March 2009 Archives

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.

Those wages should quickly put it into perspective how the Mexican cartels are able to bring as many as 100,000 men under arms for their cause. They could offer 100,000 men making that much money a 100% pay raise upon desertion, and it would cost $45,800,000. For a billion dollars a year, they could easily build a series of rival private armies more than capable of holding their own against the Mexican government. The US government can continue to deny that the War on Drugs has caused this crisis, but it's probably only a matter of time now before the US Army has to intervene. If and when that happens, they will be facing a situation much more dangerous than Iraq.

Coworker: "I think there should be a maximum income allowed." Me: "You know what they did in the last major society that practiced Socialism?" Coworker: "What?" Me: "They shot the kulaks." Coworker: "Who were the kulaks?" Me: "Middle class property owners like you..." Coworker: "Oh..."

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.

 

This looks like one to watch:

Meanwhile, the elder Monroe had started walking toward the front door. When he got to the first step on the porch, the witnesses said, the rookie officer opened fire, striking Monroe several times.

"He just shot him through the screen door," said Denise Nicholson, a family friend who said she was standing a few feet away. "After [Monroe] was on the ground, we kept asking the officer to call an ambulance, but all he did was get on his radio and say, 'Officer in distress.' "

The witnesses said the second officer picked up a handgun that Monroe, an avid hunter, always kept in plain sight on the porch for protection. Using a latex glove, the officer grasped the gun by its handle, the witnesses said, and ordered everyone to back away. The next thing they said they saw was the gun next to Monroe's body.

"I saw him pick up the gun off the porch," Marcus Frazier said. "I said, 'What are you doing?' The cop told me, 'Shut the hell up, you don't know what you're talking about.' "

The Louisiana State Police, FBI and the U.S. Attorney with jurisdiction in this case are all investigating the local police over this. When even the Louisiana state government gets involved in a case like this, you know that there have to have been shenanigans of the criminal sort, given Louisiana's abysmal record on racism and public corruption.

It also appears that the officers involved didn't fall very far from the "Official Department Policy Tree:"

"If I see three or four young black men walking down the street, I have to stop them and check their names," said Mills, who is white. "I want them to be afraid every time they see the police that they might get arrested.

"We're not out there trying to abuse and harass people -- we're trying to protect the law-abiding citizens locked behind their doors in fear."

There is a time and a place for profiling of this sort. If you have three or four young black men who seem to be wearing known gang colors, that's one thing, because chances are that they are gang members. However, it does nothing to improve the relationship with the community for young black men to be treated like criminals simply because they are walking down the street in a small group. Mills' nuance-free comment doesn't leave one with the impression that he or most of his department appreciate the distinction between the two approaches.

So far, the official stance doesn't sound in the least to be defensible. The police did not fear for their lives or the lives of anyone present. Given the level of corruption common in municipal governments in Louisiana, the coverup allegation is nowhere near as outlandish as it might seem. If Mills actually cared about winning back the support of his community, among all races, these officers would be sitting in a local jail, given the severity of the charges and number of eye witnesses against them.

 

The recent shooting in Alabama may have left a lot of people dead, but it doesn't justify bringing soldiers in to keep the peace. Surely local and state police forces were more than sufficient to control the crime scenes and keep the peace. This is part of a growing trend of getting the military more involved domestically. It began with republican meddling with the Posse Comitatus Act to help fight the drug trade, expanded through the rise of SWAT units in every podunk jurisdiction and recently the Army has started to take a more active role in "Homeland Security." The trend is moving steadily toward more military and paramilitary forces aimed at the American public.

Bills and laws like this only serve to make it harder for parents to be responsible for their kids:

Child care providers or parents who allow children access to pornography would be guilty of child abuse and listed on the state's child abuse registry, under legislation being considered by lawmakers.

Some critics say the bill could be interpreted so broadly that even a child who sneaks a peek at a Playboy Magazine could push parents into legal turmoil. The legislation is not clear on whether it includes explicit material a child might discover on the Internet. And critics note other laws already hold parents accountable for failing to provide care that could prevent children from harm.

You better believe that some overzealous prosecutor looking to make a name for himself will use that loosely worded language to try to go after some parents whose kids are habitual consumers of pornography. Exploiting loopholes like that to win new prosecutions is one of the fastest ways for a prosecutor to build a career. Eliot Spitzer, pre-hooker scandal, was a perfect example of that, which is why critics have every reason to suspect that the law will be a lot more abusive than it is being made out to be by its supporters.

