February 2009 Archives

Several fit RCMP officers could not take down a single, allegedly crazy Pole wielding a stapler without tazering him nearly a half a dozen times:

An RCMP officer has testified he was sure Robert Dziekanski intended to harm the Mounties called to Vancouver's airport in October 2007.

Const. Gerry Rundel told the public inquiry into the death of Dziekanski that the stapler the Polish man was holding could have been used as a weapon against the officers or members of the public.

You've come a long way, baby. Just twenty years ago, these guys would have been the laughing stock of their profession, now it is an acceptable defense for a police officer to claim that he feared for his safety against a man "armed" with a stapler who the mere civilians around him say was not particularly threatening. Good call for the cops. If that man were an accountant, who knows how many pens he had on him that he could have thrown like throwing knives at these brave public servants!

Obama just keeps breaking with the past, and ushering in an era of hope and change that we can believe in:

WASHINGTON -- The Central Intelligence Agency's new director outlined spy policies Wednesday, including an aggressive campaign in Pakistan, that underscored considerable continuity with the Bush administration.

CIA Director Leon Panetta, in his first meeting with reporters, said the agency will continue to carry out drone attacks on militants in Pakistan. He also said that while CIA interrogations will have new limits, President Barack Obama can still use his wartime powers to authorize harsher techniques if necessary.

Perhaps the worst victims of his continuation of the nefarious policies from Bush the Younger will be the liberals, whose hopes and dreams are being lead into an open field by a firing squad to await their one way ticket to meet their maker. At least they'll still have their precious diversity:

Within the agency, Mr. Panetta said he is looking to raise linguistic and cultural fluency. Currently, just 13% of CIA officers and analysts have foreign-language proficiency, he said, adding that his goal is to get the agency on track to reach 100%. He said he will work to improve diversity at the agency, raising the proportion of minorities in the work force to 30% from 22%.

The Child of Hope and his agents will at least not disappoint us by ensuring that even the janitors at the CIA speak at least two languages, and that even if means jamming thousands of square pegs into round holes, come hell or high water, the CIA will at least superficially resemble America on its HR reports.

PajamasMedia posts a philosophical trainwreck from a student who is learning the distinction between negative and positive rights, but hasn't actually learned how to apply that difference coherently to his own ideas:

But this isn’t a call to end all social welfare programs. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. This is a call for the proper approach to government assistance. Instead of the absurd positive rights approach, we need one of responsibility. I shouldn’t get food or shelter from others because I have a right to them, but rather because it’s the responsible thing for them to do. The government shouldn’t give me welfare or food stamps because I have a right to them, but rather because it is irresponsible for a government to let its citizens starve or go homeless.

But if the outcome is the same in the two approaches, then what’s the point in making a distinction anyway? Well, besides the fact that you always want to carry a correct political and philosophical outlook, the outcome really isn’t the same. Yes, those who buy into the fallacy of positive rights and those who don’t want to help those unable to help themselves. However, those who reject positive rights are looking for the best and most practical way to provide assistance.

A proper attitude towards providing relief for those in need lends itself to flexibility and knocks the bloated, gargantuan, and ineffective entitlement programs we are saddled with off of their pedestals. It smashes the stone tablets they’ve been engraved on for far too long. By doing so it opens us up to compromise on how to fix our monolithic yet utterly defunct aid programs. It lets us make minor changes like, say, private savings accounts in Social Security, without being utterly crucified.

So instead of being an outright positive right, welfare programs now become cynical, pragmatic, crypto-positive rights because while it may not the positive right of the welfare recipient to receive welfare, it is the positive responsibility of the government to make sure that its citizens are not homeless or starving. By simply shifting the wording from "I have a right to" to "they have a responsiblity to" you are simply reframing the point of reference here regarding the transaction from the individual asserting the right, to the group that is having the responsibility to provide for the services asserted in the right. The only shift here is one of perspective, not of philosophy.

Even if this were to be a fundamental philosophical shift, and it isn't, it would still leave the state with a responsibility to meddle in everything from emergency health care, to home ownership, to retirement. If America had shifted its system of slavery from one based on race, to one based on right of conquest and legal punishment modeled after the Greek and Roman systems of slavery, there would be little doubt that any philosophical shift aside, the underlying issue remained intact.

This is the man who will be heading up the National Intelligence Council:

Not surprisingly, Freeman's admiration for the Saudi royals comes in inverse proportion to his disdain for the democratically-elected government of Israel. In today's Journal, Gabe Schoenfeld fairly calls Freeman a "China apologist and Israel basher" (Freeman's bizarre sympathy for the Communist crackdown on democracy activists in Tiananmen Square 1989 was examined here yesterday).

Well, I guess we all know who is going to be taking up the mantle for John Yoo in his absence. I have to hand it to Obama. He sure does know how to pick candidates who really can turn betraying his supporters into a masterful display of performance art. For his next move, I suggest that he hire the captain of the police team that raided Ryan Frederick's house to head up the BATFE, put Marrion Barry in charge of the DEA and put a senior scientologist in charge of the NSA.

I hope that that saying applies to web services too. After five hours of off and on struggling with the nuances of XML schemas and Spring-WS, I have finally gotten a basic web service of my own working based on some code borrowed from the Spring-WS echo sample. In hindsight, it actually isn't hard, but I'm looking at the effort involved and left wondering why it has to be so hard to do that when the following Perl code would have sufficed:

use SOAP::Transport::HTTP;

SOAP::Transport::HTTP::CGI->dispatch_to('Demo')->handle();

package Demo;

sub add {
    shift;
    my $one = shift;
    my $two = shift;
    return ($one + $two);
}

I'll be writing up a tutorial to document what I have done, and how I got here. Might also be useful for others since tutorials are few and far between on Spring-WS. Here's to hoping that Java becomes the next COBOL.

Just like we "only need honorable, ethical people to make big government work," we just need "the right security measures" to assuage most of the fears about digitized medical records:

"It seems to me there is a big concern about the digitization of data as separate, but if we have the right security measures, that data is no different from the data physically sitting in my office," said Herb Conway, a physician who sits on the New Jersey state legislature. "Are we going to be designing laws that interfere with our ability to have interoperability?"

Mitchin said that digitizing health information creates more potential uses for the information and therefore more potential privacy hazards.

"The data today in electronic form is being used in ways it's not being used in the manual process," he said. "Do you, as a consumer, understand that data's being sold for secondary uses? I'm not sure patients understand."

There are many obvious benefits to digital records. They can be transferred very quickly and safely between health care providers, and future medical equipment will be able to directly access digital medical records. Well-designed software could make it far easier for doctors to avoid making mistakes by either alerting them to the danger of an action or even shutting down medical equipment in some cases. Then there is the simple ability of medical and billing software to more accurately show patients what they are paying for.

The privacy and liberty concerns, however, are legion. Insurance providers and employers are only part of the picture. Medical records would make an incredibly tempting target for government agencies looking for easy targets, and it's only a matter of time before they would start to gain full access to all medical records on a wink and nudge "need-to-know" basis. Imagine the DEA and local law enforcement being able to coordinate an offensive against medical marijuana users by scanning all medical records for prescriptions of medical marijuana. At some point, as DNA records are added to the medical records, it is possible that government may use that as well. If there is a genetic basis for anti-social behavior, it's only a matter of time before local governments start using these records to screen for these behaviors and put the kids who have them on watch lists. They've already tried this with psychology, and genetics would make a more effective tool for doing that.

