January 2009 Archives

Jeff Goldstein has been kicked to the curb by PajamasMedia, but I think Vox is correct when he says that he never expected it to succeed. I sent them a few submissions a little while back, and even though they were initially well-received, I was told on the first two that they had already covered the subjects and were moving on. Lo and behold, a few days later, they "changed their minds" if the front page of their site was any indication. While I was disappointed, I was not particularly mad at them because I never really expected them to publish my editorials because of the cliquish nature of the political blogosphere "A list."

El Borak made some good points about how far the system can and must go to present a good face to the public to keep public confidence in the banking system high:

That might seem a little hyperbolic, but I assure you it's not, because Ms. Lea doubtless speaks for many in positions of authority who would criticize telling the truth about our modern banking system, if their doing so would not simply draw more attention to the problem. But even then, they see the wrong problem: they see confidence as a cause, rather than an effect, of a functioning banking system.

The cause-effect difference is obvious if one puts it in a little different perspective. Let's say that you discover that your friend's husband is cheating on her with his secretary. Because she is ignorant, your friend has complete confidence in her marriage. Telling your friend the truth will likely wreck her marriage - her confidence in it will be destroyed. To not tell your friend the truth means that she will be deceived and betrayed, not only by her husband but her friend, until that day that she pays him a surprise visit at the office and learns the truth for herself. You will not have saved your friend's marriage by withholding the truth from her, nor will you likely be able to save your friendship if she discovers your duplicity*. While in ignorance, your friend may have confidence in her marriage, and it may even have the appearance of being functional (this is the government's attitude: it is better for you to live happily in ignorance) but it is a sham that will - must - someday fail.

All of this applies one way or another to the legal system, if not the entire government, as well. If the public genuinely started to realize how deep the chasm between their perception of how the system works and how it really is, the system would quickly begin to crumble. For a lot of people on the right, the case of Mike Nifong was a rude awakening into how much of the criticism about the system from the black community is actually valid. It forced them to face up to the fact that prosecutors can and will do some wild stuff that makes police brutality look reasonable.

The majority of the confidence that people have in the legal system comes mainly from ignorance. The more that people find out about how non-deterministic the law is, how many loopholes there are that corrupt cops and prosecutors can slide through to avoid accountability, and how few protections defendants actually have, the less confidence they tend to have. The myth of the "overly protected" criminal is starting to unravel because no reasonably informed person can argue that "criminals have too many rights" when in fact, the accused has very few today that aren't whittled away by exceptions in the law and procedures.

More and more cases of the police violently disturbing innocent people on faulty, incompetent drug raids is being release. More cases of prosecutorial misconduct are being aired. All the while, the system is not reforming itself. Unlike the banks, one day the legal system will face a day of reckoning, but will be completely blindsided by it,

The state can make that which is not by nature a crime into a crime, and it can make that which is by nature a crime not a crime on paper. That is precisely what the drug warriors have accomplished with civil asset forfeiture laws which allow the police to commit armed robbery against anyone carrying "too much cash" on them. The law may not call it armed robbery, but that is only because the state has carved out an exception for itself to simply take money out of the hands of people for no reason other than they have it on them and sometimes bad people have a lot of cash on them to facilitate a crime.

And yet some people wonder why I tend to be suspicious of anyone who voluntarily participates in drug law enforcement. The kind of man who can execute a civil asset forfeiture is either too stupid to understand the moral and constitutional ramifications of his actions or too morally bankrupt to care.

When the state can do whatever it wants, not being a criminal is absolutely no practical assurance that one will be free from harm.

Part of me was relieved to see that the documentary on Ted Haggard was not a hit piece. That would have been easy enough to do because there are no shortage of people who would have unceremoniously written him off as a bigot struggling with his sexual orientation. The nuance in the morality is something that is easily missed.

District Attorneys no longer have to worry about allowing their subordinates to use unreliable jailhouse snitches.

Not that prisoners have any incentive under the current system to falsely testify. Thankfully, the Supreme Court was far-sighted enough to strip prosecutors of the ability to help reduce the sentence of a convict if he or she testifies against someone who the prosecutor is currently prosecuting...

Oh wait, they didn't.

I swear, even Sharia is starting to look more concerned with truth and justice than our court system is these days.

• A girls basketball coach at a small Christian school was fired for winning a game 100-0 and then refusing to apologize for beating the other team that badly. According to the administrators of his school, he should have set a "Christlike" example by not allowing his girls to do so well against the other team.
• Microsoft is building a version of Windows 7 specifically for the netbook market. That doesn't bode well for Linux in this market.
• Free speech is almost dead in the Netherlands. Darkly ironic in light of the fact that for a long time, the Dutch were the trend-setters in Europe on freedom of speech.
• Despite laying off thousands of workers, major IT companies will continue to look for more opportunities to get H1B visa workers. I understand their need for some of these people, and that a lot of the layoffs were administrative, but they could be at least mildly tactful about this.
• There might be a cure for type 1 diabetes based on stem cells, but so far no pharmaceutical is willing to help fund the research.
  

