there is a tide

“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.”

President Barak Obama

Komen for… Komen

(Another posting complaining about some Internet sighting of an organization behaving badly. A pretty boring subject area in general, or mundane at least, but there’s alot of it out there. We hope to return to our accustomed surreality sometime soon.)

So it’s been reasonably obvious for some time that the Susan G. Komen Foundation is at least as interested in the Susan G. Komen Foundation as it is in, say, finding a cure for any particular disease. When an organization starts using contributor funds to send out attack teams of lawyers after charities that use the word “cure” or the color pink, you know something’s gone off the rails.

Well now that same Komen Foundation has cut off their funding to Planned Parenthood, because (huge surprise) Certain People don’t like Planned Parenthood. Certain People have never liked Planned Parenthood, because they provide contraception (see Comstock Laws and more recently Rick Santorum), and even abortions.

Planned Parenthood uses the Komen funds to pay for breast exams for women who are too young for routine mammograms, but these Certain People have always been more interested in preventing sex and defending the rights of microscopic fertilized eggs than they have in the health of actual walking-around people. So if they can hurt an abortion provider at the cost of some breast cancer deaths, they’re all over it.

Here’s a nice wannabe-viral banner:

Spread it aroun’…

(Although I don’t think they really needed the second apostrophe there; it’s defensible, but barely.)

They were here just a minute ago…

So by now y’all’ve no doubt heard that Rick “Santorum” Santorum has been retconned in as the winner (or, technically, the person with the most votes recorded when a tie was declared) in the Iowa Republican Caucuses. (He is also the “anal sex and bestiality” choice of evangelical Christians in the upcoming South Carolina primary, their other choice being the “adultery and Catholicism” candidate, Newt “Newt” Gingrich. Must be so tough to be a Republican these days, Evangelical or not.)

For some reason the thing that strikes me about this is not the retconning, but the fact that they’re officially reporting a tie because in eight precincts the votes cannot somehow be found. I very much enjoyed this:

Lee County GOP Chairman Don Lucas, who had four of the noncertified precincts in his county, said he believes supporters of a candidate — he’s not sure which — took the certification form to report to the candidate how the candidate did and never brought it back.

Durn it all, eh?

We thought it would be amusing to exercise our remote telepathic abilities to determine the causes of all eight of the missing counts, so here they are:

Precinct of Little Lunkwort (Lee County): Romney supporters take the certification form, showing a narrow victory by Santorum, to show to Romney; not finding Romney around anywhere, they inadvertently shred it.

South Goshen Precinct (Lee County): Santorum supporters take the certification form, showing a narrow victory by Romney, to show to Santorum; not finding Santorum around anywhere, they inadvertently burn it to a fine ash.

Spotty Nose Precinct (Lee County): Precinct hit by giant meteor, certification form destroyed.

Precinct of the Eleven (Lee County): Dog ate it.

South Franklin Precinct (Franklin County): Caucus devolved into wild beer-party, next morning no one could remember what happened to certificate. Possibly swallowed. Or never filled out at all. Did we actually ever vote, for that matter?

Precinct Precinct (Buchanan County): Martha Lewis started to fill out the form, but her husband Pete said she was doing it all wrong and grabbed the pen, and then Jean Garvey found something in the caucus handbook that she said meant they all had to vote all over again anyway, and Martha started to cry, and Pete was yelling, and everyone sort of decided to forget the whole thing and go home.

Lucas Precinct #2 (Lucas County): Romney supporters take the certification form, showing a narrow victory by Romney, to show to Romney; SUV plummets off a cliff on the way, form destroyed.

Clarion Precinct (Wright County): Certification form dispatched to party headquarters via Pony Express; rider and form devoured by wolves en route.

Dangerous times, I tell ya, dangerous times…

Sullivan on Obama

If you haven’t read Andrew Sullivan’s “How Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics“, you should; it summarizes lots of good stuff that this administration has done, and provides lots of solid meaty evidence against spurious Republican attacks.

On criticism of the President from the left, I don’t think he does nearly as good a job. This is the kind of thing:

[H]e has signed into law the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial (even as he pledged never to invoke this tyrannical power himself). But he has done the most important thing of all: excising the cancer of torture from military detention and military justice.

Implying (without actually saying, because it would sound ridiculous) that the indefinite-detention stuff is okay, because of something entirely different and good that he did.

