I’ve been reading a blog called Sacraments Wholesale for a few months and really love the content.  The author is reasonable, logical, and grounded in both his faith and his views.

Deacon Tim, the author, did a great job with his post on Harry Reid’s cowardice and political expediency at the expense of religious freedom.

Please head over to see what Deacon Tim has to say and subscribe to his RSS feed.  Great work Tim.

Here’s a great summary of the findings in yesterday’s ruling that overturned Prop 8.

From Politics Daily.

1. “Individuals do not generally choose their sexual orientation. No credible evidence supports a finding that an individual may, through conscious decision, therapeutic intervention or any other method, change his or her sexual orientation.”

2. “California has no interest in asking gays and lesbians to change their sexual orientation or in reducing the number of gays and lesbians in California.”

3. “Same-sex couples are identical to opposite-sex couples in the characteristics relevant to the ability to form successful marital unions. Like opposite-sex couples, same-sex couples have happy, satisfying relationships and form deep emotional bonds and strong commitments to their partners.”

4. “Marrying a person of the opposite sex is an unrealistic option for gay and lesbian individuals.”

5. “The availability of domestic partnership does not provide gays and lesbians with a status equivalent to marriage because the cultural meaning of marriage and its associated benefits are intentionally withheld from same-sex couples in domestic partnerships.”

6. “Permitting same-sex couples to marry will not affect the number of opposite-sex couples who marry, divorce, cohabit, have children outside of marriage or otherwise affect the stability of opposite-sex marriages.”

7. “Proposition 8 places the force of law behind stigmas against gays and lesbians, including: gays and lesbians do not have intimate relationships similar to heterosexual couples; gays and lesbians are not as good as heterosexuals; and gay and lesbian relationships do not deserve the full recognition of society.”

8. “Proposition 8 increases costs and decreases wealth for same sex couples because of increased tax burdens, decreased availability of health insurance and higher transactions costs to secure rights and obligations typically associated with marriage.”

9. “Proposition 8 singles out gays and lesbians and legitimates their unequal treatment. Proposition 8 perpetuates the stereotype that gays and lesbians are incapable of forming long-term loving relationships and that gays and lesbians are not good parents.”

10. “The gender of a child’s parent is not a factor in a child’s adjustment. The sexual orientation of an individual does not determine whether that individual can be a good parent. Children raised by gay or lesbian parents are as likely as children raised by heterosexual parents to be healthy, successful and well-adjusted.”

So the judge struck down the most important parts of this law, the parts that allow police to stop and check the immigration status of suspected illegals.

Here are a few articles from the WSJ and the LA Times.  This should not come as a shock to anyone that supports the rule of law here in the States.  The Constitution clearly prohibits the states from passing immigration laws.  To pass this law and pay for the AG to take it to court is an unbelievable waste of the taxpayers money.

There’s a serious disconnect in the Republican/Conservative Party now.  They claim to want to reduce the government involvement in everyday life and cut government spending and waste, but they pass laws the interfere with people’s lives.  They claim that the government is a horrible steward of your tax dollars, which it certainly can be, but then they spend thousands of dollars chasing frivolous lawsuits and clogging the courts.  Any reasonable constitutional scholar, no matter their ideology, could have saved a bunch of time and money by explaining the federal system of government.

The details of this law are unimportant, as are the underlying goals of the Arizona government.  The only important consideration for the judge was “Is this a constitutional law?”.  Short answer: No.

Ok, maybe I’m a little punch drunk from this crazy race, but I have to ask, what’s the worst that could happen if people voted for Alvin M. Greene?  I mentioned this in a comment on Ian’s site.

Let’s break this down by reason’s not to vote for him:

1. Criminal Record: Clinton admitted to smoking pot=Illegal.  Bush had a DUI=Illegal.  Obama admitted to doing coke=Illegal.  Teddy Kennedy killed a girl while driving drunk=Illegal.  Let’s not even get into the Foleys, Larry Craigs, and Sanfords of the country.  So he’s been accused of a felony.  At least we know who this guy is.  He’s not hiding anything and he’s not guilty yet.

2. Inexperience: This is totally bogus.  People are always complaining about “Washington Insiders”.  This guys is clearly not an insider.

Our current crop of politicians in SC haven’t exactly brought about prosperity.  Since Campbell and Riley, I’d argue that we haven’t had any serious leadership.  Hodges was a fucking joke.  So was Beasley.  Sanford, we’ll he’s just Sanford.

3.  Military Discharge: Let’s assume he’s telling the truth about his honorable discharge.  To get an honorable discharge, you have to be in good standing.  If he was a horrible soldier, he would have received a General discharge.  If he failed to conform to the military lifestyle, he probably would have received an OTH (Other Than Honorable) discharge.  He certainly didn’t get a Big Chicken Dinner or a DD.  So he served, might have separated unwillingly, but still honorably.

