A post linked by Glenn Reynolds yesterday (about Barry Goldwater's revenge) reminded me of an excellent observation which bears rerepeating:

"I became a conservative by being around liberals, and I became a libertarian by being around conservatives."

My experience was somewhat different. I became a libertarian by being around liberals, and I remained a libertarian by being around conservatives. In general, though, while I prefer hanging around conservatives to hanging around liberals, sometimes hot-button cultural issues will surface, and because I don't conform to the usual stereotypes, people misread me. Liberals assume I'm like them, and conservatives assume I'm like them. I probably put out the "wrong" signals, all the time, without meaning it. Liberals will assume I couldn't possibly be a life member of the NRA, and social conservatives will assume I'm a Rush Limbaugh fan who must take a dim view of homos. But in general, though, conservatives are more welcoming of political differences than liberals. If you say something a conservative disagrees with, he's not as get likely to get angry or turn pale like a seminary student who just met an admitted Satanist.

Ann Althouse put it well a few years ago:

the bloggers on the right link to you when they agree and ignore the disagreements, and the bloggers on the left link only for the things they disagree with, to denounce you with short posts saying you're evil/stupid/crazy, and don't even seem to notice all the times you've written posts that take their side.

the Right is looking for converts and the Left is looking for heretics.

Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

It was a little tough living through the Bushitler years, but I made it, and I voted for the evil stupid one twice -- all the while still managing to consider myself a libertarian. Plus, I voted for McCain, and considered myself a libertarian through that. While I like conservatives, and agree with them on many if not most things, I have stubborn little philosophical differences with certain aspects of the conservative philosophy, and I just don't want to be in bed with people like Ann Coulter and Michael Savage. Red meat culture war conservatism just plain turns me off. Plus, I don't think it's likely to remove Barack Obama from office.

However, the fact remains that I have more in common with red meat conservatives than I do the liberals. They're also more likely to ignore my heresy.

Speaking of adultery (which almost everyone agrees is bad) I'm wondering whose adultery is worse -- Mark Sanford's or Newt Gingrich's. I realize that I'm not the only one asking, but the question was just sort of thrown in my face earlier as I read yet another strong online moral condemnation of the eminently condemnable Mark Sanford, only to see Newt's mug staring at me from an ad placed right smack in the middle of the text I was reading.

Hey wait a second! I wondered. Newt had an affair, right? How come he gets to run for president and Mark Sanford not only shouldn't, but the latter should be kicked to the curb?

Are some adulteries more immoral than others? Actually, yes. When Tom Delay discussed his adulterous affair in his book, he specifically said it was less immoral than that of Newt Gingrich:

The difference between his own adultery and Gingrich's, he said, "is that I was no longer committing adultery by that time, the impeachment trial. There's a big difference." He added, "Also, I had returned to Christ and repented my sins by that time."

While there is a certain logic to the proximity in time argument, 2012 is still a ways off. But the problem I'm having is with the argument that adultery should be a disqualification from office, but only for some candidates.

MORE: Commenting below, TigerHawk raises an interesting point about prostitution:

Eliot Spitzer tried to claim that routinely patronizing prostitutes was less bad than what Sanford did, because he did not fall in love. We took a light-hearted poll on the subject, and our readers see it quite the other way.

As I observed in reply to TigerHawk, many Victorian women used to consider prostitution a necessary evil. Have evolved in our thinking to a better, cleaner world in which loveless sexual cheating is more evil than sexual cheating with someone who is loved? Has sex ceased to be a matter of getting one's rocks off? Common sense would suggest to me that while cheating on a spouse is bad, loveless cheating would be less of a threat, and thus better.

But that's just me. How about a poll?

If you don't like being polled on this issue, don't blame me! It was TigerHawk's fault -- for being a bad influence and creating a light-hearted poll climate!

AFTERTHOUGHT: Looking at that poll, it occurs to me that women and men might answer the questions very differently.

Also, I revised the poll to change "It would make no difference at all" to "It would make no difference at all as both are equally wrong."

When I wrote about the Mark Sanford sex scandal, I had no idea that it might be considered even remotely related to gay marriage. Well, apparently it is -- at least to some people. Rod Dreher explains:

The argument goes like this:

1. Mark Sanford is a social conservative who advocated against same-sex marriage rights.

2. But by having an adulterous affair, he dishonored his own marriage vows.

3. Therefore it is hypocritical for him -- and by extension, other social conservatives -- to argue against same-sex marriage.

4. Because some opponents of same-sex marriage are unfaithful to their spouses, there is no good reason to oppose same-sex marriage.

It's an absurd argument, but that doesn't stop more than a few people from pushing it. If you are one of the people who find its logic persuasive, though, then surely you agree that the arrest of a gay Duke University official on charges of having prostituted his adopted five-year-old son on the Internet is a convincing argument against allowing gay adoptions.

It is in no way a convincing argument against gay adoption, and no argument at all. Neither does Sanford's failings have a thing to do with the rightness or wrongness of the case against same-sex marriage.

As it turns out, the man accused of prostituting his five year old was also very active in the Episcopal Church. Should such truly horrific acts reflect badly on the church? According to some, yes, it should.

The poor child subject to this sordid event should symbolize the horrid evil being promoted by [The Episcopal Church].

I'm sure some will say this awful case implicates Duke University as well. Considering the way so many at Duke behaved towards the falsely accused Lacrosse team, there will probably be people who will want to retaliate by somehow using this case against Duke, but I don't see much of a connection. Maybe a double standard, though, were the case to be ignored or go unreported. (Uproar over the innocent Lacrosse players, and silence over the pedophile.) So far, the latter does seem to be receiving considerable press attention -- at Duke and elsewhere. (CNN, however, does not mention that the adopted boy is black.)

The frenzy to blame people other than the accused reminds me of the way some people reacted to the murderer at the Holocaust Museum.

In what has become a numbingly familiar pattern over the decades, when deranged killers strike, people with political axes to grind will invoke their favorite demons for blame. In what I'll call the "Columbine tradition," the Columbine killers were said by leftists to be a product of "the gun culture," and by rightists to be a product of the "climate" of the 1960s. (And, of course, "depravity on the Internet.")

