Your Inner Self Revealed... By Google!

Use the world's most powerful search engine to reveal your true self! And those of your friends! A technique developed today by me: In the Google search bar, type in "your name is " and see what Google thinks you are! Don't forget to put a space after is. Here's what Google thinks about me:



I would say #3 is the most accurate description, but number five would be high on most people's lists.

Book Review: Before the Next Attack

Ackerman, Bruce. Before the Next Attack: Preserving Civil Liberties in the Age of Terrorism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.

This is a very good book.

In the opening discussion about the difference between war, crime, and terrorism, he says that the distinction is that of effective sovereignty. A war is an existential assault on sovereignty. A crime assumes that effective sovereign power is still available. Terrorism assaults sovereignty while not existentially threatening it. Terrorism, therefore, is both a crime and an act of war, but is also neither.

Ackerman argues that to deal with such a threat requires powers greater than those used to fight crime, but less than those used in war. However, he sees an inherent danger in granting emergency powers for an open-ended "war on terror".

He proposes a majoritarian escalator. Granting initial emergency powers requires a simple majority vote to respond to a terrorist attack, but to renew it after a set period of time, you need 60%, then 70%, then 80%, and so on, so unless the need remains dire, the emergency powers will automatically cease.

His other policy proposals are equally interesting. He suggests that, to replace the Supreme court after a decapitating attack, it should be replaced by placing them names of the chief justice of the courts of appeal in a hat, and promoting those chosen by lot to the supreme court for staggered terms. I think we should do one better. After every congressional election, so every two years, one supreme court justice should be replaced. If there are no volunteers on the court, through retirement or death, the longest serving justice would be replaced. Why wait to have staggered terms in office until after a terrorist attack?

For the house of representatives, he suggests that we have a position of vice-representative, elected on a ticket like the vice president, whose job is to be somewhere other than with the representative. In case of a decapitation attack, they could be called to duty. He has trouble with the fact that vice presidents get elected so routinely, and vice representatives would give a party a permanent lock on the seat. I think we should couple this with my concept of non-consecutive terms. You can serve as many terms as you want, but only one in a row. Every race would be an open race, because both the representative and his vice representative would have been out of office for two years prior to any election.

He also brought up a problem I hadn't considered before. He suggests that the secretary of defense and secretary of homeland security should be removed from succession to the presidency. In any situation in power devolves that far, the secretaries of defense and homeland security would be much more needed at their posts than in the presidency.

God the Father

I was reading (offline) some prison statistics. The one that struck me most was that 95% of male prison inmates have an unhealthy (or missing) relationship with their father. For female inmates, though the statistic was not so overwhelming, it was still a major factor in their histories. The sheer impact of a father on a child's development is astounding and multifaceted.

It made me think about how God describes himself as our father. It is so much more than simply providing for our needs. He has an all-encompassing impact on us, and he created our human father's similarly, to demonstrate the nature of His role. And, I would surmise, demonstrate our need for Him in the failings of our fathers.

Can God Create a Rock so big He can't lift It?

That question is the quintessential cheap shot. The asker doesn't want or expect an answer. It's about the points pure and simple. I think the best way to answer it is to ask more questions. Here are the questions I'd ask in response to it:

Does God have to create gravity along with the rock, or can he create a rock without any gravity?

Does God have to create something to stand on so he can lift it?

If you have two big rocks, one to stand on and one to lift, isn't it really just pushing them apart and not lifting anyway?

Wouldn't the gravity of two infinite rocks instantly fuse them together and create one rock, which you can't lift without creating another one to stand on, and so on?


The point of the questions is to illustrate that the question itself is nonsense. If they go on, they're just forcing themselves into defending nonsense, which turns the cheap shot around.

Gay Marriage

Overheard: "Why can't churches marry anybody they want to?"

The quick, simple answer is that it is not the church who is marrying them, but God:

Mark 10:5-9 "⁵"It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law," Jesus replied. ⁶"But at the beginning of creation God 'made them male and female.' ⁷'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, ⁸and the two will become one flesh.' So they are no longer two, but one. ⁹Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate."

Those verses address both the issue of the Christian definition of marriage, and why churches can't marry anybody they want to. It stymies me that this is an issue in Christian churches.

Why don't more abortionists get shot?

If a doctor in Kansas were butchering hundreds of old or disabled people, and legal authorities failed to intervene, I doubt most members of the National Right to Life Committee would stand by waiting for "educational and legislative activities" to stop him. Somebody would use force.The reason these pro-life groups have held their fire, both rhetorically and literally, is that they don't really equate fetuses with old or disabled people. Link.

That is a really bad analogy. Here's my version:

If a doctor in Kansas were butchering hundreds of old or disabled people, and the legal authorities failed to intervene... in fact, they actively helped him by providing him with protection of his person and facilities and imprisoned those who tried to stop him... and declared it a "right" for people to bring old people to him... and the media and a large portion of the country praised his work... and there was social pressure if you didn't bring him old people... and every time someone managed to kill a doctor like that it made him into a martyr... I doubt most members of the National Right to Life Committee would stand by waiting for "educational and legislative activities" to stop him. Somebody would use force.The reason these pro-life groups have held their fire, both rhetorically and literally, is that they don't really equate fetuses with old or disabled people.

Actually, I don't doubt that they would wait for "education and legislative activities."

If tomorrow killing abortionists was no longer a crime, and not counter-productive in ending abortion, I doubt an abortionist would be alive by the end of the week.

The problem with this case is that the wrong person did it at the wrong time. The government should have done it, and at the beginning of his career, not after he had honed his technique and garnered a reputation.

Backpedaling, Journalist Style

In the December 2008 issue of National Geographic, they said, "Herod was almost certainly innocent of [the Slaughter of Innocents at Bethlehem]." In the April 2009 issue, they replied to various letters:

We received a great number of letters protesting the article's statement that Herod was 'almost certainly innocent' of the infanticide described in the Gospel of Matthew. In the sense that the accused is 'innocent until proven guilty' we stand by the phrase. Josephus, Herod's first-century biographer, makes no mention of such a crime...

If that is what they meant, they should have said that. "Almost certainly innocent" and "innocent until proven guilty" are phrases with very distinct, and very separate, meanings.

Secondly, Christ is the defining figure in history, yet in all of Josephus' works, Christ merits a single paragraph in Book 18, Chapter 3 in the Antiquities of the Jews. Even though, in the Discourse on Hades, it is evident that Josephus had converted to Christianity, that was all he granted him, because he was writing a political history, not a general history. If the most influential character of world history gets such a short piece, how are we expect that a minor detail from his life, which had even less political impact than Christ himself, how are we to expect that it would be given more weight, or any at all?

Death Row Investigators

This idea is not my own--it belongs to a buddy of mine--but he's not online, so even my tiny audience would not get to see it.

Every time a jury decides that the death penalty is appropriate, that case should be assigned to a special investigative team. That team has a time limit, for example, five years, to find disconfirming evidence. That team of investigators will spend five years doing nothing but working their cases trying to raise doubts about the guilt of the convicted men. If, at the end of the review period, they cannot raise reasonable doubt, the sentence is immediately carried out. There is no endless period on death row as appeal after appeal is put forth. If doubt is raised, at the end of five years they're taken off of death row and put into general population (or, depending what is found, even exonerated).

The team would have a mix of specialties, such as legal, law enforcement, forensics, and whatever else is appropriate.

The major benefit of this approach is that (a) we will execute fewer innocent people, (b) we will no longer delay justice on death row, and (c) the death penalty will be used when appropriate.

I don't think this position would be hard to fill either. People would go to school just to get the job as a death row investigator.