A Note on Wombat Droppings
Wombats produce cubic turds. They were obviously genetically engineered by a now-extinct civilization to produce dice. On the other hand, they might be evidence that God has a sense of humor.
Reactions to Two FDR Directives
In 1944, the Federal government effectively nationalized Montgomery Ward (seen via Megan McArdle):
However, Montgomery Ward Chairman Sewell Avery refused to comply with the terms of three different collective bargaining agreements with the United Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union hammered out between 1943 and 1944. In April 1944, after Sewell refused a second board order, Roosevelt called out the Army National Guard to seize the company's main plant in Chicago. Sewell himself had to be carried out of his office by National Guard troops.
What percentage of today's liberals applaud that takeover but regard sending Japanese Americans to concentration camps as racism? (No. This time you can't use the excuse that only corporations were being ordered around.) On the other hand, what percentage of today's liberals have heard of ANY historical fact that occurred before they were born?
Jane's Law at Work
In accordance with Jane's law:
Jane's Law: The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.
a substantial fraction of my fellow wingnuts are going out of their minds. In any case, abuses of power by the Federal government used to be worse. Maybe we should ask ourselves the question “What would be the reaction of someone on the fence to this rant?” Addendum: Also see this blast from the past:
Well, let's try a little thought experiment. Let's schedule a debate, and invite a lot of voters. The first speaker stands up and makes a case for one position, laying out his explanation of why the problem happened, and then saying what he thinks needs to be done to solve it, and explaining why he thinks it will help. Then he sits down. His opponent, on the left side of the stage, stands up, grins at the audience, and pulls his pants down and moons the first speaker. He then returns his pants to their customary position and returns to his seat. End of debate. If the audience was not partisan ahead of time, which advocate is more likely to have convinced them?
Does This Mean I'm Poor?
The Wall Street Journal reports on a Manhattan real-estate deal:
Hotelier Ian Schrager and investors including developer Steve Witkoff last week paid about $50 million for a piece of land at 215 Chrystie St. that served for years as a garden for a neighboring building with low-income residents, the executives said.
In case, you wondered what “low-income” meant:
Much of the rent at 10 Stanton St. is covered by the federal government, which now pays up to $3,810 a month for a three-bedroom apartment for tenants who cannot afford it.
Your tax dollars at work. I have something in common with those tenants; I couldn't afford $3810 per month either.
Another Message to My Fellow Mathematicians
A Problem with a Right-Wing Cliche
One of the commonest memes in the gun-rights community is “If guns should be banned because they're dangerous, why don't leftists want to ban cars?” There's a minor problem with this: Leftists do want to ban cars. They resent the “System” that they imagine forces them to drive. In the near future, I expect to see a left-wing proposal to ban high-capacity gas tanks.
No Escape
Over the past few decades, many lawyers have been promoting absurd lawsuits. Many businessmen have responded by using “boilerplate” contracts in which customer signs away the alleged right to sue for imaginary defects. The reaction at least one or two law professors has been to say “Ha Ha! We can sue after all!” This is supposedly on the grounds that hardly anybody reads the boilerplate contracts anyway so consumers don't know what they're signing away. My first reaction is that this means there is no escape from the lawsuit-happy legal regime. For example, even if the CPSC relents and allows buckyballs, nobody will make them if idiots can sue no matter what. My second reaction is that the principle of “We can decide what you would have agreed to had you been fully informed.” can help justify “death panels.” My third reaction is that the principle of “Excessively-complex agreements are invalid.” has implications elsewhere. It means large parts of criminal law are invalid. It also means that Congress did not pass Obamacare. My fourth reaction is that this is yet another case of changing the meaning of a contract after it's been signed. My final reaction is that the dangling thread of an excuse (the consumers don't read or understand those contracts) is on the verge of obsolescence. I suspect that in another decade or so there will be legal analysis software available (possibly open source) that can warn consumers of what they're signing. The proposed anti-boilerplate doctrine might even be an attempt to delay this.
A Message to My Fellow Mathematicians
While using LATEX, do not use \nonumber inside the {array} environment. It will not stop equation numbers inside {array} (there won't be any anyway) and it might stop a wanted equation number in the surrounding equation.
We're Waiting
The latest news from the stars: SETI Astrophysicist Craig Kasnov (not to be confused with Craig Kasnoff) has announced the approach to the Earth of 3 very large, very fast moving objects. The length of the "flying saucers" is in the range of tens of kilometers. Landing, according to calculations of scientists, should be in mid-December 2012. Date coincides with the end of the Mayan calendar. So what's taking them so long?
Set Paranoia Bit to ON
If the apparent nativist commenters on this article were actually Democratic party operatives trying to convince wavering members of an up-and-coming minority group that their only hope was with the Democrats, would they do anything different?
Is the Best Way to Prevent Housing Bubbles …
… to turn over the housing market to people in Washington? No.
I Stopped Reading
I stopped reading this article on iodine deficiency when I got to the line:
But it's best if you take these higher doses only under the supervision of a holistic physician …
What is the iodine content of bulshytt? Addendum: Something else I didn't bother to read.
Can't Bullets Be 3-D Printed?
According to Philip Bump:
In the era of 3D-printed guns, ammunition may prove a better regulatory target than the weapons themselves.
Maybe that's why environmentalists have declared war on lead.
Places Named after People That Sound Like They Weren't
Is a Recount Required?
According to a recent study, there are thousands of papers supporting the theory that the observed tropospheric warming over the past century was caused by human beings and only a handful of papers opposing it, which implies that the AGW theory is not a matter of isolated results. On the other hand, there haven't been thousands of studies showing that last conclusion. Maybe that is an isolated result. I'm reminded of the Onion headline: “Gore Calls For Recount Of Supreme Court Vote.” I must also mention that the Global Warming theory comes in several strengths. It ranges from claims that are solidly-established fact (that most parts of the troposphere are warmer than a century ago), through claims that have a preponderance of evidence in support (that the observed warming may be due to coal burning), claims that are unproved but possible (that most parts of the troposphere are warmer than a millennium ago), to claims that are complete bulshytt (that the best way to handle this alleged crisis is to turn large parts of the economy over to anti-nuclear activists). Also see my earlier comments.
Is Santa Claus a Democrat?
Future Libertarian Presidential Candidate?
