One of my pet peeves involves people who use the cover of “freedom” to take away freedom. For years, the puritanical left has been claiming to support free and open human sexuality, while waging a not-so-covert war on sex. I’m not the only one to notice, and while it’s probably normal for libertarians to notice such things and kvetch about them, conservative Ken Masugi has noticed the left’s game of destruction in the name of liberation too:

…what defenders of free speech on campus, such as the estimable FIRE, among others, may miss is the contradictory place the university has become. Having embraced the sexual revolution and encouraged an atmosphere of promiscuity, much of higher education has now created a legalistic, centralized crackdown on talk about sex. We have become what Tocqueville implied our condition would be without the influence of mores: a bureaucratic nightmare. If we can’t rule ourselves, we will have rules, myriad of them, made for us.

(Emphasis added.)

Whether it involves sex, drugs, cell phones, pit bulls, or even food, those who can’t rule themselves always provide a convenient excuse for self-appointed rulers to take away freedom, and they often welcome their “help.”

I don’t think the goal of the left was ever to get rid of mores. Of course they wanted to destroy existing mores, but not to create a sexually free society. That was only what they wanted the clueless classes to think. The ultimate goal was a wholesale takeover, with new, stricter and far more puritanical mores than the old ones they claimed they were liberating us from. Moreover, they don’t want the new mores to remain as mores; they would like to see them enforced and backed with new laws.

A perfect example is the growing campaign to wage a new, all-out war on prostitution, by rebadging it as “sex trafficking.”  The idea is to treat all women who sell their bodies as victims, and all men who buy them as criminals.

The idea is that because some prostitutes are victims of coercion and crime, all are. Prostitution is not seen by these people as an act between consenting individuals, but rather is analyzed in a communitarian manner, where individual freedom, choice and consent mean absolutely nothing.

If this nonsensical logic had remained in law review articles written by people like Catherine MacKinnon, that would be one thing, but these things have a way of first sneaking into the dialogue and then becoming law. Under the old (er, post-Victorian) mores, a woman had no right to sell sex. Under the new mores, a man has no right to buy it. MacKinnon herself claims that there is no such thing as consent to prostitution, and indeed, she has even claimed that consent should be irrelevant to a charge of rape:

MacKinnon thinks consent in rape cases should be irrelevant. Women are so unfree that even if a woman is shown to have given consent to sex, that should never be enough to secure an acquittal. Why? “My view is that when there is force or substantially coercive circumstances between the parties, individual consent is beside the point; that if someone is forced into sex, that ought to be enough. The British common law approach has tended to be that you need both force and absence of consent. If we didn’t have so much pornography in society and people actually believed women when they said they didn’t consent, that would be one thing. But that isn’t what we’ve got.”

These are the kind of crackpots who want to run our lives.

I think they are far more tyrannical than the old puritanical tyrants from whom they claim they claim they are liberating us.

Ever wonder why there is such a major push to both militarize the police, and simultaneously demilitarize — even disarm — the military?

I think Bill Quick may have touched on the answer.

Soldiers expect that they may have to kill enemies of the nation. Cops expect that they may have to kill civilian criminals. They don’t have a problem with that. If they did, they wouldn’t become cops. Now, keep in mind that the only difference between a regular civilian and a criminal is a law. If some municipality passed a law tomorrow saying that it was now a crime to have a living room painted blue, and yours was blue, in that moment you become a criminal. And if a policeman sees your blue living room, he can arrest you for breaking the law. And if you resist his attempt to arrest you, he can shoot you dead.

Soliders would likely have problems with that, because they are trained to defend Americans against people who would like to kill them. Cops are trained to kill people who resist their efforts to enforce the law. One mindset is excellent for enforcing tyranny, and the other, not so much.

Further, here in America, we have an all-volunteer army. The sorts of people who volunteer to serve in the military tend to be more patriotic, and less progressive, than the mindset of the Ruling Party. Hence, the military is not especially trusted. That’s one reason why their votes tend to get delayed or lost.