The social conservatives who support this law would do well to consider the fact that they are also putting a lot of power into the hands of kids who don't like their parents. Under this law, all they have to do is prove that they can access porn, have done so numerous times and are "troubled by it" to start a serious child abuse case against their parents.

It's rare that I find something on Slashdot worth sharing, but this comment about how feminism has gone from a semi-reasonable movement to a completely unreasonable one is a good example:

It was, but it's following a common pattern of reform movements. Back when the movement started, the issue was obtaining equality before the law. That's been achieved, so the reasonable people have moved on to other pursuits, leaving the dregs behind. It's similar to the way that the leadership of the civil rights movement degenerated from MLK to the likes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

I know several women who are 1960s-1970s era feminists who cannot believe that Amynda Marcotte is a perfect example of what feminism means today. In fact, they were downright sickened when I finally got them to see what their movement has started to look like today.

CNet needs to do a better job of screening some of its writers. The guy who wrote this mild attack on Wal-Mart's health care IT package has an obvious personal motivation for criticizing them, regardless of the technical merits:

This equates to a tremendous opportunity to change the nature of the health care business. If Sam's Club can package technology, functionality, and support at a cost that makes it simple for the average physician, then this can only be a good harbinger for the efficiency and reliability of patient records management.

Too bad Wal-Mart missed a brilliant opportunity to revolutionize the way IT services are acquired by small businesses. In this era of "on demand" pricing, charging an up-front license fee for this type of software seems almost archaic. It certainly creates a new capital expense requirement for the average medical clinic that may be a difficult pill to swallow in this economy.

A much better idea would be to offer subscription-based pricing, with perhaps some additional up-front fees for the PC, training, and installation. Or how about an entirely Internet-based solution with a secure connection between the host and a rich Internet application user interface? Best of all would be a solution delivered in a true service delivery platform, with complete end-to-end trust and performance features.

There are obvious advantages to having a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering for doctors, but at this point in the game, Wal-Mart's solution is the most practical. Baby steps before running a marathon. There are still a lot of unresolved legal issues which could come into play, and it remains to be seen how well a SaaS solution would be able to deal with all of the regulations, precedents, etc. that demand compliance. That doesn't even count the basic public relations problem of ensuring that every technically illiterate patient feels reasonably secure that their records are being protected by their doctor and his staff, something that would be nearly impossible to do if the doctor has to tell his patients that their records are stored in some far off location.

The single biggest threat that medical SaaS vendors will face will come from possessing so many records. While not as lucrative as credit card records, they will be a very tempting target, and unlike credit card numbers, once they're gone, they're gone for good into the hands of people who shouldn't have had them.

Will another one bite the dust?...

The search of the office at 1 Judiciary Square is part of "an ongoing investigation," said a spokeswoman for the FBI's D.C. Field Office, Lindsay Gotwin, said.

She said two men, Yusuf Acar and Sushil Bansal, had been arrested.

Acar is an information security officer who was also, according to online requests for proposals, responsible for contracting. Bansal is listed on the city's procurement website as the CEO of the Advanced Integrated Technologies Corporation, which was awarded two technology contracts last year worth a total of $350,000.

The Washington Post and WTOP Radio report that the men are being held on bribery charges.

The outgoing Chief Technology Officer, Vivek Kundra, was appointed last week Chief Information Officer by the Obama administration. His last day at the city government office was March 4, a spokeswoman for D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, Leslie Kershaw, said. He was appointed to the Washington post in 2007, and held it when Bansal's contract was awarded.

$350K is probably not enough to warrant the attention of a CTO in an organization as large and well-funded as the DC government. However, the underlying issue here is why a government employee was allowed to run a business that was supplying goods and services to his own agency without anyone raising enough alarms that Kundra would have heard about it. That sort of conflict of interest is something that government organizations are, by law, supposed to take extremely seriously, and TSA has been busted for it in the not so distant past.

My predictions about this case:

• 25% chance Kundra gets taken down as part of this.
• 25% chance it comes out that Kundra had no way of knowing about this.
• 50% chance Kundra is technically innocent, but is yet another lame duck appointee.

Bob Owens makes some very good points about the first and second amendments:

Perhaps they should be required to only spread ideas using quill and parchment; after all, that's what the Founders had. They couldn't have imagined high-speed modern printing presses, television, radio, or the Internet's instant global reach.

