I was up for about 23 hours, went to bed, and slept, uh, for about three hours.

I decided to get on-line and see if there'd been a further reversal-of-fortune for Proposition 8, the California measure to outlaw same-sex marriage. Although in the past the electorate had voted to ban same-sex marriage, conventional wisdom, going into this election, was that the Proposition would fail by a clear margin. I believed this convention wisdom, and saw it as the one real bright spot of the election.

But as the numbers started to come-in, it began to seem that the Proposition would pass by about the margin by which it had been expected to fail.

Now, with 22587 of 25429 precincts reporting, the measure leads 4,843,531 to 4,519,010 — about 52% to 48%. There has been a little drift in the percentages since I had last checked, but nothing that suggests that there will be some marked difference in the relative shares reported amongst the later-reporting precincts. Basically, the remaining precincts would have to have voted about 64% against the Proposition for it to fail.

I had been planning to remove the Vote No bumpersticker from my note-book computer if the measure failed. I'm inclined to leave on for a while now, as a gesture of protest. But I'm concerned that it may just depress some of the people around me, so I'm going to conduct an informal poll amongst them.

I guess that, one way or another, the sticker has a short shelf-life. A little more than eight years ago, a Proposition 22, perhaps better known as the Knight Initiative and as the defense of marriage act, set out to achieve much the same ends as this latest Proposition 8. Now-a-days, No-on-Knight is quite meaningless to the vast majority of people, and No on 22 would be mysterious to an even larger group.

As European politicians and pundits tut-tut over the ostensible relative deficiencies of American economic policy, pay attention to what is happening to exchange rates.

By itself, the absolute level of exchange rates isn't particularly meaningful — that's really just a matter of scaling. but movements of exchange rates are significant. When the value of one currency is dropping relative to that of another, it means that people are trying to shift holdings in the former to holdings in the latter.

These days, the dollar is generally strengthening with respect to the pound and with respect to the euro, which means that people are trying to increase their share of currency that buys stuff in America relative to their share of currency that buys stuff in Europe.

That doesn't mean that economic conditions in America aren't bad, but it strongly argues that conditions in Europe are worse.

Unfortunately, there's nothing truly extraordinary about this story. Policies driven by common intutions — especially those entangled with a morality of the collective — often have very different effects from those expected, sometimes opposite effects. And people actively resist any scientific argument that runs counter to those intutions. In the cases of imposition and of sacrifice for an ostensible collective good, the underlying theory seems to be that it's more important to inculcate an acceptance of imposition and a habit of sacrifice than it is otherwise to effect beneficial policy.

Some people are taken aback at how I use the word treason in a political context. So let me explain. Here's the first definition of treason that one finds in the American Heritage Dictionary:

Violation of allegiance toward one's country or sovereign, especially the betrayal of one's country by waging war against it or by consciously and purposely acting to aid its enemies.

Note that the betrayal is of the country or of the sovereign, not of the state. As to the sovereign, in a republic, supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them; in a liberal republic, a fair amount of that supreme power is individualistic (rather than collectivist) in nature.

I'm just speaking goddamn'd English when I refer to violations of individual rights by state officials as treason.

With that in mind, I note some treason to which the Woman of Interest draws my attention:

I always assumed that my conversations with my ex-girlfriend while she was in Iraq were recorded. I wasn't particularly disturbed by that thought; one end of that conversation was in a fr_ggin' war zone. And I didn't have anything to say to her that would be of prurient interest anyway, unless the listener were quite oddly perverse.

But none of these personal conversations should have been circulated for purposes of entertainment, even in cases where the discourse weren't potentially embarassing.

And, when the next President fails to bring these analysts up on charges of treason, that failure will itself be treason.

In the wake of a ruling by the Supreme Court of the State of California that required the state to recognize and effect same-sex marriage, there is a measure, Proposition 8, on the ballot to amend the state constitution to halt recognition of further same-sex marriages. I oppose this measure, though (as I have stated various places) what I really want is for the state to get out of the marriage business altogether, and to treat marriages simply as private contracts. (I think that participants should see marriage as far more, but that's not the business of the state.)

