30 June 2006 @ 2:36AM >> If you as a private citizen came into the exact same information that the Times eventually published, but instead of publishing it, you passed it along to an al Qaeda operative in a dark alley somewhere, you would be guilty of treason and could be executed. Yet, Bill Keller seems to think that “freedom of the press” amounts to one huge legal exemption—the espionage laws do not apply to him!—and by being chosen by a handful of old-money New Yorkers to edit a newspaper, he is somehow in better position to decide what is in the public interest than the government officials that we the people elected to act on our behalf. More >>

29 June 2006 @ 12:12AM >> Although the feeling is far from universal, a vocal minority of Americans despise Wal-Mart. Chief among them is author Barbara Ehrenreich, the doyenne of defeatists who, in such uplifting titles as Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, makes a career out of finding the black cloud that surrounds every silver lining.

In a debate hosted by Slate, scholar Jason Furman attempts to inject some elementary understanding of economics into Mistress Ehrenreich’s dark world:

I live near a Best Buy, the Wal-Mart of electronics stores. Directly across the street is Stereo Exchange, a boutique outfit with high-end equipment that is consistently rated the best stereo store in New York. Best Buy has a great selection and it’s pretty cheap, but don’t expect the salespeople to know the difference between a plasma TV and an LCD TV—if you manage to attract their attention in the first place. Stereo Exchange has several fawning and knowledgeable staff members, typically serving the one or two customers in the store at any given moment.

I assume that Stereo Exchange pays its staff a lot more than Best Buy does. But this doesn’t make Best Buy a bad company or prove that it exploits its workers. No one would say that Wal-Mart exploits its workers because they’re paid less than doctors. Nor would anyone say that Wal-Mart is a terrific company because it pays its employees a lot more than McDonalds does.

Now imagine that Best Buys across the country were replaced by Stereo Exchanges. We would have more “good jobs” and fewer “bad jobs.” The average wage in the electronics retail sector would go up. But where would all the former Best Buy workers go? Most of them wouldn’t work at Stereo Exchange. Maybe some would take a pay cut and work at McDonalds. Maybe others would get lucky and find this was just the prod they needed to find a better job. It’s hardly obvious this would be an improvement.

...but there wouldn’t be any more ugly Wal-Mart boxes dotting the landscape! And I suspect that elitist aesthetics—rather than a craving for so-called “economic justice”—is behind the latte left’s continued assault on Wal-Mart.

After all, how do you define economic justice? If a company has $20,000 each month to spend on salaries, it can hire 5 people at $4,000/month or 10 people at $2,000/month. Is a higher salary better if fewer people are employed? I guess that depends on whether you’re one of the 5 people who would get a raise or one of the 5 people who would lose their jobs if the company decided to double salaries.

By decrying the salaries paid by Wal-Mart, the Barbara Ehrenreichs of the world seem to be arguing for less employment, not more. Where’s the justice in that?

28 June 2006 @ 9:28PM >> In the San Francisco Chronicle, Cinnamon Stillwell covers the criminalization of speech:

Outright censorship and draconian speech codes have long been a staple of Third World authoritarian regimes. But Western democracies and in particular the United States (where the First Amendment is supposed to reign supreme) have always prided themselves on protecting free speech. Yet because of the creeping reach of political correctness, one can now be put in prison, lose a job, be kicked out of school or be otherwise censored simply for uttering an unpopular opinion.

26 June 2006 @ 12:11AM >> A letter to The New York Times:

Your recent decision to publish information about a classified program intended to track the banking transactions of possible terrorists is not only detrimental to America but also to its fighting men and women overseas. I know because I am a sergeant in the army on my second tour to Iraq. As I am sure you don’t know because you aren’t in Iraq, and I am sure never will be, terrorism happens here everyday because there are rich men out there willing to support the everyday terrorist who plants bombs and shoots soldiers just to make a living. Without money terrorism in Iraq would die because there would no longer be supplies for IEDs, no mortars or RPGs, and no motivation for people to abandon regular work in hopes of striking it rich after killing a soldier.

Throughout your article you mention that “the banking program is a closely held secret” but the cat is out of the bag now isn’t it. Terrorists the world over can now change their practices because of your article. For some reason I think that last sentence will bring you guys pleasure. You have done something great in your own eyes-you think you have hurt the current administration while at the same time encouraging “freedom fighters” resisting the imperialism of the United States. However, I foresee a backlash coming your way. I wish I had a subscription to your paper so I could cancel it as soon as possible.

Well, one prominent L.A. blogger exacted that punishment against the Los Angeles Times.