As medical technology advances, the more that your medical records will come to look like a diagnostic of your body's entire state and history. You can't underestimate how much power that will put into the hands of those who have access to your records, and how many ways that that could be abused in the future.

In yet another example of how many prosecutors will do anything and everything to win a case, a California prosecutor is going after a local system administrator for having the temerity to tell the police, his immediate manager and several unidentified parties on a conference call that they were not qualified to possess the password to one of San Francisco's key pieces of government infrastructure:

On July 9, 2008 and at all relevant times, Richard Robinson was the Chief Operations Officer of DTIS [the San Francisco Technology Information Services Department]. Defendant unwittingly found himself at a meeting with Robinson in a room at the police station at the Hall of Justice. Present at that meeting were Lt. Greg Yee and Vitus Leung from the City's Human Resources Dept. Waiting outside the room but joining the meeting midway was Inspector Ramsey. The meeting was unorthodox and short on civilities. Defendant was told that he was being reassigned and was asked to disclose the FiberWAN passwords in addition to other passwords. There was no advance notice to defendant of this request. The surrounding circumstances of this request were unnerving and troubling to defendant at best. He resisted this surprise request to disclose the passwords to the FiberWAN, telling Robinson that no one was qualified to have the passwords. Under the pressure of the situation, defendant gave password information that could not be validated. During this exchange wherein defendant was questioned regarding the passwords, a speakerphone was on the desk in meeting room and people were listening in on the other end of the phone connection in a different part of the City.

In this statement, the defense asserts that those present during the questioning were simply not qualified to hear the passwords. This impromptu meeting took place at the police station in the Hall of Justice, not in the DTIS offices, and Childs was brought there while in the building doing work on the FiberWAN. Those present included various members of the San Francisco Police Department, representatives from HR, and an unknown group of people on the other end of a speakerphone.

The four charges that they have against this admin now are disrupting a computer service and possessing devices for the facilitation of the same. That's a watered down charge of sabotage and possessing three modems to allow him to do a remote connection into the infrastructure of the city--despite the fact that they have, so far, no evidence to support the accusation that he actually caused any damage to the city. In fact, as the writer for InfoWorld states, his actions, from a professional standpoint, probably kept the infrastructure of the city in a more secure state since he had no reason to believe that everyone participating in that meeting had a need-to-know basis for hearing the password. Ironically, had this happened in the federal government on any infrastructure that required a security clearance to access, it would probably be impossible for a prosecutor to make a case against him.

If the court sides with the prosecution, it could create a legal environment where a manager who has at best a marginal need-to-know basis for accessing a secured system can now put undeserved pressure on the admins working for them. The more ambiguous the relationship between a manager and the company or agency infrastructure, the worse this becomes. In that environment, it would be safer for an admin to assume a need-to-know than to assume otherwise.

Iran is falling apart as hard as the United States, if not more:

Their efforts to isolate Iran from the cultural degradation of the American "great Satan" have produced social pathologies worse than those in any Western country. With oil at barely one-fifth of its 2008 peak price, they will run out of money some time in late 2009 or early 2010. Game theory would predict that Iran's leaders will gamble on a strategic long shot. That is not a comforting thought for Iran's neighbors.

Two indicators of Iranian morale are worth citing.

First, prostitution has become a career of choice among educated Iranian women. On February 3, the Austrian daily Der Standard published the results of two investigations conducted by the Tehran police, suppressed by the Iranian media. [1]

"More than 90% of Tehran's prostitutes have passed the university entrance exam, according to the results of one study, and more than 30% of them are registered at a university or studying," reports Der Standard. "The study was assigned to the Tehran Police Department and the Ministry of Health, and when the results were tabulated in early January no local newspaper dared to so much as mention them."

Second, according to a recent report from the US Council on Foreign Relations, "Iran serves as the major transport hub for opiates produced by [Afghanistan], and the UN Office of Drugs and Crime estimates that Iran has as many as 1.7 million opiate addicts." That is, 5% of Iran's adult, non-elderly population of 35 million is addicted to opiates. That is an astonishing number, unseen since the peak of Chinese addiction during the 19th century. The closest American equivalent (from the 2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health) found that 119,000 Americans reported using heroin within the prior month, or less than one-tenth of 1% of the non-elderly adult population.

Iran's example should blow away all conservative notions that the state can maintain morality in a society which is spiritually collapsing. The Islamic regime does not have pesky limits on its authority to enforce order like the Bill of Rights, and can take sweeping action against the vice trades, but has shown itself impotent to stem the rising tide of drug use and prostitution. As the statistics show, the people of Iran just don't want to live the way that their government is telling them to live, and there just isn't much that the government can do other than sporadic, brutal shows of force.

There isn't much that the Islamic government can do to keep the country going. Much of its wealth is based on oil, not producing products or providing services. Its pre-Islamic culture that made it a technological and military peer to the Roman Empire is long gone. The country sought meaning in a theocracy, but has sunk down into even deeper levels of poverty and tyranny that have left the youth of the country with little reason to want to make the personal sacrifices needed to fix their country. In another generation, Iran will be burned out, much like Germany is today after a century of authoritarian, even totalitarian, rule and living with the aftermath. That is the inevitable outcome of a society wherein the state jumps in and seeks to remake society as though it were a machine, not an impossibly complicated system that no central planner can long control.

London police are now looking to add CCTVs to some of the pubs in London. So far, it's not often that I have found myself in near complete agreement with Michael Ledeen, but when he said that the danger of the tyranny we face today is the illusion that it is one we have chosen for ourselves, I completely agree. As I have often said before, it's becoming obvious that one of the fatal flaws of modern democracy is that it gives the people the illusion that they are in control when in fact, they are really not much more in control over their government than they ever were in the past. Things like this level of surveillance would have never been tolerated under the ancient regime.

I suspect that this system is more likely to be subpoened by women seeking divorces from alcoholic husbands, than crime fighters looking for the next 7/7 bombers. So, who wants to start a betting pool on how long it will be before these cameras get loudspeakers and Orwell's vision starts to really come true in Britain?

I'm having to learn to do web services in Java. I've avoided learning this because web services are, in my opinion, little more than an extremely complicated layer that sits on top of what should be a fairly simple technology. They're nothing more than CGI scripts which spit out XML, and handling that shouldn't be difficult, but like all things "enterprisey," if it doesn't take 10,000 lines of XML and code, it's not good enough.

Any of you who don't know what I mean, but who have enough of a background in software development or a C.S. degree, go download the full distribution of Spring Web Services, open up the samples and read the code and configuration files for the "echo" web service. It will make you weep that this is what passes for "Hello World" these days. With every new version, Java's learning curve for neophytes steadily approaches a 90 degree angle.

The only solace I take in all of this is that if I can wrap my head around this needlessly complicated technology, in 15 years Java will be the next COBOL and I'll be paid ridiculously well (enough cash to fill 2 wheel barrels, not 1, for buying bread at the market).

And so once again, the Republicans prove why they deserve to be a minority party, having learned absolutely nothing--nothing--about why they lost power and credibility in the first place with small government conservatives and libertarians:

Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations.

