Annals of Questionable Genius - The Boston Globe reports that

Senator John F. Kerry has been steeling himself for Republican charges that he is a "Massachusetts liberal," but senior Bush strategists say they won't treat the presumptive Democratic nominee like another Michael S. Dukakis. Instead, they plan to paint him as Al Gore -- a waffling Washington insider too aloof to connect with average Americans.

Is this, um, smart? I couldn't stand Al Gore myself. But not quite half of all Americans liked him well enough to vote for him last time around. That's a lot more than voted for Michael Dukakis and about a half million more than voted for - George W. Bush in the same election.

I fully expect Kerry's lead in the polls to dissolve and more than dissolve. I don't think the White House has even started yet. But my expectations are premised on the idea that the President's campaign people are actually very clever.

The Blue Matt - Yglesias explains, with no words minced, why the Democrats suck. And he's right. Bill Clinton's stalwart guardianship of his own low pleasure rights drove conservatives nuts, but it also obscured how willing Clinton was to throw lesser beings to the lifestyle police - V-chips, drug prosecutions, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and a whole range of minor-to-major paternalisms Clinton either fostered, coopted or just couldn't be bothered fighting. (Remember school uniforms?) If it didn't involve terminating a pregnancy, your right to just about anything was, in Bill Clinton's view, negotiable.

It makes it harder, in these troubled times, for libertarians to work up much enthusiasm for cooperating with liberals. When, time after time, I have liberals complain that, since libertarians oppose affirmative action we lack "compassion" for African-Americans, I respond, "When you stop voting to keep locking up every seventh black guy for the crime of selling something other people want to buy, then come back and talk to me about my compassion deficit." And what I typically get is some mumble about, "Well, most liberals I know are against the war on drugs as currently practiced."

Great. And you and your friends have done what about that? Made it a litmus test for a nomination? Refused to vote for an enthusiastic drug warrior just because he or she bears the Democratic Party stamp of approval in the general election? Worked to elevate anti-prohibition candidates to office?

I didn't think so. And we're talking about a set of policies that were not only, in those days before the Bush-inflected version of the War on Terror, the single greatest nemesis of American civil liberties; we're talking about policies whose fell weight falls most heavily on the Democratic Party's core and most loyal constituency: African Americans.

For all the proclamations of committed liberals that the Democratic Party is the guardian of "personal liberty," the record shows that - it's just not. A critical mass of Democratic politicians will surf just about any censorious wave that gets rolling, whether it's drugs or broadcast standards or the rights of gay people to do the things that straight people do, to speak only of national issues.

If I did face a choice between a major party that wants to keep government out of the economy and a major party that wants to keep government out of people's personal lives, well, that would be some choice. But Republicans only imagine that they're the former and Democrats only imagine that they're the latter.

Wilderness of Lindauers III: The Counter-Counter-Counter Narrative - You know, the fact of Lindauer's distant relationship to Andrew Card and parentage in the (periphery of) Republican establishment make her apparent belief that she could work a back channel between Iraq and the US look marginally less delusional. Which is not to say, not delusional - anyone who imagined that the Bush Administration could be dissuaded from war by then (and yes, I spent a week like this myself) was experiencing the old triumph of hope over experience. But she could reasonably imagine that she had the sort of workable personal connection that opens Washington doors.

Area for further research: possible connections between Lindauer's overture in January and the Imad Hage overture of March 2003.

A Wilderness of Lindauers - Reports last night purport to identify the "government official" to whom espionage-related program activities suspect Susan Lindauer gave her January message:

The U.S. official was not identified. But a government official, speaking on condition on anonymity, said the recipient of the letter was White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, a distant cousin of Lindauer.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said that the last time Card recalls seeing or talking to Lindauer was during January 2001 inaugural events. McClellan said the FBI interviewed Card about his contact with Lindauer and that Card cooperated fully.

Card told the FBI that Lindauer had tried to contact him on behalf of the former regime several times.

That's from AP. And apparently her father was once Republican candidate for governor of Alaska, according to Newsday.

The connections to prominent Republicans open the possibility of a counter-counter narrative - that the indictments have actually softpedalled Lindauer's crimes for the sake of her father and Card. (And let's not forget the original, very live possibility, that the indictments are a reliable account of her actual transgressions. It happens sometimes.)

Links via Daily Kos, which is mostlyconcerned about the partisan political angle (magine!) via Antiwar.com blog.