Or perhaps they would eagerly submit to having a federal background check before being allowed to own an iPhone, BlackBerry, typewriter, computer, printer, or word-processing program, and would agree to the imposition of a 500-character limit on the amount of text they can type or words they can say before a government alert is triggered.

After all, if the pen is truly mightier than the sword, shouldn't the dissemination of potentially inflammatory thought be regulated more tightly than mere ammunition?

Of course, these same journalists would fight such restrictions on their First Amendment right to free speech and having the tools to spread their thoughts, with all the ferocity they could muster against the cruel tyranny of a far too powerful, far too intrusive state. They'd likely want to take up arms themselves against a totalitarian state and its bureau of speech.

It's too bad that under the same tyranny they encourage such arms could not exist.

The great tyrannies of the 20^th century that killed so many millions of people were created first by the force of words, not arms. Lenin, Hitler and Mao created their regimes, which went on to create their own satellite tyrannies in other nations, by gaining mass public support for their ideas. It was (de facto, if not de jure) freedom of speech that enabled Lenin to organize, speak to rallies, distribute propaganda, etc. that allowed the Bolsheviks to become a force to be reckoned with. The NASDAP and Chinese Communist Party have similar origins as well. Most of the oppressed states of the Warsaw Pact and other satellites of these countries can trace the origins of their own tyrannization to the free flow of terrible ideas from men and women of dark and sinister moral character.

Ideas have consequences, and some ideas have consequences that can sweep away the lives of millions of people; small arms-related deaths seem quaint by comparison. People often get caught up in the actions of the people afterward, which often include censorship, as they are unable to accept the fact that it was the free flow of ideas, not access to weapons and money, that got them there in the first place. Censorship is dangerous in its own right for many reasons, but so is the free flow of ideas when people forget that ideas have consequences.

The market has already begun to beat the government to the game on electronic health records:

"We're a high-volume, low-cost company," said Marcus Osborne, senior director for health care business development at Wal-Mart. "And I would argue that mentality is sorely lacking in the health care industry."

The Sam's Club offering, to be made available this spring, will be under $25,000 for the first physician in a practice, and about $10,000 for each additional doctor. After the installation and training, continuing annual costs for maintenance and support will be $4,000 to $6,500 a year, the company estimates.

Wal-Mart says it had explored the opportunity in health information technology long before the presidential election. About 200,000 health care providers, mostly doctors, are among Sam Club's 47 million members. And the company's research showed the technology was becoming less costly and interest was rising among small physician practices, according to Todd Matherly, vice president for health and wellness at Sam's Club.

The financial incentives in the administration plan--more than $40,000 per physician over a few years, to install and use electronic health records--could accelerate adoption. When used properly, most health experts agree, digital records can curb costs and improve care.

The only potential downside to this will be that many medical practices may have security issues because they won't have IT staffs keeping their networks and machines up to date and configured to fight the latest known security problems. The physicians who buy these packages need to make sure that a key part of the support package that they are buying is labor to get their infrastructure secured. For many, that may be as simple as keeping it unnetworked, as it probably should be, but for the sake of their practice, they need to make sure that there is an obligation to secure all of the affected equipment.

Whatever the technical merits and issues are, the momentum is clearly moving in this direction. The Obama Administration has made a federal case out of the cost of health care, and the market is starting to respond aggressively. The best thing that privacy advocates could do now is to stop fighting the transition, and start focusing on fighting the legislative and court battles against the privacy issues that will arise in the near future.

There are still some unresolved technical issues that will probably get resolved by legislative "solutions." Transferring records from provider to provider will be a contentious issue, and the federal government is going to try to regulate that from the network layer, up to the administrative staff level. There is also not a consensus on how to store medical data, so medical data will have to be transformed from one format to another, and that will create potential legal liability issues from both privacy and accuracy issues. It is simply naive to assume that these are issues that the government will take a laissez faire approach to, given the performance of both major parties on regulation.

This post by Elusive Wapiti reminds me of an issue that I often have with people who use Romans 13 and the "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" arguments in favor of Christians either being mindlessly obedient to government officials until they become psychotically oppressive or go to their death like lambs to the slaughter. These extremes put many Christians into a passive position which render them impotent, and worse yet, make the church look weak and useless as a source of reform and renewal in the eyes of non-Christians.