Robin Harris makes some good points about why Windows is winning the netbook market, and why it looks like it's a done deal that Linux has lost there. When I was at the Microsoft Developer Conference in Reston, they were quick to point out that they are fighting tooth and nail for this market with Windows 7 (which is already showing good signs on these devices) and so far they are succeeding.

The sad fact is that desktop Linux is a failure. The success cases are all statistical outliers. Every new year is supposed to be the "year of desktop Linux," but each has come and gone without much fanfare. In the next two to three years, with MacOS X 10.6 and Windows 7, this will be painfully apparent to most people who would have considered desktop Linux. Both Apple and Microsoft are playing hardball with resources and a competitive edge that no part of the groups developing "desktop Linux" seem to be able to match.

If Windows 7 is able to really correct the mistakes of Windows Vista, then it's game over for desktop Linux. It will be fighting against a version of Windows that most Windows users will actually want--and be able to use--and MacOS X 10.6 which will be the first release of MacOS X focused mostly on bug fixing and long-term performance boosts. They will also be in a position to put pressure on MacOS X from a developer point of view because quite frankly, .NET is a better set of APIs than Cocoa.

The reason Microsoft tends to win is that its competitors assume that it is always on the precipice of losing, but as the early reviews of Windows 7 are showing, they are also a company that can very quickly rebuild their products to make up for lost time.

You can use the following stored procedure to quickly clean up your MySQL database for when you want to do a backup. Just call it using the following SQL command: "call cleanforexport();"


CREATE PROCEDURE cleanforexport()
begin
delete from mt_log where log_category = 'straight_search';
delete from mt_log where log_message like 'news callback%';
delete from mt_session where session_id like 'blog::%';
delete from mt_comment where comment_junk_status < 0;
delete from mt_tbping where tbping_junk_status < 0;
delete from mt_asset where asset_label like 'Thumbnail%';
delete from mt_asset_meta where asset_meta_asset_id not in (select asset_id from mt_asset);
end

If you are using phpMyAdmin, the make sure that you set the delimiter field to use something other than ";" as the delimiter. // is a good example of an alternative.

On the way to work, it occurred to me that the biggest difference between liberals and conservatives when it comes to coercion is the essential form of the coercion itself, not where it is applied. Conservatives tend to prohibit people from taking an action, whereas liberals force others to do something. For example, conservatives support prohibiting homosexuals from getting marriage licenses (and the associated legal benefits) and support laws which allow employers to deny benefits to homosexual couples that are normally reserved for married couples. Liberals, on the other hand, almost always take stances that force employers and society in general to accept homosexuals, gay marriage, etc.

What makes the liberal coercion more morally repugnant is the fact that it forces people to violate their conscience or do something they wish to not do. People may get over being told that they cannot do something, and adjust their life around it, even forming groups of people who enable them to live as they wish. However, when people are forced to take an action, that is less possible because the alternative is usually possible; with conservative policies on gay marriage, it is at least still possible for gay couples to get married in the eyes of their peers and a religious body without coercing others.

Conservative acts of prohibition can certainly go off the deep end. The War on Drugs is the best example of that. Many conservatives treat drug use as though it were on par with an invasion from a terribly powerful foreign invader, justifying all manner of scorched earth and total war tactics. Yet, when one gets right down to it, this is more of an exception to the rule, than the rule itself.

If you have a Monster.com, then delete it. They just suffered a major break-in that has cost them all of the information about their user accounts, including their passwords. The people who stole this information were able to get clear text passwords which is completely unacceptable. I not only canceled my account with them, but left them the following note explaining why:

There is no good reason why our passwords were able to be stolen. Even as a fresh college graduate a few years ago, I understood the basics of securing this information through common hashing algorithms and other basic infosec measures. The fact that such simple, common sense measures were not taken by your engineering staff leaves me without one iota of confidence in Monster or its services.

They should have passed the passwords through a strong hashing algorithm and stored the value from that in the database instead of the regular password. This is a common way of securing such information. When the user logs in, you pass the value they submit as their password into the hashing algorithm and see if it matches what is in the database.

Those crazy Russians are now developing their own national operating system.

I concede that white on black may be hard on the eyes for some, so I am using this metamorph style in the mean time. I want to keep the toolbar which links all of the various pages I've written with my main blog, but most of the styles I converted in the past don't support a toolbar, which limits my options until I have the time to convert some more WordPress themes into styles for Movable Type.