Over the Other Line - Okay, now the Bush ad people really have gone too far.

Curious Omissions from the Libertarian Purity test we were all talking about the other day:

1. The right to self-defense is the most basic human right, true or false. (Answer: True.)

2. The right to earn a peaceful living may not be number two, but it's way up there. (Answer: True.)

English is Hard! - You know, it's going to be very hard not to link to Zero Intelligence every day. Latest gem: previously-unappreciated nuances in the meaning of the phrase "zero tolerance":

"There's sometimes mitigating circumstances that will support the principal's decision to not go strictly by the zero tolerance rule," she said.

Gilyard can't on comment on Renard's individual case, but does say meeting with parents and the student in question may help resolve the problem. She also says that when it comes to enforcing zero tolerance, there should be no exceptions.

Remember, this woman is employed in an educational institution. But then, I do think I'm learning.

UPDATE: Left out the part of the quote that makes it funny in the first draft of this item.

Over the Edge - The biggest story not from Spain today was the arrest of one Susan Lindauer of Takoma Park, MD, on charges of prohibited dealings with the Iraqi Intelligence Service from 1999 through 2002, including taking $10,000 for her services in 2002 in a forbidden financial transaction, and "plotting to aid resistance groups in Iraq after Hussein was ousted by U.S. forces." Interestingly, Lindauer was not charged with espionage as such.

I have no idea if Lindauer is guilty. If she was indeed working for the Iraqis, her motives seem distinctly ideological. She belonged to various antiwar groups and signed petitions against the Iraq War, and let's face it, $10,000 is not all that much of an inducement. Her resume reads like that of someone on a downward career spiral, moving down the Congressional food chain as a staffer to, apparently, a final position as a spokesperson for Carol Mosely Braun, to spokeswoman for a fledgling, would-be C-SPAN competitor until, according to the information that came out of her arraignment today, employed but "not on a regular basis." She speaks of having survived "several assassination attempts," but there's no evidence she's the sort of person who could thwart determined professional killers.

In other words, at first glance, she fits the profile of someone who decides to betray her country, and if she really did decide to aid resistance groups in Iraq, that is what she did. Oppose the war, but don't fund the killers of our uniformed countrymen. Oppose the federal government, but don't bomb crowded buildings. Oppose abortions but don't shoot doctors. There are lines the dissident must not cross. As a radical, I'm all too familiar with people who hold some versions of my own beliefs crossing over to the dark side, but I'm neither used to it or reconciled. If Susan Lindauer tried to materially aid the killers of our troops, she should rot in jail.

There is of course the possibility that she didn't do this. At least one counter-narrative suggests itself. First, there's the matter of her pre-war contact with the IIS. One incident was curiously dropped from the later edition's of the Post's online coverage, but is still in the SF Chronicle's version of the AP report:

On Jan. 8, 2003, prosecutors said, Lindauer tried to influence U.S. foreign policy by delivering to the home of a U.S. government official a letter in which she conveyed her access to and contacts with members of Saddam's regime. The official was not identified in the indictment.

This is not exactly hiding your Iraq-contacting light under a bushel. This means the government's own indictment against Lindauer claims that she seemingly intended to make sure the Federal government knew of her contacts with Iraqi officialdom more than a year ago. The obvious inference is that Lindauer, a peace activist, wanted to set up a back channel between the US and Iraq to head off the coming war. This is obviously a grandiose ambition, and consistent with the prima facie evidence in the early news reports of a delusive personality. But while acting as an unregistered foreign agent is illegal, trying to "influence U.S. foreign policy" surely isn't (still!) a crime in itself. What would we do with Mr. Chalabi?

Now let's advance the counter-narrative to the postwar period:

The indictment said she met on two occasions in Baltimore in June and July with an undercover FBI agent who posed as a Libyan intelligence representative who was seeking to support resistance groups in postwar Iraq. It said she discussed the need for plans and foreign resources to support these groups.

According to the indictment, she continued to correspond with the undercover agent until last month and followed the agent's instructions to leave packages on two occasions in August in "dead drop" operations.

Who initiated the contacts, the FBI or Lindauer? Why did they stop meeting after August? What was in those packages? What did the correspondence say? Was Lindauer, as before the war, imagining herself somehow capable of being a go-between? Who took the initiative in keeping the contacts going, her or the FBI? Did the FBI's actions rise to the level of entrapment? Going back to the pre-war period, did Lindauer even know that the Iraqi UN Mission employees she met were intelligence officers, or did she imagine they were "diplomats?"

