Unlike a lot of people who are strongly libertarian in their sentiments, I support the right of private, law-abiding citizens to violate the wishes of land and property owners by carrying weapons on their property against their will. The reason is that I believe that the right to life is so fundamental that it supercedes all other rights. Now, here's a situation for the libertarians who give the property owner unlimited rights in this regard.

From Digg:

25 Year old man + 18 year old girl = ok
35 year old man + 18 year old girl = icky but ok
35 year old man + 17 year old girl = icky and illegal
35 year old man + 14 year old girl = sick and illegal
35 year old woman + 14 year old boy = AWESOME!

Thomas Sowell on why black civil rights was a cause morally superior to gay rights:

Despite heavy television advertising in California for "gay marriage," showing blacks being set upon by police dogs during civil right marches, and implying that homosexuals face the same discrimination today, the analogy is completely false.

Blacks had to sit in the back of the bus because they were black. They were doing exactly what white people were doing-- riding a bus. That is what made it racial discrimination.

I agree wholeheartedly with Sowell. The primary difference between gay rights and black rights is that homosexuality is a behavior that can be controlled when necessary. A flaming homosexual can "act normal" in mixed company. A black person cannot conceal their blackness unless they hide it physically or are so light-skinned that they can pass as a white person.

In the 1960s we lost the right of freedom of association in public accommodations, and with that we lost the ability to impose basic rules of etiquette and other reasonable social norms on society. Yesterday, my wife and I were trying to get into a restaurant, and the one door, a revolving door, was occupied by someone's children who were busily ensuring that no one could get through. The only thing that got the mother to pull them out of there was when she heard my wife comment that I might as well wait since the kids obviously had no intent of letting anyone else use the door.

I used to think that rude behavior like this was something that I had to accept until I realized how quickly I could post a high resolution picture of someone's blatantly anti-social behavior on Facebook with my iPhone. I've done that several times already, ranging from a pickup truck driver who parked his truck on top of a store's shrubbery because he couldn't be bothered to try to park better, to a soccer mom who decided to block both lanes leading in and out of a shopping center so that no one could get her place in line. I don't do this for just anyone--I have standards. Had I not been so hungry that I forgot that I had my iPhone with me, those kids probably would have ended up getting a picture or two of them uploaded to Facebook and my blog with a snarky caption--the mother's wishes be damned since she thought it was cute until people started getting angry at her kids.

There is a certain segment of society that is pathologically forgiving and non-judgmental, that has no standards it expects of others. They will no doubt call this behavior sick, judgmental, arrogant and God knows what else. For the rest of us, I'd like to point out that this sort of ostracism is probably the last, best hope we have for making people behave. I think camera phones are a good thing, over all. I think the advent of cheap, hi-def camcorders is even better. When people start to realize that anyone around them may be recording them behaving like a jackass and posting it for the world to see, they might hold their tongues, practice a little forced grace and manners toward their fellow man, and start watching their kids' behavior.

Youtube, Facebook, Flickr and blogs might be just the thing needed for making people realize that they have to behave decently toward others.

In modern America, we seem to have gone over the deep end in our democratic sentiments to the point where we tend to hold people accountable according to the standard that ought to be used for the lowest common denominator, not the standard that might be fitting for a given person's level of education, intellect, power and responsibility. This applies in spades to the way that police and prosecutors are often allowed to behave like unthinking, amoral cretins. Police are allowed to violate the most basic "common sense" rules, such as raiding suspected drug criminals in the middle of the night while they're sleeping, all the while expecting them (again, against common sense) to be perfectly coherent and aware of who might be raiding their house. Prosecutors are allowed to bend and twist the law in ways more closely associated with a sociopath out for self-aggrandizement and satisfaction than the pursuit of real justice and law and order. Beyond those things, we have the obvious corporate examples wherein no one but the socialists seriously believe it is proper to punish corporate executives for swindling their employees, stockholders and creditors while landing safely a continent away from the blast zone with their golden parachutes.

I think it's increasingly clear that our democratic, lowest common denominator policies and laws simply don't work. They assume that all people are the same, and don't provide special accountability for those with special responsibility and power over others and their property. The officer who shot Salvatore Culosi should be executed for his negligence because he had a SWAT officer's training on firearms, and thus should be held to a far more rigorous standard than a private citizen. Prosecutors like Mary Beth Buchanan should be subjected to disbarment, and prosecution for being a party to the willful creation of injustice where appropriate. Men like Bernie Madoff ought to be required to spend the rest of their lives working to repay their victims. To grant them mercy and hold them accountable to the same standard as a normal person ignores the fact that these people have special duties and authority, and to not deeply factor that into their punishments is to give them free reign in those areas to act like imbeciles and scoundrels at the public's expense.

If necessary, we can just repackage noblesse oblige in the words of Peter Parker's Uncle Ben: with great power comes great responsibility.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought.

One of Dr. Helen's commenters made a great example of how paternity fraud in state-licensed marriages is well-defended by the system and those who claim to "represent women" like the average feminist:

Forget the fact that it is impossible for a moment, and consider a scenario with the following factors:
* Man commits adultery.
* Man lies to woman about adultery.
* Man divorces woman.
* Through lies and fraud, man collects money from woman for 15 years for a child that is not hers
* Man's lies and adultery is exposed.
* Man then collects money from the women he committed adultery with, while keeping the money he fraudulently got from his ex wife.

Basically, the man benefited from adultery and fraud, doubling the amount he would have had if he were a faithful husband.

Now, is there a representative of feminist alive who would think that this was fine, since it was best for the children?

And yet, this situation is completely support for women. A man can have an unfaithful wife who bears half a dozen children, none of whom are his, and yet he is legally on the hook for their welfare after the divorce. Furthermore, there is no legal counterbalance that gives him custody of the children in this case, or that sends his wife to prison for the better part of her life for committing adultery (or felony fraud, if you prefer). In short, there is nothing in place to protect the man's interest in this critical aspect of marriage, and there are a lot of people who have a psychopathic form of chivalry or who are pathological male bashers and who won't budge an inch on limiting the wife's prerogatives.

For men, there are no reproductive benefits to marriage anymore. They literally enjoy no additional rights, privileges or prerogatives regarding their children than unmarried men who have a whole slew of children outside of marriage would enjoy. In the past, conservatives have argued that marriage is the process by which men gain a right to access to their children, but clearly that conservative argument is dead on arrival thanks to the state of modern American marriage and family law.

Taken as a whole, the legal system makes an abject mockery of contracts, which should frost every libertarian, be they political or cultural. There are few practical consequences for a woman who flagrantly violates her marriage contract, and men generally enjoy no protection of their end of the contract, even when it is laid out in exacting detail in a prenuptial agreement. There are few examples that put this into perspective as succinctly and undeniably as the way that the modern marriage law gives men no protection or guaranteed recourse from being systematically defrauded on paternity.

Merry Christmas to all and sundry. Please, don't let me catch any of you blogging again until after you're fat, dumb and sassy from too much good food with family and honoring our Lord!

In this case, the police were allowed by the court to search through a suspect's address book and recent call list on the grounds that the information was not private because it could have been obtained through a pen register, and that it did not necessarily carry more information than a pen register would have revealed.

Orin Kerr disagrees with this ruling, pointing out that the court ignored the contextual nature of the 4th amendment's protection of devices and data, but this ruling does raise a red flag in my mind. The Internet is a quasi-public medium, and in that sense, data can never be considered entirely private. Once your data leaves your ISP's network, it technically enters into networks where you have no contractual expectation of protection. In this case, the court waived the 4th amendment protections, even though the police didn't even follow an equivalent procedure to get a pen register. We could certainly expect similar shenanigans from this court should the police ever adopt the tactic of having one telecom spy on the traffic from another.

After all, if the court can nullify the contextual protection that the device would have received under the 4th amendment simply on the grounds of what the police could have gotten through a procedure they didn't follow, it stands to reason that the court would be open to an argument that says that all data that leaves an ISP's network is open to the public because it could be routed anywhere between its source and destination. Such sophists could easily pretend that the person had no right or intent to be private in their data.

