Bash­ing Greens Won’t Help. Enough of chads, but­ter­fly bal­lots and the whole lot. Let’s say that we should have a democ­racy, and that it should work. After all, peo­ple died for the right to vote, and everyone’s vote should count. I also hap­pen to think that peo­ple should be able to vote their con­science, and vote for what they believe in. I’d like to work on mak­ing a democ­racy that lives up to that poten­tial, which means that even third par­ties should be able to par­tic­i­pate (remem­ber that the Greens had to lit­i­gate to get on the bal­lot in nine states, which is some­what of a chal­lenge to democ­racy in itself).

But here’s a bit of advice for those who don’t sup­port Nader or other Greens. If you don’t like the Green can­di­dates, don’t vote for them. And if you want to win an elec­tion, go out and get some folks to vote for you — like that 50 per­cent of the Amer­i­can vot­ers who rep­re­sent the largest party in Amer­ica, the non­vot­ers. On the way, you might build a party and a plat­form with some integrity, not just insults. (link)

There’s a lot of Demo­c­ra­tic par­ti­sans that need to lis­ten to this. If you want the Green vote, go out and win it, don’t try to intim­i­date Greens to vote Demo­c­ra­tic by blam­ing them for Bush. This is a democ­racy not a play­ground. [Al-Muhajabah’s Islamic Blogs]

The same applies to lib­er­tar­i­ans. What’s the point of vot­ing if you don’t vote for peo­ple who will actu­ally rep­re­sent you?

Eman­ci­pat­ing Hard Dri­ves. Eric Canute­son, whose real estate invest­ment com­pany is reg­is­tered as a Los Ange­les County ven­dor, reports receiv­ing the fol­low­ing notice the other day from Joe San­doval, man­ager of pur­chas­ing and con­tract ser­vices at the county’s Inter­nal Ser­vices Department:

The County of Los Ange­les actively pro­motes and is com­mit­ted to ensure a work envi­ron­ment that is free from any dis­crim­i­na­tory influ­ence be it actual or per­ceived. As such, it is the County’s expec­ta­tion that our man­u­fac­tur­ers, sup­pli­ers and con­trac­tors make a con­cen­trated effort to ensure that any equip­ment, sup­plies or ser­vices that are pro­vided to County depart­ments do not pos­sess or por­tray an image that may be con­strued as offen­sive or defam­a­tory in nature.

We would request that each man­u­fac­turer, sup­plier and con­trac­tor review, iden­tify and remove/change any iden­ti­fi­ca­tion or label­ing of equip­ment or com­po­nents thereof that could be inter­preted as dis­crim­i­na­tory or offen­sive in nature before such equip­ment is sold or oth­er­wise pro­vided to any County depart­ment. Thank you in advance for your coöper­a­tion and assistance.

As Canute­son notes, Master/Slave is a stan­dard des­ig­na­tion not only for invol­un­tary servi­tude (and kinky sex­ual rela­tion­ships) but also for com­puter com­po­nents. L.A. County pre­sum­ably also frowns on ref­er­ences to “male” and “female” plumb­ing and elec­tri­cal parts. [Hit & Run]

Wouldn’t this silly direc­tive con­sti­tute a “dis­crim­i­na­tory influ­ence” against elec­tri­cal engineers?

Dif­fi­cult Days…. They’ve been bomb­ing houses in Tikrit and other areas! Unbelievable

Does Not Com­pute!. Dan­ger, John Der­byshire! Dan­ger! Dan­ger! The recent Mass­a­chu­setts deci­sion on gay mar­riage appears to have caused the equiv­a­lent of a divide-by-zero error in the cir­cuitry of con­ser­v­a­tive brains, which are short cir­cuit­ing en masse. The spate of fran­tic com­ments seen in the last twenty four hours may col­lec­tively make less sense than every­thing con­ser­v­a­tives have said on the topic up to this point… which is pretty impres­sive.
It takes a spe­cial kind of hos­til­ity to equal rights, for exam­ple, to descend to the point where the fol­low­ing inane argu­ments count as “thought­ful”:
bq. Under the tra­di­tional restric­tions, a man can­not marry his daugh­ter, or, a for­tiori, is son, and so if he leaves them a very large inher­i­tance, it is taxed, although what he leaves his wife is not taxed. But under a gen­eral license to ‘marry’ another man, a man could marry his son, and thus pass his prop­erty to the son tax-free. […]
[W]hat if two men who are part­ners in crime take the pre­cau­tion of mar­ry­ing, so that they can each be sure that the other one won’t turn state’s evi­dence at trial, should they be caught?
So, despite the fact that a gen­eral right to marry some­one of the oppo­site sex hasn’t com­pelled us to allow father/daughter mar­riages, a gen­eral right to marry some­one of your own sex is (appar­ently) going to require us to license father/son mar­riage. And while the spousal priv­i­lege loop­hole is appar­ently not cause for con­cern when it comes to mixed-gender partners-in-crime, so many male crim­i­nal part­ner­ships will “take the pre­cau­tion” of mar­ry­ing first that we’ll have to dis­pense with it.
Der­byshire ear­lier won­dered whether cell­mates might now marry (the point? your guess is as good as mine), while fel­low Cor­ner­ite Stan Kurtz linked an only barely more coher­ent piece that pushes the lim­its of even Mag­gie Gallagher’s prodi­gious pow­ers of vacu­ity. Appar­ently, the notion that you should be allowed to marry the per­son you love, whether or not you intend to have chil­dren, is equiv­a­lent to the claim “that chil­dren don’t need moth­ers and fathers.” Per­mit­ting child­less cou­ples also, it seems, amounts to “conduct[ing] a great social exper­i­ment on chil­dren.” Because, you see… err, no, I can’t even come up with a face­tious line of argu­ment on which that fol­lows. [Hit & Run]

Christina Stokes at Scotsman.com -

Strip search that spares your blushes — mil­lime­ter wave tech­nol­ogy
that replaces the declothed body with a computer-generated
man­nequin. This some­how makes it “OK” to search you with­out your
con­sent and with­out a war­rant. It’s fight­ing ter­ror­ism, don’t you
know. For the chil­dren. Not yet ready for prime time, but the
jack­boots are work­ing furi­ously. [claire]
bq.
The pow­er­ful scan­ner, which was devel­oped by Amer­i­can sci­en­tists, uses
mil­lime­tre waves to see through clothes. It works because the fibres
in clothes are less than a mil­lime­tre across, allow­ing the light waves
to pass right through them.

