Cox Crow

Are you trying to lose our votes, or just revealing your interest in unrestrained Executive power now that you feel it is within your grasp?

I’ve noticed a number of retailers locally are refusing to take credit cards, or are requiring a minimum purchase. Large shops and chain stores aren’t, yet, but the pizza parlor, beer distributor, and locally-owned drug store are.

I am not quite sure how this august panel of nine judges decides what constitutes a cruel and unusual punishment, unless it is by simply following the precedent rather than considering whether the punishment was properly enacted and in conformity with the severity of the crime. The majority’s opinion in Kennedy v. Louisiana relies on Coker v. Georgia, which held that sentence of death is grossly disproportionate and excessive punishment for the crime of rape, and so decides that the death penalty is also excessive here.

While the opinion protests the utter cruelty of the acts in the present case, I suspect that the Court has allowed themselves to be guided too much by care for recent precedent and not considered fully the disparity between the crime and the punishment. Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, finds “evolving standards of decency” allow the rapist to live because few states passed legislation prescribing death for the crime of rape. As well, because of various institutional features in our system of justice, the prosecution of cases seeking the death penalty for rape might further harm the victim.

In my opinion, the Louisiana statute was not cruel enough. The simple death of modern executions is quick and relatively painless. Better would be if the criminal were hung, drawn, and quartered, with his head impaled on a stake on the city walls to warn others. J. Kennedy would disagree, When the law punishes by death, it risks its own sudden descent into brutality, transgressing the constitutional commitment to decency and restraint. And yet, the Court explicitly exempts crimes against the State:

Our concern here is limited to crimes against individual persons. We do not address, for example, crimes defining and punishing treason, espionage, terrorism, and drug kingpin activity, which are offenses against the State. As it relates to crimes against individuals, though, the death penalty should not be expanded to instances where the victim’s life was not taken.

If the State can punish crimes against itself, then why cannot a rape victim choose the punishment for her assailant?

I fear that our Law has backed itself into a corner over time. By removing all punishments other than fines or length of imprisonment, we find ourselves unable to respond proportionately to crimes. How long should we imprison a rapist? Ten years? One might as well fail to file one’s taxes.

If the State is not willing to act in retribution, then the more humane punishments of confining the criminal to the general population of a prison, while widely publishing the crimes committed, or of declaring the criminal an outlaw, should suffice. In either case, public opinion will devise its own suitable punishment.

via This Week in Petroleum

Dear Congressman Hall:

Thank you for your thoughtful and considered response to the concerns expressed in my mail of February 15th this year. Unfortunately, I read this evening that the House passed a compromise bill (H.R. 6304) that contained language permitting the Executive and abetting telecommunication firms to escape responsibility for their actions over the past seven years, as well as granting permission to this and future Executives to peak into our bedroom windows, listen to our most intimate conversations, and learn far to much of our habits without the simple pleasure of a warrant.

Thank you for voting against this bill. I do wish that your fellow members of Congress would show the intestinal fortitude necessary to defend Liberty from Power these days. Perhaps your party’s presumptive nominee for President might remind the Senate that these additional powers are unnecessary and undesirable — and that the citizens of this great Nation do not desire that the Executive enjoy them.

Regards,

C. William Cox, Jr.

There’s been some concern among the professional educators about skills lost over the
Summer since I was a small child, and that concern has not abated. Well, duh, of course some children are not as proficient in September as they were in May: they didn’t practice those skills for three months. I’ve not practiced differential equations for 15 years now; do you think I can do them? The same goes for calculating the area of anything not a rectangle, or playing “Minuet in G.” Practice, as my parents reminded me often enough, makes perfect.

Use it or lose it.

But do I think children should attend school year-round? No. I think they should be given opportunities to use the things they’ve learned.

I’m currently reading April 1865, an excellent book covering the events of the last month of the Civil War, which reminds us that how wars end is often of more consequence than how they start. It sets the stage for the next one.

Consider, for example, how the end of the First World War led to the Second, and to the current unpleasantness in Iraq.

Now that you’ve thought about that for a moment, do you really think it’s wise to treat with Iraq as if it is merely a conquered nation? Recall that in the best contracts, both sides think they’ve won. Tread carefully here.

Justin Logan at Cato pulls a long quote from a piece by Ryan Lizza asking if can John McCain can reinvent “Republicanism.” That’s a bit of a stupid question since the party has been co-opted by a bunch of imperialists, and he’s in the same vein. A more important question is whether we’ll care to help him win when his policies are, on the whole, antithetical to the reasons we preferred the Republicans over the Democrats. Though I don’t doubt that there are those in the party who always side with their team, regardless of which policies their team is pursuing; and also those who believe that this war in Iraq is just, that the government is not hell-bent on destroying our liberties, and that the President can be trusted with absolute power; I would prefer to be left alone. So there are a couple of quotes from Lizza’s article that stand out, and I think need some exposition.

In a recent Foreign Affairs article, McCain called for the kind of costly nation-building capacity that makes libertarians shudder, arguing that the United States should “energize and expand our postconflict reconstruction capabilities” and create a “deployable police force” that would prop up collapsing states. Echoing [Grover] Norquist’s book, [Mallory] Factor insisted that the war in Iraq is not a unifying issue for the right. He told me, “The bottom line is that to the base of the Party the war isn’t Communism—to the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan, Communism was a rallying point. This is not like that.”

