Worth the watch.

I don’t say that lightly either. I truly believe that Trump has already done irreparable damage to the GOP, and if he becomes the nominee, he will actually take it down with him.

But does that upset me? No. While we may have a two-party system in this country, there’s no reason it must remain these two parties.

Something’s got to change. We can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. We need something radically different. What if we resurrect the Federalist Party?

The Democrats and Republicans have both taken as their name political principles important to the American system of government—and we all believe in both of them. But there is another principle that was equally vital at the founding and has been gradually discarded over the past century: federalism.

A federal system is one in which power is divided between levels of government. This was an important part of the American experiment because the Founders intended the checks and balances to operate not only among the branches of government, but between the levels of government, as well. The states were to check the federal government and vice versa. In the multitude of centers of power, there was freedom.

This was so important that the “Federalists” became the name for America’s first organized political movement and the republic’s most prominent architects. The Federalist Party was the party of George Washington, and the first party secretary was Alexander Hamilton.

Now that’s a movement I can get behind.

“If we are interested in Christianity in any sort of serious way, it is not because it’s easy or trendy or popular,” I previously wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “It’s because Jesus himself is appealing, and what he says rings true. It’s because the world we inhabit is utterly phony, ephemeral, narcissistic, image-obsessed and sex-drenched—and we want an alternative. It’s not because we want more of the same.”

I have no personal sexual orientation to call my own after Christ chisels my heart anew — and neither do you. We have Christ orientation, an alien identity to which we claim no rights. Do we struggle with sin? Yes. Is temptation a sin? No. What distinguishes temptation from sin? Temptation clobbers you from the outside and lures you to do its bidding. Sin makes temptation a house pet, gets it a collar and leash, and is deceived to believe that it can be restrained by impositions of civility.

The fats restriction largely stemmed from the fact that saturated fat was once thought to be a major culprit in heart disease – and this somehow extended to all fats. But in recent years, it seems that saturated fat may not be so bad, and may even be good in some ways (as in its effects on HDL or “good” cholesterol), or at least neutral. This is especially true when compared to a diet high in refined carbs, which do nothing for cardiovascular risk, except possibly increase it. In fact, refined carbs and added sugars, which have typically been the alternative to fats, are linked to a laundry list of health ailments.

The previous restrictions led us to make all sorts of crazy diet decisions, like thinking Snackwells were a healthy choice.

“Placing limits on total fat intake has no basis in science and leads to all sorts of wrong industry and consumer decisions,” said Dariush Mozaffarian, one of the authors of the new paper. “Modern evidence clearly shows that eating more foods rich in healthful fats like nuts, vegetable oils, and fish have protective effects, particularly for cardiovascular disease. Other fat-rich foods, like whole milk and cheese, appear pretty neutral; while many low-fat foods, like low-fat deli meats, fat-free salad dressing, and baked potato chips, are no better and often even worse than full-fat alternatives. It’s the food that matters, not its fat content.”

But politics invades nearly every aspect of our lives. (That’s part of my frustration with it, actually. One almost can’t have an opinion about something without it being tantamount to a political statement.) So it’s going to be impossible to never talk about something that is political. That’s not my goal. My goal is to set my mind on the best of things.

Today’s Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage is a perfect example. How utterly political. Yet I’m not interested in the politics of it. Frankly, I would’ve been shocked had the Court ruled any other way. What reasoning would a secular society have for forbidding it?

But as a Christian, I am very interested in living by the will of God, speaking truth in love, and loving truthfully. Which means I shouldn’t avoid discussing things just because the political realm has snatched them up (as it will with everything eventually). And ironically, I think a lot of Christians are jammed up by the politics of same-sex marriage and the fact that we’re using one word (“marriage”) to mean two entirely different things. Fellow developer and Christian Greg Baugues has some wise things to say about that.

So I won’t be avoiding things just because they have a political component. But I’ll be focusing on those things from other angles and leaving the political mudslinging to others.

As you were.

This morning, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that though the text of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (casually known as Obamacare) very clearly says one thing, it actually means another thing. It means the opposite thing, in fact. It means the opposite thing because that’s now what the Government wants it to mean, never mind that the chief architect of Obamacare ran around the country for years telling state governments that the law means exactly what it appears to mean.

The Court ruled that where the law reads, “established by the State”, it somehow also means “not established by the State”.

(If you need a quick explanation of what this means and why it’s important, read the first few paragraphs of this article at Reason.)

How? What could possibly be the reasoning for such stunning absurdity?

Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is con- sistent with the former, and avoids the latter. Section 36B can fairly be read consistent with what we see as Congress’s plan, and that is the reading we adopt.

Majority Opinion in King v. Burwell

In short, words no longer have meaning because whatever lawmakers intended is what matters, even if they were too rushed or ignorant to make sure they used the right words to say so. To put another way, the Supreme Court declared itself an umpire who says “Well, he was obviously trying to throw a strike, so it’s a strike.” If the rules you thought mattered actually don’t, the game was never what you thought it was in the first place.