Meanwhile, an interesting observation:

Because the war on terror is fought in a peacetime atmosphere, treason can be presented as dissent, and you can get away with it.

And finally, on a ligher note, a little mockery.

25 June 2006 @ 1:04PM >> “Bill” writes to ask about spam:

Why does spam (and email subjects of spam) have such nonsensical words inserted? I got an e-mail that included: “Colette was at deforestation when that happened baboon. trout at nocturne or even handicapped as in ding”

It has to do with the fact that many anti-spam systems rely on keywords for determining whether an e-mail should be considered spam. These programs assign spam probabilities to each word, so that some words are weighted as more likely to signal spam than others. If the overall e-mail contains a high proportion of spam words, or if it passes a certain threshold of spam words, it is more likely to get trapped in anti-spam filters.

So often, spammers will use programs that insert snippets of random sentences from other sources or other random combinations of benign words. The intent is to end up with an e-mail that is less likely to be flagged as spam.

24 June 2006 @ 5:50PM >> The sad thing is, these demands will probably be met:

Like generations of citizens before them, California State University, Chico, students Alba Miranda, Hector Najera and Rene Ochoa descended on the Capitol on Monday to petition members of the Legislature.

Except the three honor students aren’t citizens — they’re illegal immigrants, who under state law have a legal right to in-state tuition at California’s colleges and universities, but are not eligible for financial aid.

Dozens of students like them from across California came to Sacramento to urge legislators to support a measure — Senate Bill 160 by Sen. Gil Cedillo, D-Los Angeles — that would allow them to apply for such assistance.

“This legislation would just allow us to be able to fill out applications and compete for a scholarship,” Ochoa said.

The measure has cleared the Senate and is scheduled to be heard Tuesday by the Assembly Higher Education Committee. Cedillo predicts it will land on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s desk later this summer, as immigration heats up as an election year issue.

23 June 2006 @ 9:50AM >> In response to my piece yesterday on chemical weapons found in Iraq, Daniel writes:

Mr. Maloney,

While I enjoy most of your articles, I cringed at this article because it really doesn’t prove anything. Even on Fox News they admit that nothing that they have found is evidence that Iraq had an on-going WMD program at the time we invaded. I agree with the gist of the article, though, that Saddam repeatedly lied and Democrats believed he had WMD’s, etc., but I think the recent press release by Senator Santorum was little more than a publicity stunt before the vote on troop withdrawal. Maybe some useable WMD’s are yet to be found in Iraq, but I found the recent press release to be pretty inconsequential.

Daniel

Daniel,

You are correct that the new revelations do not prove that Iraq had an active weapons program. But these weapons do prove that Iraq was in complete failure to comply with the U.N. resolutions that required him to turn over a full catalog of his weapons, and to destroy the very types of weapons that we’ve since found. Clearly, he did not do either. And either of those alone would have been enough justification for action under U.N. Resolution 1441, the 17th consecutive U.N. resolution that Saddam Hussein was violating.

Add that to the fact that Saddam Hussein had been gaming the U.N. inspections for years and apparently bribing U.N. officials as well. Those are not the actions of a man with nothing to hide, and point to the possibility that Saddam was trying to escape the noose of the U.N. sanctions so that he could restart his weapons program once the sanctions had been lifted.

I think the discovery of these weapons is relevant, considering that one of the prime arguments against the war for the last few years has been that no WMDs have been found. That’s not true, and as I pointed out in my original piece, that hasn’t been true for a long time.

Because I covered previously-discovered weapons in the past, these new revelations didn’t strike me as the bombshell that others claimed it was. But it is one more bit of evidence showing that the rationale for deposing Saddam Hussein was sound.

Thanks for writing,
Evan

22 June 2006 @ 12:11PM >> It is now considered gospel among those opposed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq that “Bush lied” about Saddam Hussein’s weapons. That’s despite the fact that many prominent Democrats made the same claims during the Clinton Administration, and that virtually every other Western intelligence service believed Saddam was hiding such weapons. That’s despite the fact that Saddam Hussein himself discussed having those weapons, and that he felt the need to bribe French and U.N. officials during his cat-and-mouse game with U.N. weapons inspectors. That’s despite the fact that Saddam Hussein used those weapons before, and that’s even despite the fact, since the war started, that we’ve seen many bits of evidence that point to Iraq’s possession of WMDs.

