You’ve shredded Guitar Hero®, you’ve rocked Band Hero®, but are you ready for the philosophical and musical challenges of Activision’s latest series title, RAND HERO®?

Struggle against cumulative onerous government regulations and the increasingly childish tastes of your audience to bring your art to life.  Improve your skills and invent new ways of playing that even the game designers couldn’t anticipate.  Advance by shedding groupies, hangers-on, and your worthless bandmates.  Then face the final challenge: your own sentimental but ultimately self-destructive attachment to your music in a world that doesn’t deserve to hear it.  Achieve victory by throwing the game away and vowing never to play again, and you just might unlock the secret bonus level which can be played on a gaming console so advanced we dare not mention it yet!

A high percentage of people I’m close to are politically left-leaning.  They, along with me, have been looking on with unhappiness at the attention paid to what is by all rights an open-and-shut case of property rights, the case of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”.  I have nothing to add to a discussion of either the facts of the story nor the tactics being employed by the opposing sides.  These are well documented.  Nor do I give a damn about any political posturing of the mosque supporters or the mosque detractors.

However, I want to point out to my allies of the moment some lessons I hope they will take to heart in the future (no, no need to thank me):

1)  As far as any straight measure of public opinion goes, we are in the minority.  2)  That does not mean that we are wrong.  Gay marriage did not suddenly become less wrong because more people have accepted it recently.  It was always right.  3)  It feels pretty crappy when the majority just decides to run roughshod over an innocent party who’s harmed no one because the majority decides they’d like things better if they ignored the minority’s rights.  Also, it feels like Every Single Day to me, thanks to both major parties, with their principle political theory of “there are NO limits to what the majority should be allowed to do”.

Some, perhaps most, of the opposition to the mosque is motivated by bigotry, albeit under the pretense of an ill-defined yearning for a traditional American way of life.  Then again, what motivates my present allies in so many of their own bullying endeavors is simple envy, albeit under the pretense of an ill-defined yearning for fairness.  I don’t see this as any sort of morally superior position.

I wonder if Walmart wanted to open up a flagship store in the same location (or if Disney wanted to open an urban amusement center), would my current allies would retain their same respect for property rights?  I hope so.  Will they support me in my desire to be unmolested by health reform?  I fear not, although I’d love to know how my rights are somehow less worthy of defense than the rights of those behind the mosque and cultural center.

Who is killing Mom and Pops?  And by “killing” I mean outcompeting, and by “Mom and Pops”, I mean small retailers.  I keep hearing that it’s Walmart, but I keep hearing it from people with no more hard data than I have.  What I’m wondering is why do they think it’s Walmart and not Amazon?  Or why are they cool with saying it’s Walmart and not with saying it’s Amazon?

Just last night while filing a claim to be paid from my FSA (New Jersey forbids most of its citizens to purchase health insurance plans that are compatible with HSAs), I was greeted with a friendly message:

Health Care Reform Affects Your Flexible Spending Account(FSA)

Some provisions of the recently enacted Health Care Reform laws directly impact your medical FSA plans. Effective January 1, 2011, over-the-counter medicines and drugs, other than insulin, will no longer be eligible for reimbursement under a medical FSA plan unless prescribed by a medical practitioner. Other over-the-counter items that are not medicines or drugs remain reimbursable without a prescription.

So. Among the sops thrown to physicians in the health care reform legislation was this bit of behavior modification.  Starting next year, if you wish to avoid seeing a doctor and just make do with OTC meds, you’ll be taxed for the privilege.  The doctors who already stand as gatekeepers between hoi polloi and most pharmaceuticals will now have to bless your choice of non-prescription pharmaceuticals unless you want to pay about 20-40% more.  The end result?  Some mix of more money being taken as tax and of more money financing otherwise unwanted physician visits.  Great.

Victims of domestic abuse deserve protection, but there are far more victims than there are police resources to provide such protection.  Often, a victim who obtains a Temporary Restraining Order against an abuser is left with little but the hope that the abuser will have more respect for the law than he did for her.  But what if there was a philanthropic organization that would provide, upon request, free or reduced-rate defensive firearms training, experienced advice on how to obtain the necessary firearms permits in her locality, and a free or reduced-rate loaner weapon to anyone who is granted a TRO against an abuser and is not otherwise prohibited from possessing a firearm?