So. If you were trying to put together a full-blown tyranny, you might want to lessen the power of the military a bit, and increase the reach, breadth, and armament of the various police forces, especially the national one you figure you will likely depend upon most to enforce your legal system. To “protect” the people, of course, of course.

Does any of this do anything to help explain some of the changes we see occurring around us? I’m not sure, but I fear that it does.

I fear so too.

SWAT teams dress as soldiers and invade living rooms of citizens, killing dogs and people with impunity. At the same time, real soldiers are increasingly not allowed to be armed at all in the presence of our leaders.

I don’t like the message. I do not find it reassuring to be told that the police are there to protect us, while the military is not to be trusted.

Remember the cacophony in 2011 when most of the country’s leading liberals — including Vice President Joe Biden — were loudly calling Tea Party supporters “terrorists.” I do, and I posted about it several times, because I think it is the height of irresponsibility to accuse people of terrorism simply because they think the government has gotten too large and want to rein in out-of-control spending.

Well surprise, surprise!

With talk like that emanating from the top, imagine what was going on in the minds of the underlings whose job it was to actually perform the more mundane functions of government.

Like, for example, carrying out the functions of the IRS.

While the current scandal is huge and deepening, it ought not to surprise anyone that the Tea Party and critics of big government would have been targeted.

After all, government underlings only want to please their bosses.

Especially a boss who openly “joked” about using the IRS to go after political adversaries.

(I’m old enough to remember Nixon’s abuse of the IRS, but he wasn’t nearly so blatant about it, nor were his enemies lists as large. Sheesh.)

MORE: Noting the president’s pathetic attempts at denial, Kim Strassel is not impressed:

President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an “independent” agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicced the tax dogs on his enemies.

But that’s not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. Mr. Obama didn’t need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he’d like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.

Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. “He put a target on our backs, and he’s now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?” asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.

Throwing your own people under the bus for doing precisely what you wanted them to do is not good leadership, nor does it inspire confidence or loyalty.

Using powerful government agencies to go after political opponents is the antithesis of statesmanship. It is antidemocratic and tyrannical, and a hallmark of corrupt Third World dictatorships.

A bigger question is whether a majority of voters think it’s OK.  If so, that does not bode well for the future of this country.

Short ARM Holdings is the title of an article at Seeking Alpha. It is about ARM computers. What did you think it was about?

Am I alone in finding it extremely annoying to still be forced to use fax technology in this day and age? I have found that often when I have to have dealings with entrenched bureaucracies (typically government or academia), they will absolutely NOT accept emailed documents. Even simple letters; if it contains anything that has to be signed, not even an emailed pdf will do. Curious about why governments and academia cling to outdated technology, I found a pretty good explanation. Fax technology is deeply entrenched and will not go away soon — thanks in particular to lawyers:

3. Traceable

Outgoing faxes generate notifications which are delivered to the sender informing him/her about the status of the fax delivery (sent/failed). A successful notification is only generated when the remote device signals that everything was received correctly.

Fax servers go even further since they can be configured to log and archive copies of all inbound and outbound faxes.  By integrating multifunctional peripheral devices (MFPs) with a fax server (instead purchasing a fax card option AND providing an analog line), all of your fax messaging can be logged and archived in a central location, optimizing both administration and security while also providing consistent and professional coversheets for outbound faxes.

4.Legally binding

There are legal precedents for faxed documents such as signed contracts to be legally binding in a court of law.  The intrinsic nature of the T.30 fax protocol, accurately reproducing documents between two remote points, meets the legal requirements of custodianship – that no third party could reasonably intercept and/or make changes to the document between the sender and the receiver. Fax server software often includes support for digital signatures which further ensures the integrity of the fax data.

5. Assured delivery

Unlike with email and mobile text messaging, with faxes the receiving fax machine must acknowledge that the document was received successfully – that the call wasn’t interrupted half way through and the device didn’t run out of paper, toner, or ink. Your notification is proof that your document has been successfully delivered to the recipient.

Little wonder that government agencies insist on them.