Communism was a rallying point because totalitarian states threaten freedom, and the Soviet Union had the ability to directly threaten ours. While the specific policies and practices that proceeded from that may have been flawed, or had unforeseen consequences, the central concern was with our freedom. Communism sought to replace my will with the will of the State. This we could agree was, and is, undesirable.

But the Iraqis do not threaten our freedom. The terrorists, on the other hand, do. They trick us into giving up our freedoms out of fear. But can they destroy in an instant the Land of the Free? No.

And so there is no reason to tolerate the intrusions of government ostensibly designed to protect us, and little to unify a party grown fat with power.

In what sounds like the advice that New Democrats gave liberals in the nineteen-eighties, Gingrich points out that “Republicans allow their campaigns to be dominated more and more by pandering to small, specific segments of the activist wing of the party”—a trend that he believes has contributed to the drop in Republican numbers on the two coasts.

Mr. Gingrich is correct in this analysis. Instead of focusing on the substantive matter of government, the Republicans became instead the church party and of Buttinskis minding of the business of everyone Not Like Me.

That may bring some concerned citizens to the polls, but it’s not why we’re here.

Speed tests are showing a 2-4x improvement over Firefox 2 and 9x over Internet Explorer 7.

Nine times faster than Internet Exploder 7! No more waiting on the Intarwebs! Get your Firefox today!

>Browse with caret allows users to select arbitrary content with the keyboard and move through content as if inside a read-only editor. This allows copying arbitrary pieces of text to the clipboard. The F7 key toggles this feature on/off.

I’m sure that feature is nice and all, but you changed the default setting, which pisses off those of us who use the page up, page down, and arrow keys to scroll.

Google Maps has topographic maps, and lets you enter multiple destinations for directions, avoid highways, and alter the route. So now I need the ability to save my itinerary so I don’t have to do that again.

Oh, that’s right. I can bookmark it!

I was wondering why my laptop was not idle when I wasn’t using it, because when I picked it up I burned my hand.

Using the handy-dandy Task Manager, I saw that Mozilla Firefox was using 25% of this 1.8GHz Intel Centrino Duo. Why would it be doing that? I’m not browsing the web, nor did I leave one of my tabs open to a new-fangled Web 2.0 site that thinks I need it to update itself every 30 seconds. I was idle. And by idle I mean that I was outside trimming the shrubs, not sitting in front of my computer.

Well, turns it that some advertisement or other written in Adobe Flash was eating that CPU time. Since I didn’t identify the advertisement, and since Adobe either provides a means for the author to disable my ability to stop the movies from playing, or simply does not provide a means for me to stop the movies from playing, I figure that Adobe owes me the cost of the energy drained by 25% of two 1.8GHz processors over the course of the 12 hours between the time I installed the Flash player to watch some idiot video on YouTube, then enjoyed my Father’s Day offline, and the time when I disabled the Flash player because I had first degree burns on my thighs.

Oh, by the way, Google, now that you’ve bought DoubleClick, if wouldn’t mind simply discontinuing the use of Flash advertisements because they’re evil, we’d love you for it. Thanks.

After reading The Austrian Economists site for a while now, I notice it shares some features with some papers Niall Ferguson posted on his website. Namely, name-dropping.

I’ve been out of academia for 15 years now, since I graduated from Fordham, and haven’t really read much “academic” work since I started reading Mr. Ferguson’s papers last year. While they were on the whole interesting, I was struck by how many references he made to his references. Often times it seemed that instead of writing about history, he was writing about writing about history. (And, really, I’ve never found reviews of “the literature” to be very enlightening; though they may reveal other avenues of investigation, they have no place in an expository essay.) Mostly this was a distraction, but in some cases it was downright harmful, since he would explain something only by reference to someone else’s work with which I was not familiar.

The authors at the aforementioned site do the same. They use authors’ names as shorthand for that author’s entire body of work, with which one is assumed to be familiar. Well, I’m not.

One of Rick Klau’s shared items in Google Reader suggested that journalists today will need to know Photoshop, HTML, and a bunch of other crap to get a job. That may be so, but remember that computers are just a tool, and any time the tool gets in the way of the Real Work, discard it.

I used to find working with computers and learning their ins-and-outs to be interesting. Now it’s just dull, boring, and a drain on my life.

Maybe if I worked reasonable hours, got enough sleep, and saw my family for more than a few minutes each day, I’d feel differently, but right now I just want to take my time machine back and murder the sons-of-bitches who invented the things.

So, no, I don’t want a job “working with computers.” I want something rewarding, preferably with Oz hours:

Get up at noon, and then to work at one / take an hour for lunch, and then at two we’re done.

It’s a beautiful day out today. The wind chases fluffy white clouds across the sky. Leaves whisper in the breeze, counterpoint to the bullfrog’s basso. I can hear the sounds of baseball from the park.

The girls are out playing somewhere, the boys are napping upstairs, while I sit on the deck, tired, grumpy, and working.

This has gone on too long, and has to stop. I want my life back.