From Digg:

Me: I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for the same liberal democrats who shriek about the separation of church and state whenever evangelicals are more politically involved than going to vote to come out and denounce these nuns on similar church-state grounds...

pjhorrex: I think you're confused. Nuns, as citizens of the United States, have every right to write to their lawmakers (publicly or otherwise) about what laws they believe should be passed. One could even argue it is their civic responsibility (just as it is everyone's) to do so.

Politically involved evangelicals are something else entirely. They tell their following how they should vote while paying no taxes, state or federal. It's highly unethical.

Me: No, I think **you** are confused. Evangelicals, as US citizens, have every right to discuss politics in church per the 1st amendment: freedom of religion, freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of speech. Not only that, but the average member of those evangelical congregations pays state and federal taxes. Since nuns take vows of poverty, that is virtually impossible for them.

So really, you are just saying a group of mostly tax-paying US citizens trying to exercise 3/5 of the 1st amendment: "you can't get involved because the incorporated entity which owns the build you're in doesn't pay taxes."

pjhorrex: I never said evangelicals did not have the right to discuss politics in their churches. I said it was unethical. If evangelical leaders participated in letter writing campaigns to their representatives or held political discussion forums on their own time there would be little (if any) ethical problems.

However, that is not what you were referring to. They preach about politics as the leaders of organizations that do not pay taxes. They attempt to manipulate a system (as an organization) they have no stake in. It is unethical.

Want to lessen the ethics problems? Do away with tax exemption for churches. Then they can preach that Barrack Obama is the Antichrist for all I care.

Me: It's still not unethical. The congregation pooled its money together to build the building and hire the pastor. Most of them pay taxes which means that most of the people you are claiming are participating in an unethical process are stakeholders under your own criteria.

The left has no problem with this when it's labor unions that do it or groups like the ACLU and others which send out voter guides to their members. None of those groups pay taxes. Yet I don't hear anyone on the left saying it's unethical for labor unions and groups like the ACLU to go out and suggest how their members should vote.

Pjhorrex is typical of liberals in that he/she gets its panties in a knot at the idea of religious groups organizing and preaching about political subjects. The kindest interpretation of this is that he/she worships legal procedure; it would be ethical for them to have the same conversation at a coffee shop, but apparently, banding together and using personal funds to build a religious organization changes everything. That is clear evidence that it is an undeniable prejudice against religion.

This Robert McCain quote (an expansion on something Margaret Thatcher said) reminded me of a conversation with a supporter of universal health coverage:

You can’t conjure up goods and services merely by proclaiming your belief that these things are a “civil right.” This is the basic problem with socialism: Eventually, you run out of other people’s money. [H/T: The Camp of the Saints]

The mainstream American view toward technology is sort of like a sophisticated cargo cult mentality where strange beings called engineers, programmers and scientists work strange crafts in realms beyond mortal understanding to deliver increasingly magical goods and services to them. Provide some supplication and lucre to these demi-gods and break-through cures, new TV and movie standards and green technology will be dropped in for them to consume. There is little appreciation for the fact that someone has to research these things, design new products, test them, pass them through quality assurance and get them to market.

It's an established fact that the current system cannot be socialized because it is too inefficient. Medicare alone is now looking at $89 trillion in unfunded liabilities in the future and it excludes a significant swath of the American public. The government will try to socialize it, and as the system invariably and predictably spirals out of control, it'll impose stricter and stricter controls on services and prices. That'll drive many out of the profession and discourage many students from studying it. There will be less profit to be had for private researchers which means fewer medical companies producing drugs and devices. Many Americans, unwilling to accept basic economics and a somewhat tragic view of the realities of life, will sheepishly despair like a Pacific islander wondering why the sky gods no longer love them enough to send them new gifts.

In some respects, it may be hyperbole to invoke the image of a cargo cult here, but underlying mental state is based on the assumption that the goods will magically appear if we use the right invocation. For the south Pacific islands' isolated tribes, that's making a giant replica airplane and worshiping it. For us, it's legislating it into existence as an act of imposing our will to power on the universe.

Google's closure compiler service gets a little too frisky under ADVANCED_OPTIMIZATIONS.

Original code:

With advanced optimizations enabled, it was able to save a whopping 92.4% of the space required for the original!

Here is the sane version using SIMPLE_OPTIMIZATION:

I was just curious to see what it looked like with the advanced optimizations. I knew that it would be useless without passing in the entire ExtJs library because it would rename the references to ExtJs. I had no idea it would just truncate most of the code!

