31 May 2006 @ 1:22AM >> Last year, ProtestWarrior—the counter-protester group known for mocking anti-war protesters with clever signs and strong spines—had their website hacked. Thousands of credit card numbers were stolen by the hacker, apparently a left-wing activist named Jeremy Alexander Hammond, who targeted ProtestWarrior because of the political views of the site’s operators. (Does that make it a hate crime?)

After the FBI started looking into Hammond, he claimed that the investigation was politically motivated. (Would the FBI not typically investigate the theft of thousands of credit card numbers?) Now Hammond’s looking at hard time: an indictment was handed down last week for a crime that could carry a jail term of up to five years.

I suspect you’ll see more attempts to use technology to stifle political opponents. Until now, the Internet has been used primarily to enable speech. But it can also being used to suppress it. A number of other prominent websites have also been taken offline by hackers, and that’s just one incident in one day.

Throughout history, people have been executed and books have been burned in attempts to stamp out ideas. Humans always seem to have an urge to muzzle people who disagree with them. As more speech moves online, so will the attempts to stop it.

---

P.S. While I was over at ProtestWarrior, I ran across this link to a description of how The San Francisco Chronicle cropped a photograph at an anti-war rally to remove the more extreme visual elements. It’s a perfect example of how the establishment media sanitizes reporting of the protest movement, scrubbing away any hint of the more radical left-wing elements behind the protests.

28 May 2006 @ 4:08PM >> I’m generally not fond of linking to press releases from politicians, but I thought this list of items in the immigration bill recently passed by the U.S. Senate was pretty interesting. My favorites:

Under the bill, illegal aliens get an option to only have to pay three of their last five years in back taxes. Law-abiding American citizens do not have the option to pay some of their taxes. [...]

[E]mployers of aliens applying for adjustment of status “shall not be subject to civil and criminal tax liability relating directly to the employment of such alien.” Businesses that hired illegal workers would now get off scott-free from paying the taxes that they owe the government.

Only having to pay taxes for only 3 out of every 5 years you work? Hey, I’d love a deal like that!

The folks who raise hell any time a tax cut is proposed seem remarkably silent on this. I guess they only like taxes when the money comes out of the pockets of legal Americans and companies that don’t break our immigration laws. I wonder if there are any other laws I could break to get my tax bill cut by 40%.

But what’s happened to the Republican Party? While 32 Republicans voted against the bill, 20 voted to pass it. A significant bloc of Senate Republicans clearly found this bill palatable.

Democrats can be expected to vote for such things; indeed, only four Democrats voted against it. But during campaign seasons, Republicans are usually the ones who claim to oppose placing undue burdens on law-abiding taxpayers. Are they afraid of being called racists? Or are they hoping that when today’s illegals become citizens in the future, the Panderpublicans will end up with that vote?

For years, I’ve heard people on the left complain that there is really only one party in Washington, it just operates under two names. I’m beginning to see what they mean.

26 May 2006 @ 11:38PM >> Are these truly The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time? Judge for yourself. I’m going to keep my mouth shut, because I have friends who’ve worked on some of those projects, and I wouldn’t mind remaining friends.

Meanwhile, here’s a decision bound to appear on a future update to that list: Hollywood studios have reportly decided that the next generation of DVDs, new formats created to bring high-definition (HD) video to HDTVs, will eventually be rigged to not output HD-quality video to some HDTVs. Why? Because Hollywood wants your TV to have built-in copy protection circuitry.

So, even if you bought a brand-new, state-of-the-art flat screen HDTV today, future HD DVD players may not support the HD quality the name implies. You might think you’re buying HD; whether or not you get it is another story.

If you have an HDTV with what’s called an HDMI connector, you should be OK. But if your set relies on any other type of jack, it looks like you’ll eventually be out of luck. The only question is when.

25 May 2006 @ 6:23PM >> According to this report from the Radio Blogger website, Air America—the left-wing radio network—may be in its death throes. I, for one, do not share in the apparent glee of author Brian Maloney (no relation); as far as I’m concerned, the more exposure undiluted leftism gets, the better it is for the people who oppose it.

