KN@PPSTER

"Dark Ages Misogyny" ... Really?

2012-02-13T01:02:00.002-06:00

What's got Charles Johnson (the wrong-headed Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, not the right-headed anarchist Rad Geek) so worked up?

Now the GOP Wants to Permit Any Employer to Deny Contraception Coverage

What's all this "permit" and "deny" stuff?

An employer doesn't (or at least shouldn't) have to offer health insurance as a job benefit at all (he or she may choose to do so, including as part of some contract negotiation or whatever, of course).

And if an employer does offer health insurance as a job benefit, excluding this or that item from said offering isn't "denying" anyone anything, nor should any "permission" to exclude anything, nor any excuse for excluding anything, be required. As long as he's not lying about what it is he's offering, I'm free to take it, leave it, or try to negotiate something different.

There's no "right" to force someone else pay for or deliver whatever health care you might happen to want, and there never will be, no matter how many times Johnson clicks his heels and shouts "war on women's rights! ... [W]ar on contraception!"

The whole "religious exemption" thing is just a distraction. I suspect that's where you'll find most objections to covering contraception in particular, for the simple reason that most employers and insurers would rather pay for contraception, vasectomies, tubal ligations, etc. than pay for pre-natal care and delivery of a baby, then cover that baby's health care expenses as well. But the general principle extends far beyond religious objections.

Maybe my employer finds out that he or she can save $10 per employee per month by offering us policies that exclude sports injuries. Unless we have a contract specifying otherwise, why should he be mandatorily out $10 extra a month so that I can play rugby or ride bulls on the weekend?

Or maybe I've had myself snipped and my significant other has had her tubes tied. Why should we not be able to buy a policy that doesn't cover (at an extra premium cost) a bunch of services we're never going to need?

Hey, maybe ... no, not just maybe ... the details of what health insurance we buy (or don't buy), or negotiate (or not) with our employers, are none of Barack Obama's and Kathleen Sebelius's business.

A Bad Idea to Fix a Worse One, Because I Can

2012-02-12T23:39:00.000-06:00

The "Fair" Tax is a really, really bad idea (see here, here and here for more on why). But, one of this really, really bad idea's really, really bad effects is fixable.

I've mentioned the solution in passing before, but I figure it's worth elaborating on. That way if it gets used (I hope it doesn't, because I hope the tax never gets implemented), I can brag about how I reduced the damage or something; and if it doesn't get used (and the tax gets implemented without it), I can bellyache about how it could have been made not quite so really, really bad if anyone ever listened to me.

The really, really bad effect in question is the "Fair" Tax's impact on people with savings upon which income taxes have already been paid. Roth IRAs, for example. The holders of such accounts paid income tax on that money before they socked it away, and now under the "Fair" Tax, they'll take an additional 30% tax hit when they spend it.

The solution is something I'm calling the S-Dollar. The "s" is for "saved." It's a second currency, to be issued/created with implementation of the "Fair" Tax. Like this:

- A section gets added to the "Fair" Tax bill specifying that post-income-tax dollars in designated types of financial institution accounts (once again, Roth IRAs are first that come to mind) as of a date certain will automatically become "S-Dollars," which will thereafter have the same value as, and exchange equally for, regular US dollars.

- When these "S-Dollars" are spent, the "Fair" Tax is not levied on the purchases made with them -- but upon the first tax-free expenditure of an "S-Dollar," it thereafter becomes a regular dollar, once again subject to the "Fair" Tax.

Obviously some technical gimmickry will be required to implement the "S-Dollar."

I'm guessing it won't be too difficult to do when it comes to digital transactions -- just give account-holders a special debit card and set up a transaction in terminal software to handle it. When money leaves the debit account, no tax. But once it's in the merchant's account, it's "regular" money again.

If a physical cash solution is needed, special Federal Reserve Notes of a different color. The merchant knows not to charge tax on stuff bought with those; when he deposits them in his bank, they go into his account as "regular" dollars and the bank turns the notes in to the Treasury Department for destruction (it gets "regular" dollars in exchange too, of course). Eventually, the "S-Dollars" would all become "regular" dollars and the program would be shut down.

Presumably there'd be some schemes to re-use (or counterfeit!) the "S-notes," but that's just a cost of doing the tax business (and some of them would be caught -- no matter what guff the "Fair" Taxers throw out about "eliminating the IRS," there will still be revenue agencies).

Anyway, that's my little plan for letting people spend their pre-"Fair"-Tax, already-income-taxed savings without taking the extra 30% hit.

But, once again, I'd rather the stupid and evil "Fair" Tax scheme doesn't ever get implemented.

Remember the Maine (Caucus Results)

2012-02-11T22:44:00.001-06:00

Another typical Mitt Romney "win."

Romney, the northeastern moderate Republican, got 39% in a northeastern moderate state.

61% of Maine Republicans voted against him.

Ron Friggin' Paul came within three points of beating him.

And this, write Rosalind S. Helderman and Felicia Sonmez of the Washington Post, is something that Romney "hopes will put his campaign back on track and help him regain momentum."

He's like the Leonard Lawrence of presidential candidates.

Recommendation to Political Candidates

2012-02-11T21:49:00.000-06:00

No, this is not an affiliate post, nor has it otherwise been paid for, solicited, etc. I just happen to like this company, and receiving a mailing from them today put it in my head to give them a little free promotion.

They're called postcardmailer. They used to be called Pure Postcards. They did an absolutely fabulous job for me in my 2008 congressional campaign in every respect -- fast work, fantastic customer service, great prices, just a beautiful, trouble-free experience. If you need postcards, rack cards, flat or tri-fold brochures, mailing services, etc., for your campaign (political campaign, marketing campaign, whatever), I highly recommend them.

If you need help with brochure copy and so forth, I've been known to offer such services.

Chuck Moulton: Open Letter to Gary Johnson on the "Fair" Tax

2012-02-11T13:51:00.001-06:00

I'm not going to post the whole letter here -- you can read it at Independent Political Report. And you should. As a teaser, here's the opening:

Main libertarian objections to the Fair Tax:
1. The prebate would start a new welfare entitlement.
2. The transition would redistribute from savers to borrowers.
3. There is a danger of getting BOTH an income AND a consumption tax.
4. Advocates disingenuously quote a 23% rate when it is actually 30%.
5. Advocates use protectionist rhetoric to sway populists.

Also well worth a read is Jason Gonella's open letter to Johnson, which covers some other issues.

And two pieces on the "Fair" Tax by LP presidential nomination candidate R. Lee Wrights (here and here).

And finally, while I don't by any means claim to be "the father of libertarian opposition to the 'Fair' Tax,'" I can claim to have done a bit of writing on it long before it became a football in the Libertarian Party's 2012 presidential nomination process -- see here and here.

Resolved ...

2012-02-11T01:15:00.000-06:00

... that neither the Holy Roman Catholic Church, nor any other institution, organization or person, has any moral obligation whatsoever, absent some voluntary contract or commitment on their part to do so, to pay for anyone's aspirin, amoxicillin, fluoxetine, sildenafil, braces, spectacles, surgical procedure, estrogen/progestin combo, metformin, etc.

Further resolved, that this is not a complex issue.

Discuss.

A Little Brisk Out

2012-02-10T20:47:00.002-06:00

The weather forecast: "[S]now flurries ending with partial cloudiness and windy conditions continuing overnight. Low 17F. Winds NNW at 20 to 30 mph."

My forecast: Guess I'll probably zip up the mummy bag tonight. 17 degrees and nobody shooting at you is a walk in the park, as these gentleman would likely attest:

Addendum: Yes, I slept out. So toasty warm and comfortable in the mummy bag that I slept in, too. Best night of sleep I've had in a week. It was in the low 20s fahrenheit when I crawled out of the bag.

Give It Up, Dodd, We've Got You Surrounded

2012-02-10T14:41:00.003-06:00

Ernesto @ TorrentFreak on the ease and minimal resource requirements involved in reproducing the important parts of a file-sharing operation the size of The Pirate Bay:

the greatest arch rival of a billion dollar entertainment industry is nothing more than 164 megabytes of text

More on that via Techmeme.

The bad news for RIAA, MPAA & Co. is that intellectual property monopolism is done. It's dead as a dinosaur, even if the dinosaur's brain is so small and so isolated from the rest of its body that its tail is still flailing around.

The good news (once again courtesy of Ernesto, TorrentFreak and Techmeme) is that it doesn't really matter:

A new academic paper by researchers from the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College has examined the link between BitTorrent downloads and box office returns. Contrary to what's often claimed by the movie industry, the researchers conclude that there is no evidence that BitTorrent piracy hurts US box office returns.

Of course, the bad guys already know that. Their real concern isn't stopping "piracy" of their products, it's making it harder for artists to establish their own content distribution channels.

That is, they don't care so much that some people might download the new Michael Bay movie, the new Lady Gaga album, or the new Stephen King novel without paying. That's just "inventory shrinkage" a la shoplifting -- an unfortunate cost of doing business that you throw a little money at deterring, but otherwise don't lie awake at night panicking over.

Their real goal is heading off a bigger -- possibly existential -- threat to their business model. To wit, they want to make it impossible for Michael Bay, Lady Gaga and Stephen King (and any newcomers, of course) to reach you without going through Paramount Pictures, Universal Music Group and Scribner.

In a free market, dinosaur outfits like those represented by MPAA/RIAA would have no choice but to compete on being better at connecting creators with audiences. But nobody likes to change, and these guys have grown fat on a "toll booth" business model: "We've parked ourselves in the middle, there's no way around us, you have to cough up if you want past."

So, their plan is to keep their friends in government at work trying to shut down the makers of flying cars, teleportation devices and such.

It won't work. Too many cats are out of too many bags. The real choice here for those old-style companies is asking themselves "how's that working out for us?" and changing, or eventually going out of business. Everything else is Kubler-Ross "Five Stages of Grief" stuff. They seem to be on the fence between the "anger" and "bargaining" stages.

Addendum: Rick Falkvinge (h/t Tennyson McCalla) wonders why we should give a damn about the IP industry's profits anyway.

A Couple of Quick Takes ...

2012-02-09T21:22:00.001-06:00

... mainly because I just don't want to get in the habit of not posting every day.

If you read Amazon e-books (on a Kindle device or using one of their apps), you should definitely subscribe to Pixel of Ink's email list. Each day they throw their readers links to several free Kindle downloads and discount deals. I'm pretty sure I've seen some B&N Nook downloads from them as well.
If you've seen the trailer, etc. for Richard Gere's latest flick, The Double, you know they give away right up front that Gere himself is "Cassius." If you haven't, well:

So anyway, there are obviously other plot twists. And they're pretty good. The movie's available on Netflix streaming, so presumably it's also out on iTunes, DVD, etc. Worth a watch.
Another one worth a watch is Blackthorn.

A Clean Sweep for Santorum

2012-02-08T01:55:00.000-06:00

Those who follow KN@PPSTER closely will recall that I didn't do a "Missouri, Minnesota, Colorado prediction" post. If I had done such a post, no, I would not have predicted that Rick Santorum would win all three states.

Frankly, this GOP primary cycle has me feeling a little bit like Blackie in my favorite clip from Where the Buffalo Roam:

Robert Stacy McCain is deservingly exultant.

And me? How do I feel? Well, my Youtube search for that video clip above brought up another one too:

Manson makes about as much sense as this ball game.

"A Slushy Mix"

2012-02-08T00:59:00.003-06:00

That's what the weather people are calling this:

34 degrees, feels like 28. That dark blob in the middle of the picture is my tent, to which I shall repair shortly. But first, a nightcap!

Hemingway's Whiskey by Guy Clark on Grooveshark

Update: The "morning after" pic. It was actually a wonderful night. Slept like a log, warmly. Didn't even bother zipping up the mummy bag.

Rule of What?

2012-02-07T15:18:00.001-06:00

Imagine, for a moment, that you are driving at 30 miles per hour through a town with a clearly posted speed limit of 35, and are pulled over for speeding. When you object that you were going well below the posted speed limit, the cop points to one of the signs, which now declares that the speed limit is 15 mph. A few seconds later, the sign changes to 20. Then 10.

Or scratch that -- imagine you've been pulled over for driving 40 miles per hour in that 35 mph zone. You're busted. Fair cop. And the town ordinances specify a fine of $50 for that offense. But when you schlep down to the courthouse to pay the fine, the clerk sees that you have red hair and decides she'd rather throw a dart at a board on the wall to determine your actual penalty, which may now range from "get out of jail free" to "death by lethal injection."

Setting aside the fact that Alyssa Bustamante's crime wasn't speeding but instead the brutal killing of a nine-year-old girl, the situation is very similar.

Bustamante was 15 years old at the time she committed the crime. She was clearly a "juvenile" under Missouri law, and that law specifies how juveniles are to be treated.

But Missouri law has hooks in it allowing (when it's politically advantageous) for "juveniles" to be miraculously re-classified as "adults" for purposes of criminal prosecution.

Arbitrary legal age classifications are stupid and evil enough on their own without throwing in capricious exceptions to those classifications for use by prosecutors and judges who may very well be thinking more about re-election or promotion than about the actual facts of the cases they try.

Keep in mind here that nobody came to Alyssa Bustamante the day before she murdered that little girl and said "I wave the magic wand of adulthood over you. You may now drive, vote, buy alcohol and have sex. Oh, and by the way, if you commit a crime, you'll be held fully responsible for it."

No, the thing was ex post facto: "At the time you committed the crime, the potential penalties were X. But because the newspapers love a good 'tough on crime' story, we've decided to change the penalties in your case to Y. Have a nice day."

That idea, given its wide application, is at least as evil as stabbing and strangling a nine-year-old to death.

OGNAAP!

2012-02-06T14:04:00.000-06:00

Image via WikipediaIt stands for "Oh God, Not Another Abortion Post!" Although a little Googling says that I've only mentioned abortion in passing here on KN@PPSTER. And the title acronym explains why. I friggin' hate arguing about abortion. Nobody ever convinces anyone of anything, and everyone goes away mad, and nothing really changes.

But, once more ... or at least once ... into the breach, due to my friend Nila Thompson pointing out this bit on Rachel Maddow's blog about ... you guessed it ... Ron Paul.

Short version: Paul makes an exception to his opposition to abortion for rape ... but only "honest rape."

"Honest," as ascertained by whom? Presumably Dr. Ron Paul, MD, OB/GYN. At least that's how it comes off, and I can't blame hordes of women for being insulted at the idea of it being their doctor's prerogative to decide whether or not what they say happened to them did, in fact, happen to them.

But what bugs the hell out of me is not that in particular, but what got Paul to the point of even being asked that particular question: The "rape or incest exception" argument. That is a complete dead-end street when it comes to the abortion debate. Here's why:

Most self-identified "pro-choicers" consider abortion a woman's medical decision to make, period, end of story. They either don't think that a fetus is a "person" with rights, or they believe that if the rights of mother and fetus come into conflict, the mother's rights trump the fetus's. So when they pose the question "but what about in cases of rape or incest?" to self-identified "pro-lifers," they're being disingenuous. It's not like they'd turn around and say "oh, well, okay then, I'm fine with banning abortion otherwise" if they got the answer they're fishing for, is it?

Most self-identified "pro-lifers" consider the fetus a "person" with rights, including the right to life. And I don't think there's any dispute that if that's the case, this "person" is an innocent who is in the position he or she is in (developing in the womb) through no fault of his or her own and entirely due to the actions of others. So making an exception for rape or incest is effectively saying "well, if a crime was committed against the mother, the mother gets a free pass to commit homicide -- not against the perpetrator of the crime, but against a second innocent victim." That's entirely inconsistent with the principle which motivates the "pro-life" position in the first place.

Now, I know I'm painting with a fairly broad brush above, and that there are as many variations of opinion on abortion as there are people to hold said opinions. So let me be clear here: I have no ax to grind with you whether you call yourself "pro-choice" or "pro-life." I have my own opinions on the subject of abortion, but I gave up sharing them (apart from in personal situations where they are immediately relevant -- in which case I've emphasized being a supportive friend instead of trying to be "the judge") a long time ago for the reasons I mention in the first paragraph.

Or, to put it a different way, I am not posting this because I want to argue about abortion. I'm posting it because I'm interested in where a particular aspect of arguments about abortion leads, politically.

Paul let himself get routed onto that "rape or incest exception" street, and then tried to get himself turned around in a pretty weird and creepy driveway. "Honest rape" doesn't cut any ice with anyone on any side of the question. It just makes you look unprincipled to pro-lifers, like a too-eager-to-please hair-splitter to pro-choicers, and like a misogynist to everyone. I can't imagine that Paul won a single new supporter, or a single vote, with that answer ... and he probably lost some.

Ron Paul: Traveling Man

2012-02-06T11:44:00.002-06:00

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeAs someone who doesn't support Ron Paul's presidential campaign, I find myself coming to his defense far more often than I'd like.

One reason for that, aside from basic respect for fact -- if Paul's going to get slammed, I prefer that it be for things he deserves to get slammed on -- is that his supporters tend to "defend" him by pasting the word "smear" (with some random number of exclamation marks appended) into a blog post 50 times or so, then surrounding said word with other invective. Which, outside the most cultish precincts of Paul's following, isn't very effective.

So anyway, the latest, via Roll Call:

Rep. Ron Paul appears to have been paid twice for flights between Washington, D.C., and his Congressional district, receiving reimbursement from taxpayers and also from a network of political and nonprofit organizations he controlled, according to public records and documents obtained by Roll Call.

The story's pretty long, mostly by way of throwing in the kitchen sink to hide the fact that there's really no "there" there. Near the bottom, for those who bother to read that far, is the money quote:

Public records show hundreds of flight payments between 1999 and 2009 in which both the House and Paul's campaign paid for plane tickets of the same price and about the same date. Given the limitations of publicly reported data, in many of those cases it's not possible to conclude that the matching flight payments represent duplicate reimbursements, because the possibility of an alternate traveler cannot be disproved. Paul has not been accused of wrongdoing by any authorities.

