Code Monkey Ramblings

The Russians and the Chinese may have finally figured out an effective way to deal a death blow to the US dollar's standing as a global reserve currency:

Arkady Dvorkevich, the Kremlin's chief economic adviser, said Russia would favour the inclusion of gold bullion in the basket-weighting of a new world currency based on Special Drawing Rights issued by the International Monetary Fund.

Chinese and Russian leaders both plan to open debate on an SDR-based reserve currency as an alternative to the US dollar at the G20 summit in London this week, although the world may not yet be ready for such a radical proposal.

Mr Dvorkevich said it was "logical" that the new currency should include the rouble and the yuan, adding that "we could also think about more effective use of gold in this system".

Some of the Muslim countries have been talking off and on about a similar currency. It's about time that some major country finally started to debate the merits of fiat currencies versus precious metal-backed currency. The best argument that opponents of this policy have come up with that I have seen is that "there is not enough gold for the global economy." Even if that were true, the immediate deflationary impact of switching to a gold standard would be justified by the way that a gold, gold/silver or gold/silver/platinum standard would impose fiscal responsibility on governments and corporations. Let's not lose sight of the fact that a lot of the wealth that we take for granted under fiat currencies is little more than an illusion.

If this takes off, the best way for the United States to counter it would be to immediately go to a system based on gold and silver for the backing of our currency. Even copper could be thrown in there for good measure, as copper has a lot of industrial value and is increasingly expensive. Of course, won't actually do that because in this era of hope and change, that's too realistic and insufficiently idealistic.

He clearly understands, unlike most politicians, that there is something very sick in our legal system:

The National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009 that I introduced in the Senate on March 26, 2009 will create a blue-ribbon commission to look at every aspect of our criminal justice system with an eye toward reshaping the process from top to bottom. I believe that it is time to bring together the best minds in America to confer, report, and make concrete recommendations about how we can reform the process.

Why We Urgently Need this Legislation:

• With 5% of the world's population, our country now houses 25% of the world's reported prisoners.
• Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980.
• Four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals.
• Approximately 1 million gang members reside in the U.S., many of them foreign-based; and Mexican cartels operate in 230+ communities across the country.
• Post-incarceration re-entry programs are haphazard and often nonexistent, undermining public safety and making it extremely difficult for ex-offenders to become full, contributing members of society.

There are too many problems to do the system the justice that it deserves in a single blog post, but they range from a completely incoherent sentencing system, to little accountability for police and prosecutors, to an explosion of outsourcing of the prison system to private corporations. There is, something fundamentally sick about a system wherein the imprisonment of American citizens is treated as a market opportunity, rather than as a basic cost of keeping society orderly. When the left says that corporations have a vested interest in undermining the rights of the public, they are absolutely correct when speaking about this one.

All of the tough-on-crime rhetoric of the last 30 years or so has created a system that is entirely focused on punishment and that has few protections for the falsely accused. Law-and-order voters don't really care about civil liberties protections because it never occurs to them that innocent people really do get caught up in the system, that police and prosecutors can really be so corrupt as to frame people or protection a conviction at all costs (even when the person is probably innocent) or that someone could be in the wrong place, at the wrong time and simply appear guilty of a crime. Their worlds were turned upside down for a little while when Mike Nifong was publicly exposed.

The problem with tough-on-crime politics, which lead us to where we are today, is that they are simplistic. They assume that corruption is non-existant. They assume that the police and prosecutors are extremely gifted at investigating, collecting facts and coming to the right conclusions. They assume that the victim is a pure victim, and the perpetrator is a scoundrel unworthy of sympathy. All of these things are childish, and unfounded in reality. Even casual research on domestic violence will show how untrue this is, as men usually cause only half of the violent situations, but bear an overwhelming majority of the convictions.

The truth is, there are precious few safeguards in place anymore. The power of the jury has been weaked by efforts to reduce every jury to a collection of drooling, pliable mouth-breathers. Courts have frequently allowed police and prosecutors to get away with virtually any offense committed in the line of duty from showing no common sense regarding the use of military force in a residential setting, to withholding exculpatory evidence that would exhonerate the defendant. The justice component is almost completely missing from the process beginning with the basic goals behind the laws, to their enforcement.