I have no idea. Do I think the counter-narrative makes Lindauer some kind of hero, or at least okay? No, I do not. IF she took foreign money from a hostile country without registering, she betrayed not just her country but the peace movement itself. It doesn't matter that the amount was, in spy game terms, small. Once they have your signature on the receipt for an illegal transaction, they own you. Even if you think you're working for yourself, or Peace, or the higher ideals your country should aspire to, they've got evidence that you committed a crime and they can burn you at any time. You have made yourself a soft target for extortion by a hostile power. You are at the very least criminally naive, and that's leaving aside the plain truth that no decent person should want a dime of Saddam Hussein's largesse.

That's if she took the money. And again, that hasn't been proven. And of course, while the early media picture is consistent with a sad sack falling apart as she subsides through middle age, the early media picture may be wrong. I did a lot of independent Google-mining on Lindauer this morning - the fruits of it are available in this Outside the Beltway item, not that you could tell where it came from - and drew the "Falling Down" picture independently, but it's still just an interpretation. My best guess is that, at the least, Lindauer crossed a line she shouldn't have crossed between opposing her country's foreign policy and advancing another's. It is an honorable thing to oppose an unwise or an unjust war - IF you do it of, by and for love of YOUR country. You don't take money from an evil regime, or even give its minions the time of day. (Imagine Lincoln accepting funding from Santa Ana.)

It may be as true that the government took advantage of a weak woman's naivete in hopes of political gain. We'll find out. Though I doubt we'll all agree with what we find out.

Spain - My heart goes out to the people in Madrid. I can't tell you What It All Means, but neither can anyone else right now - never trust the early reports. Iberian Notes blogs from Spain in English, so keep checking there for news. When I come across relief donation opportunities I'll post them here.

This is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - This site congratulates the Washington Wizards on last night's 99-62 drubbing of Tracy McGrady.

You Call That Dark-Skinned? - I've got relatives with darker skin than the actor playing the terrorist in the new Bush ad that's the outrage of the day. Okay, they're African-American, so they've got a head start, but still - I think some of Mrs. Offering's Italian-American relations are duskier than this guy. (I'd peg his ancestry as just north of the Med rather than just south if you made me guess based only on that eybrows-to-cleft closeup.)

The real outrage is that it's more of the Bush Administration trying to frighten the electorate into submission by accusing John Kerry of wanting to repeal the PATRIOT Act - and "Weaken Fight Against Terrorists" as it says in the scary red box at the bottom of the screen. (Does Kerry really want to repeal the PATRIOT Act? Because the man still has time to convert me from a leaner to a supporter, appalling as he is in so many ways. Keep me posted!) On the skin tone complaint, I call bullshit.

(Via Atrios.)

Math is Hard! - The White House and Pentagon refuse to include moneys in the FY2005 defense budget for Iraq and Afghanistan:

The Pentagon's refusal to estimate costs is the same stance it took before the war.

For months leading up to the invasion, officials said they couldn't estimate because they didn't know how long it would take to fight the war.

Within days after it started, however, the Pentagon sent Congress a request for $63 billion.

''So you know they had it in their back pockets,'' all along, said Cindy Williams, a former congressional budget officer now with the MIT security studies program. ''They were just not wanting to disclose to the American people on the eve of the war how much it was going to cost.''

reports Newsday. Maybe they've hired a bunch of Patrick Henry College accounting graduates, and Patrick Henry doesn't have enough professors to cover the concept of accruals yet? Let alone the methodology of projections? If the Pentagon will drop me an e-mail, I can recommend some real accountants for them.

Because leaving those moneys out of the budget has an unfortunate, utter coincidence to it:

Had Bush included it in the budget proposal sent to Congress in February, the government's surging deficit problem would have looked even worse.

I'm sure nobody wants to confuse the American people about the true size of the deficit.

Imitation Tech Blog Item - Kevin J. Maroney points me to Character Cleaner from Malevolent Designs, which will replace high-ascii characters with low ones (e.g. smart quotes to striaght quotes), or convert them to Unicode. Cool! As Kevin notes, you can save the page to your desktop and run it locally.

For my purposes, I'll have to go a paragraph at a time. It either wants to add paragraph break tags for you based on spacing or lump everything into a single big paragraph. You get to choose, but since I use MovableType's paragraphing functionality, neither of those options is particularly good for me. Still, very useful web utility.

