I have never seen something that so profoundly summarizes how abysmally stupid most secular leftists sound when discussing Christian theology:

Let this be a small lesson in why "cultural Christianity" is absolutely meaningless.

I can't say that I'm particularly surprised or even upset by Palin's comments. While she is wrong in every meaningful technical sense, since the media is not legally an organ of the state, she is not wrong in the sense that it relates to her. After all, one would have to be either daft or an ideologue (did I just create a false dichotomy there?) to have not observed the increasing tendency of the majority of the mainstream media to act like a propaganda ministry for the state. In every practical sense, the media has act as a ferociously partisan, auxiliary of the state on behalf of Barack Obama against Ron Paul, Bob Barr, Sarah Palin and even Hillary Clinton.

As a civil libertarian who has grown sick and tired of the feckless mainstream media's lack of a desire to hold government accountable for its corruption and abuse of the public, I understand her perspective. Too often the mainstream media is complicit in helping the state hurt the public to such an extent that one can easily forget that technically, it's still private business.

About two weeks ago, I reported that I had become the *ahem* beneficiary of some weird indexing behavior at Google. My daily hits went from about 200-300 up to about 1,500. Well... last night it went up to about 3,000-3,200 hits. Take a look at the screenshots below to see my conundrum.

And this is what my CPanel bandwidth stats look like from my host:

The fool has said in his heart "there is no way the government will try that."

I'm thinking about rewriting my news reader plugin for Movable Type around Google Reader. After doing some research on the subject, it seems like it'd be worthwhile since Google Reader exposes its parsing and storage capabilities as an API. If I can figure out how to use its API, then I can make Movable Type a front-end for Google Reader.

It would appear that Sony is really starting to feel the heat as it loses developers. Microsoft was the first company to open up its console to home-brewed games via the XNA Game Studio, and Sony has now cut away almost all of the bureaucracy between game developers and the PlayStation 2. Apparently all you need now to make a PS2 game is to buy one of their development machines.

I often see advice posts published on sites like digg and reddit for career-related things, and they invariably say things like "do the work that's interesting and that makes you happy." That's all well and good, provided the job pays you well enough to keep you going at the level you want to be, and you have no family to support. Better advice would be for people to be told that work is work, and that they may not like their job, but it's better to have one than not. This is especially true if you have a family to support. You can't simply say "screw this corporate job that pays all of the bills handsomely. I want to go work at a little company, doing fun stuff, even though my pay will go down 40%."

Do I shriek in rage that a pop star gang raped a classic Depeche Mode song, or do I give her props for doing a "good for pop" song inspired by Personal Jesus?

If you are not comfortable with the supernatural, I strongly suggest that you don't read the rest of this post.

Several centuries ago, Martin Luther explained the essential conundrum that conservative Christians find themselves in when they attempt to legislate morality that is not related to public order:

What can only be taught by the rod and with blows will not lead to much good; they will not remain pious any longer than the rod is behind them.

I call this a conservative idea because it comes from the traditional conservative understanding of human nature as being broken and sinful. It naturally makes us ask, "to what end do we make people who have no intention of being virtuous, virtuous?"

One need not be a theologian to realize that all of the cajoling and coercing in the world will not make an unrepentant person repent of anything. It will not actually make them a new creation pleasing to God. In fact, the strict, structured environment can be a stumbling block as it will reinforce false ideas as to who and what they really are as people.

As it is written, the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick. God judges the heart, not the actions. This is why conservatives must recognize that legislating morality that doesn't have a direct impact on public safety always ends up being in vain. It has no power to save or effect any lasting good.

I understand the desire to have a realistic presentation of science in science fiction. Sometimes Sci Fi veers off into a direction is like the Fantasy genre but with advanced technology replacing magic. Yet one area where it often falls down is getting basic computer technology right. The best example that comes to mind is a book from a prominent Sci Fi writer that horribly mangled the description of a tablet computer. He described a tablet computer that uses wireless signals inside the device to allow different internal components to communicate with one another. For most of the book, the characters couldn't use these computing devices because the signals would be detected by aliens passing by the planet.

No one in their right mind would make a small, tablet PC-like device that uses **wireless** signals to communicate between hardware components! First of all, you'd have all sorts of security problems with people being able to intercept and modify the signals between hardware components. Second, you'd have a problem with bandwidth... it'd be an inherently slow device unless you used wireless signals powerful enough to literally burn all of the flesh off your hand within minutes of holding the device. Finally, a modern 802.11 network can barely make it through a multi-story house. The odds that aliens would be able to detect it a dozen or more miles away in orbit are laughable.

Surrick ruled that Berg lacked standing to bring the case, saying any harm from an allegedly ineligible candidate was "too vague and its effects too attenuated to confer standing on any and all voters."

As I said in my "about" section, I almost became a lawyer, and rulings like this were the reason that I realized that a career in the legal profession was not for me. I rebelled against my family's recommendations and wanted nothing to do with the law because it is irrational, corrupt by design and arbitrated by people who overwhelmingly tend to be political hacks. Everyday that I curse my current situation, I do so with an unsaid "thank God" that I had the good sense to major in Computer Science. Enough about me, this just happens to be a subject that leads to some pretty hostile and intense bitterness on my part when it comes up.

From a logical standpoint, the judge probably simply made this ruling up out of thin air. As Vox Day rightly pointed out, if a registered voter doesn't have a meaningful legal standing in a case like this, then no one would. It would have been interesting to see if John McCain or a third party candidate would have fared any better, since they would have the additional claim of actually running against someone who quite possibly had no legitimate right to be competing for the support of the electorate. The result would probably be the same. It'll be interesting to see if the Republicans ever try to run Schwartzenegger and use Berg v. Obama as a precedent to demolish the arguments against him.

