May 2009 Archives

As those who know me might imagine, I am not in the least bit sickened by Tiller's death. As an unapologetically pro-life libertarian/minarchist, I see no reason to mourn the death of a man who enriched himself by specializing in dismembering unborn children that were so developed that they could have just as easily been placed up for adoption. I would no more mourn him than I would mourn the loss of Dr. Mengele.

UPDATE: LGF wonders how those of us who are "gloating" can call ourselves Christians. I think the real question is, how can a "church" call itself Christian when it allows a man who makes a living this way to be an active member of its congregation? I'm probably expecting too much mental heavy lifting on the part of LGF and most of its readers who clearly think that the partial birth abortion isn't murderer based on the "geometric definition of human life" (the baby's 3D coordinates determine whether or not it's a human yet) employed by partial birth abortion defenders.

UPDATE: Cal Thomas would like us to believe that there is no difference between the man who killed Tiller, and the 9/11 attackers. I am curious. Is Thomas saying that the workers at the WTC and the Pentagon were engaged in work morally equivalent to providing partial birth abortions, or that partial birth abortions are morally indistinguishable from banking (and other activities at the WTC) and military service? For someone who says that abortion is a grave moral issue, he has a curious way of equivocating in a way that insinuates that Tiller was a swell, probably misunderstood guy who just filled a niche that was in hot demand.

UPDATE: Scott Roeder is a murderer. I agree with that statement from other pro-lifers. However, what separates him from run of the mill murderers is that the man he murdered was, himself, a serial murderer. Personally, I would not engage in a similar action because I cannot ever see myself being able to defy God's law against cold-blooded murder.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan uses this as yet another cudgel with which to beat up the dreaded "Christianists." I see that like Cal Thomas, he cannot appreciate the difference between men who blow up a building of innocent, law-abiding men and women trying to work for a living, and the execution of a man who made a living depriving viable children of the right to life. While Roeder is objectively still a murderer (his act was literally murder), it takes an extreme moral relativism to conflate his act with those of Islamists who murder innocent civilians. Roeder may be a murderer, but his target was certainly not one that can honestly be described as innocent.

UPDATE: I think El Borak has a great take on this from a moral and legal point of view. Both men, Roeder and Tiller are equally guilty of murder, and like El Borak, I would vote to hang Roeder. Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not one of those pro-lifers who the government needs to worry about. If a prosecutor showed me the evidence of this case, and it showed me that Roeder did it, I'd have no problem voting to execute him. I'd also not hesitate to turn in someone if I knew that they committed a similar act. I just happen to regard Tiller as someone whose profession rendered him as close to being a completely unsympathetic victim as has ever existed.

Gotta hand it to them, they really respect tradition. Obviously, that proves once and for all that corporations are conservative:

Look for another rosy round of profits when banks turn in their numbers for the second quarter ending in June when it will be legal for them to improve their balance sheets by shifting losses into the future, thanks to new accounting rules passed by a one-vote margin by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB).

It's just one in a series of changes made to accounting rules that allow banks to shift or ignore losses or pretend that liabilities aren't liabilities. The struggle for control of the financial recovery -- where the money goes, how it's counted and who survives -- is nothing short of war. Truth has been the first casualty.

The latest rule change allows banks to split losses into ones that they recognize immediately and others that are pushed down the road and may pop up on the books later. It passed in April with barely any notice from the press. The accounting tricks allow banks, which may otherwise be deemed insolvent, to continue to operate. It's a hell of a time to be an accountant.

Good to see the banks returning to the time honored tradition of fraud and cooking the books. When in doubt, look to the traditions of the past which served you well, I always say. Back when they cooked the books to make the toxic assets look like tasty morsels of organic economic goodness, they were flying high and snorting cocaine off the asses of $10k/night hookers in hotel rooms that cost more per night than a middle class family's mortgage monthly mortgage payment. Now that they're back to square one, they can get their act back together.

Well, anyway, let this be yet another lesson that the rule of law is one of those nice academic constructs which really doesn't do a whole lot to define the way the world actually works. When the going gets tough, the corrupt starting scheming on how to fix the system to work for them. Stroke of the pen, law of the land and all.

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce"

Karl Marx

I guess that puts this historical cycle somewhere in the vicinity of straight-to-dvd comedy movies written by a committee of identity politics activists, old church ladies and wahabi imams and certified by the ADL.

 The federal government prepares to shut down emigration:

The US Department of Homeland Security is set to kickstart a controversial new pilot to scan the fingerprints of travellers departing the United States.

From June, US Customs and Border Patrol will take a fingerprint scan of international travellers exiting the United States from Detroit, while the US Transport Security Administration will take fingerprint scans of international travellers exiting the United States from Atlanta.

Biometric technology such as fingerprint scans has been used by US Customs and Border Patrol for several years to gain a biometric record of non-US citizens entering the United States.

But under the Bush Administration, a plan was formulated to also scan outgoing passengers.

Michael Hardin, a senior policy analyst with the US-Visit Program at the United States Department of Homeland Security told a Biometrics Institute conference today that the DHS will use the data from the trial to "inform us as to where to take [exit screening] next."

"We are trying to ensure we know more about who came and who left," he said. "We have a large population of illegal immigrants in the United States - we want to make sure the person getting on the plane really is the person the records show to be leaving."

The federal debt is going to double while Obama is in office unless Congress does a radical shift in the federal budget. The amount of taxes needed to service that debt will increase dramatically over the next few years, and then there's the unfunded liabilities from Social Security and Medicare which add even more trillions of dollars of debt. For people with the means to emigrate, it just makes a lot of sense to pack up their bags and leave for another country because they are going to get sucked dry by the IRS.

The US is one of the only countries which not only taxes its citizens income when they live abroad, earn abroad and spend abroad, but that has a punitive "exit tax" on citizens who renounce their citizenship. These taxes are allegedly justified by the "protection" and "benefit" that one gets by being an American, no matter where they live, and that one should have to pay a heavy cost to give up one's citizenship. Nevermind the fact that the exit tax alone makes it clear that being an American citizen is not a meaningfully voluntary relationship with the United States for native-born citizens.

In the coming years, the United States is going to have to resort to heavy taxation and wholesale property rights violations in order to fund Obama's spending and the unfunded liabilities that are piling up in our retirement and health care programs. People who want to get out need to do so now, and it would be a very smart move for other countries to not only refuse to extradite ex-Americans who don't pay these taxes, but to not even cooperate at all with federal law enforcement on such matters.

Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with illegal immigration.

At some point, liberals began to prefer positive rights to negative rights. Most of the philosophical problems that cause liberalism to introduce the very totalitarianism it loathes come from the shift to positive rights because positive rights require action on the part of others in order to exist.

Rights like unemployment benefits, public education, universal health care coverage and access to an attorney in all serious criminal cases are positive rights because, at the very least, they require taxes in order to sustain. In most cases, they also require things like limits on individual autonomy and choice. Socialized health care and public education often require a de facto, if not de jure, legal monopoly on the service in order to be effective (from the liberal's perspective). Liberals must, then, naturally be hostile to choice because increased competition could cause the naturally less efficient government service to forced out of business. Most public schools would quickly collapse for lack of quality in a free market, and that's just but one example.

Positive rights are not inherently bad. There are some positive rights which are beneficial to the public and civilization. Children have a positive right to support from their parents. We have created a positive right to basic legal counsel for the poor, and that has at least helped some defendants. However, positive rights always carry a direct, measurable social cost in the reduction of someone's liberty and autonomy, even if it's "only" less money on their paycheck.