No, despite all that, if your only source of information is the editorial page of The New York Times, you probably still believe that Saddam Hussein was an innocent man wrongly deposed by a bloodthirsty American president. You’ll probably also find ways to discount this latest report:

U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq have found about 500 chemical weapons since the March 2003 invasion, with more thought to exist, according to portions of an intelligence report made public yesterday.

“Since 2003, Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent,” said an overview of the report, which was declassified at the behest of Sen. Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania Republican, and Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican and head of the House intelligence committee.

“Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf war chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf war chemical munitions are assessed to still exist,” according to the report.

Expect this story to pass in a couple of days without much further discussion. There’s simply no good angle for using it to criticize the war effort. The media that spent a decade covering up for Saddam Hussein has too much invested in the “Bush lied” storyline, and deviating from that storyline now would require one massive correction for the last three years of reporting.

21 June 2006 @ 5:57PM >> Last week, I posted some e-mails received in response to “Why Do They Hate Us?” Although those e-mails took issue with my article, it’s always refreshing to read an argument that is literate and informed, even if it is tinged with bit of condescension.

Unfortunately, most of the arguments that end up in my inbox don’t quite live up to that standard. Case in point, this note from an Australian e-mail account listed only as “LDupont2”:

Dear Mr. Coyne,

I read your article on Why do They hate us? and would wish to point out to you that they hate us because we are hypocrisy. The rest of the World used to look to the United States for leadership. I remember during Clinton leadership that yes I would gladly acquiesce to America being the leader of the free world Clinton was so statuesque so intelligent, so charismatic then he leaves office and what do you present me with a Bush cabal of mental midgets. Sadam as you know had no WMD yet our troops are locked in a battle to the death with the Iraqis and the Iranians are licking their lips. They hate us because we can no longer command their respect. Our soldiers like the Jews bomb people’s houses murder innocent women and children. They hate us because despite our 500lbs bombs we couldn’t even kill Zawquari. He lived long enough to embrace death and his martydom 52 minutes and the cause of his actual demise is arbituary

Thanks for that healthy round of hearty guffaws.

The fact that the United States was so respected during the Clinton Administration must explain all these terrorist attacks that didn’t happen during his presidency.

19 June 2006 @ 4:08PM >> A number of readers have been sending links to coverage of proposed “net neutrality” regulations being considered by Congress. If you haven’t been following the debate, net neutrality is one of two things—depending on which argument you find more convincing:

1. A way to prevent Internet bandwidth providers—typically cable companies, telephone companies, or ISPs like Earthlink—from providing improved or degraded service between you and websites like Google. Some bandwidth providers are essentially trying to extort companies like Google into paying to prevent the site’s traffic from being routed through slower Internet lanes. But Google is already paying for all the data it sends to you, and you are already paying for all the data you receive. So why should Google have to pay again for what two parties are already paying for, just to prevent its site from being demoted to the slow lane?
2. A regulation that prevents Internet bandwidth providers from managing capacity effectively and according to market demands. Some traffic needs to go through the networks faster—video, for instance—and throwing all the traffic together can create bottlenecks. So, if you want to be able to watch high-quality video without dropouts, you’re going to need special “lanes” set aside for the traffic that needs to be delivered within a certain time. People already pay premiums for faster delivery with FedEx, so why can’t bandwidth providers offer similar services?

You can tell you’re in propaganda-land when neither argument really addresses the other.

It is true that special applications like high-quality video-on-demand require prioritized delivery of data. This requires a certain amount of bandwidth to be set aside for delivery of that data. This really only becomes an issue when a certain part of the network gets saturated. In order to guarantee delivery of high-priority data, there will be times when delivery of lower-priority data must be delayed. Only so much data can be pushed through Internet pipes at any given time. Other limited resources tend to go to the highest bidder. Why should data networks be immune to the basic laws of capitalism?

On the other hand, it is also true that the Googles of the world are essentially being told by bandwidth providers, “Pay up, or it might take a while for people to get to your website through our pipes.” Fearful of jacking up prices on end-users, bandwidth providers are going to the deep pockets and playing the Yahoos of the world off the Googles. So instead of high-priority service being a voluntary choice made by consumers, bandwidth providers sound like they’re trying to start a data protection racket.

In The Weekly Standard, Andy Kessler declares that there’s “no one to root for in the net neutrality debate”:

Telcos and cable companies have no choice but to lobby for legislation that bars neutrality. Because without the ability to extract money from the webbies for the use of their not-so-fast Alexander Graham Bell-era wires (forget that you and I already overpay for this), AT&T or Verizon might not have any business model going forward. With no real competition, they’d rather keep U.S. telecommunications in the Flintstone era and overcharge for calls to Grandma than upgrade their networks. Since 1998, telecommunications companies have outspent computer and Internet firms on politicians $231 million to $71 million, just to keep the status quo.

