June 2009 Archives

The SCOTUS body slammed public schools on a major strip search scandal. From the ruling:

What was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana [Redding] was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear. We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable. [emphasis mine]

Is this a crack in the zero tolerance edifice? The Supreme Court just smacked them down on the basis that there was no reason to believe that the pills were harmful, and that the public school officials had no reason to believe she would go so far as to hide them in her underwear. Both are excellent points since the first point reinforces the issue of there being actual harm, and the second not only reinforces the fourth amendment by restraining how far a search can go, but can be cited in the future to stop perverts (think it's not an issue?) from using it for a peep show.

The only dissent, from Clarence Thomas, seems to be based primarily on federalism grounds, not defending anything that actually happened or the use of power.

(I had to "take a break from the break" since this was an uncommonly good SCOTUS ruling)

I've been blogging for about 7 years now (3 domains total...) and honestly it's getting a little old these days. In fact, for the last week, I've come close to shutting it down completely a few times. I'm not saying that I am quitting, but I am going to be taking a break for about a month or so, and see if it still is a good fit for me. Honestly, I just don't know if it is. If I do come back for real, it'll probably be on a less frequent, but more substantial basis, and focus more on programming and religion than anything else.

For a while now, I've skated on a thin edge with this at times, and lately I've found it to be getting disruptive to my "offline life." It's time to put it away, pray over it, and see if it's a childish thing or not. I have a feeling that in its current incarnation, it's the former.

Comments are still open, and I'll be monitoring them from my gmail account (and checking out feeds from Google Reader), but that's about it for at least a month.

Yeah, I know. The Internet is going to shut down without me creating new ways to blow bandwidth over HTTP, right?...

From an argument between Cathy Young and a left-wing feminist:

Rather than pulling out the rather musty notion that paternalism, and/or downright patriarchy is what these women and their children need, why not directly open our society's resources to benefit these families? How? Universal healthcare access, generous family leave benefits to workers, better quality free schooling, and family law that recognizes families as they are rather than wishing for what they never were. Because regardless of how much society encourages marriage among parents, women will continue to get pregnant and bear children outside of marriage, just as they have from time immemorial. All the encouragement in the world will not make it go away.

I'm sure that Young's sparring partner was completely oblivious to the irony of her argument. Her demand for a more active government is extremely paternalistic. If her description of what she thinks the government should be doing does not amount to the figure of "provider and protector" that was traditionally assigned to a husband, then I don't know what is.

Feminism is a necessarily statist movement because most of the goals of the broader feminist movement cannot be accomplished with the government's active interference in private life. Women cannot "have it all" without either being exceptionally wealthy, run into the ground by their careers or without the active involvement of the state. Someone has to pay for child care, education and health care, and that usually isn't the women because their career choices tend to make earning a high income on their merits exceptionally difficult. Take away public education, dismantle all of the laws regulating vacation and sick leave, and chop out the welfare safety net, and within a generation the culture war would be over.

It's worth noting too that in order to advance the sexual freedom of women, a key issue for feminists, the government has had to provide a comprehensive welfare safety net for single mothers and make adultery a functionally meaningless offense in court. The welfare safety net not only makes it possible for single women to behave in extremely irresponsible ways without fearing for their finances, but the obliteration of adultery as an issue in family law has helped to make the marriage social contract (and its legal aspects) dangerous to men. It is now legally possible for a woman to cheat on her husband day-in and day-out, then divorce him under a no-fault divorce statute, and see his finances and custody rights devastated.

A very significant portion of what is defined as "women's rights" are positive rights, meaning that they coerce others to behave a certain way. Public education and socialized child care require taxes. "Generous family leave benefits" coerces employers to behave a certain way, and actually affects labor rates for all employees. Socialized health care not only requires a great deal of taxes, but results in decreased choices and rationing of health care services and products. No fault divorces have enabled the destruction of otherwise sound marriages and families without penalty to the divorcing spouse, and without any recourse for the injured spouse and children. As I have said before, marriage is the "black sheep of contracts" because it is the only contract that many libertarians will cheerfully defend any breach or nullification as damn near a civil right and as a public good.

It is time for libertarians and other minarchists to accept the fact that feminism has a rich history of statism, and that today it is deeply statist. Nostalgia for non-statist variations needs to be allowed to die. Core political libertarianism already addresses the "women's rights" that are legitimate rights.

Megan McArdle actually has a very good point:

Not because hospitals are above covering up malpractice, or because doctors don't protect other doctors, but because any private hospital would have been terrified of getting sued.  The VA is very hard to sue because of sovereign immunity.

The sovereign immunity angle is almost a foregone conclusion because the federal government is not going to allow itself to be targeted en masse by people like John Edwards, nor will it allow itself to be easily held accountable by the common man for actual injuries. Sovereign immunity is the bane of civil libertarians in how it allows police to get away with incredible incompetence, and even borderline criminal conduct without even an apology to their victims. It's the legal mechanism which allows the police to bust down the wrong door, cause all manner of property destruction, terrorize a family, and the cite a warrant and claim good faith.

Socialized health care in the United States will look equal parts like the VA and your local public school system with the added benefit (to it) of being almost unaccountable. Even if free marketers were to concede that socialized health care works in Canada, the differences in both the legal system and government culture in the United States would simply not allow it to work here.

I tried to log in last night, and I got prompted to do a lot of upgrades to my blog's database. I don't know what happened, but I don't seem to have lost any data. It seems like it just inconvenienced people trying to login and do stuff like that. It's fixed now.

Federalism is a code word for harboring sinful desires:

The argument would only work if white supremacy were the reductio ad absurdum of opposing globalization and federal power, an assumption that makes no sense. You'd actually expect the most partisan patriots to embrace a radical decentralism, not racism. Perhaps expecting this objection, Stern argued that decentralist rhetoric is racist itself-that the idea of states' rights "has always been used to shield local governments from criticism over discriminatory practices" (emphasis added). And the dangers of decentralization didn't stop there. "Most Americans," Stern wrote, "define their political associations from top to bottom: One is an American, a Texan, from Dallas. There has always been a countervailing tendency...to reshape alliances so that small comes first, and large last, if at all." And what's so bad about that? "When a political movement rejects the idea of common American values and says, 'Let me do it my own way,' it usually means it wants to do things that are objectionable, and yearns to do them undisturbed and unnoticed."