The unwillingness of most liberals to consider the cost of their implementation of positive rights is what ultimately causes their programs to foster many of the things which they don't want. By abandoning public education, liberals could have true, pure secular education while religious conservatives could have religious education and the two would never need to come into conflict, but the liberal dogma surrounding public education is too entrenched for it to be easily reevaluated.

In general, liberals have either created positive rights or abandoned negative rights for positive rights on at least the following issues:

• Personal safety; gun rights have been replaced with police protection.
• Health care and housing.
• Education.
• Anti-discrimination.
• Workplace hostility.
• Retirement and unemployment.
• Marriage.

For a variety of reasons, and in a variety of ways, the government is now involved in these matters. The government raises more taxes, and that reduces the economic autonomy of individuals. The government increases the regulation to define and enforce the positive rights, and that results in decreased personal and economic autonomy for individuals. The government then needs more law enforcement to police the system it has created, which increases the scope of law enforcement's authority over the general public. Often, as the role of law enforcement increases as a result of the new positive rights-related regulations, it gains new police powers and prerogatives to help it enforce additional aspects of the positive rights. For example, the state has an incredible amount of power to seize and distribute property in order to help it enforce its marriage and divorce laws, not to mention distribute access to children and pets, and even limit rights like the second amendment rights of parties to a divorce.

A liberal who actually reflects on the consequences of their ideas and accepts the dischord between the results and their intent must either become an unabashed statist, ie a totalitarian, or a libertarian.

I don't think there's any situation where it can be legally justified. I think it can at least theoretically be justified on moral grounds in some circumstances, and in those circumstances the torturer should be willing to pay whatever penalty is deemed appropriate. After all, if the information he seeks is that overwhelmingly important, then he should be willing to pay a price for obtaining it. If the torturer is not willing to sacrifice hiimself for the information, if he is only willing to sacrifice his victim, then how important can the information possibly be? Be realistic, the nature of government is to stretch its limits, so one can't reasonably expect legalized torture to remain within the nuanced strictures its defenders envision for long. [Source]

If torture were morally positive or neutral, there would not be such a feverish attempt to justify it in such a narrow, concise set of situations. It's precisely because we instinctively know that torture has an inherent sadism to it, and that sadism is at all times and in all places depraved that causes those who defend torture in limited circumstances to squirm. Additionally, if it were morally neutral like firearms, the defenders would not have to resort to esoteric situations where the consequences are so drastic that the normal laws don't apply, but could rather point to a host of morally positive situations wherein torture was used for a clear good.

Those who break reasonable laws and moral norms should always expect to be punished if caught, and that includes torturers. If a soldier tortures a man who turns out to have critical informated needed to prevent a major terrorist attack, then that might warrant leniency in the sentencing of the soldier since the outcome was good and the target guilty of conspiracy. However, neither of those factors can go beyond modest mitigation into outright amnesty for the torturer for an objectively evil act.

Torture is also a lot like vigilantism in that it is pre-emptive and error-prone. Like vigilantes, torturers do not have a moral excuse from justice because they thought they had the right person. When they get the wrong person, and they almost always do, whatever grievances they thought they had do not warrant mercy on the part of the court toward them. No matter how heinous the alleged offense, their victim is objectively innocent, and they are objectively guilty, and even worse, they did not even give the objectively innocent party an opportunity to prove their innocence. Accordingly, both groups then, in that situation deserve to have the book thrown at them by society, and have no right to expect an ounce of leniency when they get the wrong person, be that person innocent or insufficiently related to the crime.

and more critical than not obstructing a critical care paramedic doing his job:

Maurice White, Jr. is the critical care paramedic seen in the video. In a statement, White says the trooper was upset because the ambulance driver didn't yield when the trooper approached from behind. White says the ambulance driver, Paul Franks, didn't see the trooper.

The trooper pulled Franks over and was going to write a citation for failure to yield, but White says he tried to tell them they were on an emergency call and needed to take the patient to the hospital and that's when the trooper attempted to arrest White for obstructing an officer.

A brief struggle followed, at which point the trooper grabbed White by the throat. Davis' cell phone captured this incident on video. White says the trooper later told him they could continue on to the hospital, but that he would be under arrest once they got there. White was never arrested, but says troopers told him he should be prepared to turn himself in if a warrant was issued.

You could have a dying relative, but what really matters to many of these thugs is that you respect their authoriteh. How dare the EMTs not stop for the police and see what the police want? Who do they think they are, expecting the police to leave them alone while they transport a woman to the hospital? The uniformed heros pulled up behind them, and expected them to pull over and wait while the cop asked them why they, driving an ambulance, might have been in such a rush to get somewhere.

It'll be interesting to see who the prosecutor sides with here, since the EMTs were responding to an emergency call, and the police were not. If a private citizen caused an unreasonable delay, it'd likely be a serious offense since most states criminalize interference with an emergency responder. However, as we all know by now, the police and most district attorneys have a certain... "understanding" of how things operate.

I hope the EMT has a good lawyer.

The federal government should fine IBM out the ass for a patent application this ridiculously obvious. It's just a waste of the US Patent Office's limited resources to even use the application for bird cage liner. Here, I'll infringe it:

use strict;

my $ssn1 = '123456789';
my $ssn2 = '123-45-6789';

if ($ssn1 =~ /[\d]{9}/ or
    $ssn1 =~ /[\d]{3}-[\d]{2}-[\d]{4}/)
{
    print "SSN1 is Valid.\n";
}

if ($ssn2 =~ /[\d]{9}/ or
    $ssn2 =~ /[\d]{3}-[\d]{2}-[\d]{4}/)
{
    print "SSN2 is Valid.\n";
}

As I said, it's ridiculous. Took me no time to "infringe on their intellectual property." If this passes, it'll just be used as a cudgel for IBM to beat up a smaller rival who will have to waste valuable capital proving that any programmer with a half page cheat sheet on regular expressions could violate IBM's "right" to this "innovation" in under a few minutes even if they'd never seen a regex before.

CCAC is trying to deny its students the right to express opinions which aren't officially sanctioned:

In April, CCAC student Christine Brashier created pamphlets to distribute to her classmates encouraging them to join her in forming a chapter of the national Students for Concealed Carry on Campus (SCCC) organization at CCAC. The handbill states that the group "supports the legalization of concealed carry by licensed individuals on college campuses." She personally distributed copies of the flyer, which identified her as a "Campus Leader" of the effort to start the chapter.

On April 24, Jean Snider, Student Development Specialist at CCAC's Allegheny Campus, summoned Brashier to a meeting that day with Snider and Yvonne Burns, Dean of Student Development. According to Brashier, the deans told Brashier that passing out her non-commercial pamphlets was prohibited as "solicitation." They told Brashier that trying to "sell" other students on the idea of the organization was prohibited.

CCAC also told Brashier that the college must pre-approve any distribution of literature to fellow students, and that pamphlets like hers would not be approved, even insisting that Brashier destroy all copies of her pamphlet.

Brashier reports that she was also interrogated about why she was distributing the pamphlets, whether she owned a licensed firearm and had ever brought it to campus (she has not), whether she carries a concealed firearm off campus, and whether she disagrees with the existing college policy banning concealed weapons on campus.

When Brashier stated that she wanted to be able to discuss this policy freely on campus, she was told to stop doing so without the permission of the CCAC administration. Dean Burns reportedly said, "You may want to discuss this topic but the college does not, and you cannot make us." Brashier was then told to cease all activities related to her involvement with SCCC at CCAC and that such "academic misconduct" would not be tolerated.