Dick Morris makes some very reasonable arguments about how Obama's first term very well may lead to a great deal of socialist policies and have some damning long-term implications. However, on the issue of health care, I believe he is very wrong in assuming that there cannot be a capitalist silver lining in the clouds. As I have said before, there are some very good opportunities coming up for aggressive conservative and libertarian politicians to gain political capital with the public on the issue of health care. It is simply a matter of taking these ideas to the public and presenting them as long-term solutions.

As much as I like Amazon and other e-commerce sites, it is unfair to local businesses that they have to collect sales tax, but when it comes to e-commerce sites, it is up to private citizens to report their purchases to the state. Obviously, most people are never going to voluntarily comply with this regulation, so it is appropriate for the federal government to step in and help the states enforce their sales tax laws (if they have them). The alternative is seeing local businesses continue to have an artificial disadvantage.

Seconds after BART police officer Johannes Mehserle shot and killed Oscar Grant, police immediately began confiscating cell phones containing videos that have yet to see the light of day.

In fact, the only videos that have been seen by the public were filmed by people who managed to leave the scene before police confronted them.

In one instance, police chased after Karina Vargas after she stepped on the train, banging on the window after the doors closed and demanding her to turn over the camera. The train sped away with Vargas still holding her camera.

"Cops may be entitled to ask for people's names and addresses and may even go as far as subpoenaing the video tape, but as far as confiscating the camera on the spot, no," said Marc Randazza, A First Amendment attorney based out of Florida and a Photography is Not a Crime reader.

In fact, blinded by Keynesianism, rather than thanking the Chinese for building and financing the faux American dream, some have chastised them for saving too much, claiming that it was their high savings rate that had to be invested somewhere that created the artificial credit bubble in the first place.

This fully ignores the role the central bank played in artificial interest rates and the part various federal housing agencies played in distorting the marketplace. It also fails to acknowledge the role savings has in economic growth.

In the event that a new stimulus plan is sped through Congress, unless it includes cuts to federal spending or tax increases, foreigners will once again fund it.

At least until foreigners get tired of the same rinse cycle and refocus their funds outside of the United States.

Leftists of all stripes tend to believe that corporations and the rich are very powerful in their own right. They say that these people and organizations have tremendous power over the public that must be checked by the government, but by themselves, all they have is money and influence through that money in the marketplace. Take a look at the story of this man who uses the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to make a living by extorting money from businesses.

I have been scoping out the requirements for writing a plugin that generates files in the export file format, so I created an index template to see if I could use a template file to generate everything I needed that way. The good news is that it definitely does work, based on my experiments with several sets of blog data that I have. The bad news is that it doesn't work very well in a shared hosting environment because it is very computationally intensive. It takes 19 seconds to generate the output of just 500 entries with this template, and my blog has about 1600 some entries so far.

Also subpoenaed for the trial were five jail inmates who evidently had conversations with Frederick about the shooting. One of them is Marlon Reed, a Norfolk gang leader who already got one break on his sentence after testifying against co-defendants in his federal racketeering case.

CNet is reporting that Hawaii is now testing a system where you can talk to a doctor online or over the phone for $10 if you are insured under the state's largest insurer, or $45 if you aren't. If you have a webcam, you can use that too so that you and your doctor can have a video chat session. Instead of having to go to a doctor's office and risk being exposed to more sick patients, someone in need of a doctor can have a quick consultation with a doctor to determine the severity of a problem and what to do about it.

David Freddoso writes:

The cause of criminal violence is not drugs or alcohol but rather criminals. To believe otherwise is to expect every drug dealer in America to give up and apply for a job at McDonald's or WalMart the day legalization occurs. Every society contains a sizable element whose members refuse to make an honest living under any circumstances. The legalization of drugs will not change this large-scale reality of human behavior. 

For now, many societal malefactors have the option of selling or trafficking drugs. But their real trade is to profit from the unwillingness of others to take the risks involved in illegal activity. Think of drug legalization, then, as a new government regulation on the drug dealer. It removes the illegality, and therefore much of the profit, from his trade. Experience suggests that such changes in government policy motivate economic actors to find loopholes. For the drug dealer or supplier, that means finding some new illegal activity through which to cash in on one's tolerance for the risks of crime. 

The mob did not disappear when alcohol became legal again. It turned to narcotics and also used violence to create competitive advantage in otherwise legitimate trades (gambling, for example). There is no reason to believe that drug legalization would have a vastly different effect today. Under legalization, today's drug dealers will run tomorrow's rackets in money laundering, tax-free contraband, gun-running, human trafficking, identity theft, numbers, contract killings, perhaps even conflict diamonds. There are dozens of other such enterprises, including the more pedestrian forms of violent crime, which have been eclipsed in profitability by the drug trade. In the event of legalization, we can expect a migration back toward them. It would also be foolish to believe that a black market in drugs would disappear with legalization, especially if drugs are taxed and regulated by the government. 

