November 2004 Archives

He was an evil thieving putz.

Terrorism Unveiled is written by this American female exchange student living in the Middle East. I like reading it because its interesting reading an American perspective abroad.

She has a great posting today about “Honor Killings”, the practice of killing girls because they’ve had sex.

Read the Whole Thing

One interesting thing I’ve observed in Athena over the last few months is that when she originally went over she was kind of a liberal Democrat.

As she’s lived in the Middle East, she’s started becoming a neo-conservative. As she says today:

These people are living lies.  All the women here are veiled, whether the physical fabric is covering them or not.

And the men are just as blind.

Having a blog, I get some weird emails sometimes.

During the election campaign season, I got this comment (excerpted) on this posting:

I was framed in Texas during the year of 2001 by Bush and some of his thugs and later convicted for a crime that I did not commit. Although the case is presently at the appeallate level, I do consider myself living proof of the corrupt and incompetent policies of this man.

Just for fun, I emailed him, and asked him what that was about. Instead of telling me, he instead sent the documents from his appeal, which were full of wild allegations about conspiracies by various people. So I had to wade through quite a bit of nonsense to get at the facts (according to him). Turns out, it was actually 1983 that it all happened. As near as I could tell by reading between the lines what happened to this guy was something like this:

Basically, this Columbian gentleman is legally blind in one eye, and he gets doubled blurry vision. He can drive, but it causes him problems. He’s hanging around in some small town in Texas (Seguin). These 2 13 year old girls pick him up, telling him they’re quite a bit older (remember, he’s legally blind in one eye). While he’s having sex with one of them, the other one is busy stealing his wallet and car keys. He passes out, and wakes up, and his car is gone.

In other words, he got rolled. It happens. So he calls the police…

Except they’re underage. So when they get caught with the car, they accuse him of raping one of them. It turns out that one of the “girls” wasn’t a girl anyways, it was a boy dressed as a girl. He/she was the one stealing the car. I expect that by law, pretty much none of the stuff they did to him matters. By his own admission to the police, he had sex with them. (“I had sex with these girls and they stole my car.”) So he’s doomed, since by law in Texas, the police are required to prosecute him for statutory rape. They’re also probably not accountable for the car theft. Also, since the girls were underage, the press was barred from the proceedings…

He’s not a citizen. So he gets deported, and then convicted. For some reason, that takes until 2001 before it happens. All told, that’s probably the best possible outcome for him. It would be much worse for him if he’d been sent to jail. As it is, he’s at least a free man in Columbia. There’s a reason we call young girls who dress older and go around drunk “jailbait”…

Of course, he doesn’t see it that way.

To him, this is all a conspiracy by the Bush family to bankrupt him, not just bad luck and perhaps bad eyesight. From the last email I got from him:

1. Eight of my law suits were filed in Federal Courts in Missouri.

2. The first thing President George Bush did after taking office was to appoint the former governor of Missouri “Mr. Ashcroft” as the U.S Attorney General. What a coincidence since he is not quite known as a great legal mind.

3. My name is Jesus “Alberto”, and the closest town to my place of residence in Texas was the city of “Gonzales”.

4. Well guess what? President George Bush jr. did appoint as the WHite House counsel a Mexican with the name of “Alberto Gonzales”.

Is all of these just coincidence?? I assure you that it is not the case.

Er, ok dude. I’m sure you’re a legend in your own mind, but I really doubt that you’re important enough to warrant 5 minutes of Bush’s time.

Naturally, this guy was a Kerry supporter, or at least an “Anybody but Bush” guy. I suspect he would have been just as mad at Clinton if his trial had been held in 2000 though.

Just thought I’d share. I wonder what he thinks about Alberto replacing Ashcroft?

From Equal Vote:

McCullogh & Plassmann assert that the Hout study “is entirely without merit and its results are meaningless.” They find that Hout and his colleagues made a basic error in their model, in attempting to quantify the number of “excess votes” for Bush. This can be shown, McCullogh and Plassmann explain, by relying on the same data and model to reach the opposite conclusion — namely that electronic voting favored Kerry.

