Octopodial Chrome

Today is Bill of Rights Day, the day in which we celebrate the guarantees of liberty in our federal Constitution. In Federalist 84, Alexander Hamilton argued that listing some rights and not others would lead to protection for only those listed and not the unlisted. He was, of course, correct: despite the the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, there is no right which is not safe when the legislature is in session.

Still, the Bill is a great document, listing a few of the fundamental rights of a free people: to practise one’s religion; to speak; to publish; to assemble peacefully (this one gets stomped on all the time nowadays); to petition the State; to own and carry arms (this one is practically a dead letter across the entire United States); to be secure in one’s property (yeah, quartering troops seems a pretty minor deal now, but the principle is important; moreover the protections of the Fifth Amendment with regard to property have been severely curtailed); to be safe from unwarranted and unreasonable searches and seizures (this one has been gone by the wayside since Prohibition); to indictment and trial by a jury of one’s peers (this one has been watered down quite a bit); to not bear witness against oneself (I’d go further and argue that no-one should be compelled to give testimony against anyone else either); to be confronted by the witnesses against one (this one too has been curtailed, to our great shame); to compel witnesses to testify in one’s favour; to be assisted by a lawyer in court and to non-excessive bails, fines and punishments (this one is all-too-often misinterpreted). This is not a bad list to start with, although I would add others. Tellingly, I wouldn’t eliminate any of them. It’s a pity that my fellow countrymen, our legislatures and our courts disagree and have removed or weakened one after another.

And then there are the Ninth and Tenth Amendments: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people and The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. Well, we see how well that worked out.

Here’s a thought: this year, why not work with the Bill of Rights, rather than against it?

I just found a review if Fat, a wonderful new cookbook in four sections: butter, lard, poultry fat and suet/tallow. It sounds tasty.

Hat-tip to jackdied.

An elementary school in Georgia has banned sugar from its premises for a decade. Not only that, but every morning has a full hours of vigourous exercise and the students are taught proper nutrition.

Within six months of the sugar ban, students misbehaved 23 percent less than before and reading scores improved 15%.

Mens sana in corpore sano.

Reason has another great feature: a documentary about Hollywood’s sick love affair with Che Guevara. Guevara was a murderer who opposed the very sort of artists and musicians who now idolise him.

It’s considered cute and trendy to celebrate Communists like Guevara, Mao and Lenin—and yet they were responsible for more death and history than the deservedly-condemned Hitler!

A few months ago I bought a T-shirt with Che Guevara's image atop the legend Communism killed 100 million people and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. Heh heh heh.

Now this is just hilarious: a group of drug legalisation activists set up a honeypot for police: they rented a home and proceeded to grow two small Christmas trees inside it. There’s nothing illegal about that, and yet somehow the police managed to get a search warrant and raid the home. What the police didn’t know is that they were on tape…

Radley Balko has some analysis: basically, it’s likely that illegal (under an opinion written by Justice Scalia and joined by Justice Thomas) thermal imaging was used to detect the grow lights, and that the police then lied on an affidavit, alleging either that they smelled marijuana or that they had been tipped off (neither would have been possible since no marijuana was ever produced or sold at the house), got a warrant and raided.

In a police department which followed the law, they would not be using thermal imaging. If the department followed the law, they would not lie on an affidavit. In this case, it appears that a lot of care was taken to ensure that there was no legal probable cause to raid the house.

Within 60 days the police have to release the warrant and the affidavit and we’ll see for certain. The question is—if they indeed broke the law, will the offenders be punished? We are a nation of laws, and our public servants should be scrupulous about following those laws. When they are not, they should be held accountable.

This is actually orthogonal to the issue of drug legalisation: even if you support drug prohibition whole-heartedly, you should be concerned when police and prosecutors break the law.

Tonight I upgraded to Fedora 10, which was relatively less painful than such upgrades have been in the past. One big problem, though, was getting Blosxom working. Try as I might, I kept on getting errors in /var/log/httpd/error_log stating Permission denied: exec of ’/var/www/blosxom/bin/blog’ failed.

After lots of playing around, I discovered the solution: just run chcon -t httpd_sys_script_exec_t /var/www/blosxom/bin/blog. It turns out the in the latest Fedora SELinux has pretty fine-grained controls and needs to be told that it’s okay to execute CGI scripts. Not a big deal, but not friggin’ documented anywhere!

Anyway, if you’ve been having this problem, there’s the solution.

Some time ago I predicted that forcing soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan to shave their beards would hinder our efforts to pacify that country (imagine, if you will, the trouble of ruling America with lisping legions in hotpants). Well, I was right: the Afghans do not respect men who look like boys.

Frankly, I think that the insistence on beardlessness is a bit strange. Hair on one’s face is no more a discipline issue than hair on one’s head: just slap some regulations on it, require neat military grooming and get on with life.

This comic is right on the money.

James S. Robbins has a good article on the aftermath of the Bombay attacks. I think he’s on to something. As to how to prevent such events in the future—I’m unconvinced that’s the right model. Sure, we should have some folks tasked with prevention, but they can’t stop every attempt. It’s far better to focus on appropriate means of response.

Imagine, say, that every able-bodied guest at the Oberoi had a weapon and military training…

Way, way too cool. Now, just figure out a way to set the chainsaw on fire in flight, and I think one will have developed the all-time ultimate weapon.

Research indicates that body odour is as unique as fingerprints, and that changing diet does not change one’s fundamental smell. Could have some interesting implications for criminology.

Now here is a treat: an audio recording of gas shells being fired by the British on 9 October 1918 outside Lille.

Today is Veteran’s Day, once known as Armistice Day to celebrate the armistice which ended the Great War. Ninety years ago today the shooting stopped, although it would be some time before the final peace treaty was signed. Almost a decade ago I had the privilege of going to Europe and touring many of the battlefields of the Western Front; it was a lot of fun and quite literally awesome. I think Philip Larkin’s MCMXIV expresses it pretty well: the world of 1914 was utterly different from the world of 1918. In a way, the Great War was the end of Western civilisation; we're just playing in the ruin our great-grandparents made of their patrimony.

In London today three surviving veterans laid wreaths; in America there is only one surviving veteran of the war. At least two of my great-grandfathers served in it; my dad’s dad’s father was an artillery officer and I believe my mom’s mom’s father was in the cavalry.

Today is the 233rd birthday of the United States Marine Corps, the pre-eminent naval infantry in the world. Founded in a bar, it is larger than the British Army and has had in its ranks such notables as John Philip Sousa, James Carville, Gene Hackman and Drew Carey—and my youngest brother. Joe Carter reflects on the day. Semper fi!

Well, it looks like America will have her first half-black president. This is good news in itself; within living memory it would have been impossible for him to vote in many states and now he's president. We've come a long way indeed. My grandmother let her black neighbour use her washing machine because the local laundromat wouldn't let coloured folks in (only they didn't use a nice word like coloured), and now a majority of the electorate have put a black man in the White House. Perhaps this will be the end of racial paranoia, which would be an excellent development. Regardless, it's a nice indication that one of our great national sins is well and truly in the past.

If Obama carries out his promise to allow the states to administer medical-marijuana programmes, that would be a good thing for sick people and for the Republic.

I hope that the Right doesn't get Obama Derangement Syndrome like the Left got Bush Derangement Syndrome and the Right got Clinton Derangement Syndrome.

I hope that he governs wisely and well; if he does then our nation will prosper.

Today is election day here in America. Unlike many others, I will not encourage you to just vote. You have that right, of course, but you also have the right to stand on a sidewalk claiming that Martians are running Major League Baseball. No, I’m going to encourage you to vote wisely. Vote for men and women who will faithfully discharge their duties under the constitutions of both the United States and your individual state. Vote for ballot issues which are consistent with those same constitutions. Vote wisely, having done your research. If you’ll vote foolishly, then please: don’t. Exercise your right not to vote. But if you will vote soberly and seriously, with an intelligent grasp of the issues at stake, then please: head down to your nearest polling station and vote.

Over the past year, motorcycle crashes have killed more Marines than has combat. Both the Marine Corps & the Navy have seen a jump in motorcycling deaths; I wonder what’s up. Is it a general thing—are motorcycling deaths among the wider population going up (perhaps as a result of more motorcycling newbies taking it up to save on gas)—or is it particular to the military? I guess only further research will tell.

Today is Navy Day, a holiday first celebrated in 1922 and last observed in 1949. Today Navy Birthday---two weeks prior to Navy Day--is observed in its stead.

On a more personal note, this evening after work I went downtown in Denver and was commissioned an ensign in the United States Navy Reserve. It's the culmination of just over two years of effort and the beginning of a new chapter in my life. My (part-time) naval career is going to be challenging, but I believe it will be very rewarding as well.

Why did I join? That's a complex question, but it boils down to three factors: I think I should, I think I'll be good at it and I think I'll enjoy it. There's a war on, and I believe that my talents can be of use. And while it'll be a lot of work, I expect it will be frequently interesting & often fun.

I've had a lot of fun updating this blog over the last five years and change; it's been a fun way to jot down my thoughts on subjects I find interesting, including politics, national security and foreign relations. It's been a pretty frank outlet for, as my tagline reads, stuff that made sense at the time. That will naturally need to change from here forward; observant readers may have noticed that for quite awhile now I've been almost silent on a lot of issues. That will continue; in addition as I can find time I will be working my way through the archives, redacting & deleting as appropriate. Meanwhile, I should note that nothing in this blog---past,present or future---is the opinion of the Navy, the Department of Defense or the government of the United States.

I apologise for the infrequent updates, but I daresay that with my new workload they'll be even fewer and far between. That's the way it goes.

Edward Cardinal Egan asks that you just look. Look at that picture, and answer three simple questions.

That’s all there is to the debate over infanticide. Is the infant a human being? Yes, it is. Is it an innocent human being? Yes, it is. Are the authorities in a civilised society duty-bound to protect innocent human beings should someone wish to kill them? Yes, they are so bound. End of story—nothing else matters.

Jim Adams, RIP.

Up to 45 million years ago, a Lebanese weevil was trapped in amber in what is now Burma; inside its body it harboured a colony of bacteria and yeast which was extracted a decade ago and is now used to brew beer. Prehistoric yeast: how cool is that?

It turns out that since Corning sold the rights to use the Pyrex name, Pyrex dishes have been exploding left and right, maiming people and generally being untrustworthy.

I just found a great article on how large corporations become functionally indistinguishable from the State: the full impact of economic decisions is not understandable and hence poor decisions are made. An example in the article is Home Depot centralising all purchasing from fifty states to Atlanta, Georgia and then exporting it to India. On paper it looks like a great idea: lower purchasing costs. But the actual impact is a multitude of problems as the India purchasing agents don’t understand the lingo of American purchasing. The decision has costs that were not apparent.

This isn’t really surprising when one thinks about it. The State is just another large corporation (albeit one with a monopoly on force). It’s perfectly natural that if the State cannot make wise economic decisions then neither can other large corporations.

A few days ago I was driving along when a great song from my college years came on the radio (One Headlight by the Wallflowers). It occurred to me that it’d be really great to know the next time they’re in town. But then I realised that there’s no way for me to be alerted of the fact.

Sure, I could sign up for their mailing list. But then I’d get announcements of records, of shows in other cities and states, perhaps the lead singer’s thoughts on politics or art or some other subject. I don’t want to know every update about the band: I just want to know when they’re playing within eight leagues of my home.

I could manually go to every concert venue in town and sign up for their mailing lists. But they may not have them at all! If they do have them, then they will send me emails about the latest death metal acts to play on their stages. I don’t want to know every band to play at the Bluebird; I just want to know the next time the Wallflowers play.

All the information about where the Wallflowers are playing is already online, in the form of concert listings at venues and postings on their website and advertisements and concert highlights in newspapers. But there’s no way to get at that data and be alerted when something interesting happens.

The Semantic Web was supposed to save me all this trouble. The semantics of data were to have been encoded with the data itself: venues would all use a common standard to indicate their listings and bands would all use a common standard to indicate their shows. Fans would then have been able to create agents which would alert them with news they would find interesting (e.g. the Wallflowers are playing at the Gothic Monday). This clearly is in everyone’s benefit: the fans get to see more shows; the artists get larger audiences; the venues sell more tickets. It’s win-win-win. But it hasn’t happened.

I think the problem is that everyone is short-sighted. They all want to run their own little walled gardens of mailing lists and web sites, afraid that if they make it easier for fans to find shows then they might find them at other venues or listen to other artists. The sad thing is, they’re almost certainly wrong: if they opened things up, the fans would see more shows and listen to more artists. I know I would.

Stephen Fry—whom some of my readers may remember for his role as the gentleman’s gentleman Jeeves—has recorded a video congratulating the GNU Project on turning 25.

I happened upon Television under the Swastika, a documentary concerning Nazi television. It’s pretty interesting stuff: cabaret acts, political interviews, cooking shows—all designed to show the greatness of the Party and its benevolent Leader.

Watching stuff like that always gets me wondering about that lost world. It’s not a sense of nostalgia, of course—the Nazis were one of the great evils of the 20th century—but one does wonder what it was actually like to live in that world.

It’s also strange to see actual pictures of the era, as opposed to movie interpretations. In the movies, everyone is a blond-haired, clean-shaven Aryan stereotype, but in the films one sees a lot of old-fashioned Imperial Germans with their forked beards and dark hair.

I also wonder about what was going on underneath the surface. The barbers being retrained as hairdressers, for example: did they ask for the retraining, or did the party simply tell some quota of barbers that they had to submit for retraining? What dark secrets lay behind the sunny scenes?

I can’t say that it’s very surprising, but incenese has been linked to nasal, oral, throat and lung cancers. I suppose soon only those over 18 will be allowed to buy it; some time after that it will be illegal to burn it in a public place. Then it will be illegal to burn around minors.

Or, just possibly, Western civilisation will get its collective head together and learn that it really doesn’t matter.

Abhishek Reddy has written an excellent precis of the features of Common Lisp. If you’re at all interested in programming languages, here it all is: everything Lisp has which your favourite language very probably doesn’t.

For my money, conditions are just about the coolest things ever.

Ethan Moyer (9) and his best friend Jake Smith (10) enlisted in the army down at the Denver MEPS. It was something the Make-a-Wish Foundation arranged for him with the co-operation of a bunch of folks from the Army who gave up their day off to run him through faux entrance processing, some simulations and even a pair of boy-size cammies.

Pretty amusing.

Bruce Webster has some interesting thoughts on modifying the Cravath model for the technical field. The Cravath model is the standard big-company practise of having partners, directors, senior managers, managers, senior associates & associates who are rated annually, with the lowest performers being asked to leave and the highest performers being promoted. In many ways the model is good, but one problem is that it doesn’t really work for technology because technologists generally don’t wish to manage and generally don’t do well in management; Webster proposes a parallel track of associate engineer, engineer, senior engineer, technical officer, senior technical officer, executive technical officer and chief technical officer.

It’s a pretty good idea, I think. I’m not certain how a technical officer would keep his skills current, but it’s probably very doable. And it certainly makes more sense than putting engineers into management.

Have you ever considered how much you pay to store all the stuff you have? I’m ashamed to say that I still have stuff in my loft that hasn’t moved since I moved in. I have videocassettes that I’ll never watch because I’ve not hooked up my VCR. I still have the VCR too. I have a giant brewpot which I never use because it’s 15 gallons and I do 6½ gallon boils. I have books that I was going to get rid of by selling on eBay or Craigslist—but there were no takers. Yes, that’s right: no-one else on the face of the planet wants them, and yet I keep them still.

Methinks this weekend is time to clean house.

Surgeons at Denver Children’s Hospital are cutting out the hearts of infants disconnected from life support after their hearts stop beating but before their brains stop functioning. They are then transplanting them into other children.

A more grotesque and evil procedure is hard to imagine. It’s disgusting. It’s indefensible.

The excuse, of course, is the transplantation: they really just want to save lives. So instead of waiting for actual death to occur, they wait until the heart stops. The same criterion is being pushed for with adult donors as well.

This is pure evil. Those responsible should be tried, convicted and executed for murder.

It’s also illustrative of how widespread organ transplantation coarsens a society. It’s one thing for someone living to give an organ (e.g. a kidney or part of a liver) to another; it’s another thing entirely to desecrate a body, rendering a man down for parts like some animal. But men are not animals, and we are more than the sum of our parts.

