September 2009 Archives

I'm confused, I thought that America was in danger of becoming a Christian theocracy...

It took Rome about 700 years to start an imperial cult. It took us 233 years. At that rate, the U.S. has only about 160 years to go before it collapses into a series of warring mini-states... if that...

H/T: In Mala Fide.

You can tell a lot about a person based on who they defend and how they defend them:

In Imbler, the Supreme Court determined that a prosecutor who knowingly uses false testimony and withholds exculpatory evidence is immune from damages, even in cases where his misdeeds result in a wrongful conviction. The Court determined that subjecting prosecutors to the possibility of such suits would affect their judgment in determining what cases to bring. In another case involving a falsely convicted man attempting to bring a lawsuit, the Court extended absolute immunity to include district attorneys who poorly supervise their subordinates.

Hrvol and Richter contend that prosecutorial immunity gives government officials the right to coerce witnesses to lie, withhold evidence pointing to a suspect's innocence, and work with police to manufacture false evidence of guilt, then use that evidence to win false convictions that send two men to prison for 25 years. Their motivation for making this argument is obvious; they'd rather not pay for their misconduct. But they're supported in amicus briefs filed by the U.S. Solicitor General, the National District Attorneys Association, and the attorneys general of 27 states and the District of Columbia. Notably, Cook County, Illinois, home to a number of wrongful convictions, also filed its own brief in support of the prosecutors.

Let's suppose that most prosecutors and their affiliated organizations are good people, and by good people I mean they generally try to do what's right, use their job to help the public and avoid harming others. Now, why would good people defend someone who has fabricated evidence to convict someone of a crime? Why would they actually write amicus briefs actually defending the immunity of such people from accountability to the public and the authorities since, by definition, those people are doing bad things to innocent people and thus are bad people? Think about that for a moment if you buy into the "few bad apples" theory here.

Consider for a moment, if you will, that if the prosecutors get their way in this case, that prosecutors will be virtually untouchable since their peers control the professional organizations which might sanction or prosecute them. What this means is that the Supreme Court will finally kill off the classical rule of law that once existed in the United States, and the "rule of law" will be synonymous with merely the legal guillotine hanging over the neck of the American people. Not even crown agents in 1776 were allowed to fabricate evidence whole cloth and convict innocent men with impunity.

Now it is true that prosecutors would be biased on bringing charges if they could be sued. They might actually want to verify the evidence they were using and punish the police when they testilie. In other words, if prosecutors could actually be sued for the misconduct that they enable, someone might have to take responsibility; the buck might have to stop somewhere instead of perpetually swirling around the toilet bowel of government accountability regulations and platitudes.

It also doesn't help that the mens rea is now generally optional:

Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate calls his new book "Three Felonies a Day," referring to the number of crimes he estimates the average American now unwittingly commits because of vague laws. New technology adds its own complexity, making innocent activity potentially criminal.

Mr. Silverglate describes several cases in which prosecutors didn't understand or didn't want to understand technology. This problem is compounded by a trend that has accelerated since the 1980s for prosecutors to abandon the principle that there can't be a crime without criminal intent.

What we have here is the final stage of "law-and-order" policies. In order to ram down crime rates, guilty minds, mercy and even accountability have to be sacrificed. Prosecutors who judge cases individually, who enforce the spirit of the law, who have a higher notion of the public good than statistics and who are accountable for their decisions won't process defendants like chickens at a poultry plant.

After perusing some blogs, and seeing this on Digg, I think I have a summary of what women want. A man who is:

• A good guy, not a nice guy. The guy who they know is a good person, but not falling all over himself to be polite or nice to people; someone who is usually polite and considerate, but not a doormat.
  
• Independent, but not in a way that leaves people thinking he'll just walk out on them.
• In good shape.
• Financially independent.

Am I missing anything about the basics here?...

From what I have gathered about the "women like assholes" comments on various blogs, it's not fair to actually call a good portion of those men assholes. They're aloof, independent, etc. "like assholes," but in my opinion an asshole is someone who treats you like dirt for no other reason than they can, spite or some other pointless reason. I don't think the aloofness, independence, etc. have any inherent relationship with a man being an asshole toward women.

If you're like me, you're not content with having just the official alpha or beta release. You want to see how things are progressing, especially if there is a chance that stuff that is currently broken might be getting fixed. Here's how to set up a nightly build of Haiku on a separate partition if you have installed Haiku alpha 1 to a partition already.