I said it was bogus when it came out, Patrick Ruffini found it didn’t pass the smell test, and now its been bludgeoned some more.

IT’S NOT PLAGIARISM when you repeat stuff from a press release without checking it — but it’s not journalism, either. It’s not even very good punditry.

Bah. I’ve been seeing that happen in the computer press for years.

Microsoft Press Release: Food-For-Windows is the best thing ever, it will revolutionize your recipes!

Computer Press “Review”: Food for Windows will revolutionize your recipes!

Its even funnier when much like Kerry’s “plan” for everything, “Food for Windows” turns out to be vaporware and there’s no way anyone could have reviewed it.

Understanding the MainStream Media is much easier if you just picture them as alcoholics in fedoras and trench-coats who just want to file their story as quickly as possible in order to get back to the buffet table. Yeah, they could spend hours reviewing the software, or tracking down facts, or whatever the naive assume that journalists do. Or they could cut/paste and go back to the buffet line while there are still some shrimp left…

The MSM isn’t evil/biased/liberal, just incompetent.

So many issues in our society will be resolved for the better once Alternative Energy means something other than Energy that’s too expensive.

Winds of Change does a periodic round up of the news, which I fine useful. I also like their Wilsonian foreign policy perspective and their other news round ups as well. (They’re in my blogroll in the “news” category)

Here’s the link to the energy news roundup.

So my wife and I were discussing the most recent Joan of Arcadia episode. Specifically, we were discussing the fact that the mother of one of the main characters is an alcoholic. I complained about the characterization, because I’ve learned from doing Qi Gong healing that many people with some sort of chemical dependency have some sort of health problem from an Eastern perspective. This would include Tobacco, Chocolate, Prozac, Ritalin, etc.

Said health problem forces them to self-medicate. If you hit a low spot every afternoon at 2:00 PM, so you have some chocolate, you’re self medicating.

So I’ve become much more tolerant of people with those kind of problems.

Of course, we still get people into the clinic who have health problems because they like to go out drinking every Friday, but most of the people we see in clinic are just people trying to get by. Since we see the chemical dependency as a symptom, we mostly ignore it, and at some point the patient volunteers on their own that they’ve given up whatever it was.

However, it still bothers me that I’ve become a nicer, more tolerant person. If this keeps up, I’ll have to change the name of the blog…

One of my commentators found a link to the original story that the Incredibles reminded me of, which was by Vonnegut, not Ellison.

Here’s the link, the story is called Harrison Bergeron

Over at Slant Point

Including a posting by yours truly on How to Trap a Skunk

From Virginia Postrel about the Incredibles:

It’s not, in fact, a particularly political movie, and it’s certainly not “Randian,” as both critics and followers of Objectivism have suggested. The most classically Randian character, a brilliant, ambitious inventor and would-be capitalist with red hair, is the villain.

Well, she’s right, its not an Ayn Rand movie. I still liked it though.

What it actually reminded me of is this Harlan Ellison story about a world where everyone by law has to be mediocre, and the hero is the exceptional man who has to carry around 200 lbs of weights everywhere he goes. I think he stages a revolution, I can’t remember. I can’t remember the name of the story unfortunately.

So it reminded me of that story more then Ayn Rand.

One of the things that has made a big difference in my life has been joining the martial arts studio. The strangest piece of it for me is studying Qi Gong. As an engineer, if you’d asked me about it 3 years ago, I would have been pretty skeptical about all this “energy” stuff.

I still am skeptical about the “New Age” energy healers in Sedona, but as an apprentice Qi Gong healer, I’m definitely a believer in Qi Gong. In talking to other engineers and scientists friends of mine, they’ve always been curious when they found out what I was doing. They know me well enough to be somewhat surprised that I’d be involved in something so touchy-feely. So they pester me with questions.

This has happened enough times that I finally decided to write it all up in long blog posting. So if you’ve ever been curious about martial arts or energy healing, read on.

I’ve mostly stayed out of this issue, but I felt that Kevin Sites (the embedded journalist) was getting a bad deal. I didn’t particularly find him anti-military, just a civilian a bit out of his element.