FWIW, I think fax technology is backwards and just plain sucks. I have a fax machine, but I don’t have a landline, and the fax machine is completely worthless without it. So, when I have to “send a fax,” I go through this stupid rigmarole of creating a signed document, then uploading the file to fax zero and sending it out as a “fax.” How that is more secure or less likely to result in fraud, I don’t know. I suspect that part of the problem is that government agencies have robotic idiots working for them who lack basic computer skills and hence cannot be relied on to download, process, or read emailed documents. But faxes are just spit out, and are therefore seen as moron-proof.

If that’s the case, I think we can expect the moronic technology to be here forever.

I enjoyed reading this complaint from a gay man who is sick of being bitch-slapped by gay activists:

The rush to embrace and console every gay man who comes out is infantilizing and condescending—but it’s a script written and promoted by GLAAD and reinforced by a sanctimonious establishment of gay men that rewards those who play by the rules—and punishes those who don’t. Novelist Bret Easton Ellis on why he refuses to take his bitch-slapping lying down.

Ellis reminds us that (“hopefully”) a time may come when sexuality won’t matter, but unfortunately, those who think it should matter are by no means limited to the anti-gay side:

In another five years hopefully this won’t matter, but for now we’re trapped in the times we live in. The reign of The Gay Man as Magical Elf, who whenever he comes out appears before us as some kind of saintly E.T. whose sole purpose is to be put in the position of reminding us only about Tolerance and Our Own Prejudices and To Feel Good About Ourselves and to be a symbol instead of just being a gay dude, is—lamentably—still in media play.

I find the whole thing unbearable. I have never understood why any adult would care about the sexual proclivities of another adult, unless he either wants to have sex with him or her, or the other adult wants to have sex with him or someone he loves or else is a threat to animals or children.

Sexuality between consenting adults is one of those things that does not matter to ordinary people, but matters very much to boring and tedious activists.

Yes boring. Gay is at least as boring as straight.

Straight people are lucky that they don’t have to put up with straight activists.

Using the procedures discussed here and here (which I skeptically suspected might be Internet disinformation), I just used a welder to zap the “dead” (meaning no longer chargeable with the charging unit) battery packs for my rechargeable cordless drill by injecting direct current at high amperage.

To my utter amazement, this immediately brought a battery pack from absolutely zero volts on the tester up to around 20 volts!

According to this post at a welders’ bulletin board, here’s why it works:

This use of a welder to recover ailing or dying NiCd batteries is Beautiful!

It seems that the momenatary burst of high amperage burns away the ‘soft’ short circuits inside the cells. It’s these semi-short circuits that drain away the cell’s power. The weak cell charges fast and the battery voltage looks good… until you put a load on it, then he battery voltage quickly drops and your power tool is useless. Left sitting, a fully charged NiCd drops in voltage over a few days and you go to use it – it doesn’t last long! Once the cell has lost its charge, it acts like a resistor to the flow of current from all the other good cells. Your power tool slows down early because it’s not getting full voltage or amperage – because the power is going into heating up the weak cell(s).

Any ideas whether that’s right? It seems to me that if the batteries are capable of taking a charge, the charger ought to be able to do the job, but what do I know?

White Rabbit on a Theremin and should you care to get technical Theremin Tech. I had a few ideas of my own about mixers, VCAs and the like. Which got me looking and following the white rabbit down the rabbit hole.

With the words as sung by Grace.

Failing to translate from English to Spanish is being called discrimination in a lawsuit.

Ribota said she was injured at work because she couldn’t read a warning sign that was in English.

“If I could speak English I wouldn’t have the problems that exist,” said Ribota.

Last week 12 custodians from the Auraria Campus filed an EEOC complaint against the Auraria Higher Education Center, which is the organization that maintains the campus for Metro State University of Denver, the Community College of Denver and the University of Colorado Denver.

“What is sort of a neutral business practice, that they speak English on campus and it’s an English-only campus has a discriminatory impact on this group of workers,” said attorney Tim Markham.

What’s next? Will failing to speak Spanish be called “discrimination”?

The malevolent bureaucratic classes just revel in their power to destroy.

