Southern Bread Blog

I just read this article: The place of consent in a Christian sexual ethic.

After laying some background on his thinking, the author starts a section like this:

Finally, we need to discern and celebrate a holistic vision of sexuality that goes beyond simply limiting sex to marriage.

And he fleshes it out with talk like this:

answering these questions is not simply a matter of quoting a Bible verse or two on sexual purity. Instead, it would take a vision of sexual freedom that goes beyond lists of dos and don’ts.

Awesome, I think.  We’re going to have a real discussion for a change.  What do we get instead?  This:

It would take pastors encouraging married couples to have sex. It would take ears willing to listen to those who are struggling to understand God’s vision for sex. Ultimately, it would take a vision of sexual freedom founded upon the intimate love of Christ for His church, His bride.

More importantly, I suspect that such a vision of sexual freedom would actually be far more freeing than simply giving consent.

Um. What?

What does any of that mean?

What is “sexual freedom founded upon the intimate love of Christ for His church”?  I have no idea.  And, neither does the author.  This is Christian pseduo-conversation.  It means, “I’m uncomfortable with this discussion, so I’m going to create a verbal safe place over here to stand by myself and contemplate straw-men.”  That type of language just wastes everybody’s time.  It’s filler.

I read the same type of thing yesterday in a different article titled: Beyond Evangelical: Part II.

I’ve made it know before that I think evangelicalism is a dead man walking, so this topic is very interesting to me.  But, when it gets to the end and he’s going to tell us what post-evangelicalism looks like we get this:

…those who have moved beyond evangelicalism emphasize four key themes:

• The centrality and supremacy of the Lord Jesus Christ.
• Living by the indwelling life of Christ.
• Experiencing church as a Christ-centered, shared-life community.
• Living for the eternal purpose of God.

Again, I have no idea what any of that means and nobody else does either.  Nobody knows what “living by the indwelling life of Christ” means. It’s a meaningless waste of everyone’s breath and mental time. But, that’s all you get anymore from church. You get Christianese pseudo-conversation and a list of do’s and dont’s. And, when it comes to worship, you get those two things wrapped up into something that resembles entertainment. There’s an un-spoken contract in play in modern churches. This contract states: We’re going to sit up on stage and sing/speak at you, while you sit down there and attempt to enjoy, understand and pay for it. It’s frankly disgusting. And it’s a prime component of why people are leaving.

In fact, I find it somewhat ironic that another reason folks are leaving church in droves is because of language exactly like what is written above.  More specifically, it’s the cognitive dissonance required to speak and entertain this type of language that is the problem. It’s exhausting. The church is speaking in a language that nobody understands. Even it’s own members. But you can’t escape it without escaping church itself. Thus, the empty pews.

As I’ve said before, I believe Christianity is the best historical and philosophical explanation for the world we live in.  But, church as we know it today is just business and politics.  It’s a self-perpetuating machine most interested in keeping itself funded.  Hey preacher, you want to make a real difference in people’s lives?  Get a real job in the real world and start a bible study group on the side or something. Start a home church. Start a business. Something. Anything.  The longer you stand up there on stage and spout off Christianese for pay, the more you are selling your own soul.  You’re going to end up a shell of a person talking to an empty room.

I’ve followed Covenant Eyes blog for a long time and have seen lots of good stuff written there about pornography addiction.  It’s a real issue, and is debilitating to many people.  However, I take growing exception to the line of reasoning they use against pornography itself.  I’m not going to argue one way or another about the morality of pornography here.  Instead, my beef is with the way they argue.  I just don’t think it’s very compelling when you take into account what we now know about how the mind works with regards to sex and sex fantasy.  I feel like I’m being forced to throw out very plain sense conclusions from cognitive psychology in order to just jump on the morality train.

One of the recent articles embodies this.  It’s entitled “Bringing Rape Culture to Light.”

The article doesn’t seem to follow any type of syllogism, so here is what I considered the thesis portion of the article:

For a moment, take these statements at face value:

• Normal porn decreases rape rates, but increases cultural tolerance of rape.
• Violent porn increases the likelihood of using violence or coercive measures.
• Early exposure to porn increases the likelihood of using violence or other coercive measures.

Now consider the known neurological impact of habitual porn viewing. The viewer is never satisfied with one image. Rather, as the brain becomes inured to a certain type of image (“soft-core,” consensual porn, for example), it increasingly requires more variety, which usually plays out in more sexually deviant materials, such as BDSM or rape porn.

Will everyone who views porn eventually get to child pornography, the lowest of the low? Certainly not. But if the seeds of addiction are planted in youth exposure to porn, and if 90% of boys are exposed to pornography before age 18, then it is likely that sexual violence will begin to rise…and at the same time, the victims will be blamed and the perpetrators protected. In fact, this attitude is already being adopted by high schoolers (see also “slut shaming,” or using someone’s private photos to brand them as promiscuous.)

–Lisa Eldred, Covenant Eyes Blog [links preserved]

The argument seems to be that porn desensitizes the mind to sexual violence over time. So, the earlier this process starts and the more widespread it becomes, the more likely it is that sexual violence will increase since the process will be given longer to proceed over a wider public body.