I hope that if my own organs failed I would have the moral strength to resist the appeal of buying my own life with another’s death.

A Somali Mohammedan has been found dead in his hotel room with a pound of cyanide days before the Democratic National Convention starts. No, there’s nothing suspicious about this at all.

The Virtual Ranger has a great comparison of National Geographic and BBC nature specials. The National Geographic version is staged, hyper-active, short-attention-span-oriented, not terribly interesting and only marginally educational. The BBC version is thought-provoking and designed to encourage the viewer to think in a methodical fashion.

We need less of the former and more of the latter.

It turns out that Royal Navy’s four-century collection of captains’ logs is yielding historical climate data. Apparently they made meticulous observations of air pressure, wind strength, air & sea temperature and other weather conditions, all of which is helping climate scientists study how the global climate has changed over time.

Rather unsurprisingly, the observations demonstrate that there’s nothing new under the sun: phenomena which have been attributed to global warming actually did occur well before there was any such thing—indeed, during the Little Ice Age.

The American Medical Association—known previously for such absurd positions as opposing gun rights—now wishes to outlaw home births because they are riskier than hospital births. That may or may not be true; I’ll accept that it probably is. But that’s immaterial: free citizens in a free society have the fundamental right to weigh the evidence and make their own choices.

I’m perhaps a bit biased: my youngest brother was delivered by midwives at home and my mother looks back on the experience fondly. Later those same midwives were driven out of business by the local physicians.

If parents wish to have their children at home, that is their business, not mine, not the medical profession’s and definitely not the State’s.

It appears that there is a novel drug-shipping method: ship the drugs to an innocent party, then have them retrieved by the deliveryman. Knowing this was going on, when a package containing 30 pounds of marijuana was addressed to the wife of the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, the county police did the only logical thing: he got a no-knock warrant, invaded the mayor’s home with a SWAT team, killed the mayor’s two black labs then bound & interrogated the mayor and his mother-in-law for hours. Because just executing a normal warrant would have been crazy: someone like a mayor has nothing to lose and might stage a shoot-out. Or he might flush thirty pounds of dope down the toilet in as many seconds. And of course if they’d executed a normal warrant then the mayor might have tied up his dogs, and what’s point of executing a drug raid if you can’t shoot someone’s pets?

Seriously though—while SWAT teams have a very valuable purpose to serve, this is not one of them. And while it is appropriate in some circumstances to shoot pets (say, if a suspect sets his dogs on one), shooting them as a precautionary measure is hardly called for. And while there are legitimate reasons for no-knock raids, this was not one of them. Besides, if they already know that there’s a false-shipping operation in town, mightn’t they have suspected that might be involved here?

William Deresiewicz—and Ivy League graduate and professor—write on the disadvantages of an Ivy education. An interesting perspective from inside the system.

I think he’s very correct that the elites are much more insulated from the consequences of their actions than most of the rest of us. When’s the last time that one saw a politician with a ruined career cast out into the street begging for change?

I made coffee ice cream this past weekend. It’s a great recipe, but is a lot of work. If I make it again (and I probably will) I’ll make more than a quart. Man, it was good stuff.

As we all know, assimilation is key to successful immigration: foreigners immigrate, assimilate and their grandchildren are just as American as those whose forebears came over on Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery. Unfortunately, immigrants from Mexico are not assimilating; in fact, assimilation is reverse in some cases. This is hardly healthy.

A disturbing statistic is that one in ten children born today has a mother born in Mexico; of those half never completed high school. This is not at all good for our republic: 10% (at least) of our citizens have roots in a culture which is not at all republican, and half of those come from uneducated families. The survival of our republic and our liberties relies upon an electorate which is cognisant of its history—what will happen when it feels more affinity for the failed policies of a failed state (Mexico is the very definition of a failed state: it has gotten so bad that it openly encourages the emigration of its citizens) than for those principals which made our union great?

Back in 1994 Bruce Bartlett wrote a great essay about the fall of Rome. Basically, Rome’s foolish economic policies (driven by the emperor’s desire to destroy the senatorial class and prop up their armies) destroyed the empire and paved the way for the Dark Ages. Pretty cool stuff, and an object lesson to nations the world over.

Bushman’s Hole in South Africa is the deepest underwater cave in the world. Read the true story of an attempt to rescue the body of a diver who had died there. One of the best pieces I’ve read in a long, long time.

On the 18th of June a young man was arrested by police; he died on Sunday. He certainly deserved to be arrested, but the manner and the results are unacceptable. While celebrating a home-team win, he and some friends passed a cluster of 10–12 police officers; he sarcastically commented, wow, it seems like there’s a lot of crime on this corner. Very dumb, considering that he was breaking the law by drinking in public. Kids, if you’re going to mock the police, don’t do it while breaking the law. But the police—from reports—violently over-reacted: eight officers and a supervisor piled onto him, beating him and driving off his friends. In the struggle, he stopped breathing, was rushed to a hospital and eventually died of his injuries.

As I noted, he deserved to be cited or arrested, for blatant stupidity if nothing else. But the right thing to do would have been for two or three policemen to have approached him and then cited or arrested him. The wrong thing was to pile on. If he had resisted arrest, then it would have been appropriate to subdue him.

We are free citizens in a free republic: the police are our public servants. They should use politeness first, and force only when necessary. They should not see us as cattle to be herded.

This ties in with the abuse of SWAT teams and warrant-serving by force. By default, warrants should be served by a few officers: knock on the door, serve the warrant and get on with life. Sending a SWAT team to arrest an optometrist for a non-violent crime escalates matters unreasonably.

Yes, there are instances (many instances, perhaps) where force is necessary. But when force becomes the default; when law enforcement is held to a lower standard of accountability (note that the eggshell skull rule holds that you’re responsible even for unforeseeable consequences—but it’s not applied to the police), when citizens are routinely slain by their public servants—in that case, something has to change.

Michæl Pollan has some nontraditional advice on how to be healthy: eat food; not too much; mostly plants.

The full article is actually a wonderful examination of how nutritionism has damaged the American diet. Instead of eating healthy food, we flock to unhealthy food with a few extra nutrients added. Believe it or not, removing fat or adding oat bran or fibre does not a healthy product make.

Our own public servants are of no use, for they are to beholden to the producers. Pollan details how back in 1977 the federal government was to have released a recommendation to reduce consumption of meat; due to pressure from the cattle industry, the recommendation was instead choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake, which is not at all the same thing. It’s much like advising choose a method of driving which maximises leg and arm motion instead of just saying exercise more.

Fortunately, Pollan also offers some good advice: eat food; not too much; mostly plants. Eat real food, not manufactured food products. Processed food-like substances trigger our taste sensors, but there’s no there there: they don’t actually contain the substances we need to survive. Avoid them, and you’ll be better off. Don’t eat too much food; gluttony is a sin for a reason (actually, all sins are sins for a reason, but that’s another blog entry). Eat mostly plants: they are chock-full of nutritious goodness. Meat’s good stuff too; you should have meat in your diet. It’s tasty, and it’s a good way of getting certain proteins in a hassle-free manner. Livestock can be an excellent way of eking out subsistence from barren grassland; some animals, pigs in particular, are excellent mechanisms for turning garbage into food. But too much meat is most definitely not what the doctor ordered. If you want my advice, do as the Church teaches and abstain from meat Wednesdays, Fridays, during Lent and Advent (there are several other fasts, but those are the big ones): you’ll cut your meat consumption down considerably, but you’ll still get what you want and what you need. Plus, self-discipline is a virtue.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Today is a great day, a red-letter day, a triumph for sanity and a victory for reason. Today a majority the Supreme Court of the United States decided to actually read their copies of the Constitution (something the justices too-rarely do). Today the Court affirmed that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

As the decision noted, the public-safety impact—whether positive or negative—is none of the Court’s business. All that matters is the constitutionality of a total gun ban. Those of you who hate guns: amend the federal constitution if you wish. I’d oppose your efforts, but I’d also applaud your honesty. If you don’t like what the Constitution says, change the Constitution—don’t pretend it says something else.

We have decades more work ahead of us before things change for the better. The next thing we need to do is to prove that the Second Amendment is incorporated by the Fourteenth and thus binding on the states. After that, we need to prove that onerous and expensive licensing requirements are unconstitutional (under decided law, one cannot license a right—can you imagine having to get a speech license, or a voting license?). Then we will need to demonstrate that machine guns, grenades, bazookas and other military arms are legitimately protected by the Second Amendment.

Only then will Americans once again be free with respect to firearms. If course, there are a lot of other things we need to work on (e.g. the over-expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause). But this is excellent news for almost everyone: excellent for gun owners, who are free to move into Washington, DC; excellent for the poor, who are most subject to violence and can now defend themselves; and excellent for women, who can better defend themselves against assailants. It’s only bad news for criminals, whose victims will now be armed, and for gun control advocates. Personally, I’m quite happy to see members of either or both of those groups have a rotten day.

Sorry for the paucity of blog updates the past few months. I’ve been working an exceedingly time-consuming project at work and have had very little personal time.

Here’s a good read about the decline of American manufacturing. It argues–convincingly IMHO—that the business philosophies of the 1970s destroyed our economic might.

Most of my friends know that I’ve an uncle who is a Catholic priest. Father Uncle Joseph (as I am amused to call him) has spent the last nine years at St. Ann’s in Kaufman, Tx., where he has done a lot of good for his church and his community. His recent transfer has actually made the local paper, no small feat in a Protestant town (some years ago he even got the award for preaching, again a bit of a big deal when it’s awarded by Protestants). I wish him the best of luck in his new posting; I’m sure that he’ll do well there.

James Kunstler argues that Americans are literally driving toward disaster. We think that we can magically wish our way out of the energy and food cost increases.

He may not be correct that we’ve reached Peak Oil; however, I think it’s pretty clear that whether it is in the future or the recent past, we will not have cheap oil forever. There is certainly a speculative boom in oil right now; the price should come down somewhat at some point (of course, speculative bubbles can last for years…). But in the long term, we know that oil will get scarcer, and burning it in order to get around town just won’t be an efficient use thereof.

Arto Bendiken notes that Lively Kernel is a reinvention of the Lisp Machine concept. For those who’ve not heard of them, Lisp Machines were really great pieces of work: at a time when command-lines and static software which crashed were the norm, they provided full GUIs, dynamic software and elegant error recovery. Perhaps Lively Kernel can bring some of that coolness into the 21st century.

Computing really is about continually reinventing the wheel.

An Australian driver in a fit of road-pique (I like that better than road-rage—it conveys the pathetic nature of the emotion better) tried to kill a line of 50 cyclists.

’Tis a pity Australia has done away with the death penalty; the driver is a prime candidate.

Elaine McArdle reports that gender disparity in science and technology may be a result of gender preferences—that is, two different studies show that men and women seek different things (big surprise, huh?). Of course, anyone who actually dealt with men and women would know this, but I guess it has taken science time to move from thinking of women as defective men, to thinking of them as the same as men, and finally to thinking of them as something different from but no less important than men. This is progress.

The details of the studies are interesting: one found that men preferred working with tools and women preferred dealing with people; another found that math-precocious men preferred to work with inorganic stuff while math-precocious women preferred working with living stuff. This led to more men in engineering and more women in medicine and biology.

The Mathematical Association of America have published and insightful condemnation of the methods by which we teach mathematics. A must-read for anyone who has ever learnt math, taught math or who has children who may one day learn math. Really good stuff.

Me, I think math should be taught using rhythmomachia. But I’m a loon.

It turns out that sunblock kills coral reeves (yes, I prefer reeves to reefs). So it looks like the choice is to burn and get cancer, or to kill coral—or to stay in the shade. I choose the shade.

Well, I’ve managed to make it through thirty years of life. I don’t really know how it happened: one day I was in college thinking that the thirty-year-old alumni were ancient, and then one day I was old.

I guess it’s immature to want to be younger, and I don’t actually want to be a twenty-year-old again, as I was kinda a twit at that age. All of us are, probably. OTOH, it sure was nice to be so carefree and sheltered. My greatest worry was that I’d make a bad grade or get caught brewing beer in the dorm. In the grand scheme of things, doing badly in school or getting scolded for breaking the rules are nothing. It was nice.

It’s not too bad being thirty though. I can do things I couldn’t dare to imagine when I was twenty. I can buy things I couldn’t afford. I’m a lot smarter and a lot more experienced.

It is a bit annoying to think how old thirty-year-olds once looked to me, and realise that I look that old now. Oh well…

On Saturday my brother John Richard Uhl graduated from Mesa State College with a degree in that queen of subjects, History. For the first time in over a year, all four of us Uhl brothers were together to celebrate. We went to church, broke bread, drank beer, smoked cigars, saw Prince Caspian (about which more later) and just generally enjoyed one another’s company. It was great spending time with one another; I know that my parents were glad to have all their boys with them again.

I had given John a hard time in the past for taking so long to graduate (he’s twenty-five: at his age I owned a house and Tom was married), but I take it back now. For one thing, he paid his own tuition—it’s not like he was living off of our parents the whole time. And if a guy is paying his own way, who cares how much of his life he spends learning? In fact, that’s exactly what John was doing: he figured that he might as well make the most of the chance to educate himself. I can’t say that I disagree. He’s certainly had some great experiences, not least spending a year in Greece studying archæology.

After church on Sunday mom put on a party for John. She baked and cooked and baked and laid out quite a spread: sandwiches and cookies and cakes and meringues, oh my! It was a very pleasant afternoon.

Now that he has graduated, he’ll be working this summer and then will head off to OCS in hopes of becoming a naval officer. His studies in history should have him well-prepared for that job.

Congratulations to him, and best of luck in his new career!

Today marks eight years since Black Sunday, that sad day when I donned cap and gown and was cast headlong into the working world. I’ve since spent twice as many years out of school as I did in it.

When I look at what I wrote on the fourth anniversary of my graduation, I don’t see that I’m much further along at 29 than I was at 25: making a little more; still ensconced in my condo; still single; still driving the same car; still with very few local friends. But there’s hope: I’m working on a shift in my career to something I find more interesting; I’m renovating my condo; I’ve actually been on some dates. I’m actually pretty happy with my car, though. It’s nice driving an auto that will be old enough to vote next year. And I’ve added a few friends, which is progress. Finally, I’m working on a pretty big change—one which I’ll announce here if everything works out as planned.

So things are looking up. But, today just as four years ago and as eight years ago, I miss school. I miss being surrounded by my friends, guys with interests the same as mine. I miss being surrounded by the highest concentration of attractive women I’ll ever experience. I miss being able to pull three all-nighters in a row. I miss employing some of the best minds in the world to educate me. I miss not having bills to pay every month. I miss getting three months of vacation every year. I miss being young and foolish and unconcerned with the real world.

On the other hand, I quite like having money. I quite like being able to afford the things I ant to own. I like owning my own place, and setting my own rules. I rather enjoy not being a complete and utter git (well, by comparison with by 18- or 19-year-old self anyway).

Still, I miss sharing an apartment with Phil and Darren, brewing beer in the dorm kitchen, sneaking girls in past visitation hours, going to parties, hanging out at the library, cutting class to go golfing, going shooting in Oklahoma on the weekends, walking to class with a pipe clenched in my teeth, wearing a tweed coat every day and otherwise just plain having fun.

Today, as four years ago, as eight years ago, I miss school.

Dr. Lawrence Huntoon has written a great article about health care costs. He says pretty much what I’ve been saying for years, so naturally I think him a genius. Medical insurance is no longer insurance at all, but rather inefficiently pre-paid medical care. Since it is generally obtained through an employer (due to tax laws dating back to the Second World War), it is more inefficient and harder to keep. The uninsured face a nasty tax liability ($19,000,000,000 per year). The way to fix rapidly-escalating health care costs is via a market mechanism using medical savings accounts.

Of course, this applies to just about everything. We’d all be better off if the money we’d spent on Social Security all these years were in a 401(k) or IRA or other investment vehicle.

We’ve all seen those credit-card-entry (and other) forms which ask us to leave out dashes, spaces and other punctuations when entering our numbers. Never mind that credit card numbers are naturally written with spaces, that Social Security numbers use dashes and that phone numbers have a number of different representations involving dashes, parentheses, spaces, periods and plus signs. The really ridiculous thing is that removing extraneous punctuation is dead-simple for a computer to do. But these lazy programmers offload a single line of code’s worth of work onto the thousands or millions of visitors to their sites.