The legislation, which echoes a measure proposed by one of their Democratic colleagues three years ago, would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates.

"While the Internet has generated many positive changes in the way we communicate and do business, its limitless nature offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children," U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said at a press conference on Thursday. "Keeping our children safe requires cooperation on the local, state, federal, and family level."

Joining Cornyn was Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who said such a measure would let "law enforcement stay ahead of the criminals."

The legal definition of electronic communication service is "any service which provides to users thereof the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications." The U.S. Justice Department's position is that any service "that provides others with means of communicating electronically" qualifies.

This is another kudgel that law enforcement can use against average citizens if it gets passed. Most people don't know how to even set up the wireless security on their home networks, and this bill would mandate that such people get new routers that can be in compliance with this law, and to be able to configure them for recording everything they do online. At a time when the Republicans should be rebuilding their party by kicking out big government regulators and spenders, they are joining forces with the Democrats to create legislation that would create one of the most dangerous and comprehensive surveillance mandates in the history of the United States.

One of the things that I find most troubling about this legislation, in its current form in the House of Representatives is the weasel-wording of the "facilitates access to" clause:

(a) Offense- Whoever, being an Internet content hosting provider or email service provider, knowingly engages in any conduct the provider knows or has reason to believe facilitates access to, or the possession of, child pornography (as defined in section 2256) shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.

Given the way that prosecutors are known to twist language and seek expansive readings of laws, it's easy to see how the "reason to believe" wording there could be interpreted to include any unsecured wireless network because the owner would have reason to believe that someone might be able to get onto it and use it for criminal purposes. That puts a lot of people in danger because they don't know how to secure the current generation of wireless routers, let alone handle ones that are designed to be in compliance with this legislation should it get passed.

One of the first casualties of this will probably be projects like the open firmware projects for consumer routers. Hackable routers are anathema to this legislation, as they would give people the ability to turn the little black box that this law mandates into something that is a lot friendlier to the owner than law enforcement viz-a-vis privacy rights. If you can modify the firmware, you can change the behavior of the logging software.

For now, they seem to be just wanting to keep the IP address assignment logs and related data, but the camel is trying to shove its snout into the tent and unless we want to share a room with that beast, the only choice is to give it a smart, principled kick. Today, it's DHCP records. Tomorrow, it's HTTP and SMTP headers.

There is now video evidence that medical examiner Michael West has been known to create bite marks in capital murder cases in order to give "evidence" to the prosecution that they can use against defendants. The courts and prosecutors even conspired to keep the video evidence of West's actions out of the hands of the defense. Will someone please remind me, once again, how it is that "criminals have too many rights" when it comes to the courts? People like West are the reason why, short of adopting reforms inspired by the Mosaic Law regarding the prosecution of perjury and standards of evidence, I am increasingly finding it impossible to support the use of the death penalty in the United States.

Little over a year ago, I wrote a blog post in opposition to an argument that employers hire "an entire person, not just an employee (or fungible unit of productivty)." Zippy Catholic argued in favor of increasing the wages of parents over single people and similar considerations. It was observed back then that this would lead to disaster wherein people would be favored not based on their skill or productivity, but because of their non-economic social arrangements. The recent events in the auto industry serve to drive this point home.

In a way, the American auto industry is a good example of why Zippy Catholic's argument was pure folly. Over time, the American auto makers compensated union workers far more than they were really worth to their employers because of sentimental reasons, and now they are being bankrupted by the costs. It may be an extreme case that he would not defend in this particular instance, but it still illustrates the larger example that the principle of compensating employees more than they are worth is inherently dangerous to the well-being of a company. Even if it comes in the form of a few extra percentage points of raise every year or extending health care coverage to children at no cost to that employee, the employer would still bear additional cost for an employee for reasons unrelated to the business.

Now that trade is increasingly one on a global scale, it would be incredibly stupid to compensate employees based on factors outside the work place. To increase a father's compensation to help him support his kids under the current alleged free trade regime is ultimately to risk sending that man's job overseas to a place where workers are willing to work for less because a lower wage means that they are employed and can actually support their families.

There have to be limits in a global economy, lest everything become a race to the bottom. Most of that can be solved by admitting that "free trade" is a sham, and abandoning it as a foreign policy principle because no country makes any effort to actually engage in it. Whatever the theory is is ultimately irrelevant as free trade has ultimately meant that the United States opens up its economy one way, while other countries maintain mercantilist policies allowing jobs to leave the country without the theoretical balance of trade that is supposed to be achieved by more productive American industries receiving far greater access to foreign markets. Even if this doesn't come in the form of overt regulation, it exists nonetheless in the form of xenophobic economic nationalism in many of our trade partners. Thus the solution to protecting the livelihood of American workers isn't so much throwing unearned dollars their way, but rather a more aggressive, less principled, more pragmatic economic foreign policy that refuses to allow foreign countries to produce for us if they won't allow us to produce for them on an equal footing.

The federal government's refusal to allow GM and Chrysler to experience the agony of bankrupcy court, and thus possibly end their experiment with undeserved compensation will invariably cost many families dearly. Far more so than if they had been cut from the corporate teat and told to find a new job. The younger union employees who are just trying to earn their paycheck while being forced to help pay for the health care costs of three retirees each will have to find new jobs in local economies imploded by the demands of their elders, making it harder to become stable providers.

I do understand the appeal of giving generous compensation to employees, especially ones with families. However, the results in the case of the UAW speak for themselves. In practice, paying one employee more because of social factors must result in other employees either being put at risk of unemployment or receiving less opportunity for increasing their own compensation. The Marxist belief that wealth is a pie to be divided up is true insofar as at any given time, a company has only produced so much wealth and must allocate it as efficiently as it can among its employees and stockholders. It cannot simply will into existence additional money for compensating young, single employees after being very (undeservedly) generous to employees who have families to support; it must produce that additional wealth or take it out of the company's assets. Thus, in the name of generously supporting aging employees with children, the company must burden its younger employees, and that inevitably results in a pyramid scheme in which the older employees reap the benefits of the labor of the younger, usually single, employees.

The next time you hear some republican or conservative saying "criminals have too many rights" or "someone should start thinking about the victim's rights," remember this case and know that there are many more like it. People who honestly believe that garbage tend to have no idea just how often police and prosecutors are willing to thrown potentially (or probably) innocent people under the bus to advance their careers. The National Academy of Science is also about to release a report which is expected to be damn near a World War II-style carpet bombing of the reliability of the forensic sciences. Things never looked so bad for the credibility of the legal system in the eyes of honest, observant citizens.

I can't say that I blame them. The Irish have been doing amazingly well ever since the IRA laid down its arms and became an investment fund.

This W4 post turned into an interesting conversation about the role of the professional military in separating the responsibilities of the franchise from the franchise. The two prevailing thoughts on how to fight war-mongering are to either abolish the military or to institute a draft that includes everyone from the poor to stinking rich kids who will never have to seriously work a day in their lives after 30 unless they want to work. That's a ridiculous dichotomy, as there is a better example from American history: maintaining a smaller military.

For most of this country's existence, the military existed as a self-defense force comparable to what Japan has today. It was large enough to defend against foreign invaders and to respond quickly to regional threats, but not large enough for the elected government to wage war without calling up volunteers or instituting a draft. The reason why this approach generally worked well at preventing imperialism and foreign adventure seeking was that the troops were simply not there for a prolonged engagement without getting the public behind the effort.