Christians frequently say "if it doesn't violate's God's law, then the government can do it." That is true to a large extent, but where they go wrong is forgetting that a group may never do that which is forbidden to an individual. Just as an individual may not murder, a group of people cannot take for themselves the authority to commit murder. Capital punishment is no exception to this rule, as individuals had a right in ancient Israel and most ancient societies to carry out a private execution against someone they knew had killed a kinsman. Moral limits scale up from the individual to the entire society.

Romans 13 assumes a reasonable, sensible government. There is no way that Paul would seriously try to convince Christians that an Emperor like Nero is God's servant to do them good because his actions toward them were unjustifiable, cruel and outright satanic. Rather, what Paul was addressing was the common civil servant in the empire who was just a normal person, of normal character, trying to enforce reasonable laws and taxes. Regardless of law and policy, this aspect of the state stays constant between regimes, flowing from one form to another. The vast majority of regime changes always have been, and always will be, at the top of the government, in the body politic, not in the machinery of the state.

The lawlessness and rebellion that is condemned is not opposition to laws and policies, but rather to the very basis and authority of the government itself. It is fundamentally philosophically and morally different to rebel against a civil servant or leader who is carrying out a grossly unjust action, as compared to rebelling against mundane, banal laws and public officials just because one finds them inconvenient. Here is an example of the difference: it is impermissible to rebel against a police officer who seizes your license for driving 50mph over the speed limit; it is morally licit to rebel against a police officer who tries to seize your property and tries to beat you and your family to death for the same offense, even if the law permits that punishment. To rebel in the former case is to rebel against authority because it is authority and inconvenient, to rebel against the latter is a moral position because the law and officer's actions are irreconcilably immoral, cruel and unjust.

The motivation of the authorities also plays into this issue. I assume that other Christians are familiar with the teachings on martyrdom, so I won't rehash them, but will point out that the motivation of the authorities is of paramount importance here. One is not a Christian martyr because one is persecuted and happens to be a Christian, but rather one becomes a Christian martyr when their mere act of being a Christian is the fundamental first cause of their persecution. This is the difference between the deaths of the Apostles and the persecution of many believers. For many believers throughout history, their faith was only a tangential issue in their persecution, if even one at all. Rather than glorifying God, their unwillingness to openly defy that persecution merely made them a run-of-the-mill victim.

The founding fathers of the United States are an excellent case study in how Christians can openly rebel against the state without incurring the wrath of God. Their act of rebellion was morally licit because they first sought reconciliation with their government, then gained the support of their colonial governments and the general public, isolating the king from support from the majority of the population (1/3 supported the rebellion, 1/3 did not and 1/3 quite frankly didn't care). By gaining the support of most of their countrymen in positions of authority, they kept the fundamental machinery of state intact and allowed it to carry out its God-appointed duties. By gaining the support or passive of acceptance of the majority of the population, they would ensure a legitimate regime that would be able to govern the country without resorting to immoral behavior to assert control.

The prevailing mentality is not entirely without justification, in that it is better for Christians to patiently deal with obnoxious laws than to become regarded as scofflaws or to have the church regarded as believing that its relationship with god immunizes it from earthly authority. It bears good testimony to reasonably obey such laws and to be a martyr for one's faith and calling. It does not, however, bear good testimony to quietly, patiently take arbitrary, capricious abuse, especially when it is directed at society as a whole.

There are times where I am sympathetic to the secularist demands that "men of God" stay in the church and out of politics. This is an example of one of those times. For a man who claims to still have a conservative bone in his body, he has a remarkably knee-jerk reaction to anyone who criticizes his Dear Leader:

You Republicans are the arsonists who burned down our national home. You combined the failed ideologies of the Religious Right, so-called free market deregulation and the Neoconservative love of war to light a fire that has consumed America. Now you have the nerve to criticize the "architect" America just hired -- President Obama -- to rebuild from the ashes. You do nothing constructive, just try to hinder the one person willing and able to fix the mess you created.

After Obama was elected, you Republican leaders had a unique last chance to send a patriotic message of unity to the world -- and to all Americans. You could have backed our president's economic recovery plan. Since we all know that half of our problem is one of lost confidence and perception, nothing would have done more to calm the markets and project resolve and confidence than if you had been big enough to take Obama's offered hand and had work with him -- even if you disagreed ideologically. You had the chance to put our country first. You utterly failed to rise to the occasion.

