Is driving a "right"?

Remember "Sultaana Freeman," the woman who refused to show her face for her driver’s license photo? A number of arguments have been presented in support and in opposition of her "right" to have her photo taken with her veil on. Unfortunately, since no one understands what a "right" is anymore, no one can say whether driving is in fact a right and just what freedoms the the separation of [mosque] and state clause allows. The current interpretation is that as long as your religion (a) does not pose any immediate danger to the public, and (b) is followed by a sufficient number of electorally – motivated followers, you will be free to practice whatever stupid tricks your holy book prescribes. This is of course an arbitrary doctrine without any rational or Constitutional basis. So, "Native Americans" can smoke their dope and wear their bald eagle feathers on their own time, but they can’t file for unemployment insurance if they get fired for smoking their dope at work or claim that cannot find work because Friday is their "holy-day." (Whereas Christians who observe the usual Sat-Sun holiday can.) The rest of us can’t wear feathers of smoke dope because although that passes (a), it fails (b).

All men are born with a right to life, liberty, and property — and that includes the right to practice any idiocy your particular shaman prescribes — as long as you don’t harm anyone else in the process. The right to liberty and property includes the right to own and drive a car — but it is a violation of someone else’s right to force them to pay for your roads and traffic cops. There is no right to drive on public roads for anyone, whether you are Catholic, Southern Baptist or Harry Krishna because the maintenance of a "public roads" is theft. So in deciding whether Mrs. "Sultaana Freeman" has the right to have her face hidden involves making the best of a bad (immoral to be exact) situation. The question her collectivist judge is currently asking — what her religion "really" says is completely irrelevant in the matter. The number of people who share your delusion has no bearing on its truth. The only question the judge should ask "Does wearing a veil pose a threat to the safety of others?" Since wearing a veil undermines the primary function of having an ID (and thus undermines the valid police function of maintaining safety and carrying out justice), I would say that the answer is clearly yes. On that basis, and on that basis alone, there is no "right" to conceal your identity on a public road.

Now as to why I used quotations quotations for Mrs. Sultaana Freeman’s name, it turns out that her real name is "Sandra Keller," and as the photo taken for her 1999 felony aggravated battery (of a foster child) conviction shows, she has already exposed her real face to the cops a number of times since her 1997 conversion to Islam.

Sultaana

I enjoyed reading Laurel's take

I enjoyed reading Laurel’s take on Iraq and agree with most of it, although I am getting sick of reading non-stop pro-war Iraqi-vision blogs. I appreciate your dedication, but have you noticed that there are witchhunts, scams, boogie-men, liars, thieving plagues, and moochers to worry about much closer to home? Good news too: some of America’s finest are leaving their ungrateful hosts to fend for themselves, while spacemen are learning to explore the skies. And with that, yet another Cox and Forkum on the Middle East:

Cox and Forkum

"The two faces of Arab terror"

The following post by David Horowitz is a great summary of the "peace process" in the Middle East:

As the Road Map continues, it is every day evident that for Arabs, peace is war continued by other means. Thus it was with the Oslo "Peace Process" which demanded words from the Palestinians and deeds from the Israelis, and led to land for the Arabs and suicide bombers for the Jews. Thus it is with the current charade in Sharm El-Sheikh. "Five Arab Leaders Denounce Violence" is the Washington Post headline on the peace summit that took place. And, to be fair, it is accurate since that is exactly what the world class liars who head the Arab states that were present did. The Jews, of course, were once again expected to respond to the hot air with actual deeds, which they once again did. In particular, they met an Arab request which was to release 100 Arab murderers of Jews. The most notable was a killer named Ahmad Jubarah who was whisked to the presence of his patron Arafat, for a ceremonial kiss. Jubarah had blown up 14 Israeli civilians in a terrorist attack 27 years ago. Meeting with reporters, he had the only honest words of the peace process to date. He was asked if he regretted his terrorist act. No, actually, he didn’t. "We were in war and still we are in war," he said. Quite. The Arabs declared war on Israel the day it was created in 1948. The Arab agenda then as now was to destroy the Jewish state. Until they renounce that aim, which would mean jailing and executing the terrorists among them — Arafat included — the peace talk is talk, and the Jews better not forget it.

I saw Horowitz speak at my school two years ago, and he is a great speaker who’s conversion experience (liberal Jew who learned from experience how repulsive the left is) reminded me of my own.

