Paul M. Jones

Don't listen to the crowd, they say "jump."

Is the U.S. a Fascist Police-State?

It's getting harder for me to answer a solid "no" to this question.

A police-state uses the law as a mechanism to control any challenges to its power by the citizenry, rather than as a mechanism to insure a civil society among the individuals. The state decides the laws, is the sole arbiter of the law, and can selectively (and capriciously) decide to enforce the law to the benefit or detriment of one individual or group or another.

In a police-state, the citizens are “free” only so long as their actions remain within the confines of the law as dictated by the state. If the individual’s claims of rights or freedoms conflict with the state, or if the individual acts in ways deemed detrimental to the state, then the state will repress the citizenry, by force if necessary. (And in the end, it’s always necessary.)

What’s key to the definition of a police-state is the lack of redress: If there is no justice system which can compel the state to cede to the citizenry, then there is a police-state. If there exists a pro forma justice system, but which in practice is unavailable to the ordinary citizen because of systemic obstacles (for instance, cost or bureaucratic hindrance), or which against all logic or reason consistently finds in favor of the state--even in the most egregious and obviously contradictory cases--then that pro forma judiciary system is nothing but a sham: A tool of the state’s repression against its citizens. Consider the Soviet court system the classic example.

A police-state is not necessarily a dictatorship. On the contrary, it can even take the form of a representative democracy. A police-state is not defined by its leadership structure, but rather, by its self-protection against the individual.

via Gonzalo Lira: Is the U.S. a Fascist Police-State? « naked capitalism.

Broadcasting and Blaring the call to Prayer in NYC

Does this strike anyone else as a problem? Because it does me:

As New Yorkers who suffered the ultimate call to prayer on 911, there is no reason in the world why we must be subjected to this noise harassment. Pamela H caught this amplified "call to prayer" on 29th street today.

Will the 13-story mega mosque be blaring the Muslim call to prayer on 911?

Bronx Mosque Suspends Request to Amplify Call to Prayer; Residents Remain Unsympathetic

This is merely an extension of the takeover of our streets -- every year we have to put up with this islamic supremacism.

Child in burka....is she a sex object? Why the cover up?

Praying on Madison Avenue.

Police dropped down too

The fellow in a NYPD uniform kneeling down with the eagles on his shoulder is at the rank of Inspector. He seems awfully damn young to be that high up the ranks.

Women allowed to pray in the last two rows only.

Initial reaction: you want to pray, fine; do it inside, and don't disturb the peace with your bullhorn. Another initial reaction: a uniformed officer of the law in public execution of his duties should not be acting that way on the street.

via Broadcasting and Blaring the call to Prayer in NYC - Atlas Shrugs.

Ten pillars of economic wisdom

1. TANSTAAFL: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

2. Incentives matter.

3. Economic thinking is thinking on the margin.

4. The only way to create wealth is to move it from a lower valued to a higher valued use. Corollary: Both sides gain from exchange.

5. Information is valuable and costly.

6. Every action has unintended consequences.

7. The value of a good or service is subjective.

8. Costs are a bad, not a good.

9. The only way to increase a nation's real income is to increase its real output.

10. Competition is a hardy weed, not a delicate flower.

via Ten pillars of economic wisdom.

Solar 1.1.1 Stable Released

On Thursday, I released version 1.1.0 of the Solar Framework for PHP. Due to a small but critical bug in the PostgreSQL adapter, I released version 1.1.1 with the necessary fix earlier today. Change notes are here for 1.1.0, and here for 1.1.1.

The single biggest new feature in this release of Solar is a Markdown plugin set for DocBook, along with a new make-docbook command to convertAPI documentation to DocBook files. Previously, the Solar API documentation was wiki-like; now, we take the Markdown-based comments in the codebase and convert them to DocBook, and render the DocBook files in to HTML using PhD. (Incidentally, I tried rendering with xsltproc; after three hours, the processing was less than one-third complete. With PhD, rendering takes under five minutes for the entire API documentation set.)