This after-noon, I stopped at the San Diego headquarters of Vote No on Prop 8 to buy a couple of bumper-stickers, one to actually slap on a bumper, and one to put on the case of my note-book computer.

The guy who greeted me there was a fool. Instead of just selling me a couple of bumper-stickers, he tried very aggressively to get me to make a substantial donation, starting with the idea that I should give them the equivalent of a dollar an day for a year, by donatiing $365. There isn't a fr__king year left until the election; there's about 40 days. Had he begun by suggesting a $40 donation, well, I might have gone along with that; as it was, he had my back up, and I said no to the other sums that he suggested. I gave them $5 and they gave me the two bumper-stickers that I'd sought. In addition to the bumper-stickers, I left with considerable annoyance.

Another irksome thing, not the fault of Vote No on Prop 8, was that I had to fill-out a d_mn'd form, because I'd made a political contribution, however small. It was a gross violation of my rights as acknowledged by the First and Fourteenth Amendments, but if I didn't fill-out that form, and truthfully, then the money could be confiscated by the state.

(Underscore mine.)

Okay, now I could write about the idiocy of the War on Drugs, but I want to instead talk about something else that makes me furious.

Far too many police, in far too many cases, have clearly demonstrated that they believe themselves to have the right to punish criminals by executing their dogs.

I'm not talking about cases where the dog has attacked, or has behaved in a way that indicates that it is an immediate threat.

It's not the right of a police officer to punish, period. And it's not the right of anyone to punish some person by killing an innocent companion animal. It doesn't fundamentally matter, when it comes to the killing of the Calvo dogs, that the Calvos were innocent. Even if they had been guilty of something truly criminal, it wouldn't be the right of police to kill their dogs because of who their owners were.

Police officials who needlessly kill dogs are never given worse than slaps on their wrists. Instead, they need to do hard prison time. More specifically:

• If it can been shown that police conducted a raid such as this, where they could have brought and deployed non-lethal measures but did not, then one or more of the officials needs to spend years in prison. It should even be a criminal offense (albeït perhaps just a misdemeanor) for any participating officer not to know who has been assigned responsibility for those non-lethal measures, so that treasonous bastards cannot merely pretend that there was a mix-up. Note that I am not claiming that non-lethal measures can always be employed; but, when it is practicable to prepare them, police should be required to prepare them.
• In any case where lethal methods have been used against a dog that is plainly not acting aggressively (as in the case of the dog who was attempting to flee), there should be years in prison.

These sorts of laws need to be effected on a state level. Governor O'Malley of Maryland should be recalled from office if he isn't the very first governor to produce a bill to such effect.

As a result of contemplating eventual replacement of my shaving brush, I have been looking into how three sorts of animal hair are harvested — badger, boar, and horse.

A type of badger bristle is used for the finest sorts of shaving brushes, but these bristles are got from killed badgers. As much as I would like a high-quality shaving brush, I do not want to do anything to promote the killing of badgers. (Their populations could be controlled without slaughter.)

Other shaving brushes (like some hair brushes) are made with boar bristles. Most boar bristles seem to come from killed boars, but there is actually at least one firm that shears living boars to harvest their bristles. I'll look into brushes from such a source.

(I can also get a synthetic-bristle shaving brush, though by all accounts these are inferior to natural-bristle brushes.)

I was under the impression that some shave brushes were made with horse hair, but seem to have been mistaken on that score. [Up-Date (2 August): I have indeed found some horse-hair shaving brushes.] In any event, I learned that some horses are raised for the hair of their manes or tails, which is clipped, but that most horse hair comes from slaughtered horses.

Famously, HDRC has a large campaign debt, which she and her husband are demanding Obama help retire. I'm not sure, then, how it is that she would be in a position to offer refunds. In any event, she is asking that money which would otherwise be refunded be contributed towards her 2012 Senate campaign, instead of being used to retire her debt.

It isn't really plausible that HDRC will pay-off her Presidential campaign debts in-full; instead, creditors will receive pennies-on-the-dollar, with the Clintons representing such settlements as-if they are payment in-full. If the Clintons channel monies that could have gone to the repayment of debt instead to her 2012 Senate campaign, then those creditors will in effect have been compelled to contribute towards that Senate campaign.