Tea Party '07

On December 16, 1773, American colonists, disguised as Indians, snuck aboard a British merchant ship and dumped tons of tea into Boston Harbor, and act of protest against British tyranny that rallied the colonists and helped spark the American Revolution.

Today, the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, believers in liberty nationwide are rallying behind Presidential candidate Ron Paul, the only candidate who supports the Founders' view of a nation conceived in liberty, bound by its Constitution, and free from government oppression. Today, December 16th, donations are pouring into the coffers of this freedom fighter, as supporters hope to ignite a second, peaceful Revolution, to restore this country to its proper track.

As of this writing (4 p.m. Eastern time), more than $3.5 Million has been donated at <http://ronpaul2008.com/donate> today. We are hoping to exceed the one-day record of $4.3 Million. Please donate as much as you can possibly afford, and forward this message to every person and mailing list you know.

WHO IS RON PAUL?

Ron Paul is a 10-term Republican Congressman from Texas.
He has never voted to raise taxes.
He has never voted for an unbalanced budget.
He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership.
He has never voted to raise congressional pay.
He has never taken a government-paid junket.
He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.

He voted against the Patriot Act.
He voted against regulating the Internet.
He voted against the Iraq war.

He does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program.
He returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the U.S. treasury every year.

Congressman Paul introduces numerous pieces of substantive legislation each year, probably more than any single member of Congress.

A medical doctor who has delivered over 4,000 babies, he is known as "Dr. No" on Capitol Hill because he votes against any legislation that violates the Constitution.

Dr. Paul is that rarest of all rarities: an honest politician.

Congressman Paul is the only major-party Presidential candidate who believes in the Founders' ideal of peace, free trade, and limited government. He deserves your support, and now is the time to give it. <http://ronpaul08.com/donate> (purchases from <http://www.ronpaul2008store.com/> also count)

View the current fundraising totals at <http://ronpaul08.com> and <http://www.ronpaulgraphs.com/dec_16_extended_total.html>.

Also, once you've donated all you can, there is one more thing you can do: Visit two houses of people you don't know and hand out literature. See <http://www.infiniteronpaul.com/?page=Tea> for details. And don't forget to visit <http://www.ronpaul2008.com/states/> to do what you can for Congressman Paul in your state.

Please do all you can to restore liberty and the rule of law to America! Support Ron Paul for President!

--
“I am for preserving to the states the powers not yielded by them to the union; and for preventing the further encroachment of the executive branch on the rightful powers of congress. I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple, and for retiring the national debt, eliminating the standing army, and relying on the militia to safeguard internal security, and keeping the navy small, lest it drag the nation into eternal wars. I am for free commerce with all nations, political connections with none…. I am for freedom of religion, and for freedom of the press. And against all violations to the Constitution to silence our citizens” - Thomas Jefferson on his positions for the 1800 election.

Security for Prosperity and Peace

(updated below)

In his interview with Wolf Blitzer on December 2nd, Ron Paul mentioned a website he called “Security for Prosperity and Peace” in connection with his contention, stated in the November 28th CNN/YouTube Republican Debate, that we were moving toward a NAFTA highway. A cursory Google search on the phrase yielded no relevant results. A little creative searching yielded the government website he was actually referring to: the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. Paul claims that the highway is mentioned on that site. Well, it is: in the Myths vs. Facts section comes this interestingly vague disclaimer:

Myth: The U.S. Government, working though the SPP, has a secret plan to build a "NAFTA Super Highway."

Fact: The U.S. government is not planning a NAFTA Super Highway.  The U.S. government does not have the authority to designate any highway as a NAFTA Super Highway, nor has it sought such authority, nor is it planning to seek such authority. There are private and state level interests planning highway projects which they themselves describe as "NAFTA Corridors," but these are not Federally-driven initiatives, and they are not a part of the SPP.