Derek Khanna (author of the paper on copyright the reactions to which I discussed here) has been fired. That means that there is at least one libertarian activist who can expect to be taken seriously by the self-congratulatory leftists at Boing Boing.
Facepalm Moment in a Discussion of Facepalm Moments
In the course of a discussion of “facepalm moments,” We find the following:
And then there's Michelle Bachman, who wants us to understand that carbon dioxide is a natural part of Earth. Yep, just like acid, radiation, and plutonium. All natural parts of Earth. "There isn't even one study that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas. It is natural," she says. "It is not harmful. It is part of Earth's life cycle." Yep, it may be natural — but that doesn't mean you want to pour a lot of it into your lungs.
Sigh. I doubt if the amounts of CO 2 likely to be emitted in the foreseeable future will be anywhere near a toxic amount. They would have been on firmer ground had they pointed out that a heavy coat won't poison you but you would not want to wear it in the summer.
The Resemblance between Human Biodiversity Debates and Environmentalist Debates
One of the fans of human biodiversity theories has noticed the resemblance between the human biodiversity debates and environmentalist debates … but not in a good way. He starts off on the wrong foot by getting the criticism of global warming/human biodiversity wrong:
When the overwhelming body of scientific opinion believes something is true, the denialist won't admit scientists have independently studied the evidence to reach the same conclusion. Instead, they claim scientists are engaged in a complex and secretive conspiracy.
Most of us don't believe that the world's evolutionary psychologists/climate scientists are engaged in a conspiracy to Hide the Truth. Instead we believe that the world's reporters aren't covering the research right. We think it's possible that the reporters are overemphasizing some research and underemphasizing other research. This isn't even due to a conspiracy among reporters. It's more likely to be due to reporters preferentially covering the more spectacular conclusions. (Also see PhD Comics on this topic.) One reason why a few people might reject science is the effect of scientific results propagated by rumor. Eventually a nonsensical conclusion reaches someone who knows it's bulshytt and rejects science itself instead of the communication chain. I would like to point out to these people that the activists sometimes accuse scientists of being insufficiently hysterical. That might be evidence that the actual scientists haven't sold their souls. I have covered this before.
We Can Match You Idiot for Idiot
The above slogan explains the bizarre committee assignments in the next Congress.
Nooooooo…
Is “knife control” next? They're already starting. ObSF: In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, one of the barbaric medieval customs ridiculed was that of forbidding the common people from owning weapons.
A Few Notes on Mentally-Disabled Voters
David Horowitz has noticed that some of the Democratic vote came from the retarded-American community. This is nothing new. In 2004, the Republicans were taking steps to counter it. I don't know if that happened this time. Maybe Democratic voters were hired for Project Orca. I also noticed much of the reaction from the Left has resembled the following Bart Simpson saying:
- I didn't do it!
- Nobody saw me do it!
- You can't prove anything!
This would be more believable if it weren't for other leftists being outraged that anybody would try to stop it. I was also reminded of the Dr. Boli bumper sticker:
I'M STUPID And I Vote!
I expected more reactions along the lines of “I thought the Republicans had the retard vote sewn up!” The closest example I found came from joe h (not me):
I actually do not have a problem with this. Ever met someone south of the mason Dixon line, NASCAR, football, and ways to consume tobacco are about the limits of there knowledge. Where do you draw the line?
Intellectual snarkiness is more impressive when you use “there” correctly.
Sigh
Point number 36 on the Crackpot Index is:
40 points for claiming that when your theory is finally appreciated, present-day science will be seen for the sham it truly is. (30 more points for fantasizing about show trials in which scientists who mocked your theories will be forced to recant.)
In the case of Anthropogenic Global Warming, the pro-AGW side has been acting like crackpots. Now, someone on the other side has deprived them of a monopoly on that form of nonsense:
I am officially reporting, to the NYC police, NASA-GISS scientist James Hansen, pictured above, for manipulating and falsifying U.S. Government temperature data, with the likely intent to defraud U.S. citizens.
Keeping Food Cool during a Blackout
It would take an Einstein to figure out how to do that! Yes, it did.
Shorter Kristof
Nicholas Kristof's recent article on outages can be summarized simply:
- Private initiatives are more effective than public institutions.
- Therefore we should use more public institutions.
ObSF: The Practice Effect by David Brin, in which using something automagically improved it. Unlike Kristof's article, it was intentionally set in an alternate universe.
Bravo, You Dolts
The Republicans had an opportunity to break through the cloud of smug usually surrounding BoingBoing (the comments were remarkably fair-minded for a change) but whiffed it. I don't know if the Republicans were going by knee-jerk reactions or if it was done by the occasional leftist who really did sell out. Disclaimer: The title is not original.
Entrapment
For the past decade or two, one of the main Democratic talking points has been opposition to out-sourcing and off-shoring. Recently, Republicans have been replying in kind, claiming that they too are opposed to out-sourcing. That was a very bad idea. Opposition to out-sourcing can be heard either as “blame business” or “blame foreigners.” Republicans are widely regarded as the party of business. In other words, any opposition of out-sourcing on the part of Republicans is heard as foreigner bashing, whereas it's not heard as such when Democrats do it. The tactic will not attract the votes of anti-business voters and it will repel immigrant and second-generation voters. In other words: It's a TRAP! As I've said before:
[Republicans] can probably get better results by running against high energy and food prices. Platform: Drill here, drill now, frack for natural gas, supplement with nukes, and stop burning corn.
The best part of that is they can do so and be pro-imports. If they must mention jobs, they should express it in terms of new jobs in export industries.
Odd Fact
An odd fact I came across in my day job today: The Burroughs–Wheeler transform, which is usually used to help compress text, can also be used to analyze DNA. Is DNA actually a language?
Crackpot Economics Is Back
The crackpot economics I predicted in 2008 (with a sighting last year) is continuing to gain popularity. The latest example is in a comment by koshandeh on The Incredible Shrinking Sugar Bag:
The problem, Megan, is not that it prevents the consumer from shifting their buying behavior, but that it disguises a looming food shortage. Between climate change killing the agriculture sector in many countries and speculators moving their money into food (from mortgages) real food prices have been inflating rapidly for two years, and it's only getting worse.
It's another case of before and after.