And with this, something like scales fell from my eyes.

It’s not just this ruling. It’s the whole system. I saw the futility of my own frustrated attempts to understand, analyze, and comment on our political system, the most impressive of mirages. None of it is real. It doesn’t matter what our laws actually say. They have no constraining power. It doesn’t matter that we have three branches of government, each designed to provide a check against the others. They don’t.

These despots will do exactly as they please, and our system of government will find some way to make it legitimate. Nothing will stand in their way because nothing is standing in their way. The political and economic elite are all in this together, and any appearance of conflict in Washington is just theater. Our entire political system only serves to give the people the illusion they’re in control. But guess what? Your vote doesn’t matter. Stand defiantly against this monster all I want, I’m a nobody with no influence and nothing I do will change a thing.

So I’m done.

I won’t waste my life with this fruitlessness anymore. I won’t let the stress of Rome burning paralyze me and poison my relationships with loved ones. This goes further than merely declaring an end to political activism, a nasty sport I swore off years ago. This is a hope to live by Philippians 4:8:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

I can’t think of a passage of text that more beautifully describes the very antithesis of engaging in political gossip.

So I will instead focus on my actual world, the world around me. The one filled with neighbors and loved ones with whom I interact on a daily basis. The one where my desires and decisions have a real effect. Where little things that I do can make a big difference.

I’m not saying I won’t slip. Most drug addicts don’t kick it the first time. So this post is addressed to my future self more than anyone else.

If you’re a friend of mine, hold me to this. When you see me going on another political tear or wasting time catching up on the latest political gossip, just say, “Hey Kev, remember that blog post you wrote?” That’ll be all you’ll need to do. I’ll know.

Here’s to dwelling on the best of things.

An addendum.

[W]hen I see people discarding their older beliefs that homosexuality is sinful after engaging with loving, wise, gay people, I’m inclined to agree that those earlier views were likely defective. In fact, they must have been essentially a form of bigotry. They could not have been based on theological or ethical principles, or on an understanding of historical biblical teaching. They must have been grounded instead on a stereotype of gay people as worse sinners than others (which is itself a shallow theology of sin). So I say good riddance to bigotry. However, the reality of bigotry cannot itself prove the Bible never forbids homosexuality. We have to look to the text to determine that.

I’d say a change of heart after getting to know gay people who don’t fit our previous bigoted stereotypes easily accounts for the biggest shift in cultural acceptance of homosexuality, especially within the western Christian church. That’s certainly what I’ve seen. Most people aren’t doing intense, sincere study of these things in pursuit of the truth, no matter how uncomfortable they may be with it. They’ve simply met some gay people they genuinely like, and they want their friends to be happy.

Keller is spot on: if all it took to change our minds was befriending gay people who don’t fit our preconceived notions of homosexuality, then we were bigots indeed.

The whole piece is worth a read.

After interviewing several people about their relationship with email, Mark has noticed that, for some people, email is an extension of autonomy—it’s about having control. One subject, she said, told her, “I let the sound of the bell and the popups rule my life.” Compulsively checking email or compulsively clearing out queues of unread emails, then, can be a form of regaining some of that control. “So I might refine your theory to say that those who feel compelled to check email may be more susceptible to feeling a loss of control [and] in missing out on information,” Mark said.

When someone drops everything just to get an unread count back to zero, productivity might be taking a hit. “It takes people on average about 25 minutes to reorient back to a task when they get interrupted,” she says. Yes, that includes even brief interruptions, like dashing off a quick response to an email, and it often takes so long to get back on task because the project you start doing after handling an email often isn’t the same as the one you were already doing. (These interruptions are so integral to modern workflows, Mark says, that when people lack external interruptions, such as a coworker striking up a conversation, they voluntarily interrupt themselves—sometimes by checking email.)

I happen to like Mark’s theory, but I also think there’s another urge that fuels the nagging feeling that comes with unread messages: Immediately reading and archiving incoming emails is just like checking a box on a to-do list and clearing out unread stories in an RSS feed. In other words, the appeal of these behaviors lies in the illusion of progress that they foster. Few tasks have a sense of conclusion as neat and immediate as archiving or deleting an email. For that reason, neurotically tidy people like me can’t help but triage emails the moment they arrive.

Bingo. Instant sense of accomplishment. I know that’s why I do it.

No, Elton was not insane. Elton was not mean. Elton was not rude. Elton was not wild-eyed. Elton was not constantly angry. Elton never threatened me. Elton was calm, level-headed, smart, and studious. He was generally kind and well-mannered. Bright and articulate, he spoke smooth and easy. Elton was not a poor unwanted outcast; a down-and-outer he was not. Neither the simplistic narratives of the right or left work for him.