And on the whole “executing American citizens without trial” thing (which this administration has actually done), Sullivan says exactly nothing.

I left a comment over on the Liberal Values entry on this subject (which reprints a nice swathe of the Sullivan piece and finishes “none of these issues would be made better by having a Republican in the White House”) and I’ll post it here also for good measure:

I like a lot of what Sullivan says. But he also omits, or passes far too swiftly over.

Can we explain indefinite detention of citizens in terms of some subtle and benign “long game”, or in terms of the limitations of what a President can accomplish? If Sullivan can, it would be a great relief to hear it. But he just zips right by it, implying that it’s okay because Obama has promised not to use that blatantly unconstitutional power himself, and besides he got rid of torture, which Sullivan says is more important.

And Sullivan doesn’t even mention execution of citizens without trial, which Obama has actually *done*.

Can we explain the continued harassment and prosecution of marijuana dispensaries that are legal under their state laws, and the general continued wasting of Federal dollars on marijuana enforcement, in Sullivan’s benign terms? Maybe he can; I’d love to hear it.

Of course liberals realize that none of this means it would have been better if some Republican was President! But on the other hand Obama’s defenders have to realize that that argument is by no means an effective counterargument to any and all criticism of what he has done. I agree with Sullivan that much of the criticism is just flatly false. It would be nice if he would, on his side, acknowledge that some of it is true, and some of that is nontrivial…

One the one hand, during an election cycle it’s very tempting to want to minimize any criticism of the preferable candidate, for fear that it might lead to enough voters staying home that the other candidate wins. But if we’re talking about Long Games, we also need to realize that only through honest criticism of even the good guys, do we maximize our chances of things getting better.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Off to Florida for a memorial service for Dad at his church down here. It will be good to talk about him to more people who knew him, and to hear from people who knew him in this part of his life.

I decided to bring only the iPad, because it’s just a few days and it let me travel very very light, just my Christmas present messenger bag. Bringing the big laptop (and therefore the cooling pad) would have at least doubled the space and weight, and bringing the work laptop would probably have meant doing work, and I’m still on vacation, dagnabbit!

(I did do work email on Monday; fortunately it looks like basically nothing significant happened after I wrote the triumphant “we’re all done for the year!” email and teleported away.)

So I miss SL, and to an extent I miss WoW (although with WoW the longer I don’t play it the less I tend to miss it), and I even miss Portal (stayed up late Monday night installing it on the big laptop via Steam, and getting I think about halfway through the post-chamber-19 section; having played through it before on the playroom computer definitely helps).

But I’m catching up with Twitter and the news (How about them wacky Iowa Republican caucuses, eh?), and here I am writing in the weblog even. So that’s all good.

Fascinating to see the Twitterverse getting Verizon to back off of a new nickel-and-diming fee, just like the Bank of America one last month, and the whole splitting-up-Netflix thing (“Qwikster” lol) before that.

Keep an eye on the “Paypal forces destruction of antique violin” story; maybe the next crowd-driven policy change.

(How is that even legal? If Paypal doesn’t make the payment, presumably the object is still owned by the almost-seller, so how can they make the almost-buyer, who doesn’t own it, destroy it? Very odd…)

I need to write more sometime about my disillusion with the big-L, and to some extent the small-l, libertarians, and with Ron Paul in particular. Pains me a bit now that I once voted for him for President, although I’m not entirely unhappy with the message that I intended that to send.

Government truly is pretty bad at various things. Some of those are things that therefore the government shouldn’t do. But significant ones are ones that we need the government to do, and that therefore our only option is to have them do it, and keep a really close watch over them (over ourselves) at the same time.

Even if we take the libertarian line that the only proper role of government is to prevent force, theft, and fraud (and I’m no longer sure that I do), it turns out you still need a significantly large government, because force, theft, and fraud can be big, subtle, powerful, and very well organized. However much we might want to believe it, Sheriff Taylor isn’t going to keep either Organized Crime from terrorizing the countryside, or Big Business from polluting the water, or Wall Street from stealing billions of dollars from its customers, with just his smile and a comical deputy or two.

It’s bright and sunny and unusually cold in Florida this morning; frost on the car windows! Pretty though. I’m sitting looking out the big windows, typing with my thumbs and wondering how differently I write with this tool than with other ones. Another interesting question…

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

This is a season of homecomings, and military families across America are being reunited for the holidays. In the coming days, the last American soldiers will cross the border out of Iraq, with honor and with their heads held high. After nearly nine years, our war in Iraq ends this month. — Pres. O.