To return to this sort of policy would not require a troop reduction in the active duty ranks, but rather an elimination of both the Army and Marine Corps reserves and a reduction in the ranks of the Navy and Air Force reserves. The National Guard would also be phased out and would return to the states as a new rendition of the organized state militias operating exclusively under the control of the state governments as they once were. Each state would be responsible for mustering, funding, training, arming and deploying its militia forces in a manner in keeping with the U.S. Constitution and state and federal law.

Without the reserves and National Guard to fall back on, the federal government could not easily, safely, make war without enlisting the public's support. There are simply not enough men and women actively serving in uniform to make that happen, and keeping a larger active duty military to get around that would be even more expensive and would be harder to justify to the public.

I just noticed this at the end of a post on Instapundit where I got a link:

MORE: Reader Dave Warner emails:

Robert Spencer writes:

"The most virulently fundamentalist Christian can find no sanction in Jesus' teaching for the murder of his opponents any more than anyone else can."

Maybe no one expected the Spanish Inquisition, but I would certainly hope that someone might remember it.

Yes, I get arguments that "no true Christian" would do this sort of thing but these seem like variants of the "no true Scotsman" line.

Perhaps he is remembering a different Spanish Inquisition. The real Spanish Inquisition that was carried out by the Spanish monarchy, not the Roman Catholic Church, as a political purge of potential fifth columnists among the Muslim and Jewish conversos. Whether or not it was justified is not relevant to the fact that it was carried out under the auspices of a secular authority for the secular goal of purging elements of the old regime/society that were trying to be absorbed into the new Spain.

Dana Blankenhorn on the "two big lies in health IT debate:"

Groups devoted to finding cures for dread diseases, like the American Cancer Society, rightly fear that evidence-based medicine will eliminate payments on unapproved therapies.

Insurers, who have their own profits on the line, are less susceptible to the political pressure of these groups. Violations of evidence-based guidelines are pressure on their pockets.

The big lie being told on the proponents' side is that no one is going to be hurt by reform. McCaughey gave this away in her now-infamous column, as published by Bloomberg, writing "the bill treats health care the way European governments do: as a cost problem instead of a growth industry."

One man's higher payment is another's higher profit.

Free market advocates often fail to grasp that certain industries (and in some cases, "industries" as is the case with the legal profession) are mostly net drains on the economy. Health care is one of them, as it produces minimal wealth. Most of it is just a cost of keeping society health and productive, and treating that as a "growth industry" is like saying that we should celebrate the steadily increasing revenues of arms manufacturers in a time of global war. There is nothing innately wrong with either industry, and both serve an essential purpose, but usually when they consume an increasing amount of the GDP, there is an underlying problem that must be addressed. So, the European perspective is correct, but their solutions are usually not.

A significant part of the opposition to EBM comes from the way that the government actually behaves on similar issues. As I previously mentioned, the federal government already makes its own decisions about narcotics based on scientific evidence that is flimsy at best. That is problematic for EBM advocates because there is no bright line between licit painkillers and illicit drugs, since most prescription painkillers are chemically related to narcotics. The federal government's political needs in the War on Drugs frequently threaten to or actually do spill over into doctors' offices over this issue, and the DEA is supremely self-confident about its ability to decide for doctors how many painkillers long-term pain patients need.

So really, the federal government has a poor track record of showing that it can put science above politics. It's done nothing to inspire confidence in the minds of skeptics who have history on their side when they predict scenarios ranging from government bureaucrats arbitrarily stopping some treatments and drugs, to law enforcement stepping in and creating a huge mess.

In Europe or Canada, the payer takes control of product at the wholesale level. They buy in bulk and handle the distribution.

In the U.S. the producer controls the product down to the retail shelf, except in the case of sales to hospitals or, say, the VA, which have the buying power to "break bulk" themselves.

This control of the channel has a huge impact on the bottom line, even for patented medicines. It means the producer here dictates the price. Buyers have no leverage.

If this control is lost, if  the subsidies to industry end, America could lose thousands of jobs, and some companies could go bankrupt. That is an economic hit we need to remind ourselves of.

This is problematic on another level. It's no coincidence that pharmaceuticals and other health care product producers tend to be based in one of the only economies where there is genuine profitability for them. In the case of Canada, for example, the Canadian government is the only major buyer of health care in the entire country. It gets an incredible amount of influence there to determine who gets what and what the prices are going to be. That monopoly position gives them power that they should never have to determine how health care resources are allocated, and skews the entire market downward, draining most incentives for Canadians to do research and product development for health care.

I doubt that ZDNet would ever say it, but every argument for controlling health care is equally valid for controlling IT. IT is one of the most wasteful industries in human history filled with dysfunctional boondoggles that cost vastly inflated sums of money. The argument for putting price controls on Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, Apple, etc. are very powerful if one accepts the premises used to justify socialized medicine. In fact, there is an even greater argument in that overly expensive health care still does an unqualified good in many cases of preventing serious harm and death, whereas most "enterprise" IT products are as cost appropriate for their purpose as a Ferrari is for a daily commuter car. How many businesses get raped using Oracle as a glorified bit bucket when they could use MySQL or PostgreSQL? Too many.

In the case of IT, the market has been forced to find ways of meeting businesses' needs without government intervention. For many small businesses, a careful DBA and development team can use MySQL instead of Oracle. They can develop a Java EE-based application with JBoss instead of Weblogic or WebSphere. Device developers can modify Linux or a flavor of BSD for an operating system.

There are better ways of handling this ranging from expanding the supply of labor, to making individuals shoulder a greater burden of the cost for their own care in exchange for higher wages (in order to make people more economically rational about their choices). None of these things are even on Obama's radar.

A PHP and Python developer demonstrates why it is usually a stupid idea to rip on another language as a piece of garbage when you don't really know it. He uses this "example" of how many lines it Java with the standard API to combine an array into a string:

import java.lang.StringBuilder;
StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder();
String[] myArray = {"1", "2", "3"};
for (int i = 0; i < myArray.length; i++) {
   result.append(", ");
   result.append(myArray[i]);
}
result.deleteCharAt(0);
String implodedString = result.toString();

Oh really? How about this:

StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder();
String[] myArray = new String[]{"1", "2", "3"};
for (String s : myArray)
    result.append(s).append( (s == myArray[myArray.length-1] ? "" : ", ") );
String combined = result.toString();

That may not be as aesthetically pleasing to you as ", ".join(["1", "2", "3"]), but it's a lot better than the "proof" that Java sucks. In his example, the import statement is extraneous because java.lang is an implicit import. How else would you get String without importing java.lang, since String is in that package? That deleteCharAt is also completely unnecessary; all he'd have to do is reverse the order of the statements in that loop and put a ternary operation in the second append statement like what I used.

Who would have thought that a business that generated relatively small amounts of revenue and that had steadily increasing business costs might be worth a lot less than the hype had lead the public to believe...