Proving once again that Obama's supporters believe that their collective will to power can overcome and dominate the basic laws of economics, Schaeffer would have us believe that all the banks really needed was an injection of confidence and capital. Nevermind the fact that they found themselves in an unimaginable clusterfuck of debt created through exotic asset arrangements and strategies that even the devil himself would applaud as innovative. The Obamaniacs' strategy for recovering the economy: carpet-bomb the failing institutions with capital and forget that they were run into the ground.

At a time when the country needs a radical shift to extreme fiscal austerity on the part of the federal government, Obama wants to dramatically increase federal spending. Whatever those who came before him did doesn't justify what he is doing now. For a "man of God," what Schaeffer is defending is tantamount to declaring that two wrongs make a right. What Obama is doing is fundamentally immoral, as it is breaking the back of my generation to ease the burden on the older generations. This whole affair is nothing short of one giant celebration of rank hypocrisy.

Pat Buchanan illustrates why no matter how long and hard conservatives chant "yes, we can" to drug prohibition, they can no more deny the basic rules of economics there than liberals can in the war on poverty:

Some 2,500 federal troops are already in Juarez, where in 2008 there were 1,600 drug-related murders. Gun battles occur every day. Nationally, 45,000 army troops and police are committed to this war that Mexico is not winning. For, according to the March 3 Washington Times, the Pentagon now estimates the cartels field more than 100,000 foot soldiers.

If conservatism is as grounded in reality as is often claimed, then conservatives need to face a cold, hard fact of economics at work here. The cartels are able to field a private army over twice the size of the government forces arrayed against them. Even if drug warriors dismiss these fighters as mere criminals, that does nothing to change the fact that the Pentagon now has credible reason to believe that in one form or another, the cartels have more men under arms than most countries are able to muster. As Buchanan rightfully recognizes, something has to give because starry-eyed, puritanical stubborness is likely to lead to a fiasco in Mexico where in the country is transformed into a bona fide failed state of 110,000,000 people with the collapse of civil government and possibly civil society.

Conservatives have long ignored, in a violently irrational way, the basic rule of supply and demand when it comes to drugs. If you cut the supply by half, you can reasonably assume that the average price for the product will rise accordingly. That will continue until we find ourselves where we are today with only the most sociopathic individuals daring to continue to be in the drug trade on a large scale. All the war on drugs has accomplished is the anti-conservative goal of giving dangerous, evil men and women the funds with which to wage a violent campaign against their government which they show all signs of having a very strong chance of winning.

If there be any doubt that the drug warriors would literally lead us to Hell if that would stop drug use, I present the following statement by our former Drug Czar:

"If the drug effort were failing there would be no violence," a senior U.S. official said Wednesday. There is violence "because these guys are flailing. We're taking these guys out. The worst thing you could do is stop now."

Leaving aside the fact that his analysis on the position of the cartels is wrong, the fact that the cartels are able to unleash violence on the scope that they are using is proof enough that the drug effort has failed. No market can be called a dying market when its leading businesses are able to command the level of wealth and power that the Mexican cartels do. People like Walters would rather see nations like Mexico collapse than see the funding rug ripped out from underneath the cartels by legalizing drugs. The fastest way to end the violence is to collapse the profitability of narcotics by legalizing them.

I just tried to log into my blog about a hour ago, only to find that the cgi scripts were completely dead without any discernible explanation. So, I had to reinstall Movable Type. Probably a matter of having upgraded one time too many or something like that. I don't know what the deal was, but it's working now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jeremy Lott is not impressed by the ostensibly precocious writing skills of the latest wunderkind, child-savior of conservatism:

It would be cruel to quote this book at great length but here is the first paragraph of Krohn's second chapter: "Now that we have finished our discussion of old school conservatism and the constitution, let's move on to the next major aspect of the conservative belief system: the life issue. The life issue is near and dear to all conservatives. Does not life keep all of us alive? If it wasn't for life would we not surely be dead? Conservatives believe that life is something that everyone should have."

Yes, conservatives do generally believe in a right to life, and also in Krohn's other three pillars of conservatism: respect for the Constitution, a smaller government, and personal responsibility. But that specific answer is the sort of unrefined thought that we expect young people to throw out there for adults to respond, "Isn't he cute?" or "Well that's not quite right, son. See..."