The tough-on-crime politicians and commentators may now frame their side as some sort of "victims' rights" movement, but the only right a victim has is to justice. Their victimization gives them no special status that warrants undermining the due process rights of the defendant or sentencing criminals to cruel and unusual punishments. A system that disregards these rights is worse than the criminals it puts away.

Roger Simon's heart bleeds for Joe Biden's daughter. He thinks that she is not fair game, even though her father has had no problem passing laws which have damaged property rights and ruined countless lives in the name of preventing people from getting high. This is my comment that I left on PJM, and I post it here in the event that it gets censored or deleted.

With all due respect, all of you, from Roger Simon, to the commenters, who believe that we should lay off her are full of it. Here we have the daughter of a man who has spent much of his congressional career creating laws which have ruined the lives of countless people just like her, have contributed to the wild expansion of our prison population and perpetuated the destruction of civil liberties and property rights (you should read some of Biden's proposals). This is a man who has no problem ruining the life of your daughter or your son, over what this woman did.

She should be arrested, prosecuted under the worst drug laws and sentenced to a 20-30 year sentence like tens of thousands of people, especially black men, get every year under laws that Biden helped to create or actually wrote. It is only fitting that she fall on the sword that her father has used to damage so many lives and undermine American civil liberties. It is only fitting that he should have to watch as his daughter is subjected to the same sort of penalties that this callous, self-righteous son of a bitch has no problem inflicting on others.

You may say she should not be punished for her father's actions, but she has helped her father's career. Not only that, but the only way to make drug warriors appreciate the human element of the laws they support and aggressively demand to be enforced is for their kids to be punished as severely as any of the rest of us or our children would be under the law.

I have little doubt that this will disappear, that no prosecutor will dare to touch her. That is precisely why she needs to be prosecuted. The moral hazard issue with the way that drug laws apply only to the average American, not the elites who vigorously support them so as to maintain a powerful state, are a key part of why we are losing so many liberties from property rights, to surveillance rights, to self-defense rights in the name of the war on drugs. The only way to temper this is to make them feel the same pain that ordinary people experience.

Most people who support drug prohibition have no problem with people drinking alcohol. Most of that group also don't believe that it is the government's business when someone gets drunk until they get behind the wheel or commit a crime. If you ask most people if they think that the state of being drunk should be illegal, they'd laugh you off as a puritanical lunatic, yet they have no problem with the government prohibiting a functionally identical state of mind achieved through other substances.

It is fundamentally hypocritical to argue that it should be legal to achieve an intoxicated state of mind via alcohol, but then condemn the same act achieved through marijuana or another drug. It is one thing to argue for some prohibition of drugs on the basis of saving people from themselves because hard drugs can be more addicting than alcohol. That is misguided sympathy for one's neighbor. It is another to object to the state of intoxication because of the chemical route that the adult chose, as that is nothing more than the conflation of personal preference with moral and objective truth.

Guess which one of these is the expensive Italian sport sedan, and the other is an American electric car that costs under $60k. CNet has the full scoop on this, but I thought a side-by-side comparison of the Tesla Model S and the Maserati Quattroporte would make a good demonstration of how far Tesla has come along.

If California's legislators were interested in real solutions, they would be lining up tax dollars to buy several hundred of these for senior government officials to use as official vehicles instead of useless, coercive legislation covering car paint. I am not one to advocate such things normally anyway, but if the government were going to dump money into any car company, it really ought to be Tesla which is at least doing serious innovation, isn't burdened by the unions, and will probably have a future if it can get its prices down over the next few years.

They act like we owe them something...

Congress appears ready to pass an Obama administration plan that could create mandatory public service requirements for all American youth, fulfilling a campaign promise.

The bill, HR 1388: The Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act, otherwise known as the "GIVE Act," has already passed the House by a vote of 321-105.