Here's a message for all the tech bloggers and reporters freaking out over the alleged Associated Press bombshell that some copy-paste legerdemain led to the revelation that Facebook valued itself at $3.7 billion at the time of the ConnectU vs. Facebook court settlement:

People who made a big deal out of Microsoft investing $240M into Facebook at a valuation of $15B forgot that Microsoft could also afford to spend $240M on air and still not notice any damage in their war chest. The reason they did that was for no other reason than to get their foot into the door as a player with direct influence with Facebook. For a company with their level of revenues and profits, that was just a minor cost of doing business to push competitors out of the way of gaining influence with the biggest social networking site.

The most likely future of Facebook is that if they don't find a way to start seriously growing their revenues and profits through a more robust business model, they will be bankrupt within five years.

Welcome to the rest of your life, modern California:

BIG SUR, Calif. -- As Sacramento squabbles over the state's $42 billion deficit, Californians are getting a bitter taste of what's to come after the steep budget cuts that are inevitable when legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger finally hammer out a deal.

Some world-famous parks like Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park may not open this year. After-school programs in low-income areas are being scuttled, putting high-risk teens on the street just as police forces are being cut. Schools are closing classrooms, and some highway projects have ground to a halt. The state may not be able to monitor some sex offenders as required under law.

A budget deal may restore some of the missing funds. But everyone knows that not all monies will flow again after a deal, and Californians increasingly fear they are seeing a hint of their future.

California is an excellent example of why the modern version of representative democracy is a doomed experiment. We all know what California should do, but won't do. For starters, the legislature should begin passing a flurry of bills to eliminate marginally useful regulations and agencies to immediately lower the deficit. It should then follow this up with a law that simultaneously breaks the back of the public employee unions and converts their pensions into 401k accounts. That should be followed up by immediately scaling back all welfare spending to cover only the most needy Californians, and to make it categorically impossible for illegal immigrants to get state benefits. Finally, both the legislature and governor should pass laws that quickly remove non-violent drug offenders both from prison and the priorities of law enforcement altogether so that criminals like dangerous sexual predators don't end up falling through the cracks.

That's what it should do; optimize and streamline as quickly as possible. That's exactly what it won't do because of the nature of the modern politician and the media's inability to demand serious accountability and action from politicians. Instead, the legislature is reduced to a series of micro-fiefdoms wherein every politician fights for his piece of the pie and rarely do they ever serve the greater good. Modern democracy is so incredibly inefficient and doomed to failure because the body politic is more concerned with its own interests than making the state work for society.

California may get a bailout and this may be washed away for now, but if it does get one, it will be in the form of either higher taxes that will cause more productive people to leave the state or the federal government printing more money. Neither of these scenarios are going to really change the fate of California if it continues like this. The first one will make the state more expensive to live in for easily identified reasons. The latter will just make it harder to live in because of inflation and the existing tax rates working together. Either way, California's future is bleak if it continues down this path.

If you can't stand profanity, this video is definitely not for you.

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work

Dana Blankenhorn clearly doesn't seem to see much to worry about here:

Conservative activists are doing the work of industry in trying, once again, to kill health reform. Opponents of evidence based health care like Twila Brase, a contributor at the right-wing Heartland Institute, are happy to help skewer science by denying it the data it needs to make things better.

Michael Phelps is proving to be his own worst enemy if this is how he treats those who actually stick with him:

LAS VEGAS--I'm here at IBM Pulse 2009, the IBM Tivoli customer conference (more on Pulse09 in my next blog). Many months ago, IBM hired Olympian Michael Phelps as a keynote speaker and the company was quite excited about having him present. When pictures of Phelps "pulling on a bong" emerged, I really felt bad for IBM, imagining an emergency meeting between the Pulse09 event team, corporate marketing, HR, and legal to decide what to do. IBM ended up sticking with Phelps as planned.

I just released version 1.75 of my ImageGallery plugin. This version expands on the search capabilities of the 1.5 release, corrects an aesthetic issue and allows each blog to declare a set of tags to use to limit the first set of images that are displayed when the dialog is loaded. It also adds asset tracking markup to the generated table, which enables galleries to connect to the asset manager in that respect.

Smaller, more frequent releases is probably the best way to go from now on. In the coming weeks, I will probably release version 2.0 which will be mostly an effort to refactor the code into something smaller and tighter. After that, version 2.25 will probably add some pagination to the asset pallet.

From Slashdot:

If Firefox hit 95% market share the proportion of net users using AdBlock would undoubtedly be high enough that a lot of sites would move to some plugin or other for their content - Flash, Silverlight or something new, most likely one with DRM. Just as software pirates brought about DRM for games, music and movies, ad-blockers ("web pirates" seems an appropriate term - they take stuff without paying for it) will bring about DRM for the web. And it'll suck. And the people who bitch the loudest about it will be the ones who caused it. So I really hope Firefox doesn't hit 95% market share or the web as we know it will be dead.

Cue downmods from freetards in 3, 2, 1...

Those of you who giggle now about how you don't see even Google AdSense ads on websites would do well to think long and hard about this. You don't want to pay for content up front, but you don't want to "pay" for it either by having advertisements show up either. Even the mere presence of the ads themselves can help make a content provider more influential by proving to their advertisers how many visitors they get.

Well, when you have a mostly Flash or Silverlight-based web, or one that makes extremely heavy use of JavaScript to kick your ad-blocker's ass, you'll only have yourselves to blame for this. Hope it was worth the "minor inconvenience" of having an advertisement on the side of a web page.

There is a lawsuit in California arguing that the child abuse registry violates the due process rights of the people of California. I haven't read most of the brief, but it is a good argument because these things sweep up people who are also "suspected" offenders. That little detail is one that the average defender of these registries is blissfully ignorant of. Regardless, they are still problematic for other reasons. One of the biggest problems is that they are not effective because they include so many trivial offenders like guys who had sex with their girlfriend in high school or peed in the bushes, and in many cases are simply not reliable in the information they do present about serious offenders. Not that the system cares.

So how to make the system care? Simple. Create an abusive government employee database. Focus it mainly on prosecutors and police. Whenever a cop or prosecutor hurts the public through criminal activity (or what should be criminal), post their full information for the public to view. Even better, track them as they go from one community to another.

That'll fix it really quickly.

In honor of the women who crave a chance to give it up for their CiC:

Original link from Triton.

John Hawkins, like most political bloggers, is not very strong on the technology side of things:

Can we reverse these trends and put the genie back in the bottle? Unfortunately, curing these problems would probably take a level of government intervention that would be worse than the disease, with one exception: the end of anonymity on the Internet. Although there would be negatives to that, it would also be the key to minimizing spam, hacking, fraud, and trolling. It would also help minimize the extraordinarily rude behavior that has become the rule, not the exception on the net.

The Internet is not anonymous. Get that through your head. All of you. It is very similar to real life where you are free to do whatever you want in public until you attract attention to yourself. People have records of your transactions at stores, and in some parts of the country they have records of part of your use of the roads via toll booths. The Internet is very similar. Your ISP is not monitoring most of the protocols you use, but if you do something funny that attracts their attention, such as inundating their network with SMTP packets or running a P2P application 24/7, they probably will start to monitor you. When John said that there is no real distinction between the Internet and real life, he didn't quite realize that even the "anonymity" of the Internet operates in a similar manner.

At a minimum, it's a fair bet that at any point in time, your ISP is recording every DHCP transaction between you and their network. That means every time you get an IP address for your house to use, they record it. Many of them do similar monitoring of your HTTP traffic for a period of time as well, just in case they have the cops rush in with a warrant that they needed executed immediately.