I figure with all the parody and Occupyin’ and stuff that’s been filling this weblog and my Facebook (“Facebook”) feed, I should post some happier stuff. That there “end of the Iraq war” thing seems like pretty happy stuff!

Also, Proposition 8 in California (the one re-banning same-sex marriage after the courts found it legal), seems to still be going down in flames, if very complexly. As you may recall :) the In re Marriage cases found same-sex marriage protected by the state constitution in 2008, Prop 8 amended the state constitution so it wouldn’t do that anymore, the U.S. District court found that to be in conflict with the U.S. Constitution in 2010 in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, with a temporary stay, which the Ninth Circuit then extended; with all that, and a constant flurry of lawsuits about whether gay judges should be able to judge cases involving gay people (zomg) and so on, the whole thing is quite in limbo, but it looks reasonably hopeful that some good law (not to mention some joyful marriages) might come out of it all.

For some reason I had a note to myself to weblogify about some recent event concerning Prop 8, but I’m not sure what it was. Presumably not just a rather technical ruling on standing, and anyway that was back in November.

Maybe I had a prognostic (prognostic? prophetic? precognitive?) dream. :)

Speaking of funny responses to Rick Perry’s stupid video from last time, here are a couple from Funny or Die that I also like:

and then there’s the rolling-on-the-floor laughing Bad Lipreading version (which WordPress doesn’t seem to want to embed), which leads us to a whole bunch of other hysterically funny Bad Lipreading things, of which my favorites at the moment are Newt Gingrich, Barak Obama:

(although I don’t think the music-video bits work all that well), and Mitt Romney:

and Ron Paul:

Give me Vaseline, for when I’m having these boring x-rays! :)

I am very fond of this meme…

Rick Perry is a Sorry Excuse for a Human Being

Not that this is any big news, but jeez.

Down in the polls, but still in play because the way the Republican race has been going he could suddenly be front-runner at any time. So, to stay relevant, attack gay people! And, explainable only by a complete lack of brain, specifically attack gay people in the military! (Because attacking our men and women in uniform is a tried-and-true way to win Republican — oh, wait…)

All this resulting in what is, thankfully, one of the most Disliked videos ever on YouTube, whose basic message is “there’s something wrong in America if both gays and non-Christians have their civil rights respected”:

Currently: 10,186 likes, 423,057 dislikes

And apparently there is an amusing mole in his wardrobe department or something, in that he is wearing what most viewers of the YouTube video will see as a Brokeback Mountain outfit in an anti-gay ad. (Perhaps the target audience of the video will see it as a Normal People outfit, but that’s not the YouTube viewership.)

There are of course a billion YouTube responses. A couple of pointed rational ones I like:

And two that are just funny, in evil ways:

It must be so painful to be a Republican right now…

Yay, I saved Europe(an bankers)!

Scene: a big fancy room in a big fancy building.

European Banker: You must help us! No one wants to trade in Euros, or borrow them at interest, or anything, because the economies that back them are all messed up!

Capitalist: This is a valuable market signal! The weak demand for, and vanishingly small interest rates on, your currency means that you are doing things wrong. You should reassess how your economies are structured and see if, for instance, they are run primarily for the benefit of politically-connected individuals and institutions who steal billions on a whim, but produce nothing of value.

European Banker: Who let him in here? GUARDS!

Shouts and scuffling, gradually receding into the distance.

European Banker: Apologies, my friends, most embarrassing.

U.S. Federal Reserve Banker: No problem, mon ami, these things happen.

European Banker: But back to our problems! If there is no demand for Euros, economic activity will slow, people will have financial difficulties, perhaps even come to think that our economies are run primarily for the benefit of politically-connected individuals and institutions who steal billions on a whim, but produce nothing of value. They could demand change! We might lose power! And we really, really, really like power.

U.S. Federal Reserve Banker: I understand completely, mon cher, mon coeur. It is not a problem! We will buy your Euros with our dollars, and we will pay as much for them as if they were actually valuable, and your economies healthy! We will make dollars cheap, cheap, cheap, and give you vast truckloads of them for your pretty colored Euros!