He posted his account in his own words today, its worth reading.

It’s not only soldiers who can get a raw deal, so can journalists.

Selected Paragraphs:

Making sure you know the basis for my choices after the incident is as important to me as knowing how the incident went down. I did not in any way feel like I had captured some kind of “prize” video. In fact, I was heartsick. Immediately after the mosque incident, I told the unit’s commanding officer what had happened. I shared the video with him, and its impact rippled all the way up the chain of command. Marine commanders immediately pledged their cooperation.

We all knew it was a complicated story, and if not handled responsibly, could have the potential to further inflame the volatile region. I offered to hold the tape until they had time to look into incident and begin an investigation — providing me with information that would fill in some of the blanks.

I knew NBC would be responsible with the footage. But there were complications. We were part of a video “pool” in Falluja, and that obligated us to share all of our footage with other networks. I had no idea how our other “pool” partners might use the footage. I considered not feeding the tape to the pool — or even, for a moment, destroying it. But that thought created the same pit in my stomach that witnessing the shooting had. It felt wrong. Hiding this wouldn’t make it go away. There were other people in that room. What happened in that mosque would eventually come out. I would be faced with the fact that I had betrayed truth as well as a life supposedly spent in pursuit of it.

And shows the Berkeley guys have been smoking too much crack

The conclusion that President Bush was more likely to improve his vote in counties with e-voting is laughable on its face. Using the Excel spreadsheet provided by the authors, I totaled the votes for counties with and without e-voting, and came up with this:

Percentage Change for Bush in Counties WITH E-Voting: 2.25%

Percentage Change for Bush in Counties WITHOUT E-Voting: 2.54%

It looks like e-voting suppressed the President’s vote by about 0.29%_ — or 7,800 votes!

Taking each of these counties as data points, was the President “significantly more likely” to have increased his support in counties with e-voting? Again, no.

E-Voting Counties with Increased Bush Vote: 13/15 (86.7%)

Non-E-Voting Counties with Increased Bush Vote: 46/52 (88.5%)

Bad science loses to E-Voting again. Thanks to Pat for doing what I was too lazy to do.

Alleging 130,000 extra votes in Florida, here’s an analysis.

Even taking at face value the findings that the paper makes, those findings don’t support the conclusion that electronic voting caused the increase in votes for Bush.

The Berkeley working paper warrants more careful analysis. I’m sure that more able empiricists than I will, in short order, scrutinize their findings and conclusions. But as I’ve repeatedly warned, we should be wary of making accusations that the election was “stolen” before all the facts are in and have been analyzed carefully. In the end, such hasty judgments will do great harm to the vital objective of making our election system more fair and equal.

It’s also a “working paper”, which means it hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet. My personal opinion? They’ve worked really hard to find the result they wanted by cherry picking their data. It doesn’t mean Bush got extra votes because e-voting machines were used. There could be a number of reasons why that happened, the most obvious being that Gore was not Kerry, so perhaps some voters switched. All that statistical analysis works about as well as polls do, since its based on the same technique.

is the $100/month for my wife’s Pilates class at Water Mountain.

• It’s made her butt smaller, and tighter.
• It’s made her hornier (shhh… don’t tell her I let the secret out.)

Alice is a great instructor too. I’d take Pilates if I wasn’t spending 12 hours a week at the dojo already.

When Saving Private Ryan came out, it was momentarily controversial, because a couple of times in the movie, Axis soldiers trying to surrender got shot.

All the WWII veterans said, “Yeah, that happened. It was a war. Deal with it. The movie was great.”

So in Iraq, an enemy soldier/insurgent/terrorist/dude playing dead got shot.

Yeah, that happens. Was the the soldier who shot him justified? Yes. Was the other guy justified in playing possum? Yes. Was it a “regrettable incident”? Yes.

It’s war guys. Get over it. Yes, we are trying to make Iraq a democracy. But soldiers are soldiers and from the cheap seats here, I think the enemy soldier was justified in trying to be tricky, and our guy was justified in shooting him. I think that’s one of the reasons that the military holds its own trials. Civilians just don’t understand.