The idea of a common American set of values is largely a creation of public education. It's maintained by the way that each region of the United States maintains a selectively provincial view of what the United States is. Each region tends to see itself as the authentic America, and the rest either hopelessly backward or running off a values cliff at full speed. That view of the other didn't come out of nowhere, but rather it comes from the fact that in our observation of our own region, and the behavior of the others, we see a marked disparity between our values and culture. Our own founding fathers realized that while we were capable of becoming a single country, we would always be closer to a union of nations along the lines of the United Kingdom, rather than a single unified nation like France which happens to have some other nationalities annexed within its borders.

It is true that federalism is often reinforced by regions that want to do their own thing in a manner which other states may find objectionable. Undoubtedly, Californians would be largely apoplectic at the thought of South Carolina using state tax revenues to support religious education. The larger issue is, however, why the hell is it California's business what happens in South Carolina? Cheap, asinine objections like dredging up slavery and Jim Crow laws only serve to show that those making the objection are intellectual one trick ponies who hope to smear their opponents with false associations. The truth is we are all hypocrites on this issue to some extent, as witnessed by the way that secular Californians cheerfully ignored the wishes of most of the other constituent members of the Union by legalizing medical marijuana (not that I personally oppose that).

Decentralization is of course the fastest way to save the lives of controversial people like Dr. Tiller. If Kansas had had the freedom from federal autocracy to declare abortion murder and punished accordingly, he would have had to set up shop in a state that would permit him to operate. Now, his killer had a history of mental problems, and Tiller did make himself more of a target by performing abortions that even most pro-choicers consider to be, at best, ethically questionable, so it is possible that his killer would have hunted him down across state lines. However, it is worth noting that in general, "right wing extremists" like a number of militia groups tend to be focused on the local, not the national. The fastest way for the federal government to remove itself from their radar is to simply stop meddling in their state's affairs. It is unnecessary centralization, with its imperial tone and demeanor, that sets the stage for confrontation.

It has been said that Puritanism was the fear that somewhere, someone was having fun. Likewise, it can be said that modern anti-federalism (supporting a more unitary state) is the fear that somewhere, some state is successfully doing something not blessed by the other 49 states.

There is a certain type of housewife who neither earns an income nor contributes in any meaningful sense to the raising of her children and the maintenance of her household. I propose a new term to describe this sort of "wife:" a salaried prostitute.

This is a sentiment that many of us who work on web applications can relate to:

On the face of it, Internet Explorer is just another browser, but it's time to stop drip feeding it, it's time to stop replacing its internal organs when one fails, and it's time to wean it off its nasty oxygen habit. Internet Explorer is old, pathetic, tiring to even look at, and depressing. Microsoft, let it die. (Failing that, just do what you did with OneCare: strip it down, funk it up and start all over again.)

Don't boycott Opera, boycott Internet Explorer. Buy Windows 7 E if you can, or if you don't want to or live in a non-European country, please for the love of God, remove Internet Explorer from your Windows 7 machine.

Internet Explorer jumped the shark around version 6. IE 6 was such a miserable piece of trash that it's amazing that Microsoft released it. Countless security patches and evidence that it had terrible support for web standards certainly did not embarrass them. Each subsequent version of Internet Explorer has only gotten worse, and now there is no point in using it at all at home. Preferring it over Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera is like preferring to drive a SUV that gets six miles to the gallon on the highway, can't do a u-turn on less than a four lane highway and that looks like it was the getaway vehicle for an army unit that got ambushed in the green zone. As a product, it is now such a miserable piece of shit that the first instinct of most web developers when they find that someone actually likes it, their first internal reaction is "what the hell is wrong with you."

For the sake of web progress, Microsoft needs to take IE out behind the shed and shoot it. Empty the entire magazine into it. Douse it with gasoline, set it on fire, scoop up the ashes, put them in a bag with a weight on it, and dump the remains in the ocean. From there, they can either create a whole new engine or fork an existing one like WebKit that is actually efficient and good at what it does.

What kind of rebel are you Your Result: John J. Rambo   The Lone Wolf. Born on July 6, 1947 in Bowie, Arizona to a Navajo father (R. Rambo according to the last film) and a mother (Marie Dragoo) of Italian descent. Needs no one. The original Army of One. Lives by his own code.
Nathan Bedford Forrest
George Washington
James Stark
Bartholomew Roberts
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
John Lennon
What kind of rebel are you Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Edwards is so deep in his own hypocrisy that he cannot imagine why a lot of people genuinely think he's a scumbag:

In 2007, Edwards said he had gone to work at Fortress because his family needed the income, despite holdings then estimated at $30 million. But in the interview, he said he was no longer fixated on finding lucrative work. "When I'm on my deathbed, I don't think I'll be thinking, did I work enough or earn enough money," he said. He plans to return to El Salvador next month. "Whether I'm digging a ditch or hammering a nail, I don't have any pride in this anymore, I just want to help," he said. "If I can help the most by working quietly, that's what I'll do. If as time goes by I can be more helpful with a public role, that's what I will do. "

He realizes that his trangressions had only bolstered his longtime skeptics, but said that any cynicism about his motives on fighting poverty was "complete foolishness." "There's a reason why it's been many years since a politician made this issue central to him -- and, I might add, I didn't get elected," he said. "There aren't many votes in helping poor people. "

Most of all, he wants his most ardent supporters to believe that the message that drove his campaigns was solid, despite all later revelations about the candidate himself.

"It was real, 100 percent real," he said. "I want them to be proud of what I stood for, and of what the campaign stood for. The stands were honest and sincere and idealistic. They were what America needed then and needs now."

For the sake of argument, I'll concede that the truth of a message does not depend on the behavior of the one who delivers it. Yet that does nothing to change the fact that most of his critics were completely on target with Edwards, since most of his critics attacked his image as a family man and someone genuinely concerned for the poor. The very fact that someone who is so obsessed with the state of the working class is living so high on the hog is inherently problematic. It's not just him holding an opinion and enjoying the American dream, it's a matter of why there is such a disconnect between his professed principles, his actions, and the means by which he can join them (financially, at the very least!)

The reason that Edwards lost in the Democratic primary is that it's hard enough for someone who is openly hard to the left to win the Presidency. It's downright impossible when the candidate is a man who behaves and rants like a cross between Huey Long and Jimmy Swaggert. His message about caring and helping the poor was no more credible for those reasons than an anti-racism conference run by David Duke.