(If I’ve mis-characterized her argument it was certainly a mistake and I’d welcome a correction.)

She describes the “most chilling” example of this:

Perhaps most chillingly, in a study of 187 female university students, researchers concluded early exposure to pornography was related to subsequent “rape fantasies” and attitudes supportive of sexual violence against women. If the rise in porn has been correlated with a decrease in rape, then it’s possible that this is simply due to women themselves believing forceful coercion to be okay or normal.

Firstly, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any woman that actually “believe[s] forceful coercion to be okay or normal” in any area of life – not just sex. I don’t find this to be a compelling premise at all. Outside of random freaks in the news, who thinks being harmed or coerced is actually okay? If her argument leads to such a conclusion that defies logic then I’m skeptical of the whole line of reasoning.

Moving on, I wasn’t able to get a copy of the study she’s citing. It appears to be behind a pay-wall. But, I am immediately skeptical of the use of the term “rape fantasy” without disambiguating the word rape. To someone who isn’t familiar with the phrase “rape fantasy” in the way a psychologist would use it, it seems shocking. How could anyone have a fantasy of raping or being raped? Especially women themselves. Let’s explore this.

To start with, rape fantasies always need to be categorized. Some studies have broken them into 2 distinct types, while others have placed them on a continuum. This study of 355 college aged women (78% of whom were self-identified Christians) from 2009 concluded that such fantasies fall on a continuum with 3 broad types: exclusively erotic, erotic-averse, exclusively averse.  Each one of these types are very different in tone and meaning – even though they all fall under the category of “rape fantasy.”  The study explains:

As rape includes the use of force or incapacitation to coerce sex against a woman’s will, rape fantasy also includes each of these components. In this sense, rape fantasy is a behaviorally accurate descriptor for these types of fantasies. At the same time, this terminology can be misleading, as it may connote a realistic depiction of violent stranger rape, which in reality is not typical of most actual rapes (Koss & Oros, 1982). In addition, many rape fantasies are not realistic depictions of rape. They are often abstracted, eroticized portrayals that emphasize some aspects of actual rape and omit or distort other features (Kanin, 1982).

…results indicate that wording of rape fantasy items does make a difference. In this study, 52% of the sample reported having the fantasy, “being overpowered or forced by a man to surrender sexually against my will,” whereas only 32% reported the fantasy, “being raped by a man.” This 20% discrepancy could be partly due to the stigma related to the word “rape,” with some women not wanting to put their fantasy into this category even if it technically fit the criteria.

The study found that 45% of such fantasies were “completely erotic” in nature. This is how they describe it:

Erotic rape fantasies. Of all the rape fantasies written, 45% were completely erotic. In a large majority of these fantasies, the non-consent was feigned or token (85%); and in over three-fourths, the self-character’s level of consent changed during the fantasy from resistant to willing (77%). An informal evaluation of the erotic rape fantasies revealed that a “not right now” prototype scenario came up frequently. In this scenario, the self-character was excited by the idea of the potential sexual interaction but expressed non-consent for reasons, such as a fear of getting caught or not wanting sex with a forbidden partner (e.g., friend’s boyfriend).

In a large majority of erotic rape fantasies, the nonconsent was feigned or token (i.e., not a real attempt to end the sexual interaction in the fantasy).

The perpetrator in these fantasies was rated as highly physically attractive, more attractive than the perpetrator in the aversive rape fantasies. In nearly one half of the erotic rape fantasies, the perpetrator was perceived as being driven either by his physical or romantic attraction toward the self-character.

A majority of these fantasies were a positive experience for the fantasizer, and this positive reaction was more common for erotic than for the other types of rape fantasy. As these were erotic fantasies that were self-rated as not at all aversive, it is not clear why the percentage of those reporting a positive experience was not even higher. It may be the case that when the reaction here was not positive, this may have been due to guilt from having a fantasy that seemed socially inappropriate.

A further 46% of the women in the study had what were called “erotic-averse” rape fantasies. These are fantasies where there were elements of fear and eroticism both, and the willingness changed to, or from, un-willingness during the fantasy.

The amount of women that had completely fearful (i.e. almost realistic) rape fantasy was only 9%.

All of this presents a much clearer picture than simply using the phrase “rape fantasy,” which is obviously misleading, even if technically accurate. It would be more accurate to categorize the nearly half of such fantasies that are completely erotic as “aggression” fantasies or “ravishment” fantasies. And, it comes as no surprise that such high numbers of women (even, maybe especially, amongst Christians) have such fantasies. While it is often remarked upon how “over sexed” our culture is – that really only applies to the pseudo-world of media. The average person doesn’t feel over-sexed at all. Instead, most people feel sexually repressed. Especially women.