23 May 2006 @ 3:10AM >> First, let’s define “they.” For the purposes of this article, “they” refers to Jihadists: a radical subset of Muslims who believe it is their duty to kill anyone who refuses to abide by their religious law. Coincidentally, “they” are responsible for a disproportionate share of the terrorist attacks around the world, as un-politically-correct as this might be to recognize.

Now that we know who “they” are, who’s “us”? Even though the “us” that “they” hate pretty much amounts to all of Western society, I will take “us” to mean the United States, since in the eyes of many in the non-Western world, the U.S. symbolizes Western society. But as the ongoing terrorist attacks worldwide prove, people are grossly misinformed if they believe the United States is the only country the Jihadists wish to destroy. More >>

22 May 2006 @ 7:31PM >> A few links worthy of reading:

• The website TimesWatch says that New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger apologized to graduates of SUNY New Paltz for failing to stop the Iraq war. (And here I was naively thinking that the purpose of a newspaper was to report the news, not to prevent the implementation of American foreign policy.)
• German magazine Der Spiegel reports that Latin America is becoming increasingly dominated by organized crime.
• According to this report from ABC News, the Palestinian Territories may be on the verge of civil war.
• The London Times reports that al Qaeda is specifically targeting Christian children for kidnapping. The children are then sold into domestic slavery and the sex trade, with al Qaeda pocketing the profits.
• As the Mexican government threatens to sue the United States for enforcing immigration laws, it is banning non-Mexicans from being employed within the country.
• Meanwhile, nearly 15% of the Mexico’s labor force is now working within the United States.

19 May 2006 @ 9:02AM >> Yesterday, the Senate voted 63-34 to adopt English as the “national language” of the United States. The move, which doesn’t call for any changes in the way government business is conducted, was largely symbolic. Nevertheless, the Associated Press reports that a top Democrat threw down the race card to denounce the measure:

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada [said,] “I really believe this amendment is racist.”

I’ve written before about the danger posed by hate speech laws. Harry Reid is yet more proof. If declaring English the national language of the United States is racist, then speaking out in favor of it could be considered hate speech.

What if the United States had a hate speech law? What if Harry Reid were the Democratic Senate Majority Leader instead of the Minority Leader? And what if someone who shared Reid’s view occupied the White House? An in-power political coalition could conceivably use hate speech laws to criminally prosecute its opposition.

As far-fetched as that might sound, it’s already happening on college campuses. And even though college campuses tend to be rather extreme when compared to your average American town, there are many municipalities that are similarly extreme: San Francisco, Berkeley, Seattle, Ann Arbor, Portland, etc.

There is a movement brewing for local hate speech laws. And you can expect them to be used just as speech codes are on college campuses: as a club with which to beat political enemies into submission.

17 May 2006 @ 11:43PM >> This week’s Chutzpah Award goes to the government of Mexico, which is threatening to bring lawsuits against the U.S.—in our own courts—for enforcing American immigration laws:

Mexico warned Tuesday it would file lawsuits in U.S. courts if National Guard troops detain migrants on the border [...]

“If there is a real wave of rights abuses, if we see the National Guard starting to directly participate in detaining people ... we would immediately start filing lawsuits through our consulates,” Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez said in an interview with a Mexico City radio station.

Perhaps the Mexican government should instead focus on reforming their economy so Mexican citizens don’t feel driven to flee the country as if it were a burning building.

17 May 2006 @ 12:57AM >> Only white people can be racist, at least according to the Seattle public school system. Here’s how they define racism:

The systematic subordination of members of targeted racial groups who have relatively little social power in the United States (Blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and Asians), by the members of the agent racial group who have relatively more social power (Whites).

By this definition, if a white person were murdered simply for being white, it could not be considered a racist act.

The school system also says that “emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology” is a form of “cultural racism.” In other words, if you believe that group privileges should not be placed above the rights of individuals, you are a racist. The only way not to be a racist is to embrace a “collective ideology,” which throughout history has been better known as communism or socialism.

I’m sure if you asked the teachers in Seattle whether they were indoctrinating their students, they would deny it adamantly. But all you need to do is read their definition of racism to see how they’re steering students into their preferred ideology. Individualism is bad. Collectivism is good. Only whites can be racist.

I wonder what Seattle’s educrats would make of this quote:

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
Ayn Rand

According to the definitions above, speaking in favor of capitalism or individual rights can be considered racist speech. If the Seattle teachers’ union were in a position to decide what constitutes hate speech, a large part of America would be found guilty.