If this is the worse thing that happens in Fallujah, its a good thing! In fact, I think that this proves the value of embedding. While its true this one guy will get some flack, the whole embedding thing has prevented any unfounded allegations from being published. The last time there was heavy action in Iraq and we didn’t have embeds, there were lots of “shooting at ambulances” stories. Now I see that the embeds are showing footage of people shooting from mosques.

The whole tone of the press coverage is 1000 times better with the embeds. Hooray for the embeds!

So I assume the Noise is out, since my deadline was a week ago.

Its interesting writing for the paper because its really a different medium. I have to be more coherent, and I have to cram everything into 500-900 words. I haven't gotten paid yet, but they did do this cool logo for my column (I'm sort of this curmudgeonly-looking devil wearing glasses), which I might put into a Cafe-Press store.

This month's article was debunking the draft nonsense from the election. Old hat for the blogosphere, but news to everyone else.

Article is after the jump. Here's a taste:

I was in Late for the Train the day after the election and I happened to overhear someone in their 20’s comment that they were thinking of moving to Canada so they wouldn’t get drafted.

Sigh. I hate election years.

I wanted to write about something else this month, not spend my 900 words debunking leftover election lies. But here goes.

Just go read

You know, I really should give a hat tip to Instapundit, but he never links to me, so why should I link to him?

While I think you’d have to be crazy to shell out full price for a copy of the Team America soundtrack, shelling out $.99 for America F**k Yeah or I’m So Ronery is probably worth it.

Though its pretty weird that people who bought those songs also bought Has Been by William Shatner.

Links to iTunes:

Team America Soundtrack

America F**k Yeah

I’m So Ronery

Has Been

Though perhaps the weirdest thing of all is that I ended up following the link to Has Been, and I enjoyed some of the songs…Shatner can’t sing, he sort of does these dramatic readings over the songs, but they’re still fun.

But they’ve become kind of fun. Who knew there was an Ayn Rand dating service? It’s like this weird snide commentary on my blog by Google.

Reading through the HTMl source for the Diplomad after reading in the blogspot help about how to turn on feeds, I discovered a link to an atom.xml file. So I guess BlogSpot provides RSS/Atom feeds, they just don’t provide links in the templates to same.

Wish I’d known that a long time ago, there are a lot of blogs I like, but don’t read regularly because they don’t provide feeds.

Cool!

(For those who don’t know, an RSS feed is basically a file with the latest postings in a website, that you can use with a specialized reader to quickly read 20 blogs in the time it would take you to read 1. )

According to the NY Observer, its really the Ayn Rand novel, the Fountainhead, mixed with Republican foreign policy:

While The Incredibles’ battle against conformity and mediocrity screams anti-oppression to some, it’s obviously Randian to others.

Is it simply that, after four years of being beaten up with good-versus-evil rhetoric and post-9/11 fear, somehow all superheroes seem vaguely Republican to us? It’s back to Nietzsche for one more shot.

The Incredibles’ storyline, not unlike most current superhero storylines, will warm the hearts of the Republican elite, and also the scared, ordinary moviegoing folks emboldened by America’s long-time military prowess. Mr. Incredible could be Dick Cheney himself, or Donald Rumsfeld, big-bellied and in mothballs during the Clinton years, watching the world go to hell while nobody needed them, tortured and beat up by the little people and the bureaucrats all around them.

Hat Tip: Tim Blair

From a moderate woman, Open Letter to the Democratic Party, How you could have had my vote. Like many of us, see seems upset by the “screaming over substance” tone of this last election.

Hat tip: Winds Of Change

Because all but one of them are glad Arafat is dead.

Now, I am too, I was just too polite to say it.

Since every one else is saying though, fine:

Ding Dong the Witch is dead, the witch is dead…

Seriously. Turning down Clinton was the last bonehead move in a history of bonehead moves. I’ve always called him AraTheif because he kept getting richer and fatter the more the Palestinians starved.

If only it were true:

The curse of Chrenkoff strikes - I write about the guy and about an hounr later he dies.

