Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

"If it stops just one terrorist attack, it was worth it."

Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey

One writer using the pseudonym 'Le_SigNagE' on the Santarchy! (or also known as the Santacon) website commented, "... after all, this is what Christmas is really about… mindless vandalism and petty theft."

Amen.

40 alleged drunken Santas accused of running amok

This list is always good for a few gems.

These are the ideas that, for better and worse, helped make 2005 what it was. You'll find entries that address momentous developments in Iraq ("The Totally Religious, Absolutely Democratic Constitution") as well as less conspicuous, more ghoulish occurrences in Pittsburgh ("Zombie Dogs"). There are ideas that may inspire ("The Laptop That Will Save the World"), that may turn your stomach ("In Vitro Meat"), that may arouse partisan passions ("Republican Elitism") and that may solve age-old mysteries ("Why Popcorn Doesn't Pop"). Some mysteries, of course, still remain. For instance, we do not yet have an entirely satisfying explanation for how Mark Cuban, the outspoken Internet mogul and NBA owner, came to be connected with three of the year's most notable ideas ("Collapsing the Distribution Window," "Scientific Free-Throw Distraction" and "Splogs"). That was just one surprising discovery we made in the course of assembling the issue. In the pages that follow, we're sure you'll make your own

The Year In Ideas 2005

Mike the Usurper wrote:

On Dec. 12, the Federal District Court in Los Angeles will hear a lawsuit filed by a consortium of Christian high schools against the University of California system for refusing to credit some of their courses when their students apply for admission.

And if I were a university, I wouldn't count a course that said Thomas Jefferson was the anti-christ as something worthwhile either.

The Jefferson quote is over the top, but I don't see this quoted content as being grounds to refuse credit. You may be required to understand Thomas Jefferson in order to get into college, but you should not be required to like him. In order to refuse these students the State must establish that they do not gain the basic knowledge needed in order to comprehend college level material from these classes. If that is the case it will take a lot more then a few quotes to demonstrate it.

U: I did some more digging. This quotation sounds like the UC system might have some reasonable objections:

For example, a course titled "Christianity and Morality in American Literature" was rejected because it used an anthology as its only textbook — whereas UC requires that students read assigned works in their entirety; anthologies may not be the only required texts in literature courses.

On the other hand, the complaint includes some troubling statements which seem to indicate that UC has a problem with the perspective of the content rather then the content itself:

As a result of the orientation/approach of the texts in question, which expressly prioritize religion over science, a course relying on these texts as core instructional materials does not meet the faculty’s criteria for the UC subject “d” laboratory science requirement.

IMHO, denying a student entrance into public colleges soley because you don't agree with the religious point of view of the content they learned in private high school classes is precisely equivelent to requiring public high school classes to be taught from a religious point of view. It attempts to use the power of the state to force other people to accept a perspective on religion. That is an affront to the First Amendment.

RE: Here's the Problem With Emily Dickinson - New York Times

Over dinner a few weeks ago, the novelist Lawrence Naumoff told a troubling story. He asked students in his introduction to creative writing course at UNC-Chapel Hill if they had read Jack Kerouac. Nobody raised a hand. Then he asked if anyone had ever heard of Jack Kerouac. More blank expressions.

"I guess I've always known that many students are just taking my course to get a requirement out of the way," Naumoff said.

In our increasingly complex world, the amount of information required to master any particular discipline -- e.g. computers, life insurance, medicine -- has expanded geometrically. We are forced to become specialists, people who know more and more about less and less.

In this frightening new world, students do not turn to universities for mind expansion but vocational training.

When was the last time you met anyone who was ashamed because they didn't know something?

Lack of curiosity is curious

Jello wrote:
Boingboing indicating that this site had stories about sex with children... I'm not exactly feeling like championing this as an example of the new war on pron, myself.

Civil liberties aren't about stuff that you like. Stuff that you like doesn't need to be protected. Freedom of speech is about speech you don't like. As I said, from what I've read this site wasn't the sort of thing that you'd really want to read. In fact I'm sure that there are some really bad people associated with it. That is very much not important. It doesn't matter who, it matters why. What is important is that they've raided someone for writing stories. Stories don't exploit people. They are expressions of thought. Even if you really really don't like them, they are expressions of thought.

If you beleive that people ought to have the freedom to determine for themselves what they want to think, and to express those thoughts if they wish, then this case ought to be a problem for you. Its a litmus test, so to speak. If you don't think that these people ought to be able to do what they are doing, then you really don't beleive that people ought to have the freedom to determine their own thoughts. If you don't have the stomach to oppose this, then you don't really get what freedom of speech is all about.

It ought to be obvious that right out of the gate the FBI isn't going to start rounding up beat poets. They haven't enforced these laws in years. They are going to start with some cases that they think are easy wins. Furthermore, this site may have been valuable because the owner seems to indicate that they may have had personally identifying information about members. Its a big laundry list of people to check out. Maybe they'll find a real criminal on the list.

