Octopodial Chrome

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