Well, Steve Friedl has decided to shame these morons. His well-intentioned attempt is probably doomed, but I wish him luck.

One week ago early this morning (very early this morning…) my youngest brother returned from his first deployment to Iraq. Thanks be to God, he is healthy and unharmed. It was good to hang out with him, Mom, Tom and Em in San Diego for a few days.

It appears that American soldiers overseas have rediscovered the utility of washboards. America’s last surviving washboard company makes a portable kit consisting of a small washboard (originally designed for travelling salesman), a tin bucket, lye soap, clothesline, clothespins and foot powder. They’re $25 and thousands have been sent to the troops.

I’m thinking of buying a set for myself…

Since the black date of 11 September 2001, many folks have been concerned about nuclear, biological or chemical terrorist attacks on American soil. A retired US Army sergeant dispels many of the myths about NBC warfare. Basically, as long as you don’t die immediately and keep your head, you’ll be okay. A must-read.

Crist aras! Crist soþlice aras!

Today is the greatest of feasts: today we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Today we mark the destruction of death’s power over man, because (while we still die) we know that we will each rise again just as Christ did.

Christus ist auferstanden! Er ist wahrhaftig auferstanden!

There are a few competing theories of the exact mechanism of how Christ’s Passion and Resurrection achieved salvation. Was it His Passion which did it? Was His death a sacrifice to pay for the sins of all? Was it His Resurrection which did it instead? By uniting the human and the divine in Himself and rising, did He make it possible for all men to rise? Was it both together? Was it something else, the Harrowing of Hell perhaps? I’m no theologian—all I know is that Christ died, and rose, and that consequently we all shall.

Christus resurrexit! Vere resurrexit!

Speaking of the Harrowing of Hell: as a boy one of my favourite images was what the scene must have been like after Christ died. In St. John Chrysostom’s famous Paschal sermon (which is worth a read in itself, and is better than anything I can write), he has this to say about what happened therein:

Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with.
It was in an uproar because it is mocked.
It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed.
It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated.
It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive.
Hell took a body, and discovered God.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven.
It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.
O death, where is thy sting?
O Hades, where is thy victory?

I always imagined Hell’s receiving-room to be something like a modern-day mailroom, with a legion of demonic clerks taking in, sorting and filing souls. I had this mental image of one of them hiding behind his desk, frantically trying to get ahold of Satan on the phone: Ummm…Boss, we’ve got a problem down here. He’s here. Oh d—— And then the line goes dead, and Satan reflects on the ideaalises that his scheme is rather finally broken. It’s a silly little thought, but I always enjoyed imagining it.

Христос воскрес! Воистину воскрес!

Just to show off Unicode, here’s the Paschal greeting in a few other languages:

Քրիստոս յարեաւ ի մեռելոց՜ Օրհնեալ է Յարութիւնն Քրիստոսի՜

ئەيسا تىرىلدى! ھەقىقەتىنلا تىرىلدى!

ക്രിസ്തു ഉയിര്‍ത്തെഴുന്നേറ്റു! തീര്‍ച്ചയായും ഉയിര്‍ത്തെഴുന്നേറ്റു!

!المسيح قام! حقا قام

ქრისტე აღსდგა! ჭეშმარიტად აღსდგა!

And of course, in the language which made it famous: Χριστός ἀνέστη! Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη!

Christ is risen! Truly He is risen!

Adam Petersen demonstrates how to create a simple polling web app in Common Lisp—in around 70 lines of code! It’s not perfect (as one reddit comment noted, he needs to escape his strings for HTML), but it’s a pretty cool demonstration of how Lisp can serve as a rapid development platform.

Lisp isn’t perfect, but it’s better than the alternatives out there.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a reasonably strict libertarian in both economic and social issues. I tend to think that the State has no business regulating private affairs, and my definition of private is fairly broad. I don’t believe, for example, that marriage should be an institution of the State (it is God’s creation, not man’s). This has led me to oppose the anti-polygamy laws not because I support polygamy (I oppose it) but because I don’t think that punishing polygamy is the proper business of the State any more than punishing the wearing of shorts by grown men (an offensive practise far more common) is the proper business of the State.

Rich Lowry has an article which gives me pause. He points out that polygamy as practised in Islamic and fundamentalist Mormon circles inevitably results in some pretty severe social effects. The most notable is that a few high-status men have many wive, leaving low-status men on the fringes of society, with little hope of marriage and children.

He’s right about the problem, although he doesn’t seem to realise that this is an effect of polygyny (multiple wives) rather than polygamy. A similar effect would probably be seen with polyandry (IIRC that was common in Tibet at one point, with brothers marrying a single wife).

The article provides a good reason for polygyny to be illegal: its negative effects spill over to the population as a whole. It may be that even a few polygynous marriages would be enough to have widespread negative effects.

I wonder though if those effects would hold in a generally polygamous society in which there were group marriages, polygynous marriages, polyandrous marriages and true marriages. And I wonder if polygamy would actually be all that common even were it legal. Certainly the majority of the churches would refuse to perform such marriages (though no doubt the Episcopalians would rush to be the first to allow them). Most women would object to a plural marriage as strenuously as they would to an affair. And I think most men really don’t want the extra bother.

Still, it does demonstrate that private choices can have public consequences.

Those of us who grew up camping and hiking in the 1980s and 1990s were constantly warned of the dangers of giardia lamblia and giardiasis. We were cautioned that if we ever drank water from a stream without first purifying it we risked our health and perhaps our very lives. Giardiasis was reputed to cause six months of uncontrollable diarrhœa; it was supposedly found in almost any stream, river or lake; it was bad juju.

Upon reflection, this didn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Old books are full of ways to find good water—they aren’t full of ways to purify water (although they might recommend boiling when in doubt). It always seemed a bit strange to me that the purported symptoms lasted for six months, a curiously round figure. Wild animals drink wild water, and they rarely seem to be suffering from intestinal trouble. Our ancestors—and many in the uncivilised world—drink wild water all the time. And then there are many of our fellows who do the same. I’m proud to say that I’ve been drinking water from streams for years, and I’ve never had a problem yet.

Well, it turns out that the giardia threat is massively overblown. Back in the 1980s some testing of wild water in the Sierra Nevadas was done: it turns out that the most contaminated water was purer than that found in San Francisco and that all but the two worst sites purer than that in Los Angeles. Even in other parts of the country, at the very worst sites one would need to drink almost 3 gallons of water in order to have a 50% chance of getting consuming enough giardia to have an effect.

Worse, it seems that 1 in 14 people have giardia in them already, and that the most likely path of contamination when camping is by food. Whoops.

All that said, there are plenty of other nasty microörganisms which can be found in water, and one needs to exercise some care. Areas which are commonly used by people are less safe than isolated areas; water that is stagnant is less safe than running water; it’s always safest to purify water one way or another. But really, it’s just not that big a deal.

I don’t really plan on carrying a purification kit. If I need to, I can boil it. And there’s something wonderfully tasty about ice-cold, crystal clear water from a mountain stream which runs through a stream bed lined with leaves. Iodine-tainted, bleached, boiled or filtered water are not the same thing.

Mark Gimein argues that the mortgage crisis will worsen considerably, especially in California. Apparently year-over-year prices have dropped 28%. One might wonder if they’ve bottomed out, but there’s an issue which will result in an even worse drop. It turns out that the fall in prices (due to the sub-prime crisis) means that it will become economically sound for prime mortgagers to simply leave their homes rather than owe (and pay for…) twice their market value.

This in turn will lead to still more foreclosures and abandonments. It could be a real estate perfect storm.

The president of Blue Jeans Cables recently received a cease & desist letter from Monster Cable. His response is a stunning smackdown of them, their claims and their business. The best line is perhaps this: Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it. It’s a long read, but every bit is worth it.

Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a network of size n is proportional to n². This follows from a simple observation: that the number of possible connections for each user in a network is n - 1; and since there are n users, then the total number of connections is n × (n - 1), which is roughly n². This all seems reasonable and makes sense.

But it’s wrong. It begs one simple question: what is the value of a connection. Metcalfe’s Law assumes that each connection is equally worthwhile. This doesn’t really make sense: is my connection to a bushman in the Kalahari as useful to me as my connection to my brothers, or to my bank? Not very likely.

It turns out that there’s another law—Zipf’s Law—which addresses all sorts of distributions. The article goes into more detail, but basically the second-most-important item in a list is one half as valuable as the first; the third is one third as valuable; the fourth is one quarter as valuable; and so on an so forth. It turns out that adding up 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4…1/n approximates log n reasonably closely. One might say that the value of a network of size n to any single user is proportional to log n (that is, the sum of the value of his most important link, his second most important link and so on until we get to his link to a squid-fishing boat in the Atlantic).

Thus Briscoe, Odlyzko & Tilly suggest their own network-value law: the value of a network is in proportion to n log n. They present some economic predictions based on this law, which seem to be borne out by the facts.

Anyway, read the article. It’s good and detailed and makes sense.

Joel Spolsky applies a lesson from his infantry days to business. A bit gimmicky, but he has a point.

This article on war pigeons is serious and interesting, but I’m shallow enough to just love the phrase war pigeon. It’s absolutely wonderful, really. Loose the war pigeons! Beware the mighty war pigeons!

I want to have a boat so I can name it the S.S. War Pigeon.

On the shores of Burundi’s Rusizi River lives Gustave the man-eating crocodile. He is quite possibly the world’s largest croc, measuring 20 feet long and weighing a short ton. The article is incredible: it’s amazing how the natives still keep going back to the water, regardless of the fact that hundreds of them are slain by crocodiles.

I think this rather proves my theory that civilisation requires extinction of the megafauna. One cannot have a civilised society in which rampaging elephants or lions or crocodiles can snatch up a child—or a man. It just doesn’t work. My reader will note that all three of those animals are to be found in Africa, and that Africa is, overall, the least civilised of the continents. This is, I think, no coincidence. Australia too has its issues in the Outback—and Australia too is rife with deadly animals.

Here in North America the aboriginal inhabitants killed and ate the majority of the megafauna millennia ago. That worked to their disadvantage (lacking horses, camels or any other domesticable animals they never really got anywhere), but it’s turned out very well for us.

Robert H. Frank offers economic-naturalist explanations for a host of questions: why women wear high heels; why milk comes in rectangular containers but soft drinks in cylindrical ones; why whales are nearly extinct but chickens are not; and quite a bit more. He has a book out soon entitled The Economic Naturalist; I’d like to get a copy of it.

Readers of this blog are no doubt aware of my opposition to most organ donation and transplantation. To be specific, I consider the harvesting of organs from corpses and their subsequent re-use to be morally abhorrent. I don’t think it should be illegal, but I do my best to oppose it and to persuade others not to participate in it.

In that spirit, then, here are some organ donation scandals. Zach Dunlap was pronounced dead by physicians eager to steal his organs: luckily for him, his relatives noticed that he wasn’t actually dead and he recovered and walked out of the hospital. He heard the physicians saying that he was dead. Rather poor medical job there, guys.

Then there’s the disturbing case of Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, who is accused of using drugs to speed the death—in plain English, murdering—a physically & mentally retarded patient in order to take his organs.

Human organ transplantation is wrong, regardless, but even were it right these incidents would argue for much tighter supervision of the system.

For the first time in over twenty years Americans drove less in 2007 than in the previous year. I know I did—I filled my car but seven times the entire year. When my brothers and I visited Chicago, we walked and took the trains or buses; when we visited San Diego we did the same; when I visited Phoenix on business I walked rather than rent a car. It was a lot of fun, to tell the truth.

Encouragingly, public transit ridership is at its highest level in over fifty years.

A purse snatcher robbed the English minister of justice, then tan into a bus full of cops. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

A Denver radio station aired a commercial for a housing development in Castle Rock—roughly an hour from Denver. It advertised a new housing development (in an era when the real estate market is flat). And, to top it all off, it proudly proclaimed that a three-car garage is standard. A three car garage. For a family of four.

A garage is a nicety. A two-car garage is a luxury. A three-car garage is an obscenity.

Here’s a nice takedown of the BOSE Acoustimass system. The short version: save your money and spend less on a better product from a reputable company.

A list of some skills you’ll need if you wish to live off-the-grid:

• Gardening/farming
• Building
• Hunting/fishing
• Canning/smoking/drying
• Sewing/tanning/weaving

I’d add that you definitely need cooking/baking (fairly obviously) and soapmaking (if you want to be clean). Brewing too would not go amiss—after all, man does not live by bread alone.

Granted, a life of subsistence farming wouldn’t be terribly exciting or fun. Well, except for the excitement of droughts and crop failures.

Desmond Warzel applies the Wikipedian ethos to time travel. Hilarious if you’ve ever worked with Wikipedia much; I suspect it’s utterly unintelligible otherwise.

Refactoring is a vital process in the creation of beautiful programs; redrafting is a vital process in the creation of beautiful literature; Basildon Coder suggest adapting P.G. Wodehouse’s redrafting method to refactoring. It makes extremely good sense.

High school students in Rothschild, Wisconsin were upset that their friends had been suspended from sports from drinking. So they threw a root-beer keg party in protest. Which the cops bust. It’s a good thing to know that Rothschild is so crime-free that the police have time to bust root beer parties. Perhaps they can then turn their attention to the angel food cake menace. Fill in your own joke about the white powdery substance known as sugar here…

The video is pretty funny. Watching it, I realised that there’s one lesson the kids didn’t learn: that they could have an amazingly fun party without booze. Honestly, they look & sound as rowdy & happy as we ever did in college, and with nary a drop in them.

Now, if we could somehow get folks to realise that one can have fun with lots of alcohol, and with none of it, and that moderation between those two extremes is a good thing—why, then the world would be a better place. That said, more root beer keg parties would be a great thing.

Charles Hugh Smith points out that the Boomers’ end-of-life expenses will bankrupt the nation. We’re looking at $60 trillion to pay for their declining months. That’s 120 times what the war in Iraq has cost so far. Yes, that works out to six hundred years of Iraq wars.

We can’t do it. We simply can’t do it. There’s just not enough money.

I don’t usually read Mother Jones (I’ve better things to do than read fascist claptrap—I use fascist advisedly), but it has a top-notch history of the anti-slavery movement in Britain. Their achievement was really quite remarkable: in less than 80 years slavery went from being accepted over the entire world to being illegal in the entire civilised sphere. When they started, slavery was just accepted as part of life; by the time they finished it was universally unacceptable.

The story gives hope to those of us who would fight other seemingly impossible battles. The anti-infanticide movement in particular should learn from the fight against slavery. Infanticide is considered a perfectly acceptable practise by much of the world right now, but a lot can change in a few years. Eventually, reason wins.

Ramit Sethi writes about the planning fallacy—the problem that people can’t estimate how long a project will take. Basically, no matter how carefully folks plan and how much they try to pessimistic, they assume that things will go better than they will. It turns out there’s one good way to estimate project length; read the article for what it is.

Someone broke into Ryan Frederick’s home early in January—didn’t take anything, just rifled through his stuff and left. Then later on that same week he was wakened by his dogs barking and someone smashing down his front door. He grabbed his handgun and stumbled to the front of his house and saw an intruder trying to enter through the door’s lower panel, and so he shot him dead.

Not exactly a happy ending, of course (death is an ugly thing), but a good enough one, right? Well, not quite. You see, Ryan Frederick’s home was being invaded by the police. He didn’t know that, of course—they were using a no-knock warrant. It turns out that the burglar was also an informant who mistook the Japanese maple in Frederick’s back yard for marijuana.

Even assuming arguendo that the drug laws should be enforced, the right way to do things would have been to get a normal warrant, knock on the door and search the premises. Had the police done that, then detective Jarrod Shivers would be alive today.

No-knock raids may have a purpose—I wouldn’t rule them out entirely. But they are massively over-used, and lead to loss of life, both to police and to citizens.

Ryan Frederick did nothing wrong. He did not know he was shooting at a detective; he believed that he was stopping a violent criminal. That he is innocent has not stopped that state from charging him with first degree murder.

The stupid word of the week is flexitarian. It means a vegetarian who eats meat. In other words, someone who eats vegetables and meat. In other words, a normal person. It’s possibly the stupidest word I’ve ever heard.

It’s actually not a stupid concept, just a stupid word. The idea is that there’s no need to eat meat at every meal, or even every day. Which is cool. I don’t eat meat on roughly half of the days in the year—this is a Good Thing IMHO. But it’s a dumb word.