Why people don't focus on the individuals themselves, I don't know. It would be one thing if a killer were acting on behalf of (or with the approval of) someone else, or an actual identifiable organization. But when a murder is committed by a single individual, it makes about as much sense to blame "the right" or "the left" (much less a "climate" created by either) as it would to blame the Republican or Democratic Party if he happened to belong to one of them.

This stuff gets a little tedious.

MORE: Townhall writer Mike Adams implicates the deceased Michael Jackson for a symbolic coincidence:

That Frank Lombard was arrested on the day of Michael Jackson's death is highly symbolic. Christians need to take a break from worshipping this culture and the idols it produces.

If it weren't all so predictable.... Really, I feel as if I've written this post a hundred times over the years.

As regular readers know, I love Sarah Palin. (So does co-blogger M. Simon).

What I don't love, though, is this attempt by Stacy McCain to link hatred of Sarah Palin to homosexuality (which McCain sees as synonymous with Andrew Sullivan's view of motherhood and vaginas). Because the man is an influential conservative as well as a supporter of Sarah Palin, I think this will hurt Sarah Palin more than it hurts Sullivan, or Ken Layne, or the allegedly mother-hating homos.

Moreover, as a Palin supporter who still clings to the belief that a libertarian-conservative alliance might be possible, I think it is very poor strategy.

But it might be that McCain's goal was more to build blog traffic than to help Palin. I can't be sure, but I like the way Glenn Reynolds summarized James Joyner's post yesterday:

Stacy McCain = Ken Layne = Andrew Sullivan

Sean Kinsell does a great job of attacking the bad logic behind the proposition that gays hate Palin because they hate moms with vaginas. Such a great job, in fact, that I don't feel the need for extended comment on the nature of the logic. (After all, don't we already know that your typical white conservative hates Obama because conservatives are racists and Obama is black? Yawn...)

McCain seems to think that he has now destroyed (and eviscerated) Andrew Sullivan. Has he? I looked, and Andrew Sullivan doesn't seem to have been slowed down at all, much less destroyed. Has he been "smacked down" * as another conservative leader claims? Apparently in the minds of his critics, but does anyone honestly think that those who read and agree with Sullivan will be persuaded in the least by this? Will the readers of Ken "Wonkette" Layne now desert him because McCain has finally exposed him as a "vicious cocksucker"? I don't think so. No; all this will do is generate more mutual animosity. I admit, that's quite a feat, and it took some doing, because the present levels of animosity seemed at an all time high.

Sure, he has the First Amendment right to call Andrew Sullivan and Ken Layne anything he wants, just as they have the right to malign a retarded baby and promote crackpot conspiracy theories. (Theories that BTW have become an independent form of Trutherism beyond that advanced by Andrew Sullivan. Yeah, so maybe I should say "there's nothing gay about Trutherism" while I'm at it.)

When Ann Coulter used the word "faggot" to characterize John Edwards, I defended her right to say it, but wondered whether any good would ever come of it. Once again, I think that Republicans in positions of leadership ought to pick their battles and choose their words more carefully.

The only message I can see that will be remembered from this is that a lot of right wingers think that those who hate Sarah Palin are gay (as if there is no greater insult) and should be called names. A new meme for the left to proudly wave.

I fail to see how this will resonate in Sarah Palin's favor.

I realize that many people are saying that Stacy McCain is only doing this for the traffic. I can't blame any blogger for wanting traffic, but I do think that if he likes Sarah Palin as much as he claims does, McCain might think twice about whether getting more hits is worth the damage he does to his cause.

When the dust settles, no one will remember the traffic he got. What they will remember is the shining new conservative principle he established.

If you hate Sarah Palin, you must be gay!

Hmmm...

Does that mean if you like her, you must be straight?

* One thing I've learned in six years of blogging is that no one is ever "smacked down" or "destroyed" by blog posts. (I say this because I was once naive enough to imagine that I had smacked down an unscrupulous news site called Capitol Hill Blue. Silly me.)

H/T R. Dave via e-mail who sent me to Gateway Pundit to get the whole picture.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Fareed Zakaria (whose Future of Freedom is a must read) has this to say about the possibility of revolution in Iran:

It's possible but unlikely. While the regime's legitimacy has cracked -- a fatal wound in the long run -- for now it will probably be able to use its guns and money to consolidate power.

I don't know why anyone thinks they need money. Regimes from Cuba to Burma to Cambodia to North Korea stay comfortably esconced with only the power that flows from the cracked barrel of a rusty gun, proving again what can be observed since the dawn of human history: leaders need neither legitimacy nor coin to quell internal uprisings, they need only force of arms and the will to use them.

Soon after the revolution, Iraq attacked Iran, and the mullahs again wrapped themselves in the flag. The United States supported Iraq in that war, ignoring Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons against Iranians -- something Iranians have never forgotten.

You know what's odd? Every time I hear this assertion, propagated by the mullah tyrants and treated as gospel by American leftists, that Iranians are holding a grudge over American "support" for the Hussein regime during the Iran-Iraq war -- which support amounted to a handshake and a smile, during a period when Iraq was the world's largest importer of arms -- I never hear any mention of the possibility they might be grateful we spent much more time and effort containing and ultimately removing Saddam. Shouldn't this net out to a giant positive in their attitude toward the U.S.?

And wouldn't it make more sense for them to resent the French, Germans, and Russians who were arming Iraq (at considerable profit) and who opposed Saddam's removal?

The situation under Saddam is a bigger deal than many people realize. For decades, Iranians were cut off from Najaf. Since Saddam's fall, millions of them visit Iraq on holy pilgrimage every year -- where they now see real democracy, which is probably a large part of why they're now taking to the streets and demanding their own.

But while we'd all like to see the mullahs overthrown and a liberal democracy in Persia, the truth is there's very little chance of that happening as long as the regime believes it has the moral right to brutally suppress dissent -- and with the current U.S. administration's avowed strategy of enabling and apologizing, there's little chance of that changing.

Does the scandal involving a womanizing southern governor shed any light on the GOP's "Southern Strategy"?

While nearly everybody agrees that what Mark Sanford did was wrong, positions as to what the consequences should be are all over the map.