On Tuesday, the Senate voted closure on the motion to proceed by a margin of 74-14 in a move that makes its ultimate passage likely.

In the words of KMFDM, "ask not what you can do for your country; ask what your country did to you." In the case of my generation, that's obvious: they saddled us with enough debt that the future of the United States as an economic superpower is growing less likely everyday. Why should anyone under thirty feel obligated to national service for a country that is being actively bankrupted by older generations who have every intent to leave their kids and grandkids with a bill that will lead to poverty if paid or possibly war if it is not? There is something revolting on a level that defies words about the way that smarmy, earnest older Americans feel that younger Americans ought to be coerced into giving up more of their time, when the older generations increasingly exist just to consume what is left of America's wealth. They want credibility? Draft every senior citizen on Social Security for 100 hours of community service every year that they are on Social Security!

One of the side effects of Roe v. Wade is that the retiring generation will be larger than the younger generation taking over from the retirees. Younger Americans will be less powerful politically, regardless of how many can be mobilized to vote, because there will be fewer of us. That doesn't bode well for the future, as more is expected of us, demanded from us and forcefully, coercively extracted from us. Something will have to give because I don't know that my generation will tolerate this situation indefinitely, especially when many of us find that it is extremely difficult to have and support a family with a middle class lifestyle.

MEXICO CITY, Mexico (CNN) -- In the face of spiraling drug violence that has shaken the country, the Mexican army has taken a lead role in attempting to thwart the narcotraffickers. But its ability to do so has been hurt by a large number of desertions, government officials say. At present, some 40,000 forces are deployed throughout the nation against the traffickers, according to the secretary of defense. "A soldier who makes 3,000 or 3,500 pesos (US$196-$229) -- how is he going to be there for one month when we know that for up to 40 days he is out of his familiar environment and the confines of his barracks?" asked Rep. Roberto Badillo, a member of Mexico's opposition PRI party.

Like a fat kid at Golden Corral, Geithner just can't help himself:

The Obama administration is considering asking Congress to give the Treasury secretary unprecedented powers to initiate the seizure of non-bank financial companies, such as large insurers, investment firms and hedge funds, whose collapse would damage the broader economy, according to an administration document.

The government at present has the authority to seize only banks.

The people on the right who supported Obama on the "lesser of the two evils" grounds are probably feeling like a sorority girl who woke up after a long night of partying naked next to a fat, townie wino right about now. "He isn't a Socialist! See, he doesn't support Hillarycare or Karl Marx." Puh. Lease. The signs were all over the wall in a neat diagram with incredible, mathematical precision in terms that even a small child could grasp if they look at it with both eyes open and their brain turned on.

KMFDM's Back in the USSA

Jerry Pournelle doesn't quite get it about democracy:

The sad truth is that democracy itself is often unstable. Intellectuals lose faith. Democracy is not flashy. It falls out of fashion. The intelligentsia feel scorned, unappreciated, and turn to new theories. There are other pressures. Republics stand until the citizens begin to vote themselves largess from the public treasury. When the plunder begins, those plundered feel no loyalty to the nation--and the beneficiaries demand ever more, until few are left unplundered. Eventually everyone plunders everyone, the state serving as little more than an agency for collecting and dispensing largess. The economy falters. Inflation begins. Deficits mount. Something must be done. Strong measures are demanded, but nothing can be agreed to.

The democratic process began to fail the moment that it gave into the great myth of equalitarianism. He quotes John Stuart Mill who said that a degenerate people unfit to rule themselves should consider themselves lucky to be ruled by a Charlemagne, but not once is it discussed how the people became degenerate and unfit to rule themselves in the first place! Little consideration is given to how the unproductive got ahold of the political power to use the machinery of state to rip away the property of the productive.

Here's the dark, dirty secret: you can blame it all on universal democracy. The seeds of the destruction of liberty were sewn the moment that the only qualification for wielding political power was citizenship and a pulse. When you give every mouth-breather the right to vote, the demagogue's job is just that much easier because he need only equip himself with a loudspeaker to rally them to the polls.