To be sure, neither a health risk nor a possible ill effect is necessarily grounds for creating any prohibition in law. But some prohibitions are reasonable and should be kept in place. Even the staunchest libertarian expects government to protect him from precisely the sort of bodily harm that certain drugs--specially meth--have a long history of facilitating. 

MCFARLAND (WKOW) -- Abbie Schubert paid more than $1,100 for a Dell laptop hoping to enroll in online classes at MATC.

But something stopped her: Ubuntu. 

That's an operating system for your computer similar to Windows that runs off the Linux system.

Schubert says she ordered her laptop online at Dell.com expecting to buy your classic bread-and-butter computer. 

She didn't realize until the next morning her laptop defaulted to the Ubuntu operating system.

"It's been a mess," she said. "I regret ordering the computer."

Isn't it wonderful that state legislators apparently have so little problem figuring out how to balance their state budget, with a $554 million deficit, that they have plenty of time to discuss laws to outlaw cussing near or around children?

Right now, I am using Google Chrome 2.0 pre-beta something or other. I still have Firefox open, but I figured I would give it a shot. There are obvious advantages and disadvantages to both of them, but so far I am finding that Chrome is a better browser in some areas.

Aside from the interactivity, there is no difference here between video games and movies:

It's my firm belief that after a while the same physiological responses occur that occur in the ingestion of some drugs. And I believe that an addiction to these games can do the same thing. The dopamine surge, the stimulation  of the nucleus accumbens - the same as an addiction. Such that when you stop, your brain won't stand for it.

The other dangerous thing about these games, in my opinion, is that when these changes occur, they occur in an environment that is delusional. Because you can shoot these aliens, and they're there again the next day. You have to shoot them again. And I firmly believe that Daniel Petric had no idea, at the time he hatched this plot, that if he killed his parents, they would be dead forever.

This judge and PajamasMedia contributor Laura Goldman (Ms. John Walker Lindh was a confused 20 year old child in the wrong place, at the wrong time) should get together and write a parenting book. He may have been delusional, or actually rather psychotic, but her certainly had deliberate malice of forethought sufficient to allow him to go get the key to his dad's lockbox, take out the game and his dad's gun, load the gun, find his parents and commit a serious violent crime against them.

This script is for Movable Type users that want to start over from scratch with their basenames. It's useful for cases like where you expand the basename from 40 characters to 100 and want to create a new, harmonized set of basenames for a consistent approach across your site. As is always the case in this sort of situation, there is no warranty, there is no claim that this script works 100% to description, and I shall not even shed crocodile tears for your blog if you uncomment those lines at the bottom, run it without backing up your database and everything falls apart.

use strict;
use lib ('./lib/', './extlib');
use MT::Entry;
use MT::Util;

my @entries = MT::Entry->load({});

foreach my $entry (@entries)
{
        my $basename = $entry->basename();
        $entry->basename(undef);
        my $newname = MT::Util::make_unique_basename($entry);
        if ($newname eq "$basename\_1") { $newname = $basename; }
        $entry->basename($newname);
    
    ##Enable this ONLY when you are ready to make the change!!!!
        #$entry->save();
        print "$basename\t" . $entry->basename() . "\n";
}
 

One quick note, to specify a blog, put blog_id => X where X is the blog id number of the blog you wish to target on your installation of Movable Type inside the {} brackets in the load statement at the top.

For people who believe in evolution, they tend to underestimate how little regard evolutionary theory has for them as members of their species:

Along with the emancipation of women, sexual liberation has become very much a part of politics around the world. To the conservatives, both these issues challenge 'family values'.

But what if there were no families? What if we say no to reproduction?

My understanding of reproduction is that it is the basis of the institutions of marriage and family, and those two provide the moorings to the structure of gender and sexual oppression. Family is the social institution that ensures unpaid reproductive and domestic labour, and is concerned with initiating a new generation into the gendered (as I analyzed here) and classed social set-up. Not only that, families prevent money the flow of money from the rich to the poor: wealth accumulates in a few hands to be squandered on and bequeathed to the next generation, and that makes families as economic units selfishly pursue their own interests and become especially prone to consumerism.

Reproduction is bad because it promotes social classes, gender identity and allows those with some money to pass it onto their offspring. That is the entire blog post in the detail that it deserves.

I'd like to point out that arguments like this make Christian theology, with its "be fruitful and multiply" commandment look like a hard science by comparison.

