When I updated my Australian Visa last year I got a biometric one with all the issues that entails. It seems the Department of Homeland Security will not be left out and consequently green card holders will have biometric data collected from them when they enter the US. This will mean me.
Currently Green Card holders get all the benefits of being a US citizen short of being able to vote. As a green card holder I get to go through the same customs and immigration lines at airports as the US Citizens. With this change I will be segregated out. Political nationalism and bureaucratic paranioa has to stop. It is a horrible inefficiency and a pre-text to collect data on citizens as the program will inevitably engulf citizens when politically able.
It is a mechanism of an expanding state to target the politically weak first. This is why terrorists, child molesters, illegal immigrants, immigrants, non-citizens are always those who have their rights and liberties restricted first. Terrorists and child molesters are politically indefensible. The other categories are politically weak and in a charged nationalistic and political environment difficult to assert in the political and public mind for their liberties.
The madness needs to stop. The lesson of the enlightenment was that maximum liberty is a universal human value; no matter the visa state of an individual. (more)
One of the premises of 19thC Australian Republicanism was that increasing liberty leads to increasing moral expression and consequent self-governance. The goal being moral perfection and the lack of need of a public government of any kind. Geoffrey Stone writes in War and Liberty that despite fears and concerns, even with the secretive Bush Administration, there has been an increasing morality in the conduct of the executive such that liberty is increasingly preserved. Stone writes:
Nonetheless, I am confident that the major restrictions of civil liberties discussed ... would be less thinkable today than they were in 1798, 1861, 1917, 1942, 1950, or 1969. In terms of both the evolution of constitutional doctrine and the development of a national consciousness about civil liberties, we have made demonstrable progress.In essence the American system of republicanism has promoted a culture of liberty and a culture of protecting, as well as expanding, civil liberties. This is probably the greatest role of the Bill of Rights in political history. Even countries without such as an entrenched constitutional set of rights, such as Australia, often claim things such as freedom of speech as both a natural and political right. (more)
With each new project I always end up looking around for a UML client that will allow me to creatively express classes and object during the design phase. Each time I get frustrated at the restrictions UML imposes such that it becomes impossible to have a free flowing construction of what I want to do and muck with to get a graphical visualisation of the design.
Each time I try numerous different applications, but to no avail, I end up doing it in a word processor where I have complete control, and easily editable access, to the methods, the names, and the relationships. (more)
The bank I used on the east coast of the US for my personal banking and my business was a small regional bank. I don't regret the decision, they helped me out a couple of times above and beyond what I expected. However since I have moved to Arizona I need to shut down one of the accounts. To do so I have to write a formal letter to them courtesy of the mis-named Patriot Act. (more)
One of the most cancerous examples of the state reaching into lives beyond its human abilities is the highly impersonal speeding camera. Roads develop emergent group dynamics that rise to suit the conditions of the moment; speeding cameras destroy that spontaneous form of self-organisation and force the citizen to deal with the bureaucracy by rote - learning where the cameras are to avoid penalty.
It is all the worst aspects of central decision making with no feel for fluent local requirements, and the matching of impersonal technology for the purpose of revenue. It is the state at its most opportunistic, inhuman and cynical. (more)
Federations are defined by having a national character and a federal character. For instance the House of Representatives in Australia's parliament is organised with a national character while the Senate has a federal character. The House has equal sized electorates and single members, while the Senate has the states as its electoral boundaries and each state has an equal number of members. So the Senate represents the states, which are the federal components of the Federation, while the House represents the Australian people, which is the national character of the government.
One of the innovations of American constitutional design was to put the national and federal characters into tension so that the national government would not grow to consume the states, yet have enough national character that the states would not assert themselves over the national government. This vertical balance of powers in the federation was designed to protect liberty and cemented through constitutional limited government.
One of the blind spots in Australian politics is that federalism is ignored as a technology to ensure liberty and natural rights. Too often people assume the role of government is service delivery, not limited government, and seek to order the political structures accordingly. (more)
What is a superpower and holder of the moral high ground to do when no matter what they do, they are criticised? (more)
One of the reasons I am getting annoyed with politics is that there isn't even any attempt to be empirical. It is a case of permanent
'why 911 means you must support my politics'
. That link is to adequacy btw. Johann Hari has an article:
How multiculturalism is betraying women
.
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Republicanism is focused on political technologies in order to maximise liberty and minimise tyranny such that tyranny is non-existent. The philosophical under-pinnings for republicanism is liberalism which also has the goal of maximising individual freedom. Republicanism is the political science that under-pins liberalism. Since they are heavily focused on the individual and the technologies to support maximal liberty the counter-argument is that they have blind spots to hostility outside of the individual and politics. Conservatives like to call this the cultural wars, but it also encompasses social division and national division.
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One of the curious aspects of an open economy is that economic liberty is synonymous with economic integration. In this respect immigrants have taken to Australia with a will and make up a significant proportion of our productive output. According to the 2003/2004 Tax statistics there were 8.8 million income tax payers.
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