The core is taking Muhammad, his words and his actions, seriously. Elton took Islam seriously.

Perhaps we should stop telling devout Muslims that they don’t really believe what they say they believe and start taking them at their word.

More on what Elton believed.

It’s easy to say “you stand with Michael Brown or you’re a racist!” It’s easy to hate the cop that shot him, or to think that all the protesters are thugs. And yet, it’s not that simple. Reports consistently indicate that most of us would like both Michael Brown and the officer who shot him, if we knew them individually. It’s entirely possible that they would like each other! Demonizing one side or the other helps us feel better, but it doesn’t make the world better.

It’s easy to say “Israel should stop killing civilians.” And it’s easy to say “Palestinians should stop shooting missiles at Israel.” And yet, it’s difficult to admit that the entire event is fraught with nuance, history, grudges, and more. Picking a side feels easy, but it isn’t.

Filing this one away for the next time someone wants to argue on Twitter. The medium just encourages the worst kind of discussion.

In the midst of the latest discussion on discrimination in the tech world, yet again I see derisive comments about white guys effortlessly tossed in by the very people advocating for fair treatment of others. Without commenting on the rest of the situation surrounding Julie Ann Horvath leaving GitHub, let me simply ask people for some empathy here.

I happen to be white and male. I didn’t choose to be either. Have they conferred privileges on me in life? I suppose, but I can’t be certain. I’ve always been a white guy. Everyone’s experience is unique, and I’d rather people know me and treat me like the singular person I am.

When I see “white guys” or some variant of it used in such a context, I’m immediately reminded of one thing: I’m not welcome here. My opinion and perspective aren’t welcome in this discussion. Because of factors completely out of my control, a whole boatload of things are assumed about me, and anything I try to contribute that doesn’t conform to prevailing opinions will be discounted or even rejected wholesale. Sadly, this has actually been my experience time and again, both face-to-face and in the oft anonymous, harsh world of the Internet.

So often when I think I might have something to add, I instead shirk back and say nothing, thinking to myself, “Nevermind, I’d rather not get shouted down again just because of my sex and skin tone.”

It’s worth asking yourself what it is you want out of your involvement in these brouhahas. To “win” the comment thread? To be proclaimed right and have your rhetorical opponents beg for mercy? To have the most retweeted blog post? To make a name for yourself? Or do you actually want the world to be a better place?

I hope the whole purpose of conversations like this is to more fully understand others from a diverse background; that’s an admirable goal. We shouldn’t box people out of those discussions merely because they’re part of some group. Even (and especially) when it’s become socially acceptable to sneer at that group.

Which is pretty ironic.

In the end, a radar gun capable of slowing cars through radiation pressure would be roughly equivalent to a nuclear weapon, and using nuclear strikes in response to traffic violations is probably overkill.

Looks like xkcd’s always intriguing What If? series will soon be in book form. Now there’s a coffee table book worth having.

​Who is this “we”? The elevation of the power of the majority over the rights of the individual—the basic assumption that people are not free unless “we” say so—is now so commonplace that we hardly notice how extreme a proposition it really is. It is contrary to the foundations of our constitutional system; it betrays not only the principles articulated by the founders but the constitutional rebirth that was announced in the Fourteenth Amendment. It assumes that no person is born free, but that freedom is a gift given to each of us by the government’s whim. It ignores the conscience of the Constitution.

Yet it is so prevalent an assumption today that government routinely restricts the individual’s right to use private property to run a business, to ingest drugs, to possess a firearm, to support political candidates, to choose their own cars, their own schools, their own spouses, their own medical insurance, and even their own lightbulbs… all in the name of democracy.

In short, it is the same political philosophy that was argued by the pro-slavery crowd 150 years ago.

In one way or another, EllisLab has been a crucial part of my livelihood over the last six years. I was part of small web agency building client sites with ExpressionEngine for several years before I went to work for the company itself. It’s no exaggeration to say that I am who I am because of EllisLab. The people here have inspired me.

Today is my last day with my favorite band. It’s bittersweet to say goodbye, but I’m incredibly proud of the work I’ve done here, honored to have been part of the important changes going on at EllisLab, and so thankful for the many brilliant, thoughtful people I’ve met here.

EllisLab is a talented, intentional, lively band of makers, and I believe in them now more than ever. The work they’re doing is foundational, powerful stuff; I’m eager to see where they take ExpressionEngine in the years to come.

For me, the road ahead combines my work in building for the web with the reason I moved to Music City in the first place: my love of music. I’m joining a small team here in Nashville to help make something really great for the music industry, and I’m thrilled with the possibilities.

Here’s to the road ahead. I do love an adventure.