You can lead a horse to water...

Need any more proof that humans aren't as rational as economists assume? Look at flexible spending accounts, a benefit that can put hundreds of bucks in your pocket. About 80% of large employers offer FSAs, but a mere 22% of their workers enroll, according to the consultancy Mercer.

An FSA allows you to set aside part of your paycheck for health expenses. (The exact limit depends on your company, but it's usually $2,000 to $5,000.) You don't have to pay income or payroll taxes on that part of your earnings. So if you are in the 28% bracket, a $1,000 FSA may save you about $350. Money in your FSA can usually be used to cover co-pays and deductibles, prescriptions, and even over-the-counter drugs. These plans used to require paperwork, but that excuse is gone. Many now offer debit cards and websites to track and manage your spending.

Unless you can afford to light cuban cigars with hundred dollar bills, you have no good reason to not take advantage of a FSA if your employer offers you one and you spend more than a few hundred dollars a year on all medical expenses. It's so simple and responsible that it's no wonder so few people actually do it! All it takes to calculate the approximate funds that you need to stash away is to list your typical expenses at doctor's visits, prescriptions and throw in an additional 5-10% to cover the unexpected. If you know that you are going to have a major operation or a child, then dump as much money as you can afford in it, and all of those medical expenses will come out of your pre-tax income.

There is this myth among conservatives that all we need to do to break people of irresponsible habits and make them more fiscally conservative is to make them pay their way. It's a nice idea that isn't born out by reality. Not only are most people irrational with regard to economics, but they're downright lazy. They won't save, even in a 401k, they won't take advantage of FSAs and they certainly won't clip coupons unless it's what the cool kids are doing. The best--the best--that can sometimes be expected is comparison shopping.

The federal government could create a program opening up FSAs to every worker in the United States, and the 22% figure probably wouldn't budge forward by more than a few percentage points. People want to have their cake and eat it too. Being American means being prosperous, and being prosperous means never having to cut back on the finer things in life or find ways to save money.

And so it begins...

It's not enough to prosecute these murders as murders. They are hate-motivated crimes and each of these men had been under some sort of police surveillance prior to their actions. Isn't it time we started rounding up promoters of hate before they kill?

The only good thing that can be said about the writer, Bonnie Erbe, is that she was consistent in her own argument since she included everyone from James W. Von Brunn, to the Muslim who killed Pvt. Long, to Jeremiah Wright. Even though she is calling for an illegal, unconstitutional preemptive attack on free speech enforced by violations of the fourth, fifth, sixth and fourteenth amendments, she is at least consistent in calling for the violation of the rights of all who engage in hate speech. Not that it would be fairly applied once the jackboots start getting their marching orders, but it's the thought that counts.

The legality of this aside, censorship is simply an insane approach to handling crazies and their potential acolytes. As they say, a prophet is never honored in his country, and there is no faster, surer way of making men like Wright and Von Brunn appear to be persecuted prophets than to persecute them for what they are saying.

Let them speak. Counter them with honest, direct, even vicious and brutal truthful speech. If they survive and even thrive after an onslaught of better, more powerful expression of good ideas, then there is no point in mourning the direction in which we are headed because frankly, we'll deserve it.

H/T: Something Feral.

The Apostate's devil-may-care attitude put into a different perspective:

I'm going to stop emphasizing to all who will listen that this world is a rotten place because people aren't safe from wild animals. I'm going to act as if we are and refuse to play into the talons, teeth and brute strength of the animals that might like to eat us. You know why? Because part of living a full life is going wherever you want, including big animal cages, shark-infested waters and when you're there, it's really cool. Being around dangerous animals is not an unfortunate fact of life, threat to one's safety or irresponsible behavior. It's a pleasurable experience to be up close and personal with a big, dangerous animal. It's a liberating experience to stand between a female grizzly and her cubs, or to swim with great white sharks. And people should be able to do these things for their own sake, not just when we find ourselves in the wrong place, at the wrong time, mistook a sign in the forest or didn't realize that we swam past the continent shelf into the hunting grounds of large sea animals, but because while we're here, we'd like to live a little. And fuck the consequences.

And while you're at it, socialize the medical costs because we're going to need it...

In which the authorities voted unanimously to return a predator to her hunting grounds:

Wendy Portillo, the Kindergarten teacher infamous for permitting neurotypical students to vote a boy with a form of Autism out of her class, will keep both her contract with the St. Lucie County school district and her tenured status after a unanimous vote by the School Board. Portillo is "overjoyed" by the ruling and hopes to return to teaching.

Alex Barton reportedly has not returned to school since the incident. Shortly after Alex was voted out of class, his mother said he was so traumatized that he was unable to even ride past his former elementary school in a car without screaming and begging not to be forced to return to school.

Gotta have them gubmint cars lookin nice:

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama says he has lost confidence in the inspector general who investigates AmeriCorps and other national service programs and has told Congress he is removing him from the position.

Obama's move follows an investigation by IG Gerald Walpin of Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, who is an Obama supporter and former NBA basketball star, into the misuse of federal grants by a nonprofit education group that Johnson headed.

The IG found that Johnson, a former all-star point guard for the Phoenix Suns, had used AmeriCorps grants to pay volunteers to engage in school-board political activities, run personal errands for Johnson and even wash his car.

Allegedly--allegedly--the charges from Walpin against Johnson are "overstated." It's worth noting that the US Attorney who is attacking the Inspector General is an Obama appointee, defending a prominent Obama supporter. While that doesn't lend credibility to Walpin's charges, it puts the US Attorney's words in perspective. Everyone knows that US Attorneys are one part prosecutor, one part politician.

Obama brought the Chicago political machine with him, and he is going to have to be careful about how he deals with corruption issues among his supporters. An enterprising inspector general could easily find more than enough skeletons to create a major scandal.

In Hudson v. Michigan, Scalia dismissed the exclusionary rule on the basis of an alleged "new professionalism" in police departments that made them more accountable for their behavior. So, with that in mind, one has to wonder how it is a sign of new professionalism that a cop had to shoot a Chihuahua/Jack Russel mix, and another was incapable of dealing with an ornery old woman without resorting to violence and tazing her.

A key part of professionalism in law enforcement is to be able to deal with low risk targets without resorting to the use of weapons. A professional cop would have at least kicked the dog out of the way or thrown it in a trash can rather than take the risk of injuring a bystander through the discharging of a firearm in a very public place over a minimal threat. Likewise, a professional cop would have been able to control his emotions in dealing with that old woman, not to mention being able to restrain her without using a weapon that could easily give her a heart attack.