- Before: Printing up funny money won't cause inflation. We've beaten inflation for good.
- After: The inflation was inevitable in a capitalist system.
If you want a description of the same phenomenon in the last inflationary era, there's the classic article “ Phyletic Size Decrease in Hershey Bars.” If you want a crackpot explanation of inflation from the same era, there was Gar Alperovitz's explanation.
A Brief Note on Secession
If you want to secede from the U.S., go ahead. Why do you have to take everybody else in your state with you?
Another Important Note to My Fellow Wingnuts
Try not to sound deranged. I was about to add a third important note (don't believe leftist gloating) but David Frum beat me to it. The only thing I have to add is that it used to take a united right-wing party to barely break even with a fractious left; now it takes a united left-wing party to barely break even with a fractious right.
Before and After
Before a regulation is passed: Businesses won't react to the regulation by laying off workers or raising prices. After a regulation is passed: Businesses are horribly evil to react to the regulation by laying off workers and raising prices.
Something Obama and Romney Have in Common
The Servant Vote
On the one hand, the exit polls show that Romney carried the votes of people wealthier than average. On the other hand, Obama carried the votes of the richest counties. Put these together and there's only one possible conclusion: Obama overwhelmingly carried the votes of butlers, valets, maids, chauffeurs, and gardeners.
Preventing Future Hurricane Sandys
One reason the storm surge did so much damage is that it occurred at high tide. Since tides are caused by the moon it's time to take the advice of the late Alexander Abian and blow up the Moon. Abian's advice might have sounded strange a decade or two ago, but it's starting to sound more reasonable now.
An Important Note to My Fellow Wingnuts
You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Do Open-Borders Candidates Turn off the Working Class?
In the 2000, 2004, and 2008 elections, there were warnings from the wrong side of the Right that open-borders candidates turned off the white working class. Now the Republicans finally nominated a candidate who didn't give nativists a “kick in the teeth.” It didn't do much good. Apparently, occupational or religious prejudice trumped racial prejudice. Another point: Nativists often claim that open-borders candidates don't get Hispanic/Asian/whatever votes anyway. On the other hand, there was a large Democratic swing in the Hispanic/Asian/whatever vote in a year where everybody else was swinging Republican (and otherwise not showing up). That might have made a difference in Florida. A third point: Open borders is the Right Thing To Do. We have no business depriving people of fundamental rights because of the accident of birth. (This also goes for the timing of birth as well as the place of birth.)
Preventing Abuses
My fellow wingnuts should recognize that some of the potential unpleasant consequences of leftists in power have been aided by policies that many of us have applauded. To take one example, drone strikes could easily be used on anybody who leaves the U.S. to avoid taxes or regulations. To take another example, it might become necessary to carry out an emergency evacuation of Israel. (I'm sure in that case the Israelis will leave behind a note that reads “We have left it as we have found it. Take over. It's yours.”) I suspect that one reason American Jews have tended to vote Democratic is that many Jews who might otherwise vote Republican have moved to Israel, depriving the socialists there of their lock on power. In case of an emergency evacuation of Israel, we can therefore expect the Obama administration to start enforcing immigration laws. (This might be similar to the Clinton administration's enforcement of immigration laws against Cubans.) If you ever wondered why we Red-Sea pedestrians tend to be open borders… Most important of all, civil forfeiture will make other abuses much harder to stop. In Western Civilization, the executive has traditionally been controlled by means of the purse strings. For example, the British monarchy was at its absolute most following the Dissolution of the Monasteries, when King Henry VIII hijacked church property. If civil forfeiture enables many government departments to operate without tax funds, they can be zeroed out by Congress but continue anyway. Civil forfeiture is most commonly used to fight the War on Some Drugs. (Please note that this includes bans on hard drugs. Legalizing allegedly “soft” will do little to stop this trend.) There are other reasons to legalize narcotics (legalization will keep stoners from voting and may stop the anti-American takeovers of Afghanistan or South America), but civil forfeiture is the important one.
Looking for Heroes
Are there any politicians who have resisted calls for odd–even gasoline rationing?
Speaking as a Cranberry …
What is the point of odd–even gasoline rationing? It doesn't shorten lines. The people who fill up their tanks every six days will continue to do so. The people who fill up their tanks every five days will simply fill up every four days instead. As far as I can tell, it's mostly based on the idea that people fill up their tanks based on random whims and that preventing them from doing so half the time will cut lines in half. On the other hand, some people claim that it will prevent “panic buying.” That is similarly based on the idea that other people's decisions are irrational but the decisions of People Like Us are rational and aren't any kind of “panic regulation.” In the unlikely event that panic buying is a problem. It might make sense for gas stations to charge a flat fee to start filling up a tank on top of the usual per gallon charge. That need not cause resentment if the per gallon charge is reduced. Most of the panic buyers will either stop or go elsewhere and the few who stick around (because of the shorter lines) will provide an extra profit for the stations. The title of this post is an allusion to a saying by Paul Ehrlich:
"To explain to one of them the inevitability of no growth in the material sector, or . . . that commodities must become expensive," the Ehrlichs wrote, "would be like attempting to explain odd-day-even-day gas distribution to a cranberry."
Addendum: The plague is spreading.
Progress
In 1936, the percentage of Americans willing to loot the rich was 60%. By now it's down to 50%.
A Few Notes on Hurricane Sandy
- The preparations for Hurricane Sandy were apparently based on theory that history repeats itself and therefore Sandy would be “just like Irene.” On the other hand, see John Campbell on whether history repeats itself:
History doesn't always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, ‘Can't you remember anything I told you?’ and lets fly with a club.
- As a libertarian, I should regard government responses to disasters as a mark of a primitive society. On the other hand, in some ways we're still in a primitive society. As the saying goes: Governments are for gravity wells.
- In related news: It's time for a Federal ban on thiotimoline.
- I think it's very ungrateful of trees to come down on our power lines, considering all we've done for plants such as providing them with CO2 fertilizer and suppressing insect pests. This is a violation of toxic-waste emitter solidarity!
- Product wanted: a generator that burns tree branches. There might be a shortage of pumpable gas in the area affected by Sandy but there's no shortage of tree branches.