Sometimes it makes sense to buy a home; sometimes it makes more sense to rent. If you can’t afford to put 20% down on a fixed rate mortgage; if you can do better investing in the stock market than in the real estate market; if you move often; if you can rent in a better area than you can buy in or if the total cost of ownership just doesn’t make sense—then don’t buy! There is no shame in renting (and if others don’t think so, nuts to them).

For years, I’ve not been a huge fan of Jim Koch (head of Samuel Adams). He’s popularised decent beer, which is good, but IMHO he’s been more marketing than anything else. But now I read that he is selling ten short tons of hops at cost to other craft brewers. This is an amazing act of generosity: on the spot market those hops could fetch many times what he’ll be selling them for.

There are some economic implications, of course. Basically, what he is proposing is a blend of first-come/first-served and rationing, both known inefficient methods. But while the free market is the most efficient mechanism in the long term, right now the hop shortage has a very real chance of destroying many small brewers. Koch’s action is like tossing a life preserver to a dying man: sure, it’s best to teach him how to swim, but right now the important thing is to save his life.

My fellow web programming geeks will have heard a lot of buzz about Representational State Transfer (REST). It’s definitely an improvement on the Ozymandian Web Services stack. But what is it really? How is it used? How does one adapt a design to it? Stefan Tilkov has a top-notch brief introduction to rest. If you write or design web-consumed services, or plan to, or manage those who do, check it out.

Ryan Tomayko has used Tufte’s ideas to remove administrative debris and remodel his blog and articles. Some excellent ideas about how best to present information—I really should look into implementing them for Octopodial Chrome.

Homo faciens is Latin for man the maker (and it’s pronounced with a hard k, not an s); it occurs to me that the term perfectly describes me. Today—while simultaneously performing a very difficult job—I am doing the following:

• Grinding wheat into flour
• Baking shortbread from that flour
• Making coffee from freshly-ground beans
• Baking pumpernickel bread with that coffee
• Making leek, potato and carrot soup
• Grinding barley
• Brewing porter from that barley
• Juicing bananas
• Making banana leather

And yes, I’m performing that rather complex and troublesome job as well (believe it or not, each of the above tasks only takes a few minutes at a time and can easily be squeezed into my breaks).

This weekend a buddy of mine threw an Ides of March party which encouraged one to wear a toga (in green for St. Patrick’s Day). In the space of six hours I researched and recreated a Roman tunic and toga—including going to the fabric store and finding linen. Yes, that’s right: in under one quarter of a single day I managed to entirely reconstruct an ancient pair of garments about which I had no previous knowledge (in fact, until I did the research I did not realise that a toga is really just a sort of stole-like thing worn around a tunic).

I’m so incredibly, unutterably, ineffably cool.

The former ruler of the atheist Soviet Union admitted that he is a Christian. It doesn’t say what sort, although I imagine that since he’s fond of Frances of Assisi that he must be a Roman Catholic. Something I didn’t know is that his wife’s parents were martyrs: executed for having icons in their home.

Interesting that a son-in-law of martyrs rose to the head of the Soviet Union and oversaw its destruction. Although I wager it was due more to incompetence than deliberate action…

Faced with exculpatory evidence in a robbery/carjacking case, prosecutors pressured a forensic technician to change her findings. Even worse, the judge in the trial told the defendant that if he continued to plead innocent and insisted on his right to a jury trial, then he would be sentenced to life. Faced with the choice between life and two years, the defendant plead guilty.

Only problem is, it turns out that he was innocent. He spent 16 months in jail and prison; he was stabbed; he suffered unknown other abuses—and all because the prosecutors and judge had no concern for justice.

It is every prosecutor's duty to provide all possible exculpatory evidence to the defense. It is every prosecutor's duty to ask that charges be dismissed when the defendant appears innocent. It is every defendant's right to a jury trial; no-one should feel pressured to plead guilty in order to avoid the possibility of a harsh sentence. It is every judge's duty to see that the law is followed and that both defense and prosecution enjoy all their rights and fulfil all their duties.

Let their punishment fit their crime: imprison each of them for 16 months. And let the inmate population know that they are prosecutors and a judge. If they survive, then maybe they will not be so quick to railroad suspects in the future.

Eating food that’s in season is definitely cheaper than eating whatever you like (it’s cheaper to ship raspberries from the next state over than from Chile). Some people think that it may even be better for you. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that it’s pleasant to live life according to the cycle of the year and not according to my own whims. There’s an element of anticipation when a food is about to come into season, a rush to pick, enjoy and preserve it once it’s ready, and a spot of sadness when its course has run. I’d even go so far as to argue that there’s a moral dimension to it: God designed the plants in our world to be eaten and enjoyed in a particular order, and we adhere most closely to His plan when we follow that order. Mind, it’s not exactly sinful to eat strawberries in December, but it’s better to eat them in May.

The Food Network has produced a partial lists of fruits & vegetables by season. It’s a good start to living life the way we were meant to.

I suppose it was inevitable: my mother’s on Facebook (and I’ll note that I’m the first of her sons to add her as a friend—Mom, that means ginger cookies, right? And fudge. And perhaps some oatmeal-raisin cookies.). One of her sisters has been on Facebook for some time now; her brother has been on for about a month perhaps and another one of her sisters joined today, so I suppose it was inevitable.

Of course, the first thought that runs through one’s mind is there aren’t any pictures of me in my Take my mother…please T-shirt, are there? But then I realised that I don’t actually have one of those, so I’m safe there. She already reads this humble blog, so she’s already aware of most of what I’m up to these days anyway.

Still, I gotta consider that when my aunts and uncles and parents are discovering an online venue that maybe it’s time to pull stakes and find somewhere a bit younger and hipper.

But then, I’m nearly 30—I’m no longer younger and hipper. When did that happen?

My dad’s uncle, Robert Victor, fell in the fight for Iwo Jima on this day sixty-three years ago. He was only 23; I know this because I’m looking at the pocket watch his parents gave him for his 21st birthday, on the twentieth of October, 1942 (I think his brother my grandfather gave it to my father for his 21st; I know that Dad gave it to me for my 21st).

He received the Silver Star posthumously, but that’s small consolation for the loss of a son and a brother.

At home we have a small metal box which the Marines sent home with his personal effects. There are some letters to his dad (about a car, I think), some religious stuff, I think a ring. And that’s pretty much all that’s left of his life: a small box in a chest in Denver and a large box in the ground in Dallas.

Neither my great-grandfather nor my grandfather ever bought anything Japanese after the war, and I cannot blame them. We ended up giving Iwo Jima back to the Japanese (which was an abominable decision). And now my grandfather is dead, and there probably aren’t too many people left in the world who knew Robert Victor Uhl personally.

For some reason, Kipling’s Grave of the Hundred Head leaps to mind.

John Bloom has an excellent article on jury nullification. Not many people are aware of it, because in the last century it has become illegal to inform juries of this fact.

In the early days of our country it was not uncommon for lawyers to make appeals directly to the jury: my client may have violated the law, but the law is wrong. But nowadays a lawyer is forbidden to do that, and a jury is told that its job is not to judge the law but to apply it.

Nonsense. One of the cornerstones of a democratic republic is the jury system. For the State to punish a man, the legislature must pass a law; the executive must enforce it; the judiciary must allow it and the People must permit it.

John Bloom, incidentally, is also the television and book persona known as Joe Bob Briggs. Even more incidentally, he used to babysit my buddy Phil’s wife Jess when she was a kid. It’s a small world after all, I guess.

The esteemed playwright David Mamet had discovered that he is no longer a brain-dead liberal. Apparently considered thought and careful reading revealed that his leftist tendencies were in part incorrect.

One hopes more leftists will have similar epiphanies.

…screws don’t make much sense.

We’re all familiar with the adage that says when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That’s true enough as far as it goes. We tend to frame problems in terms of what we know. However, there’s an even more pernicious effect: we don’t recognise the utility of solutions outside our experience. If all you have is a hammer, screws seem like a distinctly sub-optimal type of nail: they require more force to hammer in, they damage the wood and they don’t hold as well. Once you have a screwdriver, you realise that screws are actually superior to nails for many tasks.

The article inheritance is evil and must be destroyed is written by someone who only knows about hammers. He uses the example of a class representing a ball; it’s further subclassed into bouncing balls and balls which fade in and out. But what if one wants to have a bouncing, fading ball? He writes using inheritance, the code that handles bouncing and fading is locked up in the BouncingBall and FadingBall classes and can’t be used elsewhere. Well, in a language which only allows single inheritance, sure: you can only inherit from one superclass, and so it’s not possible to have a bouncing fading ball which inherits from both bouncing and fading balls.

Fortunately, we’ve had a well-defined object system since the late 1980s. It allows multiple inheritance, and all one has to do is inherit behaviour from both superclasses and Everything Works. An example:

(defclass ball ()
  ((x
    :accessor x
    :initform 0
    :initarg :x)
   (y
    :accessor y
    :initform 0
    :initarg :y)
   (colour
    :accessor colour
    :initform 'white 
    :initarg :colour)))

(defclass bouncing-ball (ball)
  ((elasticity
    :accessor elasticity
    :initform 1
    :initarg :elasticity)
   vector))

(defclass fading-ball (ball)
  ((fade-rate
    :accessor fade-rate
    :initform 1
    :initarg :fade-rate)))

(defclass fading-bouncing-ball (fading-ball bouncing-ball) ())

(defgeneric draw (ball)
  (:documentation "Draw BALL at its position"))

(defmethod draw ((ball ball))
  "Draw BALL at its position, with the proper colour."
  (draw-circle (x ball) (y ball)) (colour ball))

(defmethod draw :before ((ball bouncing-ball))
  "Move BALL to the next position as it bounces."
  (with-slots (vector x y) ball
    (setf x (bounce-x x vector)
          y (bounce-y y vector))))

(defmethod colour :around ((ball fading-ball))
  "Return BALL’s colour faded for this point in time."
  (fade-colour (call-next-method ball) (fade-rate ball) (get-current-time)))

And yes, everything works exactly as expected. The DRAW method specialised on balls draws a circle wherever it needs to; the DRAW before-method specialised on bouncing balls runs before a bouncing ball is drawn; it updates its current position and then the primary DRAW method is called, drawing the ball at the new position. The COLOUR around-method specialised on fading balls calls the normal COLOUR method, figures out the faded colour and then returns it. Yes, an instance of FADING-BOUNCING-BALL inherits from both FADING-BALL and BOUNCING-BALL, and they both inherit from BALL. It all just works.

You can either keep on trying to hammer in screws, or you can learn how to use a screwdriver, or you can claim that screws are awful fasteners and that nails are always better. One of these is a better solution than the others.

Apparently homeschooling one’s children without a teaching certificate is illegal in California. Naturally, the teachers’ union is happy about this, as it helps cut down competition for their services. Interestingly enough, most of the great men of history were taught by teachers without credentials, and they turned out alright. Moreover, so far as I can see the education of teachers is sadly lacking in any sort of realistic philosophy of education, as can be seen in the end-product of both our public and private schools (and to be fair, many home schools as well).

What’s really sad is that we know how to teach; we just don’t want to teach. Rather, we want to be seen to have taught, which is something very much different.

Lisa Schiffren writes about polygyny in New York City. I’m of two minds about polygyny in particular and polygamy in general. On the one hand I don’t see that it’s any of the State’s business who sleeps with whom, or who lives with whom, or any of that. But on the other hand it’s clearly unacceptable for women to be brought over illegally and kept in subjugation to autocratic husbands; moreover given that the modern State in its limited wisdom sees fit to award funds to pretty much anyone, it’s inappropriate for the rest of us to have to pay for the kids produced thereby.

David Binder writes compellingly about the Kosovo crisis. Back in the 1990s the world swallowed a story about lily-white Croatians and Albanians and pitch-blacks Serbs; the few (like Binder) who stood up for the truth saw their careers destroyed. And now Kosovo itself is being destroyed, being turned into a Mohammedan state in the middle of Europe. Christians are being murdered; monasteries are being sacked.

Of course, we’ve been here before: the Iberian and Balkan Peninsulas were once both ruled by Mohammedans. Christian sons were stolen from their families to be forcibly converted and turned into janissaries. New churches were forbidden to be built; old churches were forbidden to be repaired. Christians had to pay a special tax and were treated as second-class citizens in the courts of law.

We’ve been here before, and we’ve recovered before. Will we recover again?

The Art of Manliness suggests bringing back men’s hats. Not a bad idea if you ask me.

Hat-tip to Maj. D.

Over the past year food prices have skyrocketed: pizza flour went from $3–7/bushel to $25/bushel; hops have gone from $1/lb. to $40/lb. and barley has almost doubled in price. This should be the single most important political issue, but no-one seems to care.

In Sydney, Australia, a pair of armed robbers attempted to rob a motorcycle club. A burly biker club. They were beaten up with tables and chairs, one was thrown through a plate-glass door and another was hogtied with electrical wire for the police.

Maybe the robbers were actually attempting suicide? Or perhaps they were just really, really dumb.

I just discovered the tale of John I of Bohemia. He died at Crécy a few days after his birthday. He was blind, but desired to take part in the battle and so had two of his knights tie their horses to his own, saying, God willing, it will never happen that a Bohemian king runs off a fight!

Meanwhile his son Charles ran away.

Hat-tip to my brother John for the story.

Apparently some Moslem nurses in the UK are claiming that washing their arms is against Islamic modesty. I realise that the vast majority of Moslems don’t think this—but the fact that it’s becoming an issue is extremely worrisome.

Hat-tip to my brother Tom.

From Canada comes an article describing how ethanol is driving food prices up. The most damning fact is this: a single tank of ethanol uses enough corn to feed a man 2,000 calories a day for a year—and it’s burnt up in a few hours of motoring.

Just found a random beer name generator. Some of the names are pretty lame, but I rather fancy a Black Christmas Doppelbock.

Jonah Goldberg demonstrates how progressivism and fascism were intertwined in the early twentieth century.

Here’s a truly disturbing picture: an Iraqi woman holding her slain six-year-old son in her arms. The family was headed home after enrolling the boy in school when terrorists fired on their car, killing one boy and wounding another. Different people have different reactions to it: some people want us to leave Iraq; others react with hatred towards Bush; but I have a different reaction entirely.

I believe this picture show why we must remain in Iraq. We’re there to prevent murders like this when we can and to punish them when we can’t. If we leave, we give men like those who slew this boy leave to do whatever they will to other sons and daughters.

Whether or not we should have invaded Iraq in the first place is immaterial now; whether our invasion caused more death and suffering than would otherwise be the case is also immaterial. We invaded; that’s a fact. Whatever death and suffering we have caused has already been caused. The question now is what the best course of action going forward is. If we stay, there will be some amount of death and suffering; if we leave, there will be some amount of death and suffering.

I hold that our staying is better than our leaving, that if we leave the misery will be greater than if we stay. We fight in order to hunt down and punish the men who killed this boy; we fight in order to stop men like them from killing others.

As a side-note, if your response to the photo is to want to leave Iraq, the you and people like you are part of why the boy was killed. One of the goals of his murderers is to drive us from Iraq; they believe they can do that by killing innocents.

Sheldon Brown, famed cyclist, died on Sunday of a heart attack. His website was invaluable when I started cycling; I hope it’s kept online in the future. May his memory be eternal.

Most folks don’t realise that Xerox passed up the chance to be the computer company. Back in 1975—almost a full decade before Apple released the Macintosh—Xerox had a dynamic programming language, a windowed GUI, a cool computer and more. Alan Kay recollects how Smalltalk 76 was born.

Stenley Kurtz offers a deeply insightful analysis of Akbar Ahmed’s books about Waziristan and their implications for our broader war against Islamist terror. If you read nothing else today, make it this.

Tonight I did something I’ve never done before: I attended my party’s precinct caucus. To be honest, I’m not quite certain exactly how the process works: we voted both for presidential candidates and for county and state caucus delegates. I’ve a feeling that the candidate votes don’t mean much and that it’s the delegates who do, but I could be wrong.

The turnout was interesting. There was one Huckabee supporter (our precinct leader), four Paul supporters, five McCain supporters and maybe eight Romney supporters. One of the Paul supporters was a young woman named Star—her heart was in the right place, but I’m afraid her head wasn’t. I’m partial to his candidacy too, but she was…crazy. Her speech for delegate pretty much repeated his name over and over as though it were some form of protection against harm. Goofy stuff. I appreciate her enthusiasm, but the man is no divine avatar; he’s just a politician. Besides, goofiness just gives his campaign a goofy appearance.