When it comes to progress, the wheels are spinning, but the car isn't moving. We just trade one set of problems for another. 50 years ago, police were, on average, less respectful of civil liberties, but no remotely self-respecting police department would have tolerated a cop that had to repeatedly shoot a 20lb dog in order to control it or use a weapon on an ornery old woman who didn't want to sign her traffic ticket. Even if their superior didn't try to fire them, their peers would have made them the laughing stock of the department.

Over at What's Wrong with the World, I pointed out that under the right circumstances, the Just War Theory criteria used to condemn Scott Roeder could actually justify violence against providers of partial birth abortions. Part of the discussion comes down to whether or not you take a Roman Catholic or Reformed view of the intersection between human law and sin, and one's level of obedience to human law, but these are some of the criteria that rightly used to condemn Roeder's act as vigilantism:

• The lack of temporal proximity to the act of taking an innocent life.
• There was no attempt on Roeder's part to seek a non-violent resolution.
• Roeder used the maximum level of force necessary to stop Tiller, not the minimal level of force needed.

If Roeder had witnessed a partial birth abortion being carried out in front of him, any use of force would have had temporal proximity to Tiller's act of making an attempt on the infant's life in utero. Therefore, on that basis he could not be a vigilante because his act occurred at the same time as the crime, and was for the purpose of preventing it from happening. In order for him to be a vigilante in this scenario, one would have to concede that the state can outlaw all uses of force (including any in self-defense, no matter how small) and then declare anyone who uses reasonable force in self-defense to be a vigilante. I don't think any reasonable person would agree that the state has that level of authority.

If Roeder had then, in this alternate scenario, approached Tiller with a gun and threatened to harm him if he didn't cease, but did not immediately harm him, then he would have met the second criterion. Roeder's next act would have to involve shooting to wound Tiller, rather than harming him in order to meet the final criterion which is the minimal use of force necessary to stop a violent act on an innocent life.

The two critical points that were made against this were that the chance for successfully saving the unborn child's life is low given the mother's complicit role in the act, and that it is illegal to enter an abortion clinic armed with the intent of stopping the act. I would counter that in this scenario, the intervening party need not give the mother any more regard than the doctor. In fact, it would, according to the Just War Theory arguments used against the act, be ironic since the mother is the actual unjust aggressor, and the doctor is nothing more than a mercenary in her employment. The second issue is where I said that the divide between traditional Protestants and Catholics becomes apparent, with the former regarding disobedience to a law used to hide violent crimes as no vice, and the latter having some sympathy for the need to obey it.

The reason I use this scenario to illustrate what I think Martin Luther meant when he said that "reason is the devil's whore" is that reason is deterministic only with respect to the data and parameters given to it. I just logically justified a scenario in which killing Tiller could have been morally licit according to Christian theology. Another might disagree, and arrive at equally valid conclusions by taking the same underlying logic and supplying different parameters based on their own perspective. For example, even the relationship between obedience to human law, sin and salvation can skew this entire discussion wildly.

Now, consider the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the plot to assassinate Hitler. Reason alone does not provide a deterministic path to ascertaining the morality of assassinating Hitler. The logic that is used to determine this is dependent on the initial assumptions. For the sake of brevity, I'll compare two of the major ones: utilitarian and traditional Christian theology of most conservative Catholics and Protestants. The utilitarian side provides a safety valve in situations like this by making the good that which provides the most pleasure and prevents the most pain for the most people, "within the limits of reason." The traditional Christian theology holds that all moral truths are immutable and unconcerned with the utilitarian calculus of how they affect one's neighbor's happiness and level of pain, "within the limits of reason" (using Jesus' example of breaking the Sabbath to save a neighbor from harm, and that example also be applied to certain things like using deception to stop a violent criminal).

Under the utilitarian assumption, the logical path leads inexorably to the assassination of Hitler because his death would cause an undeniable good for the majority of Germans and political prisoners since it would have provided a chance to end a war that Germany was losing and to free the prisoners. Law and order considerations, and even Hitler's life, would be expendable since the potential good was so overwhelmingly higher than the potential bad, that it would have been a very clear decision. The objection, within the utilitarian context, would have been to raise awareness of new information which would have shifted the potential good to a position equal to, or inferior to, the potential harm, done by the act.

If one now assumes the traditional Christian theological approach, it is a strictly immoral act to kill Hitler even to save millions of lives because the Christian theological path assumes that the ends do not justify the means (it is true that this is an assumption, but then the point is that people make philosophical and logical assumptions before they apply logic). Dietrich Bonhoeffer summarized the position of the moral quandary that the traditional Christian finds themselves in in such a situation:

"the ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation shall continue to live." He did not justify his action but accepted that he was taking guilt upon himself as he wrote "when a man takes guilt upon himself in responsibility, he imputes his guilt to himself and no one else. He answers for it... Before other men he is justified by dire necessity; before himself he is acquitted by his conscience, but before God he hopes only for grace."

From the traditional Christian view, the act itself is still logically a criminal act because the ends do not justify the means. Whatever Hitler is doing does not justify a preemptive use of force to stop him, and from this perspective, Bonhoeffer had to make a personal choice: accept the logical conclusion that killing Hitler would be murder from his philosophical-logical path and stand aside, or do what his philosophical-logical path told him was murder, and accept whatever consequences came with it.

The conundrum that exists here between the utilitarian and the traditional Christian is that according to the logical path most consistent with both, at the time of the plot on Hitler's life, the actions were justified. For the utilitarian, Hitler's death was justified. For the traditional Christian, allowing Hitler to live was equally justified, and killing him, highly problematic. Now obviously, both of them would have preferred to be free of a murderous tyrant, but one cannot confuse the desirability of an outcome with the morality of the means to acquiring the outcome. Morality is a matter of "what should I do," not "how should I achieve this desirable outcome."

Secular moral reasoning tends to make the disastrous mistake of finding a desirable outcome, finding an an efficient path to it, and then assuming that logic and reason naturally dictate that that is the natural course of logical thinking. Another mistake that secular moral reasoning often makes is not accounting for the fact that the "desirable outcome" is often deeply rooted in emotional and subconscious desires which have little to do with pure logic. For example, there are people for whom liberty is the sine qua non of life, and there are those who for whom peace and order are the sine quibus non of life. Both of those desires are rooted in emotional, pre-rational human behavior. Logic does not dictate either of them.

