November 2008 Archives

As Black Friday dawned on Long Island, 2,000 shoppers waited in line outside a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, New York. The anticipation of low-priced flat screen televisions and children's games too much for them, they pushed and shoved their way past the locked doors before the store even opened. In the ensuing madness, a temporary Wal-Mart worker, a 34-year-old man, was trampled. As he lay on the ground, the bargain crazed shoppers stomped over him, and continued to shop even as the shocked Wal-Mart workers tried to get them to leave the store.

Is this what Christmas has come to be? Have the media and society in general turned us into such consumerists that we eschew any sense of human decency in order to save fifty dollars off a flat screen monitor? As someone on Twitter said: "Dear Jesus, We honor the memory of your miraculous birth by offering you this sacrifice, a 34-year-old temporary Wal-Mart employee. Amen"

This was a nicer version of my original reaction to the report of the work being trampled to death. I can be vindictive person when it comes to demanding that justice be done, but even I can't really find a way to really condemn this as a sign of some serious moral decline in and of itself.

As Dr. Helen brought up, there is a lot that Wal-Mart and other stores can do to prevent situations like this. They could start by changing the way that their doors are designed, so that unlocking and opening them can be done from inside the store, away from the incoming shoppers. Another option is to make the crowd line up and have armed security guards with handcuffs ready to detain any shoppers that are behaving in an unruly fashion and turn them over to the police. The police shouldn't mind, since such people can create a nastier, more complicated situation for them to deal with later if they are allowed to incite others into a panicked mob.

Now, with regard to the shoppers, it's uncertain how many of them should have reacted. The ones in the front would have probably suffered the same fate if they hadn't gone forward, and the ones in the middle were powerless to know what was doing on. Arguably, the only shoppers that should have been expected to stop, heed the instruction of the Wal-Mart employees and get out of the way were the ones toward the back who weren't being pushed forward by the shoppers behind them. It's all well and good to argue that the shoppers should have stopped, but it takes a stunning overestimation of human intelligence, independence and nature to believe that a mob of about 2,000 people will behave like something other than a herd of sheep without military training.

Dana Blankenhorn seems to have missed the fact that the Federal Reserve is one of those institutions that one should not cite as an example of success when discussing federal regulatory policy, which is probably why he doesn't get a chill down his spine at the thought of the Obama Administration creating a parallel institution for the healthcare industry:

What makes the Federal Reserve tick is data. The need for accurate economic data, for better collection and better presentation, is a never-ending preoccupation for Fed policymakers.

Data should also be a big part of the Federal Health Board effort. Only when we have a clear idea of where we are can we start managing to results, which is the ultimate aim.

Compare the sophistication of modern electronic payment networks, and the quality of the statistics they generate, with what we know about American health care and you start to see the size of the problem.

This is an apples-to-oranges comparison, in my opinion. The Federal Reserve does not need to know much of anything about the information generated by the transactions from electronic payment systems. Aggregate data, showing the general flow of wealth, perhaps, but the actual details of who bought what are minutia that is of no relevance to it. The Federal Reserve simply has no regulatory need to know what is going on behind the vast, overwhelming majority of economic transactions because they are of no significance to its role in the federal bureaucracy. For them, it might be good to know what my credit card debt is at any particular time, but my spending habits are well outside the scope of their role and interest, but the same could not be said of a healthcare analog.

The different problem that healthcare companies face is finding out the context of the information about healthcare. It's not enough to know whether or not a procedure was done, a bureaucrat (corporate or government) needs to know whether it should have been done and should have been done at that price. The information need of a Federal Healthcare Board would be enormous to the point that they cannot even be reasonably compared to any other regulatory agency in the country.

This is the classic conundrum of a central planner. Obama may not be planning on enacting a typical socialist central planning scheme, but if this agency is to even just aggregate this sort of data about the true state of healthcare, it will run into most of the same hurdles.

My guess is the first job of a Federal Health Board would be to seek better data on both wellness and illness. This implies the creation of vast, interlocking databases on all Americans, matched to medical transaction data.

By seeking to make this "above politics," Daschle gives the work a technocratic base that hides resistance to having our health tracked behind a simple need for accurate data informing policy.

If we could make it a goal to have health data as good as our present financial data within 10 years, we would be guaranteeing a revolution in health IT. It would be the Obama Administration's moon shot.