Paul is notorious for -- or at least self-promotes on the basis of -- running a lean operation when it comes to billing taxpayers. He returns much of his permitted office budget to the US Treasury each year. So I don't find it at all surprising that when he flies back to Houston from DC, and takes a staffer (or his wife) with him, he might pick up the latter bill personally and have his campaign, rather than the taxpayers, reimburse him.

That's actually quite a good "ballpark" method of accounting for the fact that on any given trip, some of his business may be "official" (stuff he does as a congresscritter) and some of it may be "political" (stuff he does by way of campaigning to remain a congresscritter).

Another "ballpark" method at play here, along the lines of "per diem" allowances, may be a practice I've heard of, but can't attest to the pervasiveness of:

Someone is taking a trip, and there are different kinds of expenses to be reimbursed by one or more parties. Instead of having the person keep (and the reimbursing entity keep track of) receipts for hotel, cab fare, meals, Starbucks, whatever, the reimbursing entity just uses the cost of the plane ticket as the basis for a flat reimbursement, and it's your job to either keep those additional expenses to that amount, or pay the difference out of your pocket.

If the plane ticket costs $350, you get reimbursed $350 for all that other stuff as well. If you stay at Motel 6 and eat at McDonald's, you pocket some extra cash. If you book a room at the Ritz-Carlton and take your kid's Little League team out to dinner at Ruth's Chris Steak House, it's on you.

I could see Paul letting the Treasury reimburse his flight costs, and then handing the same amount over to his campaign as a basis for his expense reimbursements.

I can think of other possibilities, too, but the one possibility that doesn't strike me as plausible is run-of-the-mill corruption. If Paul just wanted more money, he could easily find perfectly "legitimate" ways to milk his congressional position or his campaign committees, PACs, etc. for it. I just can't see him running some kind of complicated "double books" operation to embezzle a few hundred dollars here and there.

Addendum: I'm not big on "good government reform" type stuff, but here's one I could get behind: The US Treasury will reimburse a congresscritter for one plane ticket from back home to Washington at the beginning of each Congress, and one plane ticket from Washington to back home at the end of each Congress. If he wants to go home during that two-year period, he does so at his own expense.

It Practically Writes Itself

2012-02-05T17:58:00.000-06:00

The unschooling curriculum, that is.

I've been worried that Liam might be falling behind in math and science. He dislikes the former on principle, because when it's taught formally it tends to be in terms that don't convince him of any real need; and the latter usually takes a technical problem of his own invention to get him going

But when he does get obsessed with such a practical problem and starts throwing associated math and science problems at me, I make him learn the stuff and solve those problems himself.

This weekend, those problems took a sudden ramp upward when he decided he wants to start a home UHF television station and broadcast programs he produces (I wouldn't call him an Internet sensation, exactly, but he's had at least one video popular enough that YouTube contacted him about monetizing it) to his friends on the block.

Anyway, mean old dad wouldn't buy the ($30) transmitter until he did his own figgerin' on things like ranges to his friends' houses and the associated power and antenna requirements and came up with the required answers.

I think he learned more math this weekend, for what will end up costing $40, give or take, than he would have on a $40 investment in private school or the sundry expenses associated with shipping him off to a government indoctrination center.

I do expect it to get more expensive, though. I prophesy amateur radio equipment in his not-too-distant future (fortunately, there's a pre-existing ham antenna already poking out of the garage roof, courtesy of the home's previous owner).

A Difference in Narrative ...

2012-02-05T00:41:00.002-06:00

Their version:

Los Angeles Times: "Romney is on a roll after big win in Nevada" ... "commanding victory" ... "a strong marker" ... "The only question was whether Romney on Saturday would top the 51% he received four years ago" ...

Wall Street Journal: "Romney handily won" ...

New York Times: "Romney handily won" (same opening clause, different article, different authors, different paper) ... "solidifying his status as the front-runner and increasing his momentum" ...

My version:

So far as I know, nobody (with the possible exception of an over-enthusiastic Ron Paul supporter or three) has ever predicted anything but a Mitt Romney win in Nevada.

And so far as I know, nobody (with the same exception) predicted what an anemic win it would be. What I don't understand is why the media is shying away from discussing what an anemic win it is.

Four years ago, Romney won Nevada with 51%, despite not being the "inevitable front-runner" (he'd won Michigan, which went earlier then than this year, but had lost Iowa, New Hampshire and Florida), and carried every county in the state except Nye (which Ron Paul took).

This year, as "inevitable front-runner," he only managed 42%, and lost three counties (Nye again, to Paul again; Esmeralda to Paul; and Mineral to Newt Gingrich).

In three primary/caucus wins of five contests so far, Romney has yet to break 50%. More than half of -- usually closer to, and sometimes more than, six out of 10 -- Republicans are still saying "no, not Mitt."

This thing isn't over by a damn sight.

Update: The final vote counts took awhile, but it looks like Romney managed 50% after all.

Huzzah!

2012-02-04T21:50:00.000-06:00

My Mac's seemed a little sluggish lately, so tonight I purchased MacPaw's CleanMyMac (not an affiliate link, and this is not a sponsored post!) and ran it through its paces. Sudden and dramatic performance improvement, and a bonus:

After running CleanMyMac's normal 'cleaning" routine, I also used it to uninstall some applications, and I thought "hey, why not see if uninstalling and reinstalling Chrome fixes it?"

It did. Apparently I had missed a preferences file or library file or something in my manual uninstall/reinstall attempts, and this got it.

I've got my NewsSquares (among other things) back!

So: I definitely recommend CleanMyMac. Even absent the miraculous restoration of my preferred browser, it was well worth the eminently reasonable price (use coupon code "mwe12" for a 25% discount, while it lasts). Some annoying pauses have completely disappeared.

CodeMonkeying

2012-02-04T17:41:00.001-06:00

Every once in awhile I get a burr up my butt (usually because there's an application I want but that doesn't seem to exist), and decide it's time to learn to some very basic programming (actually, scripting usually these days) again, using one of those newfangled languages that's very different from Commodore BASIC.

Last time around it was PHP, so that I could make some fairly major alterations to a Wordpress theme. That was a week of sheer terror, and I'm not sure I retained anything I learned, but by golly the job got done.

This time it's Javascript, which I'm trying to use to write a Firefox add-on. And I'm all thumbs.

The sample code provided by Mozilla for add-on development newbies serendipitously enables the two general tasks I want my add-on to accomplish -- it puts a favicon in the status bar, and when you click on that favicon, it opens a URL.

Modifying the favicon from a Firefox logo to a graphic representing my cool idea was easy. I went to favicon.cc, designed the graphic (actually, I just extensively modified someone else's), released it under a public license, got it hosted at IconJ, (if you want a logo of lips with a mole, called "Marylin," help yourself!) and changed the URL in the sample code.

The next two steps are:

Modifying the sample code to have the URL open in a pop-up window (of a given size, in a given screen location) rather than in a new tab; and
Tapping into a publicly available API to construct that URL dynamically based on the page the user is on when he clicks the favicon.

It's the first of those next two steps that has me flummoxed (the API might bumfuzzle me too, but from what I've read so far, probably not).

It's probably the simplest thing in the world to onclick window.open, etc., but I seem to be messing up the use of brackets, quotes, parentheses and semi-colons and commas in the coding. No matter what I do, the new result when I test the add-on is that now nothing happens. Nothing.

This, too, shall pass.

Or not.

28 years ago, if you threw a BASIC term at me in my sleep, I could give you the syntax, the required and optional arguments, etc., and show you how to use it to do something. Hell, I could tell you how much to add or subtract from X to move a character on the screen in any of eight directions, based on the VIC-20's use of RAM locations as screen memory.

These days the simplest things of that nature are much harder for me to learn and nearly impossible for me to keep straight without frequent recourse to references.

Update: I have no idea why it didn't occur to me to just show the code snippet I'm talking about, so that smart people can advise me. Here's what it looks like (just a modification of the sample code to show my favicon and open a URL -- not the URL the add-on will eventually open, btw):

require("widget").Widget({
    id: "whwomyt",
    label: "We Have Ways of Making You Talk",
    contentURL: "http://www.iconj.com/ico/e/l/el40v4iomp.ico",
    onClick: function(event) {
        require("tabs").open("http://wehavewaysofmakingyoutalk.com");
    }
});

All I'm trying to do right now is make a URL open in a pop-up window, 400 pixels wide and 300 pixels tall, with scrollbars, in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, optionally with the window title "We Have Ways of Making You Talk" (that's the name of the add-on).

But no matter which changes I make (from various web searches on the subject I try), I end up with an add-on that doesn't do anything. It doesn't even show the icon. Which seems to me means that I'm not just getting the command syntax wrong, but that I'm also hooking it into the nested sequences incorrectly such that it prangs even the first part of the code.

Yes, I know that this is pretty lame. Believe me, I wouldn't have tried to crowdsource the solution if I hadn't already tried 14 different ideas of my own about where all those brackets, etc. go.

After I get that part figured out, I dive into Disqus's API and try to figure out how to make that newly opening window be a) the existing Disqus comment thread for the URL of the page the user is on, if there is such a thread (thus preserving the site owner's moderation authority, etc.), or b) a new Disqus comment thread, if the site in question doesn't use Disqus.

If I can figure out how to do that, then I will have implemented my harebrained "universal commenting" scheme as a Firefox add-on. After which I'll be back here asking a bunch of stupid questions about how to code Chrome extensions.

Initial Thoughts on Anonymous's Hack of "American Third Position"

2012-02-04T00:53:00.003-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

Background: Persons purporting to represent Anonymous claim to have hacked the web site of the American Third Position Party, a "white separatist" group, and have published a dump of forum messages, emails, etc. For the details, see Independent Political Report's report.

The primary area of interest in all this to libertarians is the following, from the Anonymous communique on the operation:

In addition to finding the usual racist rants and interactions with other white power groups, we also found a disturbingly high amount of members who are also involved in campaigning for Ron Paul. According to these messages, Ron Paul has regularly met with many A3P members, even engaging in conference calls with their board of directors.

A couple of disclaimers:

I don't think anyone is going to mistake me for a Ron Paul apologist. I've been critical of Paul for various reasons, including but not limited to the issues raised by "the newsletter controversy." Believe this: If I find anything credible anywhere directly connecting Paul to A3P and organizations of its type, I'll shout it from the rooftops.
I've only spent a few hours researching the dump, running searches on strings I would expect to shed light on the claims above. There's a lot of data to sift through, so what I've found so far may very well not be the final word on the subject.

Those two things said, I've found nothing really substantiating the two claims in the communique quote above. To wit:

A "disturbingly high amount of members" of A3P "are also involved in campaigning for Ron Paul."

This is a pretty fuzzy claim in the first place, insofar as "disturbingly high" is a subjective evaluation and "involved in campaigning for" can mean a lot of things.

What I found were several references to A3P members attending Paul campaign events; a couple of references to A3P members talking with low-level Paul volunteers whom the A3P people perceived as "with us" or "pro-White;" and one suggestion that a film/video guy who had done work for the Paul campaign be approached about doing the same kind of work for A3P.

None of the campaign events mentioned were portrayed as Paul intentionally addressing A3P-type audiences -- it was stuff like "we went to see Paul speak at CPAC" and "we went to Paul's GOP convention rally in Minneapolis" and so on.
"Ron Paul has regularly met with many A3P members, even engaging in conference calls with their board of directors."

The closest thing I found to Paul "meeting" with A3P members were references like "managed to get my picture taken with Paul when I attended the Minneapolis convention rally."

I found references to A3P's board of directors, and I found references to conference calls, but I found no references to Paul or his campaign being involved in said conference calls.

Does this mean those two claims are false? NO, it doesn't. I may have missed something. Like I said, it's a lot of stuff and I've only spent a little time sifting through it.

But those claims are strong enough that the burden of proving them falls on those making them. If the material to substantiate the claims is there, someone who can find it needs to highlight it and point it out instead of just leaving it buried down in the pile of garbage it's embedded in.

Here's the picture I get from my limited swim through the A3P sewer:

The A3P types consider the Paul movement, and the wider “paleo” movement (other referenced people, pubs and groups in the dump included Pat Buchanan, Thomas diLorenzo, The American Conservative magazine, the John Birch Society, et. al), to be “implicitly pro-White” (their terminology) and are attempting to build a “bridge” (their terminology) between those movements and “explicitly pro-White” (their terminology) groups including (named in the dump) A3P, White News Network, Stormfront, et. al.

I don’t think that belief on the part of A3P types is entirely unreasonable, given that the Rothbard/Rockwell “paleo strategy” which Paul used to raise money in the 80s and 90s was intended to specifically cater to such tendencies.

On the other hand, I think the A3P types are probably:

Under-estimating the extent to which Rothbard, Rockwell and Paul were using the “paleo strategy” to cynically exploit them — suckering them for political “seed money” and so forth — as opposed to genuinely make common cause with them; and
Seriously over-estimating the extent to which the now-existing Paul movement, which is not, for the most part, a product of the “paleo strategy,” is composed of people likely to be sympathetic to the A3P-type fringe.

So far, I'm not seeing anything that constitutes a serious indictment of Paul, his campaign, or the movement surrounding his campaign -- or at least nothing above and beyond other long-known plausible indictments of any or all of the three.

But, once again, this is just my initial impression, based on limited time and limited skills for digging through the dump. If anyone else is finding or seeing anything I'm missing or mis-interpreting, by all means let me know in comments, via contact form, etc.

As a side note, while I consider myself a member of Anonymous (expect us!) and while I'm happy to see A3P exposed, I was not involved in this operation nor did I have any foreknowledge of it.

I'll Take "Idiot Pols" for $1,000, Alex ...

2012-02-03T14:49:00.001-06:00

"Don't forget to phrase your response in the form of a question, Tom."

"Sure, Alex ... are America's idiot pols really stupid enough to start yet a third Asian land war, after losing two in the last decade, and this time with a country that counts Russia, China and India as allies, and that's three times as populous and more militarily advanced than the other two countries that have recently made the US their bitch?"

Despite the near-constant drumbeat and the wars and rumors of wars over the last few years, I've tended to discount the proposition that anyone could be that stupid. But I'm beginning to wonder. So:

I haven't found an organized event in St. Louis to attend, but I aim to misbehave for peace tomorrow, one way or another, even if it's all by my lonesome. Pray goest thou and do likewise.

My Simplistic Tech-Blogging Rationale

2012-02-03T01:03:00.002-06:00

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I am not a tech expert.

The last real programming I did was in the 1980s, in Commodore BASIC. My HTML/web design skills (other than tweaking out-of-the-box stuff like Wordpress themes here and there, with reference materials and redundant backups close at hand) are circa the late 1990s.

The *nix command line doesn't terrify me per se, and I've installed, configured and used more distros than I can easily remember, but I'm not the guy you'd call if you needed someone to help you grok grep. Ditto for networking. I've set up and fixed Ethernet and wireless home networks, but you could probably set up or troubleshoot your own as well as I could, assuming you are at least as smart as e.g. a mildly retarded rhesus monkey.

And yet I frequently find myself blogging on "tech stuff," and at some point I figure I owe my readers an explanation (or maybe not -- y'all seem to comment favorably on that as much as on the political material).

Why the simplistic tech-blogging? Three reasons:

As little as I know about any particular thing, I almost certainly know a little more than someone, and therefore may be of assistance.
As little or as much as I know about any particular thing, someone out there almost certainly knows more, and may be willing to share it with me, if I ask (and blogging about it is asking about it, unless comments are turned off and the contact form gets deleted).
Traffic. I keep an eye on entry pages, search engine referrals, etc., and a significant percentage of my hits comes from people searching for the tech items I blog about (the third biggest search referral to KN@PPSTER over the last month, after "not provided" and "knappster," has been "free android apps for tablets") . Which, in addition to constituting a reason itself, tends to confirm the first two reasons.

So anyway, now you know what that's all about. I hopefully get to teach some little things, I definitely get to learn a lot, and it feeds my obsession with traffic numbers. So thanks for putting up with it.

Interesting

2012-02-02T21:59:00.000-06:00

I haven't watched Person of Interest yet, but my latest Klout Perk (a logoed microfiber "digi clean pad" for maintaining my cell phone's screen ... pretty cool!) got me interested enough to have a look. Which I guess means the "perk" program is doing its job, huh?

Yes, I guess I'll have to give the show a try. I mean, how can you go wrong with Ben Linus AND Jesus?

OK, Yes, I'm a Gold Bug

2012-02-02T18:54:00.001-06:00

More of a silver bug, actually. But a metal bug. I like having the real stuff, and I particularly like having it already broken down into known increments that are reasonably spendable (or will be, as more and more people decide that precious metals make more sense than paper backed only by "the full faith and credit of" a bunch of politicians).

If you've seen gold and silver prices lately, you know that a one-ounce silver or even a 1/10th-ounce gold coin is a little much for normal exchange. So, I'm a big fan of Ron Helwig's Shire Silver -- laminated cards with small quantities of metal in them (0.5. 1 or 5 grams of silver; 0.05, 0.1 or 0.5 grams of gold):

Perfect even now for buying and selling stuff at freedom movement events. As fiat currency continues its unstable, decaying orbit around the black hole of politics, I expect it to come into use for more routine transactions.

You should probably get some yourself. If you're interested in doing business with it on a regular basis, you might consider becoming a Shire Silver merchant (Disclosure: I've been one -- through Rational Review News Digest -- for more than a year).

Why Hasn't Universal Commenting/Discussion Caught On?

2012-02-02T11:12:00.000-06:00

It really does seem like the next leap in social networking: Instead of (or in addition to) each site maintaining its own comment or forum setup, you could comment at or on any URL, and have your comments aggregated and threaded with everyone else's, all through the same service.

But no: We've got competing commenting systems (IntenseDebate, Disqus, et. al), in-house systems for WordPress and Blogger and so forth, all fighting for market share from the site operator side instead of the user side, and "universal commenting/discussion" doesn't seem to catch on.

