The Exercise of Vital Powers

Phil Zimmerman, creator of the really cool encryption program PGP, is working on an encryption system for Voice over IP telephony.

This is pretty cool and a slap in the face of the Patriot Act’s wiretapping provisions. With end to end encryption for a telephone call the only way it could be tapped is by bugging the physical hardware or hacking the operating system.

Assuming the Feds don’t silence Phil before its release (like they tried to do in 1993), this will be a really powerful privacy tool that the government can’t control.

http://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68306,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_5

Joe Seehusen announced his resignation as LP National Director today. His last day is August 5th, the day before the LNC meeting.

I’ve said for awhile that the LP was lucky to have Joe. He wasn’t the greatest administrative person - and even he admitted that - but he had the vision and the will to get the national LP involved in Washington politics in a real way. It was certainly better than the foot stomping tantrums the LP usually engages in.

When the LNC passed that insipid motion restricting the activity of HQ to only working on the DB conversion, it was a slap in the face of a staff that works long hours for crappy pay and has to take endless abuse from the membership. When the LNC didn’t remove the restrictions after the progress they made in the month since the resolution was passed I believe that was the last straw for Joe.

The National Party now faces two challenges: The rest of the staff is pissed at the LNC and ready to walk out, and second, Michael Dixon doesn’t have time to be Father, Consultant, Chair and ED. He was ready to quit if the LNC fired Joe in Dallas. I suspect he is readying his exit as I type.

Should Dixon resign the party is fubar. The bylaws don’t really say the Vice Chair will become Chair. Michael’s interpretation is that the person who got the second highest vote total would become chair. That’s George Phillies - the man who campaigns every convention to close down HQ and move it to some backwater town where the rent is cheap. That would pretty much undo all the credibility the LP has built up over the past few years. Only the marginal fringe will remain.

Which if you are trying to recruit people to join a faction of the GOP dedicated to slowing the encroachment of government is a good thing.

I want to thank Joe publicly for his kind words in his resignation and I hope he enjoys the rest of the summer with his family. I suspect we shall see him pop up somewhere working for the cause of liberty.

Nick Weininger over on Catallarchy makes a valid point about how problems can have multiple and simultaneous causes. He uses the examples or terrorism and two causes pushed by the right and libertarians: Islam and foreign occupation.

If we think of terrorism as a chemical reaction, then Islam is more of a catalyst than a cause. Foreign occupation is one of (many possible) fuels of the reaction. But every chemical reaction requires more than one reactant. I believe that other ingredient is poverty.

Poverty is a key ingredient in most terrorist acts. Suicide bombers in Israel blow themselves up so their family will get the payoffs from the Saudi royals and others. The French and Russian revolutions were led by upper middle class kids wanting to do something (usually the wrong thing) about poverty. The 9/11 hijackers and London bombers were more of the same, middle class reactionaries looking to blame someone for the fact their culture is so far behind the rest of the world.

Olivier Roy, writing in the New York Times, says:

Converts are to be found in almost every Qaeda cell: They did not turn fundamentalist because of Iraq, but because they felt excluded from Western society (this is especially true of the many converts from the Caribbean islands, both in Britain and France).

“Born again” or converts, they are rebels looking for a cause. They find it in the dream of a virtual, universal ummah, the same way the ultra-leftists of the 1970s (the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Italian Red Brigades) cast their terrorist actions in the name of the “world proletariat” and “Revolution” without really caring about what would happen after.

After 9/11 America consoled itself with the line: “The Terrorists hate us for our freedom”. That sounds nice, but isn’t true. Terrorists hate us for our successful economy, which we owe to freedom. Al Qaeda doesn’t hate the Saudi’s for their freedom. It doesn’t hate the Egyptians for their freedom. It doesn’t hate the Indonesians for their freedom. Yet it still blows up innocent civilians in those countries.

Oliver goes on to make the case that the whole Foreign-Occupation-as-a-cause-for-terrorism is a non-sequiter:

If the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are at the core of the radicalization, why are there virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists? Rather, the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan - or they are Western-born converts to Islam.

It is also interesting to note that none of the Islamic terrorists captured so far had been active in any legitimate antiwar movements or even in organized political support for the people they claim to be fighting for. They don’t distribute leaflets or collect money for hospitals and schools. They do not have a rational strategy to push for the interests of the Iraqi or Palestinian people.

The problem with terrorism is that is works. Terrorists, like spoiled children, want attention and our 24/7 international news cycle gives it to them. It is a small price we have to pay for our globally connected economy. And I say it is a small price because our globally connected economy has in a large part ended state to state war.

The solutions to terrorism are: global economic connectivity, ruthlessly hunting down the perpetrators and financiers of terror, preemptive elimination of the leaders for whom terrorism is their source of importance, and a general populace that says “bugger off, I’ve got to get to work” when terrorists disrupt their daily life.

The folks over at Catallarchy have posted an excellent 12 step program to help if you can’t help but mind your own business.

Anarchists Anonymous: A 12 Step Program

1. We admitted we were powerless over our neighbors – that their lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore them to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn their will and their lives over to the care of Government as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our fellow citizens.

5. Complained to Government, moralized to ourselves and whined to another human being about the exact nature of their wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have Government remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to legislate away their shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons they had harmed through apathy, and forced them to make amends to their victims.

9. Made costly and indirect transfers to such victims wherever possible, even when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take communal inventory and when our neighbors were wrong promptly called for a law to deal with it.

11. Sought through lobbying and regulation to improve our conscious contact with Government, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His laws for us and his power to enforce them.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to individualists, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

#9 is my favorite.