Most women in our culture grow up with a lot of guilt about their own sexuality.  Especially in the Christian world, women are expected to be borderline androgynous.  And, they are made to feel shameful for their own sexuality.  It’s not surprising that a young woman under this burden of guilt would resort to such a “not my fault” fantasy as a way to justify an enjoyment of sex that seems forbidden.  She certainly didn’t create such a fantasy through a conscious processing of the information. That’s not how fantasy operates.  The fact that the aggressor in these fantasies is usually “highly physically attractive” and driven by intense desire for the fantasizer provides the fuel to temporarily overcome those feelings of shame and allow pleasure to happen.

The higher the shame and guilt level, the more drastic the fantasy has to be in order to get over the threshold to pleasure.

Rather than being disturbing, it just seems normal.  It’s the way you would expect a mind to work.  Have you walked through the romance section at the bookstore lately?  It’s not small.  And there’s a whole lot of ravishment going on, on those covers.  Heard of Fifty Shades of Grey?  It didn’t become the best selling book of all time because of a “rape culture” or moral depravity.  It’s because of moral desperation on the part of millions of women(and men) to overcome sexual guilt and shame.  We seriously need to stop judging and policing people’s minds in this way.  Stop being threatened by fantasy, which is by definition not real.

Michael Bader says it this way:

The function of sexual fantasy is to undo the beliefs and feelings interfering with sexual excitement, to ensure both our safety and our pleasure. Our fantasies convince us that we’re not going to harm or betray anyone, and that if we get fully aroused, no one will suffer.

Sexual fantasy, then, has the challenge of surmounting these emotions in order for excitement to take place. Because shame and rejection are common experiences, many common sexual fantasies function to negate them. Characters must be drawn, details chosen, scenarios plotted, and roles defined to this aim.

It is an extraordinary testament to the creative and adaptive capacity of the human imagination that it is able to weave together exactly the right story to overcome obstacles to arousal. Getting turned on involves transcending the past, counteracting dangers, disconfirming beliefs, undoing traumas, soothing pain, and finally, finally, laying claim to pleasure.

–Dr. Michael Bader, Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasy

When seen from this lens, the fantasies that Lisa Eldred is so worried about do not constitute the beginning of an acceptance of sexual violence in society. And trying to suppress them just seems cruel. When the mind works so hard to finally overcome obstacles to pleasure are we just going to heap on more guilt?  These women feel robbed of sex already.  Are we now going to rob them of their fantasies as well?  Is it necessary to eradicate every vestige of sexual pleasure – even from their minds?

So, what are my take-aways from this? What am I trying to say? Three things:

1. The presence of a “rape fantasy” does not mean that a woman wants to be raped, or that she thinks rape is ok.  It is more likely that it simply means she wants sex without the shame and guilt that she feels unable to escape.  That is a rational thing to want.
2. The fact that so many women have rape fantasies is not an indictment of these women.   It’s an indictment of the Victorianism that is rampant in our culture, and the church in particular.  Shame and guilt are not required for a healthy sexual outlook.
3. Pornography is not a cause of sexual dysfunction.  It’s the mind’s attempt at a solution.  It’s being used as a tool to overcome a mental feeling of helplessness over the shame and guilt people feel for having sexual desire in a very sexually repressive culture.

The three things she wanted us to take at face value only work on a purely mechanistic model. They also seem somewhat contradictory:

• “Normal porn decreases rape rates, but increases cultural tolerance of rape.” – How can an increased tolerance of rape and a decrease in actual rape be caused by the same thing? And, even if that were the case, why does rape tolerance matter if actual rape decreases? Targeting attitudes toward rape over rape itself is akin to political correctness and hate-think legislation. What ultimately matters is whether actual rapes decrease.
• “Violent porn increases the likelihood of using violence or coercive measures.” – It seems more plausible that someone inclined to view violent porn brings his or her violence with them, rather than getting it from the porn. Such people have a history of childhood trauma that drives them to such material. Michael Bader’s work has shown how this operates based on actual clinical cases.
• “Early exposure to porn increases the likelihood of using violence or other coercive measures.” – I never saw her prove this outside of an appeal to the rape fantasy study she refers to. But, we’ve seen that using “rape” fantasies as an indication of violence tolerance is misleading. The resistance involved in such fantasies is usually token. It’s an erotic device that serves the fantasy’s purpose.

It’s widely known (by those at Covenant Eyes especially) how rampant pornography usage is amongst men (and women increasingly) in the church. The ever-increasing nature of pornography addiction should be taken as a clear indicator that the way we handle sex overall needs to change.  Simply indicting pornography and fantasy will change very little.

No amount of pornography is going to result in culture accepting rape as legit. Look at India, which is one of the oldest societies on Earth – and is literally the birthplace of pornography (Tantra, Kama Sutra).  After thousands of years their people still rose up in outrage over the Amanat rape case last year.

So, I don’t believe that we live in a “rape culture” as Lisa Eldred put it. Instead, I believe we live in a sexual pressure cooker, where husbands and wives never talk openly about their sexual desires.  They are too ashamed and fearful.  In that milieu, it’s much easier to retreat to pornography than to risk the self-rejection that comes with being open and honest with one another.  If that doesn’t change, pornography addiction will only get worse.