• He will fail on the domestic front by pursuing a stimulus plan that won't inject $1T of new money into the economy, and will focus on programs that will end up improving the economy several years after he's out of office like his digital records for health care proposal.
• Leon Panetta will be an incompetent CIA administrator, American intelligence will suffer, the other federal agencies won't be able to compensate for a semi-imploding CIA, and terrorists will exploit this to their benefit.
• Obama will have a very hard time dealing with senators who have seniority, since he has his age and lack of experience working against him already, and he capitulated to some of his critics over the CIA appointment. Many of them will have a hard time accepting him as head of the party, and his ability to lead will be undermined by this.
• After four years, one of two things will have happened: either he will recover his standing and ram through his policies with an iron fist and accomplish a lot or he will be regarded as about as useless as Bush, and will be passionately hated by the left for letting them down. There won't be a middle ground.
  

It could be worse, he could be trying to get money to build modern ditches instead of subsidizing the upgrade of health care systems to make them more efficient...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- President-elect Barack Obama, as part of the effort to revive the economy, has proposed a massive effort to modernize health care by making all health records standardized and electronic.

Here's the audacious plan: Computerize all health records within five years. The quality of health care for all Americans gets a big boost, and costs decline.

Sounds good. But it won't be easy.

In fact, many hurdles stand in the way. Only about 8% of the nation's 5,000 hospitals and 17% of its 800,000 physicians currently use the kind of common computerized record-keeping systems that Obama envisions for the whole nation. And some experts say that serious concerns about patient privacy must be addressed first. Finally, the country suffers a dearth of skilled workers necessary to build and implement the necessary technology.

<snip>

Early government estimates showed about 212,000 jobs could be created from this program, but Brailer said there simply aren't that many Americans who are qualified.

Several major problems with this article:

• In order for the data to be any good to providers and customers, it must be in a standardized format that can be easily sent back and forth to providers. What are the odds of this happening? Not good when you consider how hard it was to get software companies to even agree to voluntarily follow web standards, and bureaucrats will lose tremendous power if the data is standardized and mobile.
• It will not yield any savings for at least several years, until the data is open, transparent, analyzed and people become aware of what they are really spending money on and spend money accordingly.
• There are more than enough people qualified to work on this. There are three classes of workers needed:
  1. IT employees and various engineering staff from integrators to software engineers.
  2. People to train the medical staff on how to use the systems.
  3. People to input the physical records into the systems.
• Most of the people who will make up that 212,000 work force will be #3, and these will be easy to find. Any secretary can do this work. As to #1, there are plenty of IT workers and software engineers looking for jobs right now.
  

There aren't many details about this right now, and it remains to be seen how much of this cost will be carried by the federal government. Part of it will probably come from whatever stimulus money Obama gets. The other part will come from people buying health care...

It is a good upgrade project, but let's not kid ourselves. This project won't have any significant impact on helping the economy recover because it will create many of those jobs by recycling them from other positions, and the benefits of digital records probably won't become fully realized for at least five to ten years.

El Borak has a post talking about how the Chinese might not even have the money to loan us $1T for Obama's stimulus proposal, and that got me to thinking once again about how deficit spending is dangerous for our foreign policy. Few Americans seem to realize that we are not just selling our long term prosperity, but also our foreign policy independence.

As foreign governments acquire trillions of dollars of American debt, they gain leverage over Congress and the President similar to the way that a bank has leverage over someone who took out a mortgage through them. While China may not go to war to collect that money, if we ever decided to not pay them back, they could not only badly hurt us through economic warfare, but could take the matter to bodies like the World Trade Organization and get us into a serious situation. We have also been getting a lot of money from some of the Arab states, and that too is dangerous as that could affect our foreign policy in that region in the long run.

The Soviet Union missed out on a great opportunity to win the Cold War. Had they implemented Perestroika and Glasnost in the 1970s when China was starting similar reforms, not only would the Soviet Union still exist today, but they would be well on their way to controlling our foreign policy. I don't think anyone could seriously argue that the same people who are largely uncritical of our relationship with China would still have a problem with us maintaining the old Cold War stance against the Soviet Union if they had followed China's example.

After seeing some of the ongoing fighting about the morality of knowingly targeting noncombatants between me and some of the Catholics at W4, a Roman Catholic reader sent me this Catholic view of it:

As I see it Zippy and Co confuse intention with consequence; If someone knows that what they are going to do has a bad result, then by their definition, someone has intended a bad result and therefore is guilty of sin.

So if for example, a man undertakes an action which will knowingly entail his death, he must have willed his death and therefore been responsible for it. So a man who knowling sacrifices his own life for his friends is guilty of suicide. The concept turns the whole concept on of Christ's death on the Cross upside down. Instead of his death being a sacrifice, it becomes a suicide. This is heresy of the first order, masquerading as official doctrine of the Church.