Consider 1 Timothy 5:

¹Do not rebuke an older man harshly, but exhort him as if he were your father. Treat younger men as brothers, ²older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity.

³Give proper recognition to those widows who are really in need. ⁴But if a widow has children or grandchildren, these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God. ⁵The widow who is really in need and left all alone puts her hope in God and continues night and day to pray and to ask God for help. ⁶But the widow who lives for pleasure is dead even while she lives. ⁷Give the people these instructions, too, so that no one may be open to blame. ⁸If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

We protestants take it for granted that Sola Scriptura can provide us with the answers, and in a lot of cases it can. At least macro-answers. From verse eight, we clearly, unequivocally know that a family has a responsibility to its constituent members to provide for one another. Yet, what does it mean to provide? If we take it for granted that Paul is speaking only about material needs, then it would be entirely reasonable for a father to work the entire week, and most of the weekend, to provide for his family's purely material needs even when that it is not necessary. Doing that wouldn't be a sign that he doesn't love his family, but would rather signify only, perhaps, that he cares as much for his career as his family, which is something that doesn't really enter into the realm of being a vice as far as the Bible is concerned.

I was told that my use of 1 Timothy 5:8 to defend a father who aggressively defends his family from harm is an abuse of this scripture. Perhaps. I'm willing to concede that possibility, however, I think this serves as a useful example of why certain protestant assumptions about scripture don't necessary work as well as we'd like to think they do. From my perspective, 1 Timothy 5:8 carries a connotation of general provision, meaning that each person in the family is to provide with regard to their traditional role. For a man, part of his natural, God-given role is to provide for the defense of his wife and children.

Cases like this show that it's not enough to just look at scripture. One must also be aware that scripture can say things which can be legitimately read on different levels, and then thoughtfully compare the different interpretations to find the one most suited to being applied for the good of the church and oneself.

According to this, not long after the incident where 12 year old Dymond Milburn was brutally beaten by vice cops on her parent's lawn for resisting arrest as a "prostitute," her father was arrested and charged with possession of cocaine. Yet, the same police department that managed to get a 12 year old black girl when told to pick up 3 white women, a white man and a black man, also had a serious ethics and legal issue with their evidence room not that long ago.

Call me crazy, but I wouldn't put it past these people to have been up to some shenanigans here with that drug charge...

By now most people who are familiar with the immigration issue know how badly our system is messed up for people who try to obey the law. Well, one thing that a lot of countries get right, that we just don't get, is the need to encourage single immigrants, not families, to immigrate. From what I've read on the issue, most of the anglosphere has laws that are biased toward single men and women with skills, as opposed to bringing families over. We should do that here, as it would make for a great policy that would encourage better immigration.

In the past I've castigated other libertarians and some types of conservatives for failing to realize that opening up the borders to more immigrants without controls on welfare and education spending would be an unmitigated disaster in the long run for combating socialistic policies. One of the best things that could be done would be to change federal immigration law to be very open to single people or childless marriages, and very prejudiced against immigrants with children. The logic behind this is simple: their non-citizen children will be a burden on their local and state governments. A single man or woman from India, for example, brings no one who may depend on local and state resources for education. The same is true for a childless, professional couple.

This sort of policy change would encourage immigrants who are productive, and not likely to access state and local benefits until they are a more permanent part of the community. It would also encourage integration by making many immigrants have to date and marry American citizens, and thus become part of our society on that level. This is a reform that we really need to fix our broken immigration system.

Earlier this month, Chris Roach took another swipe at libertarians over the War on Drugs:

Radley Balko evinces a typically obtuse libertarian reaction to a typically horrifying Mexico drug war murder:  in this case, a police chief and his family gunned down in Monterrey.  Of course, it's always the drug war itself that has the chief responsibility with libertarians.  There is no condemnation of the murder or the murderers.  They are compelled, as it were, to murder.

I will grant arguendo that laws may make certain crimes more profitable and more likely and thus those laws may be on balance more costly than the benefits, but only a callous partisan would thereby absolve the killers of their moral responsibility for their acts.   These killers are bad people with the chief moral responsibility for their murder.  It's a stretch to say the drug war "made" them do it.  You need food, clothing, and shelter.  You don't need to get rich quick trafficking cocaine.  These people are callous, generally dull, and greedy people.  I also remain unconvinced that there penchant for violence would not find another outlet in the absence of drug prohibition.  Some people who are not that bright don't want to work 9-5.  They like the money, bling, and power of their present criminal activities.  They will find something to do criminal, whether it's theft, forced prostitutition, human trafficking, counterfeiting, dog-fighting, recreational rape, or generalized shakedowns of legitimate businesses.  It's not like the real Mafia did not preexist prohibition or disappeared after the end of prohibition; instead, it began in the lawlessness that was 18th and 19th Century Italy, and, after the 1930s, the original Mafia changed its attention to skimming profits from otherwise lawful enterprises like the garment and sanitation trade in NYC.

It is certainly true that many of these criminals would have other outlets for their natural criminal tendencies. However, those outlets would not be anywhere near as profitable as the black market for narcotics. Instead of dealing with small, poorly funded gangs having to act as parasites on legitimate businesses, law enforcement is dealing with criminals that are so well funded that they can actually afford to buy and build their own submarines to smuggle their products into the United States.

Furthermore, enforcement of the drug laws has created an environment wherein the most vicious are rewarded. It's no surprise that many of the drug dealers left standing after vigorous enforcement are the sort of hardened career criminals that Roach fears. Beyond them are terrorist groups, especially Islamic terrorist groups, who are most certainly not afraid of killing anyone who gets in their way. The fact that these people get to reap such incredible black market profit only makes the stakes that much more dangerous for the police and intelligence agencies who fight them. Let's also not lose sight of the fact that the Taliban was heavily funded by the opium trade, and that much of the violence hitting Afghanistan today was made possible by Taliban agents in the international drug trade.

Roach's argument that these people would still exist, and that is evidence against the libertarian position here is a nonsensical scarecrow precisely because no mainstream libertarian would ever seriously argue that the criminal element would completely go away in these areas. Even if Pablo Escobar had been able to freely sell his drugs, it is possible that he would have still resorted to illegal tactics because that is just the sort of man he was. We understand and respect the fact that the criminal element in the trade as it is now won't stop being criminals, as a general rule, just because the drugs are legalized. What we seek is a chance to displace the criminal element with legitimate businessmen just as the mafia was displaced by legitimate brewers and distillers after prohibition was repealed.

Roach also doesn't consider how the War on Drugs has aided the welfare state in crippling family life in many inner city communities. The welfare state made it easy for women to support their families without a husband or even an active father figure for their children. The War on Drugs created a lucrative black market that allowed many of their kids to avoid getting educated, avoid learning marketable skills and make large sums of money outside the normal economy. The drug trade has served as the true safety net in many communities, while the welfare state has merely been the most obvious one. Paleo-conservatives need to come to grips with this moral fact.

Finally, it is absurd to say that any mainstream libertarian would argue that a drug dealer is powerless to not murder. Where we disagree with Roach is that we see this sort of thing as being as inevitable as the violence that came out of the trade in illegal alcohol during prohibition. If we are to find fresh outrage in each case, then Roach should likewise find seething outrage every time the police terrorize an innocent family because they couldn't bother to check the street address on the house before ramming the door in. He won't because to do so would be to admit that the cure is increasingly worse than the disease, since many forced drug raids land so little drugs that to describe them as swatting a fly with a bazooka would be charitable.

So much of the empirical case for libertariansim consists of a pretty thin melange of fallacies, where all the costs of the current world we live in are attributed to those laws and institutions they do not like, and all the benefits projected into a yet-to-be-seen world without these laws.  They say this even though obvious complexities present themselves.  Countries with relatively strict drug laws are not unusually violent or lawless-Finland or Singapore come to mind-and Mexico in particular has had a 100 year bloody history rooted in age-old traditions of corruption, demagoguery, and various resentments among social classes.  These aspects of these societies exist in spite of and in parallel to the drug trade.