And Steve from Snarkout points me to a cool Mozilla-family extension, Flash Click-to-View, which works with Mozilla, Firebird/Firefox and maybe Netscape too for all I know. It suppresses Flash animations until and unless you activate them. No more trying to read deep thoughts while animations flash in your face.

Speaking of Ironies - How about all the Big Government Liberals selling blogads while the anti-government libertarian continues to eschew advertising? What's up with that?

On the other hand, the redesign of Matthew Yglesias' site shows the power of the profit motive in fostering beneficial change. (I admit the ads that flash can be distracting. To quote Homer Simpson: Did we lose a war??)

Speaking of Matt, I highly recommend his item about "low bar syndrome" in Iraq, and what really lies ahead. While I happen to have been one of the people who did expect a messy occupation phase, he's absolutely right that the real dangers haven't even had a chance to arrive yet.

The one hope might be that Low Bar Syndrome somehow works on the Iraqis themselves - that is, when we finally hit the legendary "pre-war levels" of whatever, it will make them giddy with joy - despite the fact that, at the time, they thought pre-war levels amounted to privation.

Tech Support Ticket - Any Zempt users know a quick and easy way to replace non-ascii typographical characters with standard ones when copying text for quoting? Zempt 0.6 of course chokes on smart quotes and em-dashes and such. It's darn tedious sometimes to have to zap every apostrophe and hyphen one by one in a lengthy blog item. I've tried pasting an entire item into Textpad and copying it back into Zempt, but this appears to be one of a handful of things Textpad won't do.

The Fall of the Towers - The stunning thing about Rick Atkinson's series on the invasion phase of the Iraq War? The Post allows the first-person singular to appear in the reporter's narration. That's the kind of decline in standards that leads to men marrying men and women marrying women.

Urgent Communication for You - Here we go, my spam mail - roundup style with little comment because of the hour and fatigue. Thanks to everyone who wrote in.

Michael Croft:

Eudora tells me (bless it's pointy, statistic-full littl' haid) that I send, on average, 152 messages a month. Fully half of these are to PBeMs, so that when they go out, 76 of them are expanded to about 1520. Eudora also tells me that of the 2500 pieces of mail I received in February, (those not stopped by server-based protection routines) about 7% were Junk. Significantly more than half of those were viruses designed to exploit security flaws in MicroSoft products. Bill Gates needn't worry about the mote of spam 'til he has removed the beam of viruses.

What Bill Gates wants is not your penny, although he'll take it. What he wants is to drive the next mandatory software/hardware upgrade cycle to lock in more companies to Exchange Server. He's hoping that a Y2K/HDTV kind of technology upgrade will get him both a lot of software profits both for Exchange Server and from upgraders who need better versions of his server software to run it on. And he's banking that he can exclude Linux from the trough because it's open source. If he gets your penny or dime in the process of making alternatives to his monopoly look bad, then that's gravy.

Ginger writes more e-mail than I do. I don't want to pay $35+/month to run our game at a penny a message, and we'd close down for sure if the e-stamp act wanted a dime a shot. And I certainly don't want to pay it to the guy responsible for the real on-line pollution problem so that he can use it to eliminate alternatives to his products.

As a mail server admin of a free server, it looks to that what he's proposing would balkanize the net, creating multiple bordered zones that would exclude admins like me from . In this I am anti-enclosure, although the tragedy of the commons is clear to see. For my purposes, I would probably provide all my players with whiterose.org email addresses. But considering how many games I know run on the dog's breakfast called 'Yahoo Groups', I don't think this will work for most people.

Richard Puchalsky quotes a paragraph of me, then comments:

"His model is tradeable pollution allowances or tradeable catch permits for fisheries, which most pragmatic libertarians prefer to preexisting regulatory models. But on the general question of "market mechanisms" in government policy, libertarian opinion is diverse, and my impression is that we've grown more skeptical of them over time. They tend to be financial incentives to behave in government-approved ways."

As a big government liberal, I agree with you fully on this one. I think that the general rule is that whenever government creates a new form of unreal property, government undergoes a net expansion.

And this particular case is a really poor one for a new unreal "property right". Sending spam is better modelled as a crime, or if you really prefer non-governmental models a social gaffe, punishable (after warnings) by the refusal of other sites to pass on all Email sent by the server or network that sent it. Surely it must be easier to implement that than to force the world to buy Email stamps.