When the moment comes and the sergeant-at-arms utters the sacred words — “Mr. Speaker! The president of the United States!” — the chamber will erupt, as though the assembled have entirely forgotten that the mysterious entity that is the object of this curious act of national worship only a decade ago was an obscure legislator in a destitute and corrupt state, a man whose most prominent legislative accomplishment was the passage of a bill requiring police to videotape confessions in potential capital cases — in a state in which there were as a practical matter no potential capital cases. (Illinois had not carried out an execution during the century in which the law was passed and was on its way toward abolishing capital punishment categorically.)

But they will listen, rapt, and the media mandarins afterward will evaluate each promise with great sobriety, ignoring entirely that the central promise made during the same charlatan’s first State of the Union address was subsequently labeled “Lie of the Year” by the great man’s own frustrated admirers. That an entire class of people should be so enthusiastic about being lied to, serially, is perplexing.

He goes on to say that it’s not about Obama himself, and he’s right. It’s a show put on by every president from Wilson on, and the whole spectacle gives lie to our notion of separation of powers.

Read the whole thing. It’s worth it.

Can’t wait until Google forces you to merge your Nest and Google Accounts.

It’s a show about a duck hunter operating in the Louisiana backwoods, who says the kinds of things you might expect a duck hunter from the Louisiana backwoods to say. In deciding to suspend Robertson indefinitely, A&E sought to make sure people understood “[h]is personal views in no way reflect those of A&E Networks, who have always been strong supporters and champions of the LGBT community.” I don’t know who could confuse the things said by a man who stars in a reality show about duck hunting with things the executives at the network might believe.

A&E’s suspension of Robertson is within their right. If their aim, however, is actually to be “strong supporters and champions of the LGBT community,” their application of the Streisand effect to Robertson’s views couldn’t possibly have helped.

Pretty much sums it up. I’m put out with the usual ignorant outrage over Robertson’s comments, ginned-up by interest groups with an obvious agenda. (One which does not, by the way, seem to be of respecting others’ views and engaging in meaningful dialogue.) But I’m simply crestfallen at the complete civic illiteracy in the arguments that this is somehow a violation of Robertson’s First Amendment rights.

And a comment on our cultural penchant for outrage: before you dive into the latest tiresome controversy-of-the-moment, maybe take some time to actually read the GQ profile in question. You’ll always find more nuance when you look past the soundbites.

I kept reading with the expectation that at any moment, they’d all laugh and confess to just giving the guy a hard time. Nope. They’re all in. They actually believe this stuff.

People don’t go into business to create jobs; they go into business to make money. Labor is a cost. The more expensive labor is, the more attractive nonhuman replacements for labor become. The minimum wage makes labor more expensive. Obama knows this, which is why he so often demonizes ATM machines as job-killers.

Jonah Goldberg highlights a few major chain restaurants that are rolling out tablets to allow patrons to order and pay without the need for waitstaff. Will there still be cooks and food-runners? People to refill drinks? Sure, but the overall staff numbers needed to effectively handle that kind of restaurant goes way down. As Goldberg says, even though the restaurants promise they won’t be getting rid of staff, “Are we really supposed to believe that the chain will keep thousands of redundant human staffers on the payroll forever?” Of course not.

Will all restaurants move to the tablet ordering systems? No. Fancy restaurants, where the premium experience the waiter helps create matters a great deal, will likely continue to employ servers. But server jobs at lower-end restaurants like Applebee’s and Chili’s—you know, the kind of server jobs that are fairly easy to get—are going the way of the dodo bird.

And what of fast food restaurants? At present, human labor is inexpensive enough for that business model to employ quite a few of workers in each restaurant. Bump up the cost of labor, and I suspect fast food joints will soon become a set of impressive machines manned by a single technician/manager and cleaned by a roving janitorial crew.

One of the Movember mantras is: “Real men, growing real moustaches, talking about real issues”. The slogan is as misguided as its campaign: Movember is divisive, gender normative, racist and ineffective against some very real health issues.

On the positive side, this has to be one of the most united comments sections I’ve ever seen.

If it sounds too fantastic to be true, especially if it confirms your existing beliefs, take it with a big dose of skepticism.

Most commentary has focused on the successful evocation of the essence of Ireland and the bittersweet poignancy of the reveal of the bride, but both of these miss the primary appeal of the ad, which rests in its portrayal of unironic and affectionate male friendship.

Like all advertisements, this spot presents us with the world as we would like it to be, not as it is. In the wake of the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger, four Irishmen are more likely to encounter a foreclosed McMansion than a stone church. Of course Ireland, especially to American imaginations, has always been more an idea—often a mystical, fantastical one—than a tangible reality.

The appeal, then, is not that of Ireland per se, but of what it represents. It’s the type of place where it’s normal for men to sing and sip whiskey in the rain on a friend’s wedding day, and for that reason it is a viscerally attractive place. But it’s also a place that’s distant from our own, both as a matter of time and space.

Not enough human involvement in the process. No communication. Too much reliance on initial vision. No refinement, no pivots. It’s pretty clear that this website wasn’t loved. I know that sounds dorky, but the products you love were loved by the people who created them.