Thoughts on the new WTC Design.

Have you seen the design chosen to replace the twin towers? It’s an atrocity: a bare skeleton where the building stood and a big hole in the ground where it fell. Apparently Mr. Libeskind has chosen to erect a giant tombstone as his tribute to the “resurgence of life.” As a further insult, he has decided to place a garden atop the framework as “a constant affirmation of life.” It seems that a few weeds are a better affirmation of “life” than the work of 100 thousand individuals. There are a number of groups that share my indignation at the chosen design: one group is hoping to rebuild the twin towers, while another is suing the port authority. It seems that neither the old nor the new WTC are subject to the building code imposed on private enterprises because they were/will be maintained by the Port Authority, which is immune to prosecution. I’m not qualified to speculate whether this made any difference on 9/11, but I have much more confidence in private construction that does not follow a building code than a public one that does. Since it was found out that Mr. Libeskind will not actually construct the new WTC, as he has never build a skyscraper before, there have been a number of alternative designs proposed. Most of them are impossible designs made by amateurs, but here is one I actually like.

One a side note, the skyscraper in general may be becoming an outdated relic. The rise of the Internet and intranets has greatly diminished the need for large numbers of people to work in the same place, allowing large, sprawling corporate campuses to become the new standard. As much as I love skyscrapers, they may soon join the sailing ship and biplane in my list of great symbols of man’s mind surpassed by even greater inventions.

Thoughts on Graduate School and the Social Sciences

If there is anything I worship in this world, it can be summed by the word "competence." I respect any man who gets the best job that his abilities will allow and does it well – whether his profession is in aerospace or sanitation engineering. Perhaps this is why I get extremely annoyed by people who cannot even perform some measly job that anyone with mild retardation should be able to do. I remember one Disney flick that featured a scene where an "evil" capitalist boss chews out a waitress for spilling a pitcher of water all over him. (I paraphrase 🙂 "Being a waitress is not a complicated job" he said, "there are only a few simple things asked of you, but you have managed to fuck them up." At this point the waitress cries and the theater boos the "greedy" boss, but I could barely resist shouting "hell yeah!"

Anyway, the major reason that I got out of the liberal arts field and into a technical one is that unlike the social sciences — where success is measured by federal grants, tenures, votes, and slaps on the back, the measure of success in a technical field is simple: your product either works or it doesn’t, your invention either makes money or it flunks. There is no "subjectivity" in deciding whether a certain solution is correct: as one of my profs pointed out today, there may a number of solutions to any given design problem, but there is only one that is best for the job. Both of the professors I am taking now match my ideal for both politicians and academics: teaching is not their primary occupation, and the material they teach is not just composed of abstract theories they have never applied or tested: they make their living with their minds, and they share knowledge that they know from firsthand experience to be true.

This is not to say that the social sciences are necessarily inferior to the technical ones, but that they have come to be that way because of their misguided philosophy. Some would say that the social studies are necessarily more "abstract" and "relative" because they deal with opinions and general statements that are hard to verify — as opposed to the hard sciences, which deal with directly observable facts. This is not true. In economics and politics I also dealt with many facts that are not in dispute (within most contexts) – the GPD of an economy, an inflation rate, a population size, a particular law, a known number of factories. Conversely, a very "hard" and "practical" field like information tech has many theoretical questions – what is the best model for software development, what is the trend in the relationship between centralized and distributed computing, what does the steady rise in outsourcing tech jobs to foreign countries mean for the industry, what licensing model is best for what kind of software development, etc. The primary difference and the flaw with the social sciences is the way that directly observable facts are integrated into theory. Ideally, one uses an inductive process by which he forms tentative conclusions from a great number of direct observations and constantly verifies his conclusions against reality to form a sound theory about some aspect of his field. Conflicting theories are resolved by comparing them to factual evidence and by integrating them into the field as a whole. The result is an integrated and comprehensive body of knowledge where each statement is firmly grounded in direct evidence and fits in soundly into a consistent body of knowledge. The actual method currently used in the social sciences is diabolically opposed to this. "Research" is split between abstract theories and studies based on direct observation. The first are disconnected from reality as well as from each other, while the second yield conclusions that while true, are useless statistics because they lack any sort of theoretical basis or connection to a larger theory. The end result is that conclusions are based on unstated assumptions and mistaken premises usually having something to do with Marx’s definition of commodies.