European Banker: Che bello, tesoro! That is wonderful! But what if the Euro does in fact tank? You will have huge piles of worthless colored paper!

U.S. Federal Reserve Banker: Όλα θα πάνε καλά, Αγαπούλα μου! Do not worry your head! In that case, the American people will as always make up the shortfall!

European Banker: ¡hala! That is extremely generous of them!

U.S. Federal Reserve Banker: Yes! Or it would be, if they had any choice in the matter! Ha ha ha!

European Bankers: Ha ha ha! xaxa! Ja ja ja ja! mdr mdr mdr!

Exeunt omnes.

The Political Side

Okay, so now I will write down some things about the political aspects of my visit to Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street, the Occupy folks in general, and stuff in general.

One very common complaint about the Occupy movement is that it doesn’t have a clear program, and isn’t about anything in particular. This, of course, is Just What The Bad Guys Want You To Believe, as amusingly depicted here:

Well, okay, one might respond, but just what is “economic injustice”?

I think most folks would respond that it’s the thing that underlies this:

There’s actually evidence that most folks (and not just most Occupying folks) consider that sort of thing to be economic injustice, and don’t realize just how bad it currently is; see for instance:

So there’s a good candidate for “what’s it actually about?”.

Another question, and this came up in the comments to our last entry, is okay if that’s the issue, what’s the plan? What’s the platform?

I have a couple of thoughts about this:

• The Occupy movement is very much nonhierarchical and led-by-everyone (somewhere on Friday I read something along the lines of “don’t mistake us for a leaderless movement; we are all leaders”, and I like that). So there isn’t going to be a Single Official Platform Approved By Everyone. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing; organized groups don’t necessarily do any better (waves at the Libertarian Party over there across the way). On the other hand, the movement does have some documents and statements that represent a consensus of certain people at a certain time; see for instance the Declaration of Occupation.
• Even if the plan is just “loudly express our concerns”, I personally think that that is a great plan. If nothing else, the Occupy movement has taken the focus away from the Tea Party’s astroturf platform of “give less money to the poor, and deregulate the powerful”, and moved it to something more like “punish criminal behavior by the powerful”. Which I consider to be a Much Better Message. If elected representatives start to see that message and others like it, and decide that there might be votes involved, we may see changes in behavior (I believe that we already have, in fact; I hope this isn’t the last, or the best, change that we see, and I doubt it will be).

There were various single-issue folks at Zuccotti when I was there; a few complaining that “The 1% Wear Fur”, the lady complaining that the college had lost all records of her daughter’s attending, the person with the very long detailed small-print sign about how the government had implanted radios in his teeth so on. There were a couple of cute young people with a sign that just said “Revolution”, getting their picture taken together. But that’s all okay! This is New York City, after all, and a political movement. That happens. While in fact anyone who comes into the Park with an opinion thereby makes that an opinion of the Occupation, I’m pretty sure that there are some opinions held by a more significant fraction of the folks than others.

The other week we listed some possible goals for Occupiers. I’ll reiterate them here, and add a few more.

• Tax income from capital gains just like any other income. For: why favor rich people (who get lots of capital gains income), after all? Con: if we don’t favor rich people, they might take their ball and go home.
• Let the Bush tax cuts expire like they were written to. Gets rid of most of the projected federal deficit with one blow.
• Regulate the shadow banking system about like we regulate the normal banking system. ’cause now we know that otherwise they go crazy.
• Bring back Glass-Steagall since on the whole it appears to have been a good idea after all.
• Announce that the U. S. Government will no longer be bailing out failed financial institutions beyond what’s in the FDIC and so on. “Moral hazard” ain’t just a theory anymore, eh?
• Stop lopsidedly favoring investment over savings in Federal economic policies. Savers are people, too.
• Regulate corporations. I know, kind of general. But as the very interesting The Conservative Nanny State points out (free pdf available), being able to create this fictional construct to shield yourself from liabilities is a huge benefit; government has a perfect right to require a certain amount of good behavior in exchange.
• More specifically, end corporate personhood, at least anything beyond the strictly legal and financial bits of it. In particular, there is no need whatsoever for these fictional entities to have a First Amendment right to freedom of speech, any more than they should have a right to vote. The officers and owners of the corporation can express themselves as they like, using their own resources and money; but the money belonging to the government-created entity should be used only for the legitimate business purposes of the entity, not to (for instance) lobby the government to increase their profits.
• Aggressively prosecute and convict (and get some of the billions back from) the people who ruined the world economy to enrich themselves. Seems like a no-brainer, but apparently not everyone is on board, even with prosecuting the most blatant and obvious parts of it, like fraudulent mortgage foreclosures.
• Remove those administration officials with the most obvious conflicts of interest. The argument that only these people have the skills to clean up the mess is unconvincing; the only skills we know they have are to make the mess in the first place, and to enrich themselves and their friends and firms. Get rid of ‘em.
• Abolish private prisons because it leads to stuff like this, which is just pure evil. (How do these people even look at themselves in the mirror?)
• Apply insider-trading rules to Congress just because duh.