This is a pattern with left-wing bureaucrats. They hate the first amendment with a fury that is only matched by the venom spewed by the left's conservative strawmen which they soundly and righteously thrash for their unadulterated Fascism. Be it in a public university or community college, or in a local government's zoning authority, they will routinely find ways to violate the rights of those they disagree with.

Cases like this cry out for legal reform in the form of individual culpability for actions taken under the guise of corporate protection. There is no reason the school should have to be sued when it is two bureaucrats who are clearly ordering an easily identified violation of the first amendment. Snider and Burns should be personally sued, bankrupted and then fired for this violation of Brashier's constitutional rights since what they did was deliberate and pre-meditated. A similar policy would also work wonders for making law enforcement and prosecutors gain a sense of composure in tense situations, some manners and a profound sense of discernment in dealing with the public.

The only thing that surprises me about this case is the fact that they were so brazen about it. That they didn't even bother to fabricate a complaint from a student who was "scared and intimidated" by the pamphlets, and how direct their intent was when speaking to Brashier, suggests that they had no reason to believe that anyone in a position of authority would stand up for Brashier under any circumstances.

Michael Lynton really doesn't get it:

But at the same time, I cannot subscribe to the views of those online critics who insist that I "just don't get it," and claim the world has so fundamentally changed because of the web that conventional practices concerning property rights no longer apply; that the Internet should be left to develop entirely unfettered and unregulated.

In no other realm of our society have we encountered so widespread and consequential a failure to put in place guidelines over the use and growth of such a major industry.

I'm not talking here about censorship, taxation or burdensome government restrictions. I'm talking about reasonable boundaries, "rules of the road," that can help promote the many positive attributes of Internet technology while curtailing its hugely damaging effects. And this becomes even more critical as governments around the world are subsidizing and promoting the ubiquity of high speed broadband to make their economies more efficient and competitive. With this increase in speed, content will travel that much more easily on the Internet. But without restraints, much of that content will be contraband.

Copyright law already covers most of the problem in the United States, and even in much of Europe. It's simply a matter of the government not enforcing its laws very effectively. The guardrails are already installed, it's just that they're not being maintained anymore, and that's what he should be complaining about.

It doesn't help his case that the movie and music studios have failed miserably in their efforts to exploit the way the Internet works to make their content available to anyone whenever they want it at a reasonable price. The iTunes Music Store and its competitors should be able to sell virtually anything that is on Amazon.com in physical media form, but the studios heavily restrict what can be sold through digital distribution channels such that many people cannot get the music, movies and TV shows that they want even if they are trying to buy them.

Piracy is in no small part about convenience. It is not convenient to go out to the store to buy a DVD that might not even be there when the same content is available on the Pirate Bay. Right or wrong, that's just the way it is.

Freedom of religion gets "the second amendment treatment" from local government:

A  San Diego pastor and his wife claim they were interrogated by a county official and warned they will face escalating fines if they continue to hold Bible studies in their home.

The couple, whose names are being withheld until a demand letter can be filed on their behalf, told their attorney a county government employee knocked on their door on Good Friday, asking a litany of questions about their Tuesday night Bible studies, which are attended by approximately 15 people.

"Do you have a regular weekly meeting in your home? Do you sing? Do you say 'amen'?" the official reportedly asked. "Do you say, 'Praise the Lord'?"

The pastor's wife answered yes.

She says she was then told, however, that she must stop holding "religious assemblies" until she and her husband obtain a Major Use Permit from the county, a permit that often involves traffic and environmental studies, compliance with parking and sidewalk regulations and costs that top tens of thousands of dollars.

And if they fail to pay for the MUP, the county official reportedly warned, the couple will be charged escalating fines beginning at $100, then $200, $500, $1000, "and then it will get ugly."

The easiest way to effectively destroy a constitutional right and to get away with it in the courts is to regulate it to the point of being useless in the name of public safety, environmental protection and other issues that aren't directly related to the right itself. That way, the courts can wash their hands of any responsibility for buying into sophistic arguments that are just transparent justifications for what are clearly violations of constitutional liberties.

The Supreme Court has a very bad track record on the fourth amendment, and has only recently shown some signs that it recognizes some basic individual right in the second amendment, so I'm not hopeful in the least that they would rule this to be an attempt to violate the rights of this pastor and his bible study members to assemble and worship. Heller should have been decided simply on the basis of Heller's team saying "The Constitution says: 'the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.' DC has a blanket ban on the possession of firearms for self-defense. Res Ipsa Loquitur." Yet it took the courts a great deal of hand-wringing to decide that, yes Virginia, a functional blanket ban amounts to a violation of the second amendment.

On paper, America is the freest country on Earth, but only if you don't read the fine print. There is nothing quite so blatant as the weasel clauses of the Communist constitutions which say that no rights may be used against the state or community, or Article 29 section 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Rather, the systematic whittling of most of our "paper rights" is hidden in the fine print of local ordinances and court rulings which allow "reasonable" restrictions on rights that are neither reasonable nor necessary for the preservation of public order or to ensure that one set of rights doesn't entail a violation of another. There is very little that meaningfully separates the United States from any other industrialized state in terms of actual liberty.

The Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Federal Communications Communication and the Transportation Security Administration are hereby abolished by act of Congress. Their assets shall be sold at public auction within 90 days of the enactment of this act. All personnel from these agencies shall receive a severance package equal to one month's pay and benefits. The proceeds from the sale of the property of these agencies, and the remainder of their budgets for the fiscal year shall be exclusively assigned to service the debts of the United States. All sensitive and classified materials in their possession shall be transferred to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for dissemination to the members of the intelligence community qualified to possess them and/or carry out the proper destruction of these materials.

... is a parrot in your cup?

Hi, we're from the FCC, and we're here to wipe our ass on your fourth amendment rights while we inspect your wireless router:

You may not know it, but if you have a wireless router, a cordless phone, remote car-door opener, baby monitor or cellphone in your house, the FCC claims the right to enter your home without a warrant at any time of the day or night in order to inspect it. 

That’s the upshot of the rules the agency has followed for years to monitor licensed television and radio stations, and to crack down on pirate radio broadcasters. And the commission maintains the same policy applies to any licensed or unlicensed radio-frequency device. 

“Anything using RF energy — we have the right to inspect it to make sure it is not causing interference,” says FCC spokesman David Fiske. That includes devices like Wi-Fi routers that use unlicensed spectrum, Fiske says.

The FCC is about as archaic today as the law which gives them this authority. If the agency is going to be kept around, then it needs to be lobotomized by having its content regulatory powers unilaterally revoked, and its authority to regulate devices limited to production and large scale deployments of hardware that could cause serious interference with privacy communications. Actually, you know what? Just get rid of this damn bureaucratic vestigial limb of the FDR era. If the Republicans had any desire to send shockwaves through DC by regaining their limited government credibility, they'd sponsor legislation that would simultaneously abolish the FCC and DEA and auction off all of their property to pay down the Bush-era debt.

This behavior is sadly not unprecedented. The courts have, so far, been lenient on the police when they "tag along" with regulatory inspectors who just so happen to be visiting a site of interest to the police. Here is an example of what I am talking about that happened in Prince William County, VA. Here is another write up on the same subject. Fortunately, the courts are slowly wising up to what is going on here. Those cases are not quite the same, but the courts have generally been a lot more willing to allow fourth amendment violations to occur if they happen under the auspices of a "regulatory inspection" by regulators who just so happen have to have the authority to shaft you, than a "criminal inspection" by the police.