All in all, this is mind-numbing sophistry, and it serves to illustrate the fact that in the real world, the legal profession is often barely anything more than a secular priesthood. Like priests, they waste valuable amounts of time pouring over the most insignificant points and shades of meaning and fill the gaps with their own opinions. Additionally, like priests, they are often a pox on the area of society they ostensibly serve. Cases like this prove that the only difference between the arbitrary "justice" of a mob and the "justice" of a government judiciary is the thin veneer of respectability that comes from pondersome deliberation and a 500 page ruling that could be summed up as "lynch the son of a bitch."

Read this guy's story. If a guy had done that, the cops would have been grinding his face into the pavement within the hour, and he'd have forced to pay back every single last penny of the damage he did. It's a good one to keep around when some feminist goes off about how there is a double standard that benefits men.

If the guy had caught her in the act and punched her in the face for doing several thousand dollars of serious damage to his wife's car, he'd probably also be in prison. Nevermind the fact the he would have been defending a woman's property from vandalism.

Stories like this just make me seriously believe that in an ideal world (as in, I'm not making a policy prescription here) some people would be put down on the basis that they're the human equivalent of a rabid dog.

What makes this particular case interesting is that the police department backed down when they found out that there was surveillance footage of the incident. Judging from the video, there was simply no good reason for the cop to shoot that dog, since the dog wasn't acting like he was trying to maul him, the cop had no official business on the private property, and had more than enough time to get back into his car and drive away to get directions elsewhere. In short, any reasonable person could conclude that this shooting was an unlawful use of a firearm in a residential area.

Footage like this really does make you wonder how many of the cases of cops shooting dogs that you see in the media aren't similar to this one. You'll often read about cases where it sounds a lot like the cops shoot the dog first, no matter what it's doing.

Radley Balko brings up an interesting example of how Homeland Security has laid the foundation for essentially wiping out the entire applicability of the fourth amendment for many types of searches for approximately 190 million Americans. In the case U.S. v. Martinez-Fuerte, the Supreme Court ruled that checkpoints could be set up to search for illegal immigrants and smugglers, and that so long as these checkpoints and searches were brief and for that purpose only, they could be done anywhere within 100 miles of a US border. Basically, that means that they set up these checkpoints that allow them to search you, so long as they are in a 100 mile ring around US territory.

In a lot of counties this would be very easy for them to set up because of the illegal immigration problem. Since they are searching you and your vehicle while searching for illegals and smugglers, they can still find things which are of interest to them for other reasons and arrest you for them. Given the myriad number of things that could happen, and the ability of the police to make a quick buck through asset forfeiture laws, every check point could be at the very least, a boost to their arrest numbers, and also a chance to win a small lottery.

All things considered, as long as they can make a remotely believable argument that they were looking for illegals and smugglers, you can pretty much consider the 4th amendment to be dead while you're on the road anywhere within 100 miles of a border or coastline.

A commenter on my themes blog brought up this theme. The screenshot above is the first round of work that I have done on converting it from WordPress to Movable Type.

The tricky part of this theme is going to be in having it support two and three column modes. The reason is that the way the original theme was designed, the third column was to be used only for advertising, but Movable Type's personal blog templates don't work like that. All of the widgets would have to be consolidated into second column, and a new advertising widget would have to be put in the third column. I can already sense that someone is going to ignore this instruction and complain about it not working when it's ready.

Stuff like this makes me wonder how any decent cop could take part in the enforcement of such a clearly unconstitutional, unjust law. Then I realized that the answer is that a decent man could not enforce such a law. There comes a point where personal honor would demand that a decent man lay down his badge and gun and walk away. No accountable, moral agent gets the excuse of "I was just following orders;" only robots have that excuse.

John Tierny on the so-called shortage of engineers and scientists in America:

Now, I'm all in favor of American technological innovation, and I'm glad to see Mr. Obama promising to review the export restrictions that have been so damaging to the aerospace industry (and that were promoted by John McCain because of what he called national-security risks). I'm also all in favor of American scientists and engineers, especially the ones in my family. (My father is a chemical engineer; my brother is an electrical engineer.) I'd love to see American corporations and universities frantically competing to offer them the kind of salaries paid to M.B.A.'s and lawyers.

But employers don't have to throw around that kind of money because there's no shortage of workers -- and they won't be increasing their offers if the federal government artificially inflates the labor supply with an extra 100,000 graduates. As Daniel S. Greenberg wrote in the Scientist magazine in 2003: "Despite the alarms, no current or impending shortage exists, and never did. Instead, we're glutted with scientists and engineers in many fields, as numerous job seekers with respectable credentials can attest."

The only "shortage" is of American-born scientists and engineers. But with so many talented foreigners competing for positions here in schools and laboratories, it's entirely rational for American students to head into fields where their skills are in more demand -- and harder to replace with foreign labor.

The pay for engineers certainly does not reflect a large scale shortage of labor. If there were an extreme shortage of labor, the pay for talented engineers would be on par with the creme of the legal and business school graduates. It might even be higher because of the fact that it takes engineers to actually build products and get technically complicated services up and running. In many lines of work, the engineers are absolutely critical to the company's very existence as a viable entity.

There are some good, albeit cynical, explanations for why people on the "business side" and in the legal profession often make more money. As a contract software engineer, one thing I've discovered is that management often treats engineers like they're a type of well-educated laborer, rather than a key part of the business' ability to execute contracts and bring in more business. It's common for management staff--the MBAs--to work under the assumption that they will be rewarded in part based on how much they do for the business to help it grow, but such incentive programs are often shut off from engineers, even those who have a desire to help the company win new business. Usually, the closest thing that engineers get to an incentive program is some sort of general stock option program that's open to most of the company.

