Idiotic decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals:

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants – with no need for a search warrant.

So let’s see if I have this right: the police can walk onto my property, place a GPS tracking device on my car, and track me indefinitely, because I don’t have an expectation of privacy on my driveway? What the hell sense does that make?

Their conclusion not only doesn’t logically follow from their premise, but it has no relevance to it whatever. While I do not expect to have privacy on my driveway—that is, I wouldn’t do anything I don’t want publicly visible—my driveway is my property, and thus I have the right to decide who can and cannot access it. If I don’t consent to the police being on my driveway, and they don’t have a warrant, then they cannot be there. And they sure as hell don’t have a right to place a tracking device on my car.

This ruling is, if allowed to stand, incredibly dangerous. This basically makes it legal for the government to track everyone’s location at any given time, whether they are reasonably suspected of a crime or not. This is one giant leap toward a police state.

Dave Pell:

When it comes to the net, we’re habitually guilty of LUI (Living Under the Influence). We sacrifice real life for realtime. We tweet vacation photos while we’re still on vacation. We share anecdotes about our kids when we’re spending time with them. And yes, we read and publish content from the driver’s seat of our cars.

Apt.

Ian Hines:

There has to be a solution to this problem, but it doesn’t seem to me that enough people who are in a position to find it are doing their best to. We’re all just hoping that some abstract governmental force will step up and guarantee it rather than taking concrete, actionable steps towards ensuring it. I find that disconcerting.

It starts with each of us thinking about how we want to use personal data-based services in our lives—rationally considering how best to use them so they benefit us—and then only using services from companies we trust. At this point, I’m inclined not to trust Google, and I never did have any faith in Facebook.

The only companies that deserve as much personal data as we give out are companies who are truly interested in benefiting their users.

Ron Paul chastises that are seeking to stop the New York mosque from being built:

The debate should have provided the conservative defenders of property rights with a perfect example of how the right to own property also protects the 1st Amendment rights of assembly and religion by supporting the building of the mosque.

Instead, we hear lip service given to the property rights position while demanding that the need to be “sensitive” requires an all-out assault on the building of a mosque, several blocks from “ground zero.”
…
Conservatives are once again, unfortunately, failing to defend private property rights, a policy we claim to cherish. In addition conservatives missed a chance to challenge the hypocrisy of the left which now claims they defend property rights of Muslims, yet rarely if ever, the property rights of American private businesses.

Absolutely right. I do find it amusing, though, that liberals are enthusiastically quoting Ron Paul on this, when many on the left just as giddily portrayed him as a racist in the 2008 primaries.

Paul went on to say:

This sentiment seems to confirm that Islam itself is to be made the issue, and radical religious Islamic views were the only reasons for 9/11. If it became known that 9/11 resulted in part from a desire to retaliate against what many Muslims saw as American aggression and occupation, the need to demonize Islam would be difficult if not impossible.

There is no doubt that a small portion of radical, angry Islamists do want to kill us but the question remains, what exactly motivates this hatred?

This is a terrible misunderstanding on Paul’s part of what motivates Islamists. Paul, and others, believe that Islamists are fundamentally only interested in the Muslim world (which is usually conveniently, but inaccurately, defined as the Middle East), and attack the U.S. because of our involvement in the region.

While the U.S.’s involvement in the Muslim world certainly is a motivating factor, it isn’t their primary motivation. For groups like al Qaeda, their goal isn’t to change the Middle East, but to change the world. Their goal is to restart the caliphate and extend Taliban-like rule across the Muslim world—from North Africa to China—and from there, Islamize the world. From this perspective, the U.S.’s involvement in the Muslim world is incidental. The U.S. must be defeated not because it has hurt Muslims, but because it is the world’s superpower and thus the largest threat to their ultimate goal.

Handing Iraq and Afghanistan to Islamists, renouncing Israel and withdrawing all forces from the region may, in the short-term, placate them. But the short-term is, well, short. Would we rather deal with al Qaeda as a group forced into the mountains of the Pakistani-Afghan border, or as a movement in control of Iraq and Afghanistan?

Home sales declined precipitously in July:

Economists and forecasters were predicting an awful 13% decline in existing home sales for July, to 4.65 million units.  This, we were told solemnly, would be the worst since 2009.

In hindsight, those making the predictions seem to have been the sort of wild-eyed optimists whose sunny belief in the strength of the housing market got us into this mess in the first place.  The actual figure for home sales, according to the National Association of Realtors, was 3.83 million–a 27% decline.

The home buyers tax credit ended in April and this is the result. The credit didn’t create new demand—it took existing demand and artificially compressed it into a smaller period of time. In this way, it inflated demand while it was in effect and inflated housing prices as well, and thus put off (but didn’t avoid) a necessary contraction after the 1997-2006 housing bubble. We will now live through that contraction.

We could have suffered through it earlier, but we decided to delay the pain.

Trader Joes has a very different strategy than most grocery stores:

Trader Joe’s organic creamy unsalted peanut butter will be more satisfying if there are only nine other peanut butters a shopper might have purchased instead of 39. Having a wide selection may help get customers in the store, but it won’t increase the chances they’ll buy. (It also explains why so often people are on their cellphones at the supermarket asking their significant other which detergent to get.) “It takes them out of the purchasing process and puts them into a decision-making process,” explains Stew Leonard Jr., CEO of grocer Stew Leonard’s, which also subscribes to the “less is more” mantra.