A problem you don't often hear about in the media:

But what about divorced moms who do not allow the father to visit his children, despite court orders allowing him to do so? Another study, "Visitational Interference: A National Study" by J. Annette Vanini and Edward Nichols, found that 77 percent of noncustodial fathers are not able to spend time with their children, as ordered by the court, as a result of "visitation interference" perpetuated by the custodial parent. This would mean that noncompliance with court-ordered visitation is three times the problem of noncompliance with court-ordered child support. In short, lousy moms outnumber deadbeat dads 3-1.

It works out like this. Guy shows up at ex-wife's house with a court order granting him equal access. She makes up a transparently stupid reason why he can't have the kids. He has three choices: take the kids and run a very high chance of being charged with kidnapping, call the cops and have them most likely arrest him for "creating a scene" or "intimidating" his ex-wife by trying to enforce a perfectly valid court order which she is resisting, or he could just walk away. It's no small wonder that many fathers just give up in defeat.

• LA PD union tries to get newspaper editorialist fired for having the audacity to point out that the public pension fund for the police is unsustainable.
• The states now have a legal right to regulate what is medically necessary for Medicaid patients to receive. A pretty common sense ruling when you consider the fact that Medicaid is an insurance program.
• This could turn out to be a great new computing appliance. It's got a 1.2Ghz Arm9 CPU, 512MB of RAM and a full network stack, plus it takes SD cards. For $5,000 you could buy 50 of them, and the company that makes them is saying that it expects prices could go as low as $50/device for volume purchases. Great news for businesses and hobbyists that could benefit from distributed computing like scientific researchers and cash-strapped movie and game makers.
• This woman has got to be the most unlucky cheating girlfriend/wife out there. She thinks she's having one man's child, and then ends up with a medical condition which causes her to have twins, with each child born to a different father. I bet Maury and Jerry Springer are kicking themselves for not discovering her before the media did. Imagine the story: "guess what, we ran a paternity test on you guys and BOTH OF YOU are the 'father.'"
• When they can least afford it, a number of women are splurging on shopping trips in order to cheer themselves up. Homer Simpson expressed the same sentiment when he said, "beer the cause of and solution to, all of life's problems."
• Funniest stupid, weird criminal of the day...
• A former Roman Catholic archbishop claims that he didn't know it was illegal to have sex with kids. I can't say "you can't make this stuff up" because that's what this guy is doing unless he is the dumbest son of a bitch to enter the clergy in a long time.

The maintainer of GLIBC (GNU C Library) has boldly crossed over into new open source territory. He's such a dick to others who want to contribute to GLIBC that he is the subject of his very own bug report. It takes a special level of jackass to make someone so pissed off that they formally submit a bug report about your very presence on a project.

Here's another scenario for the "Romans 13 means the government can do whatever it wants until it violates God's law" section of the church. What do you do when policy or the law demands an action of the police, but the police refuse to uphold it? I'm not sure if this exact incident is a violation of Colorado state law, but I would be surprised if it isn't:

The Colorado Springs Police Department is refusing to release the arrest report of a man who claims he was punched by a decorated policeman after he filmed officers kicking another man.

Earlier this month, The Gazette uncovered a federal civil rights lawsuit filed against the city and Officer Peter Tomitsch by Marc Johnson, a Colorado Springs man who claims he was the victim of police brutality.

Since the police are charged with enforcing the law, if they choose to not obey the law, then the law enforcers become a law unto themselves, rendering the governor and legislature's orders and bills powerless diktats. How do you force the enforcers to enforce the law on the enforcers? Occam's razor would suggest that certain groups of Christians would simply bend over and take it lest they become a law unto themselves and be in rebellion against the established authority (ironically missing the point that in-name-only agents of the established authority are the ones who are actually in rebellion against the established authority, and that the private rebellion against them is actually morally licit in that it ironically affirms the established authority).

The "Romans 13 means the government can do whatever it wants until it violates God's law" interpretation is all well and good, but it misses the practical like a blind deaf-mute looking for a safe trail through the Amazon. If the police refuse to enforce the law, or do so very selectively (and without good justification), they have become a law unto themselves. Once that happens, there are three factions: the public, the enforcers and the established authority. It would be interesting to see the people who take that interpretation of Romans 13 have to deal with a scenario similar to what happened in Rome when the Praetorian Guard became a law unto itself and surreptitiously become the real power behind the established authority that Paul mentioned in Romans 13.

One database to organize them all, one database to consolidate them, one database to normalize the surveillance data and in the ether search them:

Finally, the bill allows for a database called "Pericles" that can pull together information from various existing French databases to create a "super-dossier" on people. According to Le Monde, such a database could contain all sorts of crucial, personal information, and sounds certain to set off the same debates that have taken place in the US whenever similar projects have been floated.

The progressive French can rest safe in the knowledge that at least they won't have to worry about grocery stores and Amazon violating their privacy in order to sell them more products that they make like. Commercial databases are, after all, far more of a threat to life, liberty and property than any government database, even a super database that consolidates the data from most of the government's ministries.

This comes with a provision to give French police more authority to conduct electronic surveillance, and to create a censorship regime for web pages, starting with child pornography websites. Once the fundamental infrastructure is in place, the French political class can move aggressively to expand it to other areas. The European Union is slowly, but steadily, moving toward its members having a great deal more control over their societies as demographic breakdown becomes imminent.

Here is an example of the markup needed to selectively add two categories to the toolbar in the Professional Website template set. Manage->Categories will have the ID numbers of the categories used in a blog.

<mt:Categories>
    <mt:If tag="CategoryID" eq="113">
        <li><a href="<mt:ArchiveLink/>"><mt:CategoryLabel/></a></li>
    <mt:Else tag="CategoryID" eq="114">
        <li><a href="<mt:ArchiveLink/>"><mt:CategoryLabel/></a></li>
    </mt:If>
</mt:Categories>

As of 4.25, <mt:Categories> does not support limiting its result set based on an ID attribute, so you couldn't have two <mt:Categories> blocks that look like <mt:Categories id="113">.

False alarm. Someone at CNN is merely ignorant of the fact that troll, not flamer, is what "cyberbullies" are actually called by most of us.

I had to steal this from Isaac Schrödinger's blog when I saw the post. It's the abstract from a comprehensive sociologial examination of how women, not men, are the driving force behind the suppression of female sexuality:

Four theories about cultural suppression of female sexuality are evaluated. Data are reviewed on cross-cultural differences in power and sex ratios, reactions to the sexual revolution, direct restraining influences on adolescent and adult female sexuality, double standard patterns of sexual morality, female genital surgery, legal and religious restrictions on sex, prostitution and pornography, and sexual deception. The view that men suppress female sexuality received hardly any support and is flatly contradicted by some findings. Instead, the evidence favors the view that women have worked to stifle each other's sexuality because sex is a limited resource that women use to negotiate with men, and scarcity gives women an advantage.

Sex is the only weapon that women, as a gender, have against men, as a gender. What a promiscuous woman does is analogous to beating her sword into a plowshare in the middle of "the fight" and making peace with "the enemy." An active minority of promiscuous women can have a devastating impact on the object value of the sexuality of the majority of women if left unchecked by the majority, and women know that on a subconscious level. Even steps as radical as female circumcision are typically initiated and controlled by the older women of the community in the regions where they are practiced as a means of controlling female sexuality.