A couple of years ago, I came across a site called Buzzbot. It appears to be defunct now -- not surprising since it was set up as a multi-level-marketing opportunity. It was one of those "operating system in your browser" projects, among other things. The only thing special about it was its "browser within your browser." You could point that browser at any URL, and there would be a sidebar tab for discussion and commenting.

There was also a service call coComment -- also defunct, but from what I can tell it appeared to be a similar idea, implemented as a Firefox extension.

I think the idea is sound. In fact, I think it could be the next Twitter in terms of adoption. If I were rolling it out (and no, I won't -- I've got neither the capital nor the technical ability), it would look something like this:

A web site, a Firefox add-on, a Chrome extension, etc.
Multiple account setup/login options ("connect with Facebook," "log in with Twitter," "use your Google account," "set up an account with us").
When you go to a web page -- any web page -- with the add-on or extension running, or in an iframe or whatever from the service's site, you have a little tab on the side of your browser (for extra credit, let the user decide where the tab appears, maybe make it on of those that pops up when you move your mouse to the lower right of the screen, etc.).
Click on the tab, a comment window opens. Bam, threaded discussion, and it's not dependent on, or controlled by, the site you're commenting on ... or is it?

That last question leaves open the possibility of a "premium" service that site operators can buy, which lets them exercise various sorts of moderation and control over the service as it's used vis a vis their sites. Or maybe not even premium. Maybe there's a default service, but any site creator can create a file along the lines of robots.txt that specifies certain parameters like excluded words, bans, moderation, etc.

Ad revenue seems like the obvious profit center.

What's the fly in the ointment? What am I missing? Too much overhead required to moderate from the commenting provider's side or something?

To me, this seems like exactly the direction I'd take Disqus if I ran that service. Why compete for site owners to implement your service when you could just offer it directly to users?

Tent Living Update

2012-02-01T13:49:00.000-06:00

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I started 2012 with the goal of "camping out" every night for the entire year.

I've already had to modify that goal: Last weekend's trip entailed a family hotel stay, and I doubted the innkeepers would tolerate a tent in their backyard (Tamara rejected the idea of everyone staying at a rental tent camp site; can't say I blame her).

So in January, I went 30 for 31 days.

I'm thinking that I should probably allow myself one day a month for such things, sort of in the spirit of people trying to set world records for pole-sitting or roller-coaster-riding or whatever getting five minutes off per day or hour to use the bathroom and whatnot.

Other than that, nothing of note to report, really; just asides:

I've definitely become acclimated to lower temperatures -- these days, I don't bother zipping up the sleeping bag unless it's below freezing.
The cheap Ozark Trail tent has been a real champ in terms of weather resistance, especially since I sheltered its north face with a tarp lean-to. Any tent will admit a little moisture if there's stuff pressing against its inside walls, and there's some condensation on cold days, but apart from that the thing has been nicely dry, and surprisingly un-drafty.
Consequently, I'm kind of planning to just stick with this tent all year (or until disaster of some kind falls upon it) rather than buy or build something else come spring. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I must admit that the FieldCandy outfits look pretty cool, but they also appear to start at something like 25 times the cost of what I'm using now.
Based on past summer sleepouts, though, I think I'll try to figure out a reasonable way to mount a fan in front of one of the mesh windows once the temperature creeps up above 80 or so.

Adventures in Browser Organization: Symbaloo

2012-02-01T10:52:00.000-06:00

Since my forcible repatriation from Chrome to Firefox (I've tried everything, including multiple nukings/reinstallations, and Chrome just won't run correctly any more), I've been looking for a replacement for NewsSquares, the one Chrome extension which had most revolutionized my daily browsing routine.

I haven't found anything quite as useful yet, but this LifeHacker article on useful start pages by Whitson Gordon turned me on to Symbaloo.

No, Symbaloo doesn't do everything that NewsSquares does (integrate with Google Reader, let me preview articles and keep track of read/unread stuff, etc.). Not even close. But it does at least let me organize my "daily routine" URLs into pretty clickable squares that open in new tabs. It also has some nice built-in news tracking features. Both of those things are big time-savers in my 100+ site daily grind.

Symbaloo is also web-based and browser-independent, so I don't lose it if I switch to Safari, Camino, Opera, or even eventually back to Chrome. That's obviously a major plus.

Here's hoping that Symbaloo steps up its game and adds NewsSquares-like features, or that Rocket-in-Bottle or some eager beaver clones NewsSquares as a Firefox add-on, or better yet a web-based, browser-independent hangamajigger.

Well

2012-01-31T21:21:00.001-06:00

That's a deep subject, isn't it?

Yes, I blew the Florida primary prediction, big-time -- looks like by about 23 points or so. Hey, it happens.

Mitt Romney needed to win by 10 points or more to really get back in this race. It looks like he won by 14.

BUT! Lookit:

I grabbed that graphic from Fox News, on the supposition that a generic state map with colored counties reflecting public information probably is probably fair game for fair use. Red is for Romney, green is for Newt Gingrich.

Yes, Romney won the state fair and square. But if you take a gander at the geography there, it doesn't look very good for Romney in future GOP primaries or for the GOP itself in the general election.

In the panhandle, where the GOP primary electorate looks a lot more like most of Republican America and especially southern Republican America, Gingrich whipped Romney's ass. If he has the money/backing to stick with this, Gingrich probably has North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Lousiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas in pocket. And, of course, his home state of Georgia.

In southern Florida, where the GOP primary electorate is more moderate, Romney proved that he can beat candidates perceived as more conservative. But in November even Romney, if he's the nominee, will be the putative conservative. And the GOP is unlikely to win the White House if it can't win Florida.

This is Romney's fourth time out in this cycle. He's 2 for 4, and has yet to break 50% anywhere. The majority of Republican primary voters keep saying "not Mitt." By Super Tuesday, I predict that that "not Mitt" vote will have largely coalesced to "yes Newt."

Contra Epstein

2012-01-31T10:47:00.000-06:00

Reid J. Epstein @Politico:

Gingrich needs a close race more than Romney needs a blowout victory.

I disagree. Anything but a blowout for Romney today is effectively the end of his campaign.

If Gingrich wins Florida, "prohibitive frontrunner" and biggest spender Mitt Romney will be 1 for 4, and that one an underwhelming win in the smallest contest thus far.

If Romney wins but it's close, he continues to be what he's been since Iowa -- "the walking dead." He may hold on until Super Tuesday before going down, but down he shall go.

He needs to win by at least 10 points to really get back in the race.

With the polls now open, I'm still calling Florida for Gingrich.

I Feel Jonathan Franzen's Pain ...

2012-01-30T18:50:00.001-06:00

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... but only a little. One of America's most highly-regarded novelists (by the kind of people who fancy themselves qualified to highly, or not highly, regard novelists), author of The Twenty-Seventh City, thinks e-books rob literature of a needed sense of permanence.

Like most of those critiquing Franzen's viewpoint (Lance Ulanoff at Mashable, for example), I'll open with the disclaimer that I am a (dead tree type) book lover. I've been a dedicated reader for 40 of my 45 years, and have sometimes found myself in competition with my library for living space. Some volumes bring back associated memories every time I pick them up: "I accidentally left my last copy of this (The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman) on the airplane when I flew back from my speech to the New York Junto against the Iraq war in 2003;" "I was reading this one (Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand) the day my daughter was born in 1990;" etc. There's just something about a physical book.

But look at what e-readers are doing! Like other technological advancements (Brad has them pretty well-covered here), they're making a lot of people's lives a lot richer.

For the cost of 10-15 paperbacks (and the cost is falling), you can get a device that instantly puts thousands of classics in front of you "free" (courtesy of The Gutenberg Project, et. al) and lets you get the newer stuff with a click. The instant I bought my e-reader, my library got about 10,000 times larger, maybe more, without taking up any more space.

Ten years from now, I expect that every school kid will have an e-reader device of some sort, connected to a library much, much, much larger than any room in the government schools I went to as a child (no, I'm not putting those libraries down -- they, and their keepers, influenced me a lot; but still ...).

On this last weekend's trip, I took about 70 books with me (I actually read from four or five of them), and they didn't fill up the back seat of the mini-van. They all fit in the glove compartment, on my Cruz Reader.

I hope that dead-tree and electronic formats achieve some kind of coexistence ... but if we can only have one of the two, the latter just makes more sense. It makes more art and more knowledge available to more people, less expensively.

More at memeorandum

80 proof

2012-01-30T17:05:00.001-06:00

I've never managed to get a good picture of the old Bourbon, Missouri water tower. So, for this post, I'm using Daniel Woodrum's photo from takemytrip.com.

When I was a kid and we would drive past on I-44 (still fairly new at the time!), I fancied that the tower was actually full of bourbon whiskey. Later, I outsmarted myself. This being the middle of Missouri wine country, it was obvious to me that the reference went back to French settler times and alluded to the Bourbon dynasty.

The French presence extended west and south from St. Louis at least as far as the Springfield, Missouri area, where there's still a small town called Bois d'Arc ("Bo-Dark" in the Missouri dialect; there's also a Versailles, Missouri, pronounced "Vur-Sayles").

Anyhoo, I was wrong both ways. The tower wasn't full of bourbon whiskey, but that's what the reference was, in fact, to. The town of Bourbon sprang up around Irish work camps building a railroad through the area. The railroad workers liked their whiskey, and local storekeeper Richard Turner was eager to please, buying the newly popular Kentucky variant in quantity. His store became known as "the bourbon store," and the town that sprang up nearby just rolled with that name.

On this last weekend's trip down to Marshfield/Springfield, we took a little time to get off the freeway and drive a few portions of old Route 66. I do that as often as possible, just to show the kids that there's always some cool history and beautiful country to see if you're willing to spare the time.

The Bourbon tower is visible from I-44, of course. So why am I writing about it? Well, I'm having an Old Crow and RC to celebrate my 80th KN@PPSTER post this month -- one more than I managed in all of ~~2005~~ 2007. So it just seemed apropos (see how I worked some French lingo in there?).

The Sticking Point

2012-01-30T00:35:00.003-06:00

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Eric Dondero over at Libertarian [sic] Republican thinks I'm crazy for still predicting a Newt Gingrich win in tomorrow's Florida primary.

Maybe he's right. I do have a bad habit of over-estimating the aggregate intelligence of the Republican Party. I'm betting that Republican primary voters have enough gray matter between them to have figured out that Gingrich is the only candidate for their nomination who stands a chance in hell of both getting that nomination and beating Barack Obama in November.

A small chance, true, but a chance nonetheless. And he's the only one who even might manage both.

Ron Paul could conceivably beat Obama, but he can't sell the GOP on foreign policy sanity and get the nomination.

Mitt Romney or even Rick Santorum (just barely plausibly) could get the nomination, but neither one has a chance in hell of hitting 270 electoral votes for the win. In fact, either one would be over-performing at 100 electoral votes.

So the question is: Are the Republicans interested, or are they not interested, in at least a slim possibility of taking the White House for the 2013-2017 presidential term? If yes, Gingrich is the nominee. If no, he isn't. It's really just that simple.

I'm sticking with my earlier prediction: Gingrich by 9 points, plus or minus 2, tomorrow, for the simple reason that any GOP primary electorate dumb enough to return a different result is arguably also too damn dumb to work those complicated knobs on their doors and get out of their houses to the polling places to vote any other way.

But I could be wrong. Perhaps the Democratic Party has an "Open Those Complicated Door Thingies for Romney Voters and Drive Them to the Polls" effort set up.

And just to be clear here, no, I'm not a Gingrich fan. I don't really care one way or another whom the Republicans nominate, or who wins in November, except from the "horse race" angle. There's just no real betting to be done on Obama versus Romney or Santorum. That would be like an exhibition football game between the New England Patriots and your local Mighty Mite champions. Obama versus Gingrich would at least be more akin to the Patriots versus the Kansas City Chiefs' second string or something.

Reaching Across History

2012-01-29T19:33:00.000-06:00

One of last week's "fun political stories" was about the grandson of US President John Tyler calling Newt Gingrich a jerk.

Quite a spread of time there -- Tyler was born in 1790, fathered children late as did his son, etc. One blog post on the story (which I can't find now) remarks on Oliver Wendell Holmes having shaken the hands of both John Quincy Adams and John F. Kennedy -- the 18th century connecting to the 20th.

Nothing as dramatic for me, but I got to connect the 19th and 21st centuries this weekend when I went to visit my parents.

As KN@PPSTER readers will recall me mentioning, I often use a cane to walk these days. I haven't been that happy with the one I have (a thrift store pickup), and took the opportunity to look at replacements everywhere we stopped (found a nice one I may buy, as a matter of fact).

Anyway, my dad had an old cane that turned out to be precisely the right height. It's still in great shape, too.

I never knew its owner, as he died two or three years before I was born. His name was Simon Peter Decker and he was born in 1885 (if I recall correctly) in Knoxville, Tennessee.

I did know his wife, Minnie Elsie Crabtree Decker, who was born (once again, IIRC) in 1889, also in Knoxville. She died when I was in my early teens and she was in her early 90s.

Simon and Minnie Decker were the parents of my father's mother, Eva Knapp.

Coincidentally, on the way down to see my parents, I showed the kids the place where Minnie Decker's house once stood. There's a pavilion there now, on the grounds of the church next door. One of my dad's brothers is the pastor of that church, which I'm pretty sure great-grandma Decker attended most of her life. If I have my family history right, it was once a Methodist church, but a traveling revival preacher converted its congregation (including my grandmother and great-grandmother) to Pentecostalism in the early 20th century.

So anyway, the cane is probably 50 years old or more, and its owner, were he still alive, would be coming up on 127. I expect I'll keep set it aside and only use it as a walking aid on special occasions.

A Funded Journalism Idea

2012-01-28T10:14:00.000-06:00

I'm considering doing some investigative reporting.

I can't discuss the topic publicly (that has to do with the "investigative" part). That pretty much means that I can't seek funding for the project via something like spot.us or kickstarter.com. The topic isn't strictly political, but I suspect many of my political friends would find it interesting. It's certainly controversial.

If I do pursue this, I may self-fund. Or I may seek a sponsor. My guess at bare-bones expenses is about $200. My guess at research (including at least 24 hours of time on the ground completely "inside" the target entity) is about 50 hours.

If I do hook up with a sponsor, the commitment on my part will be:

To use the money in the ways I explain in advance (naturally I'll identify the subject of the reporting and how I plan to approach that subject);
To produce a report of my experiences and conclusions for the sponsor's eyes;
To accept the sponsor's decision on whether to turn that report into a feature article, or to continue the research with additional funding and an eye toward a longer work.

I know I'm not giving potential sponsors a lot to go on here, but if what I have said is interesting enough that you want to know more, drop me a line via the contact form.

Another Mormon Practice, Briefly Explained

2012-01-28T07:21:00.003-06:00

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Gawker puts the worst possible face on it: "Yes, the Romneys Converted Mitt's Dead Atheist Father-in-Law to Mormonism." But as religious practices go, it's actually pretty cool. Here's the skinny:

Like many (not all, but many) churches, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints claims to be the One Truth Faith. That is, through apostolic succession (in LDS's case, through a "restoration" of same after the Catholics and Protestants broke it), the church claims to act as God's authority on Earth.

That entails certain responsibilities. In order to get into heaven, certain things have to have happened. For example, you need to have been baptized. And not just dunked in any random body of water by any random person, but baptized by someone duly and properly exercising the aforementioned authority.

Where most churches making such claims fall down is on the issue of "what happens to the guy who never heard the truth?" Or, in LDS's case, even someone who heard it but didn't "get" it in time.

In some sects, well, that guy just gets a one-way ticket to Ye Aulde Lake of Fire.

In Mormonism, there's a sort of post-mortality "holding pen" for such people, where they have a chance to accept the true gospel and get into heaven. But they do still have to be baptized and so forth.

The LDS church spends quite a bit of time and money on conducting baptisms by proxy -- "baptism for the dead." One reason Mormons are so well known in the area of genealogy is that they're constantly working to identify people for these proxy baptisms, so that as many people as possible can get into heaven.

What could be more humane or pious than that? Mormons believe you have to be a Mormon to get into heaven. They also know that even their extensive missionary efforts aren't going to reach everyone. But you get a second chance after death, and they make an effort to help you out even beyond the grave.

And yes, there's a biblical hook to hand the practice on: 1st Corinthians 15:29. Baptism for the dead does appear to have been a Christian practice for 300 years or so before the emerging Catholic order suppressed it.

The Gawker headline isn't, strictly speaking, correct. If Edward Davies converted to Mormonism posthumously, he did it himself. All his daughter and son-in-law's family did was make sure that if he did so, he was equipped with the requisite certifications and such to make that conversion all proper and legal in God's eyes.

There are a lot of reasons not to support Mitt Romney for President. Depending on your religious beliefs, his Mormonism may even be one of them. But this baptism stuff is surely a minor thing within that other thing, and not nearly as creepy as Gawker makes it sound.

Winner, Winner, Chicken Din ... er, Gift Certificate!

2012-01-28T00:04:00.001-06:00

Thanks to everyone who retweeted the #followfriday message! It's the stroke of midnight right now, and I'm at random.org to pick a winner.

Drumroll, please ... and the winner of the Powell Books gift certificate is intoxicologist! I'll DM to confirm her email address and get that gift certificate out ASAP. In the meantime, check out her great cocktail blog.

UPDATE! A twist ... intoxicologists says thanks for the prize, but give it to someone else! Back to random.org, and lessee ... our new winner is Jake Porter! Jake's an Iowa Libertarian who's done more in his 20-some years than most of us will do in our lives, from publishing newspapers to running political campaigns. Hopefully he has some time to read as well. I'll get that gift certificate on the way ASAP.

Yes, a Recipe

2012-01-27T17:14:00.001-06:00

I just got roped in by one of those "chain letter" things -- send the person at the top of the list a recipe, any recipe, then hit up a bunch of your friends to do the same thing. Since I just inflicted the request on 20 people, I figure I should share the recipe with more than just one.