Let’s say that you’ve gone through and parsed the XML from a feed collection and you have a bunch of items that you want to bring into the database as new. Good for you. Now it’s time to prepare yourself for the truly maddening part of trying to take every conceivable concoction of textual barf and turning it into something meaningful and beautiful for your users to look at. This is not easy.

First off, let’s look at the ideal world. If you’re dealing with RSS, textual content should be in the <description> node and enclosures should each be in their own <enclosure> node. For ATOM, textual content should be in the <content> node, a summary of the content in the <summary> node, and enclosures are <link> nodes with a “rel” attribute of “enclosure”.

If you wanted to be super strict you would stop here and be done.  But, that would violate Postel’s Law:  “In general, an implementation should be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior.”  I consider “liberal … receiving” to include the parsing and displaying if at all possible.  If you receive it, you should really try and display it instead of silently discarding content that the user may want to see.

Here are some common things you’ll see with item content:

• RSS:  It’s common to have a shortened version of the textual content located in <description> and the full content located in a <content:encoded> node.  This mimics the ATOM model of summary and content.
• RSS:  Multiple enclosures are not strictly against the spec, even though Dave Winer has said he intended it that way.  Smart folks can read it both ways and both be right depending on the use case they bring with them in their mind when reading the spec.  Whatever they imagine constitutes an <item> in their scenario will dictate whether they see it as legal.  But, all of that aside; trust me.  You will absolutely encounter multiple enclosures in RSS feeds, so you better be able to handle it.
• HTML content:  What are you going to do with HTML content?  I’d venture to say that more feeds contain html content than text content, so you have to deal with this.  Obviously you can’t just pass unfiltered html straight into the browser.  That’s an XSS nightmare waiting to happen.  So when you start stripping tags, how are you going to preserve the formatting of the text?  Are you going to preserve media like <img>’s that you encounter?
• <iframe>:  Many feeds have iframes in the content.  Are you going to allow those?  Many times the iframe is a reference to an embedded video.  Your users probably want to see that video.
• Media-only feeds:  There are plenty of feeds that only deliver media content.  Take youtube for example.  Their feed item content is primarily just the embedded code for the video.  And others just have pictures in each item, like flickr.  Some of these have more elaborate namespace attributes like flickr’s use of Yahoo’s “media” namespace.  They make full use of it and do not use enclosures.

There are other considerations that will affect your decisions on how to deal with incoming content.  The main one is the UI that your users will use to view the content.  Will it be in a river format (example) or more of a google reader format?  For the sake of example, let me show you how I’m dealing with newly arriving items in the river-style aggregator that I’ve been working on for the past year.

Let’s walk through the parsing of an incoming item:

1. Is there a <content>(ATOM) or <content:encoded>(RSS) node?  Get it as $body.
2. If not, get <summary>(ATOM) or <description>(RSS).
3. Parse out all of the enclosures into an $enclosures array.
4. Extract all <img>,<audio>,<video>,<iframe> tags from the body content into a $mediatags array.
5. Strip out all attributes from those tags except for “src”.
6. Sanitize the “src” values.
7. Strip all remaining html tags from $body except for <p>,<br>,<hr>,<h1>,<h2>,<h3>,<h4>,<h5>.
8. Strip all attributes from these tags.
9. Iterate the $mediatags array and add each url as a new element to the $enclosures array.
10. During iteration, do a HEAD check on each url and get the Content-Length to use as the enclosure length value.  Discard tiny (less than 2.5kb) enclosures. These are probably junk img’s or even feedburner tracking tags.
11. Sanitize $body by replacing the remaining tags with “\n\n” (line breaks).
12. Collapse “\n\n+” line break runs down to just one occurence of “\n\n”.
13. Store $body and $enclosures in the database.

What we have done is sanitized all HTML content down to simple text with line breaks preserved for paragraph structure.  And we now have all of the embedded media tags as enclosures.  So, now what do we do with this content on the client side?  Well, we need to display the $body with “white-space:pre-line” to preserve the line breaks when rendering.  Then we iterate the enclosures and display them according to whatever mime type they are.  For type “image”, if there are many, we just display them as a inline elements in rows and shrink them down.  For type “html” we create an iframe.  For audio and video we create the corresponding <audio> and <video> tags with controls shown.

So, what does all of this heavy lifting get us?  This.

In February of 2011 I wrote a post detailing what I thought was going on with commodity prices (oil, metals, food, etc.) and currency prices. I said this:

Investors are fleeing to real goods by buying commodities, and that’s pushing their price up. But, it’s a very specific sort of investment. It’s a hedge investment against falling currency value so that they can continue to invest in stocks. That might seem convoluted, but think about it. In this market you have to invest to make any interest. Bank savings is fruitless since the Fed has interest rates at zero. Right now, putting your money in a savings account is little better than sticking it in your mattress. Interest rates are so low that you are losing money to inflation by doing that. Therefore, you must invest to make anything on your money and keep up with inflation. Leaving out bonds and currencies because of volatility, this leaves commodities and stocks for most people.