Steve from Snarkout:

Not that this takes away from your point vis a vis Kevin Drum and the libertarian response to email, but the "stamps" Bill Gates is supposedly endorsing are mostly the result of lazy journalism. The idea, if I'm correct, is similar to the one bandied about that's called "hashcash" -- you set up a computer somewhere (yours, or the mail server's) to bounce or filter as junk any email which doesn't contain an encrypted version of the header, including your address and the time. The encryption mechanism is set so that it takes a non-trivial time -- five seconds, say -- to compute, but a trivial amount of time to verify. The idea, then, is that sending out a normal person's mail will involve a few minutes weekly of wasted computational time, but sending out spam adverts at five hundred thousand copies a pop will bog down into impracticality. You're better set to analyze the implications in terms of market efficiency and rational choice; personally, I'll just assume that the spammers will figure a way around it, probably involving vast numbers of 0wnz0red proxy computers to do the calculations. This will be bad for my inbox, but good for my vague disquiet with the idea that it's the 21st century and there are not mirrorshaded cyberoutlaws fighting the man.

(The greylisting methodology proposed here, seems like a less intrusive and marginally more likely to succeed variation on the theme of making spammers spend a little bit of extra computational time per mail. But I have little hope.)

The calculation thing sounds weird to this layman. The biggest problem with spam is that it's supposed to be a huge bandwidth hog. So people want to fight it by increasing the bandwidth required to handle every e-mail? These earthmen are strange.

Another reader (anonymous by choice) offers a way that "e-mail postage" really could come about as a market solution:

I've been following your discussion with Kevin Drum over charging for sending email as a way to reduce spam, and I think you've misunderstood the way for this to come about as a consequence of the market.

You assume that the fee would go to the ISP of the sender, which, as you argued, would just cause spammers to find or create ISPs which didn't charge. Instead, imagine an architecture where for every email sent, the sender has to pay a fee to the recipient's ISP, and the recipient's ISP would just reject any email that didn't have a virtual stamp attached to it. Now, once most accounts are capable of sending email with virtual stamps, everyone will want their account to only accept email which has virtual stamps. They can still receive email from people they want to receive email from, because the price is negligible, say a fraction of a cent, and they get almost no spam. No government intervention necessary.

So why hasn't this arisen because of market forces? Because of course, the cost of clearing a fee for each email sent is far higher than fractions of a cent, and perhaps more than people are willng to pay. So then why did Bill Gates propose such an economically unsustainable system? Quite simply, he didn't. Read the article again. Bill Gates proposed requiring the sender to perform a costly computation for each email sent. He analogized this to buying stamps in the postal system, and other people have talked about a fee-based system, so the net result is that the journalist and the headline writer get confused.

A computation-based system could arise out of market forces in the same way as a fee-based system, with the advantage of not needing the infrastructure for clearing the transactions. So why hasn't the computation-based system caught on? I'm not sure. Probably, because it needs to be widely adopted to work, so it needs some big player in the computing industry, such as Microsoft, to push it, and get those high levels of adoption.

Which is Michael Croft's nightmare.

Paying the recipient of an e-mail seems more attractive the user than paying the recipient's ISP. I can't see why the ISP would ever let unstamped e-mails through if it got to collect the postage, regardless of the user's wishes.

As a blogger, I benefit from receiving unsolicited e-mail (clearly!). So given my choice I'm going to err on the side of accepting unsolicited e-mail. Even my filter just tucked a moving announcement from the best man at my wedding into the Junk folder. It was consigning Alan Sullivan's e-mails there for awhile, and I suspect Alan's filter is culling mine too.

Anyway, spam. What a pisser, huh?

Broken English - Some of the Reason staffers who write for the Lebanese Daily Star should try editing the paper. For the life of me I'm having a hard time tying out some of hte numbers in today's article on oil exploration opportunities in Iraq, especially this part:

Ghadban said Iraq is currently producing 2 million bpd and exporting over 1.75 million bpd. He expects the figure to increase in the coming months. Ghadban added: "We are now producing more than 2.5 million bpd and exporting oil from two terminals in Basra for the first time since 1980."

If I read this right, Iraq increased oil production by 500,000 barrels per day in the pause between paragraphs. Now that is surely reconstruction progress.

But wait, there's more, at the very beginning:

"We are now refining almost half a million barrels per day (bpd), but we shall increase this capacity in the coming months. We want to go back to the 700,000 bpd so that we satisfy [domestic] demand," he said.

