Shannon Love

Right On Iraq

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Guess who said this:

“We know we can’t count on the French. We know we can’t count on the Russians,” said Mr. Guess-Who “We know that Iraq is a danger to the United States, and we reserve the right to take pre-emptive action whenever we feel it’s in our national interest.”

Go ahead guess!

Give up?

Bwaa ha ha ha!

Jeez, I just laughed so hard I schadenfreuded my britches!

(Update: The quote is looking increasingly dodgy. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be so much a quote as a creative reconstruction. It is sort of like what the press does to Rumsfield all the time. *Sigh* It was just to funny to doublecheck.)

Britney Spears vs. The Terrorist!

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How do you hide, obscure or otherwise manipulate the availability of information in the Internet age?

If you don’t want somebody to know something, how do you stop them? In the past, one could just physically secure the information and watch the bottlenecks that occurred at the physically large facilities used for mass dissemination. That won’t work anymore. Digital technology makes copying information and disseminating it to virtually everybody on the planet a trivial task.

The question has profound implications for everything from national security to e-commerce to personal privacy. I think the answer comes from that person who has provided so much guidance for the citizens of the 21st Century.

Of course, I am talking about Britney Spears.

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Spam of the Day

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Just got an email from a Scotsman (I mean it’s written in dialect like somebody channeling grounds keeper Willie) who is threatening to eat a rabbit named Bernned (actual spelling) on New Years Eve if people don’t deposit a total of a 1,000,000 pounds by said date into his account.

For the first time in my decade long reading of spam I am sorely tempted to follow up on Spam link to just on the chance something creative might be going on.

In any case I am jealous.

I want to eat the Rabbit.

Recreating Victoria

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Via Instapundit comes a link to a post on Balkinization that proposes to create “A new crime of “reckless sexual conduct…”.

Basically, the idea is to prevent date rape and STD’s by making it a crime not to use a condom during a one-night stand. There are lot of practical and moral objections to such a law. I don’t think it has the hope of seeing the light of day but it is still a good example of a cultural and legal phenomenon that has been going on since the sexual revolution.

A pattern has emerged in the way we treat the rules for sexual relationships: (1) We start with a traditional culture based rules which may or may not be strongly enforced by formal law. (2) The argument is advanced that the traditional rules are irrational, oppressive, no longer needed etc (3) Both culture and law are changed to destroy the culture based rules. (4) To the surprise of everyone except elderly grandmothers, the new rules have unanticipated negative consequences. (5) To address these consequences, new formal laws are created that bring us back to a state very much as in (1).

In short, after destroying Victorianism culturally we recreate it in formal law. What was once enforced by the soft power of culture becomes enforced by the hard power of the state.

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