in the enforcement of it.

The source of this modern legalism is a fusion of several factors. The first offender is the pretense to science that many ethicists, sociologists and other "ists" are guilty of committing. One would think that they are documenting complex quantum states and behaviors by the way that they write volumes of meaningless drivel that splits hairs with atomic accuracy on issues ranging from who can consent, to what does consent mean, to what sex is. Second, there is a clash of interests. Many women want to maintain their Victorian Era protected status vis-a-viz rape and consumption of alcohol, while men have a clear interest in making them choose between these two dichotomous options. Lastly, there is the fact that in a democratic society (ours is more democratic than republican these days), laws change on a whim, and invariably come to resemble any other thing that is designed by a committee of people whose congress is best describe as a "perpetual squabbling machine:" a kludge that but for the grace of God doesn't explode, killing half of them, and sterilizing the other half.

The enforcement of all of these modern laws and regulations requires a lot more government and bureaucracy, just to meet basic compliance. While I am not a fan of the idea of adopting the Mosaic Law, it certainly serves as a foil for how complex our own laws on even basic matters have become. My intuition tells me that the leviathan will have to collapse under the weight of its own legalistic complexity because that is the only way a concise legal code can be adopted. The cross dependencies in our law are extreme now, and growing worse every legislative cycle.

It is easy for people to simply dismiss this by saying that we are better off today, though that is debatable. The incidents of sexually transmitted disease are undoubtedly far worse than in any other period of our country's history, and married family life is a fast dying social institution that is losing the fight to various, unstable family situations. The decay is bottom up, starting with the individual, and then going up to the family. Greater decay on a large scale is simply inevitable at this point, and when it starts to hit, we will truly live in interesting times.

This is my work in progress (warning, they're big PNG files):

This is the original version for WordPress:

While I don't think that I'll be changing my theme to this, it caught my eye when I saw the latest theme list from Weblog Tools Collection. Another one that might be of interest is this one, which is a "Web 2.0" inspired one, and by Web 2.0 inspired, I mean that it has some of the stereotypical patterns of a Web 2.0 site.

"We don't look at this as a killing machine," Lott told the paper. "It's going to keep the peace. We hope the fact that we have this is going to save lives. When something like this rolls up, it's

 Article I, Section 10 United States Constitution:

No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

Who would have thought 200 years ago that the Army would stay out of politics, and that it would be civilian police, masquerading as soldiers who would pose the greatest threat to the life, liberty and property of the citizenry? I don't care who you are. If you think that it's appropriate for civilian police to have a vehicle whose only legitimate purpose is to carry troops into battle, you're a traitor to this country.

I shudder to think what "legitimate" purpose that sheriff thinks his boys have for a belt-fed, .50 caliber machine gun.