The “end corporate personhood” and “abolish private prisons” and “apply insider-trading rules to Congress” ones are the new ones.

I’d be surprised if any significant fraction of Occupy folks would object to any of these, or even call them unimportant side-issues. So to the extent that this category of agenda-item starts to be seen as something that voters actually care about and vote based on, they may tend to get done. And to the extent that the Occupy folks loudly expressing their opinions helps them to be seen that way, they are advancing that agenda.

What else was I going to say?

Oh, yeah!

I don’t actually have anything directly against the wealthiest 1% of the American people (or any other group). If I wear a 99% button, I’m not primarily saying that I’m one of the 99% of people who make less than a certain amount of money. Mostly I mean that I’m one of the 99+% who didn’t fucking steal billions of dollars through financial fraud and then escape prosecution because I own the fucking government, and who don’t fucking pressure and/or bribe the government to put more people in jail, because I run a fucking private jail and get paid per inmate.

Or that sort of (fucking) thing.

You know?

Monday, October 17, 2011

I wear the chains I forged in life, mon!

Ha ha ha ha ha! We just came up with that in the office here. Maybe a little obscure, but it pleases me…

Secure yourself to heaven.
Hold on tight, the night has come.
Fasten up your earthly burdens,
You have just begun.
– Indigo Girls

That pleases me also, because I have no idea what it means, but it sounds neat.

I like to be able to think of the world as a deep and complex place, with lots of secrets and interesting things I haven’t seen yet, where the lit-up parts that I understand and inhabit are a nice small-and-secure corner from which one could venture out.

Songs sung in unknown tongues…

Be kind to me or treat me mean
I’ll make the most of it
I’m an extraordinary machine

Heard that on the radio yesterday (yesterday?), and liked it. Seems to be an original Fiona Apple; my main mental impression of Fiona Apple is that she is too thin. Maybe I should listen to some of her music! I wonder who else has covered this ditty.

What Do They Want?

Here is a This Modern World on the subject. (Apologies for any Daily Kos popovers or anything.)

My sympathies are to a large degree with the Occupy Wall Street (and Things In General) protestors (protesters?). As are even some folks at Fox, which gives me a warm feeling. I think.

So what is economic justice, in this context? I can think of a few examples that one might work for. I’m not sure whether or not I favor them all / each of them in any particular sense.

• Tax income from capital gains just like any other income. For: why favor rich people (who get lots of capital gains income), after all? Con: if we don’t favor rich people, they might take their ball and go home.
• Let the Bush tax cuts expire like they were written to. Gets rid of most of the projected federal deficit with one blow.
• Regulate the shadow banking system about like we regulate the normal banking system. ’cause now we know that otherwise they go crazy.
• Bring back Glass-Steagall since on the whole it appears to have been a good idea after all.
• Announce that the U. S. Government will no longer be bailing out failed financial institutions beyond what’s in the FDIC and so on. “Moral hazard” ain’t just a theory anymore, eh?
• Stop lopsidedly favoring investment over savings in Federal economic policies. Savers are people, too.
• Regulate corporations. I know, kind of general. But as the very interesting The Conservative Nanny State points out (free pdf available), being able to create this fictional construct to shield yourself from liabilities is a huge benefit; government has a perfect right to require a certain amount of good behavior in exchange.
• Aggressively prosecute and convict (and get some of the billions back from) the people who ruined the world economy to enrich themselves. Seems like a no-brainer, but apparently not everyone is on board, even with prosecuting the most blatant and obvious parts of it, like fraudulent mortgage foreclosures.
• Remove those administration officials with the most obvious conflicts of interest. The argument that only these people have the skills to clean up the mess is unconvincing; the only skills we know they have are to make the mess in the first place, and to enrich themselves and their friends and firms. Get rid of ‘em.