I kinda wish that we’d been able to give speeches. Before I left for the precinct I looked up the president’s oath of office. It’s remarkably short: I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability[sic], preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. That’s it. I’d have liked to have asked my fellow precinct-members this one question: which candidate do you believe can say that with a straight face? That’s really what choosing a president is all about: who will preserve, protect and defend the Constitution? Can you say that McCain will? He hates the first amendment. Can you say that Giuliani will? He hates the second. Can you say that Huckabee will? He wants to rewrite the Constitution to better fit his religion. Can you say that Romney will? He doesn’t seem to care about anything other than gaining power. The only candidate who would say those words, and mean them, and follow them up with action; the only man who has kept his sworn word; the only candidate who has preserved, protected and defended the Constitution to the best of his ability; is Ron Paul. He’s crazy, and he’s wrong about a lot of issues. But he’s right about the most important issue of all: he’s right about the importance of the Constitution, of a government of laws rather than men.

I could and would vote for a McCain, a Huckabee, a Romney or a Giuliani—I might even be able to vote for an Obama or Clinton—if any of those actually gave a fig for the Constitution of the United States of America, if any of those wouldn’t be forsworn within hours if not minutes of swearing. That’s the only issue which counts; all others are subsidiary.

In other news, my dear brother John is now a delegate to the Mesa County and Colorado caucuses: congratulations to him! I take some small credit for his achievement, since I was the one who walked him through the precinct caucus business and looked up his caucus location for him. It was his first one, and he managed to suitably impress his neighbours. Good for him!

We all know that Windows Vista breaks a lot of things. What’s surprising is that it breaks Windows software so badly that running that same software under Linux and Wine (a free Windows implementation) can be a better choice. Here’s a list of games which run better under Linux+Wine than under Vista. Microsoft sure have some egg on their face with this one.

The bhut jolokia is the new hottest chili pepper in the world at 1,041,427 Scoville units. That means that it would require 1,041,427 drops of water to dilute one drop of the pepper such that the heat would be unnoticeable. A jalapeño is only about 5,000 Scovillle units.

I want one. I want several, actually. I want to grow a bhut jolokia plant.

Best two quotes from the article? When you eat it, it feels like dying, reads the advertising copy from one retailer. We’re about the only species who like hot peppers; you can’t even train a rat to like them, says a taste researcher.

Well, today is the feast of the Purification which marks the end of the Christmas season and the start of the brief interlude before Great and Holy Lent. To quote Robert Herrick (1591–1674):

Down with the rosemary, and so
Down with the bays and mistletoe;
Down with the holly, ivy, all,
Wherewith ye dress’d the Christmas Hall.
—Ceremony upon Candlemas Eve

Today I took down my Christmas decorations. I’d a cool pine swag with lights and all over the fireplace, which I took down and burnt. I’d also a small live tree which was given me by my farmers; I’ve kept the tree but removed the garland and ornament it had borne. I’d already removed my advent calendar after Twelfth Night.

And so begins the wait until the Resurrection.

A pair of Boston-area men are campaigning to replace paper cups with mugs at coffee shops. It makes sense if you’re a frequent coffee drinker: bring a mug every day instead of throwing away a paper cup daily.

Today AOl has killed Netscape Navigator. I remember using Mosaic on Solaris and Macs, and when Navigator came out I thought it was just a ripoff of Mosaic (which is was—in fact, IIRC the first version was called Mosaic…). But then it became extremely popular, setting several records (including buggiest software ever).

The best thing Netscape ever did was free its code, giving us Firefox. The rest is…well, it happened: that’s the best which can be said for it.

Here’s a cute little webcomic with a deeper message. If you’re gonna go down anyway, you might as well go down fighting…

Owing to some home repairs I had to visit the local Lowe’s hardware store twice today. The first time I bought a caulk gun, some tubes of caulk, a caulk-removal tool and a caulk-smoothing tool; the second time I bought a second caulk gun (a long, sad and ultimately irrelevant story) and a third tube of caulk—and a bottle of lye crystals.

Now, the only thing I added my second trip was the bottle of lye. I was asked for my phone number and (rather unthinkingly) I gave it. But immediately afterwards it occurred to me: I hadn’t been asked for my phone number earlier. This wasn’t some scheme by Lowe’s to get my customer details (perhaps to call me with free offers later on). Were that the case the earlier, priicer purchase would have resulted in the same question. No, this was in response to my purchase of lye.

You see, lye is a key ingredient in soap-making: a quantity of lye is mixed with water and the caustic solution is mixed in with oils and fats (which are themselves faintly acidic); the resulting chemical reaction (called saponification) produces a salt we know as soap. But lye’s not just used to make soap; it’s used to clear drains, clean stainless steel and more. Being a strong base, it’s also used to manipulate pH at various points in chemical syntheses (much like adding lemon juice to a recipe using baking soda), including one particular synthesis: that of methamphetamine. It can also be used in the production of gamma-hydroxybutyric acid.

This shouldn’t be a big deal. Water, for example, is used in the production of most if not all illegal substances; like sodium hydroxide (lye) it has legitimate and illegitimate uses; unlike lye, purchasers of water are not required to provide phone numbers. But apparently someone has determined that the purchase of a substance with numerous legitimate uses is to be recorded.

I don’t use any illegal drugs at all–they’re not my thing. I ingest alcohol, nicotine and caffeine in various liquid (mmm…beer!), solid (mmm…chocolate-covered coffee beans!) and aromatic (mmm…pipes!) forms. I have never made methamphetamine or GHB in my life, nor do I have any real desire to do so. I buy lye first of all to make soap; secondly to clean out beer kegs; thirdly to clear out clogged drains. And now my phone number (and name, and address) is in some jack-booted thug’s database, simply because I prefer to do for myself rather than hire others to do for me.

Certainly, I could buy soap at the supermarket. Of course, I could purchase a commercial cleansing solution. Definitely, I could acquire a proprietary drain-clearing solution. If we all did that, the one might hazard a guess that most buyers of lye are illegitimate. Of course, that soap we’d buy would be full of toxic substances; that cleaning solution might have who-knows-what nasties in it; that drain-unclogger might have some vicious things in it.

But who cares? It doesn’t matter how badly we treat our environment, our property or ourselves, as long as we keep people from living as free citizens in a free country. I mean, next thing you know people are going to start sewing their own clothes and planting their own food, and then where will we be?

New York City is trying to ban Geiger counters, pollution detectors and so forth . Residents will have to be approved for permits to own them. Why? Because the city is worried that if people know too much then they will stir up panic.

Whatever happened to being a free nation of free adults?

It turns out that dolphins kill porpoises and other dolphins for sport. Just as we saw with chimpanzees: those animals closest to us in intelligence are also closest to us in violence.

Britain has a socialised health care system, one which works more-or-less. Its physicians are now asking to withhold treatment from smokers, drinkers, the obese and the elderly. This is the result of socialised medicine: those whom society deems unworthy are denied medical treatment.

The result of a private system, of course, is that those whose labour society does not appreciate and whom society is not charitable towards are denied medical treatment. I imagine that a private system treats more people.

The Times has a great article on why we don’t have any more heroes: it’s our own damned fault. We don’t recognise the real heroes in our midst: the men who kayaked from Australia to New Zealand or who earn the Medal of Honor. Instead, we misapply the term hero to victims. The people who died on American Flights 11 & 77 and United Flight 175 were not heroes; they were victims. Several of those who died on United Flight 93 were heroes. Most of those murdered at Virginia Tech were not heroes; Liviu Librescu was a hero; he gave his life to save his students’. We glorify sports heroes. Athletic endeavour is good and laudable, but it’s not heroism: it’s a game.

Instead of edifying tales of virtue, our papers are full of stories about that most pathetic of classes: celebrities. We get the paragons we desire. And we desire dreck.

It is legal in Colorado to prescribe, use and grow marijuana for medical purposes. The state and local police are not permitted to interfere, and if they do confiscate marijuana or paraphernalia they must be returned to their rightful owners.

An Auroran Marine who served in Desert Shield is a certified grower, prescribed marijuana to deal with pain caused by grenade shrapnel. The Aurora police raided his home, confiscated 71 plants and charged him with felony cultivation. After eight months the district attorney determined that the Marine was breaking no law and dismissed the charges.

However, in the interim the plants had all died. The Colorado Constitution requires that any property used in connexion with medical marijuana may not be harmed, neglected, injured or destroyed by the police. So the Marine is suing the city of Aurora for restitution. Here’s the great bit: for years the government has used the absurd sum of $5,200 per marijuana plant in order to pursue harsher charges against drug users, growers and dealers. But the tables are turned: Aurora is being sued for that much per plant: $369,200 in all.

They deserve it. They stole medicine from a wounded Marine; they destroyed his property; the refuse to compensate him. Pay him his money, plus damages. If they have to let a few police officers go to pay for it, let the first fired be the ones who requested, approved and led the raid. Culp&ælig; pœn&ælig; par esto: let the punishment fit the crime.

Somalia has no functioning state; instead it has competing statelike entities. And yet somehow it seems to be working. I’m not an anarcho-capitalist; I’m not even a minarchist. But it’s encouraging to think that maybe those rather extreme philosophies might actually work in practise.

Steve Yegge has prepared a simple emacs lisp primer. It’s by no means complete, but it introduces enough of the language that anyone with a small amount of programming knowledge should be able to start playing around.

Emacs, of course, is the best text editor, mail client, news client, web browser, database interface, Nethack interface and kitchen sink in the world.

It’s often said that one’s choice of computer languages is at heart a religious matter (I tend to disagree, but that’s another matter): now there’s a survey of religions and programming languages which is attempting to see if there’s any connexion. It was difficult for me to choose the languages I prefer. Common Lisp was a no-brainer, as was Python. But what about C? I decided against it—while it was a neat & cool language once upon a time, it’s hardly a sane choice today. OTOH, what about SmallTalk? I’ve never used it for a serious project, but it’s an incredibly neat idea. I ended up choosing it, simply because it deserves it.

According to this article, the United States alone have lost 95% of our cabbage varieties, 91% of our field corn, 95% of our peas and 81% of our tomatoes. No doubt these are the worst of our losses (the article has a point it’s selling), but even if they were the only losses they would be unacceptable.

It occurs to me that have multiple varieties of staple crops is one way to ensure a balanced diet and a sustainable food supply. If one variety of wheat fixes certain trace elements better than another, which fixes others better, then we do better to eat both. If two varieties out of dozens are susceptible to a certain disease, then we can survive on the others; if there are only those two varieties, then we’re in trouble.

The American chestnut is almost entirely extinct; elm trees are dying out—from what I can tell, in both cases because of a monoculture. Trees are one thing; food is another (although I’ll note that in Europe chestnuts are a poor man’s food, cheaper than wheat; in America they’re expensive if you can find them).

…a few years make: this guy is the same as this guy. I guess that means I might be a senator someday…

Although, unlike Norm Coleman I didn’t spend my college years smoking dope; also unlike him, I oppose throwing people into jail for smoking dope.

Every year Austin College offers a January Term during which each student takes an intensive three-week course. One is encouraged to study outside of one’s major if possible; JanTerm is in many ways very representative of AC’s focus on the liberal arts. These classes can be academically serious, actually serious (one was called Death and Dying) or fun to one extent or another. In 1997 I was serious and studied J.R.R. Tolkien; in 1998 I decided to have fun and took a course in bridge. I figured that I’d taken golf in the fall and with bridge in my repertoire I should be well-prepared for the life of leisure I imagined I would one day lead.

I studied bridge under Professors Jim Knowlton and Truett Cates (both of the German faculty). It was a remarkably rigorous course for one which was about a game: every evening we had homework which consisted of playing online games; we had to get our rankings to a certain point; we had to play in a local league’s tournaments at least twice; and the game itself requires no little bit of skill to play.

All in all, it was a great time. I can’t really remember all the details of bridge bidding conventions, so I’d be a rotten player now, but it was a great introduction to trick-taking games. My favourites now would be whist and tarocchi. If it hadn’t been for that bridge class, I might never have found them.

A voyage back in time, to when the internet was in its infancy and web design’s parents hadn’t met yet.

In 1943 Polish soldiers adopted an Iranian bear, gave it a name, rank and serial number, taught it to carry mortar rounds, drink beer and smoke cigarettes and brought it along on the Italian campaign. I swear that I’m not making this up. It is perhaps the oddest story I’ve ever read.

The Daily Mail has even more. And someone on the net pointed out this pic (some language)...

During Christmas Break my sophomore year, my friend Rabab had gone home to Egypt and brought back for me a hookah. It was a cheap bazaar one, but it was still a genuine Egyptian hookah. I sealed up the joints with sewing thread, notebook paper and poster putty, loaded it with cherry pipe tobacco (yes, yes, I once smoked that dreck) and was very proud of myself.

Here’s a picture of me at a Tri-Gam party called GTE:

GTE officially meant Gams on Thursday Evenings, but it really meant Get Trashed Early; it was held on Thursday nights whereas most parties were on Fridays. It was a great party and the Tri-Gams were great guys; I really wish that I'd pledged. Note the date on that picture? It was 22 January 1998—ten years and two days ago; tonight they’ll be holding that same party, a decade since.

I still have that tweed coat, that bow tie, that vest and I’m pretty sure those pants are still in my closet somewhere. The hookah, too, is sitting in a different closet. I think the other fellow on the couch was named Josh, but I’ve not seen him since I graduated. Thankfully, the black cherry pipe baccy is nowhere to be found.

I was watching Song of the Thing Man and found this great little bit of dialogue:

Nick

Darling, let’s go home.

Nora

Why, what’s at home?

Nick

You, my pipe, my slippers…

Nora

Nicky, I think you’re slipping!

Nick

Give me my pipe, my slippers and a beautiful woman…and you can have my pipe and slippers!

Heh heh.

Many folks don’t realise that in England one must purchase a license to own a television; this is what finances the BBC. Here are an amusing set of letters sent to a former licensee who got rid of his TV. The BBC apparently can’t fathom a person not watching TV and assumes that if you have ever had a TV then you will always have one.

Yesterday was the thirty-fifth anniversary of the abominable Supreme Court decision which legalised the modern-day slaughter of the innocents. As in years past, the forces of right marched for and end to this murder. The last picture says it best: without the right to life, the term human rights means nothing.

Mencius Moldbug proposes a novel theory for the causes of anti-Americanism. A very interesting read. See also his iron polygon theory. He’s a smart guy and writes well. I don’t know if he’s right, but he is at the least provocative.

Oliver Steele proposes a programmer’s pyramid based on the ideas in the food pyramid from the Department of Agriculture. Basically, a programmer should spend most of his time reading code, particularly exemplary code, then his own code, then code that he’s using which other people wrote. He should spend somewhat less time revising code. He should spend a bit less time writing code. He should spend even less time reading about code. Finally, he should spend the least time of all writing about code.

I think that Steele is on to something.

A while back I wrote about my first pheasant hunt of 2007; it’s taken me a long while to get the time to write about my second hunt.

Bill B——, Bruce J—— and I drove out to Goodland, Kansas the weekend before Thanksgiving. We got there Friday afternoon and met up with Dave M——, a high school teacher in St. Francis who owns some fallow land outside of town. Our first hunt of the weekend was on his land. It used to be his grandfather’s and has an old railbed running through it, but now it’s all tall wild grasses which reach up to one’s waist. I got my first shot ever at a pheasant there—missed, but it was still great to have the chance, particularly considering that it was my fourth hunting trip. We walked around for about an hour or so, and figured that we’d spooked anything that was there. On the way back to the car I flushed a couple of roosters, but the angle was bad (they were silhouetted against a road and power lines, neither of which is good to shoot at) so I wasn’t able to make my shot. Still, it was an auspicious beginning.