The one obvious flaw to Tierny's argument is the professions that are ostensibly more hospitable to young Americans looking to make a good salary are professions that have an artificially high barrier to entry. Most of them, no matter how good, simply won't be able to get into them and then make it from there because there are only so many slots at well-connected law firms and so many seats in medical schools. Then you have the basic problem that more and more of America's young best and brightest are headed toward fields which simply don't produce any wealth. It takes engineers and scientists to make new products to sell in the global economy, and an American economy that is largely divided between American management and foreign wealth-producing labor will be a precarious balance indeed. After all, you can stuff a company with the best and brightest MBAs in the world, but if it doesn't have people that can build a new product among them, all of their business school training won't be able to bring a new product to market.

"Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America." he told a fundraising crowd in the Pacific Northwest on Sunday. "Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

"He's gonna have to make some really tough - I don't know what the decision's gonna be, but I promise you it will occur. As a student of history and having served with seven presidents, I guarantee you it's gonna happen."

-Joe Biden.

It almost makes you think that Biden is predicting a false flag operation to be carried out or something, in order to give an Obama Administration even more power than what the Bush Administration has already gained for the President. I'm not a 9-11 truther, but I have to admit, comments like this certainly do make me think that they shouldn't be dismissed outright as kooks.

Deep packet inspection technology may end up creating a situation where the fourth amendment loses some more of its relevance in the legal system:

New technologies and changes in U.S. law are adding to pressures to turn Internet service providers into cops examining all Internet traffic for child pornography.

One new tool, being marketed in the U.S. by an Australian company, offers to check every file passing through an Internet provider's network -- every image, every movie, every document attached to an e-mail or found in a Web search -- to see if it matches a list of illegal images.

Under existing federal regulations, once an ISP gains "actual knowledge" of an incident involving child pornography (and presumably any other criminal offense), it must report that to the authorities. Deep packet inspection technology has the potential to make this process automatic by systematically scanning all of your online transactions for files being transmitted, and thus the ISPs will gain a mountain of evidence against many of their users. On the surface, it's not a bad thing.

The practical problem is that once an ISP takes steps to implement such a system, it will no longer be optional for its competitors to not institute such filtering. A combination of legislation, public pressure and the sort of political grandstanding that has been unleashed against social networking sites "on behalf of the children," will invariably hound all other ISPs into following suit. It's probable that the first ISP to do this will also use the whole thing as a marketing opportunity to claim that unlike its competitors, it operates a "safer Internet."

For the sake of basic privacy rights, I think such technology should be heavily regulated. A "private" surveillance state is no libertarian alternative to a "public" surveillance state. Liberty is not served by creating an environment in which heavy surveillance coupled with automatic reporting to the police is the norm or even legally permissible.

The whole Joe the Plumber thing got me to thinking about Biden's behavior during the Vice Presidential debate when he kept talking about fairness. To people like him and Obama, fairness is the idea that we are basically all more or less the same. It's a system of thought that says that we should reward people and give to them without regard for what their skills and work are actually worth. It's actually a lot like Robert Heinlein's argument about the ridiculousness of the labor theory of value when he points out that the product of a master chef is inherently worth more than that of an incompetent chef because the end product is its own determination of value.

This thinking is also something that most reasonable people reject in school. You know that old, tired line "if you didn't bring enough for everyone, you can't have any gum in class." The only difference is that it is dressed up in a more mature fashion for an older audience. Yet, at it's very core, Biden's view on what constitutes fairness comes down to a matter of "if everyone isn't very successful and well off, then none of us really should."

You know what's fair? Let everyone keep the product of their labor. Take only the smallest amount needed for the public good that a pluralistic society can agree on. Let each worker, business owner, etc. enjoy the fruits of their labor to the greatest extent possible. With that in mind, it's obvious what's not fair, and it's telling someone that they must work while others reap the benefit. The more he works, the more money goes directly into the pockets of ordinary, yet unproductive, citizens, or well-connected people and not the public treasury.

At the end of the day, it's the sin of envy and covetousness. People who think like Biden covet their neighbor's property. They begrudge them the fact that we're not all the same. Call it fairness until the heat death of the universe, but that won't change the fact that the only real fair system is one in which the average person gets to keep the lion's share of their pay check, without regard for how much money that actually ends up being.

I haven't gotten this many free hits since the last time my blog got installanched (as an aside, my blog has been installanched twice in its existence so far). Take a look at these search results, and see if you can see what's wrong with them based on what you have in my browser there:

This is what tipped me off:

The instructions aren't bad, but they don't give you template markup that you can just copy and paste into the template editor. For those that need the full markup for Movable Type 4.2, here it is.

John Hawkins proves why the mainstream conservative commentariat and bloggers are doing such a bad job. If he didn't see this coming at all, then that's a real indictment of him as a political commentator:

it was impossible to foresee what a lousy President George Bush would be in his second term.

A few pre-November 2004 warning signs:

1. Federalization of airport security into the wildly incompetent Transportation Security Administration.
2. No Child Left Behind.
3. The Medicare "reform" that included the prescription drug provisions.
4. The dismissal of many Army officers who insisted that our troop levels going into Iraq were too low to occupy and pacify Iraq.

Going into 2004, it was clear that George Bush was in favor of a significantly expanded federal role in education and healthcare, was in favor of further centralizing control over flying in America, and was a very political commander-in-chief. You had the excuse in 2000, but not in 2004, to say you didn't see it coming.

As a party leader, Bush was an utter failure. In his first term, after 9-11, he had the political capital to enact far-reaching reforms in the federal government, such as tightening up domestic spending. Most of the deficits that we have faced in the last seven years are directly attributable to Bush using his political capital to expand entitlement spending and his incompetent handling of Iraq. Let's not forget that most of our struggles in Iraq would not have happened had Bush invaded with a much larger force, as was recommended. The surge was simply a Johnny-Come-Lately acknowledgment that a lot more troops should have gone in during the initial invasion.