Finland is also one of the wealthiest nations in Europe, and Singapore is also legendary for its "Fascism With A Friendly Face" style of governance. Those characteristics tend to act as buffers against the sort of lawlessness and violence that plagues poor and too-corrupt-to-be-governed-effectively Mexico. That combination of poverty and laughably weak government is a serious problem with much of Latin America and transcends this one issue.

This year, T-Mobile will have hooked up at least one million users with the G1, the first phone that comes with Android. There is another Android-based phone that has been confirmed, and Garmin is also planning on entering the market with its own Android-based phones in 2009. At some point in 2010, Apple's contract with AT&T Wireless will be over, so what will Apple do then?

The iPhone will start to get a real run for its money in 2009 once there are several decent phones which run Android. By 2010, Apple will have to start reevaluating its strategy for the iPhone, which is based around being exclusively through AT&T Wireless. The danger they face there is that Motorola has also said that they are working on an Android-based phone, and Motorola has a solid relationship with Verizon, which has a much larger, more robust network than AT&T or T-Mobile.

Between 2010 and 2011, Apple is not going to have much of a choice when it comes to developing a relationship with Verizon. Fortunately for them, Verizon is going to be migrating its network to a technology endorsed by the GSM stakeholders, which should mean that it'll be a lot easier for Apple on the R&D side.

The system does work from time-to-time:

Debra Markham, a Yamhill County deputy district attorney who made national news in 2007 for prosecuting two McMinnville seventh-graders for swatting the bottoms of girls at their middle school, now faces criminal charges herself.

Markham was arrested last month in Lincoln City for allegedly punching her husband in the face during a dispute.

There has to be something to this because she lost her job. I suspect that she isn't going to get off quite so easily on the "poor little woman, beaten up by the big mean man" defense that she tried by saying that her husband tried to choke her because it looks like her office "strongly encouraged" her to leave. The media won't say as much directly, but that's the way it looks if you read between the lines in this story.

I hope they toss in every possible misdemeanor and felony they can twist to fit against her. After the stunt that she pulled against those boys, which would have completely ruined their lives over something that most of the girls involved didn't even think was particularly riseable, she deserves to not just have the book thrown at her, but be beaten senseless with it in court.

After reading Mary Jackson's latest article for PajamasMedia, I started thinking about the way that men are often treated today viz-a-vis children. It lends support to my deeply conservative believe that social morality is a wheel that keeps turning, creating the illusion of progress while never truly taking us anywhere we ought to be going. Two generations ago, the wheel had turned to a point where it was socially acceptable to create moral panics about the sexual and criminal proclivities of blacks and hispanics, and now it is toward all men, irrespective of race. Society has not, in any sense, morally improved, but rather has merely seen its collective sins mutate.

It is insane, and the problem is the general collapse of trust. Almost every human relationship that was sensibly regulated by trust is now governed by law, with cripplingly expensive consequences.

Arvind Satyanarayan created the Privacy and Protect plugins to password protect Movable Type entries. Privacy was for 4.X, but started having problems with 4.1 and seems to just not work with version 4.2. However, I noticed something about the PHP code that it generates in an entry that is useful for protecting your entries even when it isn't working:

<?php if($_COOKIE['entry2']) { ?>
        Thank you for signing in!

            If you can see this, you are either logged in or it is not working

<?php } else { ?>
        This is a private entry. Please sign in</a>
<?php } ?>

When an authenticated commenter signs in, they get a mt_commenter cookie. Merely checking for mt_commenter in a way similar to what's shown above would be enough to prevent the average person from viewing your content. Obviously, this isn't the most effective measure out of the box, as mt_commenter is created by any authenticator interface used by Movable Type, but it's a start.

I think I'll dig into this more and see if I can't create a simpler plugin that would support PHP and possibly JSP and ASP.NET.

Three or four cops rush out of a van and man-handle a 12 year old black girl after they have been told that their suspects are three grown white women who are suspected of prostitution. All of the cops were out of uniform, and it happened at night. After calling for her father, one of the cops tried to silence her by putting his hand over her mouth and she ended up going to the hospital with several injuries when it was all said and done that night. A few weeks later, the father and daughter are arrested for resisting arrest.

There is an attitude common among conservatives viz-a-vis civil liberties that the police should be given the benefit of the doubt when they violate our civil rights without malice. That's the theory behind the resisting arrest statutes that provide no latitude for anything but the most incomprehensibly bizarre scenarios. Somehow, the father should have known that these men weren't a pack of rapists looking to kidnap his daughter and possibly haul her over the border into Mexico for a life of prostitution. The daughter, likewise should have known that they were really super-secret cops, not pimps or kidnappers looking to make her turn tricks.

Cases like this are a good example of why there is little justification for the "no malice" defense of violation of civil liberties and basic decency by law enforcement. Even if we pretend that the police involved were so stupid and incompetent that they could not imagine how this scenario would be inexcusably unprofessional and dangerous, the outcome is what really matters. The natural conservative tendency is to judge the private citizen based primarily on the outcome, not the intent, of his or her actions. The police should generally be judged even more harshly here because they possess the training to act better than most private citizens, and they generally have the advantage of being the ones who make the first move when situations like this or other raids occur.

Law and order demand that private citizens never fear for their liberty in situations like this. The only conservative and libertarian answer to this situation is to permit law-abiding citizens to use forces--even deadly force--against the police when they behave like this. The alternative is to create a public that is trapped between police who can behave any way they choose without fear of legal reprisal, and a criminal element that will be able to play on the fear that the public has of the police to its advantage. If internal affairs and the courts really worked, we might not need these laws, but the facts on the ground show that internal affairs and the courts almost never have the power and will to protect the public.

Update: In a similar case, one cop killed another cop by ramming into his cruiser at over 100mph in a 45mph zone on his way to a shoplifting report. What separates this one from the case above is that the police department is actually going to charge the cop who killed his colleague with manslaughter once he gets out of the hospital. A good, responsible way of handling it on the part of the brass. However, the rank and file are unhappy with that decision. They think he should just lose his job. Well, consider what probably would have happened if a "civilian" had been driving 100mph in a 45mph zone and killed a cop on their way to pick up an extremely sick child from school. They would probably get manslaughter too, but I daresay few people inside the police department would be as understanding here, as they are toward one of their colleagues who killed one of their own in an accident that was caused by an equivalent level of bad judgment.

Another reason why I would have become an alcoholic if I had chosen to become a lawyer:

And, just recently, when lawyers for the man charged in the killing of his 8-year-old daughter and her 9-year-old friend said in court that DNA evidence from semen excluded him as the perpetrator, the Lake prosecutor had another explanation.

Mermel said DNA may have gotten inside the 8-year-old's body as she played in the woods at what became the crime scene-a place where Mermel said some couples go to have sex. The girl was found fully clothed.

In order to believe the prosecutor's claim, at the very least, you would have to believe that the man's semen can get spontaneously change its genetic code to match that of another man. You'd probably also have to believe that sperm can magically target little girls and teleport inside their vaginas. There is no other way, short of arguing that the little girl was fond of running through the forest naked, that you can argue that DNA that doesn't match her father's got into her while she was playing in the woods.

Now, I don't know about you, but if the DNA evidence is against her father being the perpetrator, chances are, it's because someone else raped and murdered the little girl.

John Balcerzak is a real piece of work. His big claim to fame was turning over a drugged and brain-damaged victim back over to Jeffrey Dahmer, even though several women on the street at the time urged them to be more cautious of Dahmer's claim that the victim was just his lover. The department rightfully fired these guys for handing a helpless victim over to a serial killer with a known predilection for sex offenses (which they would have known about, had they run an ID check on smooth-talking Dahmer).

The union defended them, helped them get their jobs back and now Balcerzak is the head of the union. On top of that, despite his reputation, most of the union members voted to keep him when there was a recall vote done on him.