One of the areas where feminists go completely wrong here is assuming that this is a function of patriarchy. It may be more pronounced in some respects in a patriarchy, but it would still be a serious issue in a matriarchy as well. In fact, in a matriarchy, it would probably manifest itself in a more virulent manner as promiscuous women be in a position to directly turn their sexuality into means of increasing their social standing and power among men. No matter which way you look at it, female promiscuity poses a direct threat to male loyalty, and subconsciously, women will go to great lengths to prevent that.

Found this on EW's blog, and I think it demonstrates the rampant dishonesty and problems surrounding marriage in and out of the church

We in the Anglican Church and throughout the Western world are not facing the marriage crisis. The destruction of marriage has gone far beyond cultural decline. It is today’s most urgent and far reaching crisis of church-state relations and the greatest test facing the church. Under "no-fault" divorce laws, the vows we take to one another before God and our congregations are worthless: The state can simply dissolve them. The state can tear up the contract and the covenant (and marriage is both, the one unable to survive without the other) at the mere request of one spouse without giving any reason and without any "fault" by the other spouse. Once they dissolve the marriage, state officials then seize control of the private lives-children, home, savings, wages, movements-of all family members, however innocent of any legal wrongdoing. In fact, the state typically rewards the guilty spouse and punishes the innocent one, who may be removed from the home, separated from the children, expropriated of all goods, and jailed without trial.

When the state then steps in and abolishes that marriage, without any objection or resistance from their church or fellow Christians, is it any wonder they see no purpose to the church or doubt the sincerity of our faith when it is put to the test? We rightly challenge government officials who permit the killing of the unborn or the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex unions. But we do not challenge the state when it abolishes marriages altogether-marriages we have witnessed and pledged to support. As long as we tolerate this, our strictures on marriage and our preaching (in the negative sense of "nagging") about its sanctity will earn us nothing but contempt.

Christians can act to change this. Recognizing that the state has effectively abolished marriage, perhaps it is time to acknowledge that fact ourselves and in the process to demonstrate the value we place on marriage in a way that would cost us something. As a thought exercise, imagine what it would say to the world if the churches refused to consecrate marriages until the state stops tearing them up.

-Source

Marriage is the only contract which society and the government do not respect, but do so with impunity. There is no longer any meaningful penalty for breach of contract (adultery, abandonment, abuse etc.), but there is no penalty for those who conspire to help a party to the contract violate the terms of the contract. On countless petty contracts, the government frequently punishes breach of contract and conspiracy to breach contract as a serious offense which is actionable for the aggrieved/wronged party to the contract, but marriage is a contract which the government refuses to punish any wrongdoing. There is a simple, straight-forward reason why so many people are squeamish about the idea that adultery should be a civilly actionable offense, and that's that it would put a dampener on the hookup culture if aggrieved spouses could not only sue their cheating spouses, but also their hookup in cases where they had reason to believe the person was married. Also, with adultery rates as high as they are these, days, penalizing adultery would too close to home for many people.

The state of marriage law is, from a libertarian/minarchist perspective, obscene. Libertarians would be apopletic if any other contract were treated with the sort of pointed derision that the marriage contract receives before the law, and marriage is one of the most common and important contracts in existence, as the marriage contract governs the rights of two adults, their children and their combined property. Children may be forced to live with a parent that they would rather not live with in the event of a divorce, property can be forcefully extracted from a party that has honored their end of the contract, and in many cases, a completely innocent party may have a large chunk of their income forcefully expropriated by the state to a party that has breached the terms of the contract. It is, in a very real sense, everything that we minarchists believe contract law should be, but completely turned on its head.

Tied into marriage law are all sorts of violations of civil rights ranging from executive branch "courts" that don't have to abide by full due process rights in many states, to custody laws which make it nearly impossible for a man whose wife cheats on him and gets pregnant to be free from financial obligation to his wife's illegitimate love-child. The incessant focus of many libertarians and minarchists on gay marriage as the serious civil rights issue with marriage is, quite simply, insane in light of all of the deprivations of liberty that frequently occur under marriage and family law.

The Church has not come to grips with its own complicity in the sham, and not just in the ways than Baskerville brings up. It focuses incessantly on male leadership rather than equally on female submission which is a very serious problem in light of women ending seventy percent of the marriages in America, usually on no-fault grounds. It won't even contemplate supporting the abolition of legal marriage and converting over the related issues such as child custody to normal contract laws which are governed by real courts and legal regulations.

On the issue of marriage, the Church is zealous to keep homosexuals from getting married, but is pathetically timid at guarding its sacraments when its own members defile them. In many cases, it is even an active agent in this, as witnessed by the willingness of many pastors to sanctify the remarriage of individuals who ended their previous marriages on terms that are in no way biblically defensible such as "irreconcilable differences" or adultery. Where it should be threatening excommunication, it accepts or shrugs off responsibility at the very least. It does this because it would be too painful to openly confront a significant portion of its members, and risk many of them leaving in disgust at the notion that Church is actually serious about its teachings on marriage. It isn't for everyone, and the Church should stop pretending that it is for a good reason:

8Jesus replied, "Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery."

10The disciples said to him, "If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry."

11Jesus replied, "Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. 12For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage[c]because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it."

The Church needs to turn its focus inward, especially now, because it is slowly rotting from the inside out on this issue.

Credit for the picture

They want to force us to return to the days when you had to get your news only through them:

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt tells newspaper publishers that the answer for journalism is to "invent a new product. That's the way Google thinks." But Google's products (and profit) would look a lot different if, for example, the law said it had to obtain copyright permissions in order to copy and index Web sites. Search engines have instead required copyright holders to "opt out" of their digital dragnets, and so far their market power has allowed them to get away with it.

It is unrealistic to demand new business models from the press without giving it the legal tools to succeed. Here are a few things Congress can do:

-- Bring copyright laws into the age of the search engine. Taking a portion of a copyrighted work can be protected under the "fair use" doctrine. But the kind of fair use in news reports, academics and the arts -- republishing a quote to comment on it, for example -- is not what search engines practice when they crawl the Web and ingest everything in their path.

The newspapers don't like the fact that they are now so dependent on a third party to get readers to their content. Without Google and Google News, it's very possible that the mainstream media would have actually collapsed by now because only a few newspapers have any real brand recognition on the Internet. Aggregation services like Google News actually do most newspapers a real favor by pulling links to their content up close to these major brands, and if anyone is hurt, it's brands like the New York Times whose content is linked next to hundreds of smaller newspapers.

Aside from Google's caching mechanism, there is no conceivable copyright violation that goes on when search engines index a news site. They don't republish the content, nor do they modify it for use in a way that could be said to making profit off of the content itself. Rather, it is well-understood that when Google and others index content, the service they are providing is one in which they help others find copyrighted materials.

It doesn't help the cause of these publishers either when it is brought to light that they periodically purge old content from their sites. In one case, the New York Times appears to be losing about $100k/month because it purged the writings of one of its contributors who didn't even want the content removed! The newspapers have not yet learned that storing old content is absurdly cheap, and that the more they make available, the more likely it is that search services like Google will be able to make their content valuable as a source of reference information.

-- Federalize the "hot news" doctrine. This doctrine protects against types of poaching that copyright might not cover -- the stealing of information not by direct copying but simply by taking the guts of the content. While the Internet has made news vulnerable to pilfering because of the ease of linking from one site to the next, the hot-news doctrine has limited use because it is only recognized in a few states.