Seems like a nice start. Hello, White House and Congress and all? You there?

Let’s see, what else we got?

Two postings on how the “SCADA” systems that control things like air traffic and the electrical grid are really not all that mega-secure after all, and in fact are probably not any more secure than one might expect. Which is a little worrying.

High-Performance Computing at the National Security Agency, not a book title one would necessarily have expected to find on the open Web. :)

The Best Thread in the History of the Internet; and I think they have a plausible case to make for the title.

Fleepgrid, a fun example of someone’s personal desktop virtual world that they’ve made available to everyone, just because why not?

I’ve been playing Glitch, which is kind of fun in a silly and amusing and relaxing way. I think I have like three invitations; tell me if you want one! I’m Orbst.

(Glitch has gotten some very positive press lately, which is notable. I have no idea how long I’ll keep playing in it; I think (sort of like WoW and utterly unlike Second Life) it will have alot to do with what the developers do to move the story that we’re all living in along in interesting ways.)

And I’ve been playing lots of Second Life, including a real clothing-acquiring spree in the last few days for some reason. (Evidence here and here and here and so on.) Perhaps decompressing after releasing my second major Serendipitous Exploration product in SL, which was great fun. (Sales are light so far, but I’m sure it will bring me worldwide fame and wealth soon!)

Otherwise, things are good in general. Missing Dad (and Mom for that matter) in wistful but nontraumatic ways, hoping that they are doing interesting things in whatever one does after one is done doing this. Loving the coming of Autumn, vaguely regretting that I can’t smell it (but not enough to go back to ENTs and talk about nose operations and stuff). Wondering about how one chooses an evaluation function (the answer being that ultimately one doesn’t, more or less inevitably, but then what?).

And writing in my weblog! Woot! :)

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Yesterday I opined that the Republican presidential candidates are all either insane, lying hypocrites, or both. Just now I heard a WNYC interview with Jon Huntsman, and he sounded relatively sane and honest (if wrong about some of the obvious things).

I may not have to change my statement, though, as it’s not clear that with something like 1% of the current Republican marketshare he actually counts as a candidate.

Someone else on WNYC (yeah, I listen to them alot in the car an’ all) said that the key thing about conservatives (Conservatives?) is something like that they believe that there is a fixed moral base out there. Which pulled me up short for a minute, as an interesting statement.

Because of course there isn’t a fixed moral base out there.

There isn’t in a couple of senses: first, there isn’t some big supernatural divine being who created the universe and has opinions about the morality or otherwise of abortion, same-sex marriage, murder, and so on.

And second, even if there was such a being, that wouldn’t take away the responsibility that every one of us has to decide what’s right and wrong. Sure, one could decide that the Big Being’s moral opinions all are correct, and that one will behave accordingly, but one would still be responsible for having made that decision.

(Personally I would not decide that way; if there were a Big Being, and he did think that oral sex or dancing or chocolate ice cream was evil, I would continue to disagree with him without an awfully good argument. Might, as a matter of simple fact, does not make right.)

Now I don’t think that all Conservatives really believe that there is a fixed moral base out there in this sense, but probably an awful lot of them do, and it’s interesting to think about what the widespread holding of a false belief like that might lead to.

First of all, they will not have much respect for the project of figuring out right and wrong, which the rest of us see as one of the Important Things that we have to do. There’s just no need to talk much about it, to try different things, to have protests; just look up what the Bible (or the Original Framers of the Constitution, or whoever) think on the subject, and you’re done.

Also, they must be sort of frustrated and/or baffled. The world just refuses to behave as it should given that there is a fixed moral base! People do all sorts of immoral things, and they are not struck by lightning or turned to salt or anything. People who believe in other fixed moral bases (which is either nearly as bad as, or even worse than, not believing in any) continue to exist, sometimes even prosper, win wars, and so on. People who believe in no fixed moral basis at all have nice families, pretty clothes, and hardly ever consume human flesh at dreadful midnight rituals. Booming voices from the clouds hardly ever sound to remind us of the rules, and we have had no freshly-minted divinely-inscribed marble slabs in simply ages. How can all this be?