Now you know why I oppose hate speech laws so strongly. The result will not be to stamp out hate, but to impose thought conformity. Hate can’t be eradicated by decree; it can only be eliminated by an awakening of the heart. And I don’t think that teaching a generation of students that only white people can be racist is a good formula for reducing whatever number of truly racist honkies there might be in this country.

16 May 2006 @ 1:25AM >> The city of Boulder, Colorado is considering a hate speech hotline, reports David Harsanyi of the Denver Post:

There’s a famous joke that goes like this:

What’s the difference between a Rottweiler and a Jewish mother? Eventually, the Rottweiler lets go.

Now, some Jews may find that joke offensive. I don’t. But if you’re insulted, and you live in Boulder, you’re in luck. Soon enough, you may be able to report me to the authorities.

Tuesday, the Boulder City Council will take up the matter of allocating public funding for a “hate hotline,” which would give residents an opportunity to report incidents in which Boulderites use tactless language.

The trouble with government regulation of hate speech is, who determines what constitutes hate?

In my research on college campuses for the upcoming film Indoctrinate U, I’ve found case after case of students and professors being punished under “hate speech” codes simply for expressing mainstream political opinions. In academia, those opinions—typically conservative ones—have been redefined as “hate” by administrators, who use speech codes to suppress opinions that they don’t like. The problem is common enough that groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education were created solely to combat the persistent abuse of tools like speech codes.

Speech codes in the form of goverment-enforced hate speech laws are far more troubling. Governments have the power to fine people and throw them in jail. City governments that are now condemning people for their opinions may one day decide to enact harsher penalties for what some consider hate speech.

Although Boulder’s proposed rat-out-your-neighbor-for-offensive-language hotline doesn’t rise to that level, it certainly seems like a step in that direction.

15 May 2006 @ 9:13PM >> The Women’s and Gender Studies Department at my alma mater finally puts on a program I might be interested in, and I find out too late to attend:

Recently, feminists at Bucknell University sponsored an event that looked more like a Duke Lacrosse party than a celebration of feminist diversity. On March 8, Bucknell’s so-called Feminist Majority - along with groups like the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, the Center for the Study of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity, and the Office of Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Awareness - paid $1,920 for a strip show at Bucknell.

Billed as a “celebration of whore culture” the show was euphemistically titled the “Sex Workers Art Show.” It featured a group of hookers, phone sex operators, smut writers, porn stars, and one woman who appeared via her 24-hour porn website.

As the article points out, what’s interesting about this isn’t what Bucknell is willing to sponsor, but what they’re not.

15 May 2006 @ 2:53PM >> My very simple plan for restoring balance to academia: send Condoleezza Rice to every college and university in the country.

12 May 2006 @ 4:33PM >> Jonah Goldberg of National Review notices that the faculty of Boston College selectively invokes the institution’s historical Catholicism when convenient for making political stands. Take, for instance, this maneuver to revoke the invitation of this year’s commencement speaker, who happens to be Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:

In a letter distributed by the heads of the Catholic school’s theology department and signed by about 200 faculty members, we are informed that, “On the levels of both moral principle and practical moral judgment, Secretary Rice’s approach to international affairs is in fundamental conflict with Boston College’s commitment to the values of the Catholic and Jesuit traditions and is inconsistent with the humanistic values that inspire the university’s work.” The letter, titled “Condoleezza Rice Does Not Deserve a Boston College Honorary Degree,” cherry-picks quotes from Pope John Paul II to argue that Rice’s policies should disqualify her as a commencement speaker.

One can respect honest disagreement over the Bush administration’s foreign policy. But this high-minded rhetoric is a bit hard to take considering that B.C. is fairly selective about where it will draw such lines. For example, Mary Daly was for decades a distinguished professor at Boston College, despite the fact she exceeds even the right-wing parody of a left-wing academic. She refused to teach men. Her writings include such relentlessly anti-Catholic manifestos as “The Church and the Second Sex” and “Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation.” (Although my favorite title is “Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage.”)