Dave took us by his friend Jeff B——’s spread; Jeff has one large fallow field that he stocks for paid hunts, but he also has some farmland which he walked with us, bringing along his dog. As the sun was setting Bill killed his first bird of the trip (the first of many) and I got to see my first pheasant up close and personal. They are truly beautiful creatures: neither words nor pictures can really do them justice. Their feathers are iridescent, shimmering as the air catches them. There are reds, blues, greens, purples, oranges, black, brown and white. They are a sight to see. After working that field for a bit, Jeff was kind enough to let us hunt his stocked field—for free! We worked it until dusk; towards the end the dog flushed a bird right in front of me and Dave; Dave shouldered, shot and lowered his shotgun before I even had a chance to do more than be startled. He was very apologetic, but I didn’t mind: you have to take your shots where you have a chance, after all; besides, it was a privilege to see a gunman like Dave at work. The man’s been hunting all his life, and it shows. No wasted movement, no hesitation: just top-notch shooting.

That evening Bill, Bruce & I headed to Bird City to have dinner at Big Ed’s Steakhouse (104 W. Bressler). The place is a complete dive (long tables with ratty old chairs, nothing but Budweiser, Michelob and Coor’s on tap or in bottles), but it was simply the best steak I have ever had in my life. No doubt part of it was due to having a good worked-up appetite from walking around all day (probably something in the neighbourhood of nine miles), but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t all. The steak was worth every penny—something I’ve never been able to say about a steakhouse steak before.

Saturday morning we were up bright and early to hunt Greg L——’s land. Greg doesn’t hunt himself (he holds the distinction of being perhaps the only man in the world with a perfect hunting record: he has shot at one bird, hit that one bird and has never hunted again), but he lets folks hunt his fields after the harvest. His land has the ruins of an old farmhouse and tornado shelter on it, surrounded by corn fields with wheat planted in the corners. We sat there waiting for the sun to rise and then pushed across the first corn field, where Bill bagged his second bird. I then got my first taste of a tailwater pit. This is a smallish pit (maybe a dozen yards across) dug in one corner of a field with the dirt from inside forming a berm around the edges, used to collect irrigation water back in the old days: it fills up with wild grasses and provides the birds lots of cover. They cover in the pits, then venture into the fields for food, then cover again, moving back and forth over the course of the day. If you surround a tailwater pit properly and then send one or two hunters into it, the birds will flush into the air rather than running away or hunkering down; once in the air they’re fair game.

We worked fields and pits all day long, making some good progress and bagging some more birds. Hunting’s strenuous work, but it’s fun work: a man’s body was made for this sort of thing. Tromping along in the fields, senses at the alert, legs and arms actually working for once in one’s life: it’s exhilarating!

That evening I learnt how to clean a bird. It’s not nearly as bad as I’d feared: you clip the wings and one foot (the other is left on to prove to a game warden that it’s a rooster and not a hen); then the skin and feathers come off in one piece; then you remove the head; then you open the cavity and pull out the viscera; finally you rinse the whole bird, making sure to clean any feathers or dried blood from the meat. The whole process takes a few minutes.

Normally Bill comes into town and takes the various landowners to dinner to thank them for allowing us the use of their land, but instead this weekend Greg and his wife invited us to join them along with Dave, his wife and small daughter for dinner. Dave’s wife brought a green bean casserole and brownies; Greg’s wife cooked potatoes and bread; Greg put on some pork ribs and we had a great feast. There was even some tasty microbrew on hand (one of Greg’s sons works at a microbrewery in Kansas)! They were wonderful people to sit down and eat with—true salt of the earth types. And contrary to the Hollywood stereotype, far from ignorant or untravelled (Dave’s wife had toured Europe in college as part of their college’s choir). They’re all great people.

Sunday morning we hunted Mr. H——’s farm. He doesn’t normally permit hunters to use it, but he and Bill are on good terms; Bill brought some wildlife cards for his grandsons, and I believe he sends him a fruit box for Christmas. H—— lent us his son’s dog, but it was a mistake on our part to accept it. The beast was happy to roam the fields; the problem is that it wouldn’t stick close to us. It scared up bird after bird—hundreds of yards away, where no shotgun could reach it. It was…dispiriting.

That afternoon Dave rejoined us and we had one of the greatest days of hunting that anyone in our party had ever experienced. For whatever reason (the wind, the temperature—who knows?) the tailwater pits were chock-full of pheasants. We’d drive up in two trucks with our shotguns already loaded, throw open the doors and run into position: birds would fly out in every which direction. Rooster after rooster flew up; rooster after rooster dropped from the air. Bruce finally got his bird: a particularly wily one, it had clung tight to cover until other birds had flushed in one direction; it then started running in cover in the other direction; when the cover ran out it flushed up just as Bruce happened to glance in that direction. It was a smart rooster (two years old from its spurs), but not quite smart enough.

Finally at one pit I got a good shot at a bird. Three of us fired: Dave from in the bottom of the pit; I from the side, Bill from another side; I don’t know which of us hit. Bill believes that his shot was wide, so it was probably Dave or I. To be honest, I think I saw it start to drop right before I shot, which would mean Dave got it—but it all happened so quickly I really don’t know. But I do know that I was the one to find it on the outer rim of the pit. It was lying on one side in the grass, looking a bit stunned. I put one foot on its legs (the spurs are sharp, and a rooster can slash very well with them) and grabbed it by the neck. It really didn’t care for that, and started struggling. Bill had said to break its neck, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that with the bird flapping about and trying to pull its legs out from under my shoes. Then I remembered how Dave had wrung his bird’s neck: he just picked the bird up by the head and spun it a few times. So I let the rooster’s legs free and spun him once. Not good—it was still flapping and now it was trying to spur me. So I spun and kept on spinning two or three times…only to see the pheasant’s body go flying off into the grass. I’d broken its neck all right—and then centrifugal force had done the rest. The rest of our hunting-party were pretty amused; I rather suspect they were trying to keep from laughing at me.

All very embarrassing, and I really don’t know if it was Dave’s bird or mine (it was probably his) but I can honestly say that it was the first pheasant I’ve killed, if not the first I’ve shot. Later that week I stewed it in its own stock with apricots, prunes and onions, and brought some over to my folks’ house on Thanksgiving where all my family (save Stephen) were able to have some. Pheasant’s a delicious meat, with almost no fat at all and a delicate flavour different from chicken. To be honest, I prefer it, and not just because I hunted it.

That afternoon Dave caught his limit and took four birds home—those, plus the one he had bagged and the one Bill gave him on Friday, went towards his family’s Thanksgiving feast. Bill, Bruce & I ended the evening on Greg’s fields, sitting on a piece of farm equipment, drinking coffee, smoking cigars and watching the sun set across the flat prairie. It was quite a day, quite a marvellous day indeed.

Monday morning we got up early once more to get a little last-minute hunting in. We when by Mr. H——’s and hunted a row of corn he was harvesting, hoping that the combine would push the birds to us. While I was sitting at the far end of the row waiting for the combine to turn around, I grabbed a corncob which had gone through the combine (which strips the kernels off) and hollowed it out, bored an airhole and stuck a piece of wheat stubble in it, then put a few pinches of tobacco in it. Ever since I was a boy and read Huckleberry Finn (I think that was it) I’ve wanted to make my own corncob pipe; now I’d finally done it! To be honest, it didn’t smoke very well, and in fact the cob started to burn and burnt corn cob is not the greatest taste in the world. Still, I think it can be considered a moral victory.

We got home late Monday evening and divvied up our birds. Bill was kind enough to let Bruce & I have his share, and so I took home four pheasants. Considering that I’d taken off two days of work and working in my share of food, lodging and fuel for the weekend, those four birds are the most expensive meat I’ve ever eaten. But man was it fun! I can’t wait until next year.

Through all my life, I’ve generally had one good friend at a time. When I was in kindergarten there was my friend Russell; later in grade school it was Scott; still later it was my next-door neighbour Chris; in high school it was my buddy Dean. My first year of college I didn’t really find a new good friend; I hung out with the guys in my dorm wing (Baker Third Floor North forever!) but I wouldn’t say that I was particularly close with any of them.

The first semester of my sophomore year (a decade ago) I had to fulfil Austin College’s physical fitness requirement (it was two-part: take Physical Fitness freshman year and then take some physical fitness class later on); I chose golf, under the theory that it’d be useful professionally and is a solo sport (being hollered at by teammates for not being any good is both no fun whatsoever and my standard experience with team sports).

It turned out that almost all the classes were held off-campus, at a nearby driving and baseball-cage place. It wasn’t more than a mile or two away, but this being Texas when gas was under a dollar (and my clubs were rather heavy…) I hunted down someone to carpool with: a fellow I’d known from my dorm wing freshman year.

Every Monday, Wednesday & Friday (IIRC) morning we’d drive over to the range and discuss girls, beer, politics, beer, science, girls and beer—the standard stuff. Phil had been a member of the 9-hole Bonham Golf & Country Club since high school, so about once a week we’d drive up to Bonham, he’d drop off his dirty clothes at his folk’s house, pick up a fresh homemade pie (or two—sometimes his mother would bake me one too) and we’d head over to play a half-round of golf. It was a good bonding experience.

That was an eventful fall. I was was head over heels over a girl and Phil was getting over his first serious girlfriend and then finding the woman who became his wife. It was the autumn that I competed in a mock male beauty pageant. It was that fall that I started brewing at college: Phil and I (being only 19) figured that it was easier to turn apple juice or wort into cider or beer than to buy the already-fermented stuff. I remember how we threw out two batches because they looked & smelt bad, not realising that fruit wines always go through a period of smelling bad, and that the colour always drains from strawberries and cherries (those would have been incredible fruit ciders). It was the autumn that my pipe collection finally started filling out nicely. I suppose in a way that it was the last fall of my boyhood or the first of my manhood. It was a wonderful semester in a lot of ways.

Phil and I would become very good friends throughout the rest of college; I’d visit his and his girlfriend’s folks with him; he visited Colorado with me one spring break; we were roommates our junior and senior years. His then-girlfriend and now-wife Jess’s parents had a piece of land in southern Oklahoma about an hour from school; every few months a bunch of us would go up there for a weekend to fish, shoot and just chill. Phil was always there for me when I was moping about one thing or another, and I think I was generally there for him when he needed a hand. Friendship is a fine thing.

I’d be lying if I said that Phil and I are as close friends now as we were during those golden years of college (at one point we were as close as brothers). A large component of friendship is shared experience, and as time marches on we each add our own separate experiences to life. Our paths have diverged: where once we were a pair of beer-drinking, girl-chasing, golf-playing, Macintosh-using college students, now Phil is a beer-drinking, married, golf-playing, Mac-using doctor of chemistry and I’m a beer-drinking, girl-chasing, many-hobbied, Linux-using sysadmin. We don’t speak or email nearly as often as we did ten—or seven, or even three—years ago. That’s the way life goes.

As the years have passed and other claims on our time have increased we’ve seen less of one another, but it still generally works out that we get to hang out at least once a year. A few years after graduation Phil even ended up getting a year-long internship in Boulder, about half an hour away from where I was living in Denver. That was a great year: about once a week I’d go up to Boulder and once a week he’d come down to Denver. We’d hit the bars and the breweries and the brewpubs and the concert-halls and just hang out; every few months Jess would visit and it’d be like being in college again. He and Jess throw an amazing Christmas party every year which I’ve managed to make twice now; I crashed at their place when I was in town for our five-year reunion. This summer I saw them both in Chicago and then later on Phil and our mutual buddy Darren visited for a concert and a beer tour of northern Colorado.

Despite the fact that we’ve gone separate ways for much of the past seven-and-a-half years, we still take an interest in each other’s doings: I was there when he called Jass’s dad to ask for her hand; he was there when I had my first house blessed; he’s been there when I’ve needed someone to confide in and I’ve been there when he’s needed a sounding board. If all the money I spent on my four years at AC had brought me nothing more than Phil’s friendship, it’d have been a bargain.

Redstate has a great list of overused blogging clichés. I’ll do my best to avoid them in the future.

Trademark law exists for a simple reason: to prevent confusion between similar product. It is a violation of Microsoft’s trademark to sell a word processor called Word; it is a violation of Ford’s trademark to sell a car called a Ford. It’s perfectly okay to sell a word processor called Ford or a car named Word, though: trademarks only apply to a certain field of endeavour.

The computer world can have name collisions too, sometimes imaginary and sometimes quite real. In the former category we have Sun’s Yellow Pages service (a bunch of yp-* commands like yppasswd); Bell forced them to change it, despite the fact that computers are a different field of endeavour.

In the category of real conflicts we have Apple’s iCal, which infringes on the name of the much older (and still in active use) ical. Then there’s Adobe’s Flex, which uses the name of the flex lexical analyser which dates back to around 1982 and is, again, still in active use.

How hard is it to just google a possible product name? Apple could have chosen another name for their product (iCalendar, iSchedule, iTime, iDates, whatever—or just sanely called it something without the i); Adobe could have called Flex FlexWeb, Flux, WebFlex, FX or any of a number of names. But no, they had to take another project’s name. Gosh, thanks guys.

My next entry in my review of presidential candidates will cover another two candidates: John Edwards and Mike Huckabee. Both are silver-tongued populists; both pander to the lowest denominator of intelligence; neither has any grasp of economics or the Constitution; both have a firm grasp of electoral politics.

John Edwards

His site, like Clinton’s, wants my email address and makes me deliberately skip past (rather than offering me the option to sign up if I wish). Obviously Mr. Edwards has a very low opinion of personal freedom.

Economic policy

Edwards is a moron, pure and simple. He wants major new initiatives to reward work—is he unaware that work is already rewarded, by money? He thinks that it is possible to end poverty in thirty years. This is of course absurd: whoever is in the bottom eighth of the population will always be considered poor, even if that bottom eighth has six meals a day, a solid gold briefcase and a rocket car. Consider, for example, that almost anyone alive today has more food, better-tasting food, more entertainment, better-written entertainment, a greater ability to travel, better health &c. than almost anyone alive in all of history. And yet our poor (who are richer than Croesus) are still considered poor. Besides, someone else has pointed out, the poor you will always have with you. Are you going to gainsay Him?

He wants to raise the minimum wage—a move widely recognised by anyone with wit or education to be folly. It destroys minimum-wage jobs and encourages automation, hurting the very unskilled workers it is meant to help. In a competitive labour market, labour earns what it is worth, period. There really can’t be any argument on this point: if you argue otherwise, you are in error. John Edwards is in error.

He supports the Orwellianly-named Employee Free Choice Act, which takes the right to vote on unionisation away from employees. He supports unions, which are a leach upon the market (rather than creating over-powerful labour unions to counteract over-powerful corporations, it would be much better to weaken corporations).

He wants to tax-subsidise low-income savings. It’s not a bad idea, but why not offer the same subsidy to anyone? He wants to subsidise bank accounts—I wasn’t aware that they need subsidy: if you want a bank account, you can get one. For free.

He blames lenders, not borrowers for the subprime mortgage crisis. It’s not a bank’s fault that its customers are morons. But then, Edwards no doubt feels sorry for his fellow mental midgets.

He complains that the tax code favours wealth over work, which one would think is good: we want to encourage savings, no? Savings equals wealth, and wealth equals savings. A tax code which favours work would penalise savings. Which is a Bad Thing.

He wants to raise the capital gains tax to 28 percent. Never mind that taxes were paid however the capital gained. Never mind that America already has some of the most business-unfriendly tax rates in the world.

He wants to keep the estate tax, further penalising savings.

He wants the IRS to do more to help Americans pay their taxes. This is a good idea, and should be adopted more widely. It’d be better to eliminate the IRS altogether, but so long as we’re stuck with it we might as well make it work for us.

He supports a line-item veto. Good for him!

Health care

Edwards wants universal health care by requiring businesses and other employers to either cover their employees or help finance their health insurance. I’m unclear as to how this is any different than the present: my employer helps finance everything I spend money on. I guess rather than allowing people to determine how much of their money goes to health care, Edwards wants to make that choice for us. Gosh, thanks!

He wants to require every American to get health insurance. I’m not clear on why Bill Gates or Warren Buffet needs health insurance; they can each self-insure. In fact, even as expensive as health care can be, most wealthy people can self-insure (a half-million dollars should cover it).

He wants to expand Medicare and S-CHIP, those two colossal wastes of money (Medicare has incurred more debt in the last seven years than the entire Republic did for the first two centuries of its existence). I am not impressed.

He wants to take innovative steps to contain health care costs. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch: cutting costs means cutting something else too: physician’s salaries; benefits; quality. It won’t be pretty. He doesn’t mention which part of the Constitution allows the President to do this—because it’s not there.