And this site wishes the Iraqi Oil Ministry Advisor the best of luck in doing so. But again, numbers problems.

2 million bpd produced
-1.75m bpd exported
0.25m bpd for domestic consumption

Which is half 500,000. The Saban Center's Iraq Index pegs February production at 2.276mbpd (which is, um, slightly lower than the Dec-February levels) - that would cover the difference. (See page 15 of the PDF.) Of course, the Saban Center also pegs Iraqi exports for February at 1.44mbpd (the lowest level since October) - so that would leave even more oil available for domestic consumption. It also happens to contradict the Oil Advisor's own export numbers.

It's just annoying when the numbers in an article aren't at least internally consistent, darnit. By the way, according to the Saban Center, Iraq's domestic consumption availability numbers for February are the best since the Occupation began keeping score, though not yet up to the fabled "pre-war levels."

More number crunching this weekend. (Daily Star link via Hesiod.)

Another Source of Homeschooling - This Zero Intelligence report on a Talawanda Middle School student's attempt to deal with bus bullies, and the hell her life became in the aftermath, filled me, as they say, with a towering rage.

Alicia went to Counselor Sandy Greenberg that day and reported that she was being bullied by four girls on the bus. As she wrote out a statement about the bullying, three of those girls were brought down to Ms.Greenberg's office. After a brief discussion with the girls Ms.Greenberg left them together unsupervised to write their own statements.

Oh that was a good idea! (My emphasis.)

All Homeschooling Apologetics Are but Footnotes to Tushnet - Why am I not surprised that Eve was a year ahead of me on the social implications of homeschooling versus not. Very good stuff. Eve goes lightly on the real danger that homeschooling can replace one kind of isolation (the kind she documents schools fostering) with another (the kind that comes from those parents who do use homeschooling as a way of shielding their children from even engaging with contemporary values, if only to reject them), probably because she sees the latter risk as obvious and well-covered elsewhere.

After last night's item I got to thinking about another parallel: contemporary feminist apologias for all-female colleges. The major variations are that women "learn differently" and that some women will blossom intellectually when removed from the glandularly-charged and dominating presence of young men. I have my doubts that women as a group really do learn differently, but taken together the arguments suggest that one size decidedly doesn't fit all.

You can say that the social "benefits" of group schooling are good for most kids and I won't argue, for all that I rank James Conant among the most evil Americans of the 20th century. But guess what? Most kids undergo group schooling already. Homeschoolers are a small minority of all school-age parents, and as Eve notes, the models for homeschooling are more various than ever. It's when you push the argument to the next level - since group schooling is good for most kids, we should require it for all kids - that I must fight you tooth and claw.

Reading Around - Congratulations to Kevin Drum. Building on the momentum he acquired from winning the "Least Dispensible Weblog" category in the 2003 Unqualified Success awards, he has clawed his way into a paid blogging position with the Washington Monthly. I am shocked at this blatant display of liberal bias by the liberal magazine, but can't escape thinking that this is an insanely good choice on their part.

Zero Intelligence is a new blog tracking "zero tolerance" follies in "our" schools.

You know those blogs that are full of cool, unpredictible material brought to you by an always-pleasant host? The Modulator is probably my favorite of those right now.

Speaking of the Modulator, he makes a useful point in his item on the meme of the day, the Libertarian Purity test:

I suspect that how you score on this test has a lot to do with the perspective you use when taking the test and that for the results to be somewhat comparable this bias needs to be included. For instance, I took the test from the perspective of what I thought an anarcho-capitalist might answer and scored 153. Tomorrow I'll try to take it from the perspective of a libertarian minarchist and see what kind of score I get. Then I'll try again from the position of ok, I have libertarian leanings but what is practical in the near term (20-40 years).

As he notes, I scored a 101, but the whole time I was taking the test I had a little voice whispering, "Go hardcore!" I suspect if I took it again I'd come in lower, maybe all the way down to Julian's 79. And as a commenter on Radley's site notes, it's really an anarcho-capitalism purity test. There are certainly plenty of people who mistake anarcho-capitalism for the whole of the libertarian movement, but it's just not the case. Yazad, whose blog is new to me, has more on problems with the test, which is too bad - we can't actually discuss it any more because, a couple of dozen comments down Radley's thread on the topic, Gene Healy, who scored 111, mentions Hitler.