The next head of the CIA will be a man who is a politician, not an intelligence professional. Obama had his chance here, but he allowed pundits and bloggers to trash his first candidate, and in doing so he set a dangerous precedent with them. He's now going to have a harder time making his first four years a success.

These allegations, critics would argue, could have easily been written about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans, which sources say was created to find an immediate threat posed by Iraq, regardless of the facts. Prior to the Iraq War, Cheney made countless visits to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where sources have indicated intelligence analysts were brow-beaten into finding the evidence Cheney believed supported his case.

Just create a law which allows a judge to say that someone is violating their orders, but that doesn't require the judge to actually prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person can do what they have been ordered to do:

One can spend a long time in jail in the U.S. without ever being charged with a crime.

It happened to H. Beatty Chadwick, a former Philadelphia-area lawyer, who has been behind bars for nearly 14 years without being charged.

Businessman Manuel Osete spent nearly three years in an Arizona jail without ever receiving a criminal charge. And investment manager Martin Armstrong faced a similar situation when he was held for more than six years in a Manhattan jail.

All three men were jailed for civil contempt, a murky legal concept. Some scholars say it is too often abused by judges, to the detriment of those charged and their due-process rights. "These results of too many civil-contempt confinements are flatly outrageous and often unconstitutional," says Jayne Ressler, a professor at Brooklyn Law School.

Obviously this goes immediately against the concept of being innocent until proven guilty. The fact that they are governed simply by the judge's belief that the person is unwilling to comply completely demolishes the normal protections that would be afforded the defendant. What could a lawyer say or do that would get the person free to stand trial where they could even prove that the judge is wrong? Not nearly enough, as the cases from that article show.

This is another example of why I have argued for the need to fold much of our civil system into our criminal system. The rights afforded the defendant in the criminal system are superior to those in the civil system. There is no reason why the civil system could not be limited exclusively to contract enforcement. In any case, remodeling our system on a combination of retributive justice and restitution would solve a great deal of our problems. It's simply a waste of time and money, for example, to allow two trials for the crime of rape where one involves the threat of prison and one seeks restitution, when both could be fairly handled at the same time with a higher standard of justice. Likewise, I don't see how one could reasonably argue that any non-contractual harm that is civilly actionable, but not prosecutable, should have a hearing in court, as it is obviously not sufficiently negligent or malicious to warrant any loss of liberty from the defendant.

His argument went down, and the flames went higher...

As if the previous post on this subject weren't bad enough, history actually proved me right, as one commenter rebuked Zippy's tendency to say I was speaking from lala land when it was shown that Saddam Hussein actually planned to tie American POWs to his vehicles and roll them on into Saudi Arabia.

I wonder how or even if he will respond to my point that defending against several thousand main battle tanks raining uranium-depleted shells onto your position, while covered in noncombatants you cannot maim or "murder" amounts to a strategy based on "if by a miracle." I also pointed out too that another nasty tactic his enemy could use against him is to tie infants to their paratroopers, and have the air force continuously drop them by the battalion in your capitol. You might as well open up the city gates to them and roll out the red carpet since you can't knowingly shoot down their plane, let alone risk shooting them in mid-air since you have a high probability of accidentally shooting the infant.

I have a PDF copy of the updated conversation in case my comments get deleted >:)

Update: Perhaps I am now just being a sadistic bastard:

However, if an aggressor were to hide behind an innocent individual and I were to shoot through the innocent in order to accomplish the end of eliminating the aggressor, then the killing of the innocent would indeed have served as a means to the end. -aristocles

That would serve to create a pacifism mandate if one faced an enemy willing and able to exploit that.

It also raises an interesting theological situation. Would the genocide of the Canaanites that God ordered have been morally licit according to your model if the Canaanites had hidden behind imported human shields? -Me

So, now, can the will of God functionally contradict itself? If arrayed such that the Israelites had to fight around the human shields, their chances of victory would be largely taken away from them, which would make their campaign illegitimate according to Just War theory.

This is a great approach to creating a printer-friendly version of your blog posts, but the author suggests enabling dynamic publishing for the printer-friendly templates. I am not a big fan of that approach, so here is a simpler approach to enable this based on static publishing or publishing queues.

Create a new entry template that combines both templates using the following PHP syntax (you'll have to be publishing your content as PHP files).