Note that what they actually deny is that any highway is actually (or will be) designated a “NAFTA Super Highway.” Does that mean that the rumors are false? Well, let’s dig a little deeper into the site, and we find the Report to Leaders. On page 24 of this PDF document we find a slide labeled “Signature Initiative: Safer, Faster and More Efficient Border Crossings,” which is what I presume Paul was referring to. On this slide, under “Key Milestones,” is listed

“Initiate new studies on the main NAFTA corridors between Mexico and the U.S. and develop a methodology to relieve bottlenecks within the highway network and at ports of entry by mid-2006 (9 months).”

Now I’ll be honest: This isn’t an issue that I care deeply about. I believe Paul is taking the wrong tack on immigration; instead of being paranoid about securing our borders against peaceful immigrants (emphasis on peaceful), I believe we should focus on eliminating the government benefits that induce them to come here and drain our tax dollars away. Frankly I believe we should eliminate most of these government-aid type benefits for everybody, but particularly for non-citizens. Then peaceful immigrants would only come here looking for work, which only benefits our economy.

But:
Looking at this site, can we really say that, while obviously not one single mammoth government project, the spectre of a “NAFTA highway” speeding people and cargo from Mexico to Canada and points in between is “illusory”?

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Update

Of course it’s a myth. The Canadian government says so. Oh, wait…

xkcd

Okay, xkcd is an awesome webcomic about, as it says, “romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” Actually, science should be thrown in there somewhere too. But the “Powers of One ” strip is particularly awesome. As with several webcomics, there’s a little additional joke in the tooltip (mouseover) text, and in this case, it’s cooler than the actual strip. See the strip to understand what’s going on, but I’m adopting the tooltip joke as a new quote: “It’s kinda Zen when you think about it, if you don’t think too hard.”

That so sums up much of Zen-type stuff for me. That’s how I believe a lot of Zenlike stuff (I’m not really dissing Zen itself here; Zen philosophy is too complex for the kind of light treatment I’m giving here. So let’s say this applies to some actual Zen stuff and a lot of pop Zen, or Zen-like, stuff) is. It sounds all cool and spooky and paradoxical until you actually examine it closely enough to understand it. For instance, I got an email from a friend today that said, “My father's mother once said ‘I'm not a feminist. I'm not particularly feminine’ and she was both right and wrong.” Now, I’m not poking fun at the author of this email; she knew exactly what she meant, and so did I. But this is the sort of quote that could be interpreted all Zen-ly: oooh, something’s both right and wrong at the same time, there’s no absolute truth, we’ve just got to go with the flow and take a lot of drugs (or meditation, or whatever) so we can try to grasp, non-intellectually, the ultimate, seemingly contradictory Truths of the Universe.

Poppycock. For someone with an intellectual, scientific mindset, this is a simple problem (and I realize I didn’t choose a particularly difficult example; if someone has a better one on tap, I’d gladly use it). Either this was intended to mean “she was both right and wrong at the same time and in the same way,” in which case it’s utterly contradictory, therefore it was nonsensical, therefore there was no meaning in the statement whatsoever; or it meant “she was right in at least one way and wrong in at least one other way,” in which case it makes perfect sense, but isn’t creepy or mystical or contradictory in any way, it’s just couched in a shorter, more-interesting-sounding way (this is precisely how it was intended to be understood in this case, by the way).

Again, I realize I used a simple, almost straw-man example, but I really view a lot (if not all) of the seemingly-contradictory, mystical statements of the Zen-loving crowd this way: either they’re actual contradictions, in which case they’re both meaningless and utterly useless, or they’re not, and a little analysis will uncover what’s actually going on, thus removing the spooky mysticism from the situation. Yes, sure, this removes a little of the mystery from the Universe, but isn’t the point of mysteries that it’s fun to try to solve them? There’s plenty more mysteries in the Universe to uncover, and meanwhile, you’ve increased your understanding of the world, which in my mind is more important than maintaining unnecessary mysteries.

South Carolina Republican Debate

(updated below – Update II – Update III – Update IV)

Did I hear this correctly? Mayor Giuliani has proposed not just a national ID card, but a mandatory nationwide database of everyone in the country at all times? Do we have any idea what this means? Universal person registration??????