At their most fundamental, the rules of logic, and by extension, human reason, are just algorithms. Like most algorithms, the result is dependent on the inputs. The inputs need not just be data, but rather can also include entire rule sets, whether done so consciously or subconsciously (usually the case). For these reasons, and more, it is important for people to realize the limits of logic and reason as the exclusive basis for moral philosophy.

The Enlightenment model of reason as the basis of morality and guiding light for humanity is fundamentally flawed in that it assumes that humans are essentially rational by nature, rather than emotional and rationalizing. A significant percentage of the body of economics and political ideas rests on this dangerous foundation because it assumes that man is a rational being who acts in his rational self-interest in relating to the world. Likewise, much of modern philosophy outright ignores the overriding influence that emotion and animal instinct have on the way that human beings utilize reason.

There are certain words and phrases that stick out to me in commentaries and blog posts as warnings that the content is going to be emotional, hackish or just plain irritating. Some of them are "vile," "fever swamp," "wingnut," "moonbat" or any anti-prejudice "ist" label. The moment that I see people use terms like that, they automatically lose at least a third of my attention and open-mindedness because I usually see words like those thrown about people I don't respect. The more readily they are thrown out, the less likely I am to continue reading what you have to say.

A lot of this is just me being jaded, but I know that most of the outrage that is routinely unleashed in politics, religion and philosophy is no more sincere than the tears shed by an actor in an A budget movie.The average liberal is not genuinely outraged by racism, sexism or genuine hatred toward gays; they just use it as a cudgel with which to beat their opponents. The average conservative only gets outraged on spending, violations of federalism and intrusive government when their side isn't the one controlling how it works. Most "outrage" is just hypocrisy and an effort to pull others down to make themselves look better. I sincerely doubt that most people involved in politics, religion and philosophy even feel genuine outrage on any issue.

The police don't like guns and camcorders for the same reason: they give people a means to fight back.

A Roman Catholic priest who monitors law enforcement treatment of minorities with a video camera released footage that appears to contradict the police account of his own arrest.

A police report says the Rev. James Manship was confronted and arrested Feb. 19 because he was holding an "unknown shiny silver object" and struggled with an officer who was trying to take it from him. But a 15-second video released this week by Manship's attorneys shows East Haven police Officer David Cari asking Manship, "Is there a reason you have a camera on me?"

"I'm taking a video of what's going on here," Manship replies.

"Well, I'll tell you what, what I'm going to do with that camera," Cari says as he approaches the priest. The tape then goes blank.

That's probably going to look really good to a jury. You have a Roman Catholic priest who wasn't breaking any laws, and a cop who wasn't being directly accused of breaking any laws who got rough with the priest. Clearly, the officer had something to hide, otherwise he wouldn't have taken the priest's camcorder away from him. The police allow the media to follow them all the time on shows like Cops, and those police are never bothered by people recording their actions as they carry out their lawful duties.

The marked hostility of the officer will certainly not help his case because the priest was not interfering with his ability to perform his duties. In fact, the defense should argue that if the officer had nothing to hide, and was obeying the relevant laws, the video would have been evidence in defense of the department in the event that a Hispanic detainee filed a false claim of mistreatment.

Keefe [the police department's attorney] criticized Manship for "creating controversy where none needed to be."

"You've got to conclude that he was out there with a video camera in an attempt, in my view, to provoke the police to do something," Keefe said. "If his goal was to attempt to stop the perceived harassment of the Hispanic community in East Haven by the police department, why didn't he go to the mayor's office?"

That certainly is a novel new legal theory: pointing a camera or camcorder at someone is tantamount to going up to them, getting in their face aggressively and using "fighting words." It's good thing people don't usually pack heat at tourist sites, but God knows that if this legal theory holds up, there will be bloodshed and mayhem as amateur photographers and those who happen to get in their pictures wage a never-ending war over being caught up in amateur photography.

In any case, there is a relationship between camcorders, cameras and guns that advocates of liberty need to defend. Hostility toward guns is already strong in much of Europe, but now the governments are starting to slowly turn a hostile eye toward recording the police (I'm lazy, and that's the first link I noticed on Google) as well.

Surveillance cameras and handheld camcorders are fast proving to be as important against a tyrannical government in their own way as firearms. Without this surveillance footage, this man would have been all but guaranteed to be just another faceless victim of police brutality:

Surveillance video shows a Passaic, New Jersey, police officer beating a 49-year-old man standing idly on a street corner.

Surveillance tape from Lawrence's Grill and Bar in Passaic on May 29 shows a police car pull up to Ronnie Holloway, who is standing still on the curb outside the restaurant. After a few moments Holloway zips up his sweatshirt -- because the female officer in the car instructed him to do so, Holloway said.

At that point, the other officer in the vehicle, Joseph R. Rios III, exits the car, grabs Holloway and slams him onto the hood of the police car. He then pummels Holloway with his fist and baton.

Holloway said he had exchanged no words with the officer before he pounced on him.

Watch the video. Even fighting words would not justify the sort of beating that the officer gave him. If this were one private citizen taunting another (and Holloway claims he didn't even say anything to the male officer), it would still be felony assault and battery on the part of the citizen that jumped him. The officer should, but likely won't, be charged in a similar fashion because the video shows him continuing to beat Holloway after he had subdued him. Far from showing any restraint, he continued to pummel the guy after taking him down.

I'm afraid that only violence against the police in situations like this will have any chance of changing their behavior. The police review boards around the country routinely see cases like this and find some half-cocked reason why the officer involved was justified. Politicians won't change the laws to allow people to resist arrest or to allow onlookers to intervene between the police and their targets when it becomes apparent that the cops are stepping well over the line of legality. The system has no checks and balances except lawsuits, and other than possible demotion or suspension with pay, the individual officers won't feel any pain from their department getting sued over their conduct. The solution is for private citizens, in cases like this, to come to the defense of their fellow citizens.

Saving is the new spending:

The 33-year-old lawyer from Mitchellville once regaled her friends with tales of shopping sprees at Nordstrom and circulated photos of Caribbean vacations with her husband. Now she tells her girlfriends about staying home for pizza night with the kids. (They watch "Madagascar." Over and over again.)