It's important to remember that the wild support Obama has today from people who often correctly rip apart the last seven years of Republican governance is based primarily on Bush's policies and leadership. Whatever comes from an Obama Administration will have been set up by the irresponsible and largely incompetent leadership of the Bush Administration, and in many respects, by the people who didn't have the good sense to vote in a new candidate during the 2004 Republican primary who was more conservative on economic and civil liberties issues.

And they wonder why many of us are afraid of allowing DHS agents anywhere near our valuable goods, such as the brilliant idea to allow them to detain a laptop without probable cause:

When the USPS and local police tracked him down and raided his place, they found they found 66 cameras, 31 laptops, jewelry, camera lenses, GPS devices and more. So yeah, how does a TSA screener systematically walk out of the airport with more gadgets than Best Buy--hell, with some gear you can't even buy there--without a single agent ever noticing? I guess if you ever check anything actually valuable, you might want avoid Newark

If the TSA agent had been smart, he would have opened up a few of the goodies, stuffed them full of ecstasy and seized them under civil asset forfeiture proceedings. Along the way, he could have taken them out of the evidence room, and called it a day. Granted, anyone stupid enough to steal a camera that costs more than most cars on the market today, and then sell it on eBay probably would never think that far ahead.

A number of us were too quick to cheer the possibility that Obama might actually be disqualified. It remains a possibility, but the judge is still considering the Berg filing.

How did Obama get into Indonesia back around 1980-1981 without an Indonesian passport, when it was said to be extremely difficult for Americans to get in there. It's doubtful he had good connections with people who could help him out.

So, if he did get in there on an Indonesian passport, and it's looking like he may have used one to get into Pakistan, how did he get ahold of it? I can't see the Indonesian government issuing one to someone they didn't recognize as a citizen, and surely if he went out of his way to get that passport, he'd run afoul of Title 8, USC:

taking an oath or making an affirmation or other formal declaration of allegiance to a foreign state or a political subdivision thereof, after having attained the age of eighteen years;

It would certainly be a pretty strong case that the action of seeking that passport would be a positive affirmation, in a 19-20 year old Obama's mind, that he was a citizen of Indonesia. Given that dual citizenship was not a legal possibility back then between the two countries, it would be a reasonable legal argument that Obama was making a positive affirmation of his loyalty to Indonesia by seeking its passport.

From a legal point of view, it would be difficult for Obama to argue that he didn't know what he was doing, since the choices were clear-cut. If he did get that passport, and Berg's motion finally goes through soon, Obama could lose his candidacy. The problem is that if he technically renounced his citizenship, even if he "got it back," he would no longer be a natural-born citizen, but a naturalized citizen by virtue of how he got his citizenship back.

Obviously, a federal judge could just waive the rules. The actual law and constitution didn't stop them from barring Obama and McCain from being on the Texas ballot, despite the fact that both candidates missed the filing deadline.

In case you didn't already know, your property rights just got prison shower raped again, this time to benefit large copyright holders (the drug warriors are taking a holiday). Feel free to send your indignation to the office of the Honorable Mickey Mouse, Senator from Disney.

Update: Here are the source pictures used to generate this.

I don't have much control over the darkness/lighting settings with this camera, which probably doesn't help here.

The Image Gallery plugin has gotten some good press. I've got some new features planned for version 1.5:

• The ability to control cell padding and spacing in the table that is generated.
• The ability to have the output be generated in a <div> that displays all of the images in a flowing row, instead of having hard row numbers in place.
• The ability to save a previously generated image gallery as an asset.

Right now, I'm reluctant to add the ability to edit a previously generated image gallery because it would add more complexity to the JavaScript, for a feature that right now, I'm not sure most people would really need. I think it's more of the sort of thing that would be added once I have nothing better to do.

This is the next WordPress style on my list of styles to convert into a Movable Type style.  I'll admit, that it can be tedious work, but it's nice to be one of the few Movable Type users who can have his blog easily mistaken for one that runs WordPress ;)

This story reminds me of how people who work in IT or software engineering are often treated by customers and users. It's worth reading, if for no other reason than it'll amusingly reinforce certain stereotypes and the fact that 99% of the commenters actually got that when the originally Brazilian or Portuguese CSR said "born again" she was really saying that they guy would have to start his life all over again in order to fix his problems. You know it's bad when one of the first comments at a site like the Consumerist is one saying that it's a great argument for homeschooling your kids!

The customer isn't always right. In fact, customers can be total jerks whose paltry business isn't worth the chaos that they can sow in one's business. Adorama got this one right when they blew off the customer; unless he bought an incredibly large volume of goods from them, there's no way his business was worth hurting their relationship with a good employee. This is a problem we face in consulting and contracting businesses. Too often, managers just don't realize that if you have an impossible customer, it's time to kick your business development people in the ass, and tell them to start beating the bushes for new business.

This is an example of what my Image Gallery plugin for Movable Type can do as of version 1.0.

Brazil will probably find out the hard way, in case it's forgotten all of its previous lessons, why basing economic activity entirely on government ownership and policy is a bad idea when you want to make sure that the commerce benefits the people, instead of wealthy oligarchs:

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Four miles under the ocean's surface off Brazil's lush coast lie billions of barrels of recently discovered light crude - a treasure that could transform the country into an oil superpower.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva called it "a gift from God" and pledged to end chronic poverty and narrow the country's broad gap between the rich and the poor.

But before rhetoric becomes reality, Brazil must first get to the underwater reserves, among the world's deepest, and then manage a massive influx of wealth - a formidable task that has left other national economies awash in corruption and even greater gaps between the rich and poor.