But I want to take a step back. We can argue the details ad infinitum, yet I observe a much broader issue with education today. Standards-based education is ruining the way we teach and learn. Yes, I’ve already been told by legislators and administrators, “Ethan, that’s just the way things work.” But why? I’m going to answer that question: it’s bureaucratic convenience. It works with nuclear reactors, it works with business models, why can’t it work with students? I mean, how convenient, calculating exactly who knows what and who needs what. I mean, why don’t we just manufacture robots instead of students? They last longer, and they always do what they’re told.

But education is unlike every other bureaucratic institute [sic] in our government. The task of teaching in never quantifiable. If everything I learn in high school is a measurable objective, I haven’t learned anything. I’d like to repeat that: If everything I learn in high school is a measurable objective, I have not learned anything. Creativity, appreciation, inquisitiveness… these are impossible to scale. But they’re the purpose of education. Why our teachers teach. Why I choose to learn.

And today we find ourselves in a nation that produces workers. Everything is career and college preparation. Somewhere, our founding fathers are turning in their graves pleading, screaming, and trying to say to us that we teach to free minds. We teach to inspire. We teach to equip. The careers will come naturally.

I know we’re just one city in a huge system that excitedly embraces numbers, but ask any of these teachers, ask my peers, and ask yourselves, haven’t we gone too far with data?

Bravo! This guy is so well-spoken, and he’s right on the money. The best things I got out of my education don’t show up on graphs.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the unraveling of Obamacare.

First, the obligatory caveats. It is no laughing matter that millions of Americans’ lives have been thrown into anxious chaos as they lose their health insurance, their doctors, their money, or all three. Nor is it particularly amusing to think of the incredible waste of time and tax dollars that has gone into Obamacare’s construction. And the still-unfolding violence that this misbegotten legislation will visit on the economy and our liberties is not funny either. This very magazine has been downright funereal about the brazen and unconstitutional seizure of one-sixth of the economy, and rightly so.

But come on, people.

If you can’t take some joy, some modicum of relief and mirth, in the unprecedentedly spectacular beclowning of the president, his administration, its enablers, and, to no small degree, liberalism itself, then you need to ask yourself why you’re following politics in the first place.

Indeed. I comment on politics not because I assume my involvement in observing the spectacle will have some actual effect, but because it is fascinating sport. Obamacare has already become a magnificent failure far eclipsing the dire predictions of its most ardent opponents, and its supporters’ unwavering belief in the efficacy of good intentions has caused them to double down on insane promises.

Jonah’s piece is a long one but well worth the read, especially if you find yourself aghast at the delight on display by libertarians and conservatives over the inept rollout of Obamacare.

I can’t pretend like I don’t enjoy watching the promises of modern liberalism become its own undoing, and it’s showtime at the comeuppance theater.

For the victims of governmental fraud, the only recourse is political, which is to say that it entails relying on the same government that perpetrated the fraud.

I understand the position of some of my more left-leaning friends who rail against big corporations. I’m certainly no apologist for bad actors in the marketplace. But I struggle to comprehend why these same people, who rightly denounce the abuses of business, give abusive government a pass as if it’s an anomaly and treat biennial, two-choice elections as an acceptable remedy.

Imagine a corporation with a monopoly protected by law and police power to enforce its desires. Imagine it extracts payment for its products in advance from everyone, whether they want the company’s products or not, and returns to customers something only vaguely similar to the product that was promised. Not happy with the product you received? Good news! The corporation holds a contest to great fanfare every other year for you to vote for one of two pre-selected candidates to join its massive board of directors.

Sound like a good deal to you?

As Morgen said, this has to be the biggest bait and switch in U.S. history.

Fullerton resident Jennifer Harris thought she had a great deal, paying $98 a month for an individual plan through Health Net Inc. She got a rude surprise this month when the company said it would cancel her policy at the end of this year. Her current plan does not conform with the new federal rules, which require more generous levels of coverage.

Now Harris, a self-employed lawyer, must shop for replacement insurance. The cheapest plan she has found will cost her $238 a month. She and her husband don’t qualify for federal premium subsidies because they earn too much money, about $80,000 a year combined.

“It doesn’t seem right to make the middle class pay so much more in order to give health insurance to everybody else,” said Harris, who is three months pregnant. “This increase is simply not affordable.”

But don’t worry, if you like your plan, you can keep it. President Obama promised.

​People are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second.

Fear of missing out? Ironically, we’re missing out on the life that’s actually happening around us because we can’t take our eyes off these little glowing screens.