Hate to break the news, but your “fast” DSL Internet access is no longer considered high speed. In parts of the world, cell phones are faster. Have you wondered why Internet video doesn’t fill your computer monitor and look like a DVD, but instead is pixelated dreck in a tiny one or two inch square? Well, Comcast is dragging its heels, too. With better video over the Internet, who would want E!, let alone the Style Network? [...]

But the answer is not regulations imposing net neutrality. You can already smell the mandates and the loopholes once Congress gets involved. Think special, high-speed priority for campaign commercials or educational videos about global warming. Or roadblocks—like requiring emergency 911 service—to try to kill off free Internet telephone services such as Skype. [...]

A truly competitive, non-neutral network could work, but only if we know its real economic value. If telcos or cable charge too much, someone should be in a position to steal the customer. Maybe then we’d see useful services and a better Internet. Sounds like capitalism.

What new things? It’s not just more bandwidth and better Internet video—how about no more phone numbers, just a name and the service finds you? How about subscribing to a channel and being able to watch it when and where you want, on your TV, iPod, or laptop? How about a baby monitor you can view through your cell phone? Something worth paying for. And that’s just the easy stuff.

The problem isn’t lack of regulation of the Internet, it’s too much regulation in the telephone and cable industries.

All regulations are written according to a set of business assumptions that existed at a specific time. But business and technology are dynamic, ever-changing environments. Government regulations lock in one set of assumptions, so once the environment changes and those assumptions no longer apply, the regulations stifle innovation and keep the old ways in place.

Businesses that fear change—such as companies that have billions of dollars invested in old technology like copper wires and coax cables—then use those regulations to block competition, which leads to the stagnation. Why aren’t we seeing more Internet delivery innovation? My connection at home is the same speed it was five years ago. But everything else from my laptop to my iPod are twice as fast and hold ten times as much. Why is that? Maybe part of the reason is that the government doesn’t micromanage the computer industry the way it does the telecom industry.

The current system may be broken, or at least imperfect. But I don’t know if the solution is to write into law more lofty ideas that will be soon be based on outdated variables. Let’s get rid of the obsolete laws first. Open up the cable and phone companies to real competition. Then, we all might have so much bandwidth for such a cheap price that we won’t need to worry about net neutrality. If the high-priority lanes are 100x faster, are we really going to complain if everything else is only 50x faster?

This problem is easily solved by abundance. We just need to create an economic environment that encourages it.

15 June 2006 @ 7:44PM >> My article several weeks ago entitled “Why Do They Hate Us” generated quite a bit more e-mail than usual. Some of it sparked interesting discussions, such as this one with a reader named Daniel Rhodes:

Evan,

I found your article titled ‘Why do they Hate Us?’ rather simplistic and superficial in its analysis. I think that hate is too strong a word to be used in this context, although for the misinformed it certainly appears as such.

Historically, Islamists are not so concerned about what the West does in its own right, just as long as it does not interfere with their ability to carry out their own religious practices. What we see as hate is simply a reaction to the last century where the West (mostly European countries) have made interventions that have substantially changed interrelations within and among Middle Eastern countries.

In addition, much of the extremism which the US claims to be aimed towards them is actually a reaction to change from within Islam (liberal vs traditional forces), rather than Islam reacting to outside forces (Saudi Arabia is a good example). Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda are more or less freak occurrences in these Islamic movements and contrary to what the Bush administration might want the public to believe, the US is probably not the central target for radical and violent Islamists. I would argue that Middle Eastern countries are far more vulnerable to terrorist attacks by violent Islamic movements, one reason why these countries are so oppressive.

Best,
Daniel Rhodes

I responded:

Daniel,

If the Jihadists just want to be left alone, and just want to carry out their own religious practices, then what accounts for the Cartoon Riots? To deny that there is a cultural clash, and that our difficulties with Islamists stems mostly from foreign policy issues, seems to be wishful western thinking. We’re so proudly multicultural and accepting of everything that we really can’t imagine people could possibly want to kill us because of our open culture. To westerners, everything must have a rational explanation, so the explanation that fits our view of the conflict is foreign policy. Because if we view it in the realm of the geopolitical—rather than the geocultural—we can relate to and understand their complaints better. Political clashes we get. Cultural ones we don’t.