Victor Davis Hanson described himself as baffled:

I am somewhat baffled by the reaction to this week's news. Take poor Governor Sanford. The only excuse for the hysteria over his trip could be possible use of state funds for personal travel, or taking vacation time without logging it in, or unauthorized leave. All are serious breaches of professional conduct.

But "adultery" during a separation? This entire popular culture transcended fornication years ago when it decided that tampons, Viagra, and Extend were fair game for commercial television. Our children know more about sexuality than our grandparents.

Can one think of very many politicians who were not guilty of some sort of adultery-Ted Kennedy? John Edwards? Bill Clinton? Newt Gringrich? Rudy Giuliani? John McCain? In a California governor's race or during the Presidential primaries the oddity is always the non-adulterer. I am being descriptive not sermonizing.

Our greatest icons-Jefferson, JFK, FDR-at times conducted private affairs in a manner that this society would have sensationalized, a society that in fact is far more tawdry and without the decorum of the past.

I don't know the circumstances of the Sanford marriage, but the notion that a culture that has deified sex, only to become "shocked" in Casablanca- like fashion that an official would reflect contemporary values is surreal. If this were 1910 or even 1950, I too would be shocked; but once our culture chose to elevate sex to Olympian status, why does it insist on Plymouth Rock reactions to the logic result of its own values and emphases?

Anyway, I do not agree with the idea that Republicans should "kick Mark Sanford to the curb." That only perpetuates an idea that the left loves: that Republicans have to be held to a higher standard than anyone else.

Let me repeat a question I have asked repeatedly:

How the hell did sex get put on the f---ing left?

Really, since when are centerfolds images of cultural and political leftism?

What is logical about doing that? How did it happen?

There was a time in this country when most cities had red light districts, and in many places prostitution was legal. In Alaska this past June, I visited Dolly's House, the last of Ketchikan's Creek Street brothels, before prostitution was made illegal in the late 1950s. That's not all that long ago; I was a kid. Brothels and prostitution are an American tradition. They are also a classical tradition; the Pompeiian brothels are a much bigger tourist attraction that Dolly's House. When something is both traditional and classical, it deserves a tad more respect than it gets from the people who attack it in the name of "tradition," but I don't want to seem argumentative, so I'll avoid the inflammatory word "values."

Anyway, while I recognize that people disapprove of prostitution and gay sex, I think it is a huge mistake to declare that this is modern political conservatism, and that the Republican Party stands for such disapproval. It's just plain bad political math, as all the Democrats have to do is nothing, and occasionally admit they're human if they get caught having sex. (The unnoticed irony is that the Democratic Party has plenty of people who are just as deserving of the "erotophobe" title as Republicans.)

If the Republicans are more against adultery than everyone else, it does more than merely set them up for a fall. By putting them on a high horse, it makes ordinary people want them to fall. For some reason, the Republicans do not understand the basic, anti-elitist, populist mindset at work here. It's why people sympathized with Bill Clinton. Not because they really sympathized with or "approved" of what he did. Few thought what he did was OK (despite the charges many moral conservatives made at the time). What they objected to was the scolding, and it is important to understand that not liking scolding does not equate with approval of the conduct in question.

Nor is the American distaste for scolding not limited to sexual scolding. People don't like being told they are wasteful and should cut down on driving, cut down on flying, change their lightbulbs, neuter their pets, ride bicycles, stop eating certain kinds of foods -- even if they already agree with the premises of the advice. I couldn't help notice that the Democrats were smart enough to put the kibosh on Al Gore during the recent cap-and-trade push. That's because they know he comes across as a scold, and had he been wagging his finger about Global Warming right now, it might have turned off enough people to generate a backlash in the form of angry calls to congressman, with predictable consequences in a precariously close vote.

Oddly enough, Republicans are perceived as less scolding on most of the lifestyle issues, but for some reason, the narrative that the GOP is the anti-sex party is a very stubborn one.

What I'd like to know is whether this is regional, and why. Is there a GOP Southern strategy that involves sexual morality? While I think it's a bit arrogant to make assumptions about people based on geographic regions, the fact is that the GOP does a lot better in the South than it does in the North, especially the Northeast.

I grew up in the Northeast, and over the past decades I've watched as many Republican areas I knew well gradually went Democratic. What shocked me the most was to see this happen among people I'd call old guard traditional Republicans. The reasons are many, but the process accelerated under Bush, and I think regionalism played a big role. It was all too easy for these people to hate what they called "the religious right," because that was considered a Bible Belt sort of cultural thing. There was nothing rational about it, and it accelerated as the GOP under Bush (whose Southernness struck many a Northeast Republican as phony) abandoned economic conservatism. Affluent country club types, wealthy older women, double income professionals -- the kind of people who could once be depended upon to vote Republican in order to preserve what they had, now saw little difference between the two major parties. Bill Clinton's triangulation strategy had helped too -- and it wasn't missed that a Southerner had seemingly thumbed his nose at the anti-sex religious mindset which supposedly dominated his area and which the Republicans now courted.

To illustrate the state of chaos and disrepair, just look at the fates of two long-time Republican Senators from my former area. Rick Santorum, a solid social conservative, was solidly rejected. The remaining Republican, Arlen Specter, fled his own party. Yet still (despite gloating on the left), a number of analysts think the GOP is not dead in the Northeast:

Pennsylvania Senate: Specter (D)(I), 41 - Ridge (R), 48
New Jersey Governor: Corzine (D)(I), 36 - Christie (R), 47
New York Governor: Paterson (D)(I), 32 - Guiliani (R), 53
Connecticut Senate: Dodd (D)(I), 42 - Simmons (R), 43
Delaware Senate: Biden (D), 34 - Castle (R), 55
New Hampshire Senate: Hodes (D), 41 - Sununu (R), 46
Connecticut Governor: Bysiewicz (D), 32 - Rell (R)(I), 53

Judging from his past, I'd put Toomey in the GOP's anti-sex camp, but he's recently written a fairly ringing endorsement of the big tent approach.