Iraq

Edwards is in favour of an American loss in Iraq. He proudly opposed the surge which has yielded such excellent results; he wants to bring home our soldiers and leave the struggling government of Iraq to be devoured by wolves.

Foreign policy

Edwards hates NAFTA and the World Trade Organisation. He appears ignorant of the proven fact that free trade is fair trade, by its very nature.

He wants to spend money on microfinance (loans of a few hundred dollars to third-world entrepreneurs). This is actually a decent idea: rather than giving money to failing states and hoping they spend it well from the top down, microfinance gives money to those on the bottom and helps them work their way up. I like it.

Liberty

Edwards would spend taxpayer dollars on infanticide and to revoke the laws against infanticide in other countries. He does this in the name of free speech, unconcerned about the speech of those whose money he would use.

He does acknowledge that hunting and self-protection are rights, but does not elaborate on the theme.

Other than that, Edwards is silent on freedom.

Miscellaneous

Edwards has a very curious policy: he wants to pay middle-class schools to enrol lower-class students. Ignoring the fact that this scheme is utterly unconstitutional, this would have two prime unintended consequences: dragging down middle-class schools by filling them with poor students; and reducing the proportion of relatively good students in lower-class schools because only the better students would be brought into the middle-class schools. Like the old joke, moving better students from lower-class to middle-class schools would lower the average student skill in both schools.

Conclusion

Edwards is a fool; his few good ideas are greatly outnumbered by his many terrible ones. His class warfare would impoverish us all. His economic initiatives are, for the most part, puerile. His presidency would be unfortunate.

Mike Huckabee

His site is very well-designed and loads in an intelligent manner. I’m impressed.

Economic policy

His centrepiece proposal is the FairTax: replacing the income tax with a consumption tax and a rebate to cover the taxes on essentials like food. There are good arguments in favour and against; what worries me most is that we would probably end up with both an income tax and a national sales tax. It’d be the worst of both worlds.

He claims to want to cut taxes in general, but increased taxes overall when governor of Arkansas.

He doesn’t seem to realise that free trade is fair trade. He’s a populist, which is to say wrong.

Health care

Huckabee recognises that a federal law mandating universal health care is unneeded; I wonder if he recognises that it is also unconstitutional.

He recognises that our health care system was devised not because it was the best way to provide health care, but as a way around World War II wage-and-price controls. This is mighty impressive—I’ve not seen another candidate who appears to understand the history behind our health-insurance foolishness.

He wants to replace our employer-based system with a consumer-based system. This is an excellent idea, but he doesn’t say how he wants to do it.

Iraq

Huckabee recognises that Iraq needs to be won, not abandoned, and that loss would have serious consequences for us. That’s good.

He calls our war the war on terror is really the war on radical Islamism. That’s good.

Foreign policy

He’s much fonder of Isræl than I’d be. Isræl is a bastard, but it’s our bastard. They’re no model for behaviour, simply better than the alternatives in that part of the world.

He’s very weak on foreign policy, which is distressing in this era.

Liberty

Huckabee says encouraging things about religious freedom: that religion isn’t to be prohibited or preferred. I can’t argue with that—but I wonder if he really believes it.

He supports that most basic of human rights: the right to live. This is vitally important. A state which sanctions murder of the innocent is not a state which is worthy of support.

He says, you need to know that your President will calmly and confidently lift you up in a crisis. Oddly, I thought that was my job and maybe my governor’s. I don’t see how it’s the President’s job at all. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, a government that can lift you up can trample you down.

He appears to support the right to bear arms and recognises that it’s not just about hunting.

He has supported a national smoking ban.

He’s silent about other issues of liberty, which is worrisome.

Miscellaneous

He recognises that a judge’s job is to interpret the law, not to make it. This is vitally important.

Conclusion

Huckabee’s site’s positions are much better than I had expected. What concerns me is his economic populism and what he has left unsaid. His site’s words are conciliatory and reasonable, but he has said that he wants to rewrite the Constitution to enforce God’s will. That’s all well and good—but his interpretation of God’s will is not the same as mine, and neither of ours is the same as yours. Although he may be preferable to Rudy Giuliani, I cannot be excited about the possibility of Huckabee as President.

The New York Times has an article about chefs coming to terms with the ethics of meat-eating. My own perspective is that it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that an animal is a living, breathing creature which should be treated well; it’s also important not to lose sight of the fact that it is, when all is said and done, an animal and not a man. Animals should be treated ethically; they should be raised well and slaughtered in an appropriate manner.

I think that it’s very valuable to kill my own food from time to time in order to remind myself of what meat-eating means. There’s nothing wrong with eating flesh (after all, our Lord did it), but it should be done appropriately.

Reason reports that San Mateo County is so crime-free that its SWAT team had to raid a small-stakes poker game for sport. In California, home games are legal so long as there is no rake; it appears that asking participants to pitch in to cover pizza and sodas counts as a rake.

A thirteen-year-old boy was at the game and was turned over to social services. So apparently playing poker with your son is considered endangerment or contributing to delinquency or some other such nonsense.

What kind of world do we live in?

It turns out that fibromyalgia was invented by Pfizer. Taking a look at the Wikipedia entry, it’s pretty obvious that fibromyalgia is simply hysteria under a different name.

Mark Pilgrim has a great idea for how to solve the sub-prime mortgage crisis: turn mortgages into lotteries. It’s what the people want!

Technology has advanced to the point that three guys were able to re-enact the landings at Omaha Beach. Three guys, three uniforms, one rope, two rifles, a video camera and movie-editing software—that was enough. Over four days of filming they got lots of footage of the three of them on the beach; then they were able to clone themselves over and over again, finally resulting in a D-Day landing which is reminiscent of Spielberg’s in Saving Private Ryan.

A Hammond, Indiana woman was attacked by a stalker who broke down her back door, entered her bedroom and tried to strangle her. Fortunately, she was armed and was able to kill him. Even more fortunately for her, she called 911 and the entire sequence was recorded. The intruder entered her home while she was on the phone with 911 being assured that the police were on their way; he entered her bedroom while she was on the phone being assured that the police were minutes away; he exited this life while she was on the phone and the police were still far away.

As the video points out, a real feminist doesn’t depend on men for protection. I’ll extend that to men as well: a real man doesn’t rely solely on anyone else to protect him, his property or his friends & family.

Photographer Carl Warner fashions lovely landscapes from food. Really cool to look at.

It turns out that Apple’s innovative designs are just rip-offs of Dieter Rams’s work for Braun in the 1960s. Everything old is new again.

The car manufacturer claims that taking a picture of your Ford car violates its trademarks. Twits.

Well, if our civilisation is not doomed it is, at the least, extraordinarily sick. Apparently an Australian website for girl 9–14 is recommending bikini waxing; Larissa Dubuecki asks what the hell is wrong with us that this is acceptable. It’s bad enough that grown men and women try to look like children for one another; it’s far worse when we encourage children to try to look like adults trying to look like children.

I think the practise of trying to look pre-pubescent is pretty absurd in the first place. It was bad from the moment the first man scraped the hair from his face: a man should be proud to be a man, not ashamed. It was bad when the first woman scraped the hair from her legs: a woman should be proud to be a woman (yes, I’m a product of my society and don’t care for hair on legs: that’s my problem, not women’s, and it’s mine to get over). It began to get ridiculous when men started scraping hair from their chests and armpits. It veered into the perverse when men and women tried to make even their genitals appear childlike (apparently a common practise).

And now we’re encouraging those who’ve just entered puberty—those who should be proud to reach physical adulthood—to hid the fact. What’s next: grown men speaking in falsetto? Women running around in children’s clothes (this is already common in Japan)?

We’re doomed I tell you. A culture which encourages its men to be boys, its women to be girls and its boys and girls to be libertines is sick, sick, sick.

Robert J. Samuelson writes about the coming demographic crisis. Politicians promise they care about future generations, when the retirement of the Baby Boomers will destroy those generations.

I just saw this: an old man and his wife were robbed of $400,000 after burglars broke into their home. The odd thing is that it wasn’t the robbers who got the money, but the police. He lost it through civil asset forfeiture, that absurd, unconstitutional, immoral and flat-out shameful procedure whereby assets are taken from a citizen, who must then defend them in civil court. Since civil court has a much lower standard of proof (preponderance of the evidence, rather than beyond reasonable doubt), it is almost impossible to win one’s goods back.

It is a criminal fine imposed through the civil system. It is legalised theft. It is an abomination and a travesty.

Hat-tip to Mr. G——.

From New Zealand comes sad news today: Sir Edmund Hillary, first man to climb Mt. Everest, has fallen asleep. His achievement was amazing for 1953, and his years since were spent well. May his memory be eternal.

Mark Chu-Carroll explains just why Donald Knuth’s TeX is so cool. To this day, I write all my correspondence in LaTeX; it’s a wonderful tool (for one thing, the LaTeX logo actually looks good when properly typeset).

For my first candidate profiles, I’ll take the first two (in alphabetical order) Republican and Democratic candidates: Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, both as it happens from New York. My thoughts are pretty much in random order, loosely grouped; there’s no real information design or editing, just lots and lots of words.

Hillary Clinton

Hmmm…her site wanted my name, email address and zip code—but was reasonable enough to let me skip that nonsense. There’s no way I want to be on her mailing list…

Economic policy

Well, she says that she wants to lower taxes for middle-class families, which is noble enough. That’s almost certainly code for and raise taxes on the rich, which isn’t so good. She mentions the oxymoronic Earned Income Tax Credit (I earn income-why don’t I qualify for it?) in the same paragraph; I think that her definition of middle-class is not the same as mine. Still, not a terribly offensive promise, and one not likely to do too much damage.

She wants to invest money in research. I’m a bit puzzled as to how that’s constitutional, but no doubt she has a good rationale.

She will ensure that unions are strong, presumably by forcing people who don’t want to be in them to contribute dues. She appears to like trade protectionism (one of the few really, honestly, truly proven bad ideas in economics). She loses points there too.

This paragraph is absurd: Hillary will restore the basic bargain that if Americans work hard and take responsibility, government will do its part to make sure they have the tools to get ahead. Wow—I thought the basic bargain is that the State exists to prevent a war of all against all, to protect my rights from you, your rights from me and our rights from those folks over there. She really loses points here.

She promises a return to fiscal responsibility. This is a good goal, and one I applaud.

She’ll throw lots of money at alternative energy. How this syncs with the previous promise is unclear.

She’ll create all sorts of new federal programmes and bureaus, without any constitutional power to do so, as far as I can tell.

She’ll expand the GI Bill, which is economically insane (it’s one reason that college tuition has skyrocketed) and VA home loans (not a terribly good idea economically, although of course it’s a political home run).

She wants to increase teacher salaries. I can’t seem to find where in the Constitution she finds that in the powers of the federal government, but apparently she believes it’s in there somewhere.

She wants to teach parents how to be parents. Oddly, one would think they could learn that from their parents. Or, if their states wanted, those states could teach them. I don’t see why the United States needs to worry about something that Sue and Jim or New Mexico and Massachusetts can.

She thinks that the fact that women earn less on average is evidence of discrimination (it’s not; it’s evidence that women are willing to trade money for other benefits, like flex-time), and that it’s a federal issue (it’s not).

She wants to fire half a million government contractors. No word on what the economic affect of that will be.

She want to publish budgets for every government agency. With the exception of intelligence and military research budgets, this makes sense to me, and should be applauded.

She claims to want to eliminate corporate welfare. This is laudable, if she’s serious. Pity she’s not so strong on eliminating individual welfare too.

Health care

She’s still annoyed she lost back in 1994 and wants to try socialised medicine once more, opening those plans for federal employees up to the general public. Not the worst idea in the world, but not a good first step. She wants to give tax credits to small business for providing health care plans (but what about large businesses?); the better solution is to stop making employer-provided health insurance non-taxable. She wants to force insurance companies to cover anything their customer wants, regardless of their contracts. She doesn’t say how she will keep me from demanding seven nurses, a surgeon, a physician, a dentist and a phlebotomist when I get a cold—someone will have to know when to say when: if it’s not me, and not my physician (who gets paid no matter how absurd my demands are), and not my insurance company, who will it be? The state? She loses big points here.

She wants to force health insurance companies to cover contraception. Never mind that contraception is, basically, breaking a working machine and that the rest of health care is fixing a broken machine.

Iraq

Clinton seems to believe that we’re done in Iraq, never mind that the state there is nowhere near stable. We were stuck in Germany for forty years; why we should be done so quickly in Iraq is beyond me. Her three-step plan is: bring our troops home, work to bring stability to the region, and replace military force with a new diplomatic initiative to engage countries around the world in securing Iraq’s future. I’m unclear as to how she would work for stability in the region without a military force to back up her diplomacy; I’m unclear which states would provide security in Iraq, if not us. The British Empire (that’s a joke, see?), maybe? Russia? Iran? Isræl?

She wants to bring everyone home, thus leaving the Iraqi government to fall to jihadists, just as her allies brought our troops home from Vietnam and let a democracy fall to communist tyranny. She is, at least, consistent.

She wants the UN to handle Iraq, apparently please with how it has handled Kosovo (once a part of Serbia, once full of Serbians, once full of monasteries and churches, now a hell-hole full of Albanians, where historic churches are pulled down and priests are murdered).

She thinks she can persuade Iraq’s neighbours (e.g. Syria, Iran, Turkey) not to interfere in its affairs. Without the US military to stop them. Presumably she will ask very nicely.

She is apparently unaware that we’ve already been mediating where possible. She’s also apparently unaware that sometimes mediation’s just not possible: when party A wants to kill party B, and party B would rather keep on living, there’s no real way to compromise.

Iraq’s neighbours (and other nations) would apparently also pay to rebuild Iraq. But of course not be repaid. And naturally this aid would never, ever, ever get into the hands of jihadists.

She does seem to realise that a US departure would create a crisis which would make the boat people seem like a Cub Scout regatta, which is good, but she doesn’t seem to care, which is bad.

Foreign policy

She wants to continue spending money on foreign aid, including funding preschools in the Benighted World. Why that’s our business as a nation (instead of mine as a citizen) is beyond me.

She wants a robust response to the violence in Darfur, but is coy about whether this would involve actually using the military, merely threatening to use the military or talking in a very stern voice.

Liberty

Clinton supports censorship of violence and sexual content (and no doubt of other things, like smoking or conservatism).

Clinton supports infanticide, apparently caring not a whit for the liberty of the unborn. She is particularly fond of the practise of partially delivering a child, then twaddling its brain with scissors.

She claims she will restore integrity to science policy, reversing Bush administration policies that are holding our nation back; this is of course code for spend federal money murdering children so that Michæl J. Fox can maybe cure his Parkinson’s. She seems to think that there is such a thing as ethical embryonic stem cell research. Well, provided that they are not human embryos, sure. But that’s not what she means. She loses points there.

She wants to force employers to hire employees they don’t like. Methinks it’s better to simply let bigots lose out in the marketplace when they pass over better-qualified candidates.

She’s silent on the right to bear arms; the right to free speech (impinged on by her censorship); the right to practise one’s religion (impinged on by her mandates for various irreligious practises); the right to confront one’s accusers; the right to property and so forth. She clearly does not believe that government is created by the people, for the people; she seems to think that government nurtures the people, for the government’s greater glory.

Miscellaneous

She wants to create a public-service academy (like the military academies, but for training bureaucrats). I don’t think that increasing the supply of leeches is a good idea.

She wants to expand voting access, which is precisely the wrong thing to do. Fewer, not more, people need to vote. Most people are morons; every election in recent memory has been decided by fewer people than that number of the population which is literally retarded. Handing out votes to felons and illegal aliens, while good for the Democratic Party, is hardly good for the United States.

She wants Election Day to be a national holiday. This is not an entirely bad idea, since it means more honest people with jobs can vote. On the other hand, it means more people voting, which is bad. And most people with upper-class jobs can vote; this just makes it easier for the lower classes to vote, which is much like handing a teenage boy a bottle of whiskey and the keys to a Corvette.

She wants more hate crimes. This is a mistake; hate crimes are no worse than other crimes and are perilously close to thought crimes (the crime which is being punished is not the criminal’s actions; it is his thoughts).

She’s proud of opposing Chief Justice Roberts, the single best judge we’ve gotten in my lifetime. Wrong-o.