I've Said This Before
The following news:
A Christian group has been effectively banned from Tufts University in Massachusetts. Tufts Christian Fellowship (TCF) has lost its recognition as an official campus group because it discriminates by requiring the group leaders to be Christians and adhere to a set of values.
reminded me of a similar reaction by the noted netkook Doc Tavish/Scott Bradbury/Gunther Schiller/John Winslow Brown (his name is legion) upon finding out that only Jews are permitted to lead prayers in synagogues:
[Sounds like religious bigotry to me! Where is the diversity? Where is the multi-culturalism- all the crap that these certain Jews want for the rest of us?]
I nominated that for the “stupidest post ever” but now there's lots of competition. I've said this before.
Stepping from Sense to Nonsense
One of the most annoying types of essay/blogpost is the one that starts out as something completely reasonable but then veers off into bulshytt. To take only one example among many, a recent article on why we can't solve big problems starts off okay but then makes a left turn:
Sometimes we fail to solve big problems because our institutions have failed. In 2010, less than 2 percent of the world's energy consumption was derived from advanced renewable sources such as wind, solar, and biofuels.
If the object is to avoid emitting possibly-excess CO 2, we don't need a Manhattan Project to solve the problem because we already had a Manhattan Project that produced a an energy source that didn't emit CO 2. It was called the Manhattan Project. Maybe people are unwilling to join something resembling the Manhattan Project because they're worried that idiots will oppose any results that work.
Debate Wanted
The recent controversy over Richard Mourdock's comments on rape reminded that there are three opinions on the pro-choice side (motto: “If it's not pregnant, regulate it.”) about why pro-lifers are slime:
- Pro-lifers are cruel because they don't make exceptions.
- They are hypocrites because they make exceptions before birth but not after birth.
- They are hypocrites because they make exceptions after birth but not before birth.
I think there should be a debate between the three sides.
Updating Santa Claus for the 22nd Century
The well-known poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” has recently been bowdlerized by an anti-smoking activist (seen via NRO's Corner). That will look very silly a century from now, after there's a cure for lung cancer. Shouldn't we try to be progressive? By the way, if cigarettes are currently being airbrushed out of old movies, will movies made in the early 22nd century have cigarettes airbrushed in in the future?
Does Obama Need “Factual Accuracy” Training?
In Australia, a radio commentator was ordered (using laws approved of by the Enlightened Ones) to get “factual accuracy” training after a minor error in one of his rants. Considering that President Obama's statement about bayonets in the recent debate that:
Governor Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works. You — you mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets — because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.
also turned out to be wrong…
A Brief Note on Insurance
An insurance policy is an agreement to turn the possibility of an improbable unaffordable expense into a certain affordable expense. It is not a magic means of making a certain expense affordable. For example, paying for birth control is highly probable. Needing vaccines or some medical tests is highly probable. Living long enough to retire is highly probable nowadays (although it wasn't back when old-age pensions were invented). An “insurance” policy that pays for such things is, at best, a matter of taking your money for a wild night out on the town and giving some of it back to you. In other words, an alleged study that shows that lack of health insurance caused some people to forgo colonoscopies, etc. should be regarded with great skepticism. A lack of something might have stopped the colonoscopies/vaccines/birth-control/whatever but that something is not health insurance. It might be correlated with lack of health insurance. It might be lack of good advice or lack of a job.
President Smith?
I'm almost tempted to write in Professor Smith for President. I'm dissuaded by the fact that he's a fictional character, also known as “ontologically challenged.”
If Words Are So Powerful
There's a common argument on the pro-censorship side that we opponents of censorship trivialize words—frequently combined with the claim that words are a type of weapon. If words are indeed weapons then wouldn't it make sense to use words to enforce your opinions instead of government? On the other hand, a censorship proponent might claim that the ideal is to eliminate nasty words entirely. Is it any better to replace them with nasty jail terms or nasty fines? Or do they believe that force has a magical property of getting things done that words don't have? Doesn't that detract from the claim that words are weapons?
Class Warfare Is NOT the New Bigotry
I disagree with the claim that class warfare is the new bigotry; there is nothing new about it. It's been an occasionally-successful part of American politics for the past four score years.
Natural Diets and Weight Loss
In view of the fact that starvation was a much bigger danger than obesity for most of human existence, you would expect the diets humans had evolved for to be those that put weight on and kept it on. If the nuts and berries that apes eat is the natural diet, that will cause weight gain. If the meat and vegetables that paleolithic man ate (according to some theories) is the natural diet, that will cause weight gain. If the grains and beans diet common in the agricultural era is the natural diet, that will cause weight gain. The questions of what diet is natural and what diet will keep you thin are interesting and important but they are NOT the same question.
A Future Left-Wing Slogan
According to Richard Dawkins, we can hold the fact that Romney is religious against him (but need not do so for Obama) because Romney is actually sincere about it. I was slightly dubious about whether we can be that sure (there have been lots of nominally religious hypocrites, some of whom were active in their religions) but then read that Romney takes his faith seriously enough to actually give to charity. Put those together and we get the next left-wing slogan: We need government so we don't have to depend on religions. Cut down on government and we might actually get more faith.
(saved from the once and future blog of TJIC).
Out of What Bodily Orifice Did He Pull That Figure? Part II
I've been looking for a source for Luis Suarez-Villa's claim that free trade in opium “caused far more deaths over time than Mao's revolution and his regime ever did.” I can't find any. Since Professor Suarez-Villa is a published author I tried googling his books. I found only one mention of opium, a reference to Auto Opium: A Social History of American Automotive Design by David Gartman, which does not sound very relevant to the present discussion. In other words, [CITATION NEEDED].
Traffic Lights for Food?
Mark Bittman wants “traffic light” labeling on food. Maybe XKCD's traffic lights are most appropriate. In view of the fact that there is no objective definition of “Foodness” or “Welfare” (even “Nutrition” changes every decade), when Mark Bittman says:
These are not simple calculations, but neither can one honestly say that they’re impossible to perform.
he's just plain wrong. We can imagine a manufacturer of freeze-dried potatoes being taken away in handcuffs for giving his product a high “Foodness” rating, followed by the revelation that freeze-dried potatoes were an Incan recipe.
WORD???
The paper mentioned in PhD comics is FINAL.doc instead of FINAL.tex? Isn't that a violation of intellectual-snob standards?
They Found a Third One!