While I don't especially like Northeast Republicans, I think the GOP has to come up with some sort of Northeast strategy. Social conservatism is a hard sell there, and if it is perceived as anti-sex scolding, the result is counter-scolding when sex occurs. Fascinatingly, what appears to be happening with Sanford is that he's being scolded by the anti-sex scolds as well as the counter scolds, and this creates a cycle: the more he's scolded by social conservatives, the more he'll be counter-scolded by social liberals.

I can only imagine what the RINOs are saying about him in the Northeast.

My "Northeast Strategy" was to leave. I'm glad I moved to the Industrial Heartland, where (if I may change the subject slightly), representatives voted 41-48 against cap and trade.

The Northeast, OTOH, voted a whopping 66-7 for the bill, while the Interior South voted 16-60 against it.

What on earth could be up with that?

Is cap-and-trade a kinky sex practice or something?

As I'm saying, the GOP needs some kind of Northeast strategy.

MORE: Not to be a conspiracy theorist or anything, but I just remembered something which might shed some light on the Northeast's penchant for kinkiness.

As he wondered about the disappearing nature of the "fierce moral urgency," Glenn Reynolds quoted Roger L. Simon on cap-and-trade:

All of a sudden... well, not quite all of a sudden, but recently... I have noticed my liberal friends (except for the most extreme and knee-jerk) are not very interested in discussing man-made global warming. The subject rarely comes up and, when it does, it is passed over quickly, given only a nod. It's as if that was last year's - or last decade's - fad, at the very moment the House of Representatives has been browbeaten by LaPelosita into voting for a cap-and-trade bill no known person has read, let alone understood.

Doesn't this just begs the question of what sort of perversions are buried inside? I say, it just has to be chock full of pornographic pork.

Can anyone prove it isn't?

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link and a warm welcome to all.

Your comments are appreciated, agree or disagree.

A lot of people complain about moral relativism, and over the years I've noticed that the term is often invoked inconsistently. Little wonder, for even defining the term is an immensely complicated undertaking. A frequently used definition of moral relativism is along these lines:

...the position that moral or ethical propositions do not reflect objective and/or universal moral truths, but instead make claims relative to social, cultural, historical or personal circumstances. Moral relativists hold that no universal standard exists by which to assess an ethical proposition's truth.

And vice versa.

Some of the worst moral absolutists are those who cloak their moral absolutism as moral relativism. One of the most irritating examples I found recently was a film review linked in Christian Toto's discussion of the The Stoning of Soraya M (about the stoning to death of a woman in Iran on trumped up adultery charges).

The critic in question is Craig Smithey -- who bills himself as "The Smartest Film Critic in the World" (would any relativist say that?) -- and here's what he said:

...there is something condescending and judgmental in the filmmaker's subtext that seems to exonerate Western culture as somehow less complicit in the atrocious murders that it commits against innocent and guilty citizens alike. With American police beating, tasing, and shooting women, children, and men to death every week, the film could have been made with a more honest approach, as a more inclusive indictment of any form of capital punishment and authority-endorsed violence.

But to his form of moral relativism, inapt comparisons are perfectly justified, as long as it is recognized that America is the primary source of evil in the world, and that Americans have no right to judge anyone else. (Naturally, in his review of A History of Violence, Smithey saw the protagonist as having a "hodgepodge mentality of esoteric ideas that combine to constitute a bizarre mirror image of America's neoconservative leaders." Who knew? I totally missed the lurking neocons, and I'll have to see that film again....) I think that what comes out of the mind of this "Smartest Film Critic in the World" is pure anti-Americanism, and although it's packaged as moral relativism, that's not really what it is. Americans are the bad guys, so thoroughly evil that we have no right to condemn evil in others.

Smithey makes me want me to play along with his game of moral reductionism, so I'm wondering how he might review a film condemning what happened to Anne Frank. Wouldn't any such film "exonerate Western culture as somehow less complicit in the atrocious murders that it commits against innocent and guilty citizens alike"? I mean, really, isn't being dragged away and gassed at Auschwitz no different from American police beatings and tasings? And wouldn't a more honest approach be to have "a more inclusive indictment of any form of capital punishment and authority-endorsed violence"? Americans are so Satanic that we have no right to say we're better than Hitler, and any attempt to do so constitutes an attempt at exoneration.

Sounds pretty absolutist to me.

Honduras.

There. I just mentioned it. Wouldn't want some scold of a blog analyst to come along and ask why it is that only conservatives care about Honduras and where are the libertarians.

But which side am I on?

Why, the libertarian side, of course!

I can't help notice that Hugo Chavez is threatening to intervene in Honduras's affairs, and a lot of countries (including Obamaland) are expressing concern that the removal of President Zelaya was illegal:

The removal of Mr Zelaya has drawn criticism across Latin America and the wide world.

The Organization of American States held an emergency meeting, while UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for "the reinstatement of the democratically elected representatives of the country".

US President Barack Obama urged Honduras to "respect the rule of law" and a State Department official said America recognised Mr Zelaya as the duly elected president. The European Union called for "a swift return to constitutional normality".

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, meanwhile, blamed "the Yankee empire", and threatened military action should the Venezuelan ambassador to Honduras be attacked.

Is there any way to support the Yankee empire in defiance of Chavez and Obama while still maintaining any shred of libertarian creds?

I don't know, but I'd hate to be accused of silence.

AFTERTHOUGHT: Lest I be misunderstood, I wrote this post to protest one of the things I most hate about blogging, and the blogosphere (if that term hasn't become outmoded....)

For me, blogging is a spontaneous act, a labor of love, even. The problem is that if you discuss things like politics and international events, the score keepers come along tallying up points and positions, with the clear intent to influence you, or to "hold you accountable," and inject the noxious notion of obligation. They have a right to do that, of course, but I think it's despicable, as it interferes with free thinking, and thwarts the creative process. Whether stifling creativity is what they want to do, I don't know, but from time to time, I feel that I must object. Of course, there's a contradiction there, as I don't like feeling obligated to object -- not even when I am objecting to an unwanted sense of obligation. The problem is, scolds are often driven by the idea that they're doing something good, like the people who want to invade your house and castrate your dog while screwing in new lightbulbs. And if you don't say anything, they'll think you're another passive idiot awaiting their divinely guided intervention.