My old PC laptop (Dell Inspiron 6000 with 1.6Ghz Pentium M, 2GB of RAM and a Radeon X300) has two partitions: Haiku Stable and Haiku Unstable. Stable is for alpha 1 (no jokes about the irony of the name and what's on the partition, please). Unstable is where the nightly builds go.

Now then, from the very beginning:

1. Boot into Haiku alpha 1's live CD.
2. Choose the installer option.
3. Open the disk configuration tool from the installer and set up two partitions.
4. Initialize both partitions to BFS (BeOS File System).
5. Install Haiku alpha 1 to the first partition.
6. Boot back into the live CD after the installer is done.
7. Open a terminal in the live CD.
8. Run bootman to load the BeOS boot manager and set up your PC to boot your operating systems. (Bootman is easy to configure)
   
9. Reboot, remove the live CD and boot into Haiku.
10. Open the network preferences and check to see if you have an IP address that is valid. DHCP is flaky in alpha 1, so the best thing to do on a home network is set the IP address to 192.168.2.50 if your network is 192.168.2.X
11. Open a terminal.
12. Run svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/haiku/haiku/trunk haiku
13. cd haiku (in the terminal)
14. Run ./configure --include-gpl-addons --include-3rdparty
15. Run jam -q @alpha-raw
16. Wait at least 30 minutes for the build to finish on newer hardware; 1-1.5 hours on older hardware
17. Open haiku/generated
18. Open the image file in haiku/generated; it will appear as a mounted drive on your desktop.
19. Open the installer app in the mounted disk image under <disk_image>/system/apps/Installer
20. Change the install-from field to the disk image, not your stable or unstable partitions.
21. Change the install-to field on the installer to the unstable partition. If the unstable partition is greyed out, and you initialized it as BFS, right click on your desktop, open the mount menu and mount it.
22. Run through the installer. It should take literally just a few minutes to complete.
23. Rerun the bootman installation locally to add the unstable partition to your boot menu.
24. Don't blame the Haiku team for anything that happens to your system during this process since what I have just described here is for the adventurous only.
    

As of right now, I have two builds on my system. Alpha 1 which is, IIRC, SVN revision 33109 and a nightly build based off of SVN revision 33258. Both work fine for me.

• Female Swedish conscripts complain that their bras are made from flammable material and fall apart during exercise; male conscripts claim that the equipment is working to spec.
• Michael Bloomberg's secret diet... like a televangelist caught at the Moonlight Bunny Ranch.
• Hot coeds are now openly called a job perk for professors.
• Four officers wounded, one critically, in a no-knock raid on a guy accused of possession of stolen goods, drug possession and weapons violations. In a saner world, the police would have just waited for this guy to come out of his home, got two sharp shooters to get him in their sights and order him to surrender.
• Is this real or a possible hoax? The researchers claim that they have a vaccine that works in about 1/3 of the cases of the most common strains of AIDS in southeastern Asia. They also claim that they made it by combining two previous, failed attempts at making a viable vaccine and they don't know why this one worked. Sounds fishy, but hopefully it's real.
• How embarrassing is this for Microsoft! Google wrote a plugin for IE which allows IE users to install the Chrome rendering engine, and it runs through the JavaScript benchmarks 9.6x faster than IE8 does. Microsoft responds by more or less claiming that Chrome is a wide open, syphilitic security disaster that no one should use. Apparently someone did a search-and-replace for "Internet Explorer 6" with Chrome before the press release.
  
• A realistic assessment of The Cloud.

I don't think most people have actually realized what the business of health insurance, public or private really is. It's not to make you genuinely healthy, but to keep you happy enough with it that you don't stop paying for it. Neither private companies nor government programs care about keeping you genuinely healthy and functional unless it can be done cheaply so that they pay as little as possible. It is not in their interest to give you a $20,000 surgery to make you so limber you feel like a kid again when a $5,000 surgery will be enough to make you a close approximation of a normal human being. If they could get away with giving you crutches so you could hobble around like Tiny Tim, that'd be even better!

If people really wanted to make health costs more affordable, they'd be clamoring for their employers to dump several thousand dollars a year into a health savings account. All the status quo does is keep price information out of the hands of patients and add a significant amount of overhead to the process of selling medical services.

David Swindle, you're up for a fisking...