So, to say that the Internet is anonymous is simply not true. It's also not nearly as hard as Hawkins believes for the police to trace a user from the "crime scene" back to their ISP because most criminals don't use complicated, encrypted proxies and tricks like that. Once they start getting some basic information, all they have to do is keeping file warrants for information. In the case of the guy who hacked Sarah Palin's email account, for example, all they probably had to do to get started was to do a WHOIS lookup on 4chan to start requesting information about the guy.

To "get rid of anonymity," you would have to first mandate a national data retention policy that would span several common protocols: HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, Gnutella, eDonkey, NNTP, OSCAR, XMPP and MSN Messenger. Larger ISPs would have to throw in some of the VoIP protocols to make this more effective. You would also need to ban all consumer encrypted traffic except at e-commerce sites during purchases. All of that would work only in the United States. You would need either a comprehensive global treaty or a global government to make it truly effective. It is simply not feasible to talk about "ending anonymity" without bringing a strong government role into play. Most people won't voluntarily give up what anonymity they do have, so that point is moot.

nonymity serves a useful role in allowing people to speak more freely. Some of the very vocal critics of Islam, such as Isaac Schrodinger don't post under their real names for obvious reasons. Likewise, you are never likely to see a local write frankly about the Saudi, Iranian or Chinese regimes under their real name unless they have a martyrdom complex. The fate that has befallen many an Egyptian blogger who had the temerity to modestly criticize their government is proof enough that anonymity is a double-edged sword that has a lot of good to offer society.

There are two major reasons why trolls and spammers exist the way they do: the lack of foreign government cooperation and the lack of priorities in government. These people just don't usually make it on the radar of law enforcement because they are too busy chasing people who've broken one of hundreds of federal criminal statutes, or the feds consider it a waste of time to ask the Russians, Nigerians or whoever it is they need to ask for help on a spammer or troll. Of course, if the federal government would release all non-violent drug offenders, it could spend the next 25 years cheerfully locking up spammers and trolls who go well past legal limits and never run out of room, but I'll save that for a different discussion.

Sega appears to be taking the first steps toward reentering the video game console market. If so, it would make sense because there is an opening for another company now because of the relative weakness of Sony and the extreme dichotomy between the markets for the XBox 360 and the Nintendo Wii.

The Playstation 3 is too expensive and is perhaps the least developer friendly of the major three consoles. The Nintendo Wii is highly profitable, but it has a large amount of cheap, poorly-conceived games and many of its owners are the sort of people who may buy only a handful of games over the lifetime of the console. The XBox 360 is very popular, but very buggy on the hardware side and has cost Microsoft a lot of money to get to the position of de facto winner of the serious gamer market.

If they do return to this market, I suspect there will be a few things that we can take for granted:

• It will be a powerful console. The Dreamcast was about as powerful in real world use as the Playstation 2. They won't go after Sony, but it's easy to see them building a console with specs similar to the XBox 360.
• It will be very easy for developers to target. The Dreamcast did so well, despite the odds, because it was a very developer-friendly console.
• Sega will go for Sony's throat after what they did to the Dreamcast. If they reenter the market, and it is not a complete failure at the onset, expect Sega to immediately go for kicking Sony to the curb so that they can replace them and enter the true next generation as one of the three major players.

I don't know how Sega would build its platform on the software side, but it would make a lot of sense for them to seek a partnership with Apple. Apple has been long rumored to be toying with the idea of entering the market itself, but they don't have any serious development studios consistently targeting OS X. It would be a very slick move for them to license a modified version of Snow Leopard (10.6) to Sega, similar to how Microsoft licensed Windows CE to Sega for the Dreamcast. There are a few reasons why this would work well for both companies:

• Apple has no hardware of its own in this market; they won't lose any of their core hardware sales the way they would if they licensed their OS to Dell or HP.
• Apple has no in-house game developers; Sega has no in-house platform developers capable of taking on the Windows development team that maintains the XBox's OS.
• Sega knows how to make good hardware, so Apple doesn't have to worry about their reputation there.
• Apple has the resources to invest money into Sega and the console to encourage other developers to target it besides Sega.

I am not going to seriously say "this is how it will happen." I just think that this would be the most logical route for Sega to take if they want to get back into this market.

That would be Nadya Suleman, the infamous mother of the octuplets conceived deliberately by artificial insemination.

Thanks to something_feral for the idea.

Inspired by El Borak's blog post.

Why is anyone surprised that a doctor willing to perform an abortion would take a quasi-viable baby and throw it in the trash? Are people so fucking stupid that they think that a man who is willing to vacuum out the brains of a viable baby as only its head remains in the womb would suddenly respect the life of that child when it accidentally is fully delivered from the womb? These must be the same people who think that cold-blooded killers will be deterred in some fashion by gun control laws.

Every abortionist and "pro-choice" individual who doesn't unequivocally condemn partial birth abortion as murder has no standing here. There is not even a hair-splitting argument that is less than a sophistic piece of garbage that can justify supporting the one, but being sickened by the other because they are the same kind of act, just performed in different locations on the child that might have (and probably would have in many cases) had a chance to live.

The only reason they're really outraged is because this incident puts the whole idea of abortion on demand in perspective. It serves as a symbol for what thousands of women do everyday to their unborn children. The reason I see little hope for the future of liberty and justice in America is that a country that regards unwanted children as disposable garbage doesn't care enough about individuals on principle enough to secure the blessings of liberty and justice for anyone except the civilization that will end up overpowering and replacing them.

The prosecutors want to charge this guy with murder? Fuck them. Call me the day that they actually have the stones to charge an abortionist with murder for doing a partial birth abortion. Until then, all this guy is guilty of under the law and its twisted logic is making a mistake.