Now if only he would write something about Bin Laden…

So Martha Stewart, who was convicted of insider trading for selling a stock she’d tried to sell 3 times before, and had discussed selling with her broker, goes to the big house, but Senators get a free pass?

State Run Television

Ok, that was the short version. Here’s the long version.

Most of old Europe has some form of Socialism, and in my experience, a culture of mediocrity. Sort of a “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down” mindset. They have a few cowboys, but not enough because their culture really enforces a sort of groupthink mentality.

That’s one of the reasons that many of the more ambitious Europeans still emigrate to the US.

As a system engineer, I’m always looking for feedback loops and how things interact.

And it hit me today. Most European countries also have television run by the state. Now in US television, we have a set of cowboys competing for ratings. In Europe, the TV is run by a combination of the bureaucracy and the intelligentsia.

So in the US, we get lots of sex and violence, and we end up with lots of cowboys. In Europe, you get all the excitement of a show designed by a committee, along with government propaganda to “conform”, plus some naked boobies occasionally. Despite the lack of naked boobs, some of the highest rated shows on the government television tend to be old US reruns.

It’s all the fault of state run television, its driving the cowboys out of their culture. Death to the BBC!

The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project has issued this report assessing claims that the discrepancy between exit polls and actual vote in certain jurisdictions provides evidence of voting machine fraud. The report finds no evidence that electronic voting machines or any other type of equipment were used to “steal” votes.

Hat tip: Equal Vote

From Winds of Change

It’s a long post, especially if you read all the other posts by other bloggers that it refers to, but its worth the read.

The Noise being the local monthly paper I write a column for. This month’s will be about debunking the draft myth, and I’ll post it in a few days after I figure the real world copies are out.

Though I’m not sure why. Its not like any of my readers were going to fly to Flagstaff in order to get their free copy of the Noise. Somehow though, it seems like minimal politeness to my editor to not broadcast stuff on the Internet first.

This month is a first as its the first column I wrote specifically for the paper, rather then retooling one of my longer blog postings. Usually I take one of my 1500 word missives and trim it down to 900 words.

I notice that many of the academic bloggers who voted for Bush identified themselves as “Libertarians”. That seems to be code for “Republican”, because you can’t admit you might be conservative in academia I guess. Being a “Libertarian” is ok though?

You can’t be a conservative, but you can be far enough out on the right that you don’t believe in government at all?

Glad I’m not an academic…

For reasons that are complex to explain, but basically, because NCLB forces our schools to actually see if they are working as schools.

Eduwonk from my Blog Roll is a fan as well, but today he? got a letter from an urban administrator praising NCLB. Its nice to hear stories from the trenches…

Read the Whole Thing

Here you go

Of Ayn Rand’s two most famous books, the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged I prefer the Fountainhead. Ayn Rand wrote about the Artist vs. the Political Correctness in 1945. It really says everything I wish the Left understood about why I detest their rhetoric. It’s quite possible to be both liberal and fascist, I don’t fear the right’s obsession with abortion with nearly the same dread as I fear the left’s obsession with political correctness.

Yet its Atlas Shrugged that I find most useful in my life. Like Fountainhead, Atlas clearly displays Rand’s contempt for those who talk versus those who do. This time the hero is not an Artist, he is a engineer and industrial magnate. In Atlas, rather then fighting the good fight against the forces of evil (and losing), the people who actually do all the work just leave the forces of evil (the talkers and parasites) to their own devices.

Of course, civilization collapses…

Which brings us to the election. The Democrats would really like to believe:

• Losing wasn’t their fault
• Republicans are Evil
• The Voters are Stupid

None of those are true no matter how much the Democrat’s might like to believe it. The real issue is much more simple, but to really understand why the Democrat’s lost, Atlas Shrugged is required reading.

Here’s are chart for you to look at that really illustrates what happend:

The annual Punkin’ Chunkin’ contest was over the weekend.

Now see, if I was a terrorist, stuff like that would scare me. I mean, this is what American’s do for fun, we compete to see how far we can shoot a pumpkin with a cannon.

Imagine what we could do if we were serious?