Relatively free market capitalism in the United States has resulted in people being able to get venture capital, form their own own small oil companies and buy their own small lots on rich oil fields. The result is that we have both a lot of competition, and a lot of opportunities to force our oil companies to fight for the public's dollars. It's far more likely that Brazil will end up with a scenario similar to Venezuela's, where the oil is used to fund every cockamamy scheme dreamed up by government bureaucrats, as well as enrich those with sufficient power and connections to siphon off some of the proceeds.

If the Brazilian government is going to approach this from a populist, left-wing perspective, it should work out a scheme wherein the government rewards tax payers and students who graduate with good grades with shares of stock in the oil company(ies) formed to exploit this oil field. That way, they could bring about a semi-Socialist plan to distribute wealth, but within the context of a market system, with minimal government regulation.

That's probably why this will never be considered.

Well, it looks like the NSA spy scandal may be a lot worse than previously thought. Declan McCullagh makes a very good point about the danger of giving the government a lot of power without a comprehensive system of accountability:

It should be no surprise that when the NSA (or any government agency) receives broad surveillance powers with scant oversight, they end up being used not to nab al-Qaida members, but to eavesdrop on phone sex conversations between a lonely G.I. and a paramour back home. Video surveillance cameras supposedly designed to let cops catch criminals are used for voyeuristic purposes too.

History echoes this point. In decades past, government agencies have subjected hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Americans to unlawful surveillance, illegal wiretaps and warrantless searches. Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., feminists, gay rights leaders, and Catholic priests were spied upon. The FBI used secret files and hidden microphones to blackmail the Kennedy brothers, sway the Supreme Court, and influence presidential elections.

Lord Acton's views on power have become cliche, but they still apply here. The hidden cost to a free society from surveillance is that can give parts of the government leverage over society. It becomes harder for mass movements for change to form when the government can easily, strategically conduct surveillance on its potential leaders and either directly blackmail them or throw embarassing information out into the hands of the media for widespread dissemination.

Society tends to have great difficulty in conceiving of the fact that modern government is very diverse and open to the creation of fiefdoms as one can have at large corporations that are composed of a large number of subsidiaries. It's not only reasonable, but entirely predictable that men like J Edgar Hoover will rise to positions of power, even if it's not the same power that Hoover once had, and that they will use it for their own ends. Where we run the risk of creating a new Hoover is that Bush and Cheney have undermined the traditional role of the National Security Agency by bringing its mission partly back home, but without a real apparatus of accountability to severely punish people who violate the law and constitution.

There will always be men and women who are easily convinced that their mission is more important than the rule of law, constitutions and such. The agents who obeyed Hoover's orders to collect information on people he opposed and blackmail them easily fit that definition in spades. The only way to counter that is to create institutional mechanisms that enforce accountability and provide outsiders with the legal authority to enforce the law on rogue government bureaucracies.

It's coming along quite nicely, isn't it? I just have a few more tweaks to go before it's complete.

I got the inspiration for this from a question on the Movable Type forums that asked if there was a simple way to insert an image gallery into a post. Right now, this is just a work in progress, done in my spare time, but it's proceeding pretty well. The screenshot above isn't representative of a completed interface at this point, but it does fully support JQuery drag-and-drop for moving the pictures back and forth between the pallet of choices and the pallet of user selections.

1. His tax cuts will benefit a number of people in the short run, but will encourage more people in the top 2% to move their assets overseas.
2. He will get more control over health insurance companies, making them less profitable and harder to enter the market with little discernible benefit to their customers.
3. He will not make a move toward banning firearms, but if he does make any gun control-related moves, they will be to make it more expensive to own one and the ammo for it.
4. Despite his claims, he will not issue any formal order to the DEA to stand down and stop raiding medical marijuana clinics.
5. If Biden's record is any indication, there will be significant internal push to a hawkish stance on the War on Drugs, including supporting legislation that further curtails civil liberties in the name of fighting drug distribution and use.
   
6. He will not make any serious domestic reforms of criminal justice issues.
7. He will not roll back the USA PATRIOT Act or any of the other pieces of intelligence/military legislation passed in the last eight years.
8. He will, at the very least, not stop the detention of suspected terrorists without a trial.
9. He will not take any measures to stop the further erosion of the Posse Comitatus Act, let alone reinforce the Posse Comitatus Act.
   
10. He will not make any serious efforts to purge corruption in the federal government, especially in Congress.
11. Military-related spending will not decrease, as the military will shift from a few large deployments, to several small deployments.
12. He will not block efforts to privatize Social Security, if Congress makes them, but will not support efforts to make the level of benefits offered more realistic.
13. Spending on education and healthcare will increase, without much correlation with results.
14. The federal budget will not be balanced for a single year that he is President.
15. He will cut the budget of federal intelligence agencies, and shift the money to the Department of Homeland Security.
16. The Department of Homeland Security, especially agencies such as TSA, will see no major reforms.
17. Based on Biden's record, it's reasonable to assume that an Obama Administration would not provide any meaningful opposition to the sort of strong IP laws that are being debated and passed by Congress right now, such as those that extend civil asset forfeiture to copyright law.
18. On issues related to the Middle East, he will be as useless as both Clinton and Bush.
19. From Triton: He will continue to use the intimidation tactics that he has used in his campaign against his critics.
    

Anything I missed that you think should be here?

When I get around to it, I'll do one for McCain.

Someone's about to learn that there is no reward for being a martyr for Obamessiah:

A 20-year-old college student suspected of hacking into one of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's e-mail accounts was indicted Tuesday, a district court has announced.

David Kernell, a University of Tennessee student and son of Democratic Tennessee state representative Mike Kernell, turned himself into federal authorities and will be arraigned Wednesday before Judge C. Clifford Shirley in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee.