If people know that she can no longer afford to get her hair done every few weeks, who cares?

"If they notice, it's like, 'Phew, I'm not the only one,' " Walker said. "There's a certain camaraderie with everyone understanding that everything is tight."

The recession has changed the conversation in America. As the era of conspicuous consumption fades along with our 401(k)s, people are clamoring for caps on executive pay and recoiling at the idea of bosses cavorting at expensive spas. At play dates and happy hours, friends are swapping recipes instead of making restaurant reservations. Teenagers are skipping flashy block-long limos and showing up to prom in minivans. Coupons has become a more popular search term than Britney Spears on Google.

Instead of feeling self-conscious about spending less, people are flaunting their frugality. Both those who have lost income, such as Walker, and those who simply fear they may become at risk are part of the new discourse.

This is just a fad. The same people who rushed out to use their discretionary spending money as a buffer for impulse buying are now bragging about how much money they're saving. It's unlikely that the underlying mentality has changed. A lot of these people aren't saving because they've gained a new appreciation for frugality, but rather because it is just another way to gain a cheap boost in social status.

We've routinely shopped sales and clipped coupons, and save an average of 33%-40% off of our grocery bills. That leaves us with room to save and eat out when we want to, which is probably a bit more than we should since both work full time and are looking at houses. It's amazing how much farther your income goes when you are spending it wisely, rather than like an impulsive fool.

If families with townhouses or garages would shop sales, buy standalone freezers and focus more entertainment around the home, they could save a lot of money. It may not be quite as good, but a DiGiorno or California Pizza Kitchen pizza can be bought for as little as $5 on sale. Two of those and a DVD can cost less than $20, compared to $20 just for the pizza delivery, and as much as $40 for a movie at a theater. Why... that actually leaves a lot of room left over for other nice things.

Life is hard in a world full of infidels:

"The future of Eclipse is in danger," Michael Scharf, a member of the Eclipse Foundation's architecture council, said in an angry April blog post. "The problem is that there is no real pressure for companies to contribute back to the community and it is easy to use the Eclipse 'for free' for their own products. The Eclipse community should create peer pressure to prevent the freeloaders and parasites from getting away without punishment," he wrote.

Scharf likens the lack of contributions back to the community to the "tragedy of the commons," in which greedy individuals unthinkingly destroy a shared resource. And in an e-mail exchange, he put it this way: "The general mentality of the industry frustrates me; the attitude to take advantage of something like open source and not give back anything to the system."

Then don't offer it for free! By definition, open source cannot be a true tragedy of the commons issue because it's a commons that cannot be exploited to the point of being worthless and beyond repair, since it is based on intellectual property, not physical property or real estate. As the head of the Eclipse Foundation rightly noted, however, the mass adoption of Eclipse's products creates a lot of opportunity for contributors to the Eclipse products to either sell services or make products that Eclipse users would want to buy.

The amount that a company should contribute back is proportional to how much they modified the original product. If Linksys added a whole new CPU architecture to the Linux kernel, then they should contribute that. If they added only some kernel drivers to make the Linux kernel work on their proprietary hardware, then that's not necessary or even sensible to ask of them. You might as well ask them to give up some of their core product IP in cases like that. In others, like Southwest Airline's use of MuleSource, if their modifications are business-specific and not useful to anyone other than their competitors, that too is just asking too much. Asking them to make original contributions as a way of saying "thank you" for getting the open source software is not just unrealistic, but the sort of demand that only an extremist could make (I'm not attributing that demand to Scharf).

"Telling women to decide on relationships by following their hearts is like telling a man to follow his penis." -My wife

There are way too many users who are complaining on a regular basis about upgrade-related issues with Movable Type on the Movable Type forums. Until the process is automated for the average user through better support from software like CPanel and Fantastico, there is a better way for the average user to upgrade Movable Type: over SSH. If you don't know if your host provides SSH (a secure, Telnet-like login process for those that have never heard of it), then contact them before trying this. If you are using Windows, you'll need to download Putty. Mac users already have SSH installed (just open up the Terminal app, and you're good to go).

Before you get started, you need to know the following things about your host:

• What URL to give SSH for logging in (it's almost always your blog's domain without anything like www before it).
• What username and password to supply at the shell prompt (usually the same one you use for account maintenance at your host).
• The path to where you can either install CGI scripts or where you have already installed Movable Type.

In Windows with Putty, you'll open putty.exe, and supply it the URL for logging into your host where it asks for a host name, and then you click on the open button. On a Mac, you type ssh -l USERNAME URL and press Return.

Now, open up a FTP connection to your host like you normally do for uploading Movable Type file-by-file. Upload the whole zip file to the directory where you have /mt (or whatever you named the Movable Type folder). For example, if the full path in your FTP client was ~user_directory/public_html/mt for Movable Type, just upload the zip file to ~user_directory/public_html.

In the SSH window, run unzip MOVABLE_TYPE_FILE_NAME. If you downloaded the tarball (tar.gz) the command is tar -zxvf instead of unzip. That will create a fully expanded copy of the latest, fresh copy of Movable Type on your host. Before you proceed, it's a definitive best practice to do the following:

• Back up your database.
• Back up your existing copy of Movable Type.

The method of doing the database varies from database to database, but a tool like phpMyAdmin is usually provided by your host and is excellent for exporting a database for backup. With regarding to backing up your old copy of the Movable Type files, you have two options:

• Download the entire directory by FTP.
• Run the "zip" command; ex: zip -r mt_backup.zip ./mt from the directory that holds your copy of Movable Type. You can either leave that file on the host or download it by FTP.

The command to copy over the contents of all files from the fresh, new copy of Movable Type to your existing installation is (for MT-4.261-en.zip) cp -R MT-4.261-en/* ./mt/

That command should preserve existing file permissions, so you shouldn't have to worry about chmod'ing anything. If anything fails after the upgrade, and you followed the backup instructions, restoring your old copy is as simple as putting your SQL backup into the database admin tool, running rm -rf ./mt and copying the file backup back to your host (or unzipping the zipped backup).

For people unfamiliar with Unix, it may seem daunting because it is different, but it usually pays off quite well. A significant portion of installation issues come from FTP clients failing to properly upload a new copy of Movable Type piece-by-piece. If you find yourself in that position, then give it a shot.