There is clearly a lot of desperation in the conservative movement if this is the sort of writing that is being passed along as the work of modern, young political prodigy. John Locke's dog barfed up greater works of erudition and rhetorical prowess than this. Be it as it may, there seems to be a method to the madness of how this comes about. If you are young and have the right ideas, you can be forgiven for a complete lack of ability to write mature commentary because your acceptance of those ideas is considered extremely precocious and a sign of your budding brilliance. You're ahead of the curve baby, just watch out for that downward slope on the other side!

Lott's commenters prove themselves to be of average intelligence and skill as well in their inability to grasp what a true prodigy is, let alone identify one. A true child prodigy would be able to stand on his or her own with the likes of a Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity without any compensation for their age. The only compensation that Mozart got as child prodigy musician was an acknowledgement that he simply didn't have enough time to truly perfect his obvious skill (which already surpassed most adult musicians). Krohn is no prodigy if that sample is any indication (and with political books, it usually is). What he is is yet another teen that conservatives will hope--in vain--is able to right the conservative ship's course before it crashes on the rocks.

In 10 years, chances are good that if he is anywhere near as good as he is purported to be, he will not look back fondly on this experience except as a money maker.

How dare they!

Limbaugh's comments were, apparently, so abhorrent that the host is accused now of being the de facto voice of conservatism and the Republican Party.

That, as we all know, is technically impossible, considering someone actually is listening to Rush Limbaugh. Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, went so far as to call the radio host the "voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party."

That is a neat trick. If Limbaugh is the voice of conservatism, conservatism must want Obama and, thus, America to fail. After eight years of seething hatred-plenty of it deserved-for George W. Bush, this brand of contrived indignation touches a new level of creative dishonesty.

After eight years of passionate, frothing-at-the-mouth, head-turning, projectile-vomiting vitriol directed at Bush as some sort of post-modern attempt at an eloquent critique of the Bush Administration, it is pathetically hypocritical to get outraged over Limbaugh's mild criticism. Many lefists hoped, prayed for the complete failure of everything that Bush touched, a number of them going so far as to damn near achieve orgasm everytime a suicide bomber successfully carried out an attack in Iraq just to stick it to Bush. They wonder where all of the critics from the right were, but the average person can be forgiven for not noticing us because we were drowned out by the raucous cacophony of the Eight Year Hate that the left breathlessly carried out for Bush.

Even more sensible democrats like Bill Clinton know that Obama is headed for a collosal failure. We've most past hope into change, only it's a change from leadership that pretended to be fiscally responsible, to one that has no idea what fiscal responsibility actually is in practice.

Many cops will take away the wrong lesson from the case of detective Jarrod Shivers who made the mistake of participating in a SWAT raid to enforce a warrant on a non-violent drug offender who had just been subjected to a break-in by a dangerous felon who had it in for him. They'll see more of a need for armor and armaments, not a need for introspection on why someone thought it was a good idea to raid a man who was a trifecta of "shit waiting to happen" for the cops. In their opinion, it defies comprehension that a man whose home had just been burglarized would wake up from a dead sleep thinking that men beating down his door would be police, rather than armed robbers. It's also irrelevant that they knew about this when they were strapping on their equipment and preparing to play Strumtruppen Part Zwei: The American Campaign.

Like most incidents that get people shot, these are easily avoided by police in most cases. All they have to do is ask themselves a few questions:

• Does this person have a history of violence?
• Is this person accused of a violent crime?
• What time of day are we doing the raid?
• Are we absolutely sure we can trust the information we have?

If the answer to any of these question is "no" or "probably not," then chances are you are about to walk into an avoidable, violent confrontation with a person who will assume you are a criminal, not a cop. Most people wouldn't give a rodent's posterior if a murderer is shot dead in such a raid, but most people have a hard time justifying a possible extra-judicial death sentence over drug use. No one likes stories of innocent families getting raided, little kids getting guns put to their heads and told to "shut the fuck up" and fathers getting either blown away or sentenced to murder for defending their family against what they believe is a gang of men busting down their door.

Because the serious terrorist groups don't have the resources to put men on the ground with maps, cameras and cell phones:

A California lawmaker has introduced a bill that would require all virtual mapping programs to blur out schools, places of worship, government or medical buildings or face hefty fines and possible jail time.

Assemblyman Joel Anderson, a Republican, crafted the bill after it was revealed that terrorists in Israel and Mumbai used popular mapping programs to help plot their attacks.

"All I'm trying to do is stop terrorists," Anderson told the AP. "I don't want California to be helping map out future targets for terrorists."