There’s the very popular theory that not following the fixed moral base results in punishments after you die, when you are well out of sight. But how satisfactory can that be, really? It seems so obviously a dodge, even the conservatives in question must feel it sometimes. There must be a terrible yearning for concrete evidence of the fixed moral base, for a voice that will, if not actually boom from the clouds, at least sound so very sure of itself that it makes the doubts seem less devouring.

It must be a sort of scary and lonely thing, really. And it may go quite a ways toward explaining the Republican Presidential field…

(Hm, do I wax a bit condescending there? Nah!)

And to close, here is a Blast from the Past, just because it somehow got stuck in my head earlier today. From a posting of mine to alt.hackers ‘way back in 1996, we present:

  All I Really Want
  (with apologies to Alanis Morissette)

  Well, it's stressing me out,
  The GUI is crawling and all greyed out,
  And you say wha-a-a-a-a-a-a-t a loser!
  I don't want to select anything today,
  I don't like to drag and drop you see
  But I ca-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-n't help it.

  There I go clicking before the mouse has settled down
  Slap me with another menu
  And it would use up all my core
  If it hadn't crashed already
  If only I could hunt the Wumpus.

  And all I really want is a shell prompt,
  A place to type netstat -s.
  And all I really want are free cycles,
  Oh-o-o-o-o-o-o-oooh.

  Do I wear you out?
  You must wonder why I'm thrashing and all swapped out,
  I'm consumed by the system's bitmaps.
  I'm like Estella
  I like to type it in and then compile it out
  I'm frustrated by your interface.

  And I am frightened by the bloated hugeness of this code,
  If only I could grep the source-tree
  And I am fascinated by the bitly-conscious man,
  I'm humbled by his hacker nature

  What I wouldn't give to find a guru
  Someone who can write tight code
  And what I wouldn't give to find a hacker
  Oh-o-o-o-o-o-o-ooh!

Peace, as they say, out.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Why do we have “foodstuffs”, but no other stuffs? What about “clothingstuffs”? Or “drinkstuffs”? “sexstuffs, drugstuffs, rockandrollstuffs!”

It’s an odd world.

The Ghost of Dibble Hollow

So driving the little boy home from orchestra, we heard something on WNYC about Christopher Columbus, and that reminded me of how in at least some movie version of Little Women or something the protagonist would exclaim “Christopher Columbus!”, and that on the old (old!) Superman teevee show Perry White would exclaim “Great Caesar’s Ghost!” (which in at least one episode caused that ghost, or someone pretending to be him, to appear), and that in some book that I read as a child there was a ghost (coincidence, that) who would exclaim “Crimenentlies!” or something by way of a satisfying exclamation that would not get them in trouble with the grownups.

I told the little boy that I suspected the book was “The Ghost of Dibble Hollow”, and I wondered if that book was on the web. It is, in fact it is more or less all over the place, including many copies of the same cover that my edition had.

And for that matter there is even one person mentioning it for exactly the same reason I am here, albeit with the exclamation spelt slightly differently.

That was a good book. I haven’t read any kid books recently; I really should. Doesn’t take long, and is good for the soul. Maybe I’ll reread A Wrinkle in Time or somefing.

The kind of libertarian I still am

So reading Griftopia has, at least for the moment, substantially changed the sort of libertarian I am. The change centers around an observation something like “small government would be great, if we had only small crimes”.

The thoroughgoing libertarian will probably respond to this by saying that the only reason we have big crimes now is precisely that we have big government, but that does not seem very likely to me. Certainly the massive fraud perpetrated by Goldman-Sachs and friends in recent years did exploit the government in lots of ways, but it also exploited investors big and small, and various other parts of the private sector. I see no reason to think that if the government was small, there would not be other things (large popular investment firms, pension plans, leading banks) that would be large, and these (and large numbers of private persons) could easily be defrauded of enough money that the fraudsters would be rich enough to buy off the government and prevent their own prosecution.

So, sadly, I think we need a relatively large and expensive government, if only to keep an eye on the inevitable large and wealthy potential criminal organizations. (Not to mention defending the borders.) Of course it’s still a hard fight to keep it from getting corrupted, too! But at least it seems like there’s a fighting chance.

Tweeting Twits

My Second Life self has a Twitter account, which started out being all Second Life type twitterings, but recently has started to be about more and more political stuff, as I observe with benign interest the Occupy Wall Street folks and etc, and get into the occasional squabble with some right-wing type, one or two of which I follow (“follow”) out of general interest.