As most KN@PPSTER readers probably know, I'm a fan of great barbecue. By definition, great barbecue is of the variety produced between Memphis, Tennessee (e.g. Corky's) to the east, Hot Springs, Arkansas (e.g. McLard's) to the west, and Springfield, Missouri (e.g. Crosstown) to the north.

Anyway, for when I can't go out for barbecue, and when the weather's not conducive to eight hours or so of tending my brick in-ground pit outdoors, I've discovered a crockpot/slow cooker recipe that produces quite good smoky pulled pork for sammiches. I've messed with it through trial and error for some time, modifying ideas I found on the Internet, and here's the final recipe:

INGREDIENTS

A rolled/tied pork loin roast
1 cup apple juice
1/2 cup water
1 cup brown sugar
1 cap full of hickory-flavored "liquid smoke"
Your favorite barbecue sauce

Place the roast in your crockpot or slow cooker. Pour the apple juice and water over it, so that the surface of the pork is wet. Dump the brown sugar on top of the roast and spread/pack it over the surface of the roast with a spatula or your (clean!) hands. Pour the liquid smoke into the liquid in the bottom of the pot (NOT directly on the roast).

Cook the roast on "high" for one hour to "shock" it. Then turn the cooker to "low" and cook for 5-7 hours (depending on the size of the roast; if bigger, cook longer). The roast is done when it tries to come apart when lifted with a fork.

Remove the roast from the pot, put it on a plate or in a large bowl, cut the strings, and hand-pull the pork to small pieces. You'll also want to get any remaining small pieces that fell off during cooking out of the pot with a slotted spoon.

Season with your favorite sauce and serve on sandwiches. Then write to tell me how great it was.

Twitter: What's It Good For?

2012-01-27T02:46:00.000-06:00

Since I'm on the subject of Twitter anyway, might as well riff on it a little. And I see that Carl Bussjaeger poses the question (in non-question form):

@CarlBussjaeger
Carl BussjaegerOK, I've tried Twitter. Still don't see point. Boring, limited. Sticking to my blog & website:
http://t.co/O3abV6hP
http://t.co/iQNiDf8P 12 days ago via web · powered by @socialditto

The short answer to the title question is "it depends."

First, a bit of heresy: Twitter is good for attracting an audience to content. That's not what it was supposed to be about, and quite a few people complain about it, but hey ... it does work. A link to every post here at KN@PPSTER gets tweeted to my nearly 2,000 "followers," and any given post will get a few visits from that tweet, and perhaps from "retweets." Over at RRND, same thing -- if my analytics are correct, our Twitter feed brings about 100 visitors a day to the site.

As an information consumer, I find Twitter extremely useful, too. I see content every day that I'd never have known about if someone hadn't tweeted a link.

Using Twitter that way does have its down sides, of course. It limits the utility of Twitter for other things.

Things like conducting a continuous, short-burst, informal conversation with a group of friends. Since I follow those who follow me, I'm following close to 2k people as well, which means that unless (or even if) I do nothing all day but watch Twitter, I'm probably only going to catch the high points.

And things like using Twitter in an office setting. A few years back, Tamara worked in a (very computerized) office where it was important to know where everyone was at all times (and where any given person might be as far afield as, say, Nepal). I suggested (the suggestion was not adopted) that the office personnel set up Twitter accounts linked to their work emails, keep their statuses updated on said accounts, and follow each other. That way, when X needed to know where Y was, it would be as easy as looking at Y's latest tweet ("gone to lunch, be back about 1;" "back from lunch, at my desk;" "gone home for the day;" etc.). And as a bonus, since most people in the office carried cell phones, they could update even while out of the office ("stranded in Nepal; someone get a sherpa out here, stat").

As the political establishment worldwide is learning (and responding to), Twitter's also a good way to coordinate protests and other actions, or even just to get a large conversation going on a topic of shared interest. Just set up a hashtag, and everyone who wants to be involved keeps an eye on it (of course, those who want to surveil you can too, which is why some new and different tools are coming into use).

You can set up multiple Twitter accounts to do different things, and there are apps that handle those multiple accounts for you. And there are other tools that can do some of the same things, perhaps better for your purposes.

But, overall, Twitter can be useful for any purpose that requires (or just benefits from) the ability to quickly and easily communicate with multiple people in short text message format across multiple device types (desktop computer, cell phone, Blackberry, what have you).

Prize Drawing!

2012-01-26T23:30:00.001-06:00

It's been awhile since I've given away a prize. Heck, I don't know if I've ever done a prize drawing here at KN@PPSTER specifically. But I've got a bee in my bonnet to increase my number of Twitter friends (okay, technically "followers," but I prefer "friends"). I'm just shy of 2,000 "followers," and want to get past that bump. I also want to increase Rational Review News Digest's "followers" (pushing toward 4,000 there).

So, anyway, I'm giving away a $10 gift certificate at Powell's Books. Here's how to win:

Between Midnight US Central Time Friday morning and Midnight US Central Time Friday evening (that is, any time Friday, January 27th, 2012);
Tweet "#followfriday @thomaslknapp @rationalreview" or "#ff @thomaslknapp @rationalreview" -- either one will do, and you can throw in additional people to follow if you like.

That's all you have to do. Since my Twitter handles are included in the message, I'll see it (probably in my Hootsuite dashboard, 'cause I'm cool like that). To award the prize, I will:

Count the number of people who tweeted the message;
Go to random.org and generate a random number between 1 and that number of people;
Count down from the top (last, chronologically) of the list of people who tweeted it to that random number; and
Announce the winner, and send a direct message to the winner to get his or her email address so I can send the gift certificate.

I'll try to do that early Saturday morning, but in case my Internet is down or whatever, let's say it might be as late as Monday just to cover all bases.

I'll also try to remember to #followfriday everyone who participates this Friday, next Friday, myself. So even if you don't win the gift certificate, you may still get something out of it. So, half an hour until go-time ...

Is Rick Santorum Serious About Advancing the Social Conservative Agenda?

2012-01-26T15:11:00.000-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

On the evidence, I have to conclude "no."

That evidence is that, as of a few hours before the final pre-Florida-primary debate, he has failed to do what Rick Perry did last week in South Carolina -- end his campaign and endorse Newt Gingrich.

The math isn't that complicated:

Santorum isn't going to be the GOP nominee, and if his IQ is larger than his shoe size he knows he's not going to be the nominee.
After Gingrich wins Florida, he'll run the table. He won't need Santorum's endorsement or support, and he won't owe Santorum's social conservative supporters anything at all.
However, as of today, it is just barely, possibly plausible -- if we stretch things quite a bit -- that Santorum's support could make, or his non-support break, Gingrich's Florida prospects, and that Newt as POTUS would look benevolently upon, and seek to repay the support of, Santorum's social conservative supporters if Santorum delivered said supporters into Gingrich's column. Offer good today only, of course.

So, is Santorum in this thing to advance his supposed agenda, or is his campaign just a personal ego altar on which he'll happily sacrifice that agenda in return for a few more days of adoring rope lines and increased face time on the idiot tube?

I guess we'll find out one way or another within about four hours.

A Couple of Missing, But Pertinent, Factoids

2012-01-26T12:06:00.000-06:00

Sez R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. in The American Spectator: Newt Gingrich is "Our [the GOP's] Bill Clinton." Followed by a recitation of Gingrich's character flaws.

Two things that Tyrrell leaves out:

Bill Clinton was elected POTUS.
Bill Clinton was elected POTUS. Twice.

Just sayin' ...

"Dead heat in Florida ahead of debate"

2012-01-26T00:56:00.000-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

That's not the headline you want to see if you're Mitt Romney and guy you're within the margin of error of and about to debate is Newt Gingrich.

A lot of people, especially pundits, have been giving themselves whiplash from watching the polls jump around this campaign season.

Rest that neck. Put on a cervical collar and stick with me here. I predicted Newt would be the nominee right after Iowa. I predicted his performance, and Romney's, in South Carolina to within 2 points each. And I'm sticking by my Florida prediction:

Gingrich: 42%
Romney: 33%
Santorum: 13%
Paul 12%

And frankly I think I may be over-predicting Santorum at Gingrich's expense, and under-estimating Paul a bit.

Here's why Gingrich is going to pull off a clear win in Florida:

The debate: When Romney comes under attack, he falls to pieces. He stutters, he stammers, he looks evasive, he comes off as distinctly un-"presidential." When Gingrich comes under attack, he goes on the offensive and doesn't ease up until the floor is soaked in his opponents' blood. Romney will take a 5-10% hit from tomorrow's debate. Gingrich will get a 5-10% bump.
Another Adelson soft money check is fueling a $6 million Newt SuperPAC media offensive between now and the primary. That's not as much money as Mitt's spending, but it's enough.
Romney is not as belligerently pro-Israel as Gingrich (Florida has the largest Jewish community of any southern state, and it is politically organized).
Romney is not as belligerently anti-Castro as Gingrich (Florida has the largest Cuban exile community of any state, and it is politically organized).
Florida has a large population of immigrants and first-generation Americans. Gingrich has aggressively positioned himself as the least insanely anti-freedom Republican candidate on immigration policy.
The top two religious demographics in Florida are Roman Catholics (Gingrich and Santorum are Catholic) and evangelical Christians (many, if not most, of whom distrust Romney's religion, Mormonism).

The worse news for Romney is that even if I'm wrong, he's still probably screwed. He doesn't just need to win Florida, he needs to break out a major ass-whipping.

He entered the GOP nomination race as the prohibitive front-runner. He's now won only one of three primaries/caucuses, and that one the smallest, and he only pulled 40% of the vote there when he should have easily cruised past 50%. He's limping. He's bleeding. Barely squeaking by is not going to be enough to get him back in this race for real.

Gingrich, on the other hand, came from double digits back to win in South Carolina, and has now pulled up by double digits to contest a state that was supposed to be a Romney cakewalk. He's got the momentum of a runaway truck. As everyone who's contested an election with him since 1976 can attest, he is not someone you want to see bearing down on you in this kind of fight.

So, I still say Gingrich by nine points, give or take two. But, as always, I could be wrong.

Quote of the Day

2012-01-25T22:06:00.000-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

In a comment on an RRND blurb that links to a Downsize DC article about Ron Paul being booed by a (presumably largely evangelical Christian) South Carolina debate audience after invoking the Golden Rule, my friend Rocky Frisco quotes his friend Beth:

What do you expect from people whose whole way of life depends on letting somebody else pay for their mistakes?

The whole comment is worth a thorough read, but that part in particular really makes me think of the popular American edit of Christianity in a way I never have before.

File Under Ironic ...

2012-01-25T14:14:00.004-06:00

From the UK's Daily Mail:

A woman who defied a driving ban on female motorists in Saudi Arabia has died in a car crash. ... They were in a four-wheel drive on Saturday evening in the northern Hael province when the accident happened. ... Manal al-Sherif was arrested and detained for 10 days in May after posting a video of herself on YouTube as she drover around Khobar, a city to the east of the country.

No comments about women drivers, please. I've driven in Saudi Arabia (rough estimate, 2,000 or so road and off-road miles, plus many as a passenger, including in the Khobar area, but not the province where the lady died), and doing so ranks high on my list of terrifying lifetime experiences.

The Abu Hadriyah Highway, which connects Jubail to Khafji, induces a pucker factor greatly exceeding any roller coaster I've been on.

Like this:

I'm driving north in a Jeep Grand Cherokee (for some reason a number of non-military-issue vehicles had worked their way into my unit's table of equipment).

The posted speed limit is 120 kilometers (about 70 miles) per hour. I'm pushing 100 miles per hour and barely keeping up with traffic.

Up ahead, I see two large military trucks abreast (The road at this particular point is four lanes wide), pulling flatbed trailers with tanks on them. They can't move as fast as everyone else.

The traffic ahead of me splits. Two cars pass the military trucks in the oncoming lanes, which are not empty. Lots of honking and skidding-tire noise ensues.

Another car and a pickup pass as well -- one off-road to the right, one to the left, and a guy in the back of the pickup is waving an AK-47 in the air and screaming ("Allahu Akbar!" would be my guess, but it's impossible to hear over the engine noises and horns). There's no shoulder, per se, just packed sand and the crumpled remains of vehicles which have unsuccessfully attempted this same maneuver in the past.

Imagine something like this happening every two or three minutes for 100 miles or more. Imagine it continuing after dark with half the drivers not bothering to turn on their headlights. Oh, and imagine that every 20 miles or so a herd of camels wanders across the road, heedless of all the other stuff going on.

Finally, imagine that once you get off this endless ribbon of carnage, you can't even find a stiff drink unless you thought ahead and buried a two-liter jug full of Kool-Aid, extra sugar and yeast in the desert for a few days. Trying to thread a big-ass stolen German army truck between anti-tank mines and burning oil wells up north in post-war Kuwait was relaxing by comparison.

That's my version. But don't take my word for it. Here's PJ O'Rourke's, from Give War A Chance:

The road was two-laned here and the driving was, as it is everywhere in Saudi Arabia, horrific -- conducted at absolute top speed with no thought for consequences. Though there were plenty of consequences to be seen. Amazing car wrecks lay beside the road, sometimes a dozen of them in a mile, things you would never know had been cars if a couple of car wheels weren't sticking up out of them. Whole Chevrolets were crumpled like gum wrappers. And these wrecks had taken place without collision on a perfectly straight and level road that is absolutely free of obstructions.

There's just no comparison in the US, unless maybe it's the Kansas City area.

Fun Facts of the Day

2012-01-24T17:31:00.000-06:00

My latest C4SS piece got picked up by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel almost as soon as I sent it out for publication today. Cool.

That got me t'wonderin' just how many newspapers my stuff's been in over the last year-and-a-half since I started flogging C4SS material for op-ed publication, and where those newspapers are located.

The answer: 23 newspapers, in 12 US states (Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Washington), and in ten countries (Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Estonia, Germany, India, the Republic of Korea, Latvia, Lithuania and the US) on four continents (Asia, Australia, Europe and North America). Further gory details at the C4SS press room.

Pretty cool. And that's just my C4SS stuff, and just the "mainstream media pickups." I guess I get around OK, for a guy my age.

NO GOP Debate LiveBlog Tonight

2012-01-23T20:06:00.000-06:00

Maybe you can watch the thing here, if you're interested.

MSNBC's proprietary video embed doesn't seem to like me very much -- freezes up in the middle of the opening commercial every time. So I can't watch it sitting at my computer, and I don't feel like running back and forth between computer and TV to post updates.

You're on your own this time, at least moment-to-moment. If I bother to watch it on the television set (probably not), I may throw some comments up here about it afterward.

ClickBleg: Help me get on Wavii ASAP

2012-01-23T16:22:00.001-06:00

It's like this: Wavii is a news aggregation hangamajigger, and we all know I'm way into that kind of thing (my day job is niche aggregation "by hand").

They're still in one of those "limited access" timeframes.

How does one move up the latter toward actually getting to use it?

Why, by referring other people, of course.

I need 10 referrals to get in ... 20 referrals and I get a t-shirt. Which means you no longer have to look at my naked torso. Surely that's worth a click to you, right?

Best as I can tell, it's not anything to download or buy -- it looks at your Facebook "likes" and then throws stuff at you that it thinks you'll find interesting.

Thanks in advance.

[Update: One referral so far, which got me a "sneak peek." Thanks! It looks pretty cool. I'm always looking for tools that call the good stuff to my attention. The less time I spend finding it, the more time I get to spend reading it, summarizing it, linking it and otherwise adding value to it for my own readers. Nine more referrals and I'm in! - TLK]

Twilight of the Gops?

2012-01-23T11:45:00.000-06:00

Quoth Doug Mataconis:

[W]hen I look at the results of the South Carolina primary, all I can ask myself is, "Has the Republican Party jumped the shark?"

That's actually a tougher question than it looks like. The GOP has gone from "on top" to "in the wilderness" more than once, including 40 years without a majority in either house of Congress. So positing that it's finally reached the "all downhill from here" point is, well, risky from a predictive standpoint.

But I'm going to take a flyer here and answer Mataconis's question "yes."

The GOP, the original party of big government, spent 30 years -- from Barry Goldwater's failed 1964 presidential campaign to Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Republican Revolution/Contract With America" -- vrooming its sparkly new "party of smaller government" pick'em up truck to the top of the political mesa, spent another six years doing donuts up there without much follow-through ... then drove right off the cliff face under George W. Bush, hitting bottom with a loud smack in 2006.

As PJ O'Rourke wrote in 1991's Parliament of Whores:

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it.

The "GOP as party of smaller government" engine doesn't run any more. They got it to turn over and pump a couple of backfires through the tailpipe in 2010, but flooded the carburetor with the 2011 debt ceiling and budget debacles, when they made it clear yet again that when they say "smaller government" they mean government that gets bigger a little less quickly than the Democrats want.

The Republicans refuse to be the party of "smaller government" for real, and they're just never going to be as convincing as the Democrats at being the party of "bigger government."

The only cards left in their hand are "bellicose government," "competent government" and "moral government," and those cards won't hold their traditional constituencies together.

Ron Paul stands at the head of a fairly large GOP bloc that's done with the Buckleyite "bellicose government" stuff. They're trying to take over the party, but they're failing, and sooner or later they'll go their own way.

The "competent government" bloc's frontman, Mitt Romney, is coming up for rejection a second time in a row, and sooner or later that bloc will likewise blow away on the political winds, to the Democrats or to a new party.

And the religious right has always understood that "moral government," on their terms, means "bigger government" to protect them from TEH GAYZ!!! and TEH FURRINERS!!! and so on (FOR TEH CHILLLLLLLDRENZ!!!, of course). After having their factotums rejected twice in a row (Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum this year) they're also on the lookout for a new bandwagon.

