The Opinionated Bastard

To the Left: Capitalism is not universally bad.
To the Right: Capitalism is not universally good.

We don't have a capitalist society in this country, we have a "democratic capitalist" society. Marx might have been right in that unfettered capitalism can lead inevitably to fascism, but not in a democratic society. In a democratic society, capitalism has lead to more wealth for everyone, and has proved its self superior to any other system.

So capitalism must exist in a system of checks and balances. The market always wins though, so those checks and balances must be carefully defined. You have to make tradeoffs. While the minimum wage raised the standard of living for some people, it also increased unemployment.

To the Left: Unions are not always right
To the Right: Businesses are not always right

Personal note: My mother was the shop steward in her union, but she hated their politics. My grandfather was imprisoned in Leavenworth for running a labor union, but though Communism was evil.

While workers are the means of production, that production is in competition with other workers. The market always wins. The union leadership is not always reasonable, neither is management. Don't shortchange your workers, don't strike yourself out of a job.

To the Left: Left wing totalitarian regimes are evil
To the Right: Right wing totalitarian regimes are evil

While the US did a certain amount of support for right wing regimes during the Cold War, its substantially backing off from that now. What both sides have yet to realize is that ALL totalitarian regimes are evil, and the US should now work to eliminate them. Both the right and the left should applaud whenever one of these regimes falls, not selectively applaud based on the stated politics of the regime.

To the Left: We are not all going to become slaves to a conspiracy of multi-national corporations. Even in cases where actions by someone can be traced back to the profit motive, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Capitalism works. It makes good movies, but the world is a lot more complex then Noam Chomsky thinks.

To the Right: Individual power is a precious and fragile thing. Freedom of choice is important. Its too easy for corporations to break the law with minimal consequences.

To the Left: The death penalty is appropriate in certain cases
To the Right: The death penalty as applied in this country is rarely appropriate.

To the Left: Being a Christian is not a bad thing, its a good thing.
To the Right: The first lesson of Christianity: Watch out for the church elders.

Being a Christian used to imply the virtues of tolerance, charity and compassion. While I think that's still true, that's not the Christians who show up on television, they are always judgmental, greedy and uncompassionate. Ironically, this is the same thing Christ told us to watch out for. Its the church elders who nailed him to the cross. For an extreme example of this, see Iran.

To the Left: Family Values Work
To the Right: That doesn't make them the law.

Children who can grow up in whole, stable homes in general will do better then others. That doesn't mean that should become the law. We all have to make our own way in the world, and its not clear that growing up in a whole but unstable home would be better.

To the Left: Abortion is bad
To the Right: Choice is good

Its shameful the number of abortions that are performed in this country. That doesn't mean it should be illegal, instead we should promote alternatives like emergency contraception. Ultimately, people have to have the freedom to live their lives, but we should work together to try to reduce the abortion rate by 75% (the effectiveness of emergency contraception).

My wife was driving from our house in Flagstaff to Laughlin, Nevada to pick up our nephew (he comes and visits with us every summer). She got as far as Bellemont when about a quarter mile up the road, she saw a bunch of people breaking and a bunch of green barrels rolling across the road.

The nuclear train had just jumped the tracks.

All I know so far. She’s back now (not radioactive as far as I can tell. :-) ), she’ll probably go out tomorrow instead, nothing on the news about it so far.

So my wife tells me that while they didn’t call it a “nuclear” train, it was the presence of green barrels with red radiation symbols marked on them that freaked out some of her fellow travelers and had them start running away.

The police came quickly with bullhorns and evacuated the area, because they were worried about “radiation”.

I haven’t found any mention of it yet on any of the AZ DOT sites:

AZ511

Looking for “green nuclear barrels” on Google didn’t turn up anything, I wonder how waste or other radioactive stuff is transported?

I-40 has been reopened. When I called DPS (the AZ version of the Highway Patrol), they said that there was a hazmat problem, but that they’ve cleaned it up.

I wonder if it was a truck instead of a train?