I did not ready myself mentally for a barrage of hipster-hating Internet commenters critiquing me for everything: my pale skin, my outfit, my hair, my typing style, my glasses. An entire sub-thread was devoted to whether or not I had shaved legs. It was not the first time I had been labeled a “hipster.” I often wear tight jeans, big plastic-frame glasses, shirts bought at thrift stores. I listen to Vampire Weekend, understand and laugh at the references in “Portlandia.” I own and listen to vintage vinyl. The label never bothered me on its own. But with each successive violent response to the picture of me, I realized that hipsters weren’t considered a comically benign undercurrent of society. Instead, it seemed like Redditors saw hipsters and their ilk as a disease, and I was up on display as an example of depraved behavior.

Pretty neat to read about how he responded to it publicly and personally. He’s a good writer, so I’ll be looking him up to find some of his other work.

Still, the hating-on-hipsters joke is more than played out. The ability for the object of your ridicule to “take it” aside, it’s just not funny anymore. Quit recycling jokes and be original.

National Security Agency officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests, U.S. officials said.

But sure, I’ll just trust the government is doing the right thing.

“For too long, these companies were allowed to make huge profits buying mortgages, knowing that if their bets went bad, taxpayers would be left holding the bag. It was ‘heads we win, tails you lose.’ And it was wrong,” Obama said.

I can’t think of anything about which I’ve more wholeheartedly agreed with the President. It’s a titanic moral hazard. The government needs to get out of the business of home mortgages.

“We can’t leave taxpayers on the hook for irresponsibility or bad decisions by these lenders or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” he said. “We’ve got to encourage the pursuit of profit – but the era of expecting a bailout after you pursue your profit and you don’t manage your risk well - it puts the whole country at risk. We’re ending those days. We’re not going to do that anymore.”

He’s sounding decidedly free market, and you’d be a fool to think that’s by accident.

We’re going to be gifted with a health care plan we are forced to purchase and fined if we don’t, which purportedly covers at least 10 million more people without adding a single new doctor, but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn’t understand it, passed by a Congress that didn’t read it but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a president who smokes with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes, for which we will be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect, by a government which has already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, all to be overseen by a Surgeon General who is obese and financed by a country that’s broke.

So what the _____ could possible go wrong?

Good thing our betters in Washington are always looking out for us!

This is where we are at. Where you have no expectation of privacy. Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list. Where you have to watch every little thing you do because someone else is watching every little thing you do.​

People are offended because the terrorist looks like a rock star, and Rolling Stone had the guts to show us that.

They show us our fear—not of him—that would be irrational because he can’t harm anyone. Rather they show us our fear of ourselves. The realization that we equate youthful and sexy appearance with benevolence. Our value system fails. The input does not equal the output. Does not compute.

For anyone who thinks this is a non-issue, perhaps Malte Spitz, who published an infographic showing how much information his metadata reveals, can help clear that up:

​Three weeks ago, when the news broke about the National Security Agency’s collection of metadata in the United States, I knew exactly what it meant. My records revealed the movements of a single individual; now imagine if you had access to millions of similar data sets. You could easily draw maps, tracing communication and movement. You could see which individuals, families or groups were communicating with one another. You could identify any social group and determine its major actors.

All of this is possible without knowing the specific content of a conversation, just technical information — the sender and recipient, the time and duration of the call and the geolocation data.

Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it.

So just how much information about you can be pieced together with this data? Get ready for a headtrip.

The best defenses of his administration require undermining the rationale for his presidency.

He then proposes “the flip side of the conspiracy theory”: the redeemer fantasy. Both delusions require bestowing on political leaders almost god-like knowledge and power, and that’s really just absurd.

Well-intentioned human error rarely gets the credit it deserves. People want to connect the dots, but that’s only possible when you assume that all events were deliberately orchestrated by human will. This is the delusion at the heart of all conspiracy theorists, from Kennedy assassination crackpots to 9/11 “truthers.”

Behind all such delusions is the assumption that government officials we don’t like are omnicompetent and entirely malevolent. The truth is closer to the opposite. They mean well but can’t do very much very well.

This brings us to the flip side of the conspiracy theory — call it the redeemer fantasy: If only we had the right kind of government with the right kind of leaders, there’d be nothing we couldn’t do.

That was the very message behind President Obama’s first campaign, yet his administration is once again helping make the case against such a far-reaching and intrusive government. The problem with the IRS isn’t a few allegedly rogue agents abusing their power. The problem is that the agency has such power to begin with. Time to decimate the tax code. It’s hard to abuse power that you don’t have in the first place.

From the Washington Examiner:

Number crunchers, whose work is nonpolitical, don’t necessarily enjoy the spotlight, especially when the media and the public assume they’re engaged in partisan villainy.

“We’re not political,’’ said one determinations staffer in khakis as he left work late Tuesday afternoon. “We people on the local level are doing what we are supposed to do. . . . That’s why there are so many people here who are flustered. Everything comes from the top. We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive.”

Everything he advocates requires Americans to lavish on government something that his administration, and big government generally, undermines: trust.