No, no one has specifically asked me to blog about Honduras. It's just a news item which struck me as likely to fall into the blogligation category sooner or later, and I resent having my writing dictated by the whims of news items.

Sometimes, the best defense is a good offense.

MORE: My newsphobic resentment aside, I do think a good libertarian case can be made against supporting the the ousted president. People can read the details at Fausta's blog, via Glenn Reynolds.

I was checking out the home page of Neda Net and came across this interesting bit:

I'm Eric S. Raymond. Some of you will know me from the open-source movement as "ESR". Because of the real threat of terrorist action against us, most of NedaNet is keeping a low profile. I have volunteered to be a visible public contact because (a) I've done this sort of public-face work before, (b) I already got my jihadi death threat from Iran in 2006 before NedaNet, and (c) I'm not easily intimidated.

Think of me as a cut-out. I have very carefully not asked who our contacts in Iran are. I don't even know who most of the rest of the NedaNet people are, and don't intend to try to find out; they're basically just handles on an IRC channel from whom I get URLs and files. And for any agent or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I've got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome.

I think what is going on in Iran has passed the point of no return. I have heard rumors of rumblings in Iran. Rumors of people saying things like "Heaven help the Mullahs if we decide to take up arms."

In the meantime the Iranian people need bandwidth in and out of Iran. Go over to Neda Net and see what you can do.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

In the latest wrinkle of Birth Certificate Trutherism, an Ebay seller has been prohibited from selling what he calls "Barack Obama's Kenyan birth certificate" -- and for a very interesting reason:

In the third listing from colmado_naranja, the seller explains, "This time their reasoning for the cancellation was that birth certificates and other forms are government ID are prohibited on eBay."

Nonetheless, the auction lives on.

Under its now third eBay number, 160345002984, the item up for sale is listed as a "story" and specifically states the document is a gift to the winner, not the object of bidding itself:

"I'm now auctioning my story (true story) of how I obtained U.S. President Barack Obama's Kenyan birth certificate," the listing states. "The winner of this auction will not bear copyrights to my story. However, along with my story the winning bidder will also take home U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama's Kenyan (African) birth certificate. Certified birth certificate. I am giving the birth certificate to the bidder that wins this auction, which is for my story."

Just to be certain, the listing restates, "You are not bidding on Barack Obama's Kenyan birth certificate in this eBay auction."

I'm more intrigued by Ebay's reasoning than the seller's attempt to get around it.

While I think it's most likely a fraudulent listing (because Obama is certified by Hawaii as having been born in Honolulu, and no one has ever been able to come up with any official documentation to the contrary), I think Ebay's statement ought to really raise eyebrows:

"...their reasoning for the cancellation was that birth certificates and other forms are government ID are prohibited on eBay."

In other words, Ebay says Obama's Kenyan birth certificate is real!

You don't have to be a Birth Certificate Truther to recognize the fun in that.

Even though I'm gloating over my good fortune, I feel guilty over a purchase I made yesterday. I'd been looking for canister filters (which are expensive -- typically hundreds of dollars each) and I spotted a Craigslist ad for a bunch of aquarium stuff which included two canister filters. Everything was $100.00. I made a date, drove out there, and saw a ton of stuff -- all of which had me drooling. The seller (a college age male) wasn't even there, and his affluent, busy dad had taken charge, as the stuff had been in the way, and he wanted it out. He realized I was getting a good deal, but didn't seem to care at all. So I concealed my delight as I paid him, piled everything in my car and took off lest he change his mind.

I'm not going to bore readers by listing every item, but it's all top quality stuff, including the filters, lighting, tank, stand, pumps, powerheads, a python, a protein skimmer, a box of expensive rocks, and it would retail for well over $1000.00. (And that's conservative; the pair of lights alone sell for $230 each.)

As far as I'm concerned I stole it. Except no crime was committed. These people were clearly the owners, so I did not receive stolen goods.

When I worked as an auto mechanic, my boss (who used to routinely buy perfectly drivable cars for less than $50.00 from clueless sellers) once said something I'll never forget: "If someone offers me a dollar for a quarter, why shouldn't I offer him a dime?" Me, I don't operate that way. I'll gladly pay the quarter. (Well, yesterday I paid a dime, but that's because they were only asking a dime.)

While I did nothing dishonest (and these people appeared to know what they were doing), I think there might be instances where not saying something can border on dishonesty. Suppose someone is having a garage sale, and clearly does not understand the value of something. An elderly widow has a box of books and miscellaneous bric-a-brac (marked "$5.00 FOR WHOLE BOX"), and one of the items happens to be a folding album containing her husband's collection of rare gold coins. That would clearly be a mistake on her part, for no rational person would knowingly sell gold that way, so I think it would be dishonest to buy them without saying anything.

Or would it? (I have to be fair to both sides, including my dark one....)

But suppose a seller knew he was selling gold coins, but priced them incorrectly, for less than the known market value of the gold? Suppose a proprietor has old prices from five years ago written on the gold coins, has not bothered to update them because he knows the current values anyway, but he goes on vacation leaving his shiftless and uninterested son in charge of the store. If he sells them to a customer at five-year-old prices, is the customer being dishonest by buying gold for a quarter of what he knows to be its value, or is he a savvy buyer, taking advantage of a super opportunity?

I will never forget buying collectible cash (old paper money) at an antique auction for less than the face value of the cash -- simply because no one was interested in bidding. It would have been better for the seller to deposit it in the bank. But a professional auctioneering house is neither a clueless widow nor a neer-do-well son. If they wanted to do that, it was their problem.

One of the craziest situations I've ever seen involved an extremely eccentric old man who was literally throwing money around in a New Orleans gay bar:

There was an ancient queen -- really old, really effeminate, and obviously on his last legs. Except he wasn't even on his last legs, as he was in a wheelchair. The man's face radiated pure joy, and I swear to God, he was passing out huge amounts of cash! Hundreds, twenties, fifties -- it did not matter to him. He was having the time of his life just giving money away to attractive young men. Watching carefully, I could see nothing remotely sexual about this behavior, and I doubt that the man was capable of sexual gratification. But even if he was, that was not his goal; he just wanted to see young men happy in a gay bar with his cash!