And Mitt Romney came straight out and said that we should “double Guantanamo.” Well, Mitt, that’s a little difficult unless we go to war with Cuba. Why don’t we do the easy thing and just establish concentration camps around the U.S.?

Ron Paul did splendidly. He mildly stumbled once or twice; when he was asked if he would actually get rid of the Department of Homeland Security in a time of war, I think he should have said, “Absolutely. We already had a Department of Homeland Security: it’s called the Department of Defense.” He actually had a better quote on his website than the one he used: “Only in Washington would anyone call the creation of an additional layer of bureaucracy on top of already bloated bureaucracies ‘streamlining.’” He also seemed a bit nervous at first, stumbling over words and fiddling with his pen.

But at moments he was brilliant. The fight between him and Guliani was awesome. I loved Guliani’s quip, that he’d never heard that theory (that Al Quaeda attacked us because of our wars and intervention in the Middle East) before. That’s wonderful, since, as Paul said, that’s the reason that Bin Laden himself gave . The pundits are saying that it was a boost for Guliani and that Paul is done. I think quite the opposite. Guliani and McCain are spouting the standard Bush line that they hate us because we’re rich and free. That plays well for the hardcore, Fox News-watching base of the Republican Party, but for anyone with any brains, they’ve been asking that exact question for six years now: Why did they attack us? The Bush answer doesn’t compute. Paul gave them the answer tonight. Expect this to work in Paul’s favor far more than the pundits have any idea.

There was one more great Paul moment, but I don’t remember what it was right now. I’ll repost when I figure it out.

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Update

Ron Paul is #1, with 30%, in the Fox News debate poll! The guy who announced that said that perhaps Paul has a better organization to coordinate his supporters texting. I don’t think so. It’s not so much a matter of coordination or organization. I mean, the email we got today was an appeal for money; it didn’t even mention the debate. His blog post for today gave the number and message to text, but that’s about it. The rest of it is just grassroots. There are several websites not formally associated with the Paul campaign that have sprung up to support him. He had a lot of people who believed in him (myself included) long before he declared his candidacy.

But none of that explains the results. Surely, with as many Paul supporters as there may be, they’re a small fraction of the number of people watching the debates. This has got to be a genuine popular upswell of support. There have been accusations that Paul supporters were somehow fudging the online MSNBC and ABC poll results. Honestly, they were so distorted that even I thought it was possible. But the results from Technorati and, in particular, Alexa (you can’t distort the drop in visitations to other candidates’ websites that happened after the first debate) seem legit. And I just don’t see how you can distort text message polls; presumably (hey, let me try…) you can only vote once from any one phone (hm. I got a response when I voted the first time, but this time my message dropped into a hole. But maybe I missed the end of the voting. Update: I did get a response, hours later. It was the same response as I got to my first message. So perhaps it went through after all. Hard to say). To fudge these results, you’d have to have tons of cell phone accounts. That’s money that Paul supporters don’t have.

Part of this can be explained by the fact that libertarians have a much higher proportion of techie types than any other political persuasion. Online polls and text message polls are only accessible to those with the technical knowhow to access them, and libertarians lead the pack on that count.

More:
One of the candidates (Duncan Hunter, I believe), in the post-debate interviews, just said, in response to Ron Paul’s comments, that “we didn’t attack a middle eastern country, we saved a middle eastern country—Kuwait—and our reward was being attacked on 9/11.” But that’s precisely Paul’s point! That was our reward for intervening in the Middle East!

Paul didn’t say anything about immigration that I heard tonight, so this wasn’t directed at him, but this same guy said, in support of stricter immigration controls, “we caught 1100 [illegal immigrants] from Communist China [crossing the border from Mexico],” I presume within the last year. This is a point against allowing immigration? 1100 of the most industrious, intelligent people in the world want to come here to escape Communist oppression, and that’s a bad thing??

