The Exercise of Vital Powers

The Republican Hero of the Week award goes to Sen. John Ensign (NV) for objecting to a senate bill that would spend $9 Billion more on Medicaid.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/novak/cst-edt-novak29.html

Apparently there is a block of GOP Senators looking to put a stop to the run away spending. They are:

Sen. John McCain (AZ)
Sen. John Ensign (NV)
Sen. John Sununu (NH)
Sen. Tom Coburn (OK)
Sen. Lindsey Graham (SC)
Sen. Jim DeMint (SC)

I’m finding it interesting that McCain – someone I have little love for due to BCRA – is leading the charge against his party’s leadership on spending. Last April at the Libertarian Party of North Carolina’s convention, I predicted a split within the GOP over this issue. As the Democrats become less and less potent as a political force there will be less and less reason for the big government (in both fiscal and social matters) Republicans to stick with the small government Republicans. One side will win control of the GOP, the others will form their own third party. Not knowing who will win control of the GOP, I can’t tell if another Democrat->Dixiecrat->Republican migration will play out like we saw in 1948.

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2005/09/rainforest_iowa.html

As many of you know, my home state of Iowa has worked for years to promote the Iowa Child Project – a grassroots effort to restore Iowa’s depleted rainforests, which were destroyed some 400 million years ago by unregulated brontosaurus development and careless asteroids. The centerpiece of this critically needed environmental program is the Iowa Rainforest Project, a planned 85 acre glass-enclosed tropical bio-vegi-dome/ entertainment complex/ factory outlet mall slated for construction next to the I-80 Citgo Truck Haven in Coralville.

A very funny Dave Barryesque read. The best part is the cost effective nature of the plan.

Professionalized Federal Airport Security Screeners abandon their posts in Houston causing massive delays in getting people out.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N22319162.htm

From a report on how the Federal Government could save money in the wake of KatrinaRita:
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the nation’s accounting watchdog, has seen cost overruns of $47 million on its building projects. The SEC’s building project costs, initially estimated to total $22 million, have instead tripled to $69 million. The implementation of effective accounting controls would not just yield savings from building projects – increased efficiencies across the agency have the potential to yield even greater savings and benefits.

Anyone need me to point out the irony here? link

Local New Orleans official hordes relief supplies

Great news! The War on Terror is over! Apparently America is now safe from Islamofacist ner-do-wells who want to blow up our building and kill lots of civilians.

Early last month, the [FBI] bureau’s Washington Field Office began recruiting for a new anti-obscenity squad. Attached to the job posting was a July 29 Electronic Communication from FBI headquarters to all 56 field offices, describing the initiative as “one of the top priorities” of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales….

The new squad will divert eight agents, a supervisor and assorted support staff to gather evidence against “manufacturers and purveyors” of pornography — not the kind exploiting children, but the kind that depicts, and is marketed to, consenting adults.

“I guess this means we’ve won the war on terror,” said one exasperated FBI agent, speaking on the condition of anonymity because poking fun at headquarters is not regarded as career-enhancing. “We must not need any more resources for espionage.”

Down in Miami its even better:

When FBI supervisors in Miami met with new interim U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta last month, they wondered what the top enforcement priority for Acosta and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would be.

Would it be terrorism? Organized crime? Narcotics trafficking? Immigration? Or maybe public corruption?

The agents were stunned to learn that a top prosecutorial priority of Acosta and the Department of Justice was none of the above. Instead, Acosta told them, it’s obscenity. Not pornography involving children, but pornographic material featuring consenting adults.

[...]

Sources say Acosta was told by the FBI officials during last month’s meeting that obscenity prosecution would have to be handled by the crimes against children unit. But that unit is already overworked and would have to take agents off cases of child endangerment to work on adult porn cases. Acosta replied that this was Attorney General Gonzales’ mandate.

So long as we protect children from possible exposure to smut it doesn’t matter how many are abused by pedophiles, right?

Law.com post on the Miami edict here

WaPo article on the FBI recruitment drive here

Click the Image to the right to see the latest DHS Color Code Advisory scheme

Marcus Ranum (one of the inventors of the Firewall) has puslished an article on the top six dumbest ideas in computer security. #2 is Enumerating Badness – the practice of trying to come up with all the different ways someone could hack a system, then going about trying to protect against those various ways.

Problem is, that doesn’t work. You can’t think of everything someone will try. How many times did we hear “Who ever thought of Terrorists using planes as weapons?” after 9/11? (It turns out several people did – but that is beyond my point). Trying to anticipate how people will attack us then putting in place measures to guard against that attack doesn’t work.

But we still do it. Manly because we have a media that is shallow and focused on attention grabbing headlines, and politicans who govern by press-release.

Politician: “Something bad is happened. Congress must pass a law!”

Our esteemed(sic) Governor tried that recently when he instituted price controls after there was a media induced panic over fuel supplies. Any economist to the right of Karl Marx will tell you that rises in price are the market’s natural way of reducing demand, but being a politican, Perdue had to do something. Letting problems work themselves out naturally isn’t allowed when there are press-releases to be issued.

This stupid reliance on movie plot threats is the reason we have to take off our shoes before boarding a plane, but no one has worried about security the large fleet of trucks no one thinks twice about being parked in front of buildings. You can’t take nail clippers on a airplane, yet less than one percent of the cargo containers are screened. Last time I entered the Empire State Building I had to turn over my leatherman – apparently there were worried someone would hijack the building and fly it into some airplanes.