Police unions routinely stand up for incompetent and corrupt police officers. They're a major source of grief for those in the system who actually want to clean things up. For the sake of the public and law enforcement profession, it's important that state governments begin taking measures to outlaw public employee unions, especially police unions, since their interests are almost always diametrically opposite of the public's interest.

This has got to be one of the dumbest Judao-Christian views on evil I have ever heard. I'll turn it around here. If God created evil, then God also is the spiritual equivalent of a terrorist who plants an IED in an open-air market. He planted it there, exposed others to it, and when it goes off, is ultimately to blame for whatever happened to them because He is the original cause behind the introduction to sin. This is why I have always had a problem with the predestinationist argument that the devil didn't act on his own to become what he is now. Had God created the devil to be the devil, then God would naturally be the author of sin itself, with the merely the agent through which God introduced evil into the world.

Such a view is blasphemy.

Something Feral posted this story on Elusive Wapiti's blog. It is a good example of why I have basically stopped criticizing the police except on matters of unabashed stupidity, in favor of focusing on bring attention to cases of prosecutorial malfeasance:

According to an interview I had on September 16 with John Edison's aunt, Alice Gaskins, the 12-year-old's medical exam, which was conducted only hours after this alleged rape took place, revealed no evidence that a physical assault had occurred, much less a violent rape. In fact, the girl's hymen apparently was still intact at the time of her examination. (Medical records are sealed and therefore not available for public consumption. However, they can be requested and obtained by the family of the accused.)

Indeed, the only "evidence" provided by the state during preliminary proceedings was the statement by the alleged victim that she had been raped. St. Mary's County sheriff's deputy James Fontana described for the court the 12-year-old's account of events, and when McDevitt asked him if he was aware of any other witness accounts or scientific evidence against Edison, Fontana said he was not.

The prosecutor in this case is not entirely a bad apple. He does seem to have the capacity to recognize problems with the system and call them out for what they are. However, like a lot of prosecutors, he seems to be driven more by outside factors than a sense of duty to the spirit of justice. What makes this case interesting to me is that when he was 18, it appears that the prosecutor participated in a gang rape of a 15 year old girl, which adds the element of a man trying to gain redemption for himself.

I don't know if it is even possible to reform a system where the judges and prosecutors behave like this. Both the judge and the prosecutor have to face the fact that not only is there no forensic evidence of rape, there is evidence against it. The alleged rape victim, who claims to have had intercourse, is still a virgin! On top of that, a neighbor saw the "victim" and the "perpetrator" carrying on and having a good time after the alleged incident.

The only way to reform the system in cases like this would be to create a system to short-circuit the case. The defense should have a way of addressing the jury and pointing out that the evidence flat out does prove the guilty of their client, and the jury should be empowered to stop the trial under such circumstances. The very reason that cases like this demand that the jury be the supreme legal body in the room in the room, as the legislature is ultimately supreme over the executive's veto, is that the judge, like the prosecutor, has refused to handle this case properly in light of the dearth of evidence against the defendant.

Dennis Howlett writes:

I think however it's important to bear in mind that while Wordpress is incredibly flexible (owing some of that to the open nature of its architecture and hence the proliferation of plug-ins) it remain a single purpose application. Enterprise systems are not.

But don't think for one minute that Wordpress is immune to issues. Theme developers tell me that many of the plug-ins are not properly tested. Wordpress itself struggles with testing. Take the example of the Lighter Menus plugin many had come to love. Wordpress didn't say explicitly but LM killed the WP2.7 dashboard sidebar. I run an automatic upgrade and as far as I can tell, there is no inline plugin compatibility testing.  The problem initially left me thinking: 'WTF?' It was only by applying a bit of sideways logic that I figured the LM plugin was likely to be the problem. Once killed, everything was fine - sort of. The Zemanata server side plug-in for WP insists on staying in the top right or left position whereas I'd prefer the Save/Publish/Update panel to be in that position. These are small things but to the author's point about giving customers what they want, even Wordpress and its plugin developer community have a way to go. More to the point, there is no Silver Bullet. But I, like the About UI guys, give Wordpress a lot of credit for working hard to make users' lives a lot easier while continuing to bake in wanted functionality.

I just installed WordPress 2.7 in my development environment alongside Movable Type 4.23, and was impressed with the new admin console. It seems like WordPress is finally starting to play catch up with respect to creating a good admin console for its users. However, it does still have a ways to go, and one of the things that makes me cringe everytime I hear about how great and advanced WordPress is is the fact that the admin console has been changed several times in the last few releases--about once per major point release! I'm not convinced that the thing that they've really been searching for hasn't, in fact, been an admin console that they can finally settle on.

A large part of the problem with developing for WordPress is the fact that it has been developed like a traditional PHP application. There is little separation of the presentation from the back end code, and WordPress is hopelessly tied down to MySQL at this point. Speaking of enterprise software, one of the critical problems with WordPress--why I wouldn't use it as a positive example for enterprise users--is that it simply cannot be reliably integrated into a real enterprise environment without rewriting most of its database access code to be able to handle even Oracle or SQL Server. This overall pattern has spilled over into the plugin development process, which is why most WordPress plugins behave like badly written hacks. I learned this the hard way when I wrote a plugin which heavily modified the way that WordPress password-protects entries.

Where most enterprise developers go wrong, and I mean very, very wrong, is that they love to just slap products together by joining together other applications with glue code and similar short cuts. I think this comes from the mistaken belief that writing custom code to handle a specific business need is almost always more expensive than buying a license for an existing product, as well as the belief that most big software products are interchangeable like car parts. The better approach is to start simple, with a small foundation and tailor the solution to fit the problem. If that sounds like obvious common sense, that's because you haven't worked in the enterprise development world.

That's part of the reason I encourage people to choose Movable Type over WordPress. Movable Type eats its own dog food; the platform is built on a solid, but simple framework that allows most of its components to be easily modified or even replaced.

I had the news on in the background tonight, and some of the people familiar with the law enforcement side of the Blagojevich case were given an opportunity to make some statements. The overriding theme was that the corruption here was so bad that even the most seasoned field agents were shocked at how deep and thorough the corruption was. Almost on the level of a veteran homicide detective being so shocked that he feels like a rookie cop seeing his first murder scene level of bad news.

It occurred to me that the government of Illinois is largely useless as an institution, given how many high-ranking people have been periodically culled from its ranks. I wouldn't say completely useless, but useless in the sense that one would describe a drug that treats a serious illness like AIDS, but that barely works in ¹/₅ of reported cases. The need for government there is far, far less as demonstrated by the fact that society can function so well in Illinois despite having a thoroughly corrupt, borderline necrotic government.

Without the ability of normal people to create spontaneous order around them, society would not be able to function in Illinois on the level that it does. The average person doesn't need government to feed them, clothe them or even protect them. They are able to go about their daily routines without much of anything from their government, and this is particularly relevant since those in command positions in their government are often more interested in graft than public service.

This is not an argument for anarchism, but simply an observation that the case for large, strong government bureaucracies to keep things functional has been vastly overstated for quite some time.

Last week I submitted a small patch to Movable Type to fix one of its XML-RPC methods. There was a bug in it that caused the data received from metaWeblog.newMediaObject to not be decoded from base64 encoding, resulting in a file upload that is functionally corrupt from the perspective of the average user. On top of that, I've started working on implementing the rest of the new WordPress XML-RPC calls. So far, I have two of them that seem to be reasonably functional and well-tested: getPageList and getCategories. I'd like to get the rest of them implemented, as time permits, within the next week or so, so that hopefully I can send them in as a patch to be included in the next release of Movable Type Open Source.

Update 12/14/2008 10:41PM: I realized that getCategories was already implemented as part of another package, so I modified sub getCategories to handle getCategories from both packages. That seems to be working now. I've also added, but not tested, support for wp.newCategory, wp.deleteCategory, wp.suggestCategories and am going to start working on wp.getComment and wp.getComments early this week. Once I have tested those, and they all seem to work, I will implement wp.uploadFile--probably as a wrapper around metaWeblog.newMediaObject.