Had a bit of a frank exchange of views with one Joe Brooks, who seems to be sort of a halfway sensible conservative, at least sometimes. He is quite anti-Occupy, and more pro-TeaParty, whereas I am rather the opposite. He thinks Occupy Wall Street and so on were started by and are controlled by Communists and Labor Unions and things, whereas I think the Tea Party was started by and is controlled by the Koch Brothers, their (shudder) Americans for Prosperity, and the Republican machine in general.

My impression of the Tea Party is that they took some “stop giving money to rich people!” sentiment around the time of the TARP bailouts, added some “Lower my taxes!” to obtain a general “The Government should tax and spend less!” which could then easily be bent into “Less government regulation!”, which is of course exactly what the rich people want, so that they can continue to become richer, some of them by more or less blatantly illegal and/or immoral means. Quite an ironic circularity there.

I can well imagine someone co-opting the Occupy Wall Street folks’s “stop financial industry fraud!” into “more regulation of Wall Street” and then “more regulation of business” and then “more government power”, which tends to become “more power to the already powerful!”, which is again what various of the bad guys want.

So one has to be careful. But in the case of Occupy, I don’t think that’s happened (yet?).

Here is a very excellent open letter and warning from a former tea party movement adherent to the Occupy Wall Street movement all about co-optation and stuff. Everyone should read it.

The kind of Obama fan I (still) am(n’t)

So I am really not hardly at all happy with Our President.

I mean, WTF.

Got rid of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell; that’s good. But…

He’s surrounded by the same Goldman-Sachs crowd that destroyed the economy for their own personal gain, and they are as far as I can tell now working to make sure that they and their cronies still in the private sector can do it again next time they want another few billion dollars in the kitty.

He’s not turned off the absurd waste of Federal money on the stupid and immoral practice of prosecuting and persecuting medical marijuana providers who are doing things that are completely legal under their state laws. He promised he would do this, and he very simply isn’t.

He’s kept us in stupid wars, expanded those wars, and gotten us into new ones. He pretty much promised that he would do this, too, but I think most of us assumed he was just saying that to get votes. That’ll teach us to hope that someone is being a hypocrite!

(In, ironically enough, his Peace Prize speech, he basically announces that America will wage war not just to defend itself and its allies, but to make sure that every nation in the world respects “the inherent rights and dignity of every individual”. I mean, excuse me? Not with my children, you don’t!)

He has claimed the amazing ability to execute American citizens without trial, on the unilateral say-so of the President. I mean, what the F’ing F? This is completely hideous, unconstitutional, unAmerican, nasty, dangerous, and wrong. We were horrified when Dubya merely claimed the ability to imprison (“detain”) citizens without due process. How can we be calm when Obama claims the ability to kill us?

Anyone who is thinking, well, this was a special case, and it was Obama after all, please consider:

2014, President Romney dies from a bad batch of Botox, and Vice-President Bachmann gets the top spot. Shortly afterward she has a vivid dream in which God tells her that America is at war with atheism.

Two weeks later simultaneous drone strokes take out the national headquarters of American Atheists and the Ethical Culture Society, as well as Richard Dawkins, in the U.S. on a speaking tour. Casualties are in the hundreds.

The Bachmann administration claims that it was a legal national security action, and cites the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki as precedent.

Couldn’t happen? Well, if the Obama administration’s assassination of al-Awlaki was legal, you will have to explain to me why the hell not.

This is why we have warrants, judges, checks and balances, separation of powers.

Phht.

So the President seems to be a not particularly Progressive statist with ambitions of American expansionism. The potential Republican nominees are all either insane, lying hypocrites, or both. I am not overjoyed!

But this, too, shall pass.

In other news

Here is a Stanford (related) AI class that anyone in the world can take and apparently some hundreds of thousands of people intend to. I understand their servers are needing some upgrading. :)

And today’s candidate for Shortest 419 Letter, presented in its entirely:

Be my partner in this huge $17.3M deal.

Enticing, eh?

The evils of convenience

I am pretty fond of this here WordPress theme. On the other hand I am not fond of the right-justification (nearly always a bad idea on computers except in the most thoroughly-typeset documents), nor of the egregious grey lines around all my images. Guess that is the price I pay for not having to hand-code and SCP-upload all these here words!

Hm.