This isn't a controversial statement, though. I'll be the first to agree with Beck. Paul's worldview is ripped from the founding fathers.  Isolationism Non-interventionism as a foreign policy made a lot more sense in 1776 than it does in 2009. (Who knows how a hyper-connected world of atom bombs and airplanes would have influenced the founders' foreign policy views?) Further, the economic ideas of the founding fathers were appropriate for the non-globalized economy of the 18th century. That doesn't mean such ideas are practical in today's world.

Airplanes are easy to defend against, which is why we have an air force and naval aviators. We also have the option of denying entry into our air space for any foreign air craft of which we are suspicious. Atom bombs likewise require some means of delivering them to our soil, most of which can be mitigated without constant armed intervention: border inspections, a missile defense shield and a robust air force. The vast majority of threats to the safety of the United States could be mitigated by a combination of beefing up the air force, navy, coast guard and border patrol and heavily restricting immigration and tourism from Islamic countries.

The main reason why the founding fathers' economic policies are not practical today is because the modern U.S. economy uses credit and fiat currency the same way that a body builder uses steroids. A sound money policy would greatly limit the ability of creditors to issue credit based on arcane financial instruments and the ability of politicians to make up for budget deficits through the printing press rather than real cuts to spending or increases in taxes.

We need to focus on Paul before we can get to Beck. What makes Paul a crackpot who we should cast out from Conservatism? Sure, he's got some economic crackpot ideas about the Gold Standard and the Federal Reserve. But are those banishment worthy? No. They're intellectual junk food, not intellectual poison. I don't like them but I'm not going to say someone shouldn't be allowed to be part of the movement because they advocate them.

Paul gets cast out because of his insane foreign policy views. He's an absolute isolationist who wants us to cut off our support and alliance with Israel. His foreign policy is all but in line with the anti-war Left.

John Podhoretz fisked this issue of Paul as an anti-Semite for Commentary back in 2007 and isolated several reasons why people could regard Paul as an enemy of the Jews. (Though Podhoretz himself disagreed with the overall assessment.) So that's the central problem with Paul.

Those "objections" which Podhoretz raises are based on some statements which were written by a ghost writer in Paul's name, his refusal to support a meaningless resolution proclaiming support for Israel and denouncing Hezbollah and Hamas, and his general antagonism toward interventionist policies. It is not a stretch to say that people like me who give nearly unequivocal moral support to Israel, who view our relationship with Israel as being generally poisonous to Israel, and who object to American tax dollars being used to subsidize foreign states are also "anti-Semitic" according to this argument. It's little different from the way that "racist" and "closet racist" are used to describe people who oppose policies like affirmative action on principle alone.

Paul's position on Israel, based on what I have seen and read from him, is entirely consistent with his general opposition to paternalism and support for allowing individuals to act in their own rational self-interest. Conservatives who support Israel frequently ignore the numerous times where the United States, even under ostensibly conservative administrations, has twisted Israel's arm to act against its own interests in dealing with its neighbors. No amount of foreign aid to Israel or meaningless, symbolic defense of Israel in that infamous, impotent multicultural assembly of clucking hens in NYC can make up for the fact that the United States routinely encourages Israel to make concessions and sacrifice its own interests; the best funded military you can build is meaningless if your strongest "ally" is constantly demanding that you not use it to defend your people from low-intensity warfare.

This really does raise the question of what sort of ally tells a country to constantly consider territorial concessions to an aggressor, not to mention demands that it respond to the killing of its citizens with only the lightest of responses. It's not like the United States is even making these demands because they are in Israel's greater interest to appease even more powerful would-be aggressors who are allies of its aggressive neighbors. Since Israel emerged dominant over its Arab neighbors in the 80s and 90s, our policy toward them has been essentially, "here's some cash, roll over and die." Can a politician who wishes to leave them alone to make their own policy and territorial decisions without constant nagging and finger-waiving from the White House really be called their enemy?..

One of the side effects of the United States washing its hands of the Middle East in a public display is that it very well might actually make Europe and Russia stop supporting Israel's neighbors. The United States has a strong relationship with Israel and Turkey, and to a lesser extent Saudi Arabia. It is only natural that other entities looking for regional influence would target Syria, Iran and other states that have weaker relationships with the United States. There are no assurances that a non-interventionist policy would make them back off, but then under a non-interventionist policy Israel would still be free to buy and modify any munitions that it cannot produce domestically from the United States.