Couldn’t find anywhere that lists hazmat reports for Arizona on the internet though.

I’ve seen a lot of hysterical stuff around about how the Bush administration is going to “steal your vote” unless the populace insists on having paper records…

Which just bugs me. Paper in itself is not going to prove that a voters vote has been correctly recorded. A computer can display one thing, print a second thing, and record a third.

While paper is invaluable in testing, it becomes a more complex issue in actual voting, because now you have 60,000,000 pieces of paper to deal with. Which means machine counting of those pieces of paper, which brings us back to square one…

It turns out that voting is a very complex problem. Voting has to be:

1. Secret
2. Anonymous
3. Verified.
4. Easy.

Out of 1, 2, and 3, any two of these would be easy, but doing all 3 is pretty complex. #4 is important because we don’t want to disenfranchise people who are slightly computerphobic, or just elderly. Right now, the EAC (Electoral Action Commission) is concentrating on #4, while they are relying on an IEEE commission to deal with 1-3.

Now verification is a new requirement, that we never had before. If you think about it, no one at any previous polling place gave you any garuntees that your vote was recorded. You just trusted the polling place workers to do their job. With electronic voting, some sort of verification seems necessary, but insisting on paper isn’t going to help solve the real problems with electronic voting, and it won’t ensure that votes get verified.

I think the new voting systems deserve a lot of attention, but they require someone to dig in and really understand the issues involved, not just report hysterically about votes being stolen. Once you dig in, you’ll find that voting is actually a pretty complex process, and anytime you add computers to a complex process, things get complicated quickly.

Adding verification to the mix makes it even more complicated. You want people to be able to double check that their vote was correctly recorded, but you also want to ensure that they can’t then turn around and use that to prove that they voted for so-and-so, or people can buy votes.

My take on this whole issue is that people are thinking too simplistically. For example, if I went to vote, if that vote was transmitted a third party like the ACLU, and I had someway to confirm that, I’d be happy with that. Once I left the voting place, the ACLU would then refuse any confirmation requests for me, which would preserve the secrecy requirement. Of course, each vote would be transmitted to multiple people, like the Democratic and Republican parties, CNN, etc.

Perhaps I could even confirm it over my cell phone, laptop computer, whatever. There would be lots of different ways.

And none of that would involve paper.

View it Here

Its a photo essay showing how women in Iran deal with the religious restrictions.

Women always know how to look pretty. :-)

Read about Yanis Kanidis

In an act of unlimited devotion and dedication, to the bitter end, an elderly teacher insisted on remaining with his students. He protected them, bandaged their wounds, and with his death, saved their lives.

Read the whole thing. It’s about a brave teacher in Beslan.

I used to think I was moderate.

Then I was talking the other day to a local teacher about No Child Left Behind because while I support the law, its a huge, ambitious piece of legislation and I expect it to have teething problems. (not that I trust Kerry to fix them, only Bush, but I digress)

She started on this long, granola-and-Birkenstocks rant about how children shouldn't be "forced to learn to read".

I was just dumbstruck. I couldn't have been more shocked if she pulled off her head to reveal she was a space alien. How do you even talk to someone who lives in such a bizarro land that they don't think that schools should do, well, their freaking job? This was from a schoolteacher? Arrgh! I'll say it again. Arrgh!

I just wanted to smack her. Its my goddamn tax dollars that pay her friggin' salary, and if she doesn't want to teach kids to read, I'd like my money back please.

Then I had to hear about how testing kids "stigmatized" the ones who didn't pass.

Let's see, which is worse. Getting an "F" once and having to get a tutor, or spending the next 80 years saying "Would you like fries with that?"

Then I came home and realized that if that's the friggin' left, then I must be way over on the right. "Should'nt be forced to learn to read." It still makes me shudder. I thought that many of the people who disagreed with me on politics must be lefties. Now I know that the people I was talking to must have been liberal Republicans or something, because we could still actually communicate as human beings.

Arrgh! I'll say it again. Arrgh!