If this is any indication, his mugshot will make for a great demotivator. Kernell looks like the posterchild for that leftist that everyone knew in college who was militant and absorbed into every single last aspect of leftist culture on campus.

The moral of this story is that if you are going to break into a controversial candidate's email account, do it from a computer that has no normal connection to you. I have a suspicion that this tool didn't even go to a computer lab on the other side of campus from where he normally has classes when he attempted this little stunt.

It's too bad that youtube didn't exist in the 1960s when all of the hippies thought that Hinduism was just another peaceful, enlightened religion:

BHUBANESWAR: The brutal rape and murder of a Hindu orphan by Hindu fanatics, who thought she was Christian because she was being sheltered by them, has added to the Orissa government's embarrassment. It is already under fire for failing to contain the saffron mob's rampage in the state.

Huh, I forgot to mention that she was also burned alive, which would explain why the police "found no evidence of rape." I could be wrong, but semen and fire don't tend to mix all that well.

It's true that not all Hindus are like this, but you can learn a lot about a religion based on how its true believers behave.

New Zealand makes an inadvertent, but powerful, argument against universal suffrage:

Some voters in Botany are scared to vote against the ruling party for fear of reprisal, and others think National and New Zealand First are the same party because they both start with N.

It goes downhill from there.

I'm still waiting for a good explanation as to why universal suffrage is good for a free society from those who think that democracy and liberty go hand-in-hand. It would seem a foregone conclusion that a body of voters who are confused by a mere letter would be ripe fodder for every Tom, Dick and Harry demagogue who fancies himself the next tyrant.

Writing for the Huffington Post, Robert Mackey would have you believe that being associated with a party that has secessionist beliefs is essentially the same as having a strong association with a man who lead a terrorist group that actively bombed government targets. Only in the reality-distorted world that dominates the Huffington Post could someone be so moronic as to draw a moral equivocation between bombs and a ballot box, aside from a political system which allows the masses to declare war. Since this is not ancient Greece, obviously he does not have that excuse.

In actuality, despite what Mackey claims, the Alaska Independence Party's platform is actually very moderate, all things considered. For one thing, its most radical platform is not secession, but actually to recognize a legal right for jurors to judge the law itself, essentially making jury nulification a formal power of the jury. It also supports ending sovereign immunity for public officials, which would have the effect of allowing them to actually be prosecuted for criminal offenses committed under the color of law. Even the matter of secession is not accurate as presented, as Wikipedia shows how the Alaska Independence Party really wanted a referendum that gave the people of Alaska the full set of options for their state, which included:

1. Remain a Territory.
2. Become a separate and Independent Nation.
3. Accept Commonwealth status.
4. Become a State.

That is quite reasonable by any international measure, and anyone who claims to respect individual rights and this country's values should want to give a region that is discussing entrace into the federal union the opportunity to consider all of the options availible to it. Perhaps some of the more hardline members of the AIP would not regard the federal union the way they do, had their state been given a more open set of options. It's hard to begrudge them their bitterness if the federal union is so involuntary that their only choices are to stay a territory with no power, become a state, or seek independence through a war against the federal government. That sounds more like the thirteen colonies' original relationship with the British Empire, than what America is supposed to stand for.

Yes, it is a free country. You get to associate or marry whomever you want, no matter how distasteful. Yes, Senator Obama served on a board with William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground and now a college professor and activist in Chicago. However, Senator Obama has clearly distanced himself on numerous occasions from Professor Ayers' actions in the 1960's. This is a non-issue. Perhaps that is why you have decided to focus on it -- better a non-issue than having to learn and think about real problems that affect everyday people, like health care, the economy and education. Those, I suppose, are just too gosh darned hard.

Not only is Ayers unrepentent for what he did, but he remains unrepentent for what he tried to do. In his own words, published for all of the world to see:

''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.'' Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago.

One would have to speak from a position of pure ignornance or a complete and utter disregard for the lives of the people that Ayers sought to murder, in order to blithely write something like "a former member of the Weather Underground and now a college professor and activist in Chicago" as though Ayers' worst offense were merely to commit some misdemeanor, minor felony or some sort of egregious faux pas in his youth. It does raise serious issues about Obama's character that he is not utterly repulsed by such a man, and that he had a long professional, working relationship with him.

For McCain, the equivalent would have been to have a fund raiser at Eric Rudolph's house, if Rudolph had stopped bombing abortion clinics a long time ago. No one in the media would forgive McCain for having a relationship with a man who is unrepentent about bombinb abortion clinics, but it is apparently much ado about nothing for Obama to have a relationship with a man who remains unrepentent about bombing government targets, and attempting to mass murder US military personnel with weapons that included pipe bombs filled with nails.

The real hypocrisy here is that the type of people who tend to support Obama won't hesitate to castigate a conservative or libertarian by even the most tenuous association. It's about time that the tables got turned.

So, I get in line behind this middle age woman in a store in Ashburn, which is one of the larger, more well-to-do parts of Loudon County in the metro DC area. She takes her sweet time, taking so long that the line next to us processes about three customers in the time it takes her to get her credit card and a few items scanned. That didn't really bother me that much because I'm used to people being slow because I grew up in smaller towns. What got me was the fact that she grabbed her bags and just walked off, leaving her cart in line for me to push out of the line for her.

It's little things like this. For 22 years, I lived in small towns in the Carolinas and Virginia, and never saw behavior that was this rude. It doesn't surprise me because I'm used to seeing bad behavior around here, but it makes it very easy for me to understand why people from small towns often have a condescending attitude toward those of us who live in cities and their suburbs.