A spe­cial cam­era using the waves can see through clothes as eas­ily as
we can see through glass. And the pic­ture it cre­ates can be seen on a
screen so oper­a­tors can see not just if a per­son is car­ry­ing arms, but
also drugs and plas­tic explo­sives. Non-metallic ille­gal sub­stances
like these are not picked up by nor­mal air­port scanners.

…

The scan­ner could even­tu­ally be used not just in air­ports and train
sta­tions but in all pub­lic places.

Petil­lot explained: “At the moment there is no real way of check­ing
fans com­ing into a foot­ball sta­dium or pupils going into a school to
see if they are car­ry­ing knives.

“The mil­lime­tre wave tech­nol­ogy needs peo­ple to pause for a sec­ond at
the moment. But it’s pos­si­ble that when the scan­ning soft­ware is
devel­oped it could get quick enough to scan crowds pass­ing through
turn­stiles into a foot­ball match.”

Another advan­tage of mil­lime­tre wave scan­ners over cur­rent tech­nol­ogy
is they do not inter­fere with pacemakers.

Petil­lot said: “The cam­era just receives the rays a per­son emits,
rather than send­ing out waves itself. So it doesn’t inter­fere with
pace­mak­ers and there are no risks involved in peo­ple going through the
scanner.”

And Petil­lot believes sim­i­lar tech­nol­ogy could be used to scan lor­ries
and trains cross­ing bor­ders for ille­gal immi­grants.
[End the War on Free­dom]

Gay Mar­riage OK in Bay State. bq. Mass­a­chu­setts’ Supreme Judi­cial Court on Tues­day opened the door for mar­riage licenses to be issued to same-sex cou­ples, rul­ing that the state may not deny them licenses.

Arti­cle here.

Update: deci­sion here.

[Hit & Run]

It’s a pleas­ant sur­prise to read of a pro-freedom deci­sion com­ing from the People’s Repub­lic of Massachusetts.

Now that we are com­mit­ted to rapid elec­tions in Iraq – with­out con­sti­tu­tional safe­guards – what will we do if the coun­try goes Islamist and wants to pat­tern the régime after Iran?  Will we annul the elec­tions?  [John Robb’s Weblog]

More likely the Feds will sim­ply refuse to allow any can­di­dates who won’t do what they’re told. That’s the way the UN oper­ates in the Balkans, there’s no rea­son to think Iraq will be any different.

In Case You Missed This. This deep in today’s Wash­ing­ton Post arti­cle about the bomb that killed at least 23 peo­ple at the Ital­ian base in Nasiriyah, Iraq: “And at a road­block in Fal­lu­jah, a restive city west of the cap­i­tal, U.S. troops fired on a truck car­ry­ing live chick­ens Tues­day night, killing five civilians.

“They went to bring chick­ens … and they came back at 9 or 10 at night and we were wait­ing for them,” Khalid Khal­ifa Jumaily, whose two nephews were killed on the truck, told the news ser­vice. “The Amer­i­cans fired on them.”

The U.S. mil­i­tary said it no [sic] imme­di­ate infor­ma­tion on the shootings.”

There’s no attempt at link­age, and Fal­lu­jah is far from Nasiriyah; the Post is just using the Ital­ian bomb arti­cle as a catch-all for other war vio­lence not worth high­light­ing or report­ing in any more detailed fash­ion. [LewRockwell.com Blog]

The gov­ern­ment seems deter­mined to make sure that the Iraqis don’t get any ideas about actu­ally being free now.

Iraq offered U.S. deal to avert war. Just days before U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq, offi­cials claim­ing to speak for a fran­tic Iraqi régime made a last-ditch effort to avert the war, but U.S. offi­cials rebuffed the over­ture, the inter­me­di­ary and U.S. offi­cials said Thurs­day. [PittsburghLive.com]

As I pointed out back in March, the Feds came right out and said that they intended to con­quer Iraq no mat­ter what the Iraqis did. Here’s an arti­cle from LewRockwell.com on this subject.

FRIEDMAN VS. FRIEDMAN. The box­ing match of the year…no, month…no, day…well, whatever…is explained here.

More and more, I’m con­vinced that one of the major rea­sons the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion and its sup­port­ers con­tinue to get away with so much is because almost no one remem­bers any­thing. Thus, many of them can main­tain their insuf­fer­able sense of moral supe­ri­or­ity end­lessly — even when they con­tra­dict what they them­selves have said in the past, and even when count­less facts under­mine their most basic… [The Light of Rea­son]

I’ve noticed this myself. All of the Cru­saders seem to be gen­er­ally either unable or unwill­ing to remem­ber any­thing that hap­pened in the past–even the recent past. The excep­tions are when one of them makes a his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ence which refutes what­ever he’s try­ing to say, as in the case of Bush’s recent com­par­i­son of Iraq to the Phillip­ine War.