After that is done, I would like to start working on some new methods. Some that come to mind might be mt.editComment, mt.editAsset, mt.deleteAsset and mt.assignOwnership. I would also like to explore the possibility of refactoring the Movable Type XML-RPC system so that it is based around the registry, but that's for another day.

This blog post and this one serve as a good illustration of why Darwin was correct when he said "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."The whole controversy could have been avoided had "Karen" done some Google searches and then contacted the head of HeliOS in a more civil manner. I disagree that his initial response was a big jump to the conclusions, since Karen came at him with a rhetorical elephant gun and one of her first statements was essentially an accusation that he was in the business of corrupting minors followed by threats of legal action. This incident reminds me of an incident that happened about two years ago

Karen didn't help her case when she not only didn't explain much about the student's behavior, but presented herself as someone who had some working knowledge of Linux. When combined with the fact that an hour or two of research would have made her drop the case, she basically invited a lot of the grief. Had it not been for the fact that her last name and other information that could be tied back to her had been politely withheld from the public, it could have gotten a lot worse. She really did give a lot of credence to the insinuations that she was just a troll.

After having been schooled a few times in the past by people that were a lot more knowledgeable, one tactic that I learned is that it's sometimes beneficial to do the intellectual equivalent of a border skirmish with someone you disagree with. Even if you lose that, you can learn a lot about your opponent and prepare accordingly.

Another good one found from Glenn Sacks:

Texas Senator Dan Patrick defends the tough law that labels Rodriguez a sex offender. "While it seems unfair, he was 19, she was 15," says Patrick, "That's the price you pay. Even if you end up getting married."

Patrick agrees that Rodriguez is different from the more serious offenders on the list, but says "we are a country of laws, and that's the law."

To quickly summarize Rodriguez's position, he was convicted of a sex offense against his 15 year old girlfriend, but has been married to her several years, has a family with four daughters with her, and is adored by his mother-in-law as a good father and husband. Yet, the law doesn't take this sort of thing into account. It would be easy for politicians to look at situations like this and conclude that there needs to be leniency because his case clearly doesn't fit any reasonable profile of someone who should be on a sex offender list, especially since even by the standards of the most ardent supporters of these statutes, he is "rehabilitated."

Arguments like "we are a country of laws, and that's the law" coming from a politician not only ring hollow, but downright insulting to any decent standard of justice. It's the job of men like Patrick to write these laws in the first place, and to write amendments to them to fix unforeseen problems. It's part of the basic job description of a state legislator to examine cases like this and bring up proposals for fixing them before the rest of the legislative body, and it would be easy and justified for Patrick to bring a bill that would release men like Rodriguez of their legal torments.

Law and order rests on the assumption that the law is reasonably good, reasonably well-constructed and not prone to creating injustice in outlier cases. Law and order are ultimately undermined when people dogmatically insist on obeying the law because it is the law because they become blind to problems that can have deligitimizing effects on the law and courts. Patrick's argument makes no more sense than keeping a guard dog that occasionally attacks his children on the grounds that it's a guard dog and that's our guard dog. Rather than keeping it, he would euthanize it and get a new one because the problems would demand corrective action.

Found this from Glenn Sacks:

In the fall of 2007, when Damon Hadley was 17, he had sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend. School authorities caught them cutting school and called their parents. The girl's father then drove to the school, where he saw Hadley in the parking lot.

"So I hit him," said Gilberto Soto, the girl's father. "Do I regret what I did? No. Would I do it differently? Yes, I would, I would." And what would he do differently? "Now? Take that kid, stick him in the car, tie a rope around his neck and go as fast as I could up and down the highways, every single highway there is," he said.

Soto's daughter told him Hadley had raped her, but she later told the police that Hadley didn't force her and that she made up a false report because she was scared.

"[Having sex is] something that she brought up before I did, so I thought it was something she wanted to do," said Hadley.

In New Hampshire, the age of consent is 16, and Hadley received a three-month suspended sentence. That means if he gets into trouble before the end of this year, he may have to serve that three-month sentence.

Soto got a one-year suspended sentence, and he's angry that Hadley didn't go to jail. "He should've done at least a year," he said.

Men like this are a major part of the reason why getting common sense reformation of the sex offender laws is so hard. He can't even see that his own daughter committed a far more serious moral offense in claiming that she had been raped--a charge that if taken seriously would have fundamentally altered every aspect of the charges against her boyfriend from mundane to deadly serious. No doubt that's why the courts gave her the more serious probation, since in her case it showed a serious lack of character that she wasn't capable of admitting to the truth. Granted, if her father is as generally violent as he seems to be based on that quote, it wouldn't be too terribly surprising that she would have a hard time confessing.

While it is commendable for fathers to have a desire to protect their daughters from sexual predators, it is equally important for them to recognize that their daughters are just as sexual as their male peers. They need to exercise discernment and realize that their "baby girl" may have been a party or even the instigator in cases such as this, and be able to demand better behavior from their own daughter. All men like Soto end up accomplishing is preventing their daughters from becoming women of character by not holding them to the same moral standard as they would hold their sons. She probably learned her irresponsibility from the behavior that was expected of her from her father.

Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan apparently spearheaded a campaign to delegitimize Obama's candidate for the next Director of Central Intelligence, and it looks like it worked. John Brennan won't be our next DCI unless Obama really grows a pair and brings himself to push Brennan's appointment anyway.

From the sounds of it, Brennan would make a good replacement for Hayden. He's a career CIA man with extensive knowledge of both the culture and major languages of the Middle East. On top of that, he's no fan of torture, but neither is he dovish about making stubborn captives and targets speak when lives are on the line. Seemed like a very competent and non-political choice, who will now be replaced by a political appointee so that Obama can regain some brownie points with these people.

I agree that torture is a serious issue, and that it can almost never be justified. However, waterboarding falls into that territory that remains up for grabs. As a Christian, I recognize that the church has traditionally considered it torture. It was even authorized for the Spanish Inquisition as la tortura de agua, one of the few forms of torture authorized to be used on suspects. However, as currently practiced, it is generally safe, and there is a certain inherent "the ends justify the means" factor in intelligence work with regard to extracting information from people who are probably foreign agents. As long as the interrogation methods don't rise to the level of undeniable torture, ie present a high risk or certitude of injury or death, it may be best to look away so long as the work of our agents is generally fruitful.

All in all, it looks like these two self-proclaimed civil libertarians have done a bang up job of ruining the shot of Obama transferring the CIA into the hands of a competent DCI. Even the night watchman state needs agencies like the CIA today, as modern life has made it impossible for governments to simply pretend that all they have to do is station the legions aggresively along the border and posture for war against other armies. One of these days civil libertarians are going to have to make peace with that just as conservatives had to make peace with the fact that having a real standing army capable of more than parading while the militia prepares to fill its ranks was a necessary adaption to changes in the world in the 19th century.

Only in modern America is a charity food co-op run by born again Christians considered such a den of villainy and ill repute that a SWAT unit can be "justified" by the authorities. This comes hot on the heels of the story of the retiring Boston cop who got a SWAT force at her door because they thought that she was mentally unbalanced because she bought a large amount of gifts for needy kids in her precinct.

Here's to the Cleveland-area Sheriff's department for making the public safe from Christian co-ops...

The Intel Atom looks to be a very promising product for people who want a very cheap, low-performance CPU. The motherboard and CPU combo shown to the left costs $79.99 at NewEgg.com, which is a steal when you consider that the only thing it is seriously lacking out of the box are disk drives, memory and a case. For about $170-$190 you can build a new dual core desktop based on the Intel Atom 330 processor. That's probably a little over $200-$220 if you want a big hard drive or don't have any hard drives that you can spare for it.