His military record is much more substantial than Jim DeMint‘s.  He at least served.

4. He’s Not That Bright: We’ve never made intelligence a prerequisite for political office, let’s not start now.

Why Vote for Greene?

So, let’s say this guy sticks it out, beats his felony charge, and makes it to the general election.  Why would someone vote for him?  Well, he’s a veteran.  In today’s society, this is a big deal.  This guy put his money where his mouth is.  He didn’t spend his time talking about the honor and dignity of serving, he served.  He didn’t pay lip service to our freedom and pat veterans on the back, he picked up a rifle and walked a post.  And he did it for 13 years.  Why he was separated, I don’t know, but he is a vet.  Period.  Full Stop.

He’s unemployed.  Big fucking deal.  If Jim DeMint loses this fall, he’ll be unemployed too.  George Bush is unemployed too.  Not so, you say?  This is just the basic difference between the upper classes and the middle to lower classes.  Reminds me of one of my wife’s coworkers in DC.  She took care of her grandchildren and they were poised to lose their apartment.  She was resigned to being ‘homeless’ again.  If we hit hard times and lost our apartment, we’d be fine staying with friends for a few days or weeks.  We also have family that would help us out in a bad situation.  While we might be technically homeless, we wouldn’t actually be without a place to lay our heads.  Why?  Because we’re white and middle class.  We have credit cards and a built in safety net called family and friends.  But for this woman, there was no net.  No friends with the means to help.  No family to loan her money.  Nothing.  Lose the apartment, you’re homeless.  If we lost our apartment, we’d be crashing on someone’s couch for a week or two.

Same with Mr. Greene’s unemployment.  Most politicians would be functionally unemployed if they lost their next election.  The difference is the connections.  Many are lawyers and can easily find a job with a friend or old partner if they lost an election.  Mr. Greene’s situation is different because he’s not quite your standard politician.

If people are serious about tossing out the current crop of politicians, this guys is a great start.  He needs to get his positions out there and start talking about why he is a real choice for Senate.  Based on the sketchy details available about his positions, he’s a pretty agreeable guy.  He’s for offshore drilling, a reasonable and logical position.  He thinks gas is overpriced: who doesn’t?.  He believes in a diplomatic solution to the North/South Korea issue: We certainly don’t need another front in addition to our current wars.  He wants more infrastructure investment and supports the 2nd Amendment: Likes guns and believes that we’ve failed future generations by wearing out the large public works projects of yesteryear.  Do I need to remind anyone of the I-35 Bridge collapse?.  He wants to put the unemployed back to work.  What’s not to like about this guy?

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I’m a big fan of the Google Operating System Blog.  Great content, very timely, etc.  I’m always curious about how successful blogs got started.  So I really loved finding this old post on the Google OS blog: What Should the Future Bring for Google?  Below is the list from the Google OS blog post from December 2005:

A calendar feature for Gmail.–Done

Free pc to mobiles thru Gtalk. Well there’s Google Voice and GTalk, so that’s Done.

Google Photo–Done

Google Music Search. Kinda Done.

Google Financial, Google’s answer to Bloomberg and Reuters.–Done

Google Earth for OS X.–Done

Google OS and Browser.–Browser–>Done.  OS–>Well, there’s android and some rumors.

Google Law– Well, sorry to say, no.

Google TV. Release your own internet TV channel using unique content–YouTube.

Wow.  8 of 9 isn’t too bad.

Really impressed with the new Google Calendar layout.

Even better, Now available with Tasks in a Sidebar:

I might actually have to start using my calendar more.  We’ll see.

It seems I might have been onto something with my post on Facebook, Microformats, and Open Source.

Here’s a great startup called Diasporia.  I’ve donated to them.  I did think the “Connect with Facebook” on the payment page was particularly ironic.  Either way, I gave them a few bucks and you should too.

The uproar is growing on the Facebook privacy fiasco.

Here are some Google engineers that are popping smoke on FB.

RWW is reporting that Leo Laporte, Peter Rojas, and others are leaving FB.

Finally, there’s this post from Jason Calacanis.