After a couple decades of near-zero growth, Japan finally elected a government that promised to get the hell out of the so-called “liquidity trap” (low growth coupled with low interest rates) by raising the inflation target from 1% to 2%.  Did it work?  Well…

Lars Christensen:

This is yet another very strong prove that monetary policy can be extremely powerful. The graph also shows the importance of the Chuck Norris effect – monetary policy is to a large extent about expectations or as Scott Sumner would say: Monetary Policy works with long and variable leads - or rather I believe that the leads are not very long and not very variable if the central bank gets the communication right and I believe that the BoJ is getting the communication just right so you are seeing a fairly strong and nearly imitate impact of the announced monetary easing.

PS As there tend to be a quite strong positive correlation between earning growth and nominal GDP growth I think we can safely say that the sharp increase in earnings expectations in Japan to a large extent reflects a marked upward shift in NGDP growth expectations.

Pretty clearly we don’t need the fiscal stimulus that Krugman, DeLong, and others have been agitating for.  There is no such thing as a liquidity trap, only ineffective central banking policies.

The “Chuck Norris effect” is a great way to understand why “expectations uber alles” in monetary policy.  If Chuck Norris says “I am going to beat up everyone in Room A who doesn’t move to Room B” then he may not actually have to beat anyone up in order to move everyone to Room B.  The Fed can generally move policy wherever it wants within the bounds of its credibility simply by giving guidance.

Time for the US to emulate Japanese policy?  I feel like it’s the 1980s all over again.

(h/t Scott Sumner)

Right now I am on the road in Illinois, so I won’t have much time for posting. But earlier (as I tried to enjoy a cup of coffee at a local motel), my relative tranquility was suddenly interrupted by a man who walked into the hotel’s free continental breakfast area in the middle of highly sensational CNN coverage of the Ohio kidnapping case.

“Look at what WE have become!” hr exclaimed while looking about the room angrily. He then went on to blame it on taking God out of schools. The man was adamant and emotional, and I averted by eyes as he looked at me, for while I disagreed with his communitarian assessment, I did not want to get into an emotional argument with a total stranger who clearly thought everyone sitting in the room was somehow culpable.

But there us no denying that this “WE” stuff has a strong appeal. (See my various admissions to being an accomplice in some of “our” worst crimes, simply because it logically follows from the misuse of a pronoun.)

Should I plead guilty to child abduction?

I was intrigued to read (in Reason) about “The GOP Civil War Over Libertarianism”

“This battle for the soul of the Republican Party [is] between people who are actually interested in cutting the size of government and…an establishment that is more scared,” says Reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch. “I think, right now, this is the national political story that is the most interesting.”

At Reason Weekend 2013, the annual donor event for the nonprofit that publishes this website, Welch discussed the GOP infighting during the 2012 convention, how the Tea Party and more liberty-minded factions are upsetting the old guard, and the policy implications that could come out of this fight.

“The quality of conversation is changing in a way that is grounds for at least slight optimism in the Republican party.”

I think there is a war between those who want to cut the size of government and those who say they want to cut the size of government.

It ain’t gonna be pretty.

As if more evidence were needed that the public school system is dysfunctional beyond belief, I read that two school boys were suspended for pretending pencils were guns:

Media outlets report the 7-year-old boys were suspended for two days for a violation of the Suffolk school system’s zero-tolerance policy on weapons. They were playing with one another in class Friday at Driver Elementary.

“When I asked him about it, he said, ‘Well I was being a Marine and the other guy was being a bad guy,’” said Paul Marshall, one of the boys’ fathers. “It’s as simple as that.”

Marshall, a former Marine, said he believes school officials overreacted.

But Suffolk Public Schools spokeswoman Bethanne Bradshaw said a pencil is considered a weapon when it’s pointed at someone in a threatening way and gun noises are made.

“Some children would consider it threatening, who are scared about shootings in schools or shootings in the community,” Bradshaw said. “Kids don’t think about ‘Cowboys and Indians’ anymore, they think about drive-by shootings and murders and everything they see on television news every day.”

Bradshaw said the policy has been in place for at least two decades. It also bans drawing a picture of a gun and pointing a finger in a threatening manner.