The only things holding the Republican Party together at this point are 1) hatred of the Democrats and 2) Newt Gingrich's ambition. Those two things aren't sufficient for the long term. They aren't nuts and bolts, they're chewing gum and baling wire.

The real $64,000 question, of course, is not what happens to the GOP. It's what, if anything, replaces the GOP. My guess is: Nothing. We're on our way from de facto one-party state to de jure one-party state.

Concerning Mitt Romney's "Mormon Problem"

2012-01-23T00:04:00.000-06:00

Yes, he has one.

America's come a long way since JFK's uphill slog to prove that a Catholic could get elected president, but not so far that Mitt Romney's affiliation with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints isn't a problem for him, with respect to both the Republican Party's presidential nomination and the general election.

Evangelical Christians -- who constitute a big bloc within the GOP's primary electorate -- don't like Mormonism. They don't consider it a real version of Christianity, and some of them consider it a cult. They're not on board with Romney.

And, as this article from the Palm Beach Post explains, African-American voters aren't likely to be very positive about Romney when they learn about his church's historical treatment of blacks.

Now, it's true that a Republican presidential candidate has a hard time getting black votes anyway, and that it's even harder when he's running against a black sitting president. But the Mormon angle certainly doesn't help with those voters, and it's not likely to sit that well with non-Mormon white voters who have moved past identity politics, either.

I might as well trot out my fairly basic knowledge of Mormon doctrine (I joined the LDS church at 18, and left it a few years later) on this issue, as it bears explanation.

Per Mormon doctrine, we are all literally children of God, with the potential to "grow up" to be gods ourselves. Jesus is our eldest brother. That war between in heaven, in which Satan and the rebellious angels were expelled? They were our errant brothers and sisters, too. We were all angels in the "pre-existence," and took part in that war before coming to Earth to "gain a body" and learn some important lessons on our paths to godhood.

In that war, some angels fought bravely on the side of God. When they came to Earth, they got light skin.

And there were the bad guys, Satan's legions, who were "cast into the Outer Darkness."

A third group was the angels who were on the right side but cowered, hid, or cut and ran ... and, well, they got dark skin. Oh, and they were banned by God from the priesthood (which includes all adult males, btw) of the one true church.

Until 1978, that is, when the church got sued and its president (whose titles include "prophet, seer and revelator") got a memo from God -- I'm sure the timing was coincidental, just as it was with the church's abandonment of polygamy, in 1890, under federal government pressure -- that he'd changed his mind about the whole "black people as priests" thing.

So you can see why African-Americans, and those who think that African-Americans probably weren't angelic cowards in the pre-existence, might not be thrilled with the idea of a Mormon president. Especially one who was serious enough about his religion to serve as a missionary for two years and then as a local bishop and a stake president (stakes are area-based groups of Mormon congregations).

In actuality, American voters generally don't seem to like the idea of a president who takes his religion extra-seriously regardless of what that religion is. That's why we haven't seen a President Pat Robertson, President Gary Bauer, etc. yet.

Sure, a presidential candidate is expected to attend church. "I sleep in on Sundays" doesn't work when that question gets asked. It's less about religion per se than it is about energetic "community involvement." It's probably a plus if he's a deacon, or heads up a local ministry to the poor, or whatever.

But if he's been in the pulpit on a regular basis as a preacher, chances are he's said some things that will come back to haunt him. And if his religion is even a bit out of the mainstream (voters seem to prefer Baptists and Methodists), he starts looking a little too weird to trust with Ye Aulde Nuclear Footeball.

Romney's Mormonism is not the only killer of his presidential ambitions. But it isn't helping him, that's for sure.

Post-South Carolina Primary Thoughts

2012-01-22T02:47:00.000-06:00

Fortified by a few Old Crow and RC nightcaps, my take on what's happened and what's next in the GOP nomination race:

Mitt Romney's chief strength going into this race was his putative front-runner status and the attendant "inevitability" of that status. So, three contests in ... he's won one of the three. The smallest of the three. The one in a state where he maintains a home. The one in the state next to the state he used to govern. The one where he should have easily exceeded 50%, but instead barely managed to notch up 40%.

Rick Santorum earned his Iowa victory with hard, dedicated, on-the-ground campaigning. But in addition to earning it, he had the advantage of being a pro-life Catholic running in a state with a large (23%) Catholic population and a large evangelical pro-life population. If that evangelical support had stuck with him, he might have a shot at the nomination ... but it didn't stick with him in South Carolina. Apparently Tarheel voters are more interested in actually winning the White House than they are in making a strong statement.

Ron Paul's supporters are more enthusiastic and dedicated than any, bar none. That makes a huge difference in states with small populations. But the populations of the primary states are growing as we go, and the bulk of the GOP base just isn't ready to give up on the Bushevik foreign policy line. He's not going to be the nominee.

Perry's out. Huntsman's out. Bachmann's out. Cain's out.

That leaves Gingrich.

Two weeks ago, I had people telling me I was crazy for saying he'd win South Carolina. Even as little as a day ago, I had people saying I was way high on my 9-point win prediction for him. As it turns out, I was low -- he won by 12%.

Ten days until Florida. That means eight or nine days of people telling me I'm crazy when I say Gingrich will win there, and one or two days of people telling me I'm over-predicting the margin of his win. Here's my initial prediction:

Gingrich: 42%
Romney: 33%
Santorum: 13%
Paul 12%

And frankly I think I may be over-predicting Santorum at Gingrich's expense, and under-estimating Paul a bit.

Paul, of course, will hold out to the end and use what support he garners to advance his agenda rather than his personal ambition. Good on him for that.

My guess is that Santorum exits the race after Florida. As much as I disagree with him on pretty much everything, he strikes me as a reasonably honest and honorable man who wants his party to succeed. He took his best shot. He did well in Iowa. He tried to parlay that into further successes. Once he's sure that didn't work, he'll cut bait and get behind the party's choice.

Romney will probably hold on until Super Tuesday. After Gingrich humiliates him, winning at least eight of the ten primaries that day, the GOP will move forward into the general election cycle with a clear nominee apparent.

That's how I'm seeing it, anyway. But you know, I'm a little tipsy at the moment.

Too Bad He Didn't Shoot a Few of Them

2012-01-21T23:52:00.001-06:00

From the Boston Herald, on the abduction of Kim Dotcom:

Police had to cut their way through electronic locks to a safe room, where they discovered Dotcom -- also known as Kim Schmitz -- with a firearm.

“Despite our staff clearly identifying themselves, Mr. Dotcom retreated into the house and activated a number of electronic-locking mechanisms,” Detective Inspector Grant Wormald from the Organized and Financial Crime Agency New Zealand told Reuters.

So he knew -- they admitted! -- that they were organized and financial criminals, on his property, probably armed, and there to kidnap him for having the gall and temerity to run a web site without Christopher Dodd's permission ... and they expected him to what? Roll out the red carpet or something?

Yeah, what Brad Said

2012-01-21T10:06:00.000-06:00

At WendyMcElroy.com:

Sites like MegaUpload are great if you want to share a really large file that you have (and that you keep on your own computer). But they're a bad way to store your files ...

As usual, I'll put in a word for Dropbox (or other sync services, but it's the one I like best, and yes that is an affiliate link that gets me more free storage when people sign up using it). It keeps your data on all your computers and a copy "in the cloud."

I set up two new (actually old -- laptop and netbook -- but unused for awhile) computers yesterday, anticipating an out-of-town trip). Getting my work stuff (RRND email templates, browser bookmarks, etc.) onto those machines was as simple as installing Dropbox and logging in. I did it at home, where my other computers were handy, but if I'd done it in Cairo or Vladivostok, same thing.

Data that needs to remain confidential/uncompromised? Stays on my hard drive (not in my Dropbox folder) and gets backed up to thumb drive or optical media. In addition to possible data loss, there's security to think of when contemplating "the cloud."

Hey, Zemanta tells me there's a new player in SyncTown; I'll be checking it out:

Final South Carolina Predictions

2012-01-21T08:41:00.001-06:00

The recent polls have Gingrich up on Romney by anywhere from 2% (in other words, tied within the margin of error) to 9%.

I'm leaning toward the higher number, not because of where it comes from (PPP -- not the most reliable polling service), but because Gingrich and Paul's supporters are energized and Romney's aren't.

Prediction as South Carolinians head to the real polls, +/- 2% on each candidate:

Gingrich: 38%
Romney: 29%
Paul: 18%
Santorum: 15%

Actual Outcome:

Gingrich: 40%
Romney: 28%
Santorum: 17%
Paul: 13%

Hey, I predicted three of the four candidates to within 2% of their actual performance! I'm surprised Paul didn't make third place.

Old Favorite Springfield Restaurant Oh Noes!

2012-01-20T12:15:00.001-06:00

I'm planning a trip to back to my home area -- the I-44 corridor running between Lebanon, Missouri and Springfield, Missouri. I grew up in Lebanon, my parents have retired in Marshfield, and my brother lives in Springfield (I used to as well).

Part of any old home trip is deciding what restaurants to go to (the ones without equivalents in St. Louis, that is -- I've got a good cashew chicken source up here).

The one I've been missing most is Melter's, formerly known as Mighty Melt Sandwich and Spud Shop. they make the most killer sandwich ever. It's hard to describe.

The bread is sort of muffaletta-like, but not exactly (one legend I heard was that the place was founded by an unemployed Schlotzsky's crew after that chain went under). It comes in squares -- a small is two squares, a medium is four, a large is nine, or something like that. I'm a big eater, but I've never finished a large in one sitting, I'll put it that way. Anyway, it's a sort of spongy bread, and quite good.

In the middle, they put your choice of meats (sometimes I go with pastrami, sometimes a "combo" of three meats), lettuce, onions, mustard, cheese, then they melt the whole thing in an oven.

So anyway, I am not finding Melter's on the Internet, and I'm only finding Mighty Melt listed in Sedalia and Warrensburg, far away from where it used to be, and from where I'm going. Sad face! Anyone know if the restaurant or a successor is still in Springfield?

I am not, of course, entirely without options. A place in Lebanon called Mr. Ed's used to make similar sandwiches. It appears to be gone as well, but it looks like there's still a sandwich shop in that location called Ollie's. So maybe it's the same food and just a different name.

And if I can't get my Melter's sammich, well, there's always Crosstown Barbecue. Or McSalty's Pizza. Or George's Steakhouse, which used to be the go-to place after the bars closed. Or hell, I've been telling the kids about Lambert's for years, so maybe we'll have ourselves some throwed rolls.

I'll put Crosstown and McSalty's up against restaurants of their kind almost anywhere. And I doubt I'll be going hungry. But just in case, refresh my memory concerning other great places to eat in the general area..

Which Part of "No SOPA for You" Did You Not Understand?

2012-01-20T01:39:00.001-06:00

Curious snippet from a New York Times article about the bust of MegaUpload, in particular the allegations in the indictment:

It quotes extensively from correspondence among the defendants, who work for Megaupload and its related sites. The correspondence, the indictment says, shows that the operators knew the site contained unauthorized content.

The indictment cites an e-mail from last February, for example, in which three members of the group discussed an article about how to stop the government from seizing domain names.

How is a discussion on how to protect yourself from domain theft, by a gang notorious for same, evidence that "the operators knew the site contained unauthorized content?"

And how is it a crime for the operators of a "locker service" to mind their own damn business, anyway? Banks not pawing through their customers' safe deposit boxes, etc., used to be considered a virtue, not a vice.

Oh, and keep in mind that the feds didn't just seize "unauthorized" content -- they stole all of it. That's like saying "we think there may be stolen diamonds in one of the bank's safe deposit boxes, so we're taking everything in all the boxes, including the one with your birth certificate and your grandma's wedding ring in it. And the cash in the vault, too, if we can get to to that."

Al Capone and John Dillinger couldn't hold a candle to Christopher Dodd. Hell, at least they hired their own gangs instead of billing the taxpayer for crew rental. And they didn't accuse their victims of "abuse of power" for not wanting to buy them new Tommy guns (all the better to rob you with, my dear).

In honor of this action, I'm canceling my tentative plans to take the family out to a movie this weekend (Daniel wants to see Red Tails; I was thinking about the new Sherlock Holmes flick, or the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).

Between a pre- or post-flick meal at the food court, tickets, in-theater snacks, and probably some post-flick impulse shopping the kids would want to do with their Christmas money (probably for "intellectual property" in the form of video games or music), I'm guessing the St. Louis Galleria Mall can thank the Motion Picture Association of America for a loss of $100+ in gross revenues. We'll order out Chinese food and pop an old DVD (bought used, of course) in the player instead.

Anonymous is taking a more ... direct ... tack:

Good for them.

Liveblog, GOP Debate

2012-01-19T19:07:00.030-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

The usual -- comment when I feel like it, quit when I get bored.

Sticking the wrap-up here, for those who don't want the blow-by-blow. I'm pretty sure Gingrich won. I'm absolutely sure Romney lost. But the whole thing was pretty ugly and boring.

[7:05 CST] Candidates introduced. All of them stand and smile except for Santorum, who waves and grins like he's on "Hee Haw." Someone probably fed him amphetamines this afternoon.

[7:06] National anthem, debate rules, opening "if you don't know who I am yet" statements.

[7:09] Gingrich is appalled at being asked if he's a swingin' dude as the opener to a presidential debate.

[7:12] This is why Gingrich will be the nominee. He's got his blood up and is ready to fight any sumbitch what gets in his way.

[7:13] Santorum calms it down with a pretty positive statement about forgiveness, etc. Romney: Let's get on to the real issues. Paul: Too often we're all on the receiving ends of personal attacks, etc.

Image via Wikipedia[7:15] Three programs to put people back to work. Paul: Get the government out of the way, sound currency, reduced regulation, reduce income tax, get rid of debt, no bailouts, get government out of the way. Gingrich: Repeal Dodd-Frank, energy independence (natural gas especially), overhaul the Corps of Engineers so they can improve ports -- takes them eight years to do studies, WWII was only 3 1/2 years.

[7:17] What did Bain do wrong? Gingrich: Underlying model of Bain kind of investment ought to be looked at. Romney: Get rid of crony capitalism to improve economy, Obama is a crony capitalist.

[7:19] Back to Bain. Romney: I know the left will attack it, but capitalism works, free enterprise works, and why the hell are REPUBLICANS attacking me? Businesses I invested in with Bain have survived, some have failed, but overall created 110,000 new jobs. Domino's Pizza (so if you were for Cain, pick me). Nothing wrong with profit, it went to pension funds, charities, profitable enterprises can hire more people.

[7:22] Santorum believes in capitalism that works for everybody. Obama wants everybody to be dependent. Need a party that talks about more than cutting top tax rate, putting people back to work. I've talked about that. Cut manufacturing tax to zero. Get the Reagan Democrats back.

[7:24] What to do about unemployment among veterans? Should feds target that? Paul: To some degree, but should make economy healthy for everybody. After WWII, budget was cut by 60%, taxes by 30%, people went back to work. Veterans deserve better health care from the VA. Santorum: Supports continuing veterans' preferences, grew up at a VA hospital, saw veterans coming back from Vietnam. Obama wants to cut military by increasing its budget by 10%, and that's disgusting. Romney: State level should help veterans. Also thinks a 10% increase is a cut. Gingrich: Attacks Paul on post-WWII claim, cites GI Bill; also tax cuts. Transition process for veterans, and cut tax and regulation on energy to get veterans back to work.

[7:31] Audience question: Do any of you sincerely believe that ObamaCare can be repealed in its entirety? Romney: Would waive ObamaCare for states, but would also go after complete repeal. But would replace it with RomneyCare II, which is market free enterprise because it's called RomneyCare instead of ObamaCare. Gingrich: Elect a House, Senate, President committed to repeal. Santorum: Romney and Gingrich aren't credible on ObamaCare. Romney invented it and it is a disaster, Gingrich supported individual mandate. Santorum just gave Romney a sucking chest wound with RomneyCare states. Santorum claims he invented HSAs.

[7:37] Romney stumbling and stammering trying to defend RomneyCare. This may be the moment that is remembered as destroying him in South Carolina. Golf claps for his attempt to defend himself, and Santorum tears into him again. Romney is starting to whine ... says Medicaid isn't a state program, a federal one, wants that money back so they can do their own kind of socialism. Gingrich: I led the charge against HillaryCare, I ran the congressional conference that implemented HSAs, I have written books on health care reform. I can debate Obama Lincoln-Douglass style and whip his ass. Santorum: Gingrich was for individual mandate, and that's the core of ObamaCare, and Gingrich will lose any debate. Gingrich: I can say I was wrong and figured it out, he was wrong and he didn't. Paul: I'm a doctor. Hard to get ObamaCare repealed, so let's talk about government involvement in healthcare entirely. Santorum supported Medicare Part D. Get rid of overseas spending to float the wind-down of government healthcare. Stand back, everyone, he's on the antiwarpath.

Commercial break ... Zemanta doesn't seem to want to feed me pictures of Romney and Paul.

Image via Wikipedia

[7:50] Q to Santorum: Gingrich says you should quit. Should you? Santorum: Grandiosity has never been a problem for Newt. I beat Gingrich in Iowa and New Hampshire. Screw Newt, he's a friend but he's a gasbag. Gingrich: I started working with Reagan in 1974, developed supply side with Kemp, beat the Russians with the Gipper, created Republican majority in 1994, reformed welfare, cut taxes, balanced the budget. Damn right I am grandiose, and Santorum's my bitch. Santorum: Saw Gingrich in the House, no discipline, did nothing about scandals. Gingrich: I led the way on kicking out the corrupt and building a Republican majority. Romney: Gingrich is a DC careerist, I've lived on the real streets of America. Gingrich: Worked with Reagan, suck it.

[7:59] Romney is well off his game. Audience question: When will you release your tax returns. Gingrich: An hour ago. Paul: Probably won't, I'm not very rich, but heck, I may do it, we'll see. N o conflict, don't talk to lobbyists. Romney: When my taxes are complete for this year, if I'm the nominee, in April. Stammering again. Gingrich: It's his decision, but if there's anything bad in there we should know it before the nomination, not after. Santorum: I do my own taxes, they're on my computer and I'm not home. When I get home, you can have them.