Altruism?

This behavior irritated the hell out of a young military-looking guy, who was following at the "wheels" of the old man, angrily attempting to stare down all takers, his face contorted into the angriest, most Calvinistic scowl of moral authority he could muster. In some cases, he succeeded in taking back the money (sometimes grabbing it as was dropped guiltily to the floor by those he shamed) and handing it back to the old queen. The old queen laughed at him and tried to hand him the money back -- as if this too was all part of his "fun."

Clearly, most decent people (certainly most altruists) would maintain that an old man like that should be placed in a home and cared for. But I don't know about that. He looked quite happy to me -- and he certainly did not appear senile.

At the risk of sounding like a hopeless moral relativist, I guess when you get something for nothing, it's better to feel guilty than entitled.

An Iranian asks:

"Dear Israeli Brothers and Sisters," writes Iranian dissident Arash Irandoost, "Iran needs your help more than ever now. And we will be eternally grateful. Please help opposition television and radio stations which are blocked and being jammed by the Islamic Republic (Nokia and Siemens) resume broadcast to Iran. There is a total media blackout and Iranians inside Iran for the most part are not aware of their brave brothers and sisters fighting and losing their lives daily. And the unjust treatment and brutal massacre of the brave Iranians in the hands of the mullah's paid terrorist Hamas and Hizbullah gangs are not seen by the majority of the Iranians. Please help in any way you can to allow these stations resume broadcasting to Iran.

"And, please remember that we will remember, as you have remembered Cyrus the Great's treatment of you in your time of need," Irandoost concludes, signing his blogged call for help "Your Iranian Brothers and Sisters!"

There are, in fact, two Irans, and the lesser known one to most Americans is undergoing a renaissance that the ruling Iranian mullahs fear the most. If the Persians are awakened to their identity as children of Cyrus the Great, who wrote mankind's first charter of human rights, these oppressive regimes will topple domino-style. Besides Iran, the Persian heritage is embedded in Iraq and Afghanistan, and were it to be rekindled, a revolution unheard of in scope could occur."

My new friend and former Muslim, whom I will call Babak Iran, told me that Korans are being burned in Iran, and that there is a strong movement toward the philosophy of Zoroastrianism. This man showed me the pendant he now wears, a symbol of the ancient religion (it is older than Judaism). This symbol, carried by many of the parade marchers in New York City, can be seen at persianparade.org. Slide # 24 in the 2009 parade is where one can see many beautiful Persian women like Neda.

The achievements of Cyrus the Great throughout antiquity is well reflected in the way he is remembered today. His own nation, the Iranians, regarded him as "The Father" and the Babylonians as "The Liberator". After this liberation of Babylonians, followed Cyrus' liberal help for the return of Jews. For this Cyrus is addressed in the Jewish Tanakh as the "Lord's anointed ". Glorified by Ezra and by Isaiah, Cyrus is the one who "The Lord, the God of heaven" has given him "all the Kingdoms of the earth".

Esther, born Hadassah, was a Jewish queen of the Persian Empire in the Hebrew Bible, the queen of Ahasuerus (traditionally identified with Xerxes I), and heroine of the Biblical Book of Esther which is named after her. The name Esther comes from the Persian word "star".

As a result of Esther's intervention and influence, Mizrahi Jews lived in the Persian Empire for 2400 years thereafter. Esther's husband Ahasuerus followed in the footsteps of Cyrus the Great, in showing mercy to the Jews of Persia: Cyrus had decreed an end to the Babylonian captivity of the Jews upon his conquest of Babylon in 539 BC.

Well enough history. The Iranians of today need help. If you can help pitch in.

H/T Judith Weiss Facebook. Judith also suggests that any one wishing to help contact Neda Net.

You can help by adding bandwidth and computing power to our network. It is still forming and growing; the more widely dispersed it gets, the less vulnerable it will be to denial-of-service attacks, blacklisting, or physical action by the Iranian government and its terrorist allies.

If you are a Linux or *BSD or Mac OS/X user, we have a detailed recipe for setting up and registering a Squid proxy for the revolutionaries' use. Update: We are no longer recommending people set up plaintext squid proxies. The Iranian regime appears to be doing deep-packet inspection on all traffic now.

To help support safe communications that are immune to deep-packet inspection, you can set up a Tor relay; this will help dissidents to communicate in and out of Iran without being traceable by the regime. See these directions.

Squid instructions for Windows users are under development.

Alternatively, there's a bootable CD called rbox that sets up a NedaNet site in a box. I'm told it's usable but still being polished. Windows users (especially) may want to go that route to avoid security issues.

Update: If you want to get deeper into the history of the Jews here is a book I liked: A History of the Jews.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

With ABC handing over hours of primetime to Obama's infomercial for socialism (which failed utterly to attract viewers, thus giving the lie to the notion they've been kowtowing to him just because he's a draw) I shouldn't be surprised by this little piece of enviro-propaganda (enviroganda?) from the AP, furtively titled "analysis," which I suppose sounds better than "openly shilling for the environmental movement."

But I am surprised, not so much by the content but by how poorly argued the piece is.

Critics of the House bill brand it a "jobs killer." Yet it would seem more likely to shift jobs. Old, energy-intensive industries and businesses might scale back or disappear. Those green jobs would emerge, propelled by the push for nonpolluting energy sources.

Has the Associated Press really never heard of the broken windows fallacy?

Let's pretend for a moment the problem was electricity rather than carbon. Let's say a group of scientists with computer models has found that our steadily increasing use of electricity is causing a tiny tear in the space-time continuum, which will keep getting larger as we use more electricity. Now, some argue the tear isn't so bad and might even turn out be a useful waste-disposal mechanism, but politicians and activists insist We Must Do Something and they have the votes.

Now imagine trying to keep a straight face as they tell you moving to more expensive and less convenient non-electric goods won't cost jobs or hurt people. You won't mind fanning yourself instead of using an electric fan. Air conditioning is bad for your allergies anyway. We survived without the Internet for most of humanity's time on this Earth. Candles are perfectly adequate for lighting. Why, we'll invent new and better forms of these things that don't require electricity!