If information on wellness and illness are all that this is for, then the CDC is already sufficiently equipped for that, which is why I suspect that it's about a lot more than that. It's about getting the government into providing more health insurance coverage, and in a more intelligent, less expensive fashion than it currently is. Finding out what treatments are actually necessary will be dicey, and could very well pit doctors against regulators. It certainly wouldn't be the first time, since the DEA already considers itself to be the arbiter of what is the medically-necessary level of pain killers in all cases.

Practically speaking, it'll be extremely difficult to get private businesses to comply in an effort that works. Compliance will be the biggest problem that they face right off the bat. It'll cost a lot of money, require incredible planning and engineering to get it done, and will be very costly in terms of actually implementing it once it gets down to making the changes at hospitals and private practices to allow the data collection. That's not even counting the amount of money the government will have to spend to build the infrastructure to manage and mine all of that data.

Going back to the comparison with the Federal Reserve, if the Great Depression, which they've accepted responsibility for creating, and the current fiasco are any indication, no thanks! The federal government has already shown that it has an ideological aversion to simply allowing the market to recover on its own, and is convinced that pumping more of the poison into the victim is the way to cure it. This rash, disregard for basic economics, observation and common sense will undoubtedly just get carried over to healthcare under this plan.

Lastly, one reason that I think most Americans can agree is a good reason to be wary of this sort of change is the implications that it has for allowing health insurance companies to get access to a lot of data that they otherwise might not have. For now, any data that is created from a report that isn't filed against an insurance policy is one that stays with the doctor's office. Not so, if data is being aggregated by the federal government. It's also just a matter of time before the federal government wants to collect genetic samples as part of the health data, since DNA could provide federal regulators with a breathtaking amount of information about the state of our population's health.

Insurance companies will get their hands on this data as surely as mass marketers often get ahold of personal information from DMV offices in states that sell that information. One would have to be naive to think otherwise.

Obama's chief of staff is now calling for liberals to do what Klein denounced the Republicans for doing: exploiting a crisis to advance their agenda. Since he'll be doing things that Klein is ideologically sympathetic to over the course of his time in office, I don't expect her to do more than muster up a little outrage over minutia in order to not give the distinct impression that she's a garden variety hypocrite.

Apparently, 76% of American middle class families are no longer "financially secure." The most obvious culprit for this that comes to mind is the tendency of Americans to overextend themselves and save very little money. That's a very significant part of the reason why our economy is in the toilet right now. A lot of industries depend on Americans spending a lot more money than they are saving, such as the auto industry, restaurants and retailers. Some of the statistics on credit card debt depend on who is doing the measuring, but between car loans, mortgages and student loans, credit cards are often the least of a middle class family's worry.

Of all of the things that most middle class Americans spend their money on, college educations are often the biggest rip offs. Forget what they say about the average college graduate making more money over their lifetime than someone with just a high school degree. If your degree isn't in a lucrative field, it's probably safer to assume that that common refrain about college educations wasn't referring to you. For most people, it makes more sense to work during the day, go to community college at night and work out an arrangement with an employer for paying for the tuition for a bachelor's degree if one is actually required by the job.

The mortgage crisis too was predictable. In fact, after the dotcom bubble burst in early 2000, and many families lost their investments, they should have sobered up and realized that a similar thing was happening to real estate values. Whenever there are investors filled with irrational exuberance, there is trouble ahead. It's not a matter of if, but rather a matter of when.

Student loans and a car payment or two got you down? Buy a house you can't really afford to live in, and flip it for a cool $100K. That'll make you feel better.

The only way out of this is for people to learn to save a lot of money. That may mean that a lot of middle class families have to do without, but it'll produce more economic stability as the economy adapts to people adopting new habits like holding onto their cars longer, eating out less and buying more modest homes.

This is a really interesting web page. It's certainly not exhaustive, but it shows a number of examples of how many non-rape, non-child molesting things one can do--some of which don't even involve you having sex--that can get you labeled a sex offender if you are in the wrong part of the country. It's probably a good link to keep around in case you ever hear someone say how all sex offenders are evil, since it clearly shows how broad the category actually is.

Chris Roach would have us believe that more force, not less, would have prevented the death of FBI Agent Samuel Hicks who was shot by a drug dealer's wife when Hicks' team was breaking into their house to serve a warrant. The only problem is that it would have more likely resulted in the death of his wife, an equally pointless death, as the SWAT unit would have immediately gunned her down the moment she fired at them thinking they were robbers.