• A significant percentage of surveyed doctors take a very hostile view of the health care reform bill before Congress, but what do they know? They're just the people who will have to work under the system it regulates into existance. They're not enlightened like the "progressives" who demand it be pushed through, the cost be damned.
• The Federal Accounting Standards Board may soon say "frak it" (they're a federal agency, it has to be FCC-approved) and undue Barney Frank's accounting fraud legalization scheme.
• Not content to allow Windows Mobile to be abused in the mobile market like a poor kid from Appalachia transplanted into a Beverly Hills high school, they now start making some IP enforcement noise right as Windows Phone 7 looks like it might be cool enough to win some developer support.
• Speaking of Microsoft, it looks like they're going all out to get Internet Explorer 9 as sophisticated as possible. They're supposedly targeting all of the latest web standards which might mean that they'll actually make a browser that is about as good as the Webkit-based browsers and Firefox at rendering web pages...
• The sex scandals in the Roman Catholic Church are getting so numerous now that the Vatican is having to consider hiring new people to handle and investigate them. This could have easily been avoided had they just established a zero tolerance policy toward it from the very beginning like the bible tells them.
• Hell is freezing over now, as evidenced by the fact that a single mother has actually temporarily lost custody of her child due to the behavior of the man she was involved with. What's next? Holding such women consistently accountable for the men they voluntarily bring around their kids?
• Google is about to change the API for its AdWords program and that will apprently break the Perl module for AdWords client access. Google's response so far is: "stop using Perl or roll your own client code."
• The ExtJs team is already getting a good start on building in support for HTML5 features like <video>. Note: the samples will not run unless you are running a very recent version of Firefox like 3.6 (maybe 3.5) or a very recent build of Google Chrome.

One possible hurdle that the lawyers at the Justice Department noted in their presentation, which was given by John Lynch and Jenny Ellickson, both attorneys in the department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, is the possibility of violating a Web site's terms of service if an agent lies about his identity.

This is called prosecutors hoist on their own petard: In the Lori Drew case, the Justice Department claimed that violating MySpace terms of service was a criminal offense.

Their problem today? Many Web sites require that subscribers use their real name. Facebook's terms of service require users to agree not to "create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission." At Twitter, "impersonation is against the terms of service." Even some newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times say that "using a name other than your own legal name in association with the submission of user content is prohibited."

A federal judge eventually ruled that a strict interpretation of criminal law would be unreasonable, but it remains an unsettled legal question.

When Lori Drew was being prosecuted, everyone was saying that this would have a lot of unintended consequences, but I don't remember anyone foreseeing the Department of Justice having to tell its agents to be extremely careful about how they use social networking sites lest they run afoul of that precedent! One prosecutor's career-making move could cost the careers of other Department of Justice personnel.

This is a good reason why legislators need to be careful in how they word laws. In particular, they need to provide guidance in legislation to the courts and juries to explain to them what their intent is behind the law so that they can help them enforce the law as intended. Even if one is cynical and says that the legislators who enabled Drew's prosecution wouldn't mind that scenario, it's unlikely that they would have still supported it if it became clear that such a scenario, if allowed to go unchecked, would hypothetically allow for the prosecution of federal agents carrying out normal undercover operations.

Shikha Dalmia pointed out that the electoral college is, strictly speaking, a progressive institution in the US Constitution. Considering the way that the left falls all over itself to "protect the rights of minorities" (and we all know that those rights are typically not their constitutional rights) of any sort, you'd think that they would love an institution which prevents a handful of big, powerful states from running rough shod over the rest of the union and consigning most states to electoral insignificance.

But then, the left has always been more concerned about acquiring power in order to remake society in its image and many of the states that benefit greatly from the electoral college are conservative states. They figure that opening up the presidential elections purely to the popular vote would garner them more power in the long run, and they're right.

What it would also do is allow for a great deal of exploitation against the smaller states, many of whom, while poor in many respects, are very agriculturally productive (often disproportionately so). That is a recipe for disaster for the union, plain and simple.

Version 1.0 of my Google Translate plugin is officially released.

I spruced up iNove (the theme currently used on this blog) and have uploaded a new zip file. The updates are also in my GitHub repository.

This is what happens when you are so politically correct that you can't tell people to keep it in their pants:

Douglas said the increased rate of infection in blacks is not do to increased risk behavior but likely due to biological factors that make women more susceptible as well as the higher rate of infection within black communities.

Rather than point out the fact that 70% of black kids are born out of wedlock and that that is a significant sociological indicator of promiscuity (the leading cause of STD transmission) among black Americans, they "tip toe" around that by suggesting that black women are less resistent to herpes than white women. Sure, it would be blaming the victim, and we all know that that is racist too, but isn't that at least a little better than implying that black women's bodies just don't cut it at fighting disease compared to white women?

On the other hand, white people are really not much better off since a white man has a 1/6 chance that he's about to douse his crotch in viral napalm the night after he says "I do." In this race to the bottom, it's only a matter of time before we all end up "free and equal" in our misery.

Businesses will spend about 3.4 billion man-hours and individuals about 1.7 billion hours figuring out their taxes this year. That is the equivalent of 3 million people working full time year-round on tax-preparation work. This is more people than now serve in the U.S. armed forces. It is more man-hours than are required to build every car, van, and truck in the United States. [Source]

There are three things which the income tax code provides the federal government: revenue, social control and a sort of make-work program. I have seen figures ranging from the mid 250 billions to as high as 300 billion dollars as the amount of money that compliance with the federal income tax law costs in additional labor and expenses to the American people. The figures cited above are from 2003 and are probably the higher end of the compliance costs, but they should serve as a serious reminder of how much money and labor is simply wasted on complying with an inefficient tax code.

Figures like this make me shudder at the prospect of Obamacare. A government which can create a tax code so inelegant, so bloated, so indecipherable that it makes Microsoft Windows look like a case study in software engineering perfection is not capable of making something like Obamacare work.