But put this in context. I don't mean to raise this site as a poster child for whats wrong with this sort of effort. However, its worth noting that this has actually started, and its worth noting where it is headed. They will build upon initial successes to pursue more ambitious cases. This case creates a framework wherein communities of people who are merely using the internet to communicate thoughts may find their computer systems confiscated and the government may be able to go through the membership lists and inprison the owners. Because of what they think. That framework is a problem, and if it is allowed to take hold and blossom it threatens all kinds of things that you DO like, including sites like this one.

The next time Vile shows up and spews a bunch of intentionally offensive crap at someone he doesn't like do I need to be worried that the FBI will shut the site down? No, but that day may be coming, and it makes sense to be aware that it is much closer now then it used to be.

First they came for the communists...

RE: The Bush Administration's porn war has begun

As the Gulf Coast reels from two catastrophic storms in a month, and the Carolinas and Florida deal with damage and debris from hurricanes this year and last, even some supporters of coastal development are starting to ask a previously unthinkable question: is it time to consider retreat from the coast?

The problem is that there are major earthquake risks in most of the rest of the US, but those things happen much less frequently. Ironically the safest areas in the country are probably the west-central quaridor (Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Montana, etc..) which are also the least populated.

Some Experts Say It's Time to Evacuate the Coast (for Good)

"Without a change on the level of ideas, any reconciliation of Islam and democracy is not going to come about.

Unless you fight out that battle on the plain of ideas and say it is perfectly legitimate to have a more liberal version of religion, then I think ultimately you will have long-term problems having genuine democracy in a Muslim country.

We should not minimise the fact that there is a conflict of ideas at the present, not with Islam as a religion but with particular interpretations of Islam."

There are some interesting quotes from Fukuyama in here, unfortunately spun together by a reporter who is trying to push him into a partisan pigeonhole. I don't think Fukuyama is a neoconservative any more then I think he is a democrat. His thinking is driven by observations and not ideaologies.

On a somewhat unrelated tangent, it strikes me that the fundamental problem with ideaologies is that people have a tendancy to prefer ideas that are philisophically pure to ideas that that actually work well for people in practice. This is because philiophical purity is easier to accept then messy reality with its endless caveats. Once you've got an ideaology you can reach a conclusion on any issue based on how that ideaology informs you to think about the matter rather then based on the actual realities of the matter itself. This fallacy seems the core problem at all ends of the spectrum. It infects communists, fundamentalists, and libertarians alike. Most idealogical (and partisan) commentators frame their points of view as "the other guy's ideology doesn't work in practice, so we should prefer the most pure form of my ideaology." In order to move past this we must get people to observe that ideaologies don't work. In order to do that, there must be a word for the ideaological fallacy. What is that word? Does anyone here know?

Francis Fukuyama: The acceptable face of the neo-cons? | Al-Ahram Weekly | Profile

noteworthy wrote:
This paper by Steven Huybrechts won the National Defense University President's Award for Excellence in Writing in 2004. It's an interesting fusion of influences, many of which may be familiar to the MemeStreams community.

This is a awefully self serving perspective for an American to have. We don't run our internal government based on this philosophy and we don't seem to have this level of problem with it. The USA is unlikely to fragement, present political polarization notwithstanding, and the breakup of Canada predicted by one of the papers you reference is an idea that is as out of date as the reference. This reasoning here is also a little circular. World Government must operate on a might makes right model or it will degenerate into a might makes right model?!

We're biologically wired to do a lot of things that we don't actually do because in this society they are stupid things to do. The very definition of civilisation is the ability to rise above base instinct. There are certainly people in this world who are uncivilized. For example, people who chant "God is great" while dragging charred bodies through the streets. This is not something we ought to aspire to.

I think World Government must serve the interests of the people it represents. To the degree that representatives are not democratically selected the interests of the people are not represented. Even in the US we do not choose our UN rep directly. A person who is elected by electors we elected nominates someone who is approved by people we elected. The degree of indirection introduces a great deal of difference between the perspective of the representative and the perspective of the represented. Our UN rep represents a political party and not a country.

Of course, undemocratic countries are far worse. I'm somewhat sympathetic to Fukuyama's proposal for a league of democratic states. If Syria isn't qualified to participate in what we consider a reasonable world government then we shouldn't include them until they are prepared to represent the interests of their citizens. You aren't going to see the kind of leadership required to make that happen when everyone's attitude about the rest of the world is "fuck it, who cares."

Clearly, the US is not constrained by international law, and needed to demonstrate that to the middle east. The UN offers a forum for these people to present their views but we cannot allow them to use it to forward interests through some process technicality which are not in line with that of their people or the rest of the world.

On the other hand, many people in the United States are tremendously ignorant about the rest of the world. Americans aren't unique in this respect, but the ratio of ignorance to access here is probably unparralleled. "I don't know a damn thing about France" is rapidly becoming "The French are obviously irrelevent, all they do is surrender." Any student of Chinese history will tell you that when ignorance gives way to hubris you're one step away from a revolution.

RE: The Biology of Conflict [PDF]

Read your Neal, you geek!

It's not every day that Neal Stephenson writes an op-ed.

In the spring of 1977, "Star Wars" wasn't famous yet. The only people who had heard about it were what are now called geeks.

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