I don’t deny that foreign policy differences account for some of the turbulence. But I also think that denying the cultural element is simplistic and superficial. As is denying the fact that the reaction to the cartoons shows a desire on the part of the rioting Islamists to have the entire globe under the thumb of Sharia law. After all, if those cartoons can’t be published in Western Europe without people getting killed because of it, then Western Europe is effectively being governed by Sharia law.

Have you seen some of the signs that were held by Islamist protesters in London during the cartoon controversy? The Jihadists are very clear in telling us what their gripes are, but we as a society don’t believe them because we simply can’t fathom the possibility that people want to kill us because we’re too tolerant. That doesn’t make sense to us.

But they are quite explicit in telling us what kind of world they want. Why won’t we listen?

Thanks for writing,
Evan

P.S. I agree that Middle Eastern nations are vulnerable, but not for the same reasons you cite. Some Jihadists believe they need a nation state, a parcel of land from which to begin rebuilding the Caliphate. These Islamists also view regimes like the Saudis as sell-outs for being too close to the West. Meanwhile, the House of Saud has been sowing its own demise by incubating and encouraging the spread of the Wahabbist movement, the very movement is turning against the Saudi royal family. Ironically, they are vulnerable only because their own propaganda has been so successful.

Daniel wrote back again:

Evan,

Thanks for the response. Don’t always be swayed by the things you see in protests (as I recall, you did a video a few years ago on how ridiculous some protesters are).

As for the cartoon riots, that was about as irrational as it gets, although it seems like it was incited rather than spontaneous — Europe has had many problems in integrating Muslims into its society and there is a lot of abuse and racism which occurs that is much more deserving of attention. There is a very good book called ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim’ by Mahmood Mamdani which addresses this culture war idea.

In response to your points about bin Laden, Saudi Arabia, etc.: Most of the really vehement Islamists that come out of Saudi Arabia and other countries have been forcefully kicked out because they are too radical, and they wind up in places like the UK where they continue to preach. Bin Laden was one of the expelled people.

I doubt a lot of the sympathy that bin Laden gets is from people who necessarily like his violent means, it’s probably from people who are more interested in his religious doctrine (or at least the principle of creating a more pure Islamic society) and from those who like a person who stands up to the West (look at Nassar or maybe even Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War; these feelings of needing to stand up to the West go back to the Ottoman Empire and problems with capitulations to Europe).

On your point about the Saudi Wahabbi movement, this is incorrect. The Saudis and the Wahabbists should essentially be seen as one, and this is the basis of Saudi political and religious legitimacy to the people. The last thing they would want to do, if they wish to stay in power, is stop promoting Islam.

However, with oil and the need for modernization, some principles have needed to be watered down, and that has of course threatened its religious base both as the protector of the faith and likewise its political legitimacy (this is where the Islamist threat arises within Saudi Arabia). I would agree that the oppression, as we see it, predated the Islamic movements, although the Islamic movements greatly exacerbated it. Looking at oppression in the Middle East through a western lens can be problematic sometimes given the differing bases of power and legitimacy.

Best,
Daniel Rhodes

I guess Daniel and I will have to agree to disagree. He believes geopolitics is the overriding source of the tension between the Muslim world and the West. I believe cultural differences are the culprit.

In the days since my e-mail exchange with Daniel, The New York Times reported on a survey that backs up my contention rather strongly. The Gallup Organization conducted “more than 8,000 face-to-face interviews [...] in eight predominantly Muslim countries”:

The most frequent response to the question, “What do you admire least about the West?” was the general perception of moral decay, promiscuity and pornography that pollsters called the “Hollywood image” that is regarded as degrading to women.

An overwhelming majority of the women polled in each country cited “attachment to moral and spiritual values” as the best aspect of their own societies. In Pakistan, 53 percent of the women polled said attachment to their religious beliefs was their country’s most admirable trait. Similarly, in Egypt, 59 percent of the women surveyed cited love of their religion as the best aspect.

When asked what they admired least about the West, notice that the answer had nothing to do with foreign policy. And while it is true that this study only questioned Muslim women, I would expect that those sentiments aren’t wildly different from what would be reflected in their societies as a whole. Muslim men inclined towards Jihad don’t exactly strike me as the sort of gents who lap up every ladleful of Hollywood’s steamy stew.

Now, I don’t doubt that foreign policy disputes have something to do with the Muslim world’s disdain for the West, but assuming that the differences are almost exclusively diplomatic is looking at the world through a decidedly Western lens. I can understand why: multiculturalism requires us to assume that everybody is just as accepting of cultural differences as we strive to be.