Of course all the attacks I just mentioned — suitcase nukes in cargo containers and hijacked delivery truck bombs — are just more movie plot ideas. For every billion dollars we spend on prevention there is another bad USA Networks movie of the week.

Maybe we should focus our efforts on detection and mitigation, and leave the disaster scenarios to Hollywood.

The AJC is reporting that the Fulton County School Board is trying to eminent domain the future site of a private Jewish school in Sandy Springs. While building schools can possibly be a valid use if eminent domain in my book, I find it very suspicious that the Fulton School Board is going after a privately run school.

AJC story is here.

Hat tip to Boortz

The Times Picayune is reporting the real reason why Nagin wants to re-populate New Orleans.

With about 75,000 Hurricane Katrina evacuees remaining in Red Cross shelters in several states, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is trying to organize them, especially black New Orleans residents, to help them return home before next year’s political elections.

The Feds are saying they don’t think its safe. There is another Tropical Storm headed into the gulf. Army Corp of Engineers is not sure the levees could withstand another storm of any size. Yet the mayor is desperately trying to get people back into the city ASAP before the decide to settle down where they are.

Smart Move Nagin. Not.

That is the only message I can take from the fact that the chief of disaster recovery for Louisiana’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness was in New York this week speaking at a symposium.

Speaking at a symposium in New York, Arthur Jones, chief of disaster recovery for Louisiana’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said he was caught off guard by the violence in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina….
Jones said the flow of aid to the city was delayed because officials were not able to guarantee the safety of American Red Cross workers and other volunteers.

Thats strange Mr. Jones, I thought you told the Red Cross to stay out of the city:

The state Homeland Security Department had requested–and continues to request–that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

In other news, Blanco is complaining that FEMA isn’t collecting the bodies fast enough, yet:
Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesman David Passey said the state asked to take over body recovery last week. “The collection of bodies is not normally a FEMA responsibility,” he said.

So once more the state of Louisiana screws up and lies about it. But its still all George Bush’s fault.

Now, does anyone wonder why GA is # 50 in SAT scores, when the freaking school administrators can’t spell?

From Tech Central Station (link):

How important on a man’s list of values is being right about the theory of the development of species? If you are a biologist, it might matter to you passionately; but if you are a farmer trying to raise your kids to be good people, it will matter far more to you what their basic metaphors about the universe will be.

That is a valid point. However when that kid is sitting in Biology class, they are being taught about how life works not where it came from. In the case of Creationism, Intelligent Design or the The Flying Spaghetti Monster, it is not the study of how life works and therefore should be in a more appropriate venue, like philosophy class – something that would probably be far more useful than the crap that passes for public school curriculum these days.

What amazes me are the people who honestly believe that the Bible is the word of God. I’ve actually heard people say “If the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, its good enough for me”. Beyond the various political machinations involved with the multiple translations of the Gospels from the original Aramaic, Greek or Hebrew into Latin, then in the 1600s into English, what makes people think that what God told us two to five thousand years ago still pertains to modern life? Consider:

You have a small child, perhaps 4 years old. He asks: “Daddy, where do babies come from?”. How do you answer?
“Well son, first a man’s penis get erect, then he sticks it into the woman’s vagina…..” or “They are delivered by storks”?

You’ll probably go with something along the lines of the latter version. Your child is too young to understand the full significances of the truth. As they get older you will (hopefully) teach them the truth. The Stork is a metaphor.

Now, engage in some blasphemy with me:
You are God. Your creations, the humans, ask “where did we come from?” – now back when humans were first asking God this question, we weren’t much more advanced than the four year old. We thought the world was flat (“Gosh, gee it sure looks it”), had no knowledge of basic chemistry, biology, DNA, or the existence of extinct species. If you were God, which explanation would you offer:
1) “Well you see, there are these microscopic molecules inside each of your cells called Deoxyribonucleic acid. In those molecules are the basic instructions for building your body…”
or
2) “Well, on the 6th day I created you in my image”

God told us a message that was appropriate to our stage of development as a species. God also gave us brains. Big ones. Brains big enough to figure out that the Earth actually revolves around the Sun, that if you mix green and yellow peas 25% of the time you get yellow peas, that there are microscopic molecules inside each of your cells called Deoxyribonucleic acid, and that different species change over time due to changes in their environment.

We don’t need God to tell us that the world wasn’t created in 6 days. He gave us the tools to figure it out ourselves! And I suspect he is quite peeved we are too stubborn not to accept it.

This way of thinking applies to other things God has “told us”. For example, assuming the KJV is the actual word of God, he said:

“If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” Leviticus 20:13.

Now, if you are the benefactor of a tribe of people trying to eek out an existence on a barren plain of land, telling your people to have babies when they have sex makes a lot of sense. There are famines, hostile tribes, disease, and the occasional 40 day flood they have to contend with. You need to keep up the population of the tribe.

Of course some four thousand years latter there are 6.5 billion of us running around, a large portion of those are malnourished, we are making good progress on the disease front, and most of the hostile tribes are making the stuff that goes into our Wal-marts. Perhaps, just perhaps, Leviticus 20:13 doesn’t apply anymore.

But you counter, “God hasn’t told us it doesn’t apply anymore”.

But has he? Just like with God getting us to use our big fat brains to figure out the world wasn’t created in six days, perhaps he doesn’t need to use burning bushes and turning people into salt. We are older now, God can be more subtle.

Perhaps he is sending a message when a prominent conservative politician’s daughter, whom he loves dearly, tells him that she is gay.

All I’m saying is lets keep an open mind about what God wants. He made us smart. He knew what he was getting into. Lets not insult him by remaining the equlivant of that four year old as a species.