Daly left the school in 1999, when she was told that she could no longer discriminatorily bar men from all of her classes. Rather than teach men, she chose to quit. But until then, Daly was free to call for the abolition of the Catholic Church and other “patriarchal religions” in favor of her own “post-Christian” feminist religion. Apparently, teaching students to reject Catholicism entirely is tolerable in a Catholic school, but Catholicism is useful in a pinch when it can be used to shun villains like Rice. “This is the only time these people have cited Pope John Paul II on anything,” the Rev. Paul McNellis, an adjunct professor in the B.C. philosophy department, told the Boston Globe.

12 May 2006 @ 4:47AM >> The Washington Post wonders whether 2006 will be the year of the black Republican:

The three are running on similar platforms of lower taxes, smaller government, and opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage, but they come to their contests with different credentials. [Ohio Gubernatorial candidate Kenneth] Blackwell has a long resume in elective office and conservative causes. [Maryland candidate for governor Michael] Steele is a former state party chairman but has never been elected on his own. [Pennsylvania governor hopeful Lynn] Swann is a true political novice, albeit one with the star quality of a Hall of Fame wide receiver.

I would imagine it’s not easy being a black Republican. Holding views that differ from the edicts of the media-anointed “leaders of your race” will get you labeled a sell-out. It will confound white liberals who assume that your skin color is supposed to determine your political orientation. It will cause political opponents to do things like throw Oreos at you during public appearances.

It must take quite a lot of guts to promote ideas you believe in knowing full well that doing so will get you excommunicated from your own racial group by the arbiters of What It Is To Be Black.

9 May 2006 @ 1:02AM >> Southern Methodist University professor Steve Denson has branded the Young Conservatives of Texas, a student-run campus organization with a presence at a number of schools in the state, as “the Junior League of the KKK.”

Why? Well, it appears that Professor Denson doesn’t like YCT’s positions on illegal immigration and the school’s use of racial preferences to set aside seats in the student senate for certain minority groups.

Interestingly, Professor Denson is also the Director of Diversity at SMU’s business school. I would assume that if Denson equates opposition to his preferred political views with sympathy for the KKK, he might not be terribly interested in promoting diversity of the intellectual variety. In fact, it sounds like if he had his way, the conservatives would be banned from campus altogether. After all, who wants to share a community with a bunch of Klansmen?

Denson seems to have two primary functions in his job as diversity enforcer:

1. To ensure that everybody looks different, and
2. To ensure that everybody thinks the same.

In other words, Denson’s job is to prevent diversity as much as it is to promote it.

He’s off to a good start.

8 May 2006 @ 10:24AM >> The Drudge Report is highlighting the latest depressing data for the newspaper business:

• Overall newspaper circulation is down 2.6% over the last six months.
• Of the top 20 highest-circulated papers in the country, 16 experienced circulation declines within the last six months.
• 14 of those papers lost 1% or more of their readers.
• 11 of those papers lost more than 2.5% of their readers.

Stunning circulation losses of 5% and more hit five big papers: San Francisco Chronicle (down 15.6%), The Boston Globe (down 8.5%), The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (down 6.7%), Los Angeles Times (down 5.4%), and The Philadelphia Inquirer (down 5.1%).

Remember, this is over a period of six months. Year-over-year statistics will most likely look dramatically worse.

The good news was relatively limited: of the four papers that had circulation increases, none had increases of 1% or more.

Here’s the raw data, as reported by Drudge:

1. USA Today, 2,272,815, up 0.09 percent
2. The Wall Street Journal, 2,049,786, down 1 percent
3. The New York Times, 1,142,464, up 0.5 percent
4. Los Angeles Times, 851,832, down 5.4 percent
5. The Washington Post, 724,242, down 3.7 percent
6. New York Daily News, 708,477, down 3.7 percent
7. New York Post, 673,379, down 0.7 percent
8. Chicago Tribune, 579,079, up 0.9 percent
9. Houston Chronicle, 513,387, down 3.6 percent
10. The Arizona Republic, 438,722, down 2.1 percent
11. Newsday, Long Island, 427,771, down 2.7 percent
12. The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., 398,329, up 0.9 percent
13. San Francisco Chronicle, 398,246, down 15.6 percent
14. The Boston Globe, 397,288, down 8.5 percent
15. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 365,011, down 6.7 percent
16. Star Tribune of Minneapolis-St. Paul, 362,964, down 2.9 percent
17. The Philadelphia Inquirer, 350,457, down 5.1 percent
18. Detroit Free Press, 345,861, up 0.04 percent
19. The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, 343,163, down 1.6 percent
20. St. Petersburg Times, Florida, 323,031, down 4.4 percent

