Hillary Clinton would be a fool to quit

Given what we know is "out there" about Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton would be foolish to give up her quest for the presidency right now. I fully expect that before long, Barack Obama is going to be toast. The probably cause is Tony Rezko-related, but there could be more about Jeremiah Wright that could take him out. Then again, there is likely to be more stuff that we have not heard about yet. You can be sure that Clintonites are out, beating the bushes, looking for such material.

Sadly, the FBI is not on our side

Perhaps I am being too harsh, but I think not. At Classical Values, Eric Scheie talks about what I have mentioned before: clicking a bad link is now criminalized! This is just another example of where the courts ignore the constitution, when they choose. I say this because they are ready to violate our constitution to achieve most people view as a reasonable end. The courts are complicit in this business and are as much to blame for ignoring the constitution when it suits them.

This sounds scarey

Orin Kerr, at The Volokh Conspiracy, has a piece about "Fake Hyperlinks Used in FBI Child Pornography Stings". We could imagine getting a spam email, say, with such a link, and without much thought clicking on it. That could you mean that the next morning, before dawn, you would have an assault team breaking down your front door and arresting you and confiscating, at least, your computer. I would guess that they would have hard to distinguish from home invaders (at least in the Dallas area). Suppose you tried to resist, thinking that they were criminals, and you are shot and killed? You get a URL-encoded link, so that they know from which email account the link was clicked. Talk about a police state. The person being arrested has not clicked on a link that would actually produce a nasty child pornography video file. The link is broken, but you are busted anyway, just for clicking a link with a bad file name ("4yosuck"). Why not go after the people who are doing bad things to young girls and making videos? Child Pornography is the "new war on drugs". There is the same overreaching in the name of doing good that caused Randy Weaver's wife to be shot and killed at Ruby Ridge (by the same people, the FBI) and the Branch Davidians to be burnt alive at Waco. I don't see how this will be fixed, either. We keep adding new crimes and increasing the penalties by orders of magnitude. that is why you see the goofy things like $250 fines for getting caught by a red light camera. "We are going to show them", for doing whatever wrong thing that they did. Once we are all sold on something being "bad", we jack up the penalties. The new Dallas District Attorney, despite not being ready for a job with this much scrutiny, is on to something. He wanted to stop the over-prosecution of black men in Dallas county and to free as many of them as possible who could be proved to be innocent by DNA tests. He has freed a good number of black men who now seem to have been wrongly convicted. The assumption had been made in the past that if it was a black man, there was the assumption of guilt. He had to prove his innocence beyond a shadow-of-doubt to keep from being convicted. The problem has spread, if anything.

Flying out of Libya at Mach 3.5 at 80,000 feet

This article by retired Major Brian Shul is cool. He tells the story about flying out of Libya in their SR-71 at Mach 3.5 at 80,000 feet. Using a calculator from the NASA website, that comes out to be 2,311 mph.

There seem to be ongoing Blogger problems

Given that at various times, I got server errors when trying to read other people's blogs, I would guess that we are seeing a lot of Blogger trouble. Anyone who has a Blogspot blog would potentially be affected. Right now, our higher traffic blog is being hammered by something. Presumably, we are seeing the affects of the Blogger trouble that other blogs are seeing.

Carrie Newcomer

I still like Carrie Newcomer's music and listen to what I have. I disagree with her politics and stance on terrorism, however. She is strongly pacifist, and I lost my patience with pacifism early on the morning of September 11, 2001, as events unfolded. In the past, I had complained about her injecting her beliefs into her music, but I would accept that doing so is a reasonable thing. I just removes any interest that I might have had in her new material. What brought this topic into my consciousness is that the current album that is playing on my car CD player is one of hers. Carrie comes from the same part of the country as I do. While she grew up in northern Indiana, she was born in Dowagiac, Michigan. That is about 44 miles from where I grew up. She is younger than I am, but she is just a bit older than my youngest brother.

"Study claims no link between vaccines and autism"

I liked the title on the Chicago Tribune story about the new study that says that there is no scientific link between vaccines and autism. The title writer obviously assumes that we all think that there is a link, even though the conclusion has consistently been that there is no link. Otherwise, why wrote a title like "Study claims no link between vaccines and autism". The idea of the link is somehow tied up with leftist politics, in a way that I do not understand.

The Texas Primary

I voted just after 7am this morning. Our polling place was mobbed: not with Republican but with Democrats. The Democratic turnout at our precinct was ten-to-one or more over the Republicans. I tell you, too, it was not Republicans voting in the Democratic Primary, but Democrats. The people in the Democratic line were obviously (to me) Democrats.

Obama

Robert Novak's column about Barack Obama and the indicted Tony Rezko is worth a read. Do you like conspiracy theories? This one is highly speculative. We know that Barack Obama has received undisclosed amounts of money from Tony Rezko, who is being pursued by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. Apparently, Tony Rezko has been funding the Obamas since 1995. We now know that at least some of Tony Rezko's money was coming from the indicted Iraqi billionaire in London, who was thought to have been laundering money for Saddam Hussein. This part is really crazy: suppose that Barack Obama is a mole hiding in deep cover. In this scenario, he surfaces after being inaugurated. He has a Sturm Abteilung in Louis Farrakhan's organization. Who knows what might happen, at that point? How is that for a wild and crazy conspiracy theory? As I say, it is based on a small bit of known fact and a lot of wild speculation, without any evidence. Let us hope that there is no basis to it, because Barack Obama is the likely next president. In any case, I doubt that it is true, or at least I certainly hope that it is not, as I said. By the way, even Hillary seems to agree with this sort of thing, at least to a small degree.

SiteMeter and IndexTools not track closely

Back some time ago, the usual situation was that IndexTools and SiteMeter followed each other very closely, when tracking visits and page views. Then, because of technical problems with one or both, they sharply diverged. Just recently, they are back in close agreement. I find that reassuring.

Blogger was apparently down, at least some servers

There was a point today when the Blogger control panel didn't work and when my Blogspot blogs were all inaccessible. The traffic that I am seeing well may be caused by Blogger, not some other issue.

I hate Yahoo Mail performance at peak hours

I find that Yahoo Mail Performance at the peak hours is close to unbearable. I am using the "classic version" because the AJAX version brought my computers to a halt. My problem is that I am committed to Yahoo Mail, because that is where I forward all my POP3 mail and where I have a lot of business mail sent.