I have three very brief posts up at other blogs where I sometimes post. At DownsizeDC.org, one on REAL ID and another on the Animal ID. And at Indie Castle, one on a Green-Libertarian Alliance.

Jim Babka wants to know if there is a single government program that's actually worked as advertised.

I saw the Geena Davis tv show Commander in Chief for the first time last night. There's a bunch of unsolved murders - seemingly all drug-related - in a nearby Maryland suburb. The "bad guy" - Speaker Donald Sutherland - has a crime bill providing for more prisons and longer sentencing. But President Geena Davis says the solution is more policing and education.

More jails, or more cops (or, perhaps, both). That's the choice we are being conditioned to accept. Striking at the root by ending the War on Drugs just isn't an option. The President speaks dismissively of state's rights as she sends forty federal marshalls to the area.

The next day, this jack-booted, fascist President is informed that the blogosphere is calling her a jack-booted fascist. Well, they at least got one thing right.

Well, I'm back, and I have a new piece up at the Partial Observer.

Here are some fun, interesting, infuriating, or important things I've found in the blogosphere over the past couple of weeks:

At A Stitch in Haste , Kip Esquire reads Time's article on the best and worst senators so you don't have to.

Buckeye State Blog has a collection of unintentionally humorous quotes from Sen. Marc Dann (D-Liberty Twp.)

You might have thought the ethnic cleansing of American Indians from the American west was a thing of the past, but not if Sen. John McCain (R-Az.) gets his way. Logan Ferree of Freedom Democrats points to this report from Cultural Survival.

The Agitator's Radley Balko, the blogger who broke the Cory Maye story, has more true tales of paramilitary police raids gone wrong.

This incident has gotten quite a bit of attention from the blogosphere. At Crime and Federalism , Mike makes the case that it goes beyond mere police overreaction and crosses the line into torture.

This story from the satirical Toledo Tales comes a little too close to the truth. So does this one.

Finally, The Lope has a cool photo essay on the new Encounters restaurant at Los Angeles International Airport (link via Gravity Lens ).

At Reason, Kerry Howley exposed the hypocrisy of anti-choicers who use women's safety as an argument for suspending the FDA's approval of RU-486. As Ms. Howley points out, the mortality rate for RU-486 is comparable to the mortality rate for surgical abortion, and less than one-tenth the fatality rate for birth:
Mifeprostone's manufacturer, Danco, states that 560,000 women have taken the drug regimen since it was approved in 2000. If Mifepristone turns out to be the cause of death in all five possible cases, the pill's mortality rate will be under one in 100,000. Between 1988 and 1997 (before the abortion pill was approved) the mortality rate from legal induced abortion, according to the Centers for Disease Control, was 0.7 per 100,000.

[...]

...no one questions the heightened risks inherent in the remaining alternative: pregnancy. In 1997, the pregnancy-related mortality rate was 12.9 deaths per 100,000 live births; more than tenfold that of legal abortion. (entire article here, link via Hit and Run)

Meanwhile, in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Jack Hitt examined the effects of anti-abortion legislation and enforcement in a country where the anti-choicers have gotten their way. El Salvador has criminalized abortion with no exceptions, not even to save a woman's life, and it goes to monstrous lengths to enforce its abortion law:

El Salvador, however, has not only a total ban on abortion but also an active law-enforcement apparatus — the police, investigators, medical spies, forensic vagina inspectors and a special division of the prosecutor's office responsible for Crimes Against Minors and Women, a unit charged with capturing, trying and incarcerating an unusual kind of criminal. Like the woman I was waiting to meet.(entire article here)

This doesn't stop women from obtaining abortions, or inducing them themselves. Mr. Hitt quotes a list from the Center for Constitutional Rights of tools used in illegal abortions in El Salvador: "clothes hangers, iron bars, high doses of contraceptives, fertilizers, gastritis remedies, soapy water and caustic agents (such as car battery acid)."

So basically, the anti-choice argument is that a chemical abortifacient that kills up to 1 in 100,000 of the women who use it is too dangerous to women, but laws that result in the use of chemical aboritfacients such as fertilizer and car-battery acid are A-OK. What a bunch of hypocrites.

If you are undecided about whether abortion should be legal, or if you lean toward criminalizing it, please read Mr. Hitt's entire article (here), then ask yourself, Do you really want to enact laws which lead to the use of such methods? Do you really want women in the United States to suffer the depredations of forensic vaginal inspectors?