We find ourselves in this position because the modern mind is so incredibly stuck on the means that the end is irrelevant to it. Better a tyranny that we vote for ourselves, than a liberty which an elite that is unaccountable to most people gives to us. The thought of having no power to influence the system is far scarier to many than the thought of losing real liberty. Ironic, considering the fact that the odds that any one vote will have any impact on actual liberties or an election are the odds that a butterfly's wings will trigger a hurricane.

As the system became more "democratic," so much tyranny has been rubber stamped with the faux legitimacy of the will of the people. The franchise has given the tyrant a cheap excuse that placates the same mobs that would have resorted to regicide or tyranicide with far greater haste under a less democratic system. Tyrants know that, and that's why the one right that they will never take away is the right to vote.

Where the dark side was calling, and you really liked its sales pitch? I don't know why, but this thread on the Movable Type forums hit a sore spot with me. I think it's because I have a tendency to be like a rat that jumps onto a listing ship. Let me explain...

Movable Type used to be the king of blog software, but it has since gotten its ass handed to it in the marketplace of ideas by WordPress. That happened because of a licensing issue, not a technical issue. On many fronts, Movable Type is, beyond a reasonable doubt, technically superior to WordPress. Yet that doesn't change the fact the community is just listing in the waters, without a lot of active development from outsiders like WordPress. Movable Type has a few, very good, developers not affiliated with SixApart, and the plugin development and such relies heavily on them.

Designers? Now that is a sad state of affairs. There are only a handful of us that take care of things on that front. My themes blog is one of the biggest references for Movable Type these days, and I haven't updated it in a few months. We have, for all intents and purposes, been soundly defeated by WordPress on this front. It doesn't help that the way that Movable Type handles templates wasn't designed for rapidly swapping out the markup, just the style sheets. WordPress' approach is problematic in that it makes it harder to reuse markup, but I'm enough of a realist to know that for the average user they just want to swap out the look and feel, which WordPress does well.

Security is the one serious concern that I have with WordPress. Articles like this don't make me confident, though the fact that Stefan Esser's site Suspekt is powered by WordPress gives me reason to believe that he is more confident in its progress since he was last asked about it. The only time my blog has been hacked was because of a slightly out of date version of WordPress 2.7, and that didn't exactly recommend it to me, but I suppose that could happen to any major project.

Threads like this on the Movable Type forums are problematic for me. I mean really, why should anyone have to buy a feature to password protect their entries when systems like WordPress provide that as a basic feature? I know the technical reasons for it, unlike most of the people who've criticized Movable Type here, but I still dismiss them as a classic case of making the perfect the mortal enemy of the good. The more I look at Movable Type, I find that it's got some amazingly good implementations of certain features, and I'm left dumbfounded with "a serious case of WTF" as to what happened to others. I mean, this is one of the most incredibly customizable content management systems out there in its space, and yet it has no default system for password protection of entries. Not even a crappy excuse for one.

For blogging, I have to say that WordPress is probably more than enough. I think a lot of my harsh criticism in the past comes from my being stuck working in an enterprise mindset on the job where WordPress would be laughed at as a serious content management system. That's also caused me to fail to accept the fact that Movable Type really is slow--too slow--for a shared host because it is so much more capable for an enterprise environment as a content management system than WordPress.

So who knows. I'll play with the latest version of WordPress and give it a shot. Time to be platform agnostic again. I'm finding myself with less play time these days, especially for screwing around with blog software, and if and when we have kids, that's not going to improve. Both of them have their strengths and weaknesses. So much so, that truthfully, I sometimes wonder if they really should even be seriously competing with one another.

Update [1 day later...]: I decided to investigate the possibility of using FastCGI to run Movable Type on my host, and found out that my host does technically support it, but they're having problems with getting mod_fcgid and Apache to communicate. If I can really speed up Movable Type, then I think I'll have to stay with Movable Type because it just does what I want to do over the next few years so much better than WordPress. In the mean time, if you are a Movable Type user running your blog on a reliable FastCGI host, please give me some feedback on your host!