Conclusion

I cannot be excited about Hillary Clinton as president. Her positions are almost always unconstitutional; they are often pandering; they are generally wrong. Her only virtue is that she is a woman, and that it would be nice to finally elect a woman president so that we can get it over with and quit having it as an issue. Otherwise she is a discredit to her country and would be a disaster for our nation.

Rudy Giuliani

Giuliani’s site uses Flash, which loses points. It also has a silly chequered flag thing on it right now.

Economic policy

Giuliani wants to lower marginal tax rates. This is a good thing; if we could cut our taxes down to about 6% or so that’d be perfect. It ain’t gonna happen, though.

He wants to eliminate the estate tax. Excellent! Taxes were already paid when the income was made; why pay twice? Certainly tax-sheltered accounts (like 401(k)s or IRAs) should be taxed or rolled over into other tax-sheltered accounts, but otherwise why should be double-tax the rich?

He wants to rein in the Alternative Minimum Tax and tie it to inflation. Why not just eliminate it entirely?

He wants to lower corporate tax rates, a reasonable enough action as our rates are out of line with those across the globe.

He wants to simplify income taxes, giving the option of filing the current forms or a simplified one. Again, not a bad idea, although not going far enough.

He wants to cut the capital gains tax; I don’t see that it really needs cutting. It’d not be bad for me, personally, but that’s no basis for federal policy.

He wants to reinstate the research & development tax credit. That’s a good idea.

He wants to end earmarking—an excellent idea whose time has come. I cannot applaud him highly enough on this.

He wants sunset clauses on all federal programmes. This too is an excellent idea.

He proposes an amendment instituting a line-item veto. It was a good idea in the 1860s and is a good idea now.

He favours burning the Midwest’s remaining topsoil in order to feed our addiction to the automobile—this is also known as ethanol. Not a good idea, albeit perhaps necessary to win votes in the Midwest (whose voters don’t apparently care that they’re denuding their own land and shipping it elsewhere to be burnt in engines).

He favours school choice and charter schools, which is good—but I don’t see how they’re a federal issue. He wants to give scholarships to all children active-duty military men (effectively, school vouchers for the military); this is a good idea, although honestly the Department of Defense is already way too expensive. It’s one of the few legitimate federal bureaucracies, but do we really need to expand it?

He wants to reform Sarbanes-Oxley. Excellent! It was an over-reaction which has hurt our economy and our national competitiveness.

Health care

Giuliani proposes excluding the first $15,000 earned for those who do not have employer-funded health care. Not an entirely bad idea, although it will inevitably lead to higher insurance rates. A better solution is to tax employer-funded health care as income. Giving everyone a $15,000 exclusion, including employer funds therein and letting inflation fix the problem (within my lifetime $15,000 will be worth about $900) is almost as good.

He favours medical tort reform, but has no details. Done right, it’s necessary; done poorly, it’ll be a very bad. And I don’t see how this is a federal issue.

He wants to streamline the FDA. How about getting a constitutional amendment allowing it first? Just a thought. How about letting people take the medicines they want? Use the FDA simply to guarantee safety, purity and effectiveness; allow physicians and patients to make their minds up otherwise.

He wants to invest in health information technology. If it’s an investment, it will pay for itself and private companies would be doing it already.

He wants to expand health savings accounts. This is vital. If instead of nickel-and-dime health insurance—which is the equivalent of gasoline and car wash insurance on a car—people has catastrophic insurance and HSAs they’d be better off and health care prices would be lower.

He wants to promote healthy lifestyles and wellness. How is this a federal responsibility?

Iraq

Giuliani realises that Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are the three current fronts against jihadism. That’s good. Other than that he appears to have no vision for how to stabilise Iraq and get back home. That’s bad.

He opposes withdrawal from Iraq at this point in time, which is appropriate. He doesn’t exactly say what his criteria for withdrawal are, which is a bit worrisome.

Foreign policy

He wants to rejigger foreign aid so as to encourage Mohammedan states to crack down on domestic jihadism. Great idea!

Giuliani wants to expand NATO—excellent idea! NATO needs to become the anti-UN. The UN is a failed relic of a fascist’s reign; NATO is the only real organ for international liberty.

He wants to expand the number of H1B visas. H1Bs are already abused: they were meant to allow in workers with skillsets not findable among citizens, but have become a way for employers to pay cheaper foreign labour instead of more-expensive American labour (in fairness, I should point out that my industry is particularly hard-hit by this and that I may not be unbiased). He loses points here.

He wants to increase free trade. Yes! Particularly if it means getting rid of the rules which prevent free trade in Internet gambling…

Liberty

Giuliani is no friend of liberty; he’s on record as stating, Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do. This is not a man who should be put in authority over anyone.

He wants to extend the PATRIOT Act and FISA. They’re not really all that bad in themselves (their vices have been exaggerated and their virtues are not unpresent), but I don’t see any need to do much more.

Giuliani supports infanticide, but as its supporters go, he’s not too bad. Of course, it’s really not a federal issue, so that should be immaterial. The end result of his policies (many of which are unconstitutional, which is a bad thing) would probably be to reduce the number of children murdered each year, which is good thing. Still, his heart is most definitely not in the right place.

He says he wants to promote religious and political freedom, human rights and democracy for dissidents across the world; I just wish he felt the same about America.

He thinks that public safety (i.e. police) is a federal responsibility. It’s not and never has been. He loses points here.

He is silent on the right to free speech (impinged on by her censorship); the right to practise one’s (non-Christian) religion; the right to confront one’s accusers; the right to property and so forth. His thoughts on the right to bear arms seem to be get guns out of the hands of criminals (and potential criminals). New York City has some of the worst gun laws in the nation, which he enforced.

Miscellaneous

Giuliani wants to create a military-civilian expeditionary force to stabilise failing states and prevent the emergence of new terrorist safe-havens. This would have been a good idea before Iraq—but do we really want to be in that business anymore? He loses points on this.

He pledges to appoint judges who read the Constitution as it’s written, not as they wish it were written. This is a good thing, a necessary thing and an unfortunately very rare thing.

He thinks that anti-terrorism is a federal responsibility; I agree, when it comes to foreign and anti-federal terrorists. Local terrorism, of course, is a local issue.

He wants to decentralise the Department of Homeland Security in regions. Why not eliminate DHS, and give each state responsibility with its borders, and the military and intelligence arms responsibility outside our borders?

He wants need-based funding for anti-terrorism. This means taxing Duluth, Des Moines and the Dakotas to pay for CCTV cameras in New York, Boston and Los Angeles. No thank you—those places have plenty of money to spend on their own.

Conclusion

Rudy Giuliani is a good administrator. If the position of President were simply the Chief Executive of the United States (as it should be), he would probably do a good job. Given that it has become King of the United States, given his lack of respect for liberty and his worrisome trend toward corporatism and authoritarianism, I cannot support him for president at this time. His tenure would probably be pretty good in execution, decent in foreign policy and absolutely terrible in civil liberties. And one can only imagine the personal scandals…

Well, now that the primaries have started I suppose I might as well address the issue of which candidates in each party are the best for our country. Over the next few articles I’ll be examining each candidate’s stance on the issues. In each article, I’ll consider one Republican and one Democrat, starting in alphabetical order. Although I’m certain—and anyone who knows me is certain—that my final choice will be a Republican (and almost certainly Ron Paul), I think it’ll be an interesting exercise.

The Dallas Morning News reports that a straight-A student risks not graduating from high school due to his long hair. He hasn’t cut his hair in four years, and for four years the school system was cool with it (as in my opinion it should be), but this Christmas it changed its mind and presented him and several other students with an ultimatum: cut your hair or be moved to an alternative school, removed from extracurricular activities and possibly prevented from graduating.

Here’s the letter I wrote to the superintendent of the school district and the principal of the school:

I’m writing in regards to the case of Matthew Lopez-Widish, the young man told to cut his hair or be moved to an alternate school, removed from extracurricular activities and possibly prevented from graduation.

First off, I’m no Yankee: I’m a graduate of Austin College in Sherman, Tx.; my extended family are all Texans; I travel back to Texas at least 2-4 times a year. I’m not some New Englander who thinks he knows what’s best for Texas. The standards in Kerens are not those of Boston–or San Francisco, for that matter.

And I’m certainly no hippie: I work for a Fortune 500 company; I’m a political conservative; I enjoy hunting and fishing; I go to church on Sunday. I’m not some leftist who thinks that schools should be vegan sit-in protest zones or that teachers should be subordinated to their students. Students should follow the policies of their schools.

Nor am I a heavy metal listener; coincidentally, just today I was watching Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. I’m definitely not a fan of Ozzy Osbourne, Korn or any of the rest, nor do I feel any real affinity for those who are.

I say all this so that you know where I come from: I accept that schools and school districts have a right to set standards for their students which are stricter than those which society at large sets; I understand that oftentimes those standards are set deliberately narrowly in order to give the students something harmless to rebel against (if the kids think that they’re getting away with something by wearing black sneakers, they’re probably not going to feel the need to try to get away with something by smuggling in booze). Certainly many rules must necessarily be unchanging: students in the 1808, 1908 and 2008 should be polite to their teachers; fighting is no more appropriate today than it was in 1952.

However, other rules necessarily change with a changing culture. T-shirts are allowed in most schools these days; sixty years ago they would have been forbidden. Male facial hair was appropriate in 1863 (e.g. Lee, Lincoln, Grant and Davis…), was considered abominable in the 1950s and is now coming back into fashion (the Prime Minister of England wears a beard; so too does the Chairman of the Federal Reserve). Likewise, long hair–which was once normal (e.g. Jesus Christ, Shakespeare, Charles I or Thomas Jefferson)–became known in the 1960s as a mark of hippies and agitators, and in the 1980s as a sign of a bad crowd. But that too is changing; it is becoming more common nowadays for men to wear their hair longer than has been usual for most of this century.

Rather than outright forbid hair past the collar, perhaps the school might consider permitting only hair that is pulled back or braided in a non-ostentatious manner? That might be a successful compromise between discipline and disorder.

In this particular case, the young man is actually that: an 18-year-old man, not a 17-year-old minor; it seems natural that he’s due slightly more freedom than a minor would be.

Moreover, there’s the fact that until recently the school had been lax, thus encouraging the behaviour it now condemns. In property law there’s the concept of adverse possession: a landowner who does not enforce his rights for a period of time can lose them, for reasons of justice towards those who have become accustomed to using that land; likewise, I would think that there’s a certain injustice in permitting a student to do one thing almost until he graduates, and then changing the rules.

The young man in question is due to graduate soon; while it’s important that students who have a year or more left in high school properly adhere to the newly-enforced standards, surely a certain amount of liberty might be afforded to a straight-A student about to graduate?

Finally, I wish to reiterate my recognition that your school district’s policies and procedures are solely yours to decide; my own thoughts and concerns are just that–the thoughts and concerns of a private citizen. I am

Yours very respectfully,
Bob Uhl

It’s certainly a school’s right to set its policies; but it should endeavour not to be asinine in those policies. Rules which force men to shear their heads are Cromwellian in their tyranny.

Here’s advice on how to win a fistfight. I’d like to ask my kid brother the Marine if any of this is good advice—and more importantly, what isn’t.

Pat Summers points out that reckless mortgage borrowers are in a trap of their own devising. They borrowed more than they should; they borrowed on unfavourable terms, betting that they could buy out before they took effect; many even committed fraud. Why are we talking about bailing them out?

I’d add: why are we talking about bailing lenders out? They made loans to bad risks; they should have set terms that would make those loans, on average, profitable. That they failed is hardly my fault—so why am I being made to pay for it?

World War I: Experiences of an English Soldier is a blog with a difference: it is about the Great War. The entries are from letters home written by William Henry Harry Bonser Lamin; his grandson Bill. He posts each one exactly 90 years after it was written. He hasn’t yet revealed if his grandfather survived or not—only time will tell, now as then.

Hat-tip to CNN of all places.

A Boy SCout saved the president of the Maldives from a knife attack by leaping forward and grabbing the knife. This shows you what good training in proper behaviour can do.

Here in Colorado, a SWAT team stormed a family’s home and stole their 11-year old son. Why? Because a paramedic was annoyed that the boy’s father wouldn’t take him to the hospital for observation (the father has medical training and determined that it wasn’t necessary; the kid had fallen on a driveway and struck his head). Even if this were a case of negligent parents, of course, using a SWAT team was absurd: a pair of deputies sent to the family’s door would have sufficed. Instead, the SWAT team punched a hole in Mr. Shiflett’s door, threatened his daughter and generally were jerks.

Why? Sheriff Lou Vallario (may he never be elected again) complained that the man was a constitutionalist. I didn’t know that respecting the Constitution was grounds for treating a home-schooling family like a terrorist cell.

Major Andrew Olmsted was killed in Iraq trying to convince three insurgents to surrender on Thursday where he was training Iraqi police. He left instructions for a final post to his blog to be made. He sounds like he was a pretty cool man. The real shame of war is how many interesting and worthwhile people are killed: Tolkien and Lewis survived the Great War, but how many hundreds or thousands died who were equal—or perhaps even better?

Every year Australia has a 544-mile footrace from Sydney to Melbourne; it attracts the best of the best, runners from all over the world, heavily sponsored and highly trained. In 1984, a 61-year-old farmer won it. His secret? He didn’t realise that he was supposed to sleep—so he ran it straight through! A must-read story.

Gever Tully describes five dangerous-but-essential things parents should let children do:

• Play with fire
• Own a pocket knife
• Throw a spear
• Deconstruct appliances/break the DMCA
• Drive a car

My folks pretty much let me do all that (well, the DMCA didn’t exist back then, but they let me have mix tapes), and look how well I turned out!

yesterday I went with my mother to see an exhibit of items from the Louvre at the Denver Art Museum which was very cool. What struck me was how very little actual art is in the museum. There are a few floors of contemporary paint-blobs on canvas; there are a few examples of handicrafts from aborigines; there are a few of pop-art of the crudest kind; but there are only two floors with art proper: one of European and one of Far Asian. The European is most interesting to me, particularly the Holbein portrait of Edward VI. That’s real art: in this case, it depicts someone of importance (Edward VI, duh), it has historical significance (I was inches from a canvas that Henry VII almost certainly touched!) and it’s attractive and executed with skill.

I’m not against non-representational art; I’m not against abstract art; I’m not against random art. Some of the greatest art of history is non-representational (just look at the Anglo-Saxons, the Celts and the Greeks!). But most of what passes for art these days is far from the ding an sich—it’s pure dreck.

That said, it was absolutely glorious to see the relics of the ancien régime and to breathe on a few great works of true art. When my readers and I are dust, those works will remain—and the dreck the Museum collects will be dust to. The eternal things will last so long as there are those who appreciate beauty, skill and true art.

Dr. Joel Weinstock believes that intestinal worms may be key to preventing asthma, hay fever, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and other immunological diseases. One man actually flew to Cameroon and walked around in open cesspits in order to be infested with hookworms (which seems rather insane to me).

The idea got me thinking though: scientists were at one point horrified at the idea of bacteria living inside us; the goal of medicine became to annihilate them utterly. But then it turned out that rather a lot of bacteria are good for us—that in fact the bacteria inside each of us outnumber our bodies’ cells. Some folks (e.g. me) even go out of their way to eat probiotic foods like cheese, sauerkraut, kimchee, kombucha and beer. I wonder if maybe someday we’ll discover that multicellular organisms can be good too, that our bodies are actually complex environments where even parasites have a role to play.

That said, I am not planning on getting hookworms. That seems beyond extreme.

Lifehacker presents ten Google search tricks. Pretty good stuff to know.

Apparently environmentally sound burial is having a resurgence. Everything old is new again, I guess.

I think the lengths we go to in order to pretend that the dead aren’t dead are pretty absurd: we pump them full with embalming chemicals; we paint them with makeup; we put them in airtight coffins in concrete vaults; many funeral services don’t even have an open casket!

When I die, I want to be buried in a wooden casket (pine if I die poor, maybe oak or mahogany if I’m rich) and buried in the actual ground. No embalming, no hyper-expensive air-tight casket, no absurd vault: just me returning to the dust from whence I came, awaiting my resurrection. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

From CNN comes this list if bad foods which are actually good: red meat; ice cream; eggs; pizza and Canadian bacon. Taken in moderation, all actually help one lose weight.

Alexander Wolfe has an interesting response to the RIAA’s most recent egregious behaviour: cut copyright terms to five years. Most money is probably made in the first five years anyway, and it would certainly hit the RIAA where it hurts.