"I don't think the report is true, but these crises work for those who want to make fights between people." Kulam Dastagir, 28, a bird seller in Afghanistan
New York Daily News - Daily Dish & Gossip - Final curtain at CBGB
Topic: Music
12:11 pm EDT, Oct 9, 2006
A performance by punk pioneer and CBGB alumna Patti Smith next Sunday will be the final show at the legendary lower East Side music club before the doors close for good on Oct. 31.
In the days since the killings in a schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pa., the tone from the grieving Amish community has been not of despair or revenge, but of forgiveness.
A relative of 13-year-old Marian Fisher, one of the children shot by Charles Carl Roberts, 32, extended an invitation to Roberts' widow to attend the girl's funeral. The Amish woman told a reporter, "It's our Christian love to show to her we have not any grudges against her." ... Still, anyone who has ever set out on the winding road to forgiveness knows it is easier to talk the talk than to walk the walk. This week the Amish have offered all of us a superb lesson on how to make the talk and the walk intersect.
SecuriTeam Blogs - The Spamhaus case, a spam-savvy Illinois lawyer perspective
Topic: Spam
1:27 pm EDT, Oct 7, 2006
Make no mistake: this is serious.
A court in illinois has ordered ICANN to kill the Spamhaus domain name because a spammer sued to have their name removed from a list of spammers, and got a default judgement, and Spamhaus won't comply.
This made me angry at first, because clearly the plaintiff here is a spammer and is using the legal system as a means of harrassment, but the attitude of Spamhaus toward the court is also a problem. What if Spamhaus did illegitimately list someone and then acted like this when issued a TRO?
"It has become clear that Internet access in itself is a vulnerability that we cannot mitigate. We have tried incremental steps and they have proven insufficient." - Undersecretary of Commerce Mark Foulon
Cato Unbound » Blog Archive » The Case for the Libertarian Democrat
Topic: Politics and Law
2:23 am EDT, Oct 6, 2006
For too long, Republicans promised smaller government and less intrusion in people’s lives. Yet with a government dominated top to bottom by Republicans, we’ve seen the exact opposite. No one will ever mistake a Democrat of just about any stripe for a doctrinaire libertarian. But we’ve seen that one party is now committed to subverting individual freedoms, while the other is growing increasingly comfortable with moving in a new direction, one in which restrained government, fiscal responsibility and—most important of all—individual freedoms are paramount.
This is Kos, at Cato, talking about libertarian democrats. Its an interesting read. The responses are, I think, more interesting. They fall into several categories:
1. The liberal hater: I hate Kos because he is a popular liberal blogger. Liberals are responsibile for everything that is wrong with the world.
2. The wannabe libertarian: I am a partisan Republican (often, a social conservative) who would vote for a Republican no matter what, but I tell my friends I'm a libertarian because I think it sounds cool, so Kos must be wrong because clearly I am a libertarian but I'd never vote for a Democrat.
3. The anarcho-capitalist: Kos fails to address the idea that the only reason corporations can be coercive is the power governments grant them, ergo, Kos is wrong.
(This one is confusing. Apparently these people are unaware that Republicans also regulate markets. Democrats might have traditionally regulated markets more than Republicans, but there is more to his point than this...)
4. The disillusioned libertarian.
This is the response that I think is interesting. The disillusioned libertarians get something that the anarcho-capitalists are missing:
The Republican Party has become corrupted by power.
I'm not talking about Jack Abramoff. I'm talking about NSA surveillance, unlawful enemy combatants, and national security letters.
Republicans have spent years arguing, rightly, that government is a dangerous, coercive thing that ought to be contained, and yet the moment they gain control of both houses of Congress, the Whitehouse, and the Court (whether they beleive it or not) they have decided, instead, that there is absolutely no problem with big government as long as they are running it.
There is absolutely no assumption of unchecked executive power which is so dangerous or far-reaching that today's Republicans won't embrace it and fight for it.
Their's is a fantasy land in which everyone accused of terrorism is guilty and government officials never commit crimes or abuse their authority. Perhaps some are not so stupid, but they don't care, because they figure they'll never personally be the victim of such abuse. Either way, they don't seem to beleive in checks and balances, nor do they seem to believe that there ought be a limit to their ever expanding coercive power.
So, lets say you start a project, and from the outset, this project is controversial. Unfortunately, you set unrealistic expectations for this project, and, eventually, you conclude that you cannot succeed. If you conceed defeat, it will be perceived as weakness, and all of your naysayers will claim they were right. Shuting down the project will also create a festering mess that you will be held responsible for. What you do in this situation is stick to your guns, but behave just incompetantly enough to get yourself fired. You get replaced with one of your naysayers, who shuts down the project, causing the inevitable mess. You then get to claim, from the sidelines, that your naysayers were wrong, that the project should have continued, and the mess is the naysayer's fault. You live to fight another day.
In addition, behavior-recognition teams will be dispatched throughout the subway and bus system as part of the program. Those officers will be authorized to search a person’s bag if they believe it is warranted.
I don't buy the arguement that this is constitutional. It doesn't fit the parameters of the NYC system. Specifically "behavioral teams" are looking for anyone who might be nervous. This is targeted, not random, and doesn't rise to probable cause.