You hear the charge that the religious right wants to create a theocracy a lot these days. It's often just a cheap attack, similar to calling someone you disagree with a Fascist or a Communist (unless they happen to actually hold very similar views). So what might a Christian theocracy look like? Let's take a look.

I ask you, what could possibly go wrong for the cops when they bust into a crowded fast food joint, dressed more like robbers than cops and brandishing rifles?

Undercover police officers stormed a McDonald's restaurant and ordered diners and employees to the ground as they tried to catch a suspected cocaine dealer Thursday.

The Sarasota police officers were dressed in black, carried rifles and wore masks when they ran into the restaurant on the corner of Beneva and Fruitville roads. They burst through the door at dinner time, yelled for patrons to hide under tables and chased a 24-year-old man who hid in a bathroom.

It was a drug sting that went bad because of a milkshake.

Based on their reported behavior, someone could have actually gotten away with shooting the cops in this situation because they were behaving like armed robbers. All of this, just to catch a guy selling $1,000 worth of ecstasy and cocaine. You'd think that they'd finally managed to corner someone guilty of multiple homicides based on the way they behaved here. With behavior like this, is it any wonder why drug raids often get messed up the way that they do, such as the case of Ryan Frederick?

There is a matter of perception that is lost on the people who defend these practices. While the cops may be legally in the clear here, such a legalistic view of how they ought to behave ignores how they will be perceived. The police should be much more cautious because of the image that they gave themselves to the law-abiding citizens who were there at the McDonalds:

"I thought it was a gang," she said. "I mean, they had masks and guns and I never heard anyone say, 'police.' I thought these guys were coming to rob us." [Emphasis mine.]

These are some photos that I took across the street for a photography class. Well, I thought I was in the class, but turned out that I had been administratively dropped because of a technicality. Anyway, I took them with my lowly Kodak Easyshare 7630DX. With any luck, I'll be able to replace that camera with a Nikon D90, which is a very, very good camera that is capable of doing the exposures necessary for HDR photography.

9:07: Palin just opened up with a pretty nasty zinger against Biden, by pointing out that while he and the rest of his colleagues were blowing off the warning signs, McCain called for greater regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Biden came off weak by trying to bring up McCain's quip that "the fundamentals of the economy are sound."

9:09: Palin just managed to call into question Obama's wilingness to work with the other side, by pointing out that he's voted his party line over 96% of the time. So far, it looks like Biden is mostly on the defensive.

9:11 Biden has done a decent job of trying to make Obama look like he saw the subprime issue too, and that McCain flip-flopped. Not bad, but he visibly came within a second of labeling McCain's policies as "right-wing" rather than Republican, which would have made him look more partisan.

9:13 Biden is doing better now, having just successfully Obama's record against Palin's comment about him wanting to raise taxes.

9:18: Oh shit, Palin just accused Biden of attempting to "redistribute wealth." She just successfully tore Biden a new asshole on spending and his comment that paying taxes is patriotic by pointing out that middle America doesn't feel that way at all.

9:22: Biden was holding his own, but then he reinforced that he really believes that paying taxes is a patriotic thing to do.

9:23: Palin just said that Obama helped get those tax cuts for the rich oil companies, and that she had to face them down in Alaska and make their relationship with Alaska work for the people of Alaska.

9:26: Biden just had to point out that Palin did support the very windfall profit tax that he and Obama supported. Most of the points that he made about McCain were lost because of this, in my opinion, though it might not have any impact on most people who were thinking about supporting Obama because it's still about McCain.

9:33: Biden is doing a pretty good job of making the argument that Obama's energy policy based around solar and clean coal will have benefits for the economy via export, but he really hurt Obama by making it his official position that human activity is the cause of Global Warming. Palin presented herself better here by suggesting that it was a combination of factors, and that she and McCain want to target the areas which are human causes.

9:38: Biden just came off as too enthusiastic about gay rights issues, which could further alienate him from people who are undecided on this issue. Palin came off better by suggesting that she would support essentially anything short of redefining marriage, and she did a good job of making it clear that McCain's administration would not deny any legal rights to homosexuals.

9:39: Biden regained some ground by saying straight up that he does not support redefining marriage to permit gay marriage.

9:43: Palin just managed to bring up a good contradiction in the voting pattern of Biden and how he said that Obama was not ready to be commander-in-chief.

9:47: Palin managed to come back and defeat some of Biden's key points by pointing out that both Paetreus and the Al Qaeda leadership agree that Iraq is the central battle in the War on Terror.

9:52: Palin just hit a home run by unequivocally supporting Israel and saying that she supports putting our embassy in Jerusalem.

9:54: Biden is also doing very well now by condemning the free elections that brought Hamas to power, and how he says that NATO allowed Hezbollah to become more powerful, and even become part of the government.

10:03: Palin succeeded in portraying Biden as a big flip flopper on military policy.

10:05: Biden tried to weasel his way out of facing the fact that he voted for the war before he was against it by trying to cast it as him being opposed to McCain's strategy. That won't work with people who were paying attention to the question. Palin did miss an opportunity here, but it might have been for the better because she could have come off a little too harsh.

10:23: A lot of talk about what people are talking about around kitchen tables. It's starting to go downhill for both candidates. Get these guys some coffee with amaretto or irish cream...

10:28: It's now degenerating into more shit about bipartisanship and other stuff.

10:32: Biden has finally convinced me that he grew up as a poor little black boy in a log cabin in the mean streets of Scranton. Something like that.

Winners, in order:

• Gwen Ifill: despite the claims that she had a financial interest in seeing Obama win, she did a very good job moderating.
• Sarah Palin: she didn't get tripped up, and made a lot of good points, some of which were real zingers, while remaining polite.
• Joe Biden: he didn't do badly either. In fact, I think he did better than Obama did in his debate.