Now that many news aggregator sites have taken "linksploitation" to a commercial level by selling ads wrapped around the links they post, Congress has the incentive it needs to pass a federal law protecting hot news. Such a law would give publishers an additional source of legal leverage outside of copyright to demand fair compensation for the content they create.

I don't see why copyright law wouldn't already cover the lion's share of their complaint here. If you have a 5 paragraph news report, and someone copies 4 paragraphs, unless they do so in the context of a massive rebuttal or some other form of protected commentary, that's clearly a copyright violation. Bloggers and others do not have a right (moral or legal) to reproduce such a large percentage of the original content, especially on ad-supported websites, while adding only at best a few lines of commentary.

Still, the newspapers have means at their disposal which they have not even begun to use before whining to Congress for more protections. They should make an example out of a few major bloggers who have a habit of reproducing whole swaths of content with minimal added commentary. All a hot news law will do is hurt their industry by giving some players an unfair advantage over others, while not addressing the core copyright issue. As is the case with the record industry, once you begin to focus on legislative remedies, you know you have a problem that is very close to home.

The liberal-libertarian alliance seems like a natural one given the way that conservatives are stereotyped as being in favor of regulating all manner of personal freedoms and rights. On balance, that's not a fair comparison, especially given the way that liberal views on economics and some social issues tend to have a greater tendency to increase the chance that rights will be violated.

Conservatives and liberals both resort to the government to solve social problems, but liberals are more likely to resort to government because they see a far greater number of social issues to fight. Liberalism has brought a great deal of intrusiveness into employer-employee relationships, given us regulation for every aspect of production, and imposed taxes on virtually every conceivable source of revenue. That is to say nothing of redistribution of wealth, entitlement programs and government subsidies for everything from the arts, to private "charities" which are doing work that some deem of public interest.

Economic freedom is not as simple as the freedom to keep one's income, and to buy goods and services. Rather, it encompasses even the very right to create itself. Every time that someone takes a product and modifies it, changes their house, builds something new, starts a business or carries out a private transaction, they are using economic rights. The liberal tendency to want a government override or "safety valve" controlling "excesses" here should be deeply troubling to libertarians because the "personal rights" that liberals generally want no government regulation on are a smaller subset of our rights than economic freedoms.

From a libertarian perspective, the only rights which liberals typically respect are keeping the government off of your body, freedom of speech and due process rights. However, many middle and upper class liberals fall down here as they too support limits on freedom of speech which are of dubious value and will support the War on Drugs, but with less gusto than many conservatives.

If that still sounds tolerable, then there is one unforgivable sin that liberalism has committed, and that is its systematic violation of the rights of children and parents through the public school system. They are the ones who created the modern, socialized, compulsory system of education. They are the ones who stripped students of their right of self-defense, who have destroyed school curricula in the name of tolerance, diversity and equality, and they are the ones who have worked tirelessly to defeat alternatives like school vouchers and homeschooling. The public school system is an embodiment of the fundamental difference between libertarian and liberal values.

Libertarians and other minarchists need to realize that the liberal worldview is fundamentally, irreconcilably statist in a way that conservatism is not. It would take an entire book to do this subject justice, in order to account for all of the nuances and flavors of the political left and right. Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism is probably the best starting point that I could recommend.

There appears to be evidence of a good deal of child rape conducted by Iraqi guards at Abu Ghraib against the children of female detainees while the prison was under American control. It wouldn't surprise me in the least given the leve of depravity that was normal in prisons under Saddam's regime, and that pederasty is a serious social problem in many Islamic countries (especially in the Middle East). So far, the charges don't seem to be that American personnel were involved in perpetrating it, but rather that it was covered up and no meaningful action was taken to stop it.

This reminds me of the time when John Yoo testified that it could be acceptable for executive agents to compel a terrorist suspect to speak by crushing his or her son's testicles if they didn't cooperate. As I've said before, the needs of the many don't outweigh the moral ramifications of the act against a wholly innocent third party. If the system can't or won't deal with the guilty parties, then hopefully the fathers of those children will be able to secure justice for their children using, *ahem*, "extrajudicial means."

America, you've fallen a long way. 100 years ago, American soldiers would have butchered those Iraqi men in righteous indignation, consequences be damned. Sad part is, if American soldiers had to explain to the world why they shot those men dead, even most of our worst critics would have conceded that it was morally justified for American soldiers to execute them for raping those kids in front of their mothers in order to terrorize them.

The Classic Blog template set does not have a navigation toolbar built into it. In order to add one, various templates will have to be edited to include a navigation tool bar, and some custom CSS will have to be inserted into the stylesheet template or into the stylesheet file that corresponds to the style that the user has selected. The latter is probably a safer approach for users who are less attentive to detail when managing their blog templates because StyleCatcher will overwrite custom additions to the stylesheet template when the user users StyleCatcher to select a new style for their blog.

The simplest toolbar HTML and Movable Type markup would look something like this:

<div id="navigation">
    <ul>
        <li><a href="<mt:BlogURL/>">Home</a></li>
        <li><a href="/about.html">About</a></li>
    </ul>
</div>

That needs to be inserted into every Classic Blog template that generates a web page, such as the main index, archive index and all of the listing archives. Put it right after <div id="content-inner"> in each of those templates in order to put it right above all of the columns on each page, and just below the page header.

The CSS is not very complicated either. This is the CSS that was used to create the demonstration navigation bar:

#navigation
{
    margin: 0px;
}

#navigation ul
{
    margin:0px;
    padding-left:20px;
    padding-bottom:20px;
}

#navigation ul li
{
    display: inline;
    border: 2px dotted red;
    padding: 3px;
}

Each user who wants to experiment with creating a navigation bar will have to modify this CSS to make it more attractive and better fit their particular blog's look. Another approach to the navigation bar is to create pages that correspond to basic information, such as About and Contact, and to use tags to find them. For example:

<div id="navigation">
    <ul>
        <li><a href="<mt:BlogURL/>">Home</a></li>
        <li>
            <mt:Pages tags="@about" limit="1">
                <a href="<mt:PagePermalink/>"><mt:PageTitle/></a>
            </mt:Pages>
        </li>
    </ul>
</div>

Here is an example of what the navigation bar described in the first half of this tutorial would look like. It may not be the prettiest thing, but it demonstrates the fundamentals of what needs to be done.

Lamar Alexander supports the second amendment so much that he was the only Republican to vote against allowing firearms in national parks. His justification? It's "too extreme:"

Here's the statement his office just e-mailed me: I have consistently been a strong supporter of Second Amendment rights, but this legislation goes too far - further than President Reagan, further than President Bush, and further than Tennessee law.

Add him alongside such luminaries as Haley Barbour to the growing list of elected Republicans who cannot stomach themselves to make a principled stand on an issue where the principled stand is the popular stance. This is precisely what happens when voters settle for the lesser of the two evils. It's not at all unlike what happens when a woman's main criteria for choosing a husband isn't that he's a good, capable man, but that he "doesn't beat me or the kids." These rats thrive in a climate of such low expectations.

This is the sort of low-life that the conservative Republicans need to chase out of their party with the sort of righteous fury that Jesus chased the money changers out of the Temple:

Since the Supreme Court's notorious 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London, which allowed that municipality to seize private property on behalf of the Pfizer Corporation, 43 states have passed laws protecting property rights against Kelo-style eminent domain abuse. Mississippi is not one of those states.