I have earlier reported that there were only two identifiable examples of a well-known family-values conservative being involved in an abortion. There appears to be third one. wow.
Out of What Bodily Orifice Did He Pull That Figure?
According to Prof. Luis Suarez-Villa:
One such instance, the British-induced Opium Wars in China and the scourge of the drug, a tragedy created in the name of "free trade," caused far more deaths over time than Mao's revolution and his regime ever did.
Is there anything resembling a source for that assertion?
Occupy Wall Street …
… is run by monkeys. I suspect the resentful monkey thought the prosperous monkey was deliberately ripping him off.
Six-Year-Old Presidemts
According to Doug Ross, Barak Obama is “forever six.” According to Cecil Spring-Rice, Theodore Roosevelt was “about six.” On the other hand, that's probably true of most politicians.
Embryology?
The propensity of a handful of conservatives to fall for the propaganda that Science is on the side of the “progressives” (earlier discussed here) has produced opposition to embryology (of all things):
All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell... You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I've found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don't believe that the Earth's but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That's what the Bible says.
I thought the development of embryology in the 19th century was what produced anti-abortion laws with teeth. Before then the fact that an embryo is a human being (since an embryo is both human and a being) was a guess. If this clown decides that nukes are Satanic manifestations of Hellfire next, I won't be a bit surprised.
Time Tyranny
The healthcare travesty passed a few years ago has a little-known malfeature:
The Independent Payment Advisory Board perfectly illustrates liberalism’s itch to remove choices from individuals, and from their elected representatives, and to repose the power to choose in supposed experts liberated from democratic accountability. Beginning in 2014, IPAB would consist of 15 unelected technocrats whose recommendations for reducing Medicare costs must be enacted by Congress by Aug. 15 of each year. If Congress does not enact them, or other measures achieving the same level of cost containment, IPAB’s proposals automatically are transformed from recommendations into law. Without being approved by Congress. Without being signed by the president. ……… By Obamacare’s terms, Congress can repeal IPAB only during a seven-month window in 2017, and then only by three-fifths majorities in both chambers. After that, the law precludes Congress from ever altering IPAB proposals.
This is a clear instance of Americans of the year 2009 attempting to establish a tyranny over future generations, even if those future generations know more than we do and decide that the law was stupid. I'm once again reminded that The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis (earlier discussed here) was not a straw-man argument:
Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. … And if, as is almost certain, the age which had thus attained maximum power over posterity were also the age most emancipated from tradition, it would be engaged in reducing the power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of its successors.
………
The real picture is that of one dominant age—let us suppose the hundredth century A.D.—which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species.
Along similar lines, see Robin Hanson's discussion of “time genocide” (although “time tyranny” seems more accurate).
Deja Moo
According to Stephanie Li and Lee Siegel, Romney is the whitest Presidential candidate ever. It sounded vaguely familiar and then I realized I had come across the same bulshytt before in the form of Lenny Bruce's division of everything into “Jewish” and “Goyish.” (I regard it as nonsense because I suspect that Lenny Bruce may have inspired Yasser Arafat. After all, by the Lenny-Bruce standard, Arafat was Jewish and Netanyahu is Goyish.) This bulshytt is rendered easier by existence of ambiguous groups. If a group can be classified as white or non-white at will, it's possible to have things both ways. If someone who is Jewish/Chinese/Irish/whoever disagrees with the Enlightened Ones, that can be attributed to being white. When similar people agree with the Enlightened Ones, they have the absolute moral authority that comes from being underprivileged or, at least, having at least one underprivileged great great grandparent. Meanwhile, to the extent the claim that Romney is particularly white makes any sense whatsoever, it comes from the fact that he came from a background of hereditary privilege. By that standard, of course, the whitest President was FDR.
What's Taking So Long?
A few months ago, I received the following warning in an e-mail (based on this):
Dear Reader: On September 30, 2012, I believe a market-crushing event will take place… I see it blindsiding investors…crushing the markets…sending our elected officials into utter panic, as they try to find a way to spend the economy back to life. And I can only imagine things will spiral down from there.
We're still waiting.
2.7 Trillion Dollars
A recent Obama campaign theme has been to calculate the supposed cost of a lifetime supply of birth control at $18,000 and pretend that's unaffordable. (Don't most cars cost more than that?) There's more than one way to make something look unaffordable. You can also multiply a cost by the population as well as by time. (By the way, $18,000 in a lifetime is 60¢ per day.) If we multiply $18,000 by 150 million women we get … 2.7 TRILLION DOLLARS. Say that in a Dr. Evil voice.
Rebel Ants?
Looked at one way, the fact that slave ants rebel is an inspiring story that even lowest of creatures want their freedom. (It's almost as inspiring as The Charge of the Ant Brigade: “Half an inch, half an inch, half an inch, onward…”) Looked at another way, it's a blatant exhibition of race prejudice on the part of creatures who, if they had their way, would set up another totalitarian system.
My Speculation Was Wrong
A few years ago, I posted:
Is it a mere coincidence that the anti-nuclear campaign went into high gear in the mid 1970s, when OPEC became able to pay for propaganda on a large scale?
On the other hand, when OPEC really is paying for propaganda, we can find out about it quickly. When we have to guess, oil money probably had nothing to do with it.
Let's Get to the Root of This
According to Steven Running, we're running out of plants and can't harvest much more because:
It's either locked up in root systems and unharvestable, conserved in national parks or wilderness areas crucial for biodiversity, or simply in far Siberia or the middle of the Amazon, where there are no roads and no way to harvest it.
Roots can't be used? How nice. I think I'll have a carrot. I won't more than mention that we have not yet reached peak roads.
The Ethnicity of the King of Id
I just realized the King in the Wizard of Id can only be an Ottoman Sultan. His mother is a slave; he keeps inconvenient relatives in jail; he talks back to the priest without any worry about excommunication even in an apparently Medieval (or at least Renaissance) environment… I was reminded of this by James Lileks.
Should We Jail This Guy?
According to Eric Posner:
The vile anti-Muslim video shows that the U.S. overvalues free speech.
The First Amendment is keeping people like him out of jail. Should we be multicultural and jail him?