These points are very true, but I think there's more to it that Steve Chapman discusses:

It's true that crime is much more common in the city than in the country. Is that because the sight of cattle grazing saps felonious impulses, or is it something else? Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University, thinks the explanation is pretty simple. "It's a matter of social control," he says. "Small towns have networks of family and friends, and most everyone knows everyone else."

This deters crime in two ways. First, you don't want to damage your reputation among people who may ostracize you for doing wrong. Second, you don't want to rob someone who can easily identify you to police--and in a small town, that limits your pool of victims. Crime is more common in cities because they offer a target-rich environment and much less chance of being spotted by someone who can tell the cops your name, address and 3rd-grade teacher.

Chapman didn't bring up the issue of gun ownership in rural America versus urban America, nor the willingness of the respective populations to use force to stop crime. I would suspect that the odds of a criminal dealing with an armed victim would be meaningfully higher in rural areas, and that there would be a greater willingness to inflict serious, probably deadly, force on the criminal. Furthermore, most rural areas don't place anywhere near as many burdens on victims of crime to prove that they were justified in using a weapon against their attacker; the attack itself is often sufficient evidence that force was justified. This is not the case in many urban parts of the country where it is very dangerous to use a weapon for fear that some overzealous cop or prosecutor will turn you into a criminal for the heinous sin of self-defense. Criminals know all too well that the cops can be just as much of their protectors as their enemies in some urban jurisdictions.

It also doesn't hurt criminals that they are less likely to face a reasonably socially cohesive community that is willing to rally in a meaningful way around a victim as the crime is being committed in an urban environment. Criminals aren't simply emboldened by a target-rich environment, but also because they know that if they act boldly, many people will simply roll over and play dead as they have been taught by anti-gun, anti-self-defense government employees. In a rural community, the odds are much higher that others will come to the aid of a victim, which not only puts the criminal at risk of facing an armed opponent, but also being outnumbered. I don't think this has to be an inherent tendency in urban settings, but urban culture certainly does encourage a more pacifistic approach to dealing with crimes that are happening in plain view against another person.

Just an experiment involving two pictures I took at a local Starbucks and Paint.NET.

Here is the original. It's not finished yet, but it's close.

It's amazing how worked up people are getting over Sarah Palin. Anti-Palin material is strewn across the web and mainstream media, with news aggregators and outlets alike publishing everything from the slightest criticism, to every rumor that some wild-eyed apparatchik has dreamed up. The behavior has reached the point of being often just frothing-at-the-mouth hatred of her.

Ironically, compared to Biden, she's really not much of an extremist. Biden is a man who has rarely, if ever, met a power short of rounding up minorities and gassing them that he didn't approve of. Just thumb through the federal law books, and you will find a disproportionate number of the outrageous police powers that federal drug cops have came from him. You think it's extreme fascism that Palin believes that abortion is unacceptable in the case of rape or incest? Well, Biden is a man who supports the idea of seizing people's property without giving them a trial (this is called "civil asset forfeiture;" look it up if you don't know anything about it) and holding concert promoters legally liable for drug use on their property, irrespective of any security measures they imposed to stop drug use.

Objectively speaking, Biden should be the target of much of the hatred that is being flung at Palin, but then hatred is rarely objective or rational. This is just one of many good reference points that explains all of the wonder ways that Biden has planned to do his part to plunder the last vestiges of American liberty.

So far, Palin seems to be the one that has a much better record on civil liberties than Biden. She has recognized the importance of jury nullification, supports the right to keep and bear arms and doesn't seem to harbor any particular enthusiasm for the War on Drugs (the number one source of new federal police powers for the last several decades) the way that Biden does. So give the woman a break, unless you're going to give Biden the attention that his record deserves.

This is an interesting article, as it explains what the average hot girl would have to do in order to become a playmate:

• Make herself into a bleached blond with big boobs. That's obvious.
• Be willing to do just about anything sexual, especially have sex with other girls, even if she's not a lesbian or bisexual.
• Be willing to screw Hugh Hefner whenever, wherever he wants. Again... obvious.
• Face up to the fact that Hef would rather do you up the ass, than wear a condom.

The thing that surprised me was that Hugh Hefner is reported to be a fan of anal sex almost to the exclusion of vaginal intercourse. Not to state the obvious too much here, but there is something not right about a man who seems to think that "the anus is the new vagina."

Apple tucks its tail between its legs like a scolded dog after being pressured by developers regarding its non-disclosure agreement on the iPhone development kit:

We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.

We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don't steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone's success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.

Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter.

The moral of this story: your platform is never so cool that you can piss all over your developers.

These are some WordPress themes that I have converted over to Movable Type styles. They aren't up at my themes blog yet, but they will be by the weekend. The second two, Disciple and Aeros both are somewhat incomplete, if you will, based on the original styles because there were certain things that just couldn't make the cut. Just little stuff like some icons. However, I think I preserved the original look of them pretty well.

Saada said Arafat welcomed his old student back toward the end of his life and gave him plenty of time to talk in his bombed-out Ramallah headquarters fully knowing of his conversion to Christianity. Shortly after this visit, an Egyptian pastor and friend of Saada also had an opportunity to visit with Arafat who said the terrorist leader "prayed the sinner's prayer" with him, converting to Christianity.

"Do you think he understood what was going on?" Saada asked.

"Yes, absolutely," replied the pastor. "He was very clear. And we were alone in the room, just the two of us."

It certainly wouldn't be the first case of someone repenting of their life on their death bed. This story may not be true, but it's as believable as any of the other stories about Arafat's life that didn't quite make it into mainstream media-approved circulation, such as the rumors of the terrible sexual debauchery that was practiced by the leadership of Fatah. It's probably even more believable because of the fact that it comes from someone who had a long relationship with Arafat.