Ranting to /dev/null

The Tower of Babel

I've been mulling over an idea for a week or so now, but the article I blogged about earlier today combined with this article from the MeFi comments has finally motivated me to write about it. Additional motivation comes from The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, a book which I'm reading and which Bill Clinton apparently referenced in a recent address.

The basic thesis of The Big Sort is that Americans have been segregating themselves on the basis of ideology--a divide that tracks class and race to some extent--since about the mid-1960s. The primary evidence for this self-sorting is traced to electoral maps from 1976 and 2004, which show a fairly dramatic increase in the number of "landslide" counties, i.e. counties where one presidential candidate won by at least 20% of the vote, a 60%/40% split. The vast majority of counties in the country were Republican landslides, but the few counties that Kerry did take by large margins are all major urban areas, so the number of people living in a landslide county for either side is quite large.

Frivolous criminal defendants

I've periodically blogged about the insane arguments that tax protesters make in court. I can't express the degree of disdain and scorn I have for such arguments and the people who make them.

But when a criminal defendant in a capital case offers the same arguments... things get weird. And that's exactly what a handful of criminal defendants are doing in Baltimore. The piece is lengthy, detailed, and incredibly informative. It exposes the origin of most of these arguments: white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and the anti-Civil Rights movement. Black defendants adopting these arguments is hugely ironic, and likely to land them in prison forever.

The prosecution has added a charge of felony obstruction of justice for pursuing this line of argument. I hope it succeeds. I think Congress should pass a law making it a crime to raise such arguments in court.

The TSA rules aren't the problem

Well, not totally anyways. Read this story and you're likely to believe that TSA is a complete and utter waste of resources. That may be the case, but the problem is less the rules that the TSA promulgates and more the people they hire to interpret and enforce those rules.

These positions require almost nothing in the way of education, so surprise surprise, the people who fill them have almost nothing in the way of education. There isn't a list of educational qualifications, but there is a lengthy list of disqualifying criminal offenses. Why? Because the people who are likely to apply are likely to have problems with that. Salaries start at $24k/year, full-time. Many positions are part time. Many of the people who pass through airport security--and many who read this blog--probably make more in a month than the screeners do in a year. The highest level supervisor makes less than $60, and there can't be more than one of those per airport. Basically, you're looking at the kind of marginally employable people who occupy a significant percentage of the lower end of the federal payroll. They suck just as much at the local DC police department as they do at the airport, believe you me. And because they're federal employees, they're just about impossible to fire, regardless of their competence.

Any wonder why they're completely incapable of any flexible thinking? Why they go completely buck wild when given a badge and the ability to make the affluent people who frequent airports jump? This is what happens when you put uneducated people on the border of poverty in positions of authority from which they cannot easily be removed.

The definition of "transformative use"

If your use of a copyrighted work is sufficiently "transformative," it counts as fair use.

If this isn't transformative, nothing is.