Future Regulation Alert
Beep… Beep… Beep… Warning: Incoming excuse for regulation detected on the radar screen. The alleged exposé of wasted energy by Internet companies that recently appeared in The New York Times (motto: ‘We know your business better than you do, even if we're trying to compete with you and failing.’) will be a new excuse to regulate supposedly-wasteful Internet companies. Hmmmm… Could this be preferentially aimed at anybody who insults an ethnic group on the A list? (It might not be same groups as today. By the time the regulations are passed, there might be new groups on the A list. The A list changes every generation or two.) On the other hand, maybe it's merely an attempt by the legacy media to handicap competitors … with a little help from management consultants and the people who designed toilets that have to be flushed several times.
Mightier Than the Sword
A policeman shot and killed a double amputee who was threatening him with a … pen (seen via View from the Porch):
A Houston police officer shot and killed a one-armed, one-legged man in a wheelchair Saturday inside a group home after police say the double amputee threatened the officer and aggressively waved a metal object that turned out to be a pen.
Well … a pen is mightier than a sword …
Phil Plait and I Have Something in Common
Both Phil Plait and I are still waiting for our paychecks from the conspiracies we supposedly belong to. The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (secretly run by renegade Objectivist extraterrestrials from Zeta Reticuli) owes me $666.13 for helping to Destroy the Planet but I haven't seen any of it. Maybe we'll both go over to the Freemasons.
If Romney Loses …
… I don't think it will be due to the “culture of dependency.” For one thing, people in the culture of dependency tend to not vote and I suspect that those that do vote hope for the dependency to be temporary. I think the problem is the lingering belief in the “Folk Philips curve.” Many people still think that the Republicans are the people to control inflation and the Democrats are the people to control unemployment. (This has benefited Republicans in the past; McGovern tried running against inflation and lost badly.) Romney can probably get better results by running against high energy and food prices. Platform: Drill here, drill now, frack for natural gas, supplement with nukes, and stop burning corn. If he's elected and the current money expansion leads to inflation, he will probably be able to get away with blaming Obama. This lingering relic of the New Deal has been ignored for the past few decades because the economy has been either in relatively good shape or suffering mainly from inflation, resulting in elections about other issues. A contributing factorAnother problem is that Romney represents the Old Enemy of Democrats; he was a financier. Opposing Big Finance (at least nominally) has been one of the few constants of the Democratic Party. We must also recall that the swing vote consists of people who would have voted a straight Democratic ticket back in the days of FDR. They just might return to their roots now that their buttons have been pushed. This might be aggravated by the decline in immigration. As I have said before:
The sort of voter who might be prejudiced against “the rich” was even more prejudiced against anything foreign.
Now they have fewer foreigners to resent. This might also mean the people Touré Neblett is against are voting for Obama. A consequenceAs I have said before:
One problem is that the usual climb to the top in politics requires a personality who believes in political power. The best way around that is to have a candidate who climbed high in the business, academic, or entertainment worlds before switching to politics. I suspect much of “political correctness” is for the purpose of ensuring that few future Reagans will come from the academic or entertainment worlds. On the other hand, there might be an adequate supply of conservatives from economics departments.
If the swing voters will exclude anybody who used to be a financier and the PC crowd can exclude anybody they dislike from the media or most of academia, that means Republicans (if they want someone with private-sector experience) will have to nominate either an economics professor or an industrial businessman.
NPR Listeners Support a Government Regulation
Am I supposed to be impressed by the fact that people who get everything else wrong also oppose open borders? ObSF: According to Iain Banks:
In general the Culture doesn't actively encourage immigration; it looks too much like a disguised form of colonialism.
I would put it the other way around: Colonialism is immigration that the Self-Congratulatory Ones dislike.
Set Paranoia Bit to ON
What if “Sam Bacile” is an Islamofascist agent who deliberately made an allegedly anti-Muslim movie while doing something otherwise arrestworthy for the purpose of convincing Muslims in general that rioting is an effective means of getting people they don't like jailed? I was inspired by the discussion here.
An Accidentally Revealing Yiddish Curse
One of the more recent of the Yiddish curses for Republican Jews reads:
May the Republican politician you fundraised for ban the teaching of evolution at your son's high school. And may your otherwise brilliant son, with perfect SAT scores believe that evolution is a controversial theory within the scientific community. And may he write as much on his application to Harvard.
Apparently in LeftWorld, even allegedly-brilliant students believe only what they're told. The above curse was apparently posted by someone who thinks that learning stops at the school exit, that students cannot check what they are told in other sources, and that the “brilliant” students mindlessly parrot back what the teacher told them. In short, it was posted by someone with the mental initiative of a turnip. I suppose this does explain why leftists are so eager to become teachers. On the other hand, I suspect they are more effective with the dolts.
A Note on Supporting “Friendly” Dictators. Part II
In the early days of the Arab Spring, I posted that it does not always make sense to support friendly dictators even when they might be overthrown by somebody worse:
If a powerful nation gets a reputation of supporting any dictator who might be likely to be overthrown by a totalitarian movement (for the purposes of this discussion it doesn't matter if said movement is communist, religious, or racist), then dictators have an incentive to prop up such movements.
Today we see some evidence of that. In Libya, where we were the enemy of the local chief thug, we not only see anti-American riots but even some pro-American demonstrations. As far as I know, this hasn't happened in Egypt. Maybe if we had stayed enemies with Egypt, we'd see pro-American demonstrations there too. On the other hand, this is the epitome of a small sample. On the gripping hand, small samples are the best we can do in international politics. Maybe we'll have a large sample after we settle the Galaxy…
According to a Legal Analyst
According to a legal analyst at The Atlantic, a “Chernobyl-like disaster” nearly occurred 55 years ago at Rocky Flats in Colorado. Next time I have a legal problem, I'll ask a physicist. Meanwhile, I already covered the fact that nukes were apparently more dangerous before 1960. (I say “apparently” because this is based on a small sample.) I won't more than mention that the cancer mortality rates for nearby Boulder, Denver, and Jefferson counties are below the national average.
Interesting but More Research Is Needed
Padraig Mac Carron and Ralph Kenna have recently analyzed (original article here) myths such as “The Iliad,” “Beowulf,” or “The Tain” to see if the social networks in them resembled real social networks or the social networks in known works of fiction. Apparently, they tend to resemble real social networks … if you remove the most fictional characters. This research might be worth repeating for a larger sample of myths and a larger sample of fiction. The research also needs an additional control group. The researchers should analyze the social networks of history as well as the social networks of ordinary people. After all, you could probably prove that Barak Obama more closely resembles fictional characters than ordinary people or that World War II was a work of fiction.