People like this may never get it, but the reason why I use scare quotes around "the rule of law" most of the time is that American law changes at least every election cycle. It's one thing for things like economic regulations on business to change, but legislators are free to revise the entire criminal statute every year if they want to. That badly undermines the rule of law, and it doesn't help that the courts and law enforcement often make things up as they go along or get away with ignoring whatever laws they find inconvenient. The public has no recourse against such people other than to hope against all hope that the next time around they'll elect someone who will hold them accountable.

Unfortunately, we have to obey the laws even if the system does not obey them. However, I find the Mosaic Law to be superior in practical terms, if not moral in many cases (such as its treatment of the accused, which is far more protective than American law), in that it is unchanging. It is basically quivalent to having the state's entire criminal code codified into the state constitution, and requiring a constitutional amendment to change anything in the body of laws that has a real possibility of denying life, liberty or property. As such, it's unchanging, or in our case it would be monumentally difficult to change it, and thus the rule of law would go from being more of a nice philosophical concept to a more observable phenomenon.

In regard to that commenter's attack on me using the Old Testament Law as a source of moral authority, I will say that I believe that the Torah is the only morally sound legal code for Christians to use as a guide in dealing with the world. It has no authority in the United States, and we shouldn't attempt to make it the law of the land, but it informs us of what is good and just in a legal system. It also informs our own behavior as Christians as readily as does the Gospel since the Torah and Gospel truly interlinked.

Part of the value that the Torah gives us is that the Mosaic Law shows us what God says is a truly legitimate legal code. When a legal code runs absolutely contrary to those principles, it should give us pause with regard to the legitimacy of that law and the wisdom of obeying it. I certainly don't think we are close to any point where American law is fundamentally opposed to those principles, but part of the beauty of the Torah and its law is that informs of what a moral and lawful authority would look like.

As a pro-lifer, it's difficult for me to have any sympathy or mercy for George Tiller. While I regard all abortion on demand as murder, I can see, though disagree, with how many Americans regard abortion in the first or part of the second trimester as something other than murder. It's sufficiently gray that reasonable people on the pro-life side can see how pro-choicers could be deluded into holding that position, and that accordingly they are not apologizing murder.

Partial birth abortion is qualitatively different from first and second trimester abortions in the same way that hiring a hitman to deal with a spouse during a divorce is different from hiring a private investigator to find every last possible damaging detail. A three month old fetus could not, short of a miracle, survive outside of a womb without the very best medical technology. That does not justify dehumanizing it, but it is not difficult to see how pro-choicers might mistake it for a non-person. A seven month old fetus almost always can. It is almost always so close to being the same stage of development as an infant, that there is no appreciable distinction between sticking a blade into its head to remove the brain, and taking a scalpel to an infant in a cradle in order to stop its brain from functioning.

It's no small coincidence that partial birth abortion is the one area where a significant portion of the pro-choice side agrees with the pro-life side. Instinctively they know that this act is so close to murdering an infant that they cannot justify it as "a woman's right to choose." That's especially true in light of the fact that at that stage, any "ticking time bomb" scenario that would justify a partial birth abortion over a cesarean section is about as likely as a federal agent using torture a la Jack Bauer to stop an act of nuclear terrorism. It may work on TV, it may seem reasonable as a hypothetical exercise, but it doesn't happen in any frequency that would lend a reasonable person to ever consider it worth considering for how things are actually to be done.

George Tiller made himself a target not by providing abortions, but by providing partial birth abortions. Pro-choicers need to face up to the fact that even if abortion is generally reduced down to a "woman's right to choose," Tiller provided a service which the vast majority of those in his medical specialization would not touch with a ten foot pole. There's a reason why most abortionists simply won't go there, and it's not just fear of getting shot by vigilantes, but rather they cannot bring themselves to hack up fetus that are so developed that they could just as easily be surgically removed and placed up for adoption with a loving family. By any reasonable standard, most people could at least concede that Tiller committed murder for money, since he specialized in terminating viable fetuses.

When I first heard that Tiller was murdered, I felt a good deal of schadenfreude because I felt that there was a certain cosmic justice in a man like him falling on the sword he wielded against so many unborn children that no reasonable person could regard as less than human beings. There is a certain elegance in cosmic justice and causality that a government's justice often lacks. It allows us the momentary perception that we live in a just world, when in fact we do not. The history of people terminating human life because they deem it to be not human is sufficient to categorically disprove that fantasy. There was, sadly, no meaningful justice in Tiller's death, and now I'll try to explain why.

Tiller's death will not bring back those that he was hired to kill. His death will also, most likely, have no positive impact on the efforts to outlaw abortion. As  a move aimed at stopping abortion it was nothing more than an isolated act of violence in a cold war between two factions. It is more likely to bring the issue to a head in a manner reminiscent of how the raid on Harper's Ferry laid the foundation for the Civil War, than to make people change their views to support the pro-life cause as a matter of new conscience. In the sense of advancing the pro-life cause, it will do nothing to slow down the rate of abortions.

Comparisons can be made between Tiller and a concentration camp worker, but if pro-lifers want to make that sort of comparison, they need to take it all the way. An isolated attack on a doctor like Tiller no more constitutes a legitimate rebellion than catching a concentration camp guard by an ally and beating him to death in an isolated incident. In both cases it is nothing more than a murder with an ideological sugarcoating. The attacker feels justified because he has smashed a cog in the machine, but in reality all they have done is committed a murder. If violent pro-lifers like Roeder wish to wage war, especially in the name of the Christian Church, then they have no choice but to educate themselves in and abide by Just War Theory, and for Christians, random homicide can never be considered a legitimate way of using force.

For pro-lifers, there may be some silver lining in that Tiller will not carry out any more infanticides ("abortions" is too weak to describe his acts). However, that does not change the moral aspect of this act from something less than a cold-blooded murder. We need not harbor any particular sympathy toward him, but consistency requires us to take the high road and defend the right to life from those who would take it without a fair hearing in a public court for a capital crime. Let us condemn this act not as a statement about the sort of man and victim that Tiller was, or anything about him as a person, but rather as an affirmation of our principles regarding the inalienable right to life.

A journalist nearly exposes kids to porn while trying to write an expose on Microsoft's new search engine which can expose kids to porn (like any other search engine):

Microsoft's new Bing search engine has a highly touted feature that some parents may find troublesome. Bing's video search tool has a preview mode that lets you view and listen to part of a video simply by hovering over it with your mouse. Trouble is, it works with porn as well as "family friendly" videos.