Ironically, for a paleoconservative, he seems to have neither any skepticism about the use of military tactics and armaments on civilians, especially in residential locations nor an understanding of what libertarians might mean if and when they talk about a natural right to deal drugs:

The libertarians' silence on the Hicks' case as the facts have come out is noteworthy.  The pro-drug-dealer libertarians of the CATO Institute make a big show of every mistaken drug raid, while ignoring the many cases of brutal drug dealer violence against police and one another. Libertarians ultimately have a maudlin view of drug dealers, whose "natural rights" to deal crack are somehow being infringed.  This is of course a ridiculous position, that makes little account of the rule of law, and ends in the absurd equation of the moral status of violent, greedy drug dealers with that of sworn FBI agents enforcing our democratically enacted laws.

The only conceivable natural law argument from a libertarian point of view here is to engage in peaceful, non-coercive economic transactions between buyer and seller. That's a point that real conservatives have generally agreed on without hesitation since the time of our founding fathers. There is a natural law presumption that buyer and seller have the right to peaceably carry out their transaction, and the state must make the case for why it is disallowing that. Considering the fact that many people do actually use drugs in a functional manner, the state has a huge burden in arguing that drugs inherently preset a clear and present danger to the public. They don't, anymore so than hard liquor does due to the tendency of people to drink hard liquor until they are drunk enough to be indistiguishable viz-a-vis intoxication from a drug user.

All of that aside, most of his argument is one big red herring to draw attention away from the fact that this raid didn't need to happen. Let me say that again. Hicks' death was literally completely unnecessary and intelligent police work would have all but guaranteed that it wouldn't happen. The cops could have easily arrested him in his front yard as he went out to work, arrested him at work or they could have just waited for him to leave and then serve the search warrant on his wife. Had they done the latter, they would have had the evidence in hand, and could have picked him up later at a time and place of their choosing. No shots fired, no one put at risk.

This is the essence of the libertarian argument. The job of the police is the exact opposite of the military. The military exists to use overwhelming force against the enemies of the nation. It does not exist to bring peace, but to use violence so thoroughly that all opposition is literally killed. The police, on the other hand, are supposed to use the least amount of force necessary to stop crime and keep the peace. Police and military are, except in cases of invasion and insurrection, mutually exclusive professions. That is a principle that we aim to protect, and that SWAT enthusiasts like Mr. Roach don't really care much about.

Finally, consider Waco. It was totally unnecessary, and a perfect example of how reality actually drives a sledgehammer through the logic of "SWAT as first resort." David Koresh could have been arrested at many occasions, but wasn't. The federal government chose, instead, to extract him by force rather than seek a peaceful solution. The end result was a scene that looked like a war zone, that was entirely preventable had the police first resorted to simply arresting him on his way to town.

Jim Harper at the Technology Liberation Front has a post up about a group that is holding a conference about issues such as cyber-bullying. There's a case in the federal courts now involving a woman named Lori Drew. By all accounts, she's a very sick excuse for humanity. You'd have to be in order to be a middle aged woman who cyber bullies a bipolar 13 year old girl so badly that she ends up committing suicide.

The interesting thing about her case is that the federal government is going after her on the grounds that she violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by accessing MySpace, against their terms of service, in order to commit a criminal act. Her crime was intentional infliction of emotional distress. If she's convicted, that'll be it for cyber bullies. Parents of victims of cyber bullying will be able to take their case to the local U.S. Attorney, instead of having to take it to the principle.

Unfortunately, that's probably how a lot of these cases will have to be resolved. Granted, if I were a teenager again, not a Christian and being cyber bullied by my peers, I would photoshop their faces onto beastiality and Japanese bondage porn and distribute them around the school. Nothing says "two can play at this game, jackass" like the bully seeing his face photoshopped onto a donkey screwing a fat chick.

When in doubt, get us deeper in debt:

Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.

One has to wonder if Keynes ever reflected on the distinct possibility that politicians would never pay down the debt that they took on to stimulate the economy. That is the reason that Keynesianism is doomed in the long run. Sure, it is a good idea on paper, but in the real world, most politicians believe that no one ever won an election by promising to pay down the national debt rather than bring home the bacon.

There are only two possible outcomes here: inflation and/or debt. The interest alone on the national debt in 2008 was $261B. I would not be surprised if the 2010 federal budget has interest payments of at least $400B. At the rate we're going, the interest payments alone will quickly dwarf our peacetime defense spending within a few years. God help us at this rate...