• The No Detail Guy. He has a problem, and you have an even bigger one because it never occurred to him to try to help you out by getting you diagnostic data, recording exact error messages (if possible) or anything else that could be construed as a symptom. Usually you can identify this person on a forum or a support email quickly because they will make damn sure that you know that they have a problem, but they'll be damned if they'll tell you much without having it pried out of them by a crowbar and the threat of waterboarding in a Mexican public restroom.
• The Know It All. This is guy has very, very strong opinions. He either loves something or absolutely hates it with the intensity that Satan hates puppies and kittens. When he has problems, he'll be quick to assume that he read everything, and there is just no way your piece of trash can do it. If there were, he'd know about it and be lecturing you about how it is really poorly designed. The more that these people know a tiny bit about programming or system administration, the more they'll make it clear that things suck. Again, they'd know. One of the worst things you can do with this person, though amusing, is to point out to them that this general market is not a democracy, it's a meritocracy. If he can't deploy something or get it to work, but somehow thousands or even millions of others can, hate to break it to you chief, the only ignorant dumbass in the room is you.
• The Butterfly Effect User. This is the user who thinks that clicking on any button or doing anything slightly ahead of what they already know will result in the complete reduction of their PC to a molten pile of slag. Yet for some reason, they can drive a car without worrying about the extremely remote possibility that the road wear on their car might damage the safety mechanisms that prevent the igniter from lighting up the entire gas tank. In short, this person believes that like the butterfly effect, the slightest action of their clicking or typing the wrong thing can lead to utter catastrophe.
• The Lazy Good For Nothing Who Wants It All. This person thinks that there is no dichotomy between raw power and ease of use. If they were in the military, they would insist on running a world war from behind a stream-lined, kid-friendly, Fisher Price-like simple user interface without sacrificing any features or power nor having to learn how to use it.
• The Amateur-Expert Architect. This user insists on jumping right in there and designing everything with you. Though they have neither formal education nor practical work experience in network architecture, database architecture or software architecture, let alone the most basic tasks involved in implementing them, they believe they are qualified to dictate actual design and implementation. They will draw out what they think are master works of interface design and system integration on the drawing board, but in reality, most of the technical staff actually look on their work the way they would a baboon flinging its own excrement at the board because invariably, it is that ugly and nasty. The truly advanced versions of this user not only manage to completely miss the very requirements they were charged with getting the IT employees and software developers, but they will actually create an elegant path that causes their work to completely miss anything remotely usable to the actual users.
• The Pathologically Impatient User. This user has a click-finger with the rapid firing motion of a machine gun. No task is too complex for the computer that they think about getting up and getting a coffee while it processes their request. It doesn't matter that a system might have to send a request to, say, a database server or a GIS application to crunch gigabytes of data. A computer is no good to them unless it gives them instant feedback. The irony of it is that when software developers are rushed, they often forget to disable certain user interface elements while the software is processing data, making old machine-gun-finger here able to reduce the system's speed to that which one would get from running JavaEE on a Commodore 64.
• The Cheapskate User. First, an example. This user expects quality support for a product they either didn't spend any money installing or that didn't get sold with a support contract. They're the sort of user who doesn't want help from the hoi polloi. Nothing less than official corporate enterprise support or a full-time developer doing a Q&A session with them is good enough for them. Feel free to disregard them, as they aren't lost business, and no paying customer in their right mind would expect you to give them the time of day between their attitude and their inability to caugh up enough money to buy a latte at Starbucks for all of the trouble they are bound to be.

Say what you will about Bill Gates, but he certainly does know how to drive a point home to his audience.

Just don't ever accept his invitation to a speech about rabies after this little stunt.

What's bad for New York is good for the rest of the country:

President Obama's Wall Street salary cap may be well intentioned and it certainly taps into public sentiment, but it's a killer for New York.

"Without the talent of Wall Street to bring us back into a position of leadership in the global economy, we're going to be in bad shape as a world economic power," said Kathryn Wilde of the Partnership for New York.

Wylde says the Obama salary cap will lead to a critical brain drain - China and the United Arab Emirates have already come to poach Wall Street talent. She also says lower salaries in the financial industry will mean dramatically lower tax revenues for the city and state.

By all means, China and UAE, take them! In fact, let's hope that Iran, Sudan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Syria all get in on the act! With these "talents" managing China's banking system and Muslim petrodollars instead of running our economy into the ground we can just take for granted another 100 years of American dominance of the international system.

The people who are good at investing, and the people who did a lot of the software development for these companies that enabled them to run simulations, manage their infrastructure, etc. will be more than capable of finding new jobs in America or at least the Americas worst case scenario (why move to China or the Middle East when you can move to the Caymans?)

This comment on PajamasMedia is typical of the sort of cretinous tendencies common to both lay conservatives and liberals like when it comes to having no appreciation for such minor nuances as who is being supported by what income:

Obama pulled the $500K figure out of the blue. What does that amount represent, in his world? Clearly, Tom Daschle and Bill Clinton couldn't live on that. What if he feels, tomorrow, that $300K is now the limit? $100K?

If you want to talk about obscene income, let's cap the earnings of Hollywood Celebrities. Today. And all the NFL players, too. I mean, it's only FAIR.

-Sara for America

Sara is absolutely correct. It is wrong for the federal government to assert any prerogative, even as a normal stockholder, to limit executive compensation. I just don't see any difference between partially nationalized banks and private, self-sustained movie studios and sports franchises. There just isn't any real difference between Johnny Depp getting paid $50 million by privately funded Disney to star as Jack Sparrow in the 4th installment of Pirates of the Carribean and the CEO of a failed, partially nationalized bank getting paid tens of millions of dollars in salary and bonuses, most of which will come from taxpayer money.

My bad. I'm clearly destined for the path of Marxism.

John Hawkins and most of his commenters have apparently never heard of the Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules. It would be absolutely stupid for Obama to allow the banks to pay their executives whatever they want while they have been known to pay out as much as $18B in bonuses and have already thumbed their noses at decency by lavishing themselves with gifts on taxpayer money. Much of that bailout money would end up in their pockets in a manner similar to how money from first world lenders to third world countries often ends up in the private bank accounts of politicians and their cronies.

There is a positive correlation between high pay and performance here. The higher the pay that the executive demands, the more likely he or she is to be some blood-sucking parasite out to rape the company. So, I say that if they are going to take my money to bail out these companies, at a time when my wife and I are trying to save for a house and start a family, the least Obama can do is a strap a fiscal flea collar to the necks of these corporations.

• Looks like Christian Bale was, actually, very justified in ripping the director of photography (DP) a new one. Some more information has been brought out, and it turns out that the DP was warned several times, civilly, by Bale to stop tweaking the lighting during the actual filming, and the DP did his last big screw up during the most intense, emotional scene in the entire movie.
• Here's one to make a typical feminist's head explode. A female Iraqi jihadist organized the brutal raping of 80 Iraqi women so that she could use their sense of shame to make them feel like the only way to redeem themselves is to commit a suicide bombing for Allah. Yet, I can also see the patriarchy somehow being blamed for this.
• 40% of Japanese investors think that the federal government will default on their investments into treasury bonds. I wonder why...
• As far as I can tell, the iNove style for Movable Type's classic blog template set (which I am using right now) is done. Now I have begun work on creating a variant of it for the Professional template set. This demo here shows its evolution/current state.
• Prosecutors are going to have a hard time painting Ryan Frederick as a high-flying, big time drug dealer when they haven't found any padded bank accounts, no stashes of cash and his full time job was delivering soft drinks.
• The Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice has released a report that has a pretty withering (by government standards) criticism of the effectiveness of sex offender registries. Quote: "We found that the registries that make up the national sex offender registration system - the FBI's National Sex Offender Registry (NSOR) and the state public sex offender registries accessed through OJP's National Sex Offender Public Registry Website (NSOPR) - are inaccurate and incomplete. As a result, neither law enforcement officials nor the public can rely on the registries for identifying registered sex offenders, particularly those who are fugitives."
  

Looks like a South Carolina sheriff really is investigating Michael Phelps for his marijuana use. See, kids, this is how marijuana can ruin your life. You work hard, accomplish a lot, maybe even make your country genuinely proud on the international stage, you smoke a little reefer, and then your hard work and achievements get flushed down the toilet by the legal system--for your benefit, naturally. The kids must realize that not even a world class olympic athlete will be spared if he dares to smoke the dreaded mary j! Der kinden uber alles!

This reminds me of the case of two Florida teens who were "protected from future harm to their reputations" by being charged with production of child pornography, which requires them to register as sex offenders. Nothing is too outrageous these days if the underlying thought is The Children^tm.

Two down, at least one more to go. Obama has not been President officially for a month and he has already had two appointees have to withdraw their candidacies and another getting pressured to follow suit. Such remarkable talent for choosing good candidates! What a qualification for office!