Neither Cleveland nor any of the suburbs in Cuyahoga County has banned smoking in bars and restaurants yet, but that hasn't stopped several establishments from going smoke-free. Last month, George Nemeth of Brewed Fresh Daily reported that Cleveland's prestigious Velvet Tango Room is now smoke-free (even though its website still features a picture of a cigar in an ashtray). At around the same time, the Steak-n-Shake in West Park announced that it would no longer allow smoking. These are just two more examples to show that, if given a chance, the free market will provide both smokers and non-smokers with drinking and dining options that suit their preferences.

The free market might not get that chance, though. A gang of busybodies calling themselves "Smoke Free Ohio" recently submitted petitions to put the issue of a smoking ban before the Ohio General Assembly. In a rare moment of sanity, the General Assembly appears unlikely to enact Smoke Free Ohio's proposal, the Ohio University Post Online reports, so the issue probably will go to the voters in November.

Meanwhile, the Ohio Licensed Beverage Association is gathering signatures for a saner smoking ban proposal, which, according to The Cincinnati Enquirer , would:

...require lawmakers to ban smoking in public places but exempt certain establishments such as bars, bingo halls, racetracks, bowling alleys and closed-off smoking areas in restaurants, hotels and nursing homes. If the language is certified, the group must collect nearly 323,000 signatures to get it on the ballot.
Ideally, the State of Ohio would not concern itself at all with smoking in privately owned buildings, but the OLBA's proposal looks to be the best way to stop the total ban that Smoke Free Ohio is pushing.

Don't expect new posts for the next week or ten days. I'll be on the road and probably won't have the chance to get on-line very much. Take care everyone.

Senate Bill 9, the so-called Ohio "Patriot" Act, went into effect yesterday. The act, sponsored by self-proclaimed "jerk" Jeff Jacobson (R-Butler Twp.), passed by overwhelming majorities in both houses of the General Assembly, and signed into law by criminal Governor Bob Taft (R-Cincinnati), greatly expands the power of police officers to demand identification from citizens. So, the next time a police officer stops you and demands your identification for little or no reason, remember that you have the following legislators to thank:

Representatives:
Allen Aslanides Barrett Blessing Boccieri Book Bubp Buehrer Calvert Carano Carmichael Cassell Coley Collier Core Daniels DeGeeter DeWine Dolan Domenick Driehaus Evans C. Evans D. Faber Fende Flowers Garrison Gibbs Gilb Hagan Hartnett Harwood Hoops Hughes Latta Law Martin Mason McGregor R. Oelslager Patton T. Perry Peterson Raga Raussen Redfern Reinhard Sayre Schaffer Schlichter Schneider Seitz Setzer Smith G. Strahorn Taylor Trakas Uecker Wagner Wagoner Webster White Widener Widowfield Willamowski Williams Wolpert Woodard Husted

Senators:
Amstutz Armbruster Austria Carey Clancy Coughlin Dann Fedor Fingerhut Gardner Goodman Grendell Hottinger Jacobson Jordan Kearney Miller Mumper Niehaus Padgett Roberts Schuler Schuring Spada Stivers Wachtmann Wilson Zurz Harris

As I wrote a few weeks ago:
I'm beginning to think that all of life's mysteries, and all scientific, philosophical, ethical, and spiritual questions can be boiled down to three:

1. What is energy?
2. What is consciousness?
3. What is money?

And I suspect that the more we learn about any of them, the more we learn about all of them.
One undeveloped thought I was getting at is that the more conventional formulations, like:

1. What/who is God?
2. What is happiness/the good?
3. What is justice?

actually throw us off track because we presume what the answer is going to be. We end up arguing the proper definitions of abstract ideals, rather than discovering the source of the actual forces in our lives. I suggest that the answers to the questions about God, happiness, and justice might be better found by studying energy, consciousness, and money.

By thinking about these things, I don't think it was an accident that I came across this mind-blowing page.

I'm not smart enough to understand or explain all of it. I may even be totally off in my interpretation. But here's my personal interpretation of some of its concepts:

Numbers are normally thought of as representations of the quantities of things we've identified as similar. We have one apple, two apples, or seventeen apples. Even though we understand that no two apples are exactly alike, we (properly) identify them as apples. We count everything that way, understanding that no two of the things we count are ever exactly alike.

But perhaps the "representations of the quantities of things we've identified as similar" is just the expression, not the essence, of numbers.

Perhaps the essential feature of numbering is not quantity, but progression. A number is a point in a progression. A progression is movement from one point to another. But what makes something - anything - go from one point (whatever that is) to another (whereever that is)?