Here's a simple formula for writing up the Conservatism Banishment Applications: you need to be able to summarize in one sentence why someone needs to be banished. These things really are not that complicated. Someone openly expresses and consistently defends a particular view which is intellectually poisonous. Examples:

1. They're a racist.

2. They're a conspiracy theorist who promotes New World Order, Birther, and Truther garbage.

3. They're a theocrat who wants to replace the constitution with the Bible.

4. They're an isolationist who want to disengage America with the world and leave Israel to be slaughtered by Islamofascist barbarians.

5. They're a secessionist or a neo-Confederate.

Number 3 is a red herring and can only be regarded as such unless you are one of those slack-jawed, paranoid leftists who believes that Dominion Theology is a mainstream ideology among conservative Christians. In fact, it is so absurd to even bring it up in a discussion on the right by people from the right, who should by all rights know the right enough to know how little support that Dominion Theology has, that to even bring it up raises some serious questions about those who bring it up.

Number 4 is also a red herring as few on the right support an isolationist policy. The non-interventionist policies advocated by Ron Paul would pull us out of NATO and United Nations and move our troops out of Europe and Asia, not make us ideologically opposed to supporting an ally that faces a real existential threat. Mainstream non-interventionism is a presumption against intervention, not an ideological opposition to all intervention. Furthermore, anyone who believes that Israel needs the United States to defend itself against its neighbors cannot be taken seriously. Israel has one of the largest and most modern militaries in the world, a large nuclear arsenal and a defense industry which is increasingly capable of producing high quality munitions (a non-interventionist policy would not preclude them buying those weapons from us that they cannot produce domestically).

Number 5 is an unprincipled exception. To wholesale reject secession as a political doctrine while claiming that one is conserving American political traditions is completely incoherent given that the United States is a country founded by a violent act of secession, and whose founding manifesto, which is cherished by self-proclaimed conservatives, vigorously defends the right of secession. The "conservatives" who stridently attack secession from the United States as a principle, rather than as stupid or immoral in particular instances, have stronger intellectual ties to the Tories than the Continentals. Further complicating things is the fact that the United States has frequently supported secession around the world, ranging from the break up of the Soviet Union into over a dozen autonomous nation-states, to the break up of Yugoslavia, to the independence of Ireland from the United Kingdom, to the secession of Kosovo from Serbia.

As I have mentioned before, the left feels no need to purge. There are no great purges of groups ranging from PETA to the black panthers (kooky-nuts versus violent-nuts). There are the occasional hail marys about them not being mainstream, but the left really doesn't get worked up about them the way that the right does. The average liberal would rather attack David Swindle or Rush Limbaugh than drive out PETA or the black panthers.

Texas has taken a positive first step toward fixing its broken criminal justice system by creating a system which will pay the wrongly imprisoned an incredible amount of money for the grief that they were put through, and that will significantly increase the funding for the public defenders' offices. However, that doesn't really fix the system so much as a provide a modest safety valve.

Most of the things that are wrong with their legal system are also experienced in the rest of the country. Lying cops, prosecutors who value victory over the truth, badly funded public defenders and weak standards of evidence are common in the rest of the country as well. While Texas' steps are positive, they're just bandaids over a deep wound.

The first step in reform is to admit that many police and court officials are, in fact, corrupt. Though they are corrupt, the legislature can create incentives for them to obey the law. It can strip the police of most of their qualified immunity, make perjury by state witnesses grounds for summary dismissal of any case and provide a reward/punishment system for prosecutors that rewards them for being judicious in bringing cases to court, and that swiftly punishes them (including disbarring) for bringing too many cases to court that the judiciary feels defy the letter or spirit of the law. Another positive step it could take would be to place professional review of police and prosecutors in the hands of private boards that are statutorily composed of people who are neither police nor lawyers, and then give them sole authority to reinstate any police officer or prosecutor removed for bad conduct.

Standards of evidence also need to be reformed. The safest, easiest way to protect the falsely accused is simply to throw out circumstantial evidence in all serious felony cases. No witness, no security camera, no audio recording, etc., no conviction. Too many of the people who are getting exonerated are people who were convicted mainly on circumstantial evidence. If circumstantial evidence is to remain in the system, then the legislature should counter it by adopting a standard of perjury and false accusation that is at least as draconian as what the Old Testament provides, and allow the defense counsel to wield it against the police and prosecution. If a private witness or police officer perjures themselves in a capital trial... execute them.