This is the perfect set up for creating a console emulator rig. It has four USB ports, which leaves enough room on there for a keyboard, a mouse, and two USB controllers. Throw Windows on there and some XBox 360 controllers, and you should be all set to have a classic emulator system for really cheap.

I could also see one of these being used to run a Linux or FreeBSD-based web development environment or something similar to that. In fact, I might have to see if there is room in the budget once we pay off my Civic to buy these parts because I bet I could turn this into a good environment for hosting all of the tools needed to run a development environment for my Movable Type projects on it. It would also be a good environment for testing out iPhone applications in a networked environment. Might be worth investing some money into it if you have a need for a cheap computer or two for simulating web services and other things that a hand-held application would need to connect to.

Isn't capitalism great? 10 years ago, it would have been impossible to get a system with a cheap hard drive, a dual core CPU and 2GB of RAM for about $200.

This case is an excellent example of how it can happen.

• Police gain suspicion that someone is suicidal or mentally unstable from something totally innocuous like a good samaritan buying a ton of toys for needy kids. In other cases, it's the word of a career criminal (commonly called a confidential informant) against a stranger.
  
• Police assume that mentally unstable and/or suicidal people are seriously violent criminals in the making.
• Police make a single attempt to contact the person.
• Police make no attempt at further intelligence gathering, such as calling a cell phone or contacting immediate family members to confirm suspicions; this part is common to nearly all SWAT-related screw ups. Intelligence gathering is for pansies.
• Police converge, in overwhelming strength, on unsuspecting target who is more likely to think they're being personally treated to a real life Red Dawn scenario than being helped by the police or suspected of criminal activity.
• Police end up finding out the whole operation was a load of bullshit that, had their commanders possessed the common sense God gave a baby chipmunk, they might have avoided this debacle.
  

There's no faster way to cheer up someone with bipolar disorder than to aim a submachine gun at their head. The therapy goes even faster when you have a squad of men doing it. I believe the professional jargon for this in the psychology profession is "Shock and Awe Therapy."

I may have to buy this book after all of my problems with the way that democracy has lead us to having an increasingly authoritarian and brutish legal system. Over the last year or so, I've grown increasingly disillusioned with democracy itself because it seems like democracy is primarily good for creating intrusive, schizophrenic governments and legal systems because it has no higher philosophy than the current whim of the unwashed masses.

When our system of government was being debated, a constitutional monarchy was one of the proposals, and in hindsight, it might have been preferable to have had George Washington assume a throne as a ruling, but limited, monarch than the current mess we have today. I don't think such a thing would have been harmful at all for our country, certainly not more so than what a number of presidents have done.

If this debate were going today, I think a few changes to our constitution would help to make things better. Mostly on the issue of Congress.

• Increase the minimum size of the House of Representatives to 1,000 to make each representative closer to their constituents.
• Limit each representative to one term of three years every twenty years.
• Strip all regulatory power from the Senate and shift it to the House of Representatives
• Divide the operations of the House of Representatives into two classifications: maintenance and revision.
• The House of Representatives cannot enter into a period of legal revision (wholesale change of any title of the United States Code) without a decree from the monarch.
• The Senate is appointed by the state legislatures with the blessing of the King from the productive classes, not the propertied classes.
• The King may overturn court decisions  which he finds to be injurious to the liberty and property of his subjects. The King may only be overridden by a 2/3 vote from both houses of Congress.
• The King may strike down any law that he deems unconstitutional without the approval of Congress. This may only be overridden by the passage of a constitutional amendment.

Some of you may have seen this ad featured on sites like Glenn Sacks' blog:

Just to put it in perspective for those who don't get it why this is just bigotry, rather than edgy commentary:

Source.

With all of the talks of terrorism, the economy and tragedy on Black Friday, you may have missed a very interesting piece of news: the market is working. Microsoft, who once held approximately 97% of the market for desktop computer operating systems, is now showing strong signs of being down below 90% of the market share now. With Apple's market share starting to approach double digits once more, and Linux creeping up on them on the server side, competition is once again alive and well.

In the late 1990s, it was taken for granted that Microsoft was unbeatable. Apple was dying, Linux never made it on most regulators' radars, and Netscape was bitterly regretting the entire process that turned Netscape Navigator into the loathsome Netscape Communicator suite which even Microsoft could deride as a pile of spaghetti code foisted on the public. Microsoft's position seemed as sure and immutable to most observers as that of the British Empire in the 19th century.

Yet, in the early millennium, the wheels of change started to grind once more and Microsoft found itself caught off guard. Apple released the Unix-based MacOS X which catapulted them from a minor player with an outdated operating system, right into a market position that could span mobile phones to scientific workstations. Open source developers increasingly began to encroach on Microsoft's position in the server market, and Google quickly went from a small start up company to a corporate juggernaut capable of defeating Microsoft in several major Internet markets.

Regulators could not have foreseen this turn events. They also could not have foreseen how Mozilla would go from a barely alive project at America Online, to a non-profit that produces a wildly popular competitor to Internet Explorer that is threatening to do it, when Internet Explorer did to Netscape Communicator. Had you testified in the Microsoft antitrust trial that in 2008, there would be an open source office suite capable of working as a daily replacement to Microsoft Office for most small businesses and home users, you would have been written off as an idealistic geek.

It took a while, longer than social engineers may have liked, but Microsoft is now facing the prospect of being just one of many competitors in many new markets. It has a very healthy presence in the mobile device market, but faces competition every bit as capable from Nokia, Research in Motion and Apple. Nintendo is a force to be reckoned with in the video game market, and Sony is still holding on despite their myriad mistakes with the Playstation 3. Microsoft is more of a bit player than a potential market leader in online search and advertising, and their platform tools for developing web applications have to play nice with everyone else because they face so much competition both as a server platform provider and as a browser vendor.

The competition and other issues they've faced have forced Microsoft to put more effort into innovating and competing. Their .NET platform is a superb competitor to the Java platform, and was arguably more open, sooner than Java until the recent decisions by Sun Microsystems to fully open source the Java Development Kit (which includes the Runtime Environment). Times have changed, and they know that they cannot be complacent anymore, especially after the deployment debacle that was Windows Vista.
In hindsight, we can see how unnecessary the government action really was. In fact, letting them off the hook was one of the few things that the Bush Administration did right. There were signs even back in 2001 and 2002 that serious momentum had already been building up against them in the market, and it was time to let them go.

The declining power of Microsoft, and the ascendancy of its rivals should serve as a warning to people who are absolutely convinced that government action is needed to keep competition alive. Things are not always as they appear. Back in the 1990s, it was conventional wisdom that Microsoft's hard-nosed dealings with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) was what kept alternative operating systems off the average desktop PC. Yet neither Apple nor Linux have had to rely on those OEMs to gain serious market share gains. Today, netbooks typically come with Ubuntu Linux as an option for those that want to forego Windows and most low-end Macs are well within the price range of many computer buyers.

Looking back we can see that government action was not necessary because the market was already correcting itself. Microsoft controlled access to and sought far too much wealth for competitors to not want to find new ways to kick them out of the way. The lesson for those looking to manipulate the market is that corporate power is much more tenuous than they believe it to be.

One generation's seemingly unstoppable corporate powerhouse often ends up being another generation's company struggling to escape obsolescence. It happened to IBM, then it happened to Microsoft, and it will happen to Google and Apple too if they grow complacent as Microsoft did. When the market is allowed to operate, that's how it works.

The reason that hate crime laws are supposed to be necessary in the first place is because hate crimes allegedly spread genuine fear throughout the identity group that the victim belongs to. By that logic, hoaxes like this and the ones where students fake violence against the are hate crimes, plain and simple.

The very fact that universities don't automatically expel a student who perpetrates such a hoax is proof enough that most universities are more interested in attacking the white majority, and white men in particular, than creating an environment where minorities are not exposed to serious racism. For all of their bluster and rhetoric, they can't seem to muster much outrage when a student fakes such racism in a manner that is so convincing that it causes serious anguish to minority students.