It isn’t politically correct to recognize that there are cultures where sawing people’s heads off is considered an appropriate response to an inflammatory film or cartoon. To recognize that such cultures exist requires us to make moral judgments about those cultures. It demands that we say, “You know, maybe it isn’t right to execute people in some excruciatingly grizzly fashion over mere drawings or books.” But the politically correct West is a post-moral society. We’re not allowed to judge the behavior of other cultures; multiculturalism forbids it.

The way the game is rigged, you’re a racist if you don’t adhere to the mantra that all cultures are morally equal. So if you can blame the behavior of Jihadists on Western imperialism, then you can acknowledge that behavior without judging it. You avoid being thought of a racist, and you can still be a concerned and caring multiculturalist in good standing. Political correctness requires that we always point the finger at ourselves. By definition, you can’t be politically correct and assign blame anywhere else.

14 June 2006 @ 1:24AM >> Who says bureaucrats don’t innovate? Check out this beautiful little scam:

1. Your local city decides to build a monorail and plans a route that runs over land currently occupied by your business.
2. Through eminent domain, the government takes your land against your will, and you are paid what the government decides is the fair market value.
3. The monorail plans fail, as any fan of The Simpsons could have predicted, so the city decides to unload the land.
4. Arguing that the land’s value has risen in the time since it was taken against your will, the city graciously offers to let you buy your land back, but only after jacking up the price by $70,000.

Sound far-fetched? It actually happened, to the owner of the Caffe Appassionato in Seattle.

Taking your property against your will and then selling it back to you at a higher price...sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference between government and organized crime.

14 June 2006 @ 12:37AM >> At Johns Hopkins University, around 600 copies of The Carrollton Record, the school’s conservative newspaper, “went missing.” Shortly thereafter, school administrators confiscated hundreds more copies of the student paper. Why, you ask?

13 June 2006 @ 2:01AM >> A bunch of busybody doctors are trying to wedge the ever-expanding gut of government into your fridge:

Doctors will this week declare war on America’s soft drinks industry by calling for a ‘fat tax’ to combat the nation’s obesity epidemic.

Delegates at the powerful American Medical Association’s annual conference will demand a levy on the sweeteners put in sugary drinks to pay for a massive public health education campaign.

They will also call for the amount of salt added to burgers and processed foods to be halved.

You are too stupid to know what to eat, so these doctors want to use the government to punish you by taking more of your money if you don’t eat what they want. Your money will then be used to pay for advertising that will scold you over your food choices.

At some point, government will expand to exert so much control over our lives and finances that we cease being autonomous adults and effectively become government’s children. We’ll be one step closer to that day if these doctors have their way.

12 June 2006 @ 8:33PM >> The owner of a restaurant in Philadelphia is in trouble for making his language preferences known:

A civil rights watchdog agency opened an investigation on Monday into a Philadelphia cheese steak restaurant that posted a sign saying “This is America - when ordering, speak English.”

The Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations complaint effectively opens a case against Geno’s Steaks of South Philadelphia, said Rachel Lawton, acting executive director of the agency.

The Philadelphia controversy has fed a national debate over immigration in which the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would declare English the national language and politicians have raised objections to a Spanish version of the national anthem.

The sign may violate the city’s Fair Practices Ordinance, which bans businesses from discriminating on the basis of nationality or ethnicity, Lawton said.

“The complaint will say that the sign discourages patronage by non-English speakers because of their national origin and/or ancestry,” Lawton, whose agency enforces the city’s anti-discrimination laws, said before the official filing.

12 June 2006 @ 10:38AM >> Sexy is relative, I guess.

8 June 2006 @ 5:07PM >> In mid-April, I reported on a website operated by the Seattle public school system that defined racism in such a way that only whites can be considered racist.

According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, increasing attention to that website since then has caused the school system to address the issue:

An outpouring of criticism forced Seattle public schools on Thursday to pull a Web site that viewed planning for the future, emphasizing individualism and defining standard English as examples of cultural racism.

The message had appeared under an “equity and race relations” section of the district’s Web site and was mentioned Thursday in an opinion piece by a Libertarian writer in the Seattle P-I. Criticism of the site has been building in the world of blogs for weeks.

In its place Thursday was a message that the site will be revised to “provide more context to reader around the work that Seattle public schools is doing to address institutional racism.”

So, in other words, the school system pulled the website not because it defined racism as a white-only phenomenon or because it defined individualism as a form of racism, but because the website didn’t describe what the school system was doing to fight those racist individualists and their institutions.

I don’t think that statement resolves the situation; if anything, it proves that the critics of the school system are correct in believing that Seattle schools are pushing a political agenda.