This one has been easier than I thought it would be to convert. Normally I don't seriously call the judgment of the original designer into question, but in this case, the original header image was a flash movie. That was strange because it did not serve any purpose other than to load Flash on the page... I got around that by using Firebug to strategically delete all of the DOM elements on the header and then took a screenshot. I then glued that screenshot to the other background image in Paint.NET. I just tested it out in IE7 and it looked 99% the same as it does in Firefox 3.5, so I think I'm well on my way for a release in a day or so.

This conversation from Dr. Helen's blog is why I regard most men's rights activists I've seen online as nothing more than men who are upset over "not getting their end of the deal" from the sexual revolution.

If men want to avoid women like this, then they have no choice but to control themselves and not be sexually active outside of a committed relationship (preferably marriage). Guys who hook up with random women or women they barely know are asking for trouble just as much as a woman who gets drunk at a bar alone and walks home early in the morning. -[Me]

JG, ever quick to attack anything resembling tradition morality, lest he have to admit that it might be of some use to most men, misses the forest for a few trees:

You are just trying to impose your own morality on this issue.

I'm saying that because plenty of men who didn't sleep with the woman have been accused of rape.

Gary Dotson in Chicago (ten years in jail) is a famous example, as well as the Duke Boys recently.

The number of cases where a man is accused of rape and he didn't even have sex with the woman are few and far between compared to the cases where sex did occur. This sort of evasion is no less intellectually dishonest than the times that feminist bloggers have tried to use cases where "good girls" were raped in their own homes to create a false equivocation between that and women who get raped after engaging in high risk behavior.

Look, it is just this simple. If you go out and have sex with a woman who isn't in a relationship with you, you are playing with fire. You are having sex with a woman who very well may have no reason to like you, respect you and generally give a damn what happens to you post coitus. She may have buyer's remorse, she may become terrified that her real lover will find out or she may just be a hateful bitch who wants to stick it to you because her "daddy didn't lover her." You wouldn't open up your bank accounts and credit cards to someone with whom you are not intimately involved, so why would you risk pregnancy, disease or worse, a false accusation against you?

Because too often men think with their dicks and not their brains, that's why. They can only see the fun and bragging rights on the road ahead of them, but not the terrain that is marked "here be dragons." A man is putting his life, liberty and property on the line whenever he has sex. STDs, unwanted pregnancy, child support, false rape accusations are just the start of where it can go wrong for him.

There are a lot more predatory women out there than most men would care to admit. There are a lot more women out there who will gladly sacrifice a man with whom they just hooked up or barely know in order to save themselves from suffering social opprobrium or having to tell a cheated lover the truth about their actions. These are the female equivalents of the men the feminists wax (in)eloquent about on issues of rape and general sexual depredation. A man who pigheadedly, indignantly says that he shouldn't have to worry about such women, except as a momentary rant about the injustice of the world, is really no different than the sort of women who say that it is not their responsibility to avoid behaviors which put them in contact with unsavory men who might harm them.

The system is stacked against men. The standards of evidence in rape cases are so ludicrous that they make the Code of Hammurabi look modern. They're not much different from a formalized process for lynching men that can be defended in polite company. So why make it that much easier for the system to wrap a rope around your neck?

Yet another argument for either returning to the "two credible witnesses" rule or a modern "two credible witnesses or video tape" rule:

MINEOLA, N.Y. - An official says the woman who claimed she was gang-raped in a New York college bathroom recanted her story after prosecutors told her a video of the liaison might exist.

Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice said Thursday that consensual sex took place in the bathroom.

Rice declined to identify the woman, citing concern for her safety and an investigation into whether to charge her.

The woman had said she was tied up and assaulted by five men early Sunday. Four were arrested. She changed her story Wednesday night and they have been released.

An attorney for one of the men has said the encounter was recorded on a cell phone.

"It looks more like a porn movie," Victor Daly-Rivera said. "It showed just the opposite of what the allegations were. There was no tying up, there was no bruising, there was no screaming."

Contrary to popular belief, a very significant portion of rape accusations (as high as 60% in some studies) are completely false. They lie for various reasons, ranging from evading responsibility for infidelity, to pure maliciousness, to buyer's remorse. The fact that rape covers everything from drunken sex, to a woman "feeling coerced," to violent, clearly non-consensual sex doesn't help.

Feminists and traditionalists alike want to see rape stamped out, which is why the standards of evidence are so ridiculously low that all it takes is a woman's accusation and signs that sex occurred. Neither witnesses nor sign of extremely serious physical trauma are required, and there is no escape for men who are equally intoxicated as the intoxicated woman they are with.