But that nearly changed in March 2009 when the Mississippi legislature voted overwhelmingly in support of a proposed law which would have guaranteed that "the right of eminent domain shall not be exercised for the purpose of taking or damaging privately owned real property for private development or for a private purpose; or for enhancement of tax revenue; or for transfer to a person, nongovernmental entity, public-private partnership, corporation or other business entity."

In addition to enjoying strong bipartisan support in the statehouse, this piece of long-overdue reform was backed by groups as politically diverse as Americans for Tax Reform, the Southern Christian Leadership Council, and the Mississippi Forestry Association.

But none of that mattered to Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, who promptly vetoed the bill, claiming it would cripple his ability to lure large corporations into the state. As Barbour, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, admitted in his veto statement, had he not promised Toyota that he would use eminent domain to secure a piece of contested land for its Blue Springs facility, "Toyota would have broken off negotiations with us and chosen one of the other states competing with us for the project."

From a conservative point of view, there is virtually nothing that Barbour could do as governor that would make up for what he did by vetoing a bill aimed at protecting private property from eminent domain abuse. Eminent domain abuse, made very easy by Kelo vs. New London, is a cut-and-dry issue for the right. If you support taking someone's land in order to give it to a private party to develop for a non-governmental purpose, you are not entitled to ever call yourself a conservative or a libertarian because basic security in one's property rights is the keystone on which the entire edifice of economic conservative depends.

This issue is also a moral issue. It is hypocritical for Barbour and his supporters to take a moral stand against armed robbery while they use the power of the law to force people off of their own land so as to benefit a third party. They may hide behind the excuse that they are merely trying to create more jobs, but the only way for conservatives and libertarians to forgive Barbour for that motivation in taking such a strong stance in defense of systematic injustice is to reduce all civil rights down to utilitarian calculations.

Mississippi Republicans need to not only stop supporting Barbour, but do everything they can to end his political career. They need to treat him just about like how they'd treat one of their own who suddenly came out in defense of a bill subsidizing partial birth abortion. There are certain philosophical issues where political expediency is unforgivable. This is one of them.

I'd be willing to bet money that this woman will be getting her kid back:

Willmar police say a drunk mom took such a sharp turn in a cul-de-sac at a trailer park that the back car door swung open and her 4-month-old fell out into the street after not being strapped in. To top off the classy move, the mom sped off, leaving the crying infant in the street.

Tuck and roll, baby.

Clearly, any effort to take the child away from the mother is nothing more than classism. The poor woman couldn't possibly afford a car whose doors reliably locked, nor could she afford a proper child safety seat. Society should have bought those for her.

Both Fox and Wired are reporting that the Ashton Lundeby is pretty much screwed in the case that the FBI has against him regarding the bomb threats that he was alleged to have perpetrated. His case got a lot of notoriety because his mother claimed that he was being held under the USA PATRIOT Act, was being denied habeus corpus, etc. Turns out, he's already had three appearances before a federal judge, has a public defender and has a trial date set, but that's just where it begins to become problematic for his family's case against the federal government:

"I heard the prank phone calls he made," says Annette Lundeby of Oxford. "They were really funny prank phone calls... He made phone calls to, like, Walmart."

Lundeby confirmed that her son was known online as "Tyrone," a celebrity in a prank-calling community that grew late last year out of the trouble-making "/b/" board on 4chan.

Lundeby insists the "Tyrone" on the recording must be a different prank caller using her son's online handle and e-mail address. "I've asked him about this and he doesn't know anything about it," she says. "There are other people who sound like him."

Bennett says Lundeby knew her son had made bomb threats. "His mother knew that he was making calls, because she'd come on the microphone when he was talking and tell him not to do any bomb threats because the house was going to get raided," he says. "He said he wasn't going to do any more bomb threats because his mom didn't approve of them. But then he did them anyway."

Lundeby denies knowing anything about her son staging bomb hoaxes. But she admits seeing a YouTube video in which "Tyrone" jokes that he's hidden a bomb in a box of take-out chicken.

It's possible that he is innocent. It's possible that someone who sounds like him was, in fact, masquerading as him. Unfortunately for him, he's put himself into a position where if he's innocent, it'll be damn hard to actually prove that because he's got so many incidents of prank calling and even possibly doing bomb threats. I don't envy the defense counsel who has to defend him.

The achilles' heel of the feminist movement:

Just the mention of women treating other women badly on the job seemingly shakes the women's movement to its core. It is what Peggy Klaus, an executive coach in Berkeley, Calif., has called "the pink elephant" in the room. How can women break through the glass ceiling if they are ducking verbal blows from other women in cubicles, hallways and conference rooms?

Women don't like to talk about it because it is "so antithetical to the way that we are supposed to behave to other women," Ms. Klaus said. "We are supposed to be the nurturers and the supporters."

Ask women about run-ins with other women at work and some will point out that people of both sexes can misbehave. Others will nod in instant recognition and recount examples of how women - more so than men - have mistreated them.

"I've been sabotaged so many times in the workplace by other women, I finally left the corporate world and started my own business," said Roxy Westphal, who runs the promotional products company Roxy Ventures Inc. in Scottsdale, Ariz. She still recalls the sting of an interview she had with a woman 30 years ago that "turned into a one-person firing squad" and led her to leave the building in tears.

The hemming and hawing about men being bullies is beside the point. The "way that women are supposed to behave" is nothing more than a romantic ideal that is coming crashing down in the face of egalitarian leveling of the playing field which has created a necessity for many women to fall back on their natural tendencies. All of the rhetoric about creating a "nurturing environment" or encouraging group identity as women will fail in a similar manner because they are based on a view of women that is little more than a memetic mutation of Victorian Era romanticism about female nature.

The anti-discrimination laws that feminists claim have helped women become successful are also an important barrier to getting rid of these female bullies. When women become bullies, they tend to be passive aggressive and to go to great lengths to sabotage other women using words and psychological warfare. Male aggressiveness can often border on being illegal, whereas female aggressiveness is more subtle and subjective making it harder for companies to make a case for firing a female bully. It's easier to write up a screaming man who overtly intimidates coworkers than it is to write up a woman who systematically psychologically attacks a female coworker.

Big government once again screws up health care and creates more trouble than it solves:

Wikileaks reports that the Web site for the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program was defaced last week with a message claiming that the database of prescriptions had been bundled into an encrypted, password-protected file.

Wikileaks has published a copy of the ransom note left in place of the PMP home page, a message that claims the state of Virginia would need to pay the demand in order to gain access to a password needed to unlock those records:

"I have your [expletive] In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh :(For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password."

The site, along with a number of other Web pages related to Virginia Department of Health Professions, remains unreachable at this time. Sandra Whitley Ryals, director of Virginia's Department of Health Professions, declined to discuss details of the hacker's claims, and referred inquires to the FBI.

It's refreshing to see that the Virginia state government takes quality of service and uptime so seriously. They could have gone the primitive route of having the backups stored in a locked facility on DVDs burned nightly or backup tapes, but they took the modern route which is have the backups on hot standby on the same network! Good for them! They really shouldn't be blamed for making it so easy for a hacker to delete their backups and encrypt their main database. The convenience of having the backups so close to the live database was just too good to pass up!

My heart goes out to the nannystaters and drug warriors who ran this database. It's not your fault that my personal information is now in the hands of a malcontent who wants to rape my credit score like a school girl at a bukkake festival. Your tireless work to save me from my very competent primary care physician who has never prescribed the wrong medicine, let alone pain killers, was necessary to keep me from overmedicating. The only way you could keep people like me safe was to have a constantly updated database with which you could track all of Virginia's doctors and their nefarious peddling of drugs, especially to pain patients who really don't need huge amounts of drugs after years of taking pain killers. It was bound to happen, but what matters is you kept us safe. Physically. Financially, I'm feeling a mite exposed and violated, but that's a small price to pay for making sure that doctors don't make human mistakes or show compassion to chronic pain patients.