The “explanation” offered by the Seattle public school system isn’t satisfying Andrew Coulson of the CATO Institute, either. A recent critic of Seattle’s educrats, Coulson commented on the new developments:

“It’s a non-apology apology,” said Coulson, an education history scholar and author of “Market Education: The Unknown History.”

“My sense was that the definition was extremely offensive, but there was not much sympathy for those who were offended ...,” he said. “The harm that can come from the Web site is the tarring of the ideal of individualism as racist, while the ideal of individualism is a central principle on which our nation was founded. Liberty is individual, not collective. So for our school district — our official school organ of the state — to tell children it’s racist to believe in a principle on which our nation was founded — is troubling.”

Indeed.

7 June 2006 @ 12:19AM >> The Associated Press reports:

A judge said a 5-foot-1 man convicted of sexually assaulting a child was too small to survive in prison, and gave him 10 years of probation instead.

His crimes deserved a long sentence, District Judge Kristine Cecava said, but she worried that Richard W. Thompson, 50, would be especially imperiled by prison dangers.

“You are a sex offender, and you did it to a child,” she said.

But, she said, “That doesn’t make you a hunter. You do not fit in that category.”

[...]

“I want control of you until I know you have integrated change into your life,” the judge told Thompson. “I truly hope that my bet on you being OK out in society is not misplaced.

The problem with Judge Cecava’s logic is, once we start exempting People of Compactness from going to jail, eventually the only people in jail will be People of Altitude, who will then file a class action lawsuit prohibiting all jail time, saying that it discriminates unfairly against the tall.

Come to think of it, doesn’t this also insult People of Compactness by saying that they’re not tough enough to handle time behind bars? I wouldn’t want to be standing near Gary Coleman if you were to tell him he’s too much of a wimp for jail.

6 June 2006 @ 4:22AM >> I generally support the idea of charter schools. They allow educational experimentation, which is usually beneficial in an otherwise bureaucracy-strangled public school system.

The downside to the leniency is that it has a way of devolving into complete lack of oversight. Nothing else would explain how Marcos Aguilar ended up running the taxpayer-funded La Academia Semillas del Pueblo charter school in Los Angeles.

Principal Aguilar, who also founded school, seems proud of his contributions in the field of education. But as far as I can tell, he’s using his position to preach the cause of racial separatism:

We don’t necessarily want to go to White schools. What we want to do is teach ourselves, teach our children the way we have of teaching. We don’t want to drink from a White water fountain, we have our own wells and our natural reservoirs and our way of collecting rain in our aqueducts. We don’t need a White water fountain. So the whole issue of segregation and the whole issue of the Civil Rights Movement is all within the box of White culture and White supremacy. We should not still be fighting for what they have. We are not interested in what they have because we have so much more and because the world is so much larger. And ultimately the White way, the American way, the neo liberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction. And so it isn’t about an argument of joining neo liberalism, it’s about us being able, as human beings, to surpass the barrier.

Self-sufficiency is admirable, but rejecting every institution that exists in your country just to prove self-sufficiency is childish. Some of our institutions have worked quite well over time: capitalism and democracy, free markets and classical liberal governments; the fact that the United States has consistently been one of the most prosperous patches of land on the planet is no accident. Students might benefit from learning such things. Understanding what leads to success might actually help kids later in life. It’s too bad Principal Aguilar’s students won’t be learning anything like that at his school.

2 June 2006 @ 12:38AM >> Computerworld columnist Scot Finnie has been running the latest pre-release version of Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Vista operating system. He’s compiled a list of 20 gripes with Vista, and draws this conclusion:

Where does Windows Vista fit among many of the PC-based operating systems of today and the last couple of decades? With Beta 2 running on multiple test units, I feel comfortable predicting that Windows Vista will not outpace Mac OS X Tiger for overall quality and usability. It’s hard to beat Apple’s top-notch GUI design grafted onto an implementation of Unix variant BSD. Mac OS X has excellent reliability, security and usability. That isn’t to say that the user interface wouldn’t gain if Apple adopted some other best ideas of the day, but Apple has the best operating system this year, last year and next year. It’ll be interesting to see what the company delivers in its 10.5 Leopard version of Mac OS X.

Meanwhile, I’m placing Windows Vista as a distant second-best to OS X. I see Linux and Windows 2000 as being roughly tied another notch or two below Vista, with XP being only a half step better than Win 2000.