No this isn’t a post about Hillary Clinton.
A California jury sentenced a child killer to death Friday. My opinion of California moves up a notch.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/07/22/avila.sentencing.ap/index.html

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/07/22/congress.daylighttime.ap/index.html

The Republicans in Congress, in what can only be an attempt to boost the faltering Tech economy, have decided to extend daylight savings time by 4 weeks (three in the spring and one in the fall). Their justification is to “reduce energy usage”.

This has got to be one of the dumbest things I’ve heard in a long time. First off, Congress cannot make the Sun rise earlier nor set later - no matter how large their ego’s might be. All they are doing is messing around with people’s minds making them think that. If you want more daylight when people get home from work, have people go into work an hour earlier. Hell, most people work some form of staggered hours anyway to avoid traffic in most places. Farmers don’t care what the clock says - they wake when the rooster crows and quit when the work is done.

What this will do is cause another major Y2K problem. Every computer that needs to track time is going to have to be fixed to account for these new rules. Much like with Y2K, an industry of consultants will arise to fix ancient mainframes where the code has been lost to the ages. Everyone is going to have to go update their computers. Oh, and if you are running an older version of Windows - like say Windows 2000 - you will have to upgrade to XP or Longhorn, because Microsoft doesn’t support Win2k anymore.

So therefore, I would like to amend this bill to rename it to the Full Employment for Computer Programmers Act of 2005.

Joe Bast of the Heartland Institute (providers of the only bumper sticker that adorns my car) has written an interesting piece on why he thinks we will see a Libertarian President by 2016.

His first problem is that he takes the fall of communism and extends that to the triumph of libertarianism. Communism was a failed form of economics and government from the get-go but there are many other forms of government on the spectrum between communism and libertarianism. Socialism comes to mind and that is still flourishing in Europe at the moment. I also note he mentions “the unprecedented percentage of the world’s people living in free democratic countries” — something that wouldn’t happen if the pacifist isolationists in the LP were running things in the early 1940s.

He goes on to quote Bush’s second inaugural speech to try and provide evidence Bush is libertarian. I think No Child Left Behind, The Patriot Act, and the Prescription Drug Benefit should disabuse anyone of that notion. I might contribute to his speech writer’s reelection campaign though.

He describes how the two major parties will split, and how the limited government types in each will flock to the LP (or some new entity). I’ve made similar points in a speech to the Libertarian Party of North Carolina and on my LJ, however his scenario seems a bit contrived.

First off the leftists in the Democratic Party won’t split off while they are the minority. Dividing their forces is politically stupid and they know it. The 200 million in 527 money is controlled by lots of various factions, not all of whom agree with each other (think conservative blacks vs gays).

Running a Hollywood celib is not going to bring them credibility. Publicity maybe, but not credibility with the flyover state voters. Nor will this new party really do much to help third parties by opening debates or ballot access requirements. Ross Perot ran a pretty successful campaign in 1992 and it did little to help third parties. In fact, it caused the two major parties to close ranks and restrict debate access even more. The LP will not benefit.

If any party is going to split first it will be the GOP. As the Democrats, under Dean, continue their march to irrelevance becoming a regional party that holds a few seats in other urban areas, both the religious moralists and fiscal conservatives will find less and less reason to stick together. I believe the only reason they do so now is to form a coalition strong enough to beat the Dems. There is going to be a battle for the heart of the GOP in the coming years. The pundits will have you believe that the moralists are the front-runners, but from my observations so far of the GOP the battle has not yet been decided.

Even if the split does occur people will not flock to the current LP. The party offers nothing to elected officials who want to keep their jobs. They don’t have armies of grass roots volunteers (the few in the LP now would not go work for former Dem or GOP “statists”), they can’t raise money to save their lives, and its not like they have a eloquent or workable platform. Regardless of the hard work of folks like Michael Dixon, George Squyers, Mark Rutherford, Joe Seehusen and the various reformers like Carl Milstead and Tim West I don’t see this changing. This is the real reason I quit the LP. When and if one or both of the major parties split, the departing elected officials will form themselves a new party taking their contacts, donors, staffers and resources with them.

I do agree that a party based on ” individual liberty, equality under the law, free enterprise, and lower taxes” will unite the country. In fact it already has. The voters have given the Whitehouse and Congress to the party that promotes that.

As you can see, the Real World Libertarian is no more. This blog has become The Excercise of Vital Powers. The old domain will point here for the foreseeable future.

In what must have come from a bad L Ron Hubbard novel, anti-porn crusader Judith Reisman is trying to prove that viewing pornography produces erototoxins that damage the viewers brain. If so Ms. Reisman better move to a nice MidEast country because her brain is already beyond repair. Get a load of this gem:

…people whose brains have been rotted by pornography are no longer expressing “free speech” and, for their own good, shouldn’t be protected under the First Amendment.

I didn’t know our God given rights are only available to the healthy of the species.

Via Nobody’s Business by way of The Agitator

And in other news, Congress is looking to pass a 25% tax on Internet Porn(Link NSFW)

Radley Balko talks about the latest fad in government abuse, Wildcatting. The theory at the SEC is that if one business has an accounting problem, then everyone in that industry should be investigated.

Radley talks about the direct costs born by the businesses, but there is a much more dangerous side effect. SEC regulations and investigations will eventually cause businesses to stop trading themselves on the open market. Instead of doing the Initial Public Offering companies will remain privately held and beyond the reach of most of the onerous SEC regulations, like Sarbanes-Oxley.

Having worked at both pre-IPO and post-IPO companies, the pre-IPO companies are the ones where the innovation happens. I’m firmly convinced that SEC quarterly reports are one of the reasons American businesses focus so much on short-term gain at the expense of long-term vision and growth.

Companies go public to provide an exit strategy for founders and investors. Put enough barriers in the way and other exit strategies will be found.

Instead of protecting the public from investment scams, the SEC will simply prevent most people from being able to invest at all.