I tested this feature quickly and with great caution on board a Virgin America WiFi equipped flight, being careful to shield the screen from fellow passengers and crew.

I can only imagine how furtive he must have looked to anyone watching him.

Passenger: "why are you watching dirty movies?! There are kids around here you creep!"

Larry Magid: "I'm uhhh researching this for... uhhh an article on Microsoft's new Bing."

Passenger: "Bing? 'Thing?' Oh that's it... stewardess!"

Ain't they just cute in how they make shit up as they go along?

Chicago and Oak Park are poorly placed to make these arguments. After all, Illinois has not abolished self-defense and has not expressed a preference for long guns over handguns. But the municipalities can, and do, stress another of the themes in the debate over incorporation of the Bill of Rights: That the Constitution establishes a federal republic where local differences are to be cherished as elements of liberty rather than extirpated in order to produce a single, nationally applicable rule. See New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262, 311 (1932) (Brandeis, J., dissenting) ("It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."); Crist v. Bretz, 437 U.S. 28, 40-53 (1978) (Powell, J., dissenting) (arguing that only "fundamental" liberties Nos. 08-4241, 08-4243 & 08-4244 9 should be incorporated, and that even for incorporated amendments the state and federal rules may differ); Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). Federalism is an older and more deeply rooted tradition than is a right to carry any particular kind of weapon. How arguments of this kind will affect proposals to "incorporate" the second amendment are for the Justices rather than a court of appeals.

Yeah, try that with the first amendment, which specifically begins with "Congress," leaving it obvious to everyone, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the founding fathers were specifically limiting the power of Congress to pass laws limiting freedom of religion and speech or to establish a state religion. The second amendment ends with the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and yet curiously, that generically worded amendment is not incorporated against local and state legal codes. Well, I guess Congress, state legislatures, city council... ehhhh what's the difference among friends, right?

To defend this court's reasoning, one would have to forget the fact that pure federalism died in the Constitution with the 14th amendment. The United States has been, since then, a semi-unitary state. The desirability of that has no bearing on the legal fact that 14th amendment changed the relationship between the Bill of Rights and the states. Second, to defend their logic, one would have to ignore the fact that cities like Chicago make it de facto, if not de jure, impossible for a reasonable person to exercise their second amendment rights. Here's a modest experiment for these judges: try to open carry a firearm in Chicago. Even with a state license. Sling a rifle over your shoulder or put a .45 on your belt, and walk around town. If you do that for a few hours without being slammed face first into a police cruiser by the Chicago PD who will cheerfully ignore your permit on "because we don't want you carrying a weapon mmmmkay" grounds, I'll gladly change my mind.

Of course, it won't happen because judges rarely take into consideration the facts on the ground. They can seriously look at a stack of laws and regulations that, taken as a whole, would require you to do the equivalent of walking barefoot on fresh piano wire over a flaming pit of napalm while facing off against a hungry pack of rabid wolves in order to exercise your constitutional rights and cheerfully respond, "well they didn't outright prohibit it, so... it's constitutional."

History repeats, but skips to the stage after farce:

WASHINGTON - It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism.

But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.

Nor, for that matter, had he given much thought to what ailed an industry that had been in decline ever since he was born. A bit laconic and looking every bit the just-out-of-graduate-school student adjusting to life in the West Wing - "he's got this beard that appears and disappears," says Steven Rattner, one of the leaders of President Obama's automotive task force - Mr. Deese was thrown into the auto industry's maelstrom as soon the election-night parties ended.

He's got no business experience. He hasn't even finished his graduate degree, and his only work experience is in politics. For some reason, this scenario reminds me of something that happened not that long ago. I think it was a disaster or something, and it had something to do with a major federal agency that was run by someone who was put there without the slightest bit of real world experience running that sort of organization. My hopes would be dashed if that weren't changed.

I wish him all the best if he ever has to actually set foot in a UAW-run factory and deal with the workers there. All of the ivory tower education in the world won't do him a lot of good once he has to factor in the UAW.

Dick Cheney comes out in favor of allowing gay marriage on a state-by-state basis, not a one-size-fits-all basis and the comments at HuffPo are telling. Comparisons to how the south used states rights to defend Jim Crow, attacking his word choice about how his family has come to grips with a lesbian daughter and idiotic, uninformed comments about how he's too stupid to understand that federal law always trumps state law (it doesn't, unless it's an area of shared jurisdiction in the enumerated powers).

I wish I could say that this was primarily a left-wing thing, but conservatives, libertarians, etc. all do it too. This is why only the worst version of anything gets passed these days. It's easier to beat up on people you normally disagree with than work with them on the occasions that you actually agree on something.

"Mater Familias."

We've come full circle, baby, and done it better than the Romans. Proof of the existance of "progress." Now it's the mother of the household who gets to wield life and death over the children. Thumbs up, baby gets born and daddy is on the hook. Thumbs down, and the baby gets flushed down the toilet or chopped up and its brain sucked out.

The main defense of partial birth abortion is really one of geometry, not health. It stands to reason that if a woman's life is legitimately threatened by giving birth that it would just make more sense to perform a caesarean section on her and guarantee that both the mother and the child have a reasonable shot of living. Like torture, it's flat out unrealistic that a medical doctor would ever encounter a "ticking timebomb scenario" where he could safely and effectively perform a partial birth abortion on a woman who truly needed it in order to live and who could not just as easily have a caesarean section instead. The health scenarios used to defend it are as unlikely as federal agents reliving a scene from 24 when interrogating an Islamist.

So that leaves geometry. Adjust the child's three dimensional coordinates by no more than a foot each, and voi la! In the radical pro-choice mind the "parasite" becomes a human being! It goes from being fair game inside the mother's womb, to being a rights-endowed child that must be protected. Nevermind the fact that the difference between the child itself inside the womb and outside the womb is so infintessimally small that we lack the scientific tools to measure the difference between the before and after.

That's why pro-lifers are outraged when the other side defends partial birth abortion. When geometry is what stands between the child and its claim to personhood, the argument has reached a sick level of legalism and technicality that is nothing more than an excuse to liquidate inconvenient human lives. As I said, health is clearly not a justification here. A caesarean section would be just as effective in all practical cases, and yet it would also provide an opportunity to save both the mother and the child. So it really does come down to geometry and a desire to find any excuse, no matter how pathetic, to remove an inconvenience.