But there is no substitute for electricity, and there isn't for coal and oil either, and waving your arms and chanting "innovation!' won't cause any of these magical breakthroughs to appear. Coal is cheap, abundant and fairly energy-dense: perfect for making electricity in fixed plants. Oil is cheap, abundant, even more energy-dense, and has the added feature of being liquid, making it perfect for mobile applications and nationwide distribution.

The rest of the article makes the argument we can do this without hurting the little people.

Not all the higher energy cost would show up in people's utility bills. Households, as well as business and factories -- including those, for example, making plastic for toys -- could use less energy, or at least use it more efficiently.

Did you catch that? You see, currently companies and households make no effort to contain costs, so if we make energy more expensive, things could get cheaper! Yes, this really is how the Associated Press thinks economics works.

The poorest of homes could get a government check as a rebate for high energy costs. That money would come from selling pollution allowances for industry.

Translation: "Well, if we only break windows belonging to rich people and corporations (never mind if Grandma's pension fund owns them) then who could really complain?" This misses the point entirely. I'll let Frederic Bastiat explain why:

It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.

Our shopkeepers will be forced to spend their six francs on a poorly substantiated environmental scare that even proponents admit has no net economic costs in the lifetimes of most people alive today. We don't even get a new window in the deal.

I get emails, and this morning I was greeted by this one:

let me see if I understand this. these deficits are bad,, but bush"s were fine. and I forget what was wrong with clintons surpluses. it is a hell of mess you people got us into..

this message was awful early, you repubs(now a small clique) must have a guilty conscious, o well the only way to distract your self from this stuff is to walk the applachian trail, or have an affair.

"You have allowed religious extremists to take over the Republican Party!"

But the accusation that I think Bush deficits are "fine" is too much, really. I resolutely oppose most forms of government spending (especially "entitlements"), I supported PorkBusters over the years, and I was one of those "hold-your-nose" Bush voters. So I replied by simply sending an attachment of the chart Glenn Reynolds has been displaying.

That's hardly an endorsement of Bush deficits as "fine."

However, if the Bush deficits were in fact fine, then the present deficits must be finer still!

* What I really want to know is after I return from Argentina do I get to walk the Appalachian trail nude?

In a discussion of Barack Obama's father, a piece in The American Thinker touched on an interesting point about Marxism:

Like many educated intellectuals in postcolonial Africa, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. was enraged at the transformation of his native land by its colonial conqueror. But instead of embracing the traditional values of his own tribal cultural past, he embraced an imported Western ideology, Marxism. I call such frustrated and angry modern Africans who embrace various foreign "isms", instead of looking homeward for repair of societies that are broken, African Colonials. They are Africans who serve foreign ideas.

A few examples. In terms of numbers alone, Marxist genocide reduced the population of Ethiopia by a million. In Zimbabwe, dictator Robert Mugabe's Marxist regime has not only bankrupted the country, but is practicing a form of "smart genocide" -- "perhaps 10 times greater than Darfur's and more than twice as large as Rwanda's." And during Angola's Marxist period, Portuguese colonial troops were replaced by Marxist Cubans.

As to the details of whether Barack Obama's father was a Marxist and thus a practitioner of this form of colonialism, I don't know, as I have not digested his entire economics philosophy, nor do I plan to. There are two sides to the argument of whether in fact he was a committed Communist. However, I don't find statements like this partricularly reassuring:

Theoretically, there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100 percent of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income that is taxed.

The point is, Marxist colonialism has much to answer for.

Little wonder Marxists like to paint colonialism as its "opposite."

The Climate Bill passed the House 219 to 212. Which is a fairly slim margin since the minimum required for a House majority is 218 votes. Now the Senate has to go over it. It will be interesting to see how the Senators from Illinois (a coal state - I met my mate in Carbondale, Illinois) vote.

H/T Watts Up With That?

Cross Posted at Power and Control

An EPA Staffer, Alan Carlin, has dropped a bomb [pdf] not just on global warming (it is currently not happening) but also on the "concensus" hypothesis about how the climate system works.

The document makes these points:

The EPA report is based on the last IPCC report which is now 3 years out of date. These new findings have not been taken into account:
    a. Global temperatures have been trending downwards for 11 years
    b. The concensus on Atlantic Hurricane behavior has changed
    c. Greenland is probably safe from melting
    d. The economic downturn has reduced CO2 emissions
    e. Empirical evidence supports negative feedback for water vapor
    f. Solar variability may account for 68% of warming

The Mr. Carlin also points out that the EPA has a history of doing its own evaluations of science and does not rely on outside organizations (such as the IPCC) to determine its conclusions. The EPA in this case has not done its own independent investigation.

Now here is where it really gets good. Watts Up With That reports that the Alan Carlin report is being suppressed within the EPA. Here is an e-mail that circulated inside the EPA:

"The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision... I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office."

- Internal EPA email, March 17th, 2009

Note that Watts Up With That also has several more pieces on the topic:

Source inside EPA confirms claims of science being ignored, suppressed, by top EPA management

CARBONGATE - Global Warming Study Censored by EPA

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Meet one of the newest members of my household (peeking from the inside of his secure PVC sewer pipe hiding place):

It's a young Jack Dempsey cichlid. I have a pair of them (each has his own piece of PVC, of course), in a tank with my Flowerhorn Trimac cichlid, which became too aggressive to be kept with my turtle, much less any normal fish. It seemed wasteful to devote an entire aquarium to a single fish though, so I thought very carefully about how to achieve a more or less peaceful balance of power, applying various game theory scenarios in my mind before deciding on the pair of Dempseys. I knew I was taking a chance as cichlids are all very aggressive fish, but in my experience, the Jack Dempsey is not quite as aggressive as the Red Devil/Trimac/Flowerhorn type monsters. The latter often can't be kept even with their own kind, and I started with two and had to get rid of one back in March. The remaining one was the wimp of the two, but now he's gotten aggressive, and I'd never try another pair of them together. The Jack Dempseys are quite larger, though, one of them is twice as large, and the smaller one about the same size as the Trimac. My reasoning was that trouble might start, but would not last, because of constantly shifting alliances. Two Jack Dempseys alone might have fought more, but together, they seem to unite against the Trimac, although the Trimac is so fierce that he's a match for either one of them. If the Trimac gets out of hand, the two will go after him and defend themselves, but they're not quite aggressive enough to attack in a completely unprovoked manner. The Dempseys occasionally attack each other, but it doesn't last, and the Trimac's attacks do not last. It's an inherently unstable arrangement, with no real alliances, but no bitter rivalries. I'm very lucky, because that's exactly what I hoped would happen. It's been almost two weeks now. A peaceful situation it is not, but I think things are close enough to achieving parity of the sort Henry Kissinger might approve.