[8:03] Back in 1969, Romney's dad set the precedent by releasing 12 years of tax returns. Will you? Romney: Maybe. Plays the one nation under God card.

[8:05] Apple employs 500k in China. What do you do about that. Santorum: I'll bring manufacturing back to the US with my plan to cut corporate tax to zero for manufacturing, by half for everyone else. Too many regulations. Cut'em. Paul: Not worried about people overseas having jobs. If we send dollars overseas, those dollars come back, and the cheaper good saves us money. We shouldn't be fighting about trade. Slams unions, supports anti-libertarian "right to work" laws. Santorum says he does support anti-libertarian "right to work," just not federal.

[8:11] SOPA. What do you think? Gingrich: You're asking a conservative about the economic interests of Hollywood. Google et. al say it will kill the Internet. It's censorship. I favor freedom. Government censoring Internet on behalf of giant corporations is bullshit. Romney: I agree with Gingrich. But I do favor intellectual property and want to destroy people who don't. Paul: I was the first Republican to oppose SOPA. Glad these guys up here are starting to get it right. Santorum: I don't support SOPA, but think that intellectual property needs to be protected. I hate freedom, and don't want the Internet to be free.

Easting dinner. Softballs anyway.

[8:24] The Know-Nothings are heard from. None of the candidates have responded correctly -- that the Constitution gives the federal government zero power to regulate immigration. But Paul at least notices that employer sanction laws are conscription of people as unpaid police officers. Would bring the troops home and militarize the border.

[8:36] Abortion. Gingrich goes after Romney. Romney stutters. Santorum goes after Romney and Gingrich. Romney stutters. Gingrich recites his pro-life record. Paul cites morality, pleads states' rights.

Commercial break. Disappointing that Gingrich has backed away a bit from being the least anti-libertarian candidate on immigration. That could have helped him in Florida, but I guess he's staking everything on North Carolina.

[8:51] Make your case to South Carolina. Paul: South Carolina is known for its love of liberty. And we need to get rid of the debt. Gingrich: Barack Obama is under your bed, oogabooga! Let's debate! Namechecks Alinsky. Romney: Stammers through parts of the Declaration of Independence and tells us how America was just like that until Barack Obama came along and ruined it. He's the reason we can't have nice things. Santorum: I'm a clear contrast to ... well, pretty much everyone else on earth.

Finis.

Ronald Reagan was Once a Democrat

2012-01-19T17:24:00.000-06:00

And Karen Santorum once dated a doctor who performed abortions.

A long time ago, in her 20s, Republican presidential aspirant Rick Santorum's future wife was live-in girlfriend for several years to the 60-something doctor who had delivered her. OK, so, yeah, that's kind of creepy.

But really, so what? Half of us in the 40+ category barely remember our 20s, and the ones who do would almost certainly cringe at the idea of some asshole conducting a forensic audit of our love lives back then for retrospective purposes.

They broke up. She met her future husband. They both became devout, practicing Catholics who oppose abortion. Judging by the number of children they have, there's no hypocrisy involved in that position, agree with it or not. Whether or not I agree with their particular values, I respect the fact that they apparently have values and try to live by them.

You know I'm the furthest thing possible from a Rick Santorum fanboy, people, but this just isn't a campaign issue. Shame on anybody who tries to make it one.

How Low Will They Go? This Low. (theothermccain.com)

No War, No Sanctions, No Intervention, No Assassinations

2012-01-19T16:30:00.002-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

Clear, simple, to the point. A nice, simple set of values that all kinds of people should be able to get behind.

It's the platform, manifesto, talking points, everything of No War on Iran: National Day of Action, February 4th.

A lot of anti-war activities get bogged down in lengthy laundry lists of talking points and arguments from the "top," before they ever reach the larger numbers of people they're supposed to recruit or inflluence. They end up having something for everyone to disagree with.

This thing leaves everyone free to make their own arguments and not have to answer for someone else's stupid ideas. No war, no sanctions, no intervention, no assassinations. Anything else you want, bring yourself.

"Radical anarchist KN@PPSTER" and "sane policy advocate KN@PPSTER" are both down with the four points, for different but not really incompatible reasons.

From a policy standpoint, screwing with Iran is the silliest damn idea I've heard in a decade characterized by silly ideas.

The US has fought and lost two full-blown wars in Asia (and smaller ones in Asia and elsewhere) over the last ten years, draining its treasury and degrading its military (in both the moral and practical senses).

Launching a third major war, against an opponent three times as populous, with much greater regional support, and much more militarily advanced than either Iraq or Afghanistan ... well, if you were looking for proof that the assorted War Colleges of the US armed forces have "special needs" classes, just check out the number of different crayon colors used in drafting that contingency plan.

Image via WikipediaFrom an anarchist standpoint, war (and preparation for war) is one of the primary instruments which the political class of every country, and their "transnational" partners, use to savage the freedoms and empty the pocketbooks of their subjects for their own benefit. 99% of the time, that's its only purpose. The other 1% of the time is when one particular clique of the political class is in real existential danger from another clique or cliques, and wants their subjects to bail them out.

So, get back to me if the war you're selling is revolutionary class struggle, productive (us) vs. political (them). Otherwise, I'm not buying. And this ain't that.

But that's all just me. I'm sure you have your own reasons. On February 4th, let's set those other reasons aside and stand together for no war, no sanctions, no intervention, no assassinations.

Why I Keep Telling You to Expect Newt

2012-01-19T10:43:00.003-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

We're three days and change from learning the results of the 2012 South Carolina Republican presidential primary.

As I write this, Texas governor Rick Perry is taking his final bow, withdrawing from the campaign and endorsing Newt Gingrich.

Yesterday, Sarah Palin came as close as she's probably going to get to endorsing a candidate until the outcome is absolutely certain: "If I had to vote in South Carolina, in order to keep this thing going, I'd vote for Newt ..."

Why do I keep pointing to Gingrich as the obvious GOP nominee? It's certainly not because I prefer him or support him. Even if I voted, and even if I voted Republican, I wouldn't vote for Newt.

But, here's the thing: This is a street fight, and Gingrich is a street fightin' man. There's no attack he won't use if he thinks it will work, and there's no blow he can't absorb standing up. That's how he's going to beat Romney, and that's how he's going to try to beat Obama.

Mitt Romney is the kind of candidate who does quite well, as long as he's floating forward on a carefully crafted narrative of "inevitability." He sounds plausible to everyone, as long as the problems of governance are presented as simple matters of managerial tweaking. But he falls right to pieces when it comes time to take the gloves off and throw down.

Ron Paul is certainly a fighter. If the GOP -- Establishment and rank-and-file alike -- hadn't let themselves get so entrenched and besieged in their crackpipe post-9/11 foreign policy errors, he'd stand a chance. Unfortunately, mistakes of that size and scope tend to self-reinforce; they're so big, ugly and stupid that people can't bring themselves to admit they were mistakes at all. And most of them just won't support a candidate who's urging them to get their heads out of their asses instead of patting them on the back and telling them they're smart.

That leaves Rick Santorum, whose positions on virtually everything are simply too extremely opposed to virtually every majority voting constituency for him to be elected president, and who failed of re-election to the US Senate in 2006 with less than 42% of the Pennsylvania vote; and Newt, who hasn't lost an election since the mid-1970s.

I'm confident in my prediction that Gingrich will at least de facto tie, and probably beat, Romney on Saturday in South Carolina.

Furthermore, I think that he will win, and probably comfortably, in Florida on the 31st. Yes, he's behind Romney in Florida right now, but South Carolina will give him momentum, and he will spend 10 days hammering Romney in ways that maximize the Latino vote. Remember, now that Perry's out, Gingrich is the GOP's voice of nominal sanity on immigration.

If he can maul Romney in Florida and South Carolina, he will be running the table by Super Tuesday.

Tempus Fugit!

2012-01-18T15:39:00.000-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

Wow! Has it really been more than a year since Wikileaks released the "Cablegate" documents?

I guess so. At least that's what the front matter of the new Rolling Stone interview with Julian Assange says.

Tone conveyance teaser:

At 40, the WikiLeaks founder comes across more like an embattled rebel commander than a hacker or journalist. He's become better at handling the media - more willing to answer questions than he used to be, less likely to storm off during interviews - but the protracted legal battle has left him isolated, broke and vulnerable. Assange recently spoke to someone he calls a Western "intelligence source," and he asked the official about his fate. Will he ever be a free man again, allowed to return to his native Australia, to come and go as he pleases? "He told me I was fucked," Assange says.

Non illegitimi carborundum, Julian. You'll get through this, and so will we. The folks in DC, not so much.

Anyone Having Problems with Chrome?

2012-01-18T12:16:00.001-06:00

OK, I gave the SOPA blackout four hours. Now I need to be back in communication with my friends.

Is anyone else suddenly having problems with the Google Chrome browser?

I'm running Chrome 16.0.912.75 on MacOS 10.5.x.

Or rather I'm not running it, because suddenly it doesn't want to run.

As soon as I try to do anything (enter text in a form, for example, or clear the cache -- it did let me disable my various and sundry extensions, of which I assumed one might be the problem), it becomes unresponsive and stays that way until I force quit it.

This happened suddenly, mid-stream in using the browser. I thought an extension I installed last night (Weatherbug) might be the culprit, but 86ing changed nothing.

No other applications are acting this way, nor do various diagnostics reveal anything wrong with the machine (early model Mac Mini, Core Duo/2Gb RAM).

I do not want to return to Firefox permanently.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Update: I've disabled all extenstions, removed Chrome, reinstalled it from the Google site, deleted temp/cache files, etc. ... it's still not working. To me, that means it's either something defective in Chrome (trying to find out when it auto-updated, possibly with a bug, right now) or something wrong with my machine. No other applications seem to be misbehaving, so that narrows it down to Chrome itself, IMO. So, I am resigned to Firefox, at least temporarily (I may revisit Safari and Camino and Opera ... but damn ... my Chrome setup was getting so comfortably lived in).

SOPA the Undead

2012-01-17T15:02:00.000-06:00

In theory, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and probably its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) are dead on arrival. US president Barack Obama has declined to endorse the parts of SOPA that require US ISPs to block web sites affected by the legislation, and congressional leaders are "shelving" the bills rather than try to pass them without that stuff.

But no, it ain't over. We've seen this movie before.

First of all, keep in mind that Obama sacrificed nothing here -- the parts of SOPA he objected to were the unenforceable parts. Even if every ISP in the US could be forced to cooperate in removing outlawed web sites from its DNS tables, tools like the Firefox "DeSopa" extension were already in the field to make sure American users could reach those sites (using offshore DNS tables). Passing the legislation without those parts would have been worthless. Passing it with them would have been ... toothless. Obama racked up a few cheap political points by being on the right side when it mattered not at all which side he was on.

So, what we'll see over the next year or so is bits and pieces of SOPA/PIPA -- the "enabling" bits and pieces that make this or that "agin the law" -- inserted into other legislation, so as to avoid, as much as possible, public debate and political damage.

Implementation will occur at the executive level, prepared behind the scenes at DoJ and/or DHS and rolled out in the middle of the night as some kind of "one swell foop" coup: A mashup of all the federal government's previous IP-blocking and domain-seizure tricks, with some new twists added.

We can only guess at what those new twists might be, but my guess is they will look something like this:

The federal government publishes a list of verboten web sites per the criteria in the various pieces of enabling legislation.
In tandem with publication of the list, the government announces that the act of routing traffic to, or facilitating the routing of traffic to, any of those sites will be treated as a "cyber attack" on the United States and responded to accordingly.
Domestically, a couple of raids on large ISPs to shut them down until they promise to update their copy of the list daily and remove all sites on the list from their DNS tables (the smaller players will fall into line ASAP); and a couple of high-profile arrests of people ("cyber-terrorists") offering tools or advice for getting around the government blockade.
Internationally, a similarly two-pronged approach: US-government-backed (probably with wink, nudge denials) cyber attacks on verboten sites, extradition requests for the sites' operators, pressure on other governments to implement the US blacklist themselves.
Co-option of the already-existing DMCA apparatus to target users who access the verboten sites -- you'll get a nastygram from your ISP, just like you do if your kid got noticed sharing a torrent of an old episode of Full House, threatening to cut off your service if you don't cease and desist.

Will it work? Well, if by "work" you mean "stop unauthorized online sharing of copyrighted materials," no, it won't "work." There might be a temporary, partial slowdown until new tools can be deployed, but in the long term, no, not even a noticeable dent. And probably not even that if the tool developers are working on new stuff before this even comes to pass.

But it will give the regime a few new tools to torment us with, and to slightly more effectively keep stuff it doesn't want seen away from the average Internet user's eyes. Which was the whole point in the first place.

If you're one of those developers making the tools of freedom, I hope you'll be working overtime over the next year or so to improve them and especially to make them more intuitive and user-friendly.

If you're one of those "a little more techy than the average bear" users, I hope you'll spend the next year encouraging and helping your "average user" friends to install and familiarize themselves with things like the DeSopa extension, Tor and so forth.

The bad guys aren't ever going to beat us, but it would be better if we didn't even let them slow us down.

How to Vote (If You Must)

2012-01-17T11:33:00.004-06:00

Yes, I am on record as having arrived at the conclusion that voting changes not much at all and nothing for the better.

But I'm also aware that some of my readers disagree, and that they will, after some ritualistic hand-wringing, choose to once again reprise their participation in the perennial performances of Democracy®.

OK, fine ... but if you're going to do that, please do it right. Vote for what you want, not just against what you fear.

The Republicans are already playing that tedious old game again -- "a vote for anyone but X is a vote for Y" -- with respect to both their primaries ("a vote for anyone but Gingrich is a vote for Romney") and the general election ("a vote for anyone other than the GOP nominee is a vote for Obama").

Horseapples.

It does not follow from your friend's insistence that Candidate X is better than Candidate Y, that your vote for Candidate Z helps Y at the expense of X. Your vote doesn't belong to any of those candidates, nor does it belong to your friend. It belongs to you, and it is owed to no one.

There's a very good chance that Mitt Romney will receive the Republican presidential nomination this year, even though he has yet to demonstrate the support of more than 40% of his party -- and that much only in his de facto home state.

In South Carolina, somewhere in the neighborhood of 2/3 to 3/4 of the Republican primary electorate wants no part of Romney.

I've suggested jokingly (mainly because this is a meaningless horse race to me), and others seriously (mainly because they've hypnotized themselves with that "Obama's is the most left-wing administration EVAH and the NUMBER ONE PRIORITY is to get rid of him" crap) that Rick Santorum and/or Rick Perry and/or Newt Gingrich should drop out and unify behind one of the three to swamp Romney.

But why should they?

And why should any voter engage in the same calculus?

If you really think that Rick Santorum is Da Bomb ... well, okay, you should probably seek psychiatric treatment ... but you probably think so for specific reasons, and don't believe that Perry or Gingrich measure up to those reasons any better than Romney does.

Compromising in support of the "lesser evil" -- voting for someone you despise just because that candidate's supporters claim you should despise him less than a common opponent -- gains you nothing. It merely sets you up for more demands to continue doing so in perpetuity. The people who make such demands never reciprocate. It's all downhill from the first surrender. Ron Paul's main strength is that his supporters understand that, deep down in their guts where it counts.

Ditto in the general election. If R. Lee Wrights, or whomever Americans Elect saddles up, are more to your liking than the major party horses, why should you sacrifice your values in order to ensure victory for the "possibly slightly less objectionable" Republican or Democrat?

The only way (if there is any way) to get what you actually want in electoral politics is to vote for it, not against the least nauseating alternative to it. Sure, you may not win this time, but if you surrender this time the demands will just be more strident, and the alternatives you're presented with more nauseating, next time.

A Note on the Tag Line

2012-01-16T18:03:00.001-06:00

Just had an anonymous email, apparently from someone at least moderately competent in Latin, inquiring as to the intended meaning of the current KN@PPSTER tag line, "Ceterum autem censeo, status esse delendam." Since I can't reply by email, I'll reply here.

I am not competent in Latin. I did quite a bit of futzing around trying to figure out the best way to drop something meaning "the state," as opposed to "Carthage," into the old saying attributed to Cato the Elder ...

"Carthago delenda est" (English: "Carthage must be destroyed") or the fuller "Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam" or "Ceterum autem censeo, Carthaginem esse delendam" (English: "Furthermore, I think Carthage must be destroyed") are Latin political phrases which were popular in the Roman Republic during the latter years of the Punic Wars against Carthage.

Image via Wikipedia... and came up with "status," although there were other possibilities.

Per the Wikipedia article linked above, Cato would end every speech, no matter the topic, with that admonition to put an end to Carthage. I'm using the tag line to remind my readers (and myself) that no matter what else I may be writing about, one should imagine invisibly tacked onto the end: "Furthermore, I think the state must be destroyed."

But, it's just an uneducated language hack, and I'm the first to admit to the possibility that I'm actually just ordering the Cobb salad or asking directions to the bathroom or something.

"Permission to Come Aboard"

2012-01-16T12:12:00.002-06:00

Image via WikipediaThat's what the Commodore line of personal computers was in the early 1980s. Inexpensive and, for the time, quite advanced. You no longer had to be a toff to participate in the computer revolution.

The Apple II, TRS-80 Model III, etc., were still well out of the lower-middle-class price range.

Cheap clones of the IBM PC weren't really on the market yet.

The Sinclair ZX81/Timex-Sinclair 1000 was "the first computer under $100," but its testy membrane keyboard and use of single-key BASIC syntax entry probably put at least as many people off personal computing as on it.

Brad over at WendyMcElroy.com celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Commodore 64 (several days ago -- just got around to linking).