Customers accept that Trader Joe’s has only two kinds of pudding or one kind of polenta because they trust that those few items will be very good. “If they’re going to get behind only one jar of Greek olives, then they’re sure as heck going to make sure it’s the most fabulous jar of Greek olives they can find for the price,” explains one former employee.

That’s a powerful strategy in any business: compete on your selections, not your selection.

Keith Hennessey breaks down a favorite rhetorical trick used by welfare state supporters:

In this view of the world, revenues belong to the government and are allocated by policymakers as gifts to those who need or deserve them.  When you hear that “we cannot afford to cut taxes” and “we should not give tax cuts to ______,” you are hearing this philosophy.

Money doesn’t just magically appear in the government coffers. A private citizen or firm earns income and the government takes a portion of that income. The money initially belongs to he or she who earned it. Using “we” to refer to the government suggests the funds being spent by the government belong to the government. This matters because if the money belongs to the government, then elected officials should apply their moral principles to figure out who needs or deserves it most. If the money belongs first to he or she who earned it, then elected officials should apply their moral principles to figure out whether they should take it from the earner and spend it on something else or give it to someone else. Those are fundamentally different decisions.

In this case, Keith is responding to Paul Krugman’s use of this convenient lie, but it’s widespread. When welfare state supporters discuss reducing taxes, they refer to it as “giving” money to some group. Krugman et al love using it, because it makes tax cuts sound like a plot to make the wealthy wealthier. In reality, of course, this is absolutely false—a tax cut merely reduces how much the government forcibly takes from someone.

Nancy Pelosi:

“There is no question there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some. And I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded,” she said.

What a ridiculous issue all around. There’s no reason the mosque shouldn’t be built, and many people who oppose it—like Newt Gingrich and Harry Reid—are absolutely doing so for political advantage.

Yet now we have Pelosi criticizing them for making this a political issue, and then trying to politicize it herself by calling for an investigation.

This is an excellent example of just how broken our political system is. We have conniving fools like Newt Gingrich using people’s prejudices for their own gain, gutless idiots like Harry Reid trying to gain a little support by opposing it, and Nancy Pelosi doing the only thing she apparently knows how to do: threatening to use government power.

Oh, and I forgot the President. Can’t forget him! For his part, he decided to opine on a local issue (I’m rather sure Obama wants to add “Opiner-in-Chief” to his official title) and support building the mosque, then when he realized that might invite some criticism (God forbid!), he “clarified” that he only supported the general right to freedom of religion, but not necessarily this mosque. That sure clears that up.

Alexis Madrigal comments on the nature of the web:

Streams — on AM radio, CNN, Ustream, or some future platform — are products of seconds; they reflect the passions and occupations of a moment. Perhaps valuable in their own way, necessary for some things, but deeply attached to an instant. Streams say, “This is.” They rarely have time to ask, “Why is this?” And they never seem to have time to answer that question.

Books are objects defined by how much time it takes to craft them — and to consume them. They cannot be taken in at a glance. They are the distillation of many moments and states of consciousness for writer and reader alike. They slow us down and hold us steady.

Yes, yes, yes. I made a similar point last November.

Ray Bradbury in 2001:

If an idea isn’t exciting you shouldn’t do it. I usually get an idea around 8 o’clock in the morning, when I’m getting up, and by noon it’s finished. And if it isn’t done quickly you’re going to begin to lie. So as quickly as you can, you emotionally react to an idea. That’s how I write short stories. They’ve all been done in a single morning when I felt passionately about them.

Mandy Brown:

If publishers are to continue to be relevant, they need to repair both of these errors: first, by publishing lists, not books—meaning, collections of books where each book fits into the list and contributes to a larger story—and second, by cultivating a relationship with their readers. In either case, it helps to be small.

Former Broncos tight end Nate Jackson on training camp:

Your body says No, but your brain says Yes.

The Economist has a excellent, in-depth look at David Cameron’s reforms in Britain:

Where does this radicalism come from? Ruddy-faced and shire-bred, Mr Cameron looks and sounds like the stolid, middle-of-the-road High Tory he is often thought to be. Part of the answer lies in the company he keeps. Among the most evangelical of the Tocquevillian Tories is Steve Hilton, Mr Cameron’s strategist. A former advertising man who grew intrigued by the potential of businesses and other non-state organisations to bring about social change, he joined his old friend’s campaign to remake the Conservative Party.

The Economist on artificial intelligence and our own brains:

Proponents of so-called swarm cognition, like Dr Trianni, think the brain might work like a swarm of nerve cells, with no top-down co-ordination. Even complex cognitive functions, such as abstract reasoning and consciousness, they suggest, might simply emerge from local interactions of nerve cells doing their waggle dances.

Al Qaeda is recruiting Sons of Iraq:

A second Awakening Council leader, Sheikh Moustafa al-Jabouri, said disaffection among his ranks had reached breaking point as US combat forces increasingly depart, with most of his men not having been paid for up to three months and now facing a relentless recruitment drive by local al-Qaida members.

The “Sons of Iraq” are a Sunni militia recruited and paid by the U.S. military beginning in 2006 to protect their neighborhoods from Shia and Islamist attacks. This strategy was likely just as, if not more, responsible than the surge itself for the remarkable reversal in Iraq in 2006-07.

This is very worrying. If Al Qaeda successfully weakens the Sons of Iraq as the U.S. draws down its force, Iraq will very quickly go back to where it was in 2005.