Copied from Jason’s Post:

Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline

Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook
http://gizmodo.com/5530178/top-ten-reasons-you-should-quit-facebook

Yet another Facebook privacy risk: emails Facebook sends leak user IP address
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/05/07/yet-another-privacy.html

A Stunning Infographic on Facebook’s scary privacy evolution
http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/

Facebook’s “Posts By Everyone” Feature: Do People Realize They’re
Sharing To The World?
http://selnd.com/96avG4

Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative | Epicenter |
Wired.com
http://bit.ly/aoNxf0

Senators Call Out Facebook On ‘Instant Personalization’, Other Privacy Issues
http://tcrn.ch/907D27

Facebook’s email days: “I’m CEO bith@#$%!”
http://bit.ly/ba5wRY

Facebook’s new features secretly add apps to your profile
http://bit.ly/bHXpH5

The Day Facebook Stole My Page
http://bit.ly/ar4A4As

Facebook is Dying – Social is Not
http://bit.ly/atwbzX

Facebook’s “Evil Interfaces” | Electronic Frontier Foundation
http://bit.ly/9ww6g3

So there’s a total shit storm developing about Facebook‘s new privacy situation.  Long story short, FB has decided to implement a few new sharing features and enable these tools by default.  That is, you have to opt out.

If you want a bit of background, you can check out this article from GigaOm.

For those of you who don’t like all those words, you can check out this graphic.

Just this morning there were reports that Yelp.com, one of the three sites that Facebook shares data with had a security breach that would have allowed a hacker to gain your information without you ever visiting the site.

What’s really frightening to me is that you have absolutely no control over your data.  That is, there’s no way for you to ‘own’ your data.  You enter data into Facebook, be it text, images, links, video, etc, and then it just disappears into your profile.  I don’t mean that you can’t see the data, I mean you can’t control the data from a central point.

Take this site for example.  I have complete control over all the data published here.  I can log into my control panel and delete, change, modify, and hide any information.  I can obscure some posts and information, I can control who can see certain posts through passwords.

The problem with Facebook is the same problem with any technology that is simplified to the point that anyone can use it.  It becomes so dumbed down that unintended consequences start causing issues.  Now, I’m not being a tech snob here, I’m just saying that when technology becomes so democratized, it’s very easy to end up with an entire userbase that simply doesn’t understand what the hell is going on with their data.  The problem that Facebook faces is that it’s become the most popular site by being so accessible.  So, Facebook won’t make any significant changes to increase data portability or security; the site might be less attractive to people with no technical ability.

So, what’s a solution?  Obviously, if you read the title, Microformats and Open Source.  Microformats, in a nutshell and taken from their site, are

a set of simple open data format standards that many are actively developing and implementing for more/better structured blogging and web microcontent publishing in general

Microformats are a way to structure data to make it more usable and searchable.  Microformats are, to oversimplfy, tags that tell search engines what kind of data they are crawling.  These tags take a simple bit of information, like Eric H. Doss, and defines what each part is.  That is, it explains that the Eric H. Doss is a name, Eric is the first name, H. is the middle initial, and Doss is the last name.  This is important, so make sure you understand this before you more forward.

Microformats can also be used to tag addresses, email addresses, URLs, picture albums, and instant messenger names.  Expanding microformats to include certain social content would allow a larger implementation across platforms.  In other words, if there was a simple way to organize social data, you could use any number of websites to share your content, but all the information would be open and portable. To say that you need to use Facebook or MySpace or Bebo to share social content is about the same as saying that your GM vehicle can only run on Exxon gasoline or saying that your Whirlpool washer can only use Purex.  Actually, it’s more like saying that your Ford Taurus can’t run on the same road as a Chevy truck.  It’s silly.  If the social web is a highway system, users should be able to access the social web no matter what you drive.  This is, with the exception of IE8 not processing CSS properly, the case with browsers.  You can access most websites with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or IE.

Establishing a set of social microformats would allow you to publish updates, post photos, comment on other people’s statuses, etc without depending on Facebook or MySpace.  To use microformats, you would need to have a website of your own.  That doesn’t mean that you’d need your own domain: your site could be a blog, a Posterous site, or a text file.  Once you have a site that allows microformats, it would be great to have a pretty simple interface for tagging data.  Once you do that, the crux of the thing is to get your site found.  Google makes that pretty easy for you.  You can submit your site to Google using a sitemap file.  Google accepts and indexes some microformats, including people, recipe, and review microformats.

Once you implement microformats on your site and your friends do the same, it’s just a matter of using a search engine to locate the data.  Basically, to find me, you would do a search for pages where Eric H. Doss is tagged as the owner.  The essential piece of this idea is how to aggregate this data and present it in a format that is useful to the average user.  The real key to make this work would be a site that aggregated and stored the locations of your ‘friends.’  Basically, you would log into a site, list your friends, and then allow the site to aggregate and search for your friends.  This would be really similar to the way I use Google Reader and RSS feeds to consume data.  At any time, I can export my subscriptions from Google Reader and import them into another news reader.  Your friend data would be the same, you could export and import at will.

The larger issue is that people are really starting to realize that closed and propriety systems are not good for users, not good for privacy, and not good for sharing.  If large social networks implemented open standards, you could decide to leave Facebook and move to MySpace without any hassle, save exporting and importing a file with your data.

Thoughts?