Over the weekend I started working a Perl API for connecting to Google Reader. I know there is an existing one, but it seems a bit heavy and it's old, so I'm giving it the old college try. My goal is to use this with Movable Type as the foundation of a reimplementation of my news reader for MT, so I want to use only packages that are bundled in the extlib directory of Movable Type and XML::DOM. So far, I've figured out all of the basics, I think such as getting the session ID, getting the modification token, getting a user's subscription list, retrieving feed data, updating feed data, etc. The only part that I'm a little sketchy on is the groupings by label. I'm pretty sure that's represented as just tags, but I've got to pour over the reverse engineered documentation to make sure.

If everything works out, I'll be able to make a real mashup between Movable Type and Google Reader. So far, Google seems to have no interest in changing the "API" behind it. That's probably because Google Reader hasn't really been updated in a while, and there's just no good reason for them to fight people finding interesting ways to make use of their free services.

(Note: This was a submission to PajamasMedia)

Mike Huckabee's comments against the ostensible libertarianism of the Republican Party for the last eight years or more reveal a brewing battle for the soul of social conservatism in America. According to him, libertarianism in all of its variations is uncompassionate, un-American, and incompatible with social conservatism. He has accused libertarians of all stripes, even right-of-center libertarians who share much in common with conservatives, of being little more than cold-hearted Scrooges who must be opposed by social conservatives. Earlier this year, he said:

I've been bad, I think.

33 miles per gallon

Created by The Car Connection

Found by the Elusive Wapiti.

This is a very interesting video. Mike Huckabee is defending himself and his positions, and it sounds a lot like the man hasn't even stopped to consider how much he actually sounds like he could get along with libertarians on a lot of issues. Furthermore, he also sounds like he can't really distinguish between the Rockefeller Republicans who are against the emphasis on traditional values and libertarians who are just sick and tired of wasting efforts on getting the state to enforce them.

It's actually sad because he's closer to being a libertarian than he realizes, yet he continues to attack the libertarians and libertarian-influenced conservatives based on things that don't even represent us.

Inspiration.

This one caught my eye because it's similar to the other Metamorph themes that I've converted into styles for Movable Type so far. I'm not sure if I want to release two versions of it when I'm done. The toolbar at the top was something that I added to the template markup, but I could see some people not wanting to alter their template markup.

Anyway, it's coming along very well now. Quite frankly, this work is a bit on the back burner for me right now because I have a lot of other things going on. One thing that'll hopefully prove to be useful for me in the future is the Firebug plugin for Mozilla. It's really cool, how it lets you right click on a DOM element in the page and "inspect it." It seems like it might be a very useful tool for shaving some time off of a future conversion project by allowing me to focus less on matching HTML and CSS, and more on just saying "oh, this element has these properties, let me throw them in there."

For explaining why the decrepit American auto industry is failing. The screenshot to the left shows the three closest competitors that I could find to the Honda Civic Coupe on the General Motors website. They all come in at at least $1,000 more than the Civic in their MSRP. They same is true of their price relative to the Toyota Corolla.

Is it any wonder, then, why people would no longer be buying these cars? When you make a product that is more expensive, less reliable and that doesn't even have a very good image, you can't exactly expect to do well in the market.

The unions and the big 3 are made for one another. Between expensive, ugly, unreliable designs and overpriced labor, what could possibly go wrong?

I know a company in the area where this would actually be taken seriously if it happened there... I guess it's true what they say about the best comedy having an element of truth to it.

I had a show on Physics and alternate universes on as background noise tonight, and one of the scientists was going on about different universes being out of phase, but in the same place as ours. Thus, he said, dinosaurs could be rampaging through your living room and you'd never know it.

And yet, these people call us crazy when we talk about a "spiritual world."

Movable Type used underscores in the past to represent spaces in file names. For example, hello_word.html instead of hello-world.html. If you create an Apache error handler in PHP, you can use the following code sample to redirect from the old style to the new style without any problems:

$str = $_SERVER{'REQUEST_URI'};
$matches = array();
if (preg_match("/\/[\d]+\/[\d]+\/([\w]+_)+[\w]+\.(html|php)/", $str, $matches))
{
    $filename = str_replace("_", "-", $matches[0]);

    if (file_exists("." . $filename))
    {
        header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
        header ('Location: '. "http://www.codemonkeyramblings.com" . $filename);
    }
}

That will convert a request for, say, http://www.domain.com/2008/11/hello_world.php into http://www.domain.com/2008/11/hello-world.php. I'm using that now in my HTTP error handler.