That comes in, well, degrees. Degrees don't count similar objects, they count an increase, a growth, in one single essence or phenomenon.

Degrees count energy. Numbers aren't differences in quantity, they are differences in degrees.

Whether we count because we move, or we move because we want to count, it hardly makes a difference. Numbers don't represent objects, they represent energy. And energy is made known to us by degrees, expressed in numbers.

No wonder Marko Rodin thinks he has discovered the fingerprint of God.

In a $2.7 trillion criminal enterprise like the government of the United States, it's hard to keep on top of things.

And I know that things have gotten so bad, that nothing shocks us anymore. Are they really that evil? Yes.

But I do reserve the right to be surprised by how the evil manifests itself. Not shocked, but surprised in the sense of not expecting the unexpected, in not knowing how they'll be evil.

Logan Ferree gives us another example. Is it "shocking" that John McCain would support the forced relocations of Navajo and Hopi families for the benefit of the largest strip-mining coal company in the world? Thinking about it a little, not really. But that doesn't mean you anticipate it. You can't. The enterprise is so vast, you don't know what is going to happen next. You don't even know what is happening right now.

My latest at the Partial Observer.

I've already written here and here about the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). It is unimaginably bad, and DownsizeDC.org has now lauched a campaign against it. With your participation, which takes just a couple of minutes, we can stop this thing.

Paul J. Gessing directs us to the conservative Human Events Online's Ten Most Harmful Government Programs.

Personally, I'd have put the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Defense in there somewhere, but I didn't have a vote.

Or should we say, especially not a Southern thing, not any more. Mike Tuggle reports on several encouraging developments. Among them is HomeFromIraqNow.org which intends to use "binding statewide ballot initiatives around the country to pressure the administration to bring our troops home now," specifically state national guard troops. As Tuggle points out,
This is squarely in the New England tradition. New England States saw the War of 1812 as an attempt to annex Canada, and invoked State sovereignty to resist it. Massachusetts refused a presidential order to send its militia, and declared that the power to send a state’s militia is “reserved to the states.” Connecticut also refused to commit its militia for what it ruled to be "an offensive war," and resolved it would not release its militia unless the State was threatened "by an actual invasion of any portion of our territory." The Iraq invasion and occupation is certainly "an offensive war," as opposed to a defensive war. Connecticut was quite right to withhold its militia in 1812, and any State that proposes the same today would also be right – morally and constitutionally.

While we were watching The French Connection tonight, my brother-in-law suggested a theory behind these ridiculous smoking bans. In Washington State, even bars can't allow smoking - no indoor place of business can. But they do have one effect: people can now stand around outside without raising eyebrows. In other words, it makes it easier for cops to stake out a joint. You'd probably have to see the movie to understand the difficulty of the stake-out. It ain't easy.

In any case, while I'm no film critic, buff, or historian, it seems to me that The French Connection has to be among the fifty most important movies of all time. It set the standard for the "gritty crime drama." I don't even know how many such flicks predate it (1971), or how many focused on a major drug deal. But I know there weren't many.

One thing that impressed me about the movie is that it reminds me of the musical compositions I'd play the French horn for in high school concert band. It starts quiet and slow, and then builds and builds in intensity, so that even after the most riveting part is over you are totally engrossed right through the end.

And as a movie, I think it set the tone for what Roger Ebert has called a Golden Age for Hollywood that ended when Star Wars (1977) changed the rules. And I appreciate The French Connection as a time capsule, capturing the look and feel of New York City of the early '70's. And what's striking about the movie is that, while it isn't a bloodbath, innocent people die as a result of the police's attempt to catch drug dealers.

But more than that, I gather lessons from The French Connection probably unimagined by its makers. It's a throwback to another time, before cell phones and video cameras. Yes, with a warrant the police could tap phone wires, but otherwise it took some effort to track "suspicious characters." And the bad guys catch on.

It made me think of the trade-offs we've made. Back then, one had to go to a library and ask a reference librarian to track down an obscure piece of information, and had to go through the risk of being recognized to get access to porn. You were legally free to get the porn, but there was social pressure against it. Now, both are immediately accessible with a few keystrokes. But back then, nobody was watching, or at least most people would have confidence that they weren't being watched. In that sense, they were free to do whatever they wanted. The reference librarian wouldn't have batted an eye if you wanted to find out about, say, anarchist movements in the late 19th century. Just another research topic. Today, we don't know who's tracking our Internet activities, and which keywords or sites provoke "alarm bells" that would get the attentions of Homeland Security agents. Or what sites people may visit - even inadvertently - that government agents can use as blackmail.