Via Amy Alkon, who calls the educrats “drooling morons.” (Very funny, although I think drooling morons might do a better job of running the schools than these brainless apparatchiks.)

No doubt it will soon be a crime to say “BANG BANG!”

The Daily Mail (UK) has an article up about endocannabinoids. Cannabis-like chemical could help keep couch potatoes slim.

The break out of “endocannabinoid” into major publications has begun. And the Brits are ahead in the race.

I have been doing more thinking about the article in the local paper about the 4:20 meeting of the local chapter of NORML/Americans For Safe Access recounted at Cannabis talk here will lighten up sooner or later.

The newspaper article galled me because I think that it perpetuates stoner stereotypes in its subtext. A stereotype that way back in the dark ages was used for blacks. The happy darkies at play. And now the happy stoners at play. In this case there was a reversal of the stereotype – the darkies/stoners are not happy.

What was the meeting about? The persecution of stoners and endocannabinoids/medical marijuana. Very serious subjects. No wonder the darkies were not happy. Maybe they don’t like being the Jews of America any more that the Jews of Europe liked it in the 1933 to 1945 period. It is true we don’t resort to mass murder of stoners. But we do have mass persecution and mass incarceration.

The reporter’s injunction at the end of the piece “it will be time sooner or later for marijuana supporters in Rockford to lighten up, man” is so out of place. And not only that, I haven’t heard stoners talk like that for at least 20 years. Evidently the reporter met a few of the darkies in her college years and has avoided contact ever since.

I did the very first interview with a LEAP Officer which can be found at Interview With A Police Officer. Also at Winds of Change.

At 5:39 into the video there is a discussion of the corrupting influence of the War On Drugs On Police. Radley Balko also discusses that at Boston And Militarism: The Modern Drug War.

You can go to the LEAP site: Cops Say Legalize Drugs.

H/T The Weed Blog

Reading this gave me a wry chuckle:

all digital communications – meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like – are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

What about the Fourth Amendment, you ask? That’s long since been discarded under the “expectation of privacy” exception. In other words, if you don’t expect privacy because the government has taken it away, then you don’t get privacy. (Something I doubt even Lewis Carroll would be able to explain….)

And what about the “right” to privacy? Sorry, no deal. That only applies to things like abortion. No reasonable person would ever think it allows people to talk on the phone without the government recording every word.

From NASA Video Tech Briefs

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) launched in February 2010 with the goal of understanding the causes of solar variability and its impacts on Earth, focusing on measurements of the interior of the Sun, the Sun’s magnetic field, the hot plasma of the solar corona, and the irradiance that creates the ionospheres of the planets. Since its launch, SDO has had practically unbroken coverage of the Sun’s rise toward solar maximum – the peak of solar activity in its regular eleven-year cycle. This video shows those last three years at a pace of two images per day. The images were taken by SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, which images the solar atmosphere in multiple wavelengths to link changes in the surface to interior changes. Several noteworthy events briefly appear, including two partial eclipses of the sun by the moon, the largest flare of this solar cycle, comet Lovejoy, and the transit of Venus.

Update: 06 May 2013 0950z

NASA: The Transit of Venus

Los Angeles City Council member Bill Rosendahl: “I thanked God… …medical marijuana has saved my life.”

I don’t understand why the endocannabinoid system isn’t better appreciated.

NIH: Endocannabinoids in the immune system and cancer.

Modulation of the endocannabinoid system interferes with cancer cell proliferation either by inhibiting mitogenic autocrine/paracrine loops or by directly inducing apoptosis….

And that is only one cite among thousands.

Go to nih.gov and use their search function to search – endocannabinoid cancer – we know a lot. And we are learning more every day.

Made a 12 inch long steel airplane from rough plans, to which I added a scaled, nine cylinder rotary engine I designed from tiny hardware parts.

Behind the engine is a clock mechanism. (As you can see, the photo was taken at a little after 9:30.) The second hand is the propeller.  The landing gear is my vague evocation of 1930s style wheel coverings and model wheels.

It’s a cutesy sort of item, but trust me, it was a lot of work. (Especially the bloody cowling around the engine.)