While we're at it, why not bring up the fact that Obama has halfway reneged on one of his promises about transparency reforms.

Change we can believe in.

Did you know that there is only one legal source of marijuana for America researches to use? Not only that, but the only marijuana that it grows and distributes is a single, low-quality variety when there are many competing varieties of marijuana in use around the country.

Given all of the problems with getting sample groups, testing different varieties of plants legally and such, it's amazing that anyone would take their research seriously.

On the surface, the case of Nadya Suleman is a perfect example of how and why hard cases make for tempting, but potentially disastrous foundations for policy. Through in vitro fertilization, she has given birth to fourteen children, and she is neither married nor economically capable of supporting those children on her own. She is to children what a cat hoarder is to felines.

It is hard to say that Suleman actually genuinely loves her children. Perhaps she is simply insane, but that is less likely than the possibility that she is just another self-absorbed woman who thinks that her womb is an untouchable sanctuary free from the regulations of society, the state and God. She says that she loves children and clearly she feels to have as many of them as she wants irrespective of their needs and consideration about them as human beings with an equal claim to rights (not to mention a rightful claim to her that makes her obligated to support them at all costs).

Despite the appearance of just being a hard case, this case is actually a clear warning shot about a long-term problem which is people using in vitro fertilization as an alternative to giving children a reasonably stable family life based on having both a mother and father in their lives (especially ones that are married). Plenty of women do this on a small scale. They spend their fertile years chasing a career, then resort to modern medicine to have the children that they now want, and like Suleman it never really occurs to them that the child they are creating is a being whose rights they must consider and whose needs they must place before their own. They want a child, but a child has a superior need for a stable, normal family life.

Aside from the basic needs of the children here, and the lack of respect for them, there is another issue here. In vitro fertlization, when abused, can result in a woman being able to have far more children than she could ever support and doesn't have the natural controls that natural pregnancy does that limits how many children these irresponsible women can give birth to at any one point. Theoretically, Suleman could go from having fourteen to forty children by the time she is forty if she repeats this process a few more times, and that should give sober libertarians and conservatives pause because there is an inherent sickness to a society which allows adults to collect and produce children in a manner similar to a cat hoarder. There is an implicit reduction of those children to the status of mere property which is philosophically offensive and unacceptable.

Suleman, and people like her, really do exist to serve as a warning to others, but more than that, they serve as a basis for society to start considering how, when, where and why limits are needed on certain freedoms. So while hard cases may not make for good policy themselves, they are better than normal cases for spurring debate about an issue.

Christian Bale goes ballistic on a photographer after he ruins one of Bale's scenes for the second time by stumbling onto the set.

Radley Balko writes the open letter that Michael Phelps should have written for his critics:

Dear America,

I take it back. I don't apologize.

Because you know what? It's none of your goddamned business. I work my ass off 10 months per year. It's that hard work that gave you all those gooey feelings of patriotism last summer. If during my brief window of down time I want to relax, enjoy myself, and partake of a substance that's a hell of a lot less bad for me than alcohol, tobacco, or, frankly, most of the prescription drugs most of you are taking, well, you can spare me the lecture.

I put myself through hell. I make my body do things nature never really intended us to endure. All world-class athletes do. We do it because you love to watch us push ourselves as far as we can possibly go. Some of us get hurt. Sometimes permanently. You're watching the Super Bowl tonight. You're watching 300 pound men smash each while running at full speed, in full pads. You know what the average life expectancy of an NFL player is? Fifty-five. That's about 20 years shorter than your average non-NFL player. Yet you watch. And cheer. And you jump up spill your beer when a linebacker lays out a wide receiver on a crossing route across the middle. The harder he gets hit, the louder and more enthusiastically you scream.

Read the rest of it.

Michael Phelps is a living testament to how stupid it is to say that if you use pot, you are doomed to a life of failure. The man occasionally uses a little reefer, but somehow has managed to reach a level of physical prowess that most tee-totalers could never even dream of achieving. In the first 23 years of his he has achieved more than most of them will ever achieve. It's just a mite difficult to take them seriously when they say that kids who follow his example will be lead to ruin, unless one is speaking primarily about government agents taking away their liberty.

"Make no mistake, tax cheaters cheat us all, and the IRS should enforce our laws to the letter. " Sen. Tom Daschle, Congressional Record, May 7, 1998, p. S4507.

Then the IRS should send him a note saying that he needs to pay $100,000 in fines and report to prison for 3-5 years.

Change we can believe in:

WASHINGTON - The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba.

But even while dismantling these discredited programs, President Barack Obama left an equally controversial counterterrorism tool intact.

Under executive orders issued by Obama last week, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, or the secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the U.S.

If I were an enemy combatant, I would much rather end up in the hands of the CIA in a secret prison rather than being sent by the CIA to Syria or one of the other countries that cooperates with us. The Syrians, unlike the federal government, have a well-earned reputation for making Islamists rue the day that they ever took up jihad.

I posted the following comment on Dr. Helen's blog, and several of the MRAs went after it:

To some extent, a woman who has spent her time as a homemaker is actually entitled to her husband's earnings because she has sacrificed hers to enable his career. She's the one who takes away the burden of caring for the kids during the day, cleaning the house, stocking the fridge, cooking, etc. So the sense of entitlement is not entirely without cause if the woman is a genuine homemaker.

I personally don't have much respect for the sort of man who loses his job and then spends his time trying to get a similar, good job while not working. Why didn't the man go take 1 or 2 hourly wage jobs while looking for a good salaried position? He's still got bills to pay, and his homemaker wife doesn't exactly have a whole lot of earning potential.

If you, as a man, let a woman assume the position of housewife, you're just going to be wide open for crap like Mike T is spouting.

Depends on the type of woman you marry. As a Christian, I have access to a better dating culture than most MRAs.

If you don't have small children at home, a "homemaker" is simply a parasite. I wouldn't touch one with a ten-foot pole.

There is no such thing as a childless homemaker, aside from women who stayed at how to take care of things until their kids went to college.

But if you absolutely want to be able to brag that you're such a good breadwinner that you easily support a sit-at-home, then go to it. Make sure you can also support her for the rest of your life (including alimony in the case of a divorce). If you want such slavery only for outer appearances to others ("I'm such a high-earning and swell guy that I can support a leech") then you deserve what you get.

My wife isn't the sort of lazy, good-for-nothing that you've obviously known most of your life. Neither are the women in her family. 

Mike T: A 100 years ago, women who stayed at home probably had a full day of work. Things have changed. Your willingness to absolutely ignore that fact is odd. Or do you think that you have to stick up for women, just because?

I think it's pretty obvious, JG, that you are a perfect example of the unhinged MRA who sees any qualified defense of women as a tacit admission that a man is a secret "mangina." It may strike you as incredible, but there are still a number of women who have to work a full day to take care of the house, children, bills, errands, etc. This is especially true of families that homeschool, which my in-laws did and my wife and I will when we have kids.

All of you MRAs who put your kids through the public schools because you want your wives to work full time are also parasites. Your wives' unnecessarily presence in the workforce inflates the labor supply and creates a greater need for daycare and public schooling which costs families like mine that take care of those costs themselves. I can count the cost of your parasitism every time that Fairfax County sends me a property tax assessment.