Proving once again that the Capitalist spirit is indomitable, Constitution Arms has created a handgun specifically targeted toward the elderly and the crippled. They call it the Palm Pistol. The best part? The device has been classified as a medical device by the FDA because it is specifically designed for users who are too frail to use a traditional firearm. This thing actually makes me feel not so bad about paying for others' health care costs, as hopefully people will be able to get this covered since it's a "medical device," and I would bet that most insurance policies have nothing in their contracts that mention devices like this on the list of things that aren't covered. It's a far cry from the days when the states used to buy military-grade weaponry for their militias, but I actually wouldn't mind paying Medicare taxes if I knew that they were being used by some elderly people to exercise their second amendment rights.

The NRA should set up an insurance fund to provide coverage for anyone who requests one of these, but cannot afford one.

Lord Brajerian stepped into the training room where Sara waited for him. The Talian's steps were deliberate and self-assured. For the first time she saw him as a soldier, not her ocassional instructor. Behind him, another soldier walked into the room. He wore no armor and carried no weapon other than a short sword. In fact, the only things he wore were his gray sparring pants and the sword which was strapped to his side. She wasn't sure what her trainer had in mind, but it wasn't exactly as it appeared.

One hour ago, Lord Brajerian had given her an order to suit up and arm herself as though she were going into an actual battle. She wore the exposed exoskeletal version of the armor that was standard issue for inductees into the Special Defense Corps and had a sidearm, a battle rifle and all of the bladed weapons that were normally issued to her service. She stood there, rigid and at attention awaiting her lord's next command.

Declan McCullagh did a great write up for CNET describing the myriad problems with Eric Holder as our next Attorney General, but one of those issues deserves a lot more exposure. That issue is that Eric Holder is a supporter of the creation of a data retention policy at ISPs to make it easier for the government to track what people do online.

In a speech in Vienna in 1999, he was quoted as saying:

First, we must take steps to ensure that we can obtain the evidence necessary to identify child pornographers. That means certain data must be retained by ISPs for reasonable periods of time so that it can be accessible to law enforcement,

Some privacy activists have tried to give him the benefit of the doubt that he was only referring to retaining records that have been requested by the government, but there was no context for that in his speech. Lacking that sort of nuance, we must simply take him at his word that he wants ISPs to get into the game of retaining records of their customers' activities for long periods of time. Whether that is through the government leaning on ISPs until they "voluntarily" adopt such policies or through naked force is immaterial.

A lot of people assume that the Internet is a "public place" and that you have no reasonable guarantee of privacy. To some extent that is true, but the real policy issue here is why should the government take actions which are absolutely guaranteed to diminish what privacy we do have. That's precisely what a data retention policy/mandate would do, as it would leave copious amounts of information about everything from instant messages, to emails, to web site visits exposed on an ISPs network. Such information is ripe for abuse, be it from law enforcement, criminals looking to score a big heist on personal information or curious employees.

Long-term data retention has been the norm in Europe for a while now, and according to one survey, it's already changing the behavior of some non-criminal segments of the German population. That is one of the natural side effects of living in a society where everyone knows that a significant amount of information about all of their electronic communications are stored and possibly monitored by third parties. It goes without saying that raising future generations of America under such a regime is going to have the result of making them generally accept such systematic surveillance as the norm of modern life. Such a thing does not bode well for the long term defense of liberty.

Between technologies like deep packet inspection and the steadily decreasing cost of storing large amounts of information, the technology barriers against large scale, systematic surveillance of Internet activity are almost gone. Compression algorithms like Bzip and 7zip would allow several terabytes of logged activity to be compressed to fit onto a single hard drive that costs less than $100.

Efforts to make ISPs retain data on their users' activities for several years are not only feasible now, but not even very expensive to mandate. They will also be the first, and probably most important, battles that civil libertarians will fight against the future of government surveillance of the public. As more and more communications are consolidated into Internet-based communications, the possibilities that will be opened up for spying on the public will be unprecedented.

Ever since former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez first seriously raised the issue with ISPs and Congress, there has been bipartisan support for data retention mandates. The Democrats were more modest in their proposals, but that can be more readily attributed to them distrusting the Bush Administration's potential use of a data retention mandate than principled opposition. Pushed under the guise of yet another "will somebody please think of the children" piece of legislation to help fight child pornographers, it didn't get much outrage despite being a far more devastating proposal than anything the NSA was caught doing these past several years.

Holder's views are not very far away from those held by Gonzalez on this issue and others regarding police powers and surveillance. For one, he has a very spotty record on encryption technology in the hands of the average person. We take powerful encryption for granted today, but during the mid to late 1990s, it was considered to be a very dangerous tool, often called a military technology, that shouldn't be left unchecked in any civilian's hands. Holder was typical of the Clinton Administration, which was no friend of encryption technology and tried to get backdoors put into encryption products. Taken together, his positions on a myriad number of privacy and Internet-related issues give civil libertarians good reason to believe that he will jump at the first chance to get a long-term data retention scheme either voluntarily implemented or mandated.

Perhaps Holder and Obama have bigger fish to fry, and will not actually do anything on this issue, but events of the last year or two combined with Holder's early calls for a long-term data retention scheme should give us reason to be vigilant. There wasn't much principled opposition when it was being debated by both parties under the Bush Administration, and it's even less likely that a Democratic Congress will challenge Holder if he wants to raise the issue. Despite superficial outrage over the privacy and constitution violations of the Bush Administration, the Democrats have largely shown themselves to have little inherent opposition to the sort of surveillance that this issue presents to the public.

In trying to debunk Johah Goldberg and Ed Feser, Heather MacDonald only shows how little she understands Judao-Christian theology:

I wonder to which science Mr. Feser is referring. There was the Templeton prayer experiment, and that didn't work out too satisfactorily, did it? Granted, the research design was laughable, in a charming sort of way (the people praying for the recovery of cardiac patients, for example, were only given the patient's first name and last initial, on the assumption presumably that God would know to which Jim G. they were referring). Perhaps Mr. Feser could propose a more scientifically rigorous design to show the efficacy of petitionary prayer or any other religious practice of his choosing.

That experiment, and all like it are doomed, because they treat God as though he were a machine that can be used whenever someone feels like accessing his power for any given purpose. I wonder if MacDonald is just flat out ignorant of the New Testament to such an extent that she doesn't even know that during the temptation of Jesus by the devil, when the devil tried to make him prove his power, he simply responded "do not put the Lord to the test." That is precisely what a scientific experiment that treats prayer and God's power as though they were mere forces of nature that can be called down, reliably, based only on the will of the caller. The Bible makes no such claim which makes this experiment, and all like it, as theologically ludicrous as it is scientifically ludicrous. People have also tried to prove that there is demonic influence in the world in a similar manner, as though demons were things that we could pop out of thin air, put on a table for observation and dismiss without incident.

The allegedly rational attempts to prove or disprove the supernatural have always been based on a very crude and childish understanding of just what the supernatural is. Let's say that there is a spiritual world, filled with sentient beings whose normal state is incorporeal. They can come and go as they please, leaving only a certain dark je ne sais quoi in their wake. What makes us think that we can prove or disprove their existence, since we have no ability to isolate them and bring them under observation if they do in fact exist? That conundrum doesn't make questions about their existance irrational, but rather merely outside of the realm of what science can answer.

The curious thing to me is why the idea of secular conservatism is so "appalling" to Mr. Feser and others.  We are only proposing that the basis of conservatism  can be broadened beyond revelation to rest on an understanding of human nature itself.

This statement assumes that we share a common understanding of human nature. The traditional view of human nature held by conservatives is based on the Judao-Christian understanding that human nature is essentially flawed. It's very essence is tainted by evil and destructive qualities that must be controlled, and religiously speaking, redeemed. It's from this basis that conservatism has always derived its understanding that utopia is unconditionally impossible on this side of eternity, and has had a skepticism about power, especially government powers. The reason that the political left was generally doomed to be the domain of violence and tyranny was because of the opposite belief, namely that human nature is essentially good. This is the foundation of our disagreements on most things, left and right.