Hat Tip: Eduwonk, who says ” It’s a great way for students to learn about physics, engineering, sportsmanship, and c’mon, it’s a whole lot of fun… Eduwonk thinks this that in addition to their obvious sagaciousness; this school won the youth trebuchet division!”

The “Youth Trebuchet division”. The mind boggles. A Trebuchet is a type of catapult for those unfamiliar with medieval siege engines. So basically, we’re teaching our youth how to storm castles. For fun.

In other news, it seems we invaded Fallujah today. Maybe we can load any foreign-born insurgents into a trebuchet and send them back to their homeland…

Look at it here

It shows relative percentages of blue, purple and red by county.

Voter Registration began in Iraq on Monday. That’s pretty cool.

Hat tip: Mudville Gazette

Who is a conservative mole inside our own State Department:

Most State types, deep inside, believe that the primary purpose of American diplomacy is not to advance our country’s geo-strategic interests, but to provide for them a prestigious career in which their unusual talents (e.g. foreign languages) and interests (foreign lands) are properly valued and appreciated (Note: there’s precious little demand in the real world for experts on the history of Venezuelan political parties). This is a mindset that makes too many diplomats contemptuous of most ordinary Americans, who, in their view, are narrow-minded and boorish. You see the looks of bemused disbelief around the conference table - especially an AID one - whenever anyone suggests that a policy decision should be governed by the interest of the American taxpayer.

So, we were all minding our business one fine day, when one of these very boors - from Texas, no less - turned our little world upside down. It’s not that Bush is a Republican, or conservative, or overly aggressive. It’s that he’s NOT a member of the club of Those of Us Who Understand These Things. As such, he had no right to redefine our foreign policy and security doctrine overnight. Certainly not without first commissioning many feasibility studies and blue-ribbon panels informed, of course, by Us. As a result “all our allies” hate us, and our international relations have been set back years

Read the Whole Thing

The President’s press conference from yesterday.

Interesting to compare the transcript with the news stories. All politicians give thoughtful, reasoned answers in general, which the media dumbs down to irrelevancy.

Here’s a 3D version of the red county/blue county map.

Kind of debunks the whole “we’ll all join Canada” thing…big parts of even Oregon were red…

First a review of that Kansas book so no one wastes their money.

Here are some facts debunking the “moral values” poll:

If the Los Angeles Times’ pollsters, which allowed multiple choice answers, are to be believed (a big caveat), 40% of voters voted on “Moral/Ethical Values”, with Bush leading, while only 15% voted on “Social issues such as abortion and gay marriage”—where the vote was evenly split!

Here’s a rant by the same guy on the subject. He’s a gay bush voter if I remember correctly. I had an interesting conversation with him about a constitutional amendment, how it might be a good idea in a different form if it just explicitly let states go their own way.

And finally, here’s a survey by the BBC with a lot of good responses. Sounds to me like a lot of people made informed decisions.

From a “market-based environmental group”. You can read it here.

While that’s not a great grade, it “suggests that the Bush administration has improved slightly on the Clinton administration in bringing market approaches into environmental policy.” Bush was better then Clinton? Hmm…

Here’s an interesting quote to whet your appetite:

Activists have created the impression that the Bush administration has virtually ended air pollution regulation in the United States. In reality, the administration has taken a series of actions that will eliminate the vast majority of remaining air emissions.

Which everyone should subscribe to, its a great magazine:

Here’s the Article.

Here’s the conclusion:

Finally, a word of unsolicited advice to scientists who want to play in the public policy arena. Facts by themselves do not immediately entail the adoption of particular policies. Many of the scientific “facts” cited by activists arise from contested epidemiological data and controversial computer models. For example, if humanity is significantly warming the planet, it is entirely possible that the best policy is to encourage rapid technological progress and economic growth so that any problems caused by such warming can be dealt with more effectively and fairly in the future. And how does one make the trade-off between possibly harming a few species of birds through the use of DDT, and using the insecticide to prevent the deaths of millions of people each year from malaria? These are political decisions. Suggestive scientific data certainly help guide our decisions, but they do not mandate any particular policies—not even those championed by the most brilliant researchers.</