I then saw this article today: All Time Record High Gas Prices for February.

Most people will be completely flummoxed by such high gas prices in the midst of such a lousy economy. It’s hard to imagine how oil investors could possibly be so stupid as to push the price of oil up so high, when that is essentially what popped the bubble in 2008 and led to such pain. But, when you think about it for a little while it will make a lot more sense. Let’s break down the parameters of what’s going on:

1. Real inflation is running close to 10%. (source)
2. Interest rates are at/near zero, so interest income is gonna lose you almost 9% a year. Toss that out.
3. Stocks aren’t any better as a hedge since most people can’t play them correctly (high frequency, high volume trading). Buy and hold is dead in a market that has been essentially flat for over a decade.
4. The Federal Reserve continues to pump insane amounts of money into the economy, making currency trades a loser as well.
5. The housing bubble is re-inflating based purely on artificially low rates and money pumping. This makes real estate trading extremely dicey for the foreseeable future.

This leaves power to make money against inflation in these traditional ways in the hands of a very few groups of people in the investment banking realm. Most people will simply not be able to do any of those things without losing their butt. There is one hedge commodity, however, that is not only stable, but as close to a slam dunk investment as you can get: oil. The whole world runs on oil. And, there is very little the average consumer can do to lower their oil consumption. For the average person, reducing their oil consumption level would require a career change in order to change their commute, or at least a major lifestyle change like dropping many family activities. Those types of changes don’t happen without a lot of price pain.

But, this is only part of the oil story. The biggest consumer of oil is government (military, municipal). We “can’t” stop the mail from running. We “can’t” stop the school buses. We “can’t” stop the “tanks” from rolling. We “can’t” stop the police cars from sitting with idle engines for 20 hours a day. We “can’t” stop the bureaucrats from junketing.

Essentially, oil has become the commodity version of what treasury bonds used to be. It’s pretty much “Backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.”, so it’s a very wise hedge investment. And, as such, there is no way that the price goes back down in any significant way while these parameters remains as they are.

[*from 2010]

Legitimacy is the primary concern of any government. It doesn’t matter if they actually have any type of objective right to rule over others. The only thing that matters is that the populace believes they have such a right. That’s why democracy is so appealing to the power elite. Democracy gives the illusion that what happens in government is the “will of the people”, because they got to vote.

But, voting is worthless for the masses. You only get to choose between two buffoons, neither one of whom you would trust in your house for five minutes alone. No, all voting does is give the state that veneer of legitimacy that it so desperately wants and needs. Why else would there be politicians on the radio telling us to do our duty and not neglect our “sacred right to vote?” Sacred? Oh please. That’s just code language to try and influence the masses to keep taking them seriously and believing that simply voting for someone somehow gives them an objective right to rule and govern us.

I heard an example one time that summed up the problem with democracy and voting very well. Think of being at a party where there are a few different drink options. The host of the party decides to put it to a vote. He asks everyone to raise their hand if they would like sweet tea. Then he asks everyone to raise their hands if they would rather have beer. It turns out that a majority of folks vote for beer. Therefore, he only serves beer at the party. Well, what if you don’t like beer? Sorry. Your out of luck. What if you neither like sweet tea or beer, and would rather have a third option? Too bad. Go find another party. Sorry, but that’s democracy.

But, there’s another point to keep in mind. Thomas DiLorenzo puts it like this

…even the most brutal dictator ultimately bases his power on the opinions that are held by a majority of the population that is under his rule. After all, even dictators with large armies tend to be vastly outnumbered by the populations they rule over, and revolution is always on the dictator’s mind … democratic regimes also base their legitimacy on their ability to claim that their rule is “the will of the people.”

 

–Thomas DiLorenzo, LRC

Never forget that the reason politicians croon so loudly about getting out and voting is because it benefits them to keep us lulled into thinking our vote matters. This is critical because, as DiLorenzo points out, the ruled always vastly outnumber the rulers. If the mob thought their vote didn’t matter, then the ruling class wouldn’t last very long.

You also have to think back and recognize that from the beginning of ratification of the constitution our choice of candidates for political office has always been limited to a very few in the ruling class. And, that’s how it will always be. You don’t have a chance in this world of becoming president, and neither do I. Here in Alabama, I thought Stan Cooke had a good chance of defeating Spencer Bachus for state representative during the primary. He wasn’t perfect by any means, but he had some views that were very good on the economy. But, of course he got trounced. It wasn’t even close.

I won’t be voting any more because I no longer want to contribute any legitimacy to our thug government. I voted for Bush and he ran this country into an economic and military mudhole just like all the rest of them do. Then Obama just took the baton and kept on running. I’d rather have a clean conscience and know that I withheld my consent to be governed by elitist warmongers. The R and D behind their names are irrelevant. They all hate us and just want power and money.

The oft-quoted statement by Emma Goldman sums it up best:

If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.