James Joyner, who has somehow managed the trick of becoming the successor to Instapundit without Instapundit retiring, is expressing common qualms about home schooling:

Are there people who home school their children for reasons other than religious brainwashing? Sure. By and large, I'm still not sure it's a good idea. A large part of schooling is the social process of interacting with other students, dealing with the rigors of a set schedule, learning to live with seemingly arbitrary rules set by others, etc. While I'm often disgusted with the quality of the teachers at public schools, they at least expose their students to views beyond those of their parents. That's a good thing.

One of my nieces is being homeschooled, and while we aren't homeschooling Offering Boy or the Littlest Offering, I'd consider it under certain circumstances. Having followed my sister's efforts, including her (successful) efforts to find secular course materials, I've come to some conclusions: first, there are people out there who homeschool for nonreligious reasons, like, for instance, the local school sucks big time (in educator-speak). Second, the social value of schooling can be overrated. Schools can be savage tutors of sociability. The structural support they provide the shy child, the eccentric child, the impulsive child, can be small to nil. In the wrong circumstances they can do more harm than good, teaching the impressionable that other people mean inscrutable torment.

As liberals are fond of saying, different students learn at different rates, but this is true of social learning too. Offering Boy is a swell kid, but he is shy around others, excitable, and prey to lashing out when his feelings are hurt. He is much, much better socialized than he was as a preschooler, and increasingly successful at managing his relationships with his classmates. But when Mrs. Offering went back to work this year and we looked at after-school care options for him, we rejected the in-building program because it has quite a lot of free-for-all about it. He needs more supervision and smaller groups of kids.

And he's far from the worst-socialized child I've known. Awkward children plunked down among their peers can find themselves sucked into feedback loops where their awkwardness sparks hostility which engenders further awkwardness and so on. Some children, probably most, survive it. Some even, eventually, flourish. Some are able to use alienation as the engine of their intellectual development.

But some kids end up as gibbets in the spittle of the sleek and savage weasels that appear in the educational ecology as early as preschool. The thing to do with those children is not to leave them in place to try to reconstitute their psyches in the midst of the frenzy but to pull them out and find another entry vector into society. Homeschooling can be not only acceptable for such kids, it can be crucial. Also, from what I've seen, homeschooling parents tend to be very sensitive to socialization issues. Any area with a large density of homeschoolers will have networks of parents formed for the express purpose of giving their kids contact with other kids.

Now, James is writing in the context of recent reports on Patrick Henry College, which is nowhere I'd want to send my child to get a bachelor's. But you know what? It's nothing but diversity in action. Patrick Henry College is, from what I can tell, something under a thousand students out of the millions of kids who got their secondary education at home. A country of three hundred million has room for that many eccentrics and more.

Wait, this was supposed to be a blogwatch-style item! What happened? Anyway, Outside the Beltway is probably the best way to keep up with the world of Republican blogging these days.

Tacitus reminds me that I still have to get back to the basic issues in our differences of opinion. Hold that thought. Sometimes I leave off warblogging for a bit because it starts to bore even me.

Legendary roleplaying game designer Robin D. Laws has started a livejournal. An early post is his Blogging Pledge, consisting of the things he won't do. So there's your dead pool opportunity.

Tomorrow morning: spam mail.

Strictly Your Alanis Morrisette Kind of Irony - Kevin Drum was kind enough to comment on my item about Bill Gates' proposal to move e-mail from a flat-rate to piece-rate model, adding:

As a libertarian, I'm surprised that Jim doesn't look more kindly on this proposal. After all, it's just a way of enforcing property rights on our collective time and bandwidth. Why not let the market sort the whole thing out?

But no. In an odd reversal of roles, it's the big government liberal who thinks that using market mechanisms to solve this problem has a lot of merit. In fact, I suspect that in the end there's no other solution. The only possible way of reducing spam to tolerable levels is to find some way of making it economically infeasible.

Let's acknowledge something up front: new classes of property rights do arise in the course of time and get codified in law. It is certainly possible that "my in-box, my right" will turn out to be one of these new classes - is becoming such even as we type. However, there's a reason why the big government liberal is more drawn to these sorts of "market mechanisms" than the libertarian. It's not irony. It's because we're not actually talking about "let[ting] the market sort the whole thing out" at all.