Defense Distributed, the Texas-based nonprofit that wants to empower people to 3D print their own guns, has hit a bit of a legal snag. According to founder Cody Wilson, DEFCAD, the open source weapon-printing project powered by Defense Distributed, received a letter from the State Department’s Office of Defense Trade Compliance, telling him to remove the blueprints of the Liberator, his 3D printed gun, from the web so that they may be reviewed by the department.

The group’s website currently has a red banner appended to the top that reads, “DEFCAD files are being removed from public access at the request of the US Department of Defense Trade Controls. Until further notice, the United States government claims control of the information.”

“I immediately complied and I’ve taken down the files,” Mr. Wilson said. “But this is a much bigger deal than guns. It has implications for the freedom of the web.”

Of course, since this is the Internet, the files are already all over the web, even though Mr. Wilson complied with the takedown.

“I still think we win in the end,” he added. “Because the files are all over the Internet, the Pirate Bay has it–to think this can be stopped in any meaningful way is to misunderstand what the future of distributive technologies is about.”

The information is already out there. Shocking to discover the bureaucrats don’t know how the Internet works.

​Gun homicides have dropped steeply in the United States since their peak in 1993, a pair of reports released Tuesday showed, adding fuel to Congress’ battle over whether to tighten restrictions on firearms.

Gun-related homicides down 39% by raw numbers, down 49% by percentage given the population of the country. Non-fatal gun crimes are down 70%. Major improvements, mind you, and all in an era when gun control was overall becoming more relaxed. But yeah, we definitely need more gun laws. Especially reactionary gun control legislation that wouldn’t have done a thing to prevent whichever event those boobs are using as an excuse this time.

...as a Christian, I am my brother’s keeper (Genesis 4:9). To deny that would go against God. Every person around me – and the closer they are, and the more vulnerable they are, the greater my responsibility – has the right to expect me to care about them. After all, God cares.

That means, among many other things, that if – God forbid – I should ever find myself in a situation where people are being harmed by a violent person, I must try to protect them. Sadly, that is not an inconceivable scenario.

I have a handgun permit from the state of Tennessee. My gun is secured where no child or intruder can gain access to it. But I am prepared to serve as my brother’s keeper. I am saying to my family and community, “I will place your safety above my own.”

I can see Christians disagreeing – hopefully, in a charitable manner – about aspects of this. And I will not be distracted from my life mission: to advance the gospel of Jesus. But one blog post will suffice to say, I am my brother’s keeper. God says so.

From the ABC affiliate out of Delaware, and this time it’s a Planned Parenthood:

“He didn’t wear gloves,” said [former employee Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich].

Another former employee, Joyce Vasikonis told Action News, “They were using instruments on patients that were not sterile.”

The former nurses claim that a rush to get patients in and out left operating tables soiled and unclean.

Werbrich said “It’s not washed down, it’s not even cleaned off. It has bloody drainage on it.”

“They could be at risk of getting hepatitis, even AIDS,” added Vasikonis.

Both of these nurses said, they quit to protect their own medical licenses, stunned by what they called a meat-market style of assembly-line abortions.

If Anne Frank had not died a teenager in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, Justin Bieber hopes she would have been his devoted fan.

That’s what Bieber, 19, wrote in the guestbook at the Anne Frank House when he visited there Friday, according to the Amsterdam site.

From The Atlantic:

On February 18, 2010, the FBI raided the “Women’s Medical Society,” entering its offices about 8:30 p.m. Agents expected to find evidence that it was illegally selling prescription drugs. On entering, they quickly realized something else was amiss. In the grand jury report’s telling, “There was blood on the floor. A stench of urine filled the air. A flea-infested cat was wandering through the facility, and there were cat feces on the stairs. Semi-conscious women scheduled for abortions were moaning in the waiting room or the recovery room, where they sat on dirty recliners covered with blood-stained blankets. All the women had been sedated by unlicensed staff.” Authorities had also learned about the patient that died at the facility several months prior.

Horrifying. This sounds like the makings for quite a movie. Glad to see the media finally start to pick this one up.

UPDATE: Amidst all this devilry, why was nothing done? Why didn’t the state shut him down? The grand jury’s indictment concludes:

We think the reason no one acted is because the women in question were poor and of color, because the victims were infants without identities, and because the subject was the political football of abortion.

​Let them be upset. It’s not the worst thing in the world… It’s a desperate thing to need everybody to be really happy with everything you say… As soon as you crack your knuckles and open up a comments page, you just canceled your subscription to being a good person.

​But when we’re discussing our goals, our passion and the way we interact with the culture, it seems to me that what works is significantly more important than what’s new. Racing to build your organization around the latest social network tool or graphics-rendering technology permits you to spend a lot of time learning the new system and skiing in the fresh powder of the unproven, but it might just distract you from the difficult work of telling the truth, looking people in the eye and making a difference.