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Update II

This is priceless. Immediately after the post-debate show on Fox, there is a show on Discovery Times on Osama bin Laden where they clearly say that bin Laden was severely upset by the U.S. liberation of Kuwait, believing that it was the duty of the Muslim world to do so. This (along with, I’m sure, what the show will say later) utterly validates Paul’s point. It has nothing to do with us being rich. How could it? Saudi Arabia is crazy rich. Bin Laden himself is incredibly rich. It has nothing to do with being free. As bin Laden himself said, why then did he not attack Sweden? It has everything to do with blowback from our intervention in the Middle East.

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Update III

I remember now, after seeing the video of Paul’s performance in the debate, what his last great moment was: His gripe that they were dealing with hypothetical situations when the real Osama bin Laden was still free and we were basically ignoring him. Awesome.

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Update IV: June 18, 2013

Updated some formatting and a few links, in particular the “websites” link that previously linked to the official campaign blog, not a grassroots website. I think I (embarrassingly) did not realize that was the “official” blog.

You have no right to a speedy trial

I’m speechless.

Marcia Cooke, Federal judge trying the case of Jose Padilla, has held that our Constitutionally-protected right to a speedy trial only comes into play when a suspect is actually charged with a crime. Before that time, Government officials can hold you in a cell indefinitely. So, if the government never wants to see someone come to trial, all they have to do is not charge them with any crime. I see. Well, that’s alright then. No possibility of injustice there.

Someone tell me…when is it time to revolt, again?

I’m waiting.

Public Schooling

Reposted from The Perfunctory Hero [dead link]:

Public "Schools": Destroying Lives
Get.
Your kids.
The fuck out of.
Public "school".
This instant...


... if you really do love them.

Evidence .

It was pretty good while it lasted

The American experiment is over .

Gingrich

This is possibly the best speech I’ve ever heard .

Leopard=Windows?

(updated below)

Screenshots

There are some very interesting “screenshots ” that have recently been released purporting to be of the next version of Mac OS X, 10.5 “Leopard.” The most tantalizing thing about these supposed screenshots is that apparently, Windows applications (in this case, Internet Explorer 7) can run natively on a Mac under OS X in Leopard.

If true, this is revolutionary. Windows and OS X applications running concurrently on a Mac? This is the Holy Grail of computing. Now, I don’t know if these screenshots are real or not. If they’re fake, they’re superbly done. But here, it doesn’t matter; I just want to talk about the idea, not whether or not Apple is actually doing it.

Explanation

Now, there are positives and negatives to this idea. Before we go into them, let’s examine exactly what we’re talking about here. The new Macintoshes (as of 2006) are now based on Intel processors instead of the old IBM/Motorola/Freescale PowerPC processors. Since Intel (or Intel-compatible) processors power all Windows (and Linux, for that matter) PC’s, that introduces a potential level of compatibility between Macs and PCs impossible previously. Already, Apple has released software called Boot Camp that allows the new Intel Macs to boot into Windows XP. Now, this is a separate boot situation: You can turn on your computer and have it be a Windows PC, or turn it on and have it be a Mac. While this is useful (for more details see my previous post on the subject) for occasionally running Windows-only software like games, it’s anything but seamless, and there’s almost no real benefit besides saving desk space over just buying an actual PC. The recently released Parallels software is another option for running Windows on your Mac: It provides an environment similar to the old Virtual PC , where Windows, and Windows applications, run in a window on your Mac. This is better than a dual-boot situation; you may lose a tiny bit of speed, but not much, because Parallels on an Intel Mac is not an emulator like Virtual PC on a PowerPC Mac; it’s a “virtualization machine” and therefore runs at near-native speed. The problem with it is that it’s still not seamless. Parallels is one application on your Mac; all your Windows applications run within that application, in a window with the Windows desktop in it. Functional, but ugly, and a bit of a pain to work with.

The ideal solution is something called a “compatibility layer.” This will allow Windows applications to exist side-by-side with Mac applications—completely seamlessly. Done right, the only way you’ll know which kind of application you’re running is by how it (the application itself) looks and behaves. Instead of being like having a Windows machine on your Mac, it would be like simply running Windows applications in the same way you run Mac applications. In a perfect world, Windows apps would exist on your hard drive right next to your Mac apps and documents and files, with the only distinguishable difference being in the icon. Mac OS 9 (Classic) applications work exactly like this on PowerPC-based OS X machines now. There is currently no way to do this, but the Darwine project is working on it, and this is what is promised by the Leopard screenshots mentioned above.