Proposition 8 was an unsung victory for defenders of individual liberty. Wait, I know what many people will say to this. How can a measure that prevents gay couples from getting a marriage license be beneficial to the defense of individual liberty? It's because that vote represented a line drawn in the sand, even if a thin one, preventing the government from furthering its control over the institution.

As it currently stands, there is nothing short of the problem of finding a pastor, priest or rabbi who is willing to perform the marriage rite that is stopping most gay couples from getting married. They may not necessarily be legally married, but there is nothing stopping them from having a marriage in every other respect, including the public sanctification of their relationship and vows. This issue is really about other legal topics such as power of attorney and employer benefits than marriage itself, at least on the legal front.

The fact is, proponents of state licensing of gay marriages are generally in favor of using the power of the state to force society to accept homosexuality and gay marriage. They know that in a society based on a more concrete notion of freedom of association, that their views will have a hard time competing for dominance, and so they seek a short cut through the state.

In this day and age, it's refreshing to see some small, if temporary, victory in preventing the further politicization of an aspect of our culture. American politics are increasingly totalitarian in the literal sense that totalitarianism was explained by its proponents in the early 20th century: everything is political; every issue is up for debate before the legislature. One of the best defenses of individual liberty is oppose every attempt to politicize aspects of our culture.

Liberal opposition to Proposition 8 is understandable, but libertarian opposition is not, considering that the one real libertarian position on marriage is that it should be a private institution, unregulated by the state between consenting adults. In that sense, Proposition 8 was also a libertarian victory, as it slowed down the state regulation of marriage and might give libertarians ammunition to use with social conservatives to utterly abolish state licensing of marriage should the courts take this out of the voters' hands.

It's certainly educational to observe how many homosexual activists responded to the vote on Proposition 8. For them to compare their situation with that of black Americans is not just offensive, but ludicrous. Black Americans not only faced a whole host of very serious limitations on their legal rights, but often faced the imminent threat of violence should they even peacefully assert their rights. The biggest threat most of them will ever face is the possibility that somewhere, someone won't approve of them.

If most people aren't seeing this as a major civil rights battle, it's because it really isn't. Unlike being black or female, sexual orientation is something that can be controlled, hidden and denied. For millennia, priests practiced celibacy successfully in defiance of strong male heterosexual sex drives. Others have suppressed and denied impulses that their cultures have deemed immoral or depraved for equally as long. The defining difference between "women's rights" and "minority rights" versus "gay rights" is that short of plastic surgery and medical therapy, one cannot control, hide or deny their gender or race.

None of this is to say that homosexuals are inferior human beings who deserve less liberty. However, it's time for homosexuals to realize that their cause is not as worthy as that of women or blacks because what separates them from everyone else is most likely, at the biological level, merely a minor genetic defect. Likewise, defenders of individual liberty need to realize that even the bigots did everyone a favor here by temporarily delaying the state's advance on its control over even the definition of marriage.

It's possible that some of us have been wrong in judging many of the gay rights activists as being vicious totalitarian thugs in the aftermath of Proposition 8. So then, the challenge to them is to prove us wrong. They can start by offering up a counter proposition to dismantle state licensing of marriage in California and to allow each religious institution to define for itself what marriage is between consenting adult parties, as it always should have been. Surely, if this is really just about getting married, they can find willing parties among the Church of Scientology or the Unitarians at the very least.

For my Flash class, I had to add audio and/or video to my first homework assignment. Read on to see my semi-snarky addition to my first assignment, the "thank you card" from the government for giving up your house, so that property taxes could be raised.

Rachel just got glasses, and looks very good in them. A lot of guys are apprehensive about this sort of thing, but not me because I had faith in her taste and it paid off when I saw what she had selected. You know you're a lucky man when your wife can do something that a lot of men are uneasy about and actually come out looking even better!

(This was submitted to Pajamas Media over the weekend, but unfortunately, they ran enough on this subject and thus couldn't consider it.)

If these numbers are right, then the UAW and the big three deserve bankruptcy in spades. The only way for the numbers to be skewed that I can think of would be if they include executive compensation, which is unlikely because the article specifically points it out as hourly pay. Factoring in the mainstream media bias in favor of organized labor, it's highly unlikely that they'd fudge the numbers to make them look better by factoring in the hourly rate of salaried employees when discussing compensation for hourly employees.