So That's What He Meant!
After reading the following:
As Isaac Pollak, an ardent Republican, kissed his wife goodbye before heading out on a business trip to Asia several years ago, he handed her his absentee ballot for the coming presidential election and asked her to mail it. Bonnie Pollak, a Democrat, weighed her options. Should she be loyal to her spouse, respect his legal right and mail the ballot? Or remain faithful to her deeply held beliefs and suppress his vote? "It was a real dilemma," says Ms. Pollak, 58 years old, a student in a doctoral program in social welfare who lives in Manhattan. "I decided to do the right thing." Ms. Pollak threw the ballot away.
I realized what E. M. Forster meant when he said:
… if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
Determinism and Regulation
Liberalism started out as a defense of human freedom and most modern liberals still think they are defending freedom. On the other hand, they also defend intrusive regulations. For example:
California has a crazy law that allows employees to collect substantial ex post facto compensation if they claim they were denied a 10 minute break every four hours or a thirty minute unpaid lunch break after five. … A few weeks ago I was advised by a senior case-worker at the California Department of Labor that the only safe harbor left for employers is to FORCE employees to take an unpaid lunch. This means they clock in and back out, this means they have to leave the job site (because if a customer happens to ask them a question, then they are "working"), and this means we have to ruthlessly enforce it. Or we are liable for scads of penalties.
According to some philosophers, any behavior that is caused is incompatible with free will. In other words, if you do something for a reason, you are not free. That means that the employees who had a reason to work through lunch are not free. The regulations are saving them from SLAVERY! This explains why Sandra Flake thought having to pay for contraceptives is a violation of her rights. Having to pay for contraceptives provided a reason for her not to have sex, which meant she was not free. (This also applies to anybody who gave her a reason to have sex, which explains sexual-harassment law.) I won't more than mention that there are reasons to believe pointless actions are also unfree, which reduces your consciousness to the status of a croupier at the human roulette wheel.
Anarchy vs. Anarchy?
The Occupy Wall Street Movement is supposed to have an anarchist core. I suppose that means they will have no objection to the police deciding not to enforce laws against motorists running over rioters in the Occupied Zone. David Graeber reminds me of someoneIn this year’s “Occupy Handbook,” David Graeber, an anthropologist who teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London and was an early Occupy organizer, writes that demands shouldn’t be articulated because the systems they would be addressed to are irredeemable.
This sounds familiar … indicting someone but not saying what the indictment is. It's a little like Kafka's nightmares and a little like the Star Chamber but it's a lot like Lewis Carroll:
A SURD is a radical whose meaning cannot be exactly ascertained. This class comprises a very large number of particles.
They're not effective enough to resemble Kafka's nightmares or the Star Chamber. In related news, David Graeber turns out to be the theoretician behind the giant puppets (remember them?).
Odd Historical Fact
Henry Wallace was, among other things, noted for developing a breed of chicken:
Wallace resumed his farming interests, and resided in South Salem, New York. During his later years he made a number of advances in the field of agricultural science. His many accomplishments included a breed of chicken that at one point accounted for the overwhelming majority of all egg-laying chickens sold across the globe.
I'm sure it had two left wings.
What Was Touré Neblett Thinking?
Many of my fellow wingnuts have been criticizing the following from Touré Neblett:
“He loves this line of ‘our rights come from God and nature’, which is so offensive to so much of America,” pontificated the MSNBC personality. “Because for black people, Hispanic people, and women, our rights do not come from God or nature. They were not recognized by the natural order of America. They come from the government and from legislation that happens in relatively recent history in America. So that line just bothers me to my core.”
I have a theory about what he was thinking. You just remember the following: 1) Nowadays, the Left is the logical home of collectivists; 2) some leftists, especially the older ones, started out as conservatives. (Others have made an apparent change when the major issues changed from X to Y, in which they agreed with conservatives on X and liberals on Y; in related news, if there were an election in which the only issue were open borders, I'd probably vote Democrat.) Try to consider what sort of conservative a collectivist would be. He would be someone looking back at a society where white folks were secure (i.e., did not have to live in fear of their neighbors), and could basically pretend non-whites don't exist. These people are rare among conservatives nowadays—because most of them have gone Left—but they used to be common. These ex-conservatives would regard an environment of closed borders and legally-mandated segregation as part of a “natural order.” (I have discussed a liberal who thought conservatives were fans of the 1950s here, a liberal who was trying to attract votes from such conservatives here, and argued with such a conservative here.) It's easy for a liberal to mistake such the former opinions of such ex-conservatives for those of current conservatives. This was probably combined with ignorance of the fact that the anti-slavery movement was started by religious fundamentalists … back in the days when Unitarians were compared to Wahhabi Muslims by people who weren't being ironic.
Zombie-eyed?
The sinistrosphere has been calling Paul Ryan “zombie-eyed,” apparently under the impression that it's some kind of insult. If they really wanted to be insulting, they should have called him “Nader-eyed.”
Two Quotes
From Barak Obama:
You didn't build that.
From Carl Sagan:
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
Addendum: I'm not as original as I would like to be.
Technology for Big Planet
There's a moderately-common scenario in SF stories: a planet with a nearly-complete lack of iron and other heavy metals. Examples include: Big Planet by Jack Vance, The Man Who Counts by Poul Anderson, The Riverworld series by Philip José Farmer, Tatja Grimm's World by Vernor Vinge. This lack of metals makes it very difficult to start up a technological civilization. I've been wondering if it is possible to start up a technological civilization on such a world anyway. For example, I think it might be possible to build Stirling engines out of nonmetals. Electricity might be more difficult but it should be possible to make an electrostatic generator. Graphite is somewhat conductive, so given an electrostatic generator and graphite bus bars it should be possible to make an electrolytic cell. The electrolytic cell, in turn, makes aluminum possible. In short, it should be possible to have at least a mid-20th-century level of technology.