“I can’t describe the value we deliver, I’m too busy integrating this new technology into my workflow!”

All too often, the ones who are aggressively seeking the theory of the day don’t have a lot to show for what they did yesterday.

Chasing the hot new shiny and complaining about the work others do hardly leaves you any time to do great work and show it off yourself. But maybe that’s the point…

Police chief says the Georgia gunman chose firefighters as hostages because he knew they wouldn’t be armed.

Interesting…

(h/t Jennifer Castleman)

“I only do what I’m told to do,” [Lynda Williams] told the jury. “What I was told to do was snip their neck… I never knew it was murder.”

Hmm… that excuse sounds really familiar.

​The only thing that can explain the news media’s resounding silence on this: journalists know it’s a horrifying story that would send emotions racing in a direction counter to their own political agenda. Shame on them.

​“What’s the efficacy of banning these magazine clips? I will tell you, these are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now, they’re going to shoot them,”[Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colorado] said.

She went on to say that “the number of these high capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will be shot and there won’t be any more available.”

So she thinks magazines are a one-time-use sort of thing? Definitely the kind of expert we want writing and passing legislation. But let’s cut the congresswoman a break. Maybe she misspoke. Via The Denver Post, a correction from the congresswoman’s spokeswoman, Juliet Johnson:

“The congresswoman has been working on a high-capacity assault magazine ban for years and has been deeply involved in the issue; she simply misspoke in referring to ‘magazines’ when she should have referred to ‘clips,’ which cannot be reused because they don’t have a feeding mechanism,” Johnson said.

So she and her staff have been working on this for years and don’t know that magazines (sometimes called clips) are reusable? Awesome.

(And while magazines are also sometimes colloquially known as “clips”, the two are not interchangeable terms. More importantly, the gun control proposals DeGette is referring to seek to outlaw high-capacity magazines, not clips.)

There’s just so much wrong with this. It staggers the imagination.

Let’s design the world’s most terrifying spider, shall we?

First, we’ll get the basics down: the legs, the eyes, the fangs. Some spiders, like the giant huntsman, look scary but are basically harmless. We can’t have that. Our spider needs to be poisonous. Let’s make it super fast, too, able to dart around in and out of reach. It needs to have camouflage and a propensity for hiding in the world’s nooks and crannies, ready to jump out and scare the bejesus out of us. Now, we’re almost there, but we’re certainly missing something. Oh, I know, let’s make it the size of your face.

​The wars of the 9/11 era have demonstrated the perils of fighting heavily armed religious fundamentalists on their own soil. We Tennessee Presbyterians are a little like the Taliban — only certainly better armed and probably less tolerant of the Roman Catholic Church. Still, if Georgia wants to invade and occupy East Tennessee, it is welcome to try. Getting in should be easy. Getting out, however, is another matter entirely.

​You don’t create a culture. Culture happens. It’s the by-product of consistent behavior. If you encourage people to share, and you give them the freedom to share, then sharing will be built into your culture. If you reward trust then trust will be built into your culture.

New York City’s limits on sugary drinks are not legal, a state judge ruled Monday. The ban on large-sized sugary drinks was set to go into effect on Tuesday.

Ya think?

Cathy Reisenwitz:

​And this is no silent filibuster. And not one where a Senator reads something. No, Rand Paul has been literally talking about civil liberties… for hours. It is straight-up libertarian porn. I had it on as I worked earlier. His ranting about due process and martial law was music to my afraid and oppressed ears.

It wasn’t all for naught either. As underscored by The Wall Street Journal, Paul’s filibuster made it impossible to ignore the hypocrisy of all the anti-war Democrats who have been conveniently silent on the excesses of the Obama administration. In the 7pm hour of the filibuster, Senator Paul called for a vote on a non-binding resolution that would simply express Senate opposition to drones killing Americans on American soil. Slam dunk, right? That’s like a non-binding resolution expressing Senate appreciation for smiles from adorable children. How could that not pass?

Yet the Democrats rejected it. Wow.

But the even bigger win for Paul was that he got an unequivocal answer from the Justice Department. Attorney General Eric Holder wrote:

It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: “Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?” The answer to that question is no.

Well done, Senator Paul. Keep bringing issues of liberty to the forefront.

The FBI said a man walked into the bank, showed a weapon and demanded cash. He was shot in the face by a civilian in the bank during the attempted robbery and then left, the FBI said.

First, awesome. Second, strange we don’t see stuff like this mentioned in the totally reasonable, level-headed gun debate.

(h/t Instapundit)

This is indeed very rare and it is historic. These fireballs happen about once a day or so, but we just don’t see them because many of them fall over the ocean or in remote areas.

WHAT?

Only in Washington could an increase in $7 trillion in spending over a decade be called a cut.

Reason has an excellent comparison of the Obama, Rubio, and Paul speeches from last night. Three entirely different visions of our country, to be sure.