$70.00-$75.86 is extreme. The average union worker is not worth even half that. $75.86/hour is about $152,000/year in income. As a comparison, most people with engineering degrees from a good university might make that much money fifteen to twenty years out of college unless they live in a very expensive area.

If these numbers are right, the big three are screwed. The unions will never tolerate their wages getting slashed to something more realistic like $30-$45/hour ($62,000/year - $94,000/year).

An 11 year old hits his mom in the head with a saw, then offers her $5 to not call the cops on him. This is after a track record that includes trying to cut his pregnant sister's belly open with a fork to "give her a C-section" and using hairspray and a lighter to set the family's cat on fire.

Within 10 years, a jury will look back on this news report and probably conclude that, had someone *ahem* "done something," they wouldn't be deliberating over homicide charges with him as the defendant.

Love him or hate him, Rupert Murdoch actually understands why the mainstream media is steadily collapsing and what needs to be done to fix it:

"The complacency stems from having enjoyed a monopoly--and now finding they have to compete for an audience they once took for granted. The condescension that many show their readers is an even bigger problem. It takes no special genius to point out that if you are contemptuous of your customers, you are going to have a hard time getting them to buy your product. Newspapers are no exception."

"It used to be that a handful of editors could decide what was news-and what was not. They acted as sort of demigods. If they ran a story, it became news. If they ignored an event, it never happened. Today editors are losing this power. The Internet, for example, provides access to thousands of new sources that cover things an editor might ignore. And if you aren't satisfied with that, you can start up your own blog and cover and comment on the news yourself. Journalists like to think of themselves as watchdogs, but they haven't always responded well when the public calls them to account."

This election was really what did them in. To call them propagandists for the Obama campaign would be too euphemistic. On most counts, as a watchdog and "guardian of democracy," the mainstream media is a colossal failure. It never ceases to amaze me the number of times where I have read a report about the police doing something that should have arouse suspicion, such as breaking down the wrong door, or shooting a leashed dog in a residential neighborhood, and the media just obediently parrots whatever line is given them. The media also didn't do itself any favors this year by focusing so much on Palin will giving Joe "Gaffe Machine" Biden a free pass.

Nothing illustrates Murdoch's point about the haughtiness and arrogance of the editors than the treatment of John Edwards's affair. That reporters and official newspaper bloggers were blatantly told to "shut up and not go there" only added fuel to the fire. The first and strongest image that came to mind for me during that episode was of a dinosaur defiantly screeching and trying to savage its prey as it sunk deeper into a tarpit.

Apparently, my spam filter caught a bunch of legitimate comments as spam. Not sure why. Only one user, DirtCrasher, seems to be affected by this. I set the filter, TypePad Anti-Spam to be almost toothless so that I could err on the side of caution. If this happens again, hit me up at mike__AT__codemonkeyramblings.com.

I've been thinking about redoing my news reader plugin for Movable Type based around Google Reader. In order to do that, I had to find out some things about the Google Reader API, at least as far as is publicly known about its API (if you can call it that). This blog post proved to be invaluable in getting this working sample (and understanding) up and running. It's ugly as hell, and I know there is a CPAN module for GoogleReader (that may or may not still be working), but I figured I'd learn how it works through trial and error in order to better understand it.

use strict;
use LWP;
use HTTP::Cookies;
use HTTP::Request;
use HTTP::Response;
use HTTP::Request::Common qw( GET POST );
use URI;
use URI::Escape;
use URI::QueryParam;

my $login = 'me@gmail.com';
my $password = '*******';
my $source = 'CMR';

my $google_url = 'http://www.google.com';
my $reader_url = $google_url . '/reader';
my $login_url = 'https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin';
my $token_url = $reader_url . '/api/0/token';
my $subscription_list_url = $reader_url . '/api/0/subscription/list';
my $reading_url = $reader_url . '/atom/user/-/state/com.google/reading-list';
my $read_items_url = $reader_url . '/atom/user/-/state/com.google/read';
my $reading_tag_url = $reader_url . '/atom/user/-/label/%s';
my $starred_url = $reader_url . '/atom/user/-/state/com.google/starred';
my $subscription_url = $reader_url . '/api/0/subscription/edit';
my $get_feed_url = $reader_url . '/atom/feed/';