From a secular point of view, it's difficult to say that human nature is essentially flawed because a secular world view accepts that many of the negative traits that we have are things that allowed us to evolve to this point. For example, cases have been made that rape was used by alpha males to spread their seed far and wide. How then, does one automatically make a convincing argument that rape is inherently wrong, when rape served a biologically useful role that allegedly made our species healthier? The very essence of sin and evil is that it is intrinsically destructive and harmful, but strictly speaking, rape is only harmful and destructive psychologically in most cases. Rape that results in a healthy child is physically no worse than normal sex in this context, since our basis for determining the good is so heavily influenced by what got us to where we are now. It could even be better if the father is a healthier father.

The consent and individual autonomy paradigm that is as close as secular conservatism can get to traditional conservatism's Judao-Christian moral code is fatally flawed because without a common, imposed moral code, human beings must intuit the good on fundamental issues. For a religious conservative, the fact that God said rape is always bad is good enough to condemn it even when it might produce offspring of such health that their DNA can be used to cure diseases and increase the life expectancy of the whole species.

Secularists have to start from the ground up and say here "is rape always bad" in order to understand it. Before they can do that, they have to come up with a common definition of what "bad" is, and that's nearly impossible to do when each person is supposed to use pure reason to determine what bad is. Reason, being not just the devil's whore, but the whore of human intellect and data, is subject to manipulation in ways that are not obvious to people like MacDonald. One person may reason that psychological harm cannot be quantified, therefore it cannot be rationally considered. Therefore, they might judge the morality of rape in large part based on the health of the father, the quality of life that the child enjoys and other factors that can be emprically determined and thus fed through the reason machine. Another may start from the perspective that psychological harm must be minimized, therefore all acts which could inflict serious psychological harm must be stopped. Lastly, another could easily prefer a positivist worldview with respect to authority and ability to act toward others in ways that control them or do things to them.

We still live in a society in which Judao-Christian memes are reasonably influential, which is why they influence the thinking of secular conservatives. They have not yet been so divorced from the culture, that their influence has been lost on what we assume about morality, justice and other subjects that science cannot give us a definitive answer. They still inform the thinking of a lot of secularists, as witnessed by the fact that our society still largely conforms to distinctly Judao-Christian values on issues ranging from torture, to marriage, to how to conduct war.

Reason and the evidence of history show the crucial importance of parental responsibility, self-discipline, limited government, and free economic exchange in creating a society in which individuals can most thrive.  Do religious conservatives believe that only religious belief grounds conservatism?  That position strikes me as rather an admission of defeat.

It's a matter of how much these things can achieve their fullness within a secular society. Secularism has hardly been good for conservatism, as witnessed by the fact that most secular parts of the West are the most staunchly left-wing. Going purely on observation here, it seems highly irrational to say that conservatism and secularism have any real natural affinity for one another.

Secular conservatives applaud the virtues put forth in various Holy Books, we simply claim them--proudly-as the creation of human beings, to which all have access.

That's all well and good, but utterly simplistic. One of MacDonald's commenters said that "thou shalt not kill" (which was actually "you shall not murder") was a moral commandment before it was given in the 10 Commandments, but that's not true in the least. From a secular point of view, there are times when murder is not only moral, but virtuous. To murder Hitler, Mao and Stalin would, in that context, be a mitzvah if there ever was one. In the utilitarian calculus that underlies secular thinking about universal moral statements like "murder is always wrong," to murder three people to save nearly 100,000,000 people from being slaughtered by their governments would be effectively impossible to declare immoral on any level worth discussing because the the result is an unqualified good. The slippery slope begins there, once one realizes that doing acts that we used to believe to be evil, can actually result in truly good outcomes.

Once one rejects the premise of the Holy Books, namely that they come from the Creator of the universe, they lose their authority. Any moral code that lacks authority is one that is toothless since there is no incentive to learn it, commit it to one's heart and live by it other than some generic desire to better oneself. Take away God and Hell, and the Holy Books are just incoherent rantings about morality by people who were surrounded by pathetic degenerates. Reject Jesus' claim to being the Son of God and you find yourself listening to a man who is either a devious son of a bitch or a lunatic. In either scenario, you have to be on guard lest you be lulled into stupid, self-destructive behavior.

The issue of torture serves as a good example of the moral divide between conservatives. While many religious conservatives were opposed to the policies, many secular conservatives were not. Just because the virtues that are taught in the Holy Books are accessible to secular conservatives, doesn't mean that they will embrace them. The torture issue is a good example of that with mainstream conservative Republicans tending to support Bush, while many religious conservatives took the issue itself as a sign of the moral decay of America.

Cases like this are a perfect example of why I am so critical of prosecutors as a profession. To summarize, a sixteen year old boy has sex with a girl who he thinks is his age, but turns out to be thirteen. The girl's parents admit that they know she lied, don't want to press charges and just want him to steer clear of their daughter from now on. An honest man who cares about justice would take one look at the case and see that the families resolved it in a perfectly amicable way according to the norms of society. No reason for the state to get involved.

Seeing yet another notch on his belt in the making, a state prosecutor went after the boy and tried to ruin his life over a lie. No mercy, no understanding, just the cold, iron fist of the state coming down on him. A just prosecutor would have told him that if he stayed away from the girl and didn't get into any more trouble until he turns 18, the prosecutor would rip up the case and forget about it.

Cases like this are the natural result of a system that is charged with imprisoning as many law-breakers as it can, rather than separating out the habitually criminal, the sociopathic and the generally just plain evil from those who just got caught up in a bad situation. As long as society rewards police and prosecutors based overwhelmingly on statistics, it cannot expect them to exercise discernment and seek justice because society has made it in their best interest to not do those things. In a way, the system itself is a victim of the statistic-obsessed society that spawned it.

It's offensive to the sensibilities of most normal, decent people to even think about executing a child, and with good reason. We tend to find that most serious criminal conduct on the part of children can be traced very easily back to their parents. When they're as young as eight years old, there's also the good question of whether or not they can even understand what they did.

That said, consider some of the news reports about the eight year old who recently shot his father and his father's friend. For example, here they ruled out the possibility of abuse by the father:

An 8-year-old Arizona boy charged with premeditated murder in the deaths of his father and another man shot each victim at least four times with a .22-caliber rifle, methodically stopping and reloading as he killed them, prosecutors said Monday.

Although investigators initially said they thought the boy might have suffered severe physical or sexual trauma, they have found no evidence of abuse, said Roy Melnick, the police chief in St. Johns, Ariz., where the shootings occurred. Psychologists say such abuse is often a factor in the extremely rare instances in which a small child murders a parent.

Then, there's this evidence and testimony:

Each man was shot several times with a single-shot, bolt-action .22-caliber rifle.

His grandmother told police that if any 8-year-old was capable of the crimes, it was him. Police reports say the boy told a state Child Protective Services worker that his 1,000th spanking would be his last.

Let me break it down for those who don't know much of anything about firearms. The boy used a single-shot, bolt-action rifle. That means that every single shot that went into his victims had to be loaded methodically. There was no semi-automatic "bang, bang, bang" that allowed it to "just happen." Rather, he had to load a round, take aim, fire, repeat, at least four times.

A .22 caliber rifle is also not a weapon that is good for hunting anything bigger than a squirrel or for defending yourself against anything other than a small or medium-sized dog. It's closer to a CO₂-powered pellet gun than the man-killing assault rifles featured breathlessly in the media. Put another way, the average sidearm carried by a cop is like a portable canon in close range quarters like in a house, compared to a .22 caliber rifle.

Suffice it to say, if this boy hunted down and killed two grown men with a bolt-action rifle, chances are pretty good that he's a sociopath and so messed up in the head that it's more of a matter of when he will kill again, not if.

This one caught my eye because it looked like it would be pretty easy to convert. Sometimes the low-hanging fruit is a good target. Here's another one I am working on. It's called Metamorph Cell.