Ironically, they hadn't been voyeuristic and wanted to record this for posterity and sharing with others, they'd be looking at felony records right now. That sort of thing sets a dangerous new precedent for women; if men want to be free from the accusation of rape, they need to record their hookups.

If the prosecutor cares about rape victims, he'll get his staff to comb through every law on the books that still applies in his jurisdiction from British common law, to modern city ordinances to find every possible statute he can use against her.

(Disclaimer: this is a work of satire not to be confused with a quote)

(Disclaimer: this is a work of satire not to be confused with a quote)

The Haiku project released their first complete alpha on Monday. Alpha 1 can be downloaded either as a LiveCD or as a virtual machine image that can run in VMWare or VirtualBox. If you choose to download the LiveCD, it can install Haiku onto your computer in a single or dual boot configuration. I chose the LiveCD because I've run VMWare images of it off and on for well over a year and a half. For me, the real test would be how well it would do on my laptop as a stand-alone OS.

I didn't have any expectations because Syllable has never booted on this laptop. It's a Dell Inspiron 6000 which comes with a 1.6Ghz Pentium M, 2GB of RAM and a Radeon X300. To my surprise, not only did it boot almost flawlessly into the LiveCD desktop environment, but the resolution was 1280x1024. The desktop environment was as clean and responsive as BeOS R5 was on my old hardware. It also detected the Broadcom 440 ethernet system built onto my motherboard which was an additional, welcomed surprise for someone who has come to not expect much from open source OSs that aren't based around Linux or a BSD.

In order to keep the LiveCD small, it only comes with a small number of applications, but one of them is a fork of Firefox 2 which should make it more usable for those users who might want to buy a cheap netbook and use it for testing releases of Haiku or just playing around with it. The only thing that most users who get it booting are likely to find disappointing is the lack of wireless networking support at this point.

Hopefully, after a few alphas, they'll add experimental builds of the new Webkit-based browser that is being ported/built for Haiku. A more up to date browser would go a long way toward helping it gain users and attract attention from developers.

For an alpha, Haiku is incredibly polished. If they keep up this momentum, by this time next year Haiku will be a force to be reckoned with among open source desktops. With its light memory footprint (118MB on my laptop), it's much smaller for a full desktop than the average Linux system, Windows or OS X making it the potential ideal platform for netbook users. All Haiku is missing before it can really start to come into its own is a newer browser and a wireless network stack.

For 2.5 I am focusing on cutting down on the clutter in the interface. Notice the tooltips for the images and the right-click context menu that controls the size of the images. More functionality will be becoming configurable, such as whether or not the thumbnails are generated as squares and the default size of the thumbnails. Once this round of clean up is complete, I may start working on compatibility with Movable Type 5.0 beta.

How you respond to something like this comment:

Until the Pope and the male fundamentalists in Florida can demonstrate the ability to give birth themselves, there's not *one* of them has the right to say *anything* about who is or is not allowed to either *get* pregnant or *avoid* pregnancy. End of discussion.

Until women can get pregnant without sperm, we'll just have to call it even.

(They may also have easy access to sperm through sperm banks, but men are also only about 20 years away from having "womb banks" where they can artificially simulate a womb.)

I've started releasing the work I've done on Movable Type lately. Three new styles: Carrington Blog, Swirly Glow Things and Connections have been converted (a fourth one will be posted shortly). After a long hiatus, I also released a heavily upgraded and refactored version of the Image Gallery plugin. It doesn't add much in the way of new features, but the code base really got cleaned up. Some of the changes will make it easier to support older versions of Movable Type and others will make it possible to support other editors at some point.

The story of the Ropen, the "demon flyer" of Papua New Guinea, is an interesting one. The reports sound exactly likely a pterodactyl. Even many westerners claim to have seen it and reported the same physical description as the natives. Of course, the thousands of witnesses are automatically wrong, wrong, wrong because dinosaurs could not possibly still be alive today on one of the hottest tropical locations on Earth. Please ignore the fact that they just found a whole slew of new critters in a remote location of PNG...

After eight years of active development, the Haiku project has released a LiveCD alpha of HaikuOS. This is the first serious milestone toward HaikuOS becoming a serious contender as an open source desktop OS. It's got a much smaller footprint than desktop Linux and the interface leaves the average Windows or Mac user feeling right at home. I'll review it when I get some time and if it boots successfully on my semi-decrepit PC laptop.

A 33-year-old Michigan man has been charged with murder in the shootings this morning of an anti-abortion protester outside a high school and the owner of a gravel company found dead in his office.

