The controversial REAL ID Act, and its draconian laws that stamp each American citizen with an RFID chip is already finished. A group of German hackers developed an electromagnetic zapper to deactivate the cards and any RFID technology. Problem is someone from the EU hacked the hackers site. Their solution for hardcore RFID protesters is a lot easier than creating your own homemade electromagnetic pulse reaction by putting your real ID card in the microwave with a fork. Either way, the technology is already toast.... http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2006/01/05/german-privacy-hackers-develop-rfid-zapper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REAL_ID_Act

Biofuels are a hot topic. It seems everyone, and I mean everyone, wants to weigh in on it, from Bill Gates to Fidel Castro. So I want to send out a special thanks to Jesus' General for posting on what happens when biofuels go bad: http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/2008/03/food-or-fuel.html The case can be made that Brazil already produces enough sugar cane ethanol to fuel the entire continent of South America; and that we could use the same technology without creating food shortages or following some of the more radical soylent green biofuel dystopias floating around in the policy-o-sphere like using thermal depolymerization on people....if you do not know about thermal depolymerization , please read about turning turkey guts into diesel and the same could be done to people; scary huh? I think so: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/11/1125_031125_turkeyoil.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization Now Libertarian phobic fantasies have been around fore...

Don't you really hate it when something essential to your argument comes right after you publish it? Today I received my copy of First Things , and in it--naturally--was an essay on organ donation apparently inspired by the Gordon Brown plan in Great Britain for an opt-out harvesting program similar to that proposed in Delaware by Rep. Pete Schwarzkopf. [I am going to quote extensively because you won't be able to find the article itself online without already being a subscriber until the next issue comes out in 2 months. With luck I will go back then and paste in the URL here; if you are reading this after March 2008 and it is not here, jog my memory.] For me, the article was a "good news-bad news" sort of thing. Bad news first. Professor Gilbert Meilander, holder of the Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University, presents a really cogent counter-argument to my "it's my body and my property argument" that I did not see offered in t...

There is a length debate at First State Politics on Rep. Pete Schwartzkopf's bill to change Delaware's "opt-in" organ donation system to an "opt-out" system that presumes consent to organ donation unless there is clear evidence of non-consent. Two of the legislators signed on to this bill as co-sponsors are awaiting kidneys themselves. The idea is that "opt-out" organ donation increases the number of transplantable organs harvested, benefitting everyone in society; many supporters suggest that it is not logical (dead people have no rights) or moral (you are allowing people to die through inaction) to do otherwise. Some commenters, like me, see a slippery slope toward increasingly nightmarish State intrusions into our control over our bodies. This has not resonated with many of my liberal or progressive friends, who feel that it represents typically paranoid Libertarian thinking, laced with rhetorical fear-mongering questions and devoid of either...