Note: I am being a bit lazy by using the term “readers” and “circulation” interchangeably. In the newspaper business, circulation refers to the number of copies of each issue pushed out the door. Usually, the paid readership is substantially lower than the circulation, so the numbers above overstate the number of people who pay for each issue. On the other hand, some copies of those papers may be read by more than one person, so the number of people reading the papers—which is what advertisers generally care about—is likely to be higher than the paid circulation. But whatever the underlying numbers actually are, there’s no way this is good news for the newsprint business.

4 May 2006 @ 10:36PM >> Stuart Browning, one of my business partners in On The Fence Films, stopped by the May Day protest in San Francisco to gather some footage. He also noticed signs and banners from the various extremist groups that backed the protest, and wonders why the establishment media is glossing over the radical nature of the organizers.

El Uno de Mayo, his two-city report (which incorporates some of my footage from New York), is now available for free online viewing.

4 May 2006 @ 10:27PM >> Earlier today, Power Line posted an in-depth video report of the May Day protests held around the country this past Monday. The effort was coordinated by documentary filmmaker Andrew Marcus, who edited and narrated the report

I shot some of the New York City footage, and contributed a few comments to the report via phone interview. It’s been quite a while since I’ve been able to dedicate enough time to creating a short video for Brain Terminal, but with the work on Indoctrinate U winding down this summer, I hope to be able to post some new videos of my own in the not-too-distant future.

3 May 2006 @ 6:56PM >> Convicted September 11th co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui was spared the death penalty. His reaction:

“America, you lost. I won!” Moussaoui yelled as he was escorted from the U.S. District courtroom in Alexandria after the verdict was read. He clapped his hands as he left.

There are those who believe that the fight against Jihadist terrorism should be handled by law enforcement, as though al Qaeda were the mafia. To me, that’s naive and dangerous thinking.

You can’t win a war in court. Just ask Zacarias Moussaoui.

3 May 2006 @ 9:36AM >> The quote of the day, courtesy of Osama bin Laden:

[T]he crime committed by a freethinker is the worst of crimes, that the damage caused by his staying alive among the Muslims is of the worst kind of damage, that he is to be killed, and that his repentance is not to be accepted.

[...]

Indeed, this is our Prophet’s law regarding anyone who mocks him, and belittles Islam and scorns it... They should be killed... It is intolerable and outrageous that the heretics are among us, scorning our religion and our Prophet.

Therefore, you must fear Allah and do His will. Do not consult anyone about the killing of these heretics. Be secretive in carrying out that which is required of you.

How exactly does one “give peace a chance” with someone like this? Failing to act against this type of corrosive ideology just gives bin Laden and his followers a chance to keep killing. In what way does that further the cause of peace?

2 May 2006 @ 4:07PM >> Stuart Browning, one of my partners in On The Fence Films, took his video camera to the May Day protest in San Francisco yesterday. For now, he’s got a series of stills from the rally; in a few days, he’ll be posting a video covering multiple cities.

Also, documentarian Andrew Marcus leads a multi-city team in covering the protests in conjunction with PowerLine and Pajamas Media. He’s got a few scenes from the protests, and will also be following up with more footage later this week.

2 May 2006 @ 1:27AM >> According to Nancy Kruh of The Dallas Morning News, veteran New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has been stuck in a rut for years. “For several months now,” Kruh writes, “as I’ve read one Iraq war column after another, one thought always comes to mind: Um, haven’t I read this before? So, yesterday, I finally immersed myself in Lexis-Nexis to try to quantify and qualify this phenomenon.”

What Kruh discovered is that many of Herbert’s columns during the Bush presidency contain similar, interchangeable passages. She cites a number of examples that make it seem like your average Herbert column is just a random recombination of verbiage from earlier columns.

Given the paper’s recent stock performance and rumblings from restless investors, I thought I’d help the Times find ways to put out the same product for less money. So I spent about fifteen minutes writing software that can generate Bob Herbert columns while using a minimal amount of our Earth’s precious resources. More >>