Update [5 days later...]: Like a dilettante, I played around with WordPress 2.7, but found that it did not meet my needs on many levels. I host several blogs on one installation of Movable Type, something that you cannot do with a single installation of WordPress. I'd have had to install WordPress MU in order to come close. After a little bit of reorganization and modification, I was able to get a tighter level of organization between these blogs from the same admin console without writing any plugins, changing htaccess files, adding new database tables, installing new software, etc.

I have to agree in hindsight that WordPress is deceptive in that it is a great upgrade from Blogger, but it is a poor replacement for a real content management system like Movable Type. While it may be faster at certain things like processing comments, it is not faster for creating software, new page layouts and it is certainly not as fast at delivering unchanged content as the static publishing model that Movable Type uses by default.

If you use PHP, one of the things that is really great about Movable Type is the ability to have it generate large shared chunks of the templates as PHP includes. I've used that to save tens of megs of storage space on my host.

The prosecutor who tried these cases would make a great target for someone in the FBI's civil rights office:

Alan Jepsen was playing videogames at his home in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, when the cops came knocking on his door. He was handcuffed in front of his sister and thrown in jail. In the words of his attorney, Jeffrey Purnell, "This child, this 17-year-old high-school kid, had to spend a week in jail-they locked him up and they put him in jail with grown-ups."

His crime: Having sex with his 14-year-old girlfriend. And, perhaps, being a boy.

The day after Alan's arrest, Sheboygan authorities arrested Norma Guthrie, also 17, for having sex with her 14-year-old boyfriend. Norma, however, did not have to spend a single day in jail. She was released immediately, on signature bond, while Alan was held on a $1,000 cash bond, which his family could not afford. Sheboygan County Assistant District Attorney Jim Haasch is handling both cases.

The disparity in the punishment of these 17-year-olds, both accused of having sex with the 14-year-olds they were dating, goes much deeper. Haasch charged Alan with a Class C felony, which, according to court records obtained by The Daily Beast, carries a maximum prison sentence of 40 years. Norma, on the other hand, was charged only with a misdemeanor, which carries a maximum sentence of nine months in jail.

This is a clear-cut violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. It is every bit as much of one as giving 40 years to a black man for selling a kilo of cocaine and 4 years to a white man for the same offense when they have similar histories. The conduct of the prosecution is such that the FBI needs to get involved because this case is clearly a serious violation of the civil rights of Alan Jepsen.

Some of the commenters at the Daily Beast have pointed to the fact that no matter how hard we try, men and women are different and will be treated as such. There is some truth to that, but that demands certain changes. Either women should retain their equal rights and be equally accountable, or their rights should be reverted back to what they were for centuries.

From a societal perspective, what Guthrie did with her boyfriend was actually worse than what Jepsen did with his girlfriend. A 14 year old girl is typically better suited to fill the role of a mother and caregiver to an infant than a 14 year old boy is to be a provider for the mother of his child and their child. From a traditionalist perspective, if one were to try to justify different punishments here, it should actually be Guthrie who would receive the harsher sentence. Devil's advocacy aside, it's non-negotiable that Guthrie's behavior with her boyfriend had more severe potential consequences for society than Jepsen's behavior with his girlfriend.

According to Kathy, Alan's girlfriend told him she was 16. The criminal complaint against Alan confirms this, and reveals that his girlfriend lied to the police, as well. She was at Alan and Kathy's apartment at the time of the arrest, and told the officers twice that she was 16. One of them "then advised [his girlfriend] that if she was not truthful with the officer, she possibly would be arrested for obstructing if she lied about her age, at which point [his girlfriend] looked down at her feet, looked back at the officer, and said she was 14. Immediately when the defendant [Alan] learned of this, his body tensed up and he got a scowl on his face."

At that point, said Kathy, "I was pissed off and wanted to hit her, but there were three cops in my apartment, so I couldn't."