The market has already sorted out e-mail as follows: practically everyone who sells e-mail service offers a flat rate for access, and practically everyone who buys e-mail pays a flat rate for access, inbound and outbound. Note that there are some few services that charge by the piece now, and in the early days of internet service providers there used to be more. People voted with their dollars for flat-rate, and flat-rate became the dominant, even ubiquitous model. Most vendors charge extra for more than a certain number of mailboxes, most vendors either limit mail storage space or charge extra if you exceed your storage limit. In principle, very heavy e-mail users could fall foul of bandwidth charges. But "the market" clearly says: e-mail wants to be "free." (After you spend $1400 on your computer and $10-50/month for your ISP - more for business-class broadband.)

Virtual stamps as a way to limit spam only work if everyone _has_ to buy virtual stamps. If virtual stamps become simply one pricing method among many, spammers will decline to go that route and chances are the rest of us will too. We already have. The virtual stamp model is a proposal to forbid my ISP from selling flat-rate e-mail, and me from buying it.

Whatever that is, it ain't letting the market sort the whole thing out.

It's a sin tax, really. And its one that must apply the world over. By the way, World, you're with us or you're against us on this too! Otherwise it just doesn't work. If spammers may still buy flat rate e-mail service in Barbados, spammers will move to Barbados.

Now, Kevin is too smart to confuse the virtual stamp solution with a free market, and I would not want to accuse him of imagining otherwise. His model is tradeable pollution allowances or tradeable catch permits for fisheries, which most pragmatic libertarians prefer to preexisting regulatory models. But on the general question of "market mechanisms" in government policy, libertarian opinion is diverse, and my impression is that we've grown more skeptical of them over time. They tend to be financial incentives to behave in government-approved ways. In many cases, we don't feel it's the government's business to approve or disapprove. In others, we doubt that the particular mechanism will be either effective enough or flexible enough.

So it's not all that odd that Kevin likes the virtual stamp idea more than I. Nor am I necessarily right and him wrong. As I've written before, I do not get that much spam. It's the rare day I get more than a dozen pieces. But this is because my penis is already famously massive. That's not going to be true of most bloggers.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - It's amazing what a little exercise will do for one. 166 pounds this morning, two lower than last week, with midweek readings at 165. Got in some about five miles of walking between last Sunday and this - not much, but keeping my hand in. Winter is gone, hibernation over.

Marathon prep: Ran some today on a cub scout hike. First sustained running I've done in the New Year. This week starts the "pre-training" program in earnest.

Stuff to Read: Bruce Baugh has switched to Weight Watchers. I look forward to reading about what the experience is like, as I've long been skeptical of WW's effectiveness, and it's certainly never sounded like a regimen I could stick with. Can't argue with his early results, though.

Higher Fitness Blogging: Bruce and I were exchanging e-mails about stuff, including whether any given diet was more likely than others to lead to boomerang weight gain.

Bruce: My impression is that most people gain back weight whatever they do, really.

Me: The body wants us to die. You know this better than the most, but it's true for the rest of us too.

Which brings us to the President's so-called Bio-ethics Commission, which recently purged some members for having the wrong ethics. Matthew Yglesias explained exactly what is so hideous about the official "Kass position":

Simply put, the view is that scientific research holds the promise of radically improving human health and therefore must be stopped.

To be clear, the view is not that scientific research holds the promise of radically improving human health and nevertheless must be stopped because of some other issue (this would be, I take it, the "pro-life" thought on stem cell research). No. The view is that the problem with the research is that it might succeed in letting people live longer.

Folks, the Bush Administration wants to kill Bruce Baugh. I realize that there are people all over RPG.Net who say they want to kill Bruce Baugh too, but the chances of hardcore gamers working up the ambition required to complete a real-world task like that are pretty slim. Politicians don't suffer from the same inertia, and killing people - by design, by neglect, by convenience - comes easy to them. "We" will be better people for their care, there just won't be as many of "us." I'd be surprised to see the population of them drop significantly, though.

Too Late! - I avoid IM as much as possible. So naturally I didn't know:

Michael has a reasonably common screen name (first initial, last name) on AIM. In addition to the weirdos who think he must be the person they know, he gets a fair amount of porn webcam spam, and has done for some time.

There's already a lot of IM spam out there, not to mention IM viruses/spyware/malware that will IM your friends using your buddy lists to suggest that your friends download this new k3wl thing "you" recommend. Since I'm not platform-impaired, I don't worry about the malware, but the "cum on see me on my webcam" is still annoying.

That's Ginger Stampley in e-mail, loyal readers, so au courant she even knows what stuff like "L33T" means.