Interesting stuff from the news

CNN reports that a new television program called ‘Meow TV’ will consist of a tv show entirely for cats. This may be a clever marketing ploy, but does anyone actually buy this? Until cats start to do their own shopping, I think it will be a pretty stupid idea, but I’m glad to live in a country that can afford to market human-like food… and now television to animals. I remember how in Ukraine, everyone would make fun of Americans for buying food made especially for animals while bums starved in the streets. (Of course, no one starves in a rich country unless they want to, and even then nowadays some social worker will probably force feed you.)

SecurityFocus reports that the CIA may have “too much security” — it has ancient software, restricts internet access and PDA’s to analysts who need it, and generally fails to keep up with innovations in technology. The sad (and scary) result is that “analysts maintain informal networks of personal contacts within the agency just to track down the information they need to do their job.” In a related story, my web host (but not my own servers, which are ironclad 🙂 ) was hacked this morning with the SSH crc32 compensation attack detector exploit. The damage was light, but if you are running SSH 2.2 or older, I strongly suggest that you upgrade ASAP! For you movie buffs, this may be the same exploit that was used in the new movie Matrix Reloaded.

Matrix Reloaded nmap hack

Also, anyone want to buy an aircraft carrier? Only $4.5mil USD

I finally registered for my

I finally registered for my first classes of graduate school today on my way to a masters in MIS. I will be taking VB.net and Database Design the first summer semester and taking off the second to go to California. Getting into grad school turned out to be a big fiasco becuase my recomendation letters were somehow lost by the admissions office, and my application nearly got lost in the "incomplete" pile. Apparently the address given on the application downloaded from the website was old or inaccurate. Well either way, I should be out of here in a year if everything goes well and I take a full load.

By the way, I saw The Pianist last night, and the movie really sucked, despite by best expectations. Growing up Jewish, I saw dozens of movies about the Holocaust and grew terribly sick of them when I realized that nobody had a clue of what caused it or even attempted to answer why. More often than not, it was portrayed as a natural disaster, not to be understood and learned from, but merely blindly countered with "never again" without knowing what was the evil thing that should not be repeated. I know now of course, which is why I was all the more angered when I saw the same attitude towards 9/11.

Anyway, I thought the movie would have much more piano playing and less drawn out and impresonal history of the Warsaw ghetto and several scenes which reminded me of how I sometimes scrounge around my apartment looking for leftoover food. The only part I liked was the smuggling of the guns, which reminded me of a flier I saw some time ago (shown below). The Nazis, Chinese and Soviets never banned all guns — they just made sure that they were controlled tightly enough so that no "subversives" could get their hands on them. By this standard, gun laws in England and parts of the US (like NYC) are already equal to or worse than those under the Nazi’s and Soviets.

If you’re wondering why all the interest in guns all of a sudden, it’s becuase I decided to get one a while back and started doing research on both the legal and psychological aspects of gun control. I found that the gun-control movement exists as a natural extension of the collectrivist-liberal philosophy — in this case, intrincisim (guns are inherently evil becuase men are unevitably unstable and amoral), determinism (violence is inevitable, we can only choose to take away the weapons), Statism (the State owns the people) and malevolence (a desire for criminals to have an advantage over honest citizens). The last seemed shocking to me too, but it is easy to see in explicit terms when one looks at the pacifist’s foreign policy agenda in areas like terrorism, the UN, and Israel.

Some psychologists have looked at the anti-gun mentality as a passsive-agressive mental disorder, but I see it as a typically irrational reflection of the subjectivist’s own mentality. Lacking values themselves, the liberals/subjectivists/posmodernists seek to destroy value out of pure envy. Their tolerance is actually an intolerance of principle, and they seek to riducule and destroy the concept of value itself (hence subjectivism disquised as "tolerance" and "diversity"). A principled and moral man flies in the face of the degrading collectivist view of human nature and cannot be taken on directly, so they seek to eat away at his principles by deterministic nanny-state policies such as welfare and gun control. For the great majority of liberals, the connection between their philosophy and its political outcome is subconscious, which means that rational challenges to their views can be that much more powerful by contrast. Unfortunately, the philosophy of rights, reason, and reality is so lacking these days that both sides muddle on without really knowing what issues they are debating. Liberty is lost in the end because the bureaucracy is inherently unstable and politicians always power hungry, so that one side is always pushing for slavery while the other can only respond "not so fast!" as they give up their lives one regulation at a time.

monopoly