Because God has a sense of humor.

Let’s hear it for tolerance and compassion, those sorely neglected Christian virtues.

Well, I saw the latest from the South Park guys. It was funny. I won’t get it on DVD, because I probably couldn’t watch it over and over, unlike South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.

After 9/11, I read this great essay on the web that talked about how the terrorists shouldn’t have messed with America, because we were crazy. It was called, Only a Crazy Person Picks a Fight with Someone Who’s Nuts . It then went on to document all the wild and silly things found in this land of ours. While watching this movie, I was reminded of that essay, because I kept wondering, what will the rest of the world think of this movie? Will they realize that America does get “it”, that we know that violence can be a dead end, that life isn’t like a Bruckheimer movie? Will they also realize that in turn, you can’t always fight evil with sternly worded memos?

I managed to dig up the original link to the essay, but it seems the original site was eaten by the dot-com-bomb. However, through diligent searching, I found the author’s new blog, and found his most recent posting of it. Which you can read here

Here’s a taste:

To those extremists that perpetrated this crime against our nation, I have a warning for you. There are those of us who look at your actions as irrational, twisted, and completely inhuman. By all measures, what you have done can only be seen as insane.

I have news for you. We’re more fucking nuts than you, and it should scare you shitless.

We eat whole pizzas with a single diet Coke and think we’re eating healthy. Taking a single pill from GNC that can cause heart attacks, psychosis, strokes, and even death just so we can metabolize that pizza faster makes it even healthier. And then, despite countless numbers of starving people throughout the world that could have used the food besides us, we go to the bathroom and puke it all up just to stay thin.

We made a sequel to Police Academy 5.

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!

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

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. )

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.

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.

Over at Slant Point

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

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

You’ve seen her on mudflaps. Lots, and lots of mudflaps.

Feminists have ranted about her as an objectification of women. Thelma and Louise made fun of her, and the truck drivers who displayed her.

But do you know her story?

It seems that when mudflaps first came out, they had a problem.

The mudflaps would fray at the end, because as truck tires picked up rocks, the rocks would fly at the mud flaps, tearing them. Gradually, the mudflap would fray away at the end, until it wasn’t offering very much protection to other drivers.

This meant that you had to replace the mudflaps fairly often. Even worse, if a mudflap wore excessively, you could get an expensive ticket for having an inadequate mudflap.

Then, Frank Bosworth hit on the idea of placing a little piece of metal on the back of the mudflap to reinforce it.

His mudflaps lasted 10 times longer then anyone else’s. Pretty soon, if you were going to buy a mudflap, you were going to buy one from Frank.

The shape of that piece of metal? He designed it off a picture he had of his wife from their first date. They went to the beach together, and he snapped that picture. It had been on his desk ever since. She’d died of cancer that year, and he wanted to remember her as she was.

Because of his patent, for years, the only long lasting mudflaps you could get were Frank’s, and he refused to change the design. His patent has expired now, so you can get mudflaps in other designs now.

Which is too bad really. By the way, her name was Lisa.

So the next time you see a Mud Flap Madonna, you’re really seeing a sign that says “Frank Loves Lisa”.

Hosted at SophistPundit

I got top billing!

Not Safe For Work (but free):

Yowsa! Or this one? Hell, why stop there? :1 2 3 4

Maybe its just me, but if you look at the examples above, it seems like they’re both higher quality and much nastier then the American equivalents. (Without being particularly misogynistic.)

Please Lord, save me from the self-righteous.

So my wife and I went to the local health food store for some sandwiches, and plastered all over the parking lot I see these signs that say No Bookstore Parking.

So let me get this straight. Four days out of the entire year, college students come to that bookstore to trade in the useless ravings of college professors they were forced to purchase for some badly needed cash. Yet the health food store, which is often so busy the other 361 days that their parking spills over into the bookstore parking, they're offended? So much for living in peace and harmony with our fellow man.