Also, the fish have probably bonded by having had to make it together through the dreaded Nitrogen Cycle, which is very hard on fish. I have been testing the water for nitrites daily, and changing water sometimes twice a day just to keep the levels down. I stumbled onto a product called Seachem Stability, and I can confirm that it truly is the miracle substance it is said to be, because it has sped up the process from the normal month or so to just over a week. The way it works is by releasing a proprietary brand of spores into the water which cause nitrite-eating bacteria to grow much more quickly than they normally would. It used to be believed that Nitrobacter was the microbe that did the converting, but recent research has revealed that it's most likely Nitrospira. Finally, this morning (after over a week of daily testing and countless water changes), for the first time there were no longer any nitrites in the water -- not even trace amounts.

I'm sure reading about the Nitrogen Cycle is putting regular readers to sleep. Maybe I should try to tie it to Global Warming?

Asking readers whether they have any ideas what the man might mean, Ann Althouse links a perplexing tidbit from former presidential hopeful Mark Sanford:

I'm here because if you were to look at God's laws, they're in every instance designed to protect people from themselves. I think that that is the bottom line of God's law, that it's not a moral, rigid list of do's and don'ts just for the heck of do's and don'ts. It is indeed to protect us from ourselves. And the biggest self of self is, indeed, self; that sin is, in fact, grounded in this notion of what is it that I want as opposed to somebody else?

Now, you might say that makes no sense, just as many are saying that Mark Sanford's remarks made no sense. But since when has not making sense stopped anyone from not making sense?

There are some things worse than not making sense, though. It's when the stuff that does not make sense is invoked as justification for telling people what to do. I found someone who makes even less sense than Governor Sanford, but who invokes her senselessness in precisely that way. The president of PETA believes that just as purebred dogs should not have purebred dogs, purebred humans should not have purebred babies:

"I am opposed to having children. Having a purebred human baby is like having a purebred dog; it's nothing but vanity, human vanity."

Does that mean man was vainly created in the image of a purebred god?

Until today I had never heard of Baby Dee. But a friend enlightened me after seeing her act, and I found this on YouTube.

As Baby Dee explains in the above, s/he does not want to be called a "singer songwriter," so I won't.

Your cultural mileage may vary.

Culturally illiterate I may be, but I grew up listening to Michael Jackson, whose brilliant career and tragic life ended with an apparently preventable death. In life, Jackson was hyped to the max, and I don't doubt the same thing will happen in death.

Considering the monstrous cap and trade scheme that is poised to be put over on a largely uninformed public, I share Glenn Reynolds' concern that the hype over Jackson's death will crowd this much more pressing concern out of the news.

Sure, a preventable death is a tragedy, but it's too late to prevent that. It is not too late to prevent cap and trade, which is more far-reaching than any single tragedy.

This is the bureaucratic nightmare the bill plans to create:

Via Glenn Reynolds, who notes that the Democrats are passing the bill without reading it.

Yes, and if today's newspaper is any indication, cap and trade will be passed while the general public was busy reading about Michael Jackson.

But maybe my premise is all wrong about preventability.

Nightmare legislation might be less preventable than celebrity deaths.

MORE: Glenn Reynolds links this analysis from Investor's Business Daily comparing cap-and-trade to Smoot-Hawley, which spells out in gruesome detail what the bill would do:

Not since a misguided piece of legislation imposed tariffs that turned a recession into a depression has there been a piece of legislation as bad as Waxman-Markey.

Its centerpiece is a "cap and trade" provision that has been rightfully derided as "cap and tax." It is in fact a tax on energy everywhere it is consumed on everything it is used to make or provide.

It is the largest tax increase in American history -- a tax on all Americans -- even the 95% that President Obama pledged would never see a tax increase.

[...]

As we've said before, capping emissions is capping economic growth. An analysis of Waxman-Markey by the Heritage Foundation projects that by 2035 it would reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $7.4 trillion. In an average year, 844,000 jobs would be destroyed, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by almost 2 million (see charts below).

Consumers would pay through the nose as electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, as President Obama once put it, by 90% adjusted for inflation. Inflation-adjusted gasoline prices would rise 74%, residential natural gas prices by 55% and the average family's annual energy bill by $1,500.

Awful. Truly awful. Long term, this is going to make the bailout fiasco look like child's play.

I'll say this for the bailout scheme. At least there were some well meaning people who thought it would aid the country's economic recovery.

The goal here is to deliberately harm the economy. And for what? To advance an unproven theory that deliberately harming the economy might lower the planet's temperatures by a smidgen?

No wonder they'd rather hype Michael Jackson's death.

The question of the day is: will Northern Lights replace Cabernet Sauvignon or Dos Equis?

Mary is a 37-year-old, self-employed mother in Seattle who smokes pot several times a week. "It is relaxing, fun, and once in a while I self-medicate for cramps or headaches," said Mary. She says she prefers smoking to drinking beer because it's easier on the body and has fewer calories. Mary buys her bags from a dealer, making it more risky because "there's still a real danger of being arrested," says Mary.

The website, Chikii.com, surveyed hundreds of women nationwide between the ages of 25 and 60 years old. Out of that group, 52% admitted to using marijuana at least ten times a year. 27% smoked between one and seven times a week. And 78% of those women knew someone who got high on a regular basis.

The results of recent surveys are no surprise to Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML. "These findings are indicative of women's willingness to admit to the social stigma that was so high in the 1970s and 80s," said St. Pierre.

Both women who shared their stories with momlogic say that many of their friends smoke weed.

Just look at what is going on in my town of 150,000. We have enough demand for indoor horticulture to support two grow op stores. No doubt the