So, why is the year-old Mac OS X Tiger so much better than Windows Vista, which Microsoft won’t even ship before January 2007? It isn’t that Apple has put more effort into its operating system; Microsoft has mounted a gargantuan effort on Windows Vista. It’s that the two companies have very different goals. I’ve come to believe that Microsoft has lost touch with its user base.

That last point is absolutely true. For more than a decade, Microsoft seemed to design products more to fortify its monopoly position than to address the needs of actual customers. This led to some short-term benefits for the company (Netscape Navigator once owned the web browser market, and now Microsoft’s Internet Explorer does) but it has also led to long-term pain both for the company and customers (flaws in Internet Explorer made the product a major vehicle for delivering computer viruses, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security advises people to avoid the program).

And now, new revelations about Microsoft’s sales practices show an outright abuse of existing customers:

[A] Microsoft manager named Janet Lawless sent a series of increasingly threatening letters to Dale Frantz, CIO at Auto Warehousing Co., about how Frantz’s company appeared to be using unlicensed software and how Microsoft wanted the issue resolved.

Frantz figured this was about his Microsoft software licenses, so he kept offering evidence that he was in compliance. Tennant concluded that Lawless was trying to intimidate Frantz to land a software deal.

They were both wrong. It’s sleazier than they imagined.

See, Janet Lawless doesn’t work for a part of Microsoft that enforces licenses. Frantz thought she did. You’d think so too if you got a letter saying “a preliminary review ... indicates that your company may not be licensed properly,” then a follow-up saying “since this is a compliance issue, I am obligated to notify an officer of Auto Warehousing of the situation and the significant risk your organization may be subject to by not resolving this situation in a timely manner.”

Lawless kept insisting that Microsoft should send a consultant to Auto Warehousing to inventory its software.

But Lawless doesn’t enforce licenses. The clue is her title: She’s an engagement manager. That’s right — Lawless’s job is to drum up business for Microsoft’s consulting operation. In this case, that’s Microsoft’s software asset management consulting business.

This wasn’t about confirming license compliance or about a software deal. It was about securing Microsoft a paid consulting gig.

In other words, Microsoft is using the implied threat of legal action against its own customers in order to coerce those customers into buying consulting services from Microsoft. Classy!

Windows Vista is still pre-release software, so it may yet improve. But they’re going to have to start finalizing it soon in order to make the target ship date of January 2007. And considering Vista is getting panned by some of Microsoft’s biggest cheerleaders, the operating system that’s been six years in the making may end up being a disaster of Ishtar proportions. Of course, whether competitors would be able to take advantage of it is another story.

What would cause Microsoft to start failing? Has it developed such a corrosive corporate culture that it’s simply incapable of developing products that customers want? It’s hard to create great software when your design decisions are geared more towards stifling competitors than satisfying customer needs. Companies that lose sight of the customer do so at their own peril.

1 June 2006 @ 2:08AM >> Long-time Brain Terminal reader Robert Sciolino sends this thought for the day:

Everyday I go for a ten kilometer run. I hate running. It is more time efficient than biking right now as I look to destroy as many calories as possible in as short a period as possible before getting on the bike and renewing my bike race goals.

The first two miles are torturous. I ask myself repeatedly, “why am I doing this...it hurts...I hate it, there must be a better way”. I look for excuses to stop. I see rational reasons not to do it. I develop pains in my knees and ankles (that some how go a way when ignored). I then remember that this pain is no where near the pain I have when in the middle of a interval training session on the bike.

And yet, I lose another notch in the belt. I feel like a human being all day long rather than a couch potato. I can feel my heart pumping strong and my legs feel as they did when I was eighteen years-old, in fact, as the weeks go on, I feel like an eighteen- year-old all over. My body gets stronger. I’m slowly becoming an athlete again. The bike and the racing inch closer.

I strain to see the big picture while I struggle through the first two miles. It is very easy and even rational to view my pain as meaningless and maybe even detrimental to my goals as I torture myself through it. It is very easy to dismiss my actions as masochistic. I can easily see alternatives such as the new diet drugs out there that magically convert millions of years of physiological evolution into lost weight by a simple swallow (or how about gastric by-pass!). It is VERY easy to forget how my body become stronger as it anticipates more pain tomorrow and actually produces less when tomorrow comes (funny how that works).

And then I see the naysayers about Iraq and Afganistan and I understand. Democracy and freedom have responsibility as twin brothers, and people who have never been free struggle to learn that principle, and many of us see the struggle and look for the magic pill that easily converts former slaves into responsible free people.

I really do understand the intellectual couch potatoes...

...every day I begin my run. I hate running.