my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new(agent => $source);
my $response = $browser->post($login_url, [
     'Email' => $login,
     'Passwd' => $password,
     'service' => 'reader',
     'continue' => $google_url,
     'source' => $source
]);

my $sidline = $response->{_content};
my $sid = substr($sidline, length("SID="), length($sidline));
my @parts = split(/\n/, $sidline);
$sid = substr($parts[0], length("SID="), length($parts[0]));
print "$sid\n";
unless ( $browser->cookie_jar ) {
     $browser->cookie_jar( HTTP::Cookies->new( hide_cookie2 => 1 ) );
}
$browser->cookie_jar->set_cookie(0, SID=>$sid, '/', '.google.com', undef, 1, 0, 160000000000);
my $uri = URI->new($subscription_list_url);
my $req = GET($uri);
$req->uri->query_param( ck => time * 1000);
$req->uri->query_param( client => $browser->agent);
$req->uri->query_form( { $uri->query_form, output => 'xml'} );
my $res = $browser->request($req);
if ($res->is_error()) { print "ERROR!!!!\n"; }
print $req->as_string() . "\n";
print $res->decoded_content() . "\n";

After reading this, I got an interesting idea about how Obama could go about implementing his mandatory service proposal quickly. Just pass a law updating the role and scope of the Selective Service program. Drop the age of initial registration down to fourteen, with draft eligibility later added on at eighteen, and use the existing Selective Service system to track graduating high school seniors.

It would be eminently feasible for him to do because the Selective Service system is already tied into the federal programs for getting college assistance and getting a security clearance (for those that want to work for the federal government). It probably wouldn't take more than a few months for the Selective Service system to have a completed plan for executing a comprehensive upgrade to take on these new capabilities, provided that the funding is there to execute the plan.

As El Borak said, the conservative movement will spend the next four years or more bitterly pissed off that it didn't use the last eight years to scale back the federal government's powers.

One problem that I see a complaint about every so often with Movable Type is that you have several independent blogs that use the same URL to get to their trackback and comment scripts. To get around this, I discovered a little trick. Modify your templates so that each template points explicitly to the URL of your blog, assuming it's on a separate domain. For example, change all references to the trackback script to explicitly point to http://www.domain2.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi if your installation of Movable Type is hosted at http://www.domain1.com/mt/. Now, create a symlink between "mt" in the directory that hosts domain2.com and your mt directory under domain1.com/mt. Then, in the root directory of domain2.com, add the following statement to .htaccess (create a file named .htaccess if it doesn't exist):

Options +FollowSymlinks

That's it! Now, whenever someone points to http://www.domain2.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi, it should be internally mapped, without any problems, to http://www.domain1.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi. I tested this out with the trackbacks and it worked fine.

She writes:

There are thousands upon thousands of high school and college students, as well as adults, doing some form of community service right now. Service to your community is an altruistic thing; it is a way of perhaps giving back to a community that has given to you. It is a way to reach out to a community, to help others who may not be as fortunate as you, to teach young adults about sharing, caring, and helping others, to do something out of the goodness of your heart that will benefit your community. This is not slavery. This is not forced labor. This is outreach. It represents values. Slavery is an act that benefits no one but the person who owns the slave; community service benefits both the giver and receiver and helps make the world a better place and leaves a general good feeling for everyone involved. It is not comparable to slavery.

The essence of slavery is forced labor, irrespective of compensation. It is the coercive act of saying to someone "you have no choice, but to do the work I dictate to you." It doesn't matter whether or not the person is compensated for it or supported by it in some capacity. The purest essence of slavery is being forced to perform work at someone's command without any option to avoid it. If Obama ties community service to federal funding of schools, he is most certainly adding involuntary service--slavery--to the curriculum. Focusing on the duration and even compensation, don't change the fact that it is involuntary labor.

What Michele calls a matter of values here is better discussed in the terms that Martin Luther used for describing the fundamental problem of trying to instill virtue in those who, on their own, would have nothing to do with it:

"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."

A similar principle applies here. Students who are not disposed to do community service will most likely end up deeply resenting the policy, and will not continue volunteering. If anything, it is more likely to make them cynical about volunteering again.

On the college level, Obama's plan would ensure a $4,000 tuition credit to students who complete 100 hours of community service a year. With the cost of college education soaring, that $4,000 is like a windfall to a college student. The student would be rewarded monetarily, but the reward of completing service toward the community is something that will stay with them, as well as the community, forever. Service to others is a lasting gift.