My first computer was the Commodore VIC-20, and it was a dream machine. I'd spent the summer of 1983 in a quick BASIC programming course on the Model III, but couldn't afford one. Here comes the VIC-20. Only 4.5k of RAM, but you could get a cartridge to expand it to 16k, like the basic Model III. Real keyboard. Embedded Commmodore BASIC, which was a pretty nice version of the language. Passable graphics (although not the sprites available on the C-64).

It's the childhood Christmas present I remember most vividly and gratefully. With Commodore, you didn't have to be one of the rich kids to have a real computer on your desk at home. Neither the VIC-20 nor the Commodore 64 were trivial expenditures on a working class budget, but they were doable. I'm sure my parents sacrificed a few things to hook me up (the cost of the machine, digital tape recorder, some manuals, etc. was more than 1% of the cost of our house and more than I paid for my first car!), but plugging the thing into a $10 garage sale TV opened up a whole new world for me; they knew it and I appreciated it. Even more so today than then.

I spent my junior year in high school writing BASIC programs all the time. If I couldn't be in front of a computer (the school had some Model IIIs, some Model 4Ps, and a Tandy IBM PC knockoff -- Radio Shack was the only electronics store in town), I was coding in a notebook -- or, when stuff got more complicated, flowcharting, even though I had initially snorted at that as a waste of time in the "data processing" class I took that year (our final assignment was to write a BASIC program that "actually does something;" a friend of mine and I worked up a routine to break the 8-character-maximum passwords on Model III floppy disks by brute force; the teacher hated it, but had to give it an "A").

I wrote a pretty decent "Breakout" clone, and rigorously slimmed it down until it fit well within the VIC's base 4.5k (I think it bottomed out at about 1.8k). Every day at school, I'd sit in class working on how to get this or that subroutine to the minimum necessary instructions. Then I'd go home and key the stuff in by hand from my notebook and test it. I think I sold about eight copies of it at $5 a pop on consignment at a new local hobby shop (I was hoping to earn $125 to buy an old Burroughs minicomputer they had sitting there, but no dice).

I sometimes wonder today's student programmers even get talked to about efficient coding to minimize memory requirements and maximize speed. My (older) Mac Mini is more than a thousand times faster than the VIC (1.6GHz Core Duo vs. 1.1MHz 6502), with about ~~444,000~~ 466,000 times as much RAM (2Gb vs. 4.5Kb), and of course that's on the very low end of what's available these days (I remember thinking in 1994, when I grabbed an original Mac at a junk shop and got back into using computers, "who could ever need 128k?"). I also paid a good deal less for it, not even accounting for inflation, than a Commodore 64 would have cost me on release day.

If I Trotted Out an Internet Poll ...

2012-01-15T15:12:00.004-06:00

... showing Ron Paul eight, nine or 14 points up from where "regular" polling says he is over the same period, and 25 points up on where "regular" polling says his nearest opponent is relative to him, I'd get laughed out of the room.

But when Reuters does that, well, it must be news.

I guess Reuters/Ipsos could be right, but my money's on the traditional polls being a truer picture of reality.

Traffic Bump, or Traffic Measurement Bump?

2012-01-15T12:37:00.000-06:00

Over the last couple of days, KN@PPSTER's traffic has jumped by about 70 visits a day (average as of right now, per Sitemeter, 319 visits and 516 page views; as you can see, 70 visits is a non-trivial percentage of the total).

I'm not sure how much, if any, of that is a real increase in traffic, though. I've made a change in how I measure traffic, and given the now-larger proportion of traffic that lists the referrer as "unknown," I suspect that measurement change is largely responsible for the increase.

The change? I added the Sitemeter button to the site's RSS feeds.

I don't consider that dishonest, or a "trick." The traffic is real; I've just never measured it before. Apart from the Feedburner chiclet that says how many people subscribe via that particular burn, I've never had any idea how many people are reading KN@PPSTER via RSS instead of direct.

It finally occurred to me to fix that measurement gap when I created the KN@PPSTER Android app, which uses RSS as its source. I'm just now getting comfortable with RSS myself, or it would probably have occurred to me to do that before.

Reminder: Getcher KN@PPSTER for Android Here

2012-01-15T12:04:00.000-06:00

Finally had a chance to test the app personally -- ran it on a couple of display tablets at a local electronics store yesterday. Looks pretty good, IMO! But definitely hit me with feedback if your mileage varies (or doesn't).

I haven't put the app in Android Market ... yet. For one thing, I figure it's enough of a "niche" app that it probably wouldn't do great things there, so why waste $25? For another, since the package I bought from Publish5 only supports 1,000 users, I definitely want to give KN@PPSTER's existing readership dibs on it before handing it out like candy elsewhere.

So anyway, click here, or on the screen shot, to download the .apk files and install KN@PPSTER for Android to your device.

What Henry Farrell Said!

2012-01-14T12:31:00.000-06:00

About the "new" gmail.

It's user-unfriendly and aesthetically revolting. It looks and acts like someone handed their four-year-old a C++ manual and the source code of Yahoo! Mail circa 1998 and said "go to town."

I was a fairly early adopter and endorser of gmail. I've been using it since mid-2004, and apart from some early trouble keeping my machines/browsers up to snuff to take advantage of the latest version without bogging down, I've never had any serious complaints about it until now.

But this just sucks.

It's All in the Crosstabs

2012-01-13T21:34:00.001-06:00

Image via WikipediaA new South Carolina GOP primary poll has Mitt Romney performing better than in the last one -- but with Newt Gingrich still within the margin of error, albeit a little less close. The top line is Romney 29%, Gingrich 25%.

And remember, the top line only tells us so much. It's Romney 29%, Gingrich 25% among "likely GOP primary voters," but take a look at the crosstabs:

Among self-described Tea Party supporters, Gingrich leads Romney 28-24.
Among self-described evangelical Christians, Gingrich leads Romney 40-13.
Even among self-described Republicans, as opposed to independents, it's 29-29 (and among independents, Ron Paul leads Romney 29-27).

Among the groups very likely to vote next Saturday, Gingrich is either even with, or ahead of, Romney.

Rasmussen has new data, too, but they're only showing the top line to non-subscribers.

2012-01-13T17:26:00.001-06:00

Testing Blogger's "post from phone" whatsit. I wonder what the post title will be?

Duh, Winning! (Hearts and Minds Edition)

2012-01-13T14:16:00.003-06:00

From Three Against Hitler, by Rudi Wobbe and Jerry Borrowman:

Near our home was a shoe store, owned and run by a Jew. Even before 1933 his store windows and swastikas had been painted on the walls and door. But, after the "takeover," the Nazis demolished his store in broad daylight. They broke all the windows, threw the merchandise onto the sidewalk, and dragged the proprietor and his wife and two children into the street. They started beating and cursing them, all the while calling them dirty names and shouting that they weren't fit to live among the exalted German, Aryan people. The greatest indignity of all is that after the family was lying in the gutter in agony, the Nazis urinated on them. I was only seven years of age when this took place, but I remember it vividly.

From Afghanistan:

From Pamela Geller, quoted in the Houston Chronicle [h/t -- Eric Dondero]:

I love these Marines. Perhaps this is the infidel interpretation of the Islamic ritual of washing and preparing the body for burial.

In future dictionaries, a "geller" will be defined as "a near-perfect intersection of abject stupidity and irredeemable evil."

Flattry Will Get You Everywhere

2012-01-13T12:42:00.001-06:00

Now appearing at KN@PPSTER -- at the bottom of each post, and in the sidebar -- is a "Flattr Button."

And what, pray tell, is a "Flattr Button?"

Flattr is a micropayment service. Or, really, a "tip jar" for cheapskates.

On the "paying" side, it allows people to make small contributions to sites they like by taking a larger payment and splitting it up. For example, you might decide to fund your Flattr account to the tune of a dollar a month. At the end of each month, Flattr splits that dollar evenly between all the sites you've "flattred." If you only clicked the button at one site, that site gets a buck. If you did it at two sites, each gets 50 cents. A hundred sites, everyone's a penny richer. That's the basic idea, anyway. You actually have to pay a little more than your funding level. That's one way Flattr makes its money.

On the "receiving" side, Flattr stores the collected money from flattry and lets the recipient withdraw it once it's reached a reasonable minimum (10 euros). They take a 10% cut on that end too, I think.

So anyway, if you've ever thought to yourself "I like KN@PPSTER sooooooo much that I'd like to pay him something ... but the transaction fees on a dime would just make that silly," here's a solution (especially if you've thought the same thing about a bunch of other bloggers).

The Bain of Romney's Existence

2012-01-13T11:11:00.001-06:00

Image via WikipediaIt's hard to predict how the attacks on Mitt Romney's career with Bain & Co./Bain Capital will really play out, especially in South Carolina.

Inside the GOP, the whole thing seems to be bouncing back and forth between "it's vulture capitalism!" and "no, stop being such a commie, it's just capitalism!" with the latter take seemingly ahead.

From the limited research I've done, the attacks are somewhat overblown.

Per Kevin D. Williamson at National Review, Bain hasn't been the recipient of extra-special levels of state privilege, and it was an unforced error on Romney's part to compare the FDIC/PBGC stuff to Government Motors and such. The state privilege it advantaged itself of seems to have been the long-embedded kind available to pretty much any entity with "Inc." its name. While I oppose that kind of privilege, I don't generally condemn any specific company for not eschewing it.

Yes, Bain took over companies, ran them through "management efficiency" routines and did its level best to wring profits out of them, sometimes leading to workforce reductions. But the evidence doesn't suggest that it took the "corporate cannibal" approach -- swoop in, buy cheap, sell off everything that a quick profit can be turned on, shitcan everything else -- as such.

Is Mitt's Bain resume a weakness? Well, it could, and probably should, be. It exposes him as a managerial tweaker type -- maybe even a technocrat -- in a year when pretty much everyone on all points of the political spectrum, from Tea Partier to Occupier, thinks that "the system" needs more than just a tweak.

But who can exploit that weakness? The obvious counter to it is a populist approach, and Romney's Republican rivals (with the exception of Ron Paul) are clearly part of the "power elite" (or at least consiglieri thereunto) themselves. Obama's tried playing the populist card, but it just doesn't work for him. He's a Romney-type tweaker himself, only without real-world proof of his expertise at it.

Which, I think, is why the Bain attacks are hurting Romney but not helping any of his opponents in particular. They don't point the way to a clear alternative (once again, with the exception of Paul, who has problems of his own).

The KN@PPSTER Android App is Here!

2012-01-13T08:01:00.001-06:00

Maybe. I can't get it to run properly on my device ("closed unexpectedly"), but that's not unusual, as my device is an older, modified/semi-proprietary Android 2.0 ("Eclair") ereader that does seem to have problems with some apps.

If necessary, I'll download the SDK, set up the emulator, create a virtual device, etc. ... but IMO I'd then really only know as much as I do now. Probably simpler to put the thing out for download and ask y'all to let me know if it works. Click the screen shot or click here for direct download (this is not through Android Market, it's a direct download of the APK file):

... and let me know how it goes. It's not a complicated app -- just this blog, packaged up for Android.

One request: Please don't download the app unless you plan to actually use it. The development package I bought from Publish5 supports up to 1,000 users for a very reasonable one-time fee of $19. More than that, and I have to upgrade to a $15/month plan to keep growing the user base. Which I don't mind doing if they're real users. If it's 1,001 people who download the app and then forget about it, not so much.

Brief "Tent Living" Update

2012-01-13T00:13:00.000-06:00

When last we spoke of this, I had slept the better part of two months outdoors, and was taking New Year's Eve off, then planning to get back to it and see if I could manage an uninterrupted year.

So far, so good! But I woke up this morning with snow on the tent, and tonight will be the first big test of "cold AND snowy."

I've slept out down to 13 degrees but dry, and I've slept out 30 degrees but with precipitation.

Tonight it's snowy, 18 degrees, with 8mph winds out of the west/southwest (perfect -- the house shields the tent most fully from exactly that direction).

I don't expect any big problems. Hell, last night I didn't even bother to zip up the sleeping bag.

I'm still trying to decide whether or not to allow myself a break from outside/tent sleeping when I travel. Not that I do that a lot, but I do have a weekend trip in mind soon.

It's Way Too Early to Say I Told You So ...

2012-01-12T21:36:00.001-06:00

... but instead of getting a New Hampshire bump, Mitt Romney's taking a South Carolina dump.
Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr
The first post-Granite-State-primary poll [PDF] in South Carolina shows Romney tumbling seven points from his pre-New-Hampshire 30%, to 23.1%. I don't see a margin of error listed, but it looks like Newt Gingrich would be well within said margin at 21.3% (not because he's gaining -- he isn't -- but because Romney's nosediving).

In freefall instead of rising the day after his second putative victory in this race, and the target is on nobody's back but his for the next eight days. The Republican Establishment is trying to gin up a "backlash" on the Bain attacks, but that would at best likely be a holding action. Things aren't looking very good for Mitt.

Absent some kind of game-changer, I (still) expect Gingrich to at least de facto tie Romney in South Carolina, and possibly beat him; to knock him on his ass in Florida after Perry and possibly Santorum drop out; and to romp on Super Tuesday.

Update, 01/13/12: Just got a campaign email from Newt.

Subject line? "Poll: Newt surging in SC -- we can still stop Romney."

First graf: "The InsiderAdvantage poll of South Carolina likely Republican primary voters shows Newt Gingrich surging, coming within a statistical tie of Mitt Romney."

Like I said above, yes, Gingrich is probably within the margin of error ... but it's not due to a Newt "surge." The last pre-New-Hampshire poll, by PPP, had Gingrich at 23%. He's not gaining ground on Romney, Romney's losing voters to Santorum and Perry. Here's the South Carolina poll track at Real Clear Politics.

Not that it matters in the grand scheme of things -- whatever gets him even with or ahead of Romney will do, and of course a purported surge is better advertising than "sittin' here, watching my opponent fall past me." But it's our job to notice what's really what. We are, after all, professionals.

Regarding "rising tensions in the Gulf"

2012-01-12T08:42:00.000-06:00

Pearl of wisdom from a Union private crossing the Rappahannock into Fredericksburg, December 1862:

Shit! They want us to get in. Getting out won't be quite so smart and easy. You'll see.

Apparently Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative hasn't worked its way into US naval doctrine yet.

Albatross Watch, GOP Primary Edition

2012-01-12T01:55:00.003-06:00

After topping out at an embarrassing 40% in New Hampshire Tuesday, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney absorbed another campaign body blow Wednesday as the UN ambassador voted "most likely to be cast as Dr. Strangelove in the remake" tried to hitch himself to the former Massachusetts governor's star. Read all about it at Politico.

Somewhere tonight, Newt Gingrich is smiling, having managed not only to remove that incredibly unfortunate piece of campaign stump improv from around his neck but to hang it on Romney's.

Grrrphone

2012-01-11T13:24:00.002-06:00

The phone saga:

I mentioned awhile back that we had decided to cut loose the land line and port the number to a cell phone.

It all went swimmingly at first. Net 10 took the information, did their jiggery-pokery, and within a few hours BAM! The new cell phone said it was active, showed the right phone number, etc. I could call out using it, and caller ID would show that the call was, indeed, coming from the right number.

But, calls INTO that number went to voice mail at the old land line provider (Charter). I gave it a day to see if that was just a thing to wait on. No. So I called Net10, they did some more jiggery-pokery, and told me it was all good on their end, but that Charter hadn't released its end of the number yet. Could take a few days, just give it time.

So today, a little over a week later, I call Charter. Their answer: The thing didn't go through, Net10 didn't take possession of the number yet, the request expired yesterday, the whole process has to be re-started.

Except that Net10 obviously HAS taken possession of the number, ma'am. Look at your caller ID -- I'm calling you from it. It's you we're waiting on.

No, no, you have to call Net10, nothing we can do.

Sigh. Back to the drawing board.

In other phone news, I'm also in the middle of transferring my previous Net10 cell number to a new phone. I've done that before and it's always been easy. This time, after the usual jiggery-pokery, they told me they have to send me a new SIM. It'll be here tomorrow, via FedEx.

No biggie. If I had thought about it, I just would have activated the new phone with a new number. That phone is the C4SS batphone, and C4SS's number is a Google Voice number that I can forward to any phone. Probably five people on earth have the actual old cell number, and I could have just communicated the change to them. But I'm assuming the SIM problem would still have been a SIM problem, so I guess it's all the same, really.

I've always had good, reliable and courteous service from both Net10 and Charter. I'm inclined to blame the land line transfer snafu on Charter. And yes, I've been a little irritable with them about the whole phone thing.

In terms of communication, Net10's call centers are scattered around the world and sometimes the accents make it a little harder to communicate, but not so much that it's really troublesome (there are worse things than spending half an hour on the phone with a Filipino lady). Charter's call center (at least the one I've talked with and asked the location of) is in Louisville, Kentucky, where the accents would be just as much a factor if I didn't speak Southern.

Update, 01/12: OK, the C4SS bat phone is back up. Net10 FedEx overnighted that new SIM (for a $30 phone!). Plugged it in and that was the end of the problem. Great service.

On the Free Will vs. Predestination Debate

2012-01-11T12:03:00.000-06:00

It drives me bugfuck. But maybe there's not a thing I can do about that, right?

To be perfectly candid (or perhaps just to fulfill my destiny), I'm amazed that it keeps rearing its ugly head after at least hundreds of years of organized debate in the English language, and presumably thousands of years of individual and collective mulling over. But maybe all of that is unavoidable.

In my opinion -- which I may have arrived at independently and volitionally, or may have just had implanted in my brain by God, the programmers of an artificial reality we live in, what have you -- the whole debate is irrelevant:

Either we do have free will, or we live in a reality in which our programmed destinies damn near perfectly mimic free will, i.e. we not only do what we're "supposed" to do, but can't help believing that we decided for ourselves to do it.

If the former, huzzah.

If the latter, it's not like there's anything we can do about it -- or for that matter even want to do about it, unless we're predestined to such a desire.

Carry on (if you want to, or are compelled to).