I find it interesting that the people who go to church the most often are the ones, according to this poll, who tend to take a more morally ambivalent approach to torture. There isn't any way to prove why that actually is, but I suspect that part of the blame is the way that a lot of evangelical churches teach an authority-free church doctrine which turns grace and mercy, and the spirit versus letter of the law into a license to do evil that good may come of it. Surely, if Jesus broke the Sabbath to save a man's life, what's a little waterboarding of a possibly innocent person to extract information about an attack that may not even be coming?

I can't say that torture can never be justified, but I can say firmly that a Christian can almost never support it, and that that is not a matter of freedom of belief. It goes without saying that a casual policy of torture, wherein it is used to stop any attack, no matter how minor, is a disgusting assault on the commandment to love one's neighbor and to honor the fact that they were created in the image of God.

Of course, the spirit-of-the-law sword cuts both ways. It grants us liberty on the one hand, but shackles us in others. It frees us from worrying about asinine things like what really is work on the Sabbath, but it also commands us to follow through with moral commands on a higher level as was the case when Jesus said that lustful thoughts were tantamount to adultery in God's eyes. So really, the spirit of the law provides us with precious little liberty here to say "well, if the ends justify the means" as a torturer is still guilty of a grievous sin and their only hope is to penitently throw themselves at the mercy of God, knowing full well that the outcome cannot negate the means that acquired it.

As is often the case, extreme examples serve to bring issues like this into focus, and John Yoo provided one when he talked about crushing the testicles of the child of a suspect. In its true, pure form, this is how vile and satanic torture is, and how it lives and dies by the equally satanic moral code "if the ends justify the means." If it takes the destruction of a child's body to save 1000 lives, "is it not worth it?" We are not in God's position, so we cannot know if it is possible for the saving of those lives to be worth it. However, we need not ask God whether or not the act visited upon the child is a grievous sin, the sort which bring's the torturer's soul perilously close to the Lake of Fire because by instinct all Christians know what sort of sin-nature it would take to do such a thing.

The common, extreme argument used to justify torture is the "24" type scenario in which a Jack Bauer type has to do something incredibly evil to an enemy agent to save a city from an attack that could destroy it or at least kill tens of thousands. The improbability of this fortunate event, namely a brilliant, effective interrogator/torturer finding the right guy at the right time, aside, it ignores a fundamental facet of faith. It trusts more in the torturer's hands and tools than in God's faithfulness. It is the same sort of practical faithlessness that made Saul perform his own sacrifices rather than waiting for Samuel to bless his army in the name of the Lord.

(As an aside, making people uncomfortable is no the same thing as torture. Denying them food for days or making them hot or cold (extremes aside) is not torture. However, things like waterboarding have traditionally been regarded in the West as torture. From the time of the Spanish Inquisition, to various military tribunals where our own military has prosecuted waterboarders as torturers, that sort of thing has not been in doubt.)

It's only a matter of time before the rubber industry gets the ultimate bailout plan by having the entire United States rubber-coated to make it safer...

The U.S. House of Representatives has scheduled a hearing Tuesday to examine a bill that would force peer-to-peer applications to provide specific notice to consumers that their files might be shared.

Know how this got started? Some idiot decided to install Limewire on either a corporate or government system that had a lot of information about Marine One. It's easier for Congress to grandstand about file sharing software than to demand to have the contractor responsible for the incident severely reprimanded (loss of job and/or clearance if they have one plus getting referred to law enforcement). It's also a great opportunity to turn a legitimate security issue (the pointless presence of software like Limewire on sensitive systems) into an issue that the copyright cartels can use to push through more regulations.

Now, these people who can't usually even draft legislation which accurately does what they claim it does want to tell us how to write software:

Bono's Informed P2P User Act says that it will be "unlawful" for P2P software to cause files to be made available unless two rules are followed. First, the utility's installation process must provide "clear and conspicuous notice" of its features and obtain the user's "informed consent." Second, the program must step through that notice-and-consent process every time it runs.

Considering the fact that most people who use P2P software are using it for illegal purposes, I don't see why it should be safer. The greater the risk of personal loss, the less likely people are to use it. This legislation is as smart as passing a law entitled the Crackhouse Safety Act to make open air drug markets less dangerous.

...than be perceived as a racist. Stories like this only serve to highlight the idiocy of modern anti-racism and why anti-racism has become a form of irrationalism with a religious dogmatism about it in modern America. Prejudice and stereotyping are valuable to animals because the need to quickly categorize objects and creatures is essential to the survival of an organism. Far from making her "more advanced," the anti-racist nonsense that she has been spoonfed has actually created a block in her mind which overrode common sense and her own survival instinct at a time when they were absolutely correct, and in doing so, she also put her child's life in danger as well!

The rational form of anti-racism is one in which one may make certain group stereotypes, but one adapts to individual exceptions. Individual exceptions to generally true stereotypes don't disprove the stereotype, but merely serve as a reminder that there are exceptions about which one must be open-minded. As people are not empirical data to be used in mathematical equations, a stereotype can only be disproved if there are sufficient individual exceptions to prove that it is no longer useful for making basic assumptions.

As a matter of justice, I think this woman walked entirely into this situation and for that she deserves no sympathy. Her child deserves plenty, both for having been in possibly mortal danger and for having a mother that stupid. What the thug did was criminal and worthy of prosecution, but what this woman did was no more pitiable than that woman who got attacked after jumping into the polar bear exhibit during feeding time. Causality may be a heartless bitch, but she is rarely unjust.

"The modern-day greed gospel is one of the worst cancers and blights on the present-day Church. I don't apologize for saying that, I'm not gonna back up for saying that, and I'm not gonna apologize saying that. It is evil, it is a cancer, and it leads to covetousness, and it leads to destruction. There is no difference between the evil of that message and the evil of Las Vegas, Atlantic City, or any other place of gambling. Actually, Las Vegas and Atlantic City and any other casino is more holy than that demonic greed gospel, because casinos do not bring God into their lives. [emphasis mine]" -Donnie Swaggert

The prosperity gospel is not a hard theological fraud to disprove. In fact, there are only two types of people who can genuinely believe in it: those ignorant of history and theology and hucksters. History, even current events, is filled with countless examples of Christians being bitterly persecuted for their faith. These events range from the nearly cliche example of Romans throwing Christians to the lions, to North Korean government forces running over Christian converts with steamrollers. Jesus warned His followers of this when he said that we must count the cost of following him, that he who tried to save his life would lose it, that we must take up our cross daily, and especially when He warned us that the world would hate us for His sake. America is exceptional in that the "persecution" we face today is little more than discrimination and sneering rather than being subjected to serious loss of life, liberty and property. That exception helps to prove the rule that nowhere in the Gospel is there a promise of earthly material success or material happiness.

None of this is to say that God doesn't desire happiness for us, that God won't bless a family with intimacy and stability if they are faithful. God will also never forsake those who make an effort to be faithful to Him. However, that is a far cry from prosperity. Both history and theology attest to the fact that the Gospel is more likely to be spread around the world by faithfulness in times of misery than by people seeing Christians becoming prosperous.

And of course, if anyone remains on the fence about this issue, I suggest reading a few chapters into the Book of Job...