 

–Emma Goldman,

The two dominant news syndication formats (and the only ones I bother to parse) are RSS 2.0 and ATOM. From what I’ve seen so far, ATOM is mostly well-behaved because of it’s more strict set of item-level required tags. I also get the feeling (although I can’t be sure of this) that there are fewer ATOM libraries out in the wild than RSS libraries. This would make things more consistent/predictable on the ATOM side.

RSS is a different beast, however. It’s a beautifully loose specification, in the sense that you really can customize it’s structure to the format of the content you want to deliver. It doesn’t assume it knows what your content is. That’s really nice for the content deliverers, but not so easy on the consumption side. Here are a few things that have tripped me up and how I solved them.

Duplicate Items

A channel may contain any number of <item>s. An item may represent a “story” — much like a story in a newspaper or magazine; if so its description is a synopsis of the story, and the link points to the full story. An item may also be complete in itself, if so, the description contains the text (entity-encoded HTML is allowed; see examples), and the link and title may be omitted. All elements of an item are optional, however at least one of title or description must be present.

–Dave Winer, RSS 2.0 Specification

That means that this is a valid feed:

<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Test Feed</title>
<link>http://test.com</link>
<description>My little test feed.</description>
<item>
  <description>This is a test.</description>
  <enclosure>http://test.com/post4/file.mp3</enclosure>
</item>
<item>
  <description>This is a test.</description>
  <link>http://test.com/post3</link>
</item>
<item>
  <description>This is a test.</description>
</item>
<item>
  <description>This is a test.</description>
  <guid>http://test.com/post2</guid>
</item>
<item>
  <description>This is a test.</description>
  <link>http://test.com/post1</link>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

This might look like a stupid example that we wouldn’t want to see in our feed reader anyway. But, imagine if those aren’t blog posts. Imagine if that’s a USGS seismograph feed. You’d want to see all the duplicates if they were actually new posts, and not duplication errors. That’s tough though. Since the only requirement for an item is to have one of either description or title, there’s no way to differentiate whether or not these are meant to be separate posts or not, without tracking duplicates on every potential element an item could contain. That would be very messy.

The solution I settled on is to use the RSS guid element as-is if it was defined in the item. If it wasn’t defined, we create one by hashing the string representation of the entire item into a 40 character hash. All we care about here is speed, so we use SHA-1. We then index the feed items table to place a unique index on the combination of “feed id” and “guid”. This ensures that guid’s, whether defined or hashed, are unique within their own feeds.

Pub Dates That Lie

Another issue to deal with is publish dates for feed items. Since “pubDate” isn’t required in items, we have to generate one if it’s missing using the channel’s pubDate, or current time if that’s missing too. No big deal. But, what you see in the real world of crappy CMS’s are insane pubDates. I’ve seen brand new items with a pubDate of 2 days ago when the description content on the item lists today as the post date. What’s worse is that some feeds mix up their time zone settings and constantly show pubDates in the future. Sometimes by a day or more.

To deal with this, we chose to determine newness and sort order based on the time the post shows up in the feed. We still track and show pubDate if one exists. Even bad ones. But, we mostly ignore it for purposes of sorting and displaying feed items. This “time added” time stamp becomes gospel.

Re-appearing Items

A lot of CMS’s simply parse their database for the most recent X number of posts and build their RSS feed from that. This means that if you delete a post somewhere in that range, an older post that had previously rolled off the feed will now come back. From what I’ve seen this is very common. This isn’t a problem if you choose to honor the “pubDate” element for sorting. But, since we sort based on “time added”, these old items reappear at the top of the list as if they were newly published. That’s no good.

One way you could fix this is to simply not delete items as they roll off their respective feeds. But, when you’re dealing with hundreds of feeds, that’s really not do-able. Database size would become a serious issue.

The fix we chose instead was adding a pubDate check to all new items being added. If we think it’s new, then we check the pubDate. If the pubDate is more than 36 hours older than the current time, we set “time added” to be equal to pubDate. This makes the item sort back in time where it should be.

But, there’s another problem. What if there’s no pubDate in the item to compare to? Since we can’t just assume that RSS feeds are going to be structured in reverse chronological order; and, since pubDate isn’t required, this is a possible scenario. Actually, I have no answer for this at the moment. And, luckily, I haven’t seen it happen yet. If anyone can think of a solution, I’d love to hear it.

Seriously. This is really, really easy to make. And it’s absolutely delicious. It’s a no-knead bread, so it takes a long time to rise. But, as a reward for your patience you get the ease of not kneading and the excellent flavour of a long rise bread. Let’s get to it:

Dry Ingredients:

• 2 cups of Bread Flour (or Hard Red Wheat Flour if you grind your own)
• 1 cup of Soy Flour
• 2 tsp of Salt
• 2 pinches of Sugar
• 1/2 tsp Active Dry Yeast

Wet Ingredients:

• 13.5 oz. (400 milliliters) of slightly Warm Water (NOT hot. Hot water will kill the yeast.)
• Olive Oil

Instructions:

1. Pour the warm water into a large bowl.
2. Put the yeast in and slosh the water around until it dissolves.
3. Dump in the bread flour, soy flour, salt and a couple of pinches of sugar.
4. With an oiled baking spoon, stir up all the ingredients into a thoroughly wet dough ball. If it looks too wet, don’t worry. It’s supposed to.
5. Drizzle olive oil around the circumference of the bowl and let it run down the sides and puddle slightly around the dough ball. This just coats the sides a little so that the dough is easier to remove later.
6. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and place a kitchen towel on top to block the light.
7. Let it sit on the counter for 12 hours.
8. Now grease up a bread pan(I spray it with PAM) and dust it thoroughly with all-purpose flour. We don’t want the bread to stick to the pan.
9. Using a greased baking spoon, turn the dough out into the bread pan.
10. Cover the bread pan with the same plastic wrap and towel you used for the bowl.
11. Let it sit for about an hour and a half. You just want it to re-rise a bit and fill out the pan.
12. Set the oven for 425°F and put the bread in with the oven still cold.
13. Once the oven hits 200°F, set the timer for 1 hour.
14. When it’s done, take the bread out and put it on a cooling rack. Let it cool down for about an hour before eating.

Slather some butter on a slice of this and enjoy. Once you’ve made it a couple of times, you’ll be able to crank the dough out in about 10 minutes flat. You’re total active time (minus the rise times) is about 15 minutes of work. Perfect!

You can use 3 cups of bread flour instead of the 2 + 1 cup of soy flour, but the soy helps in two ways. It drops the carbs and gluten considerably. And soy flour contains lecithin that helps the bread be spongy and moist on the inside. I’d suggest leaving it in.

A good way to prep this is to mix up the dough before bed and let it rise overnight. You can then pop it in the oven for breakfast. You can also mix it up after breakfast and it’ll be ready at dinner time. This is usually what I do. I’ve made this bread probably 25 times. It’s the only recipe I use now.

I’ve tried explaining the fundamentals of what money is in previous posts, but I don’t think I’ve done an adequate job. The sticking point has always been about the nature of certain types of money, like gold. People always end up thinking that I’m saying hard money has inherent value, while paper money is inherently non-valuable. This belies a misconception of the argument, and indicates that I’m not doing a good job explaining things.

I think I may have come up with a better way of getting the idea across this time, however. The only thing you have to remember when reading this is that I’m talking of these things in the absence of government. When a group of people with guns tell you that something is money, then your answer is most likely “yes sir.” That’s not what I’m talking about here. That doesn’t actually tell us anything about money. It tells us about people with guns.

So, here is the sequence of thought:

1. Something will be money: Money is not an option. A society never has the opportunity to decide whether it wants to use money or not. Money just happens. It has to. It’s an economic law – as unavoidable as gravity – that every society will quickly promote something to be money.

2. Nobody gets to decide what will be money: Call it the “invisible hand” or whatever term you want, but the choice of which item will be used as money is never made by a person or group of people. It’s something that emerges from the market as trade happens.

3. The money will always have certain attributes: Whatever the market chooses as money will always be that commodity where, on a chart, “easily divisible”, “easily transportable”, “most durable” and “most desirable” intersect with “easily obtainable.”

4. The money can change: It’s always possible that something else will replace the current money. Again, this will be an evolutionary process by the market itself. Nobody can actually make it happen or stop it from happening. When some other item satisfies rule #3 better than the current money, then it will become the new money.

Those are the rules of money. When society is in a non-coerced state, those things will always be in play to bring about money. Notice I did not mention anything about gold, silver or inherent value. Those are not part of the discussion of what money objectively is. Gold and silver only come into the discussion when you understand these monetary rules and then look at what the market has historically chosen as the fulfillment of those rules. Gold and silver simply fit the bill more times than not.

Perhaps the most important point is rule #1. Something will be money. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that money is something that is chosen from other optional systems. That’s not how it works. Just like language emerges from the free association of peoples in a region, money will develop as well. No group sits down and decides what the language will be. It just happens. Rapidly.

Just like attempts by governments to change the “official” language of a people group require monumental effort (and usually violence) with very little success, attempts by the state to decide what is going to be money in a society is not really possible. The dollar did not become the United States currency simply because the government decided it should be so. Our current dollar is an evolution of previous “dollar” such as the Spanish Milled Dollar that was in wide use beforehand. The takeover of the dollar by the state was a glacial process that played on the dollar’s already established market credibility and momentum.

Maybe you think I’m beating a dead horse with this topic, but I promise you it’s important. I’ll tell you why in the next post.

A pet peeve of mine is the over-use of the phrase “mind controlled.” We’ve discussed the mind-body problem a few times before here, so hopefully you’ll see the problem with an article like this:

…we have this robotic leg prosthesis that is fully controlled using brain waves, making it a potential game changer for those who suffer from spinal cord injury.

This prosthetic lower limb’s predecessor can be controlled in real time by EEG (electroencephalogram) signals that are fed into a computer, and it works great as long as you have a brain, regardless of whether you are able-bodied or otherwise. It takes around 10 minutes to master the new mind-controlled robotic leg…

–Edwin Kee, Ubergizmo

This isn’t “mind control.” It’s brain control.