Also, the make-model command now recognizes a star at the end of the model name, indicating it should make one model class set for each table in the database. For example, this will make one model class from the table "foo_bar" ...

./script/solar make-model Vendor_Model_FooBar

... but this will make a Vendor_Model class for each table in the database:

./script/solar make-model Vendor_Model_*

That kind of thing is helpful when getting started with an existing set of tables, or when you're updating your models after schema changes.

Other highlights include a series of small fixes, better CLI output in non-TTY environments, improved automation of CSRF form elements.

Finally, we've added a new manual chapter on user authentication, roles, and access control. Find out how, with some config settings, you can instantiate a single object and let it automatically handle user login/logout, role discovery, and access permissions for you! And if you want more direct control over the process, browse on over to these blog entries from CoolGoose:

If you haven't tried Solar yet, maybe now is the time: run through the Getting Started documentation and see how you like it!

(Cross-posted from the Solar blog.)

The Helpless Titan

It’s not necessary to ignore the misdeeds of British Petroleum to criticize the appalling performance of our massive super-State. Big Government and Big Business have become so entwined that any disaster on the scale of the Gulf oil spill, or the subprime mortgage crisis before it, will have both public and private agencies to blame. Suggesting that government cannot be criticized until every one of its private-sector “partners” has been bankrupted or nationalized is a recipe for tyranny. We should study the example of BP and understand that only one half of the government-business alliance can call press conferences at will, addressing a media prepared to extend them unlimited credit for their good intentions.

One of the reasons Big Government is so helpless in the face of an actual crisis is that it never learns anything, because it evades blame and consequence for its failures. The politicians who brought you the subprime crisis are richer and more powerful than ever before.

via The Greenroom » The Helpless Titan.

Nashville PHP User Group

I was lucky enough to be in town for the inaugural Nashville PHP User Group as resurrected by Ben Ramsey last week. The presentation by Josh Holmes was interesting though over-long.

My favorite part of these things (as always) is meeting the other attendees. We retired to a nearby bar after the meeting, where I cliqued up with Brian Dailey, Ryan Weaver, Jeremy Kendall, and others. Here are some of the books, blogs, and podcasts that came up in our discussion:

If anyone there remembers other stuff we talked about, leave a comment and I’ll put it in the main entry.

Disaster Rituals

Combine How Complex Systems Fail with Fooled By Randomness and throw in some organizational behavior models, and you get the human response to unforeseen disaster. We think we can prevent future disaster, somehow, by going through a particular set of rituals. Then Malcolm Gladwell asks, way back in 1996:

But what if the assumptions that underlie our disaster rituals aren't true? What if these public post mortems don't help us avoid future accidents? Over the past few years, a group of scholars has begun making the unsettling argument that the rituals that follow things like plane crashes or the Three Mile Island crisis are as much exercises in self-deception as they are genuine opportunities for reassurance. For these revisionists, high-technology accidents may not have clear causes at all. They may be inherent in the complexity of the technological systems we have created.

I think there are lessons here for, among other things, the BP oil spill. As with most of Gladwell, it's worth your time to read the whole thing.

Islam Confuses The Left/Liberal Psyche

Q: What does Islam do to the liberal psyche?

A: Confuses it. The liberal psyche wants to protect minorities, to apologize for imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and the appalling treatment of black people during the civil rights movement. At the same time, they want to continue to defend the rights of individuals. They’ve convinced themselves that the best way to do that in general is to defend the cultures that are non-white. But what they forget, and what they’re being confronted with, is that non-white cultures contain misogynistic, collectivist, tribal, gay-unfriendly and female-hostile traditions. And so they’re confused: on the one hand, they’re looking at minorities as groups they need to save and speak up for, and on the other hand, they’re confronted with the ideas and practices of individuals within those minorities that are very undemocratic and appalling, really.

Via On why Christians should try to convert Muslims - Books, The Interview - Macleans.ca.