It wouldn't be so annoying if the store didn't sell the sorts of magazines that claim that if it wasn't for the evil of corporations, we'd all be living happily together in the forest off of nuts and berries at peace with one another. There are several problems with this theory:

1. The health food store itself is a corporation.

2. Have you ever tried to live off nuts and berries? Give me a cheeseburger any day!

3. The people I see in the health food store always look sickly. The people I see in the butcher look healthy. Do the math.

4. All the people I know who shop exclusively at health food stores are terrible cooks.

5. I can't think of anything worse then living with the people I meet in health food stores.

6. After living in Flagstaff for awhile, when its January 15th and I'm looking out the windows of my house watching it snow horizontally, and I'm warm and toasty, I kind of appreciate those evil energy companies...

But the real point for me is that these days, when I meet someone who is smugly certain that their world view is 100% correct, that God and all his Angels are on their side, chances are he's wearing a T-Shirt and Birkenstocks. The whole thing with the parking lot is typical. Inside, they sell these magazines promoting peace and harmony; outside they're towing customers cars away.

All those people who grew up in the 60's have to realize that to a Generation-Xer like myself, they've become the Establishment, and frankly, people being people, they're just as smug, self-satisfied, and close-minded as the guys in suits and crew cuts they replaced.

Typically, in Flagstaff last week, smoking got banned in bars as well as restaurants. Now a few years ago, I wouldn't have thought about it, and given that my wife smoked, I would have been secretly glad. But then I started working in the Taoist healing clinic at my martial arts studio. I found out from working on healing people there that all the people that smoked, drank too much, whatever, had some sort of health problem. It's not that people were addicted to cigarettes, as much as they were self-medicating.

From a healing point of view, cigarettes and alcohol are terrible “herbs” in that they have bad side effects beyond the effect the person is taking them for. On the other hand, they're widely available, and the quality control is good. In our clinic, we don't treat the alcohol or nicotine addiction, instead we treat the underlying health problem. Eventually, the patient stops on their own.

If you talk to the people that pushed this sort of thing through, they'll tell you all about how they're pushing through the smoking ban for “health” reasons.

Hmmmph. I think you just deprived sick people of their medicine.

In the 20th century, left-wing governments killed more people and caused more misery then right-wing governments. For all that left-wing people like to call right-wingers “Nazis”, Nazi is short for National Socialist.

To paraphrase Jesus, I'd rather hang out with a bunch of strippers then a bunch of left-wing political activists; the strippers are probably a better class of people. Come to think of it, hanging out with capital-C-Christians wouldn't be so bad either; annoying as they are, they usually mean well and given the dominance of the hippies, they're often more open minded. (I'm a little-c christian myself.) The liberals hippies I meet are sometimes well-meaning, but rarely open-minded.

I like Ahrnold, but ugh

My entry about Goose-Stepping Hippies was in the Carnival of the Vanities this week. Also in there was this piece called Liberal Fundamentalism by Mahatma over at the Loonatic Left, on a similar theme.

I know, I know, its supposed to be the reverse.

But they sent me the necessary paperwork to me for any sort of health care directive thing, with all their decisions spelled out.

I know it was hard for them, because it seems less remote then it does to me. But they did it.

I know, I know, its supposed to be the reverse.

But they sent me the necessary paperwork to me for any sort of health care directive thing, with all their decisions spelled out.

I know it was hard for them, because it seems less remote then it does to me. But they did it.

Here's a link

I had some problem with my email, so I was behind on blog comments, so I ended up reading a month’s worth of ernie the troll’s invective at one sitting. Then today, I read this piece.

Enough whining!

Bad enough when ernie the troll does it, now Peggy Noonan is whining too? Someone who was part of the Reagan administration’s message of optimism has just written one of the most depressing things I’ve read in years?

Gah.

Every person in America lives better then the Kings of the past lived. There is no better time to be alive then right now. Even the poorest person in the poorest country in the world lives better now then their king lived 200 years ago.

We’re now whining because a category 5 hurricane directly hit a city of 25 million people and 500 people died?