Harlan Drake of Owosso, near Lansing, was arraigned on two counts of first-degree murder and other gun-related crimes. Prosecutors said Drake also had planned to kill a third, unidentified person. -[Source]

After Dr. Tiller was murdered, people were falling all over themselves to condemn his murderer, "hold the pro-life movement accountable," and there were more than a few pro-choicers who wanted to make him a secular martyr. So far, the media has not made much of this story, and with good reason: because the pro-choicer cannot be defended.

Considering the fact that a significant number of Americans believe that abortion is murder, and anti-abortion violence is so rare, that speaks to the character of the pro-life movement in general. That is tolerance in its purest form.

Oh man, the WordPress team is catching all kinds of flack at Reddit for this. If you follow that link, the bug fixes are the paragraphs marked in green...

This widget is based on the Classic Blog template set. It shows you the 10 entries with the most comments on your blog. By replacing the Entries/Entry tags with Pages/Page tags, it can also be easily repurposed for showing the pages with the most comments.

Download.

In a discussion about the death penalty, one Agitator reader reminds those who quote the Bible in defense of capital punishment have to do so within the context of biblical jurisprudence which was far superior to the secular American legal system in protecting the accused:

By the way, for those who quote the Bible as the authority for capital punishment, don't forget that the Bible also calls for false witnesses and those who falsely accused the person (and this would include prosecutors and judges) to receive the penalty to be given to the falsely accused person.

Thus, if the prosecutor and judge in the Willingham case were strapped to gurneys and given lethal injections, along with the "expert witness" who gave fraudulent testimony, I might have confidence in government to carry out capital punishment. Instead, we have the real murderers getting off scot free.

Conservative Christians who cite the Mosaic Law in defense of capital punishment without acknowledging what the Mosaic Law states about evidence, perjury, etc. are no better than liberal Christians who cite Matthew 7 in support of non-judgmentalism. The Bible offers no support for capital punishment as implemented in the United States, unless you want to argue such things as Jesus' or Paul's submission to the Roman state's legal judgments against them proves that the Bible is open to capital punishment period (at which rate you'd have to acknowledge that it can licitly execute you for your beliefs).

The Bible has the following requirements, which we don't have:

1. 2 credible eye witnesses
2. Perjury and knowingly filing false charges against someone are punished by the sentence for the crime for which the defendant is accused.
3. Prosecutors, police and judges are fully accountable to the defendant under point #2.
4. The courts had the legal authority to sentence perjurious witnesses on the spot the moment the defense could prove their perjury.

In America:

1. People can be executed on circumstantial evidence in most states. Witnesses are optional, not the core of the prosecution's case.
2. Prosecutors are almost completely legally immune for anything they do to a defendant, including withholding exculpatory evidence from their defense counsel. Police are not far behind them.
3. Perjury is almost never punished, and when it is, the punishment is usually just a felony record and a few years in prison no matter the circumstances of the perjury.
4. Prosecutors frequently rely on criminal witnesses, especially "jailhouse snitches" who are "witnesses" of such low moral caliber that no normal person in their right mind should believe them.

There you have it. I am totally down with my fellow conservative Christians remaining in support of the death penalty, provided that they also adopt the Bible's standards for prosecuting serious crimes.

I was a heck of a lot nicer than Radley Balko was when this happened to him...

Patrick Ruffini, John Henke and Megan McArdle want to isolate WorldNetDaily and bring it to its knees. That's a great idea, provided you're either a leftist or the sort of self-proclaimed libertarian or conservative who, in November of 2008 seriously thought that Obama was the lesser of the two evils, and then became unnerved at his predictable swing to the left. In that case, I could see how you would think that isolating and destroying one of the right's largest publications over a few nominally crazy articles would make sense.

The problem with this approach is that the left does not consider conservatism, and often even libertarianism, to be respectable, defensible positions. The sheer fact that one is a conservative or libertarian is proof of one's mental instability, lack of intelligence and/or education. One of the single greatest reasons for the backlash against intellectuals from within the conservative movement is the fact that so many intellectuals are leftists and so many of them harbor such a dismissive hatred of anything from the right and a sneering condescension toward everyone associated with it.