Something Old, Something New

2012-01-11T00:26:00.000-06:00

In his New Hampshire primary day piece for The American Spectator, Robert Stacy McCain takes note of some interesting numbers:

Polls in Iowa showed that [Ron] Paul got 48 percent among caucus voters under 30, which might suggest that his libertarian-tinged anti-war message represents the future of the Republican Party. But that youth vote was only good enough for 21.4 percent of the total, because fully 60 percent of Iowa GOP caucus-goers were 50 or older. So the oldest candidate in the race, dismissed as a crackpot by most mainstream Republicans, is almost uniquely capable of attracting young voters to a party dominated by the gray-hair-and-bifocals set. However one attempts to explain this situation, it does not bode well for the GOP. And perhaps it doesn't bode well for America, either.

Image via WikipediaEven if (as seems likely) he fails of presidential triumph in person, Paul's campaign presages a massive realignment in American politics just over yon horizon, and the near certain doom of a Republican Party ill-equipped to survive that realignment.

It's that old bogeyman, the "generation gap," in spades. America is separating along the age demographic.

Older voters refuse to let go of their Cold War "national security" fetishes or their Social Security checks so long as they can have both (if they could only have one, it would be the latter, but the GOP establishment lacks the intestinal fortitude to force that choice upon them).

Younger voters are getting less and less willing to continue paying through the nose -- in blood, in treasure, in debt -- to shield either of the oldsters' treasured houses of cards from the whipping winds of economic reality.

The Republican Party isn't willing to give up the larger demographic for the smaller. That, at least, makes sense. If you can't have both voting blocs, you go for the larger one, right?

But neither is the GOP well-equipped to compete with the Democrats for that larger demographic. The Democrats are just as good as the Republicans at playing the jingo card when they have to (if George W. Bush was a tin-horn Napoleon, Barack Obama does at least a passable impression of Genghis Khan), and much, much better at catching geezers by hiding in the bushes and imitating the mating call of a benefit check.

The Republicans will continue to pine ceaselessly for oldster love, but the Democrats will be the ones who, more and more, actually get that affection. And the youngsters will eventually abandon a party that has nothing to offer them for some new vehicle. GOP, finis.

Apart from strictly partisan concerns, it is social conservatives who are also set to lose big in the coming recombobulation. As the GOP disintegrates around them, they'll find themselves forced to choose between moving en masse into the Democratic Party as a minor voting bloc, or seeking lodgings in the third party ghetto. The youngsters aren't supporting Paul because they agree with him on abortion, immigration or marriage. They're supporting him in spite of his positions on those issues, and because he's got their backs on foreign policy, fiscal policy and monetary policy.

GOP Primaries: Colbert outpolls Huntsman in South Carolina

2012-01-10T17:11:00.000-06:00

Nothing for this but a Reynolds-like "heh."

Google +1 WTF

2012-01-10T16:55:00.000-06:00

I've not been using Google +1 very much, or for very long, but I just ran into something I haven't seen before: "Cannot +1 this page."

That's using my Google +1 Chrome extension button, which sits next to my address bar so that I don't have to look around for a button actually on whatever page I'm reading and want to bump that way.

As it happens, there's a +1 button on the page in question, and it worked. But I'm wondering why the extension didn't.

Eess Not a Gang, Eess a Bleg

2012-01-10T15:30:00.000-06:00

I've been working with the Center for a Stateless Society for several years now, first as a News Analyst and for the last year-and-a-half as Media Coordinator (and "Senior News Analyst," which means I write occasional, rather than twice-weekly, op-eds).

Like most of the operations I work with, it's a shoestring kind of deal that does a lot with what money it raises. The Center's financial nut at present is somewhere below $1,500 a month.

What do we accomplish with that money?

For starters, an average of one "mainstream media published" market anarchist op-ed every weekday -- 445 of'em since we started keeping track in June of 2010.

That's right -- for about the pay of one minimum wage worker, C4SS gets market anarchism into newspapers big (the Republic of Korea's Joongang Ilbo has a circulation of 2.2 million -- more than the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post combined), small (Florida's Hernando Today has been showing our stuff to a few tens of thousands of readers on a regular basis), left-wing (Counterpunch and the Canadian), right-wing (Arizona's Sonoran News and the Carroll County, Maryland Standard), you name it. We've been published on every currently above-sea Earth continent except Antarctica (and I recently started submitting the Center's material to McMurdo Station's Antarctic Sun).

We also produce (primarily through the efforts of our Research Associate, the estimable Kevin Carson) academic studies, and have been involved in various ways with the publication of important books (Gary Chartier's The Conscience of an Anarchist; Markets Not Capitalism, a collection edited by Chartier and Charles W. Johnson; and of course Carson's oeuvre).

Oh, and there's our Wikileaks mirror, launched to keep that vital information source available when the US government tried to suppress it. And our Tor node, which facilitates communications from and among revolutionaries and dissidents worldwide even when governments try to interdict or censor those communications.

And so on, and so forth. How much do we accomplish for the movement with that $1,500 a month? A lot, and there's no two ways about that.

Now for a sad story: As much as we do for a notional $1,500 a month or so, we're just not bringing in that amount.

Not being the money dude (our finances run through the Molinari Institute), I don't have the exact figures at hand, but IIRC we're bringing in about $800 per month in recurring donations (i.e. people sign up to send us $X every month). Based on our last fundraiser, I guesstimate we've been doing another $100-$150 a month in "one-time" donations.

Some costs like domain renewals, hosting for the sites and the Tor node, phone service (yes, phone service -- newspaper editors still expect to be able to pick up a phone and hear it answered "professionally" when the piece they're looking at claims to be from an "institution," so we spend $15 a month to make that happen), and so on and so forth, can't be deferred. We pay, or the stuff gets turned off.

What gets deferred is our workers' minimal (see that total above? One minimum wage worker's pay covers everything) pay, which pretty much always runs at least a couple of months behind schedule.

We don't complain. Much. And we keep working, trusting that the whole financial thing will get better over time. And it will ... if you decide that it should.

Another hundred anarchists ponying up $5 a month, or another 50 coughing up $10 a month, would put us on something like a stable financial footing, so that we can not only keep up the work we've been doing, but start looking for even more work that needs doing.

So pretty please, with sugar on top, support the Center for a Stateless Society.

Romney, Huntsman tied at 33% in Early New Hampshire Returns

2012-01-10T00:20:00.000-06:00

OK, so it's a very small sample: Six GOP primary ballots cast in Dixville Notch, breaking out to two each for Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, one each for Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul.

The town is not necessarily a bellwether. In 1992, ten Dixville Notch voters cast their ballots in the Libertarian Party's presidential primary for Andre Marrou, while only nine cast ballots for GOP incumbent George HW Bush.

Paul Slams Santorum for Supporting Freedom to Contract, Associate

2012-01-09T23:54:00.001-06:00

Ron Paul's new South Carolina ad:

Starting at about 32 seconds in:

Santorum promised to stand with workers, then sided with big-money union bosses and opposed the Right to Work Act.

That's the National Right to Work Act of 1995, an evil, anti-liberty bill that would have (in mimicry of similar laws in some states since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act allowed it) forbidden employers to choose to hire exclusively through a union, and required unions to represent non-members as if they were dues-paying members.

There's nothing even remotely libertarian about the dishonestly named "Right to Work" laws, which Paul's son Rand has also promoted since his election to the US Senate. They're exactly as evil as the National Labor Relations Act -- just the flip side of the same "government will decide who must or must not contract with whom, and how" coin.

There's a lot to dislike about Rick Santorum. Shame on Ron Paul for coming out against freedom of association and the right to contract just to pander to the anti-union vote.

Marriage: The State vs. Contract and Religion

2012-01-09T13:19:00.000-06:00

From my latest piece at the Center for a Stateless Society:

The same-sex marriage debate is a perfect showcase for the anarchist argument against political government itself. For marriage is two things, neither of which require a monopoly state to enact, support, preserve or regulate.

Read the rest here.

A Libertarian Strategery Note

2012-01-09T09:19:00.000-06:00

Image via Wikipedia
To the extent that the Libertarian Party has a "conventional wisdom," that wisdom says former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson has the party's 2012 presidential nomination pretty much nailed down just by throwing his name in the hat.

I'm not so sure that's true -- Johnson does have some weak points when it comes to campaigning internally in the LP, such as his support for the "Fair" Tax, and I suspect my friend R. Lee Wrights, who's been running an aggressive internal ground game for the nomination, will force a debate that highlights those weaknesses -- but just supposing it is, high on the "next question?" list is the choice of vice-presidential nominee.

Unlike the "major" parties, the LP doesn't just ratify its presidential nominee's choice of running mate. The presidential nominee is given speaking time to offer his thoughts on the VP nomination, but it's a competitive race of its own.

So, who's the ideal second half of Johnson/? 2012?

Some have suggested that Johnson may already have a pick in mind. Perhaps a wealthy running mate who can pump millions into advertising for the ticket, or a "big name" that Americans will recognize. If so, that could make things even more interesting. But if not, I have a suggestion.

Two more bits of conventional wisdom: First, that Johnson will put at least some emphasis on campaigning in New Mexico, where he served two terms as governor and can probably rack up an abnormally high vote percentage for a Libertarian presidential candidate. Second, that Johnson's position on marijuana legalization will be a big part -- perhaps too big, if the media decides it wants to use it to caricature him -- of his campaign.

With those two things in mind, I'd like to suggest that the ideal Johnson running mate would be a prominent marijuana legalization advocate from a large, non-"swing," state which is likely to have a big vote gap between President Obama and whomever the Republicans nominate, and where some sort of popular marijuana-related initiative is also on the ballot.

A state like, perhaps, California.

In polling so far, Obama beats the pants off any likely GOP presidential nominee in California. That minimizes "wasted vote" considerations: Libertarian-leaning Republicans are free to vote for Johnson, knowing that the GOP candidate doesn't have a chance anyway; Libertarian-leaning Democrats know that their party's candidate has it nailed down, so they're free to register a third party "protest vote" as well.

California is also likely to have a sweeping marijuana legalization bill, the Regulate Marijuana Like Wine initiative, on its November ballot.

A prominent California legalization advocate on the ballot next to Johnson, campaigning up and down the state all summer and fall, could increase turnout for both that initiative and the LP's presidential ticket. The voters who come out for one or the other would tend to support both.

So, do we know anyone like that? Why yes ... yes, we do.

Image via Wikipedia

Steve Kubby came within about 30 votes of the Libertarian Party's vice-presidential nomination last time, even against presidential nominee Bob Barr's endorsement of his opponent, Wayne Allyn Root (a mistake which probably put a five or six digit dent in Barr's November vote total; every time Root opened his mouth, the LP ticket hemorrhaged votes).

Internally to the LP, Kubby enjoys even more goodwill today than he did at that 2008 convention, if for no other reason than that he went balls-out to stop a convention walkout by the party's radical faction and hold the party together at a tough time. He could play a similar role this time. The radicals are suspicious of Johnson's more "centrist libertarian" orientation. One of their own in the second slot would go a long way toward allaying that suspicion.

Externally to the LP, Kubby's well-known in California and positively associated with the issue of marijuana legalization. His presence on the ticket would boost both the issue and the candidate, not only in California but elsewhere ... and since some of the legalization spotlight would be on him, that would free up Johnson to get his licks in on other issues.

Just something to think about.

Disclosures: Wow, where to start?

I'm no longer an LP member, no longer vote (I'm an anarchist) and have not endorsed any candidate for the LP's 2012 presidential or vice-presidential nomination. However, I've worked with R. Lee Wrights for more than a decade, consider him nothing short of a brother, think he's the candidate most properly reflective of what the LP supposedly stands for, and have done a little (very little) back-office consulting for his campaign.

Also, I was Steve Kubby's presidential campaign manager in 2008 and still believe the LP made a huge mistake in not nominating him to either position on its ticket. I've worked with Kubby on both business and political projects since then as well. And yes, I have discussed a vice-presidential candidacy with him, and would not be writing this post if his answer had been "not only no, but f&%k no."

BUT: Kubby himself had no input on this post; he won't even know it's coming until it's up; he has not "approved this message," as it were. Nobody paid me or otherwise enticed me to release this idea into the wild, nor do I expect, if Kubby decides to throw in for VP, to make any money from having suggested it. Any pre-nomination VP campaign work I might do for him would almost certainly be unpaid and volunteer, as has been the case for everyone else I've done little things for so far this election cycle.

It's a Hard Knock Blogging Life ...

2012-01-08T16:59:00.001-06:00

... but you can make it just a little bit easier.

Back in early December, when I decided to buckle down and start blogging regularly again, KN@PPSTER was averaging about 80 visits a day. That's crept up to about 240 visits a day (actually about 270, but about 30 of them are "traffic exchange" hits that I'm using for a specific purpose unrelated to my regular traffic). The low end of my goal is 1,000 visits a day. I'd actually like to get it up to 1,429 visits a day (10,000 visits a week).

And so, in my best Sally Struthers voice, I ask, "will you please help?" It's fast, it's easy, and it shouldn't add more than 30 seconds to the time you spend visiting KN@PPSTER.

Behold, a screen shot:

See the arrow labeled "1?" That little "share" whatsit it's pointing at appears at the bottom of every post here on KN@PPSTER. Hover over it, and you get a list of places to show off the post. Click on it, and you get an even long list a la the box indicated by arrow number "2."

Pick one and let'er rip. Tweet it. Digg it. Share it on Facebook. Bookmark it on Reddit. Give it some Google + juice.

Any or all of the above will help me get the word out. Your reward? Well, the more people seem to be interested in this blog, the more interested I'll remain in keeping it active. So it's really a question of whether or like reading KN@PPSTER enough to help me keep up my own enthusiasm for it. If so, thanks in advance.

Inadvertent Source Deprecation?

2012-01-08T12:49:00.001-06:00

NewsSquares is dramatically changing the way I hand-aggregate content for Rational Review News Digest.

I've tried using RSS readers and such in the past, but always ended up abandoning them because they just weren't very intuitive. I was always worried I'd missed something. So I just stuck with the method I've been using for more than a decade now (at RRND and before that at Freedom News Daily): Keeping folders full of bookmarks and making sure I directly visit every site I cover (about 90 of them), every day.

NewsSquares is a Chrome app (at least the version of it I use is) which interacts, I think, with Google Reader. For the sites it works with (which is most of the sites I cover), it seems to work flawlessly. With one glance, I can tell which sites have new content since my last visit. A click pulls up a list of the new stuff, after which I can have a closer look and, if warranted, break it open at the source in a new tab. I haven't been running a stopwatch, but I suspect it's saving me an hour a day or so.

The rub, though, is that "for the sites it works with" part. There are only a few, but some of them are sites I classify as very important in the "libertarian commentary roundup" scheme of things.

These sites fall into two distinct groups: Sites that just don't have RSS feeds, and sites that have RSS feeds which are incorrectly formatted or something, such that they either generate garbage, or throw a bunch of unrelated stuff at me, in NewsSquares.

Two of them are among the most popular libertarian sites on the Internet. In theory, they have separate RSS feeds for commentary, multimedia, events, etc., but in practice no matter which feed I choose, I get everything (and they have a lot of everything). That makes it harder than just visiting the sites, where the stuff I want is clearly segregated.

I can already feel those sites slipping just a little out of focus. When something gets harder to do relative to other things, people tend to do it less. I guess I'm going to have to go through those folders full of bookmarks, put all the "rogue" sites in one folder, and train myself to visit that folder every day, so that I'm not reducing the value of my publication to my readers by taking it easy.

I have to wonder how big a factor similar effects are elsewhere. Are web sites that don't work and play well with RSS losing a lot of traffic -- not just from direct readers, but from journalists who never notice them in research, etc. and therefore never link them -- because they don't work their way into various "feed reader" schemes?

And speaking of such schemes, a question for KN@PPSTER readers: If this blog was available as a nicely pre-formatted Android or iOS app, would you read it more? I'm asking because Rocket-in-Bottle, the same company that make NewsSquares, has a neat thing in beta -- Publish5 -- that I just used to make a KN@PPSTER Android app. It seems pretty cool, but I'm not interested in popping $25 to put it in the Android market (where I can't imagine making it anything but a "free download") if nobody wants it. Talk at me in comments about that.

[Update: As you were on the app thing. I misunderstood the procedure -- I will be getting the app directly, which means I can just make the apk files downloadable and not have to pay an Android Market fee. I did have to pay $19 for the app itself, but that seems a reasonable price, especially since I can update it even after it's in the field, and Publish5 will serve new versions to people who have the old ones. So -- KN@PPSTER on Android, coming in a week or so!]

The Exact Instant The Santorum "Surge" Ended ...

2012-01-08T01:00:00.001-06:00

Rick Santorum [h/t Donald Douglas @ American Power -- I tuned in late to the debate and missed this part]:

We have to have one law. We can't have someone married in one state and not married in another.

Problem solved:

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. ... No State shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Any questions?

As of mid-2011, 53% of American voters supported ending marriage apartheid, and six states and the District of Columbia have now done so.

That trend will not reverse.

Within the lifetimes of most people my age (45), same-sex marriage will not only have been fully legally implemented by all 50 states and recognized by the federal government for tax purposes and such, but advocacy of turning back the clock on the matter will enjoy (and rightfully so) the same political cachet and public support as proposals to re-institute segregation of public water fountains by race or to accord US Senators the privilege of jus primae noctis in their home states.

Some of the other Republican candidates -- like most Democratic candidates -- can probably get away with pretending to oppose same-sex marriage in order to give the dwindling social conservative bloc a plausible excuse for voting for them. This year, anyway. By 2020, taking that side of the issue will be political cyanide for any presidential candidate, period.

Rick Santorum, on the other hand, obviously does oppose same-sex marriage, which means he has zero chance of winning independents, and therefore zero chance of being elected president. And enough Republican voters will figure that out in time to know that they have to pick someone else if they don't want to have zero chance at the White House too.

KN@PPSTER

"Dark Ages Misogyny" ... Really?

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