I will admit that even in a society without government intrusion our public movements could still be caught by other people's cell phone video cameras. And we would definitely want to read the fine print on all Internet "terms and conditions" we'd come across. But government wouldn't track our movements and activities, and we'd have no fear of mandatory "Big Brother" tracking of our every movement, through national ID cards, RFID tags, or whatever means. Privacy may be the inevitable price we pay for convenience. If that is the case, the least we should demand is that the decision to pay it be left to individual choice.

I'm still thinking about the subject of my last post and the score I got on the moral politics quiz. I still don't like the questions given, and I'm still unconfortable with the connotations of both "progressive" and "neo-liberal" which the quiz says is my ideology.

(Progressive neo-liberal sounds to me like the warmongering wing of the Democratic party, who are arguably worse than the Busheviks and neocons because they celebrated our unprovoked war against Serbia and fault the war on Iraq only only because a Republican is waging it.)

Many of the names given ideologies in the quiz are strange. And what it means by "moral rules" and "moral order" is confusing, especially since it is evident that the horizontal axis is about individuality vs. conformity, and the vertical is about private ownership vs. communal ownership.

But I must give the designers credit. They are definitely on to something in how they conceived their political map and for correctly placing me on it (5.5 spaces down from the horizontal line, half a space left of the vertical line).

And their definition of liberalism appears right in line with Ludwig von Mises, who called liberalism "an ideology that advocates the preservation of private ownership of the means of production." The consequence of this - the minimal state - is how ultra-liberalism is defined in this quiz.

But some of Mises's intellectual heirs added a moral and philosophical dimension to his "economic" liberalism to create a moral individualism that veered left of Mises's own bourgeois outlook. They fall more into the "libertarian capitalist" area while Mises himself would probably remain somewhere in the "ultra liberal" area.

What I like about my placement is that I am definitely in the "economic liberal" area, but have enough enough concerns about the land monopoly and the disruptions caused by mass migration to be an ideologue.

And while I definitely endorse libertarian ends regarding individuality and non-conformity, I am also convinced that paleo-conservative means, such as judicial restraint, states' rights, and anti-globalist measures, are essential for preserving liberty. The test got that right: I managed to score right in between "libertarian capitalist" and "paleo-conservative."

I am also pleased that I haven't come out as a purist or dogmatist. I don't live in a world of absolutes. Instead of total belief in a particular system, or loyalty to a particular philosophy, I thnk it's better, after considering both theory and fact, to ultimately decide for myself:

1) What I honestly believe will make most other people better off overall.
2) What are the costs, who should pay them, and how.
3) What are the risks, who is put at risk, and how.

My conclusions are almost always in favor of much smaller government, but they are also almost never in favor of abolishing all government right now. Actual gains in shrinking government's size, cost,and power now mean more to me than conformity to libertarian doctrine.

The questions on the test do not, it seems to me, address any of these issues. But when it comes to who I agree with and why, and who I disagree with and why, this quiz has me pegged pretty well.

That doesn't mean I am not libertarian in my overall outlook. Throw any other quiz at me, and I'd come out strongly libertarian. (And this quiz has a very "libertarian" definition of liberalism.) But this shows that there is greater diversity and variation in our outlooks, even when we're largely in agreement about the main issues and are fighting for the same things.

Kevin at Indie Castle alerts us to a unique political quiz, the Moral Politics Test.

The test asked a bunch of questions that I do not believe have anything to do with politics. It thus shouldn't be a surprise that I scored as a progressive neoliberal:
Neoliberalism is a political philosophy and a political-economic movement beginning in the 1970s that de-emphasizes or rejects government intervention in the economy, focusing instead on achieving progress and even social justice by more free-market methods, especially an emphasis on economic growth, as measured by changes in real gross domestic product.

Progressive Neoliberalism is Neoliberalism associated with non-conforming moral values.

I don't agree with this, which I think is a problem with the questions. My "moral values" really are quite remote from my political values, because my focus politically isn't what people ought to do or think, but rather, how to minimize the damage inflicted by the State.

That said, the political map they've created is quite interesting. Note that libertarians, of both capitalist and socialist varieties, are on the far left. So in that sense this quiz gets it right.

I'm still waiting for a quiz that takes into account not just economic and moral issues, but also foreign policy and centralization of authority. That would provide a more complete picture of anyone's ideology.