The girlfriend should have been charged with obstruction of justice over this to teach her a lesson because her actions caused Jepsen to commit a felony. Based on his reaction, a decent prosecutor would have noted that the Jepsen didn't have criminal intent in his actions, and that it was the girl's deceptive behavior which caused the criminal act to take place. The prosecution shouldn't be allowed to hide behind the "you should have found out her age first" argument either because there are plenty of people in high school who, for one reason or another, don't have any official government ID showing their official birthdate. Therefore, even if it had occurred to him to try to find out if she was deceiving him, it would have been a herculean task for him to verify her age, and no reasonable person could expect that of a high school student.

Sex still sells:

CHICAGO - As a bartender and trainer at a national restaurant chain, Rebecca Brown earned a couple thousand dollars in a really good week. Now, as a dancer at Chicago's Pink Monkey gentleman's club, she makes almost that much in one good night.

The tough job market is prompting a growing number of women across the country to dance in strip clubs, appear in adult movies or pose for magazines like Hustler.

Employers across the adult entertainment industry say they're seeing an influx of applications from women who, like Brown, are attracted by the promise of flexible schedules and fast cash. Many have college degrees and held white-collar jobs until the economy soured.

"You're seeing a lot more beautiful women who are eligible to do so many other things," said Gus Poulos, general manager of New York City's Sin City gentleman's club. He said he got 85 responses in just one day to a recent job posting on Craigslist.

They say that prostitution thrives on sexual slavery, that it needs sex slaves in order to meet the demand, but that's no more true than saying that the alcohol industry needs Russian mafia smugglers to cheaply distribute Vodka in immigrant neighborhoods. As the economy is showing, there are plenty of women who, for the right price, will sell themselves as anything from strippers to prostitutes, if the price is right. The dark sides of the vice trades are nothing more than unethical price competition.

Color me unsympathetic to the argument that these women are victims of exploitation when they often make more in one day than most of us make in a week. Exploitation never paid so incredibly well. I'm sure many of these women are crying themselves to sleep every night over their lot in life, as they pay down mortgages, buy new cars and live far better than they once did.

As Iran's example shows, there will always be a decent number of ambitious, college-educated women who are willing to whore themselves out to get ahead. Culture barriers are superficial on issues like this. In fact, the more expensive that college gets, and the less opportunities that women have to make the big bucks in "honest jobs," the more that this trend will grow.

Old women will do the strangest things to help their sons get out of a traffic ticket, including faking a serious heart condition that they later pretend to die from...

MEMPHIS, TN (AP) - A Memphis man who was driving his 83 year-old mother to a hospital says a Shelby County Sheriff's deputy stopped him for an expired tag and did little to help as his mother died in the back seat of his car.

Wayne Ables says during an early March 12, 2009 traffic stop, the deputy refused to follow Ables to Saint Francis Hospital-Bartlett and write the ticket there.

The hospital was less than a mile away.

Instead, the deputy, whom the department has not identified, checked Ables' license and insurance while calling an ambulance.

What's that? She died before she got to the hospital because the power-tripping jerk had to show his authoriteh right there? Of course, the local police force will let him get away with this offense against common sense and decency because he cannot be expected to behave with either of those things. Yet another lesson in how most evil is actually incredibly banal. The cop likely caused this woman to die--all because he couldn't be bothered to follow the man to the hospital and wait to ticket him after the hospital staff had taken the woman into the emergency room.

This brings a whole new level of meaning (and wrongness) to an old saying:

MARCH 18--Meet Michelle Owen. Concerned that an ex-boyfriend had used her laptop to search for child pornography, the Indiana woman asked police to search the computer for illegal images, but had her plan backfire when cops discovered two videos of her engaged in illicit acts with a dog. Owen, 24, was charged last week with two felony bestiality counts in connection with the video files, which a detective found in the laptop's "recycle bin."

My favorite part of the story is that the dog got bored and walked away. Good for him. At least someone had some sense in the whole thing.