<?php
if ($_GET[printerfriendly]) {
?>

// Your printer friendly template markup goes here

<?php
} else {
?>

// Your normal entry template markup goes here

<?php } ?>

Then, you'll want to create a link on your posts. One good approach to this would be use an icon. Upload one using the asset manager, get its ID, and use the following markup, substituting the asset ID for X:

<a href="<mt:EntryPermalink/>?printerfriendly=1">
    <mt:Asset id="X">
        <img src="<mt:AssetURL/>" alt="Printer-friendly version" title="Printer-friendly version"/>
    </mt:Asset>
</a>

Save and rebuild.

A while back, I wrote a post showing that Israel does not, in fact, need any formal aid from the United States to maintain its position against its neighbors. With an economy nearly the size of Switzerland's, and a slightly higher per capita income, it is a very wealthy country that would only need to shift some money out of its welfare programs to make up the meager $3B aid that we provide them.

One area that Israel has suffered grievously from its relationship with the United States is that it has been a pawn in our international disputes with Europe and Russia. A lot of supporters of Israel don't realize that the opposition to Israel in Europe and Russia is in large part due to a cynical desire to gain leverage and influence for self-aggrandizement. If they want to be power brokers and players, Europe and Russia need to seek areas where America has far less influence like the Arab world.

Obviously, anti-semitism will continue to be a motivation for a number of European and Russian politicians to continue to demonize Israel even if we cut off formal aid and completely back out of Israel's affairs. However, there are other, more subtle forms of help that can be provided. These include preferential trade and immigration policies that allow Israelis to simply come and go as they please for trade and education, provided they have no criminal record. For both countries' sake, we should really explore this option, since it would defeat the propaganda talking point that we arm and subsidize the Israeli war machine.

So lately I have gotten into a spirited series of debates on What's Wrong with the World with one of the resident Catholics. It's too long for casual reading but here is the original link, and at the bottom is a PDF copy of the page incapable my posts start to disappear. Suffice it to say, I won't be going back to W4 anytime soon because I am now most likely Persona Non Grata based on how that last debate ended.

Some people can't accept the fact that when you take their precious philosophical models and subject them to the torment of being applied against the real world, they crash and burn like a drunk Kamikaze pilot. In this case, he was not happy that I proved to him that in practice, or in the real world, his views on how we absolutely, positively cannot ever take an action that we know will kill innocent people would actually end up causing every society that obeyed his rules to be incapable of fighting a defensive war according to Just War theory.

Yeah, it turns out that when intent doesn't matter, as he argued in the main post, you can't risk using modern weapon systems because they will make you "murder" people who the rest of us would simply call "collateral damage" or "acceptable casualties." The end result is that the invader can use all of those nice, modern tanks, APCs, gunships, fighters, strategic bombers and nuclear weapons against your army which is only able to safely use infantry that are armed with small arms. Oh, right, you can use all of those modern systems when there is no meaningful risk of noncombatants being killed in actions you should have known would lead to their death. In other words, all they have to do is grab a civilian in a headlock, aim a rocket at your tank with the other arm, you cannot knowingly use your tank to kill them before that because your plan inherently involves you blasting a noncombatant to kingdom come.

Kind of makes the need to demonstrate that you have a defense capable of achieving victory a mite impossible to Just War theoreticians.

At any rate. No hard feelings on my end. Zippy seems like a good guy, even if comes off as a total loon on this issue. For my part, it's obvious that we're just wasting our time, so I'm moving on and am going to be removing W4 from Google Reader in just a moment.

View the trainwreck as a PDF.

I just released version 1.5 of my Image Gallery plugin for Movable Type. This version adds a search feature based on tags. Use it, abuse it, let me know what you think.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation wants the federal government to provide a $30B stimulus package to invest in "creating new IT jobs." Here's what's ironic about that. The more successful an IT upgrade is, the fewer people there will be needed to keep it working. When IT is truly successful, the human element is most phased out entirely. The reason you pay the big bucks for IT products and services is to make your operation more efficient, so you can more efficiently allocate your capital. In short, a bill that allocates money in ways that creates a net growth in IT jobs is counterproductive.

A better alternative would be make to provide means for reducing the staffing costs of some of these businesses, especially the healthcare business. Instead of spending on Health IT, spend that money on providing grants to qualified universities to found new medical schools, and to create more nursing and technician courses at community colleges. Make it easier for motivated people to get into the labor market for healthcare.

Has the speed of posting a comment improved? I've been making some configuration changes lately that should speed them up, but I want to know if anyone has seen a performance gain?

Update: So, here's the issue. Movable Type publishes everything at once. That is why it is slower to comment here than it is at a WordPress blog. So you lose performance there, but actually loading a page or feed here is as fast as Apache can serve up a regular web page and as reliable too. The change I made was designed to make Movable Type publish less things at once, and defer them to later. I'll keep playing around with this, and see if I can't make things a bit faster.