Here again, Michele is missing the bigger picture. The result of Obama's policy would have been to flood charities with unmotivated "volunteers" and to risk further inflating the cost of college tuition by a few thousand dollars. It's also long been observed by critics of federal funding of higher education that efforts to create tax credits and guaranteed student loans have created cushion for universities that has prevented them from having to find ways to cut costs.

Service to others is a lasting gift, but forced service is not. From the perspective of someone who is predisposed to seeing serving others as an inherent good, this may be a distinction without a difference, but to many Americans it is deeply offensive. It is deeply offensive because many Americans are still very independent people who scoff not at the idea of serving others, but at even the perception of someone telling them that they must do that. There is still some trace of the spirit of rebellion and independence left in the American character, and it chafes against proposals to make people do things against their will.

It's interesting how many right-leaning blogs are frowning upon the community service idea, though some are being thoughtful about it. Generally, people on the political right tend to belong to churches, and churches are big proponents of community service. So why the negativity?

It's the difference between a volunteer army and a conscript army. With a service-oriented church, you are there because you want to be there to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ through acts of service. No one shows up to such a church on Sunday because they are forced to because the government assigned them to a church, and their family doesn't have the money to take them out of that church and put them in a church of their choosing. Yet, that is precisely the situation that is faced by most students in public schools; their parents simply don't have the resources to put them in a school of their choosing, which automatically puts them in a position of having no choice but to perform service.

Another reason why evangelical Christians have a serious problem with this proposal is that we believe that service should be motivated by personal conviction, and we are not so idealistic as to believe that most public school students would fit that description under this plan. In many respects we could not blame them either, as the plan appeals to their desire to graduate, and not on a higher level to do service. For that reason, we recognize that even though the fist of the state is wearing a velvet glove, instead of an steel gauntlet, the fist of the state is still aimed at the student's face through the possibility of being penalized academically, at a government school they most likely had no option of not attending.

This is not socialism. This is not Marxism. This is the mark of a country that knows it needs to rely on those who can to help those who can't. It's the mark of a country that knows it needs to depend on its citizens to make their communities flourish. It's taking the "ask not what your country can do for you" attitude and transforming it into smaller clusters, where we ask what we can do for those we live with and around, instead of waiting for people to do for us. It's how communities become stronger, how they grow, and how a strong, giving community makes for a strong, giving nation.

Aside from the fact that giving students $4,000 for a mere 100 hours of service (the equivalent of about $83,200 in income per year) is indeed socialistic, there is a potential warning sign here. If America is indeed having to resort to incentives and coercion to create civic participation, that's the sign of a culture in decline. Kennedy would, no doubt, be horrified of the thought of a President offering a carrot-and-stick proposal for responding to the call of what one can do for one's country.

By itself, Google's new flu tracking program is more of a cool idea than a threat to your privacy. Google is not turning over search results to the CDC, but rather is making information about them available through a public web application. The initial results look promising, as the CDC said that their data and Google's were very close to one another; close enough to predict the flu trends of the past few years.

The danger here is one of mission creep. It'll start with the CDC, and eventually law enforcement agencies are going to want to get in on the act. The Department of Justice has tried unsuccessfully to get a data retention mandate for ISPs and major websites (I've written extensively on this subject). If this project turns out to be successful, then it'll be another argument that the DoJ will be able to make in favor of why it needs a data retention mandate and access to search data.

A year or two ago, Google turned down the Bush Administration when they came knocking, looking for a lot of free data that they could use in defense of the Child Online Protection Act in court. Google turned them down on principle and basic business sense. It made no good sense, for either reason, to give the government the impression that Google would roll over and die the moment it came looking for information on its customers. However, if it can be proved that datamining their search results is an effective process for protecting public safety, they may not receive such a sympathetic hearing in the future in federal courts or before Congress.

It's easy to forget how weasely government bureaucrats can be in making arguments for expanding their power. The USA PATRIOT Act was almost entirely ready to go right after 9-11 because the Department of Justice had been merely looking for a good argument to use in favor of most of the language in what would become the USA PATRIOT Act. Google has already faced concerns from the European Union and the federal government over its practice of anonymizing logged search data after nine months because of the perceived forensics implications that come with that. It would not be far-fetched in the least to see the EU and federal government at some point saying that, as proved with the flu tracking program, there is a public interest in them not anonymizing their logs and datamining the trackable information.