According to the bill text, photographs and images of schools, places of worship, government or medical buildings must be blurred. Street-level imagery would also be banned. Companies that violated the provisions of the bill would face fines of up to $250,000 for every day the illegal imagery was available online.

It worked so well for Barbara Streisand that it's just amazing that no one has had the wisdom to apply this thinking to more important buildings like schools, places of worship and government buildings. It's about time that the law was changed because clearly, blurring out these buildings will make them inaccessible to terrorists and other ne'erdowellers. Good for you, Joel Anderson, for denying international terrorists what is clearly the key part of their intelligence gathering process. We need more politicians like you, and less like the ones who are busy trying to balance California's budget.

Why the entitled American poor are one of the least sympathetic classes of people in human history:

• America is capitalist and greedy - yet half of the population is subsidized.
• Half of the population is subsidized - yet they think they are victims.
• They think they are victims - yet their representatives run the government.
• Their representatives run the government - yet the poor keep getting poorer.
• The poor keep getting poorer - yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.
• They have things that people in other countries only dream about - yet they want America to be more like those other countries.

While many foreigners would consider it an incredible blessing to trade bankruptcy for a new lease on life, we are told that we are one of the crappiest countries on Earth because people cannot have their cake and eat it too with respect to health care and other issues. For many Americans, the perfect is functionally the mortal enemy of the good.

For EW:

• They claim that women are oppressed - yet women have the same basic legal rights as men.
• They have the same basic legal rights - yet they don't share the same basic responsibilities.
• They don't share the same basic responsibilities - yet they demand more concessions in the name of equality.
• They demand more concessions in the name of equality - yet male wages, education and legal standing are slipping.
• Male wages, education and legal standing are slipping - yet they claim that men control everything.
• They claim that men control everything - yet men have virtually no legal recourse against a woman who wants to walk all over them.

 

 

Now is not the time to be putting "principle" before reality for many job seekers:

Americans enjoy a right to privacy even though it's not technically protected by the Constitution. Employers that exploit the free, open nature of the Web to snoop into and judge people's personal lives infringe on everyone's privacy. Their actions also verge on discrimination.

Unfortunately, what you say online can be very important to an employer. How many employers would feel comfortable with a job applicant they found who is an active contributor to Stormfront (or an equivalent site) or ran a pornographic blog that came up on the first page of Google search results on their name? Not many because sometimes what you say online can say a lot about you, especially if you are trying to build up a professional image in the workplace. Imagine the ridicule that a competitor could inflict by discovering all sorts of sordid information about its competitors' employees and public contacts. That's just a taste for how outside pressure can influence these decisions.

I am curious, though, about the discrimination angle. Would it be discriminatory for an employer to tell an applicant that he or she wasn't hired because they posted a picture of them having deviant sex, while wearing a Nazi uniform and smoking a crackpipe? Where does this evil discrimination end, and unavoidable social pressure begin? With the state of common sense, the world may never know...

It's ironic that Vox Day cites a poorly reasoned article by Dirk Benedict when he says that the new Battlestar Galactica is unrealistic. Reading Benedict's take on the original BSG shows that it is he, not the new series' writers, who is offbase. Seriously, who watches a post-apocalyptic story about the human race being subjected to a withering nuclear holocaust and then remorselessly hunted by robotic enemies looking for a story of genuine hope, faith and redemption? Probably the same people who watched The Day After expecting a happy ending (reuniting in heaven doesn't count).

One of the things that the new series does that the old one didn't, is that it pulls no punches on human nature. Good guys don't wear white and bad guys don't wear black. The lack of moral clarity is so strong in the new series because like humans on Earth, the humans from the colonies are not objectively good people. They're just people, normal people, caught up in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust and who are being hunted by a relentless enemy. Only a believer in the "inherent goodness" of man could believe that if you took 50,000 stranges, crammed them into a fleet of ships on a course to no known location, and put a homicidal enemy behind them that most of them would retain a real sense of nobility and character.

For many, the series' writers committed the mortal sin of giving the villains complex motives, and even going so far as to suggest that the "good guys" are from a people who have a similar history of bloodshed and exploitation, as witnessed by the way that Gemenese and and Saggitarons are treated by the rest of the colonial society. There is a sense that humanity is sinful, first hurting its own, then creating a slave race of sentient machines, and now its sins are coming back to haunt it. That is offensive to many viewers, who want a show which focuses less on the judgment against the "good guys" and more on seeing evil get neatly trounced. God forbid that there be a kernel of legitimate rage and demand for justice on the part of the villain.