Consequences

What are the ups and downs of this last method? Well, the ups are obvious. Being able to run any Windows application natively on my Mac without having to deal with the horrid Windows operating system is, as mentioned above, the Holy Grail of computing. There have been many times where some service or game or function that I wanted to access or use was only available for Windows, and I didn’t have a Windows machine or emulator, so I and my beloved Mac were left out in the cold.

The downs are a little more interesting. Viruses are obviously the biggest threat. I don’t need to describe here how horrible the virus situation is in the Windows world. Running Windows on your Mac obviously exposes you to virus risks that are currently nonexistent for OS X. Dual booting is no more or less risky than simply using a Windows box. Your Mac is a Windows box then. The situation is similar running virtualization software; whatever partition of your hard drive is dedicated to Windows is vulnerable to Windows viruses. The virus risk for compatibility layers is an unknown; we’ve never seen one in the wild, so it’s hard to tell. There’s reason to hope, for solutions like Darwine, that the virus risk would be somewhat lessened, as you’re running Windows applications, but not Windows itself. With the hypothetical Leopard version, however, it doesn’t look like that would apply, as the screenshots imply that Windows is running in the background (just like Mac OS 9 does for Classic now). It could even increase your Mac’s exposure to viruses if, as I suggest above, Windows applications reside on the same logical drive that your Mac applications do…which is why it won’t be done that way.

But there’s a much more important potential “down,” that I mentioned in detail in my previous post on the subject: That the ability to run Windows software on your Mac will serve as a serious disincentive for developers to write new software on the Mac. This was my biggest fear before, and is echoed by others, for instance this comment on MacRumors : “[Running Windows apps natively]= the end of native Mac development as we know it.”

I certainly understand why people might think so, but I no longer do. See, my Economics classes have finally started to have some effect in my brain, and I think the process will work itself out quite differently from the “Those Macies can just fire up Windows if they need to use our software. Ha ha ha (evil laugh)” scenario. In fact, given the insights from my Economics classes, I suspect it might be just the opposite: The ability to seamlessly run Windows apps on the Mac will attract millions (yes, millions ) of new Mac users. This will increase the Mac’s market-, user-, and mind-share dramatically. These new converts from Windows will run their old Windows software, sure, but as time goes on, they will gradually migrate to Mac OS X applications (exactly as happened during the transition from OS 9 to OS X via Classic), because of the greater esthetic value, interoperability, compatibility and functionality of Mac software on the Mac platform vs. Windows software on the Mac platform. Besides (and this is really the killer point), it doesn’t matter if they migrate or not. Maybe they will all keep using the old software they’ve got until it’s so old that it’s useless. Still, when they go to buy new software, they will look for Mac software first. If they can’t find any at wherever they’re looking, sure, they’ll buy Windows software and use that. No big loss. The point is, though, that a developer that offers a Mac version of their software has an opportunity to make a sale that the developer of Windows-only software will miss out on. This will provide a powerful incentive for software developers to program for the Mac. No, this won’t cause every single Windows publisher to put out a Mac version. Not by a long shot. But, if Leopard does include native Windows support, and if that in fact causes a boom of Mac switcher sales, expect the amount of Mac software (and, possibly, even Mac-only software) to increase, not decrease.

Gavin Shearer of Microsoft has an interesting article with a similar perspective on this issue.

