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Saturday, May 20, 2006
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Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775:
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Benjamin Franklin, November 11, 1755:
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety
THIS is the conservative notion of bravery and patriotism today:
I am a strong supporter of civil liberties. But you have no civil liberties if you are dead."
From the bravery of the Founding Fathers fighting against tyranny, to whiny-ass titty babies like Pat Roberts saying we have to let the government spy on us in order to be safe.
Josh Marshall:
...Sure, liberal democracy is nice, but not if someone might get hurt. One might think that strong supporters of civil liberties would be willing to countenance the idea that it might be worth bearing some level of risk in order to preserve them.
Second is just this dogmatic post-9/11 insistence on acting as if human history began suddenly in 1997 or something. The United States was able to face down such threats as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany without indefinite detentions, widespread use of torture as an interrogative technique, or all-pervasive surveillance. But a smallish group of terrorists who can't even surface publicly abroad for fear they'll be swiftly killed by the mightiest military on earth? Time to break out the document shredder and do away with that pesky constitution.
Last, there's the unargued assumption that civil rights and the rule of law are some kind of near-intolerable impediment to national security. But if you look around the world over the past hundred years or so, I think you'll see that the record of democracy is pretty strong. You don't see authoritarian regimes using their superior ability to operate in secret and conduct surveillance to run roughshod over more fastidious countries. You see liberalism prospering -- both in the sense that the core liberal countries have grown richer-and-richer and in the sense that liberal democracy has consistently spread out from its original homeland since people like it better. You see governments that can operate in total secrecy falling prey to crippling corruption. You see powers of surveillance used not to defend countries from external threats, but to defend rulers from domestic political opponents.
The U.S.S.R., after all, lost the Cold War, not because we beat them in a race to the bottom to improve national security by gutting the principles of our system, but because the principles underlying our system were actually better than the alternative. If you don't have some faith the American way of life is capable of coping with actual challenges, then what's the point in defending it?
Why indeed. Have we really become such a nation of snivelling cowards that we're not willing to fight to keep the rights that the very people in our government who would take them away from us say are God-given?
(Via Brilliant at Breakfast.)
6:40:58 PM 
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Jon Carroll writes about findings by Sabernomics folks with regard to steroids.
Here's the weird part: It is
perfectly possible that Barry Bonds cheated but that the cheating had nothing
to do with the records. So if you are worried about the taint on the game
brought about by illicit drug use, fine. Boo away. But of you think the records
are tainted -- well, check your math. Everything you know could once again be
wrong.
Baseball statistics are just strange enough that it's really easy to believe this. The Sabernomics posts are here and here, and the case is pretty good. They point out that pitchers have been busted, too, which should balance things out, and that there are more homer-friendly ballparks. But the big thing, and it's hard not to doubt this, has been league expansion:
The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould put forth a novel theory of extreme achievements competitive environments. His idea was that as the variance of the quality of participants shrinks, opportunities for great performances diminish. Being an avid baseball fan, Gould used baseball as his example. He argued that because MLB was being populated by better baseball players, great achievements, such as hitting .400, were decreasing. You see, very good players dominate very bad players, and as the very bad disappear from the game, the very good can no longer rack up good performances against them. Expansion has the effect of letting in the riff-raff for baseball’s elite to exploit. And we can see that as evidence of the inferior pitching entered the leagues that pitchers began to hit more batters. As the graph above shows—did I forget to mention it was a digram of the hit batter rate, not home run rate, over time?—the current era of baseball could just as easily be referred to as the hit batter era rather than the home run era. And most certainly, no one believes steroids cause pitchers to hit more batters—well, maybe it’s roid rage, but I don’t buy that.
4:29:44 PM
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Now to start working your way through the list! So many beers, so little time.
1:58:21 PM
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Because it’s important, and everyone needs to read it. Somegirl points out that the “real meat” of the immigration bill is yet another massive government database:
The EEVS [Employment Eligibility Verification System] would require - for the first time - all workers to obtain a federal agency’s permission to work, regardless of citizenship or immigration status. It would create two massive government databases containing the most sensitive personal information on every lawful resident. Every worker would be registered in the two systems with data files tracking every job they ever sought or held. The two systems combine that information with substantial amounts of personally identifiable information, all keyed to a person’s Social Security number.
All employers would be required to participate in a national employment eligibility verification program in an expansion of the faulty but voluntary “Basic Pilot” program. However, no proposals have been brought forth to provide for a secure system; making it likely that the EEVS system would be a ripe target for identity thieves.
(Via Suburban Guerrilla.)
11:15:35 AM
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"I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it," - John Stuart Mill, in a letter to Sir John Pakington, a Conservative MP, March, 1866. 
(Via Daily Dish.)
10:39:29 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Steve Michel.
Last update: 6/1/2006; 8:54:30 AM.
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