There is an element of truth that the series does portray the women a bit too powerfully, mainly coming from the character Starbuck, but the accusation is unfair with regard to Cylons and Laura Roslyn. Tori is portrayed as an unsympathetic, back-stabbing subordinate, and there is nothing particularly strong or interesting about Cally. Dualla was portrayed as a very supportive wife to Lee Adama who was treated unfairly because of the love triangle that she found herself in with her husband and Starbuck. Cain, well, Cain was portrayed as nothing short of a cold-blooded monster who embodied the worst traits of a military officer, and looked horrible when compared to Bill Adama. Most of the women are strong because they have to be for reasons that have more in common with the lives of frontier women than with East Coast feminism.

The most unfair criticism of the series is that the men are universally weak-willed, confused and useless. On numerous occasions, Bill Adama demonstrated his independence from the women above him, and personally risked his life for the sake of the civilian population. Likewise, Saul Tigh manfully handled torture on new Caprica that would have reduced Benedict's Starbuck to a sniveling little twerp mewling for his mother. He even overrode his love for his wife when he had to choose between her and the resistance. Turrel could hardly be called pussy-whipped, and Anders likewise lead a desparate resistance to the Cylons on the shattered colonies. Helo may not be a brash, flirtatious son of a gun, but that would be inappropriate in a character who is supposed to be a conservative family man and warrior.

There are legitimate criticisms of the show. It may be somewhat intelligent and philosophical, but it is not very deep in those respects. The way that Starbuck is able to get away with bloody murder is not very realistic, even if you factor in her skills and the dearth of qualified replacements. However, a lot of the criticism it has gotten is, in my not so humble opinion, just a bunch of bullshit based on a highly political, culture war-esque view of the show.

This is an example of one of the things that is very wrong with the typical American's view of morality:

Thank you for this essay. I refuse to watch Battlestar Galactica for every reason you mentioned. I like science fiction but what I like more(and I believe most people do) is an upbeat message and a clear delineation between good and evil, with good winning every time. I never watched the original ( with you as Starbuck) but I loved the A Team and of course Face was my favorite.

Good and evil are not so cut and dry. Even good done for the wrong reason is not an objective good. The world operates in shades of grey, with the white side of things impossibly out of our reach, and our nature pulls us much closer to the black side of the spectrum. People tell themselves that it is as easy as good guys in white, and bad guys in black, and never shall the two meet because that makes themselves feel better about who and what they are. That is why most people, at least in America, really like a clear separation in every movie. It makes it easier to hate the villain and keeps the villain from reminding them too much of themselves or anyone they've associated with.

Unless you are speaking from the perspective of eternity, not only does good not always win, but it rarely wins because the odds are stacked against it 10,000:1. We see signs of that everyday, even when we just read through the headlines, but again, because people need to see things in black and white, they rarely make the connection that shades of grey exist and dominate our world.

I don't read the Bible anywhere near as much as I should. It's one of my biggest shortcomings as a believer, and that is saying something since I have my own very long list of shortcomings. At one point or another, I read the following chapter, Matthew 23, but for some reason (probably the Spirit's guidance), I opened it up tonight when I opened the New Testament to a random location to do a little reading:

13"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men's faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.[c]

15"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.

16"Woe to you, blind guides! You say, 'If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.' 17You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the temple that makes the gold sacred? 18You also say, 'If anyone swears by the altar, it means nothing; but if anyone swears by the gift on it, he is bound by his oath.' 19You blind men! Which is greater: the gift, or the altar that makes the gift sacred? 20Therefore, he who swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. 21And he who swears by the temple swears by it and by the one who dwells in it. 22And he who swears by heaven swears by God's throne and by the one who sits on it.

23"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. 24You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

25"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.

27"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean. 28In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

29"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. 30And you say, 'If we had lived in the days of our forefathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.' 31So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. 32Fill up, then, the measure of the sin of your forefathers!

Teachings like this are why I have come to truly understand just how impotent we are to force virtue on others. What do we gain by teaching others to be good on the outside, where that teaching will always stay, when the inside does not change? Shall we continue to hide the ugly truth of who and what we are by more ritual righteousness? The world is indeed going to hell around us, but is that not the nature of mankind when allowed to express itself fully?

If we want change, we must first realize that we cannot have it through our own selves and actions.