What's Wrong With The World has quoted an excerpt from a book which happens to show how so many of the assumptions about modern liberal democracy are simply fraud:

Putnam and Habermas can rejoin that we teachers do our best to be Socratic, to get our job of re-education, secularization, and liberalization done by conversational exchange. That is true up to a point, but what about assigning books like Black Boy, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Becoming a Man? The Racist or fundamentalist parents of our students say that in a truly democratic society the students should not be forced to read books by such people--black people, Jewish people, homosexual people. They will protest that these books are being jammed down their children's throats. I cannot see how to reply to this charge without saying something like "There are credentials for admission to our democratic society, credentials which we liberals have been making more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists, male chauvinists, homophobes, and the like. You have to be educated in order to be a citizen of our society, a participant in our conversation, someone with whom we can envisage merging our horizons. So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours."

-Richard Rorty

Conservatives and libertarians have written volumes about how modern liberals are incredibly intolerant of divergant views, so this won't come as a complete surprise to many. What it does show is that the foundation of modern Western society is fraudulent, as it is purported to be based on pluralism, but in reality, the alleged pluralism is only in degrees of liberal orthodoxy. You're allowed to be mildly conservative about homosexuality, such as enacting "don't ask, don't tell," but you are not free to openly state that you believe that homosexual behavior is deviant, wrong and should be politely, but firmly, rejected. You're allowed to be mildly religious, so long as your religious beliefs don't contradict the establish consensus of the scientific community--as it stands at the moment.

The society that people like Rorty want is not one based on diversity and pluralism, but one that is sterile and dogmatic. It is a nation-wide echo chamber. Comments like his should serve as a final proof that the very reason why there is a culture war is because of the inherently totalitarian nature of left-liberalism. By definition, any ideology which makes no distinction between the political and the social is totalitarian. The ground-up assault on everything from the ideas, to even the familial stability of one's opponents makes left-liberalism an enemy which warrants no compassion or commiseration from its opponents.

The Guardian does a decent job of describing the transition to dynamic programming languages for many projects, but falls short in a few areas:

The recent trend is towards dynamically typed languages, which use inference to reduce the amount of code to be written. Java, C# and C++ are "static typed" languages, whereas JavaScript, Ruby, Python and PHP (used by Facebook) use "dynamic typing". In static languages, the programmer must declare each variable's class (such as string, integer, or list) before the program runs; in dynamic typing, it is assessed as the program runs. Fowler says Ruby is between two and five times more productive than Java. "In static languages, there are all these speed bumps. You can just express yourself more rapidly in languages like Ruby and Python, and that gives you an edge. That edge does make a significant productivity difference."

I don't think it's accurate to make such a big deal out of the dynamic typing issue, especially since most .NET languages and Java are loosely-typed. Most of the tricks that are done with Python, Ruby and other dynamic languages could be done with proper use of object hierarchies in either Java or a static-typed .NET language. The real gain in productivity comes from the libraries and deployment environments. It takes only a few minutes--once--to set up a deployment environment for these languages, and the turn around time from writing code to testing is minimal because so little needs to be done to run the code.

Java's slow decline is coming mainly from the culture behind it. When coming up with the specs for web application development with Java, Sun and its partners had a chance to make an alternative spec that would allow Java to be integrated into a regular web server and Java apps run like CGI or PHP scripts, but they didn't, and that's costing them today. There is nothing particularly special about the syntax or the libraries of the major dynamic languages, PHP aside, that make them naturally better than Java. Rather, it's the way that the Java environment works on the server-side.

Despite growing interest in emerging languages, the dominance of Java and C# is unlikely to be shaken soon. One reason is that many of the alternatives compile to a format that executes on the Java or .NET runtimes, such as Groovy and JRuby, which are dynamic languages for Java, and Iron Ruby, Iron Python and F#, which run on .NET. This enables easy integration and access to rich runtime libraries. "People are not learning new languages to escape from platforms, rather they are trying to find new ways of doing things better on the existing platforms," says Bini.