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Update: June 17, 2013

The screenshots turned out to be fake, and Darwine never quite materialized, but Wine came to the Mac, and, more importantly, has been polished and published as Crossover . However, sadly, the seamless experience I envisioned has not yet come to pass. Crossover is an application that runs (many) Windows programs. While those programs run in their own windows and not in some Windows environment, compatibility is spotty, and Windows programs don’t even have their own Dock icons (though that is changing). As it turned out, the virtual machines—Parallels and Fusion —came to be the most seamless methods. While they are running a full copy of Windows in the background—and Crossover/Wine doesn’t—they can launch Windows apps in what Parallels calls “coherence mode” which works essentially the way Classic did: You don’t see Windows, only whatever program you’re running, with its own Dock icon and everything. The benefits of using Crossover (which is all I use to run Windows programs on my Mac) are twofold: It’s a lot cheaper ($40, with no need to buy a Windows license), and you’re not running Windows on your Mac, which greatly reduces the threat of viruses and is probably faster (I haven’t done any testing). But the price you pay is a lot of tweaking and troubleshooting to get the programs you want working properly—and sometimes they won’t work at all.

Insanity

(updated)

Alright, I haven’t posted here in a looong time, and frankly hadn’t intended to, but an item I ran across has incensed me so much that I just couldn’t stop myself.

The essence of the story is this: A passenger asks too many questions during the airline screening process, and is subsequently held, interrogated, bullied and threatened with arrest by government officials. The story is actually a bit scarier than that, but I’m wanting to focus on something else: the fact that simply asking questions makes you a suspect in our War on Terror.

Let’s think about this for a minute. What sort of person is likely to be asking awkward questions during a security screening? A terrorist? Good God, no. Asking questions is the last thing a criminal or terrorist is likely to do. “What if the terrorists are investigating the security system?” one might ask. What if they are? Again, the last thing a competent terrorist (and al Qaeda has shown that, if nothing else, it is competent) would do is to actually ask about the security; it might draw attention, and therefore suspicion, to themselves. No, what actual terrorists will do is send someone through the targeted checkpoint several times. Heck, make him a regular flyer; a familiar face. In fact, if he is going to ask any questions, it will be of the names of the screeners, so he can say, “Hi, Bob, how’s it going today?” He will become familiar; ingratiated; a no-threat. Someone that gets the most cursory pat-down, or gets to bypass the more intrusive measures, because he’s “safe.”

That’s the high-investment scenario. It’s risky, because you still might get caught when you actually have the weapon or explosive on you. Another is the shotgun approach: send a bunch of people through a bunch of checkpoints a bunch of times, so that you get a notion of what behaviors are safe, of what always gets checked, what usually gets checked, and what only rarely or exceptionally gets checked. Then, on der Tag, send twenty different people (carrying weapons, or explosives, or whatever) though twenty different checkpoints at twenty different airlines at as close to the same time as possible. Sure, some of them will get caught, and your terrorist ring is busted; but there is a strong likelihood, if you’ve done your homework, that several will get through to do the mission.

There are other possibilities, which I’m not going to go into here; this isn’t a terrorist training manual. Heck, for all I know, the two ideas above are horrible ones that would never work for some reason. The point is that no intelligent terrorist is ever going to ask awkward questions. They’re not interested in civil liberties. They’re not afraid of humiliation. Their only interest is to get through the process without calling attention and suspicion to themselves.

So if detaining and interrogating question-askers and rights-asserters doesn’t do anything to harm or deter terrorists, who does it harm?

Why, you and me, of course.

Even if we never fly on an airplane, it harms us. Intimidating, bullying and threatening someone who simply asks what his rights are has only one effect: to condition us never to question authority. It doesn’t stop terrorists. It doesn’t hurt terrorists. In fact, if, as President Bush claims , what the terrorists hate is our freedom, it helps the terrorists. By treating anyone outside of the norm as a suspect (note that I’m not talking about strange-but-quiet behaviors like what the SPOT program is targeting; SPOT is a good idea (update: er…or, well, maybe not )), we inculcate the idea that being in any way out-of-the-ordinary is criminal. By detaining those who question the system, we ensure that the system is never questioned. By refusing to publish the rules , we condition the people to accept whatever they are told.

How is this anti-terror?

It’s not.

It’s anti-freedom.

It’s anti-American.

Don’t for a moment think that this is going to end at the airline check-in counter. This is a precedent that will spread, and spread, until it ultimately dominates the American landscape, unless something is done.

Make no mistake: the American police state is here .