500 people used to die in a city of that size every time it got cold. A storm like that used to kill thousands of people. Ever hear of the Johnstown flood? Half the town died in that one.

We’re now whining because unemployment is whatever it is? There used to be slavery; unemployment meant you starved to death.

We’re now whining because the President’s choice might not have been from the top ten nominees? The Supreme Court started with people who now wouldn’t even qualify for being a clerk. When we started this country, someone like Harriet Meirs would have been a nominee for Chief Justice.

We’re now whining because someone might have the capability to blow us up. Sure, that’s bad, got me there. Meanwhile though, more of the world is at peace then every before in human history.

We’re now whining about a self-created tempest in a teapot about whether it was a “secret” that the wife of an ambassador was a spy. All ambassador’s wives are spies. It’s their job.

Perspective people. It’s all about perspective. I’m all for continuing the human race’s quest for perfection.

But lets not forget how good we have it really.

It used to be that every day, the best musicians in the world would come to my home and play music for me.

But that wasn’t good enough. So the best musicians in the world had to follow me wherever I went and play for me there. But I still wasn’t satisfied, I wanted more variety, there were plenty of mediocre musicians who had just one song that I liked. So they started following me too.

If I was Queen Elizabeth maybe once a day, 5 hacks from the local stews would come and bang on some instruments for me. They would probably suck, but it would be something to do while avoiding getting killed in my sleep by my “court”. President Bush only has to worry about members of his administration screwing up; Queen Elizabeth had to worry about members of her administration cutting off her head.

Throughout history, its always been optimists who’ve accomplished the great things. The glass isn’t half empty, its full nearly to the brim when we consider modern life, and its worth remembering that.

Follow the Link

Previously: What if the Tin Foil Hat Brigade is right?

Update: Here's a rebuttal

I like the fact that the rebuttal caught the original post in a lie, they're using Chef's Pride Aluminum foil instead of Reynold's as they state in their article. I also think its pretty funny that they tied the MIT Media lab into the whole mind control conspiracy thing:

Most relevant here, a Media Lab research group called “Society of the Mind” (secret societies have long been involved in mind control) is involved in the DARPA funded CHIP: Comprehensive Human Intelligence Project, which “aims to develop a 'Cognitive Architecture' inspired by the observed structure and dynamics of the human brain/mind system” and is part of a larger DARPA program called Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architecture. DARPA gave Media Lab US$1,032,627 for this black project, about which no information can be found.

Also interesting was this:

Aluminum was originally named “alumium” by Sir Humphry Davy, who later changed it to “aluminum” (perhaps in an attempt to make it more Latinized since alumen is Latin for alum, the aluminum compound that the name is derived from). The British (and allied English speakers) shortly thereafter changed the name once more, this time to “aluminium” so that it would again match the pattern of most other elements (helium, sodium, etc.), while the North Americans eventually decided to keep the second, slightly more traditional name. I predict that North Americans will adopt the more regular “-ium” spelling by the year 2050, prompting the British to start calling it “alumininium”. At that point debate can begin on changing “platinum” to “platinium”

From this page. I love the internet.

Venezuela is driving their Jews away

Ever notice how countries that lose all their Jews end up biting the big one? I'm not trying to be anti-Semitic or even pro-Semitic here. All my Jewish friends suck at managing their money, so I don't believe Jews are any better with money than anyone else.

I'm just saying that Egypt used to be the richest country in the world. Then the Jews left , and wham! there goes the empire. (That was a Moses joke). The Romans came up with the Diaspora, and wham! there goes the empire.

And of course, there's the Palestinians, and the rest of the Middle East for that matter. All the Jews move to Israel and the next thing you know, the Middle East, except for Israel, is a toilet.

I'm just saying...maybe Jews ARE the chosen people, like they keep telling us, and we shouldn't fuck with them. In fact, maybe we should actively recruit Jews, because it seems like countries with more Jews do better. Maybe Jews are lucky!

BTW, you should in no way take this blog post seriously.