While such an organization might want to coordinate with a legal initiative to streamline firearm rights of domestic abuse victims, it wouldn’t have to.  It could just endeavor to raise utilization of rights already recognized, and to educate those who would exercise them in how to do so with maximum safety and effectiveness.

So.  Who wants to start it, and what should the group be called?

In November of 2008, I predicted here that “in late 2013, the notion of a global scientific consensus about the severity of global warming will be shattered, and governments will no longer introduce legislation to limit carbon emissions”.

And now this in Forbes: “The global warming warriors will likely have to go through the five stages of grief before accepting that their moment has passed and the movement is dead. Thinkers more sophisticated than Krugman will no doubt point to many proximate causes for its demise beyond evil Republicans such as lack of engagement by President Obama, bad economic timing, filibuster rules, what have you. The reality is, however, that the crusade was doomed from the start because of its own inherent weaknesses. RIP.”

Some people saw the legitimate concerns about atmospheric conditions as an opportunity to use science to trump political considerations, but science will proceed at its own pace.

I noticed in the comment thread to this post (h/t Donald Heath) that there is a second live video broadcasting app for the iPhone, Qik.  I was already aware of Ustream’s app, and both support other smartphone platforms, and there’s very likely other solutions out there as well.

This is part of an important trend in counter-surveillance, but there are a few more pieces required for what I think would be the ideal solution.  On the hardware front, a battery-powered glasses- or headband-mounted bluetooth webcam would permit hands-free recording of, say, a traffic stop or other police encounter without providing the police with a pretext like “Burke wrote in his report that he feared that Greenfield could have been holding a dangerous object such as a ‘cell-phone gun’…“.

On the network side of things, a service akin to Wikileaks could allow real-time and distributed upload of smartphone-broadcast video, so that the info wouldn’t be subject to easy suppression by overzealous legal authorities.

Lastly, on the legal front, more of this please:  ”A U.S. Congressman has introduced a resolution that would protect citizens who videotape cops in public from getting arrested on state wiretapping charges.  Edolphus Towns, a Democrat from New York, introduced the resolution on Thursday, the same day USA Today wrote a scathing editorial denouncing these types of arrests.”

I’m guessing about three years until these pieces are in place.  Yes, even the legal protection of public videotaping, although I’m more confident in the hardware and network pieces.

I was engaged in a task that I thought would be facilitated by a shoe horn. But then it occurred to me that I haven’t seen a shoe horn in well over 20 years. I bet I can find one at Walmart today though. I wonder what exciting advancements have been made in shoe horn technology in the last 20 years! Will the experience be similar to that of someone who hadn’t seen a TV since ’87 wandering into Best Buy for the first time? I’m guessing not, but here’s hoping.

Reason.com comments on Barney Frank’s H.R.2267 passing committee, and quotes him discussing online gambling back in 2006:

People have said, “What is the value of gambling?” Here is the value: Some human beings enjoy doing it. Shouldn’t that be our principle? If individuals like doing something and they harm no one, we will allow them to do it, even if other people disapprove of what they do.

Quite right.  He even seems to believe it when it comes to financial institutions, to the chagrin of many of his colleagues: “Is Barney Frank Joining the Wall Street Sellout?”

At any rate, I’m sure this isn’t his guiding governing philosophy, but just for saying the right things at this time, he gets a provisional thumbs up.

Just pointing out the obvious: When Pakistan’s government banned Facebook over “Everybody Draw Muhammed Day”, this was not an act of self-defense. I really dislike reality television game shows, but I don’t need to ban them, because I can just not watch them. No, Pakistan’s government banned Facebook because they knew that people _did_ want to see it, and the thought of other people doing what they wanted was more than they could bear. It was bullying, pure and simple, the act of one group preemptively punishing another for not holding the same things sacred.

And now I’m thinking about NYC’s salt restrictions, activists fighting to legally prevent Walmart from putting a store in their town, the DOE’s war on high-flow showerheads, opposition to gay marriage,…