The British often ridicule America as a violent, backward place where your kid will get shot in school. All I can say is that at least most of our school shooters, in their minds, had a serious grievance with the people they shot compared to the yobs of Britain who get their shits and giggles from cutting up old women and their dogs.

A disabled woman was slashed repeatedly with a knife after confronting a gang who had stabbed her dog to death in her garden.

The mother-of-three, who has not been named, discovered the mutilated body of her Yorkshire terrier Willow lying in a pool of blood outside her door.

Seconds later she was confronted by four men who threatened her, forced her back into the house, in Knotty Ash, Liverpool, and then attacked her with a knife.

The 38-year-old suffered 'numerous' cuts to her body and had to be treated in hospital.

Police have arrested a 13-year-old boy on suspicion of carrying out the assault, which took place at around 2pm on Sunday.

America may have more violent crime, but at least our violence tends to be motivated primarily by normal, mundane motives. Even most inner city crime is related to the vice trade. If there is one thing we don't deal with very much, it's stuff like this where gangs of kids and teens prey on the elderly and the others they suspect as being easy targets and hurt them for simply no reason other than they can.

Iranian authorities have banned the Kargozaran newspaper after it published an article critical of the Palestinian group Hamas. A government spokesman said the article "portrays the Palestinian resistance as terrorists who cause the deaths of children and civilians by taking up positions in kindergartens and hospitals." (Source)

If people get paid to write stuff like this, I really am in the wrong field. A CNet writer writes a ~2 page article about how it's much harder to switch to MacOS X from Windows, and 90% of his complaints revolve around the fact that there are a lot of differences between the apps written for the respective platforms. A perfect example of what I'm talking about:

On the other hand, Office 2008 for the Mac bears little resemblance to Office 2007 for Windows. I've just gotten used to the new Windows version of Word and Excel. Now I have to learn a new suite for the Mac?

Imagine that. Microsoft actually adapted the interface of Office 2008 to be mostly compliant to Apple's user interface guidelines. What's ironic about this complaint is that MacOffice 2008 is pretty similar to Microsoft Office 2003 and earlier in its interface.

One thing I've learned along the way, so far, is that there is little meritocracy involved in people getting published like this. I've written submissions that were very well-received by an editor, but then turned down because it came a little too late, only to find later that they published a few more articles on a similar subject from more prominent writers.

On the other hand, software engineering tends to pay a lot better than writing >:)

-Liberals supported giving some land to the Jews out of guilt for the Holocaust, in spite of the normal left-wing tendency to engage in hatred of the Jews.

-Liberals felt like they could wash their hands of the Jews by giving them this land to assuage their guilty, and then looked on in horror as the Jews actually, *drum roll* defended their territory and then conquered more territory when invaded by the Arabs.

-Liberals now look on in horror as a nation founded by millions of survivors of state-sanctioned genocide, theft, rape and plunder defend themselves against their barbaric neighbors who wage war behind civilian human shields.

-Liberals look on in rage as many of their fellow Westerners and the majority of Israel don't feel bad that thousands of Palestinians get killed in the process in every "intifada" or resumption of hostilities because the Palestinian civilians allow themselves to be used as human shields.

Israel wasn't supposed to be a success. At best, it was supposed to end up like Liberia with a Jewish elite in an arab-dominated region living tenuously together. Realistically, the Jews were supposed to be wiped out by the 1948 war, so that the left could see them finally exterminated and have that subconscious pleasure, while being able to consciously feel solace in the fact that "they tried to make things right" by giving them 3 marginally connected scraps of land.

From What's Wrong with the World:

If Jerusalem and the West Bank were the site of enormous crowds of entirely unarmed, peaceful protesters under the leadership of an Arab Ghandi figure, imploring Tel Aviv to establish a peaceful political arrangement--in front of the ceaseless watch of CNN, BBC, Reuters, etc.--the Israelis would completely unravel and wither under the political and moral pressure.

I think it's no coincidence that the hearts of so many Palestinians have been hardened against Israel. Using the biblical precedent, it's clear that God has hardened the hearts of the Palestinians to make them violently hate Israel for Israel's protection against world opinion. It is incredibly hard for any rational, reasonable, decent person to ever be sympathetic to an organization that promotes the total genocide of the Jewish people, and the population that wildly supported them as demonstrated by election results.

Population of Chechnya: 1,103,686

Over the holidays I confessed to my father-in-law that I am starting to come to grips with the fact that the predestinationist doctrines I was taught in the church that I got saved in have actually hurt me dearly as a Christian. Between them and the struggles that I have experienced with life in Northern Virginia, I have come to realize that they have left me feeling weak and powerless in the face of the devil and my own sin. As I look at the fruit that they have born inside me, I realize that they are tainted and rotten.