Certainly, having particular kinds of thoughts can influence EEG patterns. That’s not in doubt. But, controlling an external device using electrical activity patterns in the brain is not the same thing as “mind control”. If it is, then so is driving a car or typing on a keyboard, or any other physical action we do. Sure, the driving of the car is the result of processes that began in the mind. But, the nervous system is simply one proxy layer of the manifestation of those mental events into physical actions. Those nervous system signals are not, themselves, the mental activity.

All these researchers have done is take one of the proxy layers off of the stack. They are not tapping into the mind directly, which is impossible.

Why impossible? Because mental events, such as thoughts, beliefs and willings are non-physical things. We know this. And, it’s this lone fact that makes me convinced that a supernatural world, and ultimately a God, exists. Whether that God is the Christian one is a completely separate topic.

I’m not just being nit-picky over words. This stuff matters.

It’s time to move to the second assertion of my argument:

2. Most of us can’t make an informed decision about the history and contemporary context that lead to conflict.

Remember, this argument isn’t taking the form of a syllogism. It’s a probability argument. The 8 assertions contained in it are meant to show that the probability of any particular war meeting “just war” criteria is very low. A “just war” isn’t precluded by this argument, but it’s made to be highly unlikely.

Unlike propaganda, which deals with knowing true facts about current events and historical narratives, this assertion deals with knowing the contextual affairs that surround the parties at war. For instance, what is the history of a particular country’s economics and trade ties? Where did it’s current batch of leaders come from and why are they in power now? Who are their neighboring countries and what’s the history of dealings with them? What outside interference have they had from other major powers? What is their main export? Who is their main buyer for that export? Has that changed recently? Were they ever a colony of a Western power in the past?

These are all critical questions to understanding current conflicts, but they are questions that very few people know the answers to.

Let’s take Germany for example since they are the favorite whipping boy of the 20th century. Did you know that Germany, as it’s known today, only came into existence in 1871. In that sense, the United States is older than Germany:

By the time the Republic and Napoleon had finished disassembling and reassembling the map of Germany, almost 60 percent of Germany’s population had changed rulers at least once; by 1820, the 294 or so Germanic territories that existed in 1789 had been reduced to 39, many of them loosely grouped under the Confederation of the Rhine. The Confederation gave the Germanic states a common identity they had never before experienced, and as such helped prepare the way for the eventual unification of Germany fifty-five years after Waterloo.

–Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State

Before unification in 1871, Germany was a loosely federated group of smaller states and territories that had been dominated and brutalized by European powers for centuries:

For thirteen years Europe’s largest armies fought across the face of Germany, waging campaigns of a geographical scale and complexity that would have been inconceivable in the medieval era. Not yet able to fully master the fiscal and logistical challenges of waging war on so large a scale, the occupying armies ravaged the land and terrorized the inhabitants as they sought to provide for their soldiers. Millions perished.

–Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State

Unified Germany was born in the “age of empires”, when all the great Western powers were seeking colonial territories in Asia and Africa. In this milieu, Germany was the China of it’s day – meaning that the entrenched Western powers were terrified of a newly unified, organized Germany that could compete with them industrially on a global scale:

Germany’s entry on the scene, at Constantinople and elsewhere, marked the beginning of a new age in world politics. The German Empire, formally created on 18 January 1871, within decades had replaced Russia as the principal threat to British interests.

Half the world’s industrial production was then British-owned, but by 1870 the figure had sunk to 32 percent, and by 1910, to 15 percent.9 In newer and increasingly more important industries, such as chemicals and machine-tools, Germany took the lead.

–David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace

They weren’t just competing. They were pretty much kicking butt:

The connection between imperialism and domestic reform was strongest in Germany. By 1880, industrialization was proceeding at a breakneck pace in the newly unified Reich—a process destined to propel it in less than thirty years from an agrarian state with only 38 percent of Britain’s manufacturing output to the exalted status of leading industrial power in Europe.

–Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State

My point here is to show you that the common narrative of the “evil Germany” of World War I is just simplistic nonsense. It was war propaganda. But, if you didn’t know the historical context of European politics and Germanic/Austrian/Prussian history, then you’d have no way of knowing that it was propaganda. You might believe it was all true. You might believe that the Germans were simply the “bad guys”.

Just like the completely arbitrary distinction between microeconomics and macroeconomics, there is an unjustified distinction made between internal and external politics. They are, in fact, the same animal. Internally, big entrenched business interests use regulations to squash competition from smaller competitors. The same thing happens in inter-state politics. The big boys use war and destabilization to exclude competition. The problem for Germany is not that they were evil. It’s that they just didn’t know how to play the game. They were rookies.

Germany is just an easy example though. You must challenge your own assumptions about whatever the current war or conflict is. Ask yourself if you know anything at all about the country in question beyond simple rhetoric. Go and research the country or group in question using pre-conflict literature so as to minimize bias. In every case you will find that what you aren’t being told in the media makes critical differences in whether the particular war is “just”.