The left does not police its own, though one might confuse the few occasions where it has merely thrown an inconvenient fellow traveler under a bus for a moment of self-control, poise and civility. A lot of the left-wing bloggers exhibit the same sort of behavior which is leading to denunciations and calls for denunciations on the right, but the left is not outraged over their behavior. The left is in this to win elections, not to win the respect of the right. It only "polices" itself in cases were people become genuine liabilities such as when Wright became a liability to Obama and when Amanda Marcotte had to be let go from Edwards' campaign. The very fact that Ayers was not a liability, despite being largely unrepentant, is damning.

Most of the people who want to banish the birthers are the same sort of people who want to see the religious right banished to the wilderness as well. These are the sort of people who want to see Rockefeller Republicanism and neo-conservatism become the mainstream face of conservatism. These are also the sort of people who so badly mismanaged this country and let it be run down by scoundrels and criminals that the left-wing of the Democratic Party was able to elect a candidate who barely attempted to conceal most of his goals in the primaries and general election. The birthers are merely a distraction for the right compared to the existential threat that these people pose to the future of conservatism. They had the chance to make conservative goals actually come to fruition, and they not only blew it, but now blame everyone but themselves for the disaster.

Ministering to Mary Magdalenes of the 21st century can get you killed by the state:

Family and friends of a Lavonia minister gunned down Tuesday by an undercover police officer continue to look for answers about how he died.

Stephens County Sheriff Randy Shirley said Jonathan Ayers, 29, was not the target of their sting operation and that authorities were looking for a woman they say Ayers dropped off minutes before the shooting. That woman, whose name has not been released, had been charged with cocaine possession and distribution, he said.

Hopefully, this surveillance footage will stay up for a while. It puts the lie to the argument that this was a tragic event insofar as it was the result of a series of unfortunate events rather than a use of force that, had it been done by private citizens, would have gotten the perpetrators charged with manslaughter at the very least, if not second degree murder. It shows two plain clothed officers jumping out of a still-moving Escalade (man that's a nice "cop car!"), chasing after his car as it is backing up, shouting "police" and aiming a gun at him (then shooting his car when he brushes against one of them.

Now picture this, if you are sympathetic to the police. You are trying to help a friend who has a troubled life. You drop her off at work at a 711. You know she has drug problems. You get in your car to leave the 711 and nice vehicle that is the sort of SUV that you better-connected gang bangers might drive pulls up near you. Two men, dressed like you, not like cops, rush at you with guns. Are you going to stay around to find out what they want, since you have no reason to believe that not only are they police, but that they have a legitimate reason to be chasing you down like blood-raged gang bangers trying to kill you?

I didn't think so. The only way that anyone could excuse the police at all, based on the reports so far, is by completely ignoring the fact that the police behaved and dressed like armed criminals chasing after Ayers.

Based on the information that has come out, Ayers was likely doing this as part of his normal pastoral duties. His congregation, friends and family say that he was a straight-down-the-line minister, and he had a young, pregnant wife. Anyone who has spent any time in the church can think of plenty of legitimate reasons why a pastor would spend time with a woman who had drug problems like Ms. Target of the Investigation.

We are supposed to be shocked--shocked!--that an industrialized method of processing millions of chickens to create low-cost food for the masses rapidly destroys unviable or unwanted chicks. Most of the ones being destroyed would grow up to be roosters anyway. Can anyone imagine a more painful agricultural task than being the schmuck assigned to keep order in an industrialized, "humane" chicken coop with hundreds of thousands of young roosters?

Didn't think so...

• Sad, but true..
  • That's one way to compensate for a lack of social skills...
  • This explains a lot about management...
  • I've worked on at least one project that followed this financial methodology...
  • Some people actually consider this a valid requirements gathering process...
• An open source way of building a 67TB storage cluster for less than $8k.
• In-game advertisements are a lot more effective in violent games than non-violent games. My theory is that they are more effective because violent games tend to require greater observation of the game's environment and attention to details to survive in combat.
• I think this is too harsh of a take on the failures at usaspending.gov. While it is true that they made a lot of coding mistakes and things of that nature, it was a 1.0 product and it is more of a cultural problem that is holding it back from getting fixed and more useful. The effort itself was actually probably a B- for a 1.0 project.
• Teaching people how to shut down dissenting views at townhall meetings.
• Other than the modest speed increase, I think this may be the most compelling new feature of Snow Leopard. Grand Central Dispatch is a C-based API for handling threads that sounds like it could really give C, C++ and Objective C a good, well-supported system for handling multi-threading in a less painful way than is usually the case with those languages. The ease with which one can multithread Java applications is one of the reasons why they are so widespread in the enterprise today.