This approach is a half-way approach, and won't address the underlying issue of the complexity of developing an application in Java that is ready for deployment. In the long run, it'll be a trojan horse that enables a purer set of dynamic languages to gain a better footing. Developers will start migrating to JRuby or IronPython, and eventually new projects will start to be evaluated from a perspective of "do we really need the JRE or CLR?" In many cases, they won't, and thus Java and .NET will be bypassed. Where businesses will benefit is that developers can pick and choose. Pure Ruby or JRuby? Use JRuby going forward on legacy Java systems, write new business software that has little practical need for the JRE's huge object library in pure Ruby with ruby-on-rails and other frameworks.

I won't hold my breath that businesses and government agencies will ever get over the "one language to rule them all" mentality. There is a lot of security in having a single language that kinda works because there are more developers to choose from, and there is less risk of "why did you choose this over that" at project reviews. It's competing against the mentality embodied by the saying "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM (or Microsoft)," and that's a battle that no one was won yet.

• Like a few more gallons of gas on a raging fire, what's another $1 [Trillion - thanks Erik] being dumped into the financial system by the Federal Reserve?
• The Obama Administration appears to be moving in a direction that would allow for independent research into the medicinal use of marijuana.
• Internet Explorer 8 is out. While the betas and release candidates did feel like a marked improvement over IE 6, it's still a bloated beast compared to Firefox 3.1, Safari or Chrome. Hopefully the rumors about Microsoft preparing to replace the IE rendering engine with a radically redesigned one from their research labs are true.
• Twitter's growth is huge. Part of me is tempted to join Twitter, but I'm not sure if my attention span can tolerate another hit...
• The Agitator has some good law and order links.
• I figured out an easy way to set up password protection for blog posts and pages. If you need help setting up WordPress-style password protection, and use Movable Type Pro, give it a look.
• Google is trying to advise the New Zealand government on its proposed DMCA-like legislation. Who would have guessed that a law like the DMCA, which has a minimal burden of proof on the accuser, would be ripe for abuse?
• Looks like the iPhone is going to be getting a multi-core upgrade sometime soon.

They say that the system redistributes wealth from the middle class to the rich, but I don't think that that necessarily has to be the case. All the middle class has to do is buy into these companies when they're being bailed out. I have a few thousand dollars in an old 401k that I can spare, so I figured it was time that I complete the "Circle of Finance." Why not buy 500-1000 shares each of Citi and AIG? If the federal government is going to redistribute my money to these banks, why not make sure that I close the loop so that if they stay solvent I can at least get my money back and offset the outrageous taxes we will pay later for the debt used to bail out these companies?

The money I stand to lose from this gamble is far less than the money I know I will lose in taxes later on, and that I just might get back if these companies recover.

The one topic that is rarely brought up when discussing systematic reforms to the way that business is done in D.C. is the issue of the moral hazard inherent to any system in which the underlying constitution is not treated as a serious body of law, rather than a framework. As it currently stands, legislators can pass laws that violate the constitution with impunity because the worst that they will ever suffer is having the Supreme Court shoot down their ideas, and then they are free to make another, modified proposal because there is no personal risk involved in constantly defying the Supreme Court and the U.S. Constitution.

The argument for not allowing legislators and executives to be sued is usually that it would "undermine democracy" by giving too much power to the courts, but that's rubbish. The current system is undermining itself precisely because there are so few practical checks on legislators who barely pay lip service to the Constitution and the courts' decisions on their legislation. Furthermore, there is real harm done to people who are prosecuted or sued under unconstitutional laws. All of the money spent on court costs, lost business, grief and misery from being subjected to civil or criminal sanctions are non-trivial injustices done by out-of-control politicians.

As a matter of practicality, the liability should be limited to the members of Congress who propose unconstitutional laws and cosponsor them. The current system allows members of Congress to combine laws, add bad amendments to good laws and other mechanisms which could create chaos if proposing unconstitutional laws were made a tortious offense. Still, this would go a long way toward bringing the moral hazard issues under control.