More on Those Yiddish Curses
There appear to be some new entries in the Yiddish curses for Republican Jews. One of them is the following:
May your only “grandchildren” be cats, and may you be allergic, but may your pharmacist legally refuse to refill your Allegra prescription because it's manufactured by the same company that makes the abortion drug.
I suspect that an all-feline set of grandchildren will be more likely among people who take the following two curses seriously:
May G-d give you a daughter-in-law who is as kind as she is beautiful, as patient as she is rich, as wise as she is devoted, a virtuous woman in every way. And then may a ballot initiative invalidate her marriage to your fat lump Rebecca.
or
May your state outlaw the morning-after pill the day before your daughter comes home from the NFTY convention.
La Ronde
According to C. N. Parkinson (earlier discussed here), socioeconomic classes are recycled by a tendency for the top of the ladder to adopt downwardly-mobile habits and the bottom of the ladder to adopt upwardly-mobile habits. Hanna Rosin's recent article on the “hook-up” culture (discussed here) accidentally provided something resembling evidence:
About two-thirds of the students came from what they called “more privileged” backgrounds, meaning they had financial support from their parents, who were probably college-educated themselves. A third came from less privileged families; they supported themselves and were probably the first in their family to go to college. ……… The most revealing parts of the study emerge from the interviews with the less privileged women. They came to college mostly with boyfriends back home and the expectation of living a life similar to their parents’, piloting toward an early marriage.
The women from less-privileged backgrounds were the upwardly-mobile and those from more-privileged backgrounds were the downwardly-mobile. I suspect the most chaste women were those that transferred out of the party school to a real university and were lost to the study. In related news, the lowest abortion ratios in New York City (as of 2009) could be found in zip code 10282, otherwise known as the “1 percent.” (It edged out the Orthodox Jewish district 11219 by a statistically-insignificant amount.)
Debate Wanted
I think a debate is needed between Hanna Rosin (who claims that the “hookup culture” is empowering women) and Kay S. Hymowitz (who pointed out that the “hookup culture” is most prominent among women who aren't exactly empowered). I think there's a lack of control groups. Ms. Rosin looked at women who “hooked up” and appeared to be getting ahead. As far as I know, she didn't look at females who didn't get to college in the first place (who are even less likely to marry and are more likely to abort or give birth out of wedlock) or the dissenting virgins (who might also be getting ahead). The closest approximation to a control group were those women who had boyfriends back home (who might have started “hooking up” even earlier). I won't more than mention the sample size of 53.
Good Heavens
My viewers have more than doubled over the past two days, owing to my my response to Yiddish curses for Republican Jews. Since “the customer is always right,” I'll add some more analysis (this time serious instead of snarky). One of the curses is:
May you live to a hundred and twenty without Social Security or Medicare.
Social Security is supposedly necessary to keep great-grandparents from starving to death and Medicare is supposedly necessary to keep great-grandparents from dying of illness. Presumably reaching a hundred and twenty in the first place meant you didn't need them. I'm reminded of the following William F. Buckley quote:
The economic model in capitalism is that a living wage must be paid in order for an economy to function. Mr. Carey insisted that part-time workers for United Parcel Service earned ``too little to live on,'' which prompts the question, Why aren't they dead?
It looks like the curse list was devised by people who listed mindless cliches with no evidence of thought or other mental activity. What does this say about all the people repeating to each other that the curse list is “brilliant”?
An Armed Student Would Feel Safe
Jerry Peterson has an armaments policy:
CU physics professor Jerry Peterson -- speaking for himself Monday, not the faculty group he leads -- said he wants his students to feel safe to engage in classroom discussions that could be controversial. "My own personal policy in my classes is if I am aware that there is a firearm in the class -- registered or unregistered, concealed or unconcealed -- the class session is immediately canceled," Peterson said. "I want my students to feel unconstrained in their discussions."
Won't armed students be unconstrained in their discussions? Besides, violent nerds tend to prefer hammers, knives, or bombs.
Yiddish Curses for Democratic Jews
Some of the Yiddish curses for Democratic Jews (responding to Yiddish curses for Republican Jews seen via Paul Krugman):
| Republican version | Democratic version |
| May your child give his Bar Mitzvah speech on the genius of Ayn Rand. | May your child give his Bar Mitzvah speech on the genius of Karl Marx. |
| May you be reunited in the world to come with your ancestors, who were all socialist garment workers. | May you be reunited in the world to come with your grandfather, who was a small businessman who voted for Hoover. |
| May you have a rare disease and need an operation that only one surgeon in the world, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, is able to perform. And may he be unable to perform it because he doesn’t take your insurance. And may that Nobel Laureate be your son. | May you have a rare disease and need an operation that only one surgeon in the world, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, is able to perform. And may he be unable to perform it because he doesn’t take government insurance. And may that Nobel Laureate be your son. |
| May you have a large store, and have it all dismantled by vulture capitalists. | May you have a large store, and have it taxed to death by vulture socialists. |
| May you spend your whole life supporting and voting for and sending money to Israel, and may you one day be actually forced to move there. | May you spend your whole life supporting and voting for and sending money to Israel, and may you one day be actually forced to move there. (Wait a moment …) |
| May you find yourself insisting to a roomful of skeptics that your great-grandmother was “legitimately” raped by Cossacks. | May you wish you had never been born. |
| May your insurance company decide constipation is a pre-existing condition. | May you pay twice as much for milk of magnesia because your insurance company was compelled to take your dollars out for a wild night on the town. |
| May you feast every day on chopped liver with onions, chicken soup with dumplings, baked carp with horseradish, braised meat with vegetable stew, latkes, and may every bite of it be contaminated with E. Coli, because the government gutted the E.P.A. | May you waste a ridiculous amount of time responding to an absurd web site only to realize it had been set up by blithering idiots who cannot tell the difference between the E.P.A. and the F.D.A. |
File Format for 3D Printing?
If 3D printing is the Wave of the Future, is there an equivalent of PostScript or SVG for 3D? I was reminded of this by reading of one of the problems of today's 3D printing:
It's interesting to examine the texture up close. It's possible to see the facets from the original Blender model (the round cylindrical parts are actually high-number polygons, so they are faceted when you examine them up close). In other places, the scan lines from the printing process are more obvious -- as in the top of the wheel quad in Figure 16.
I think we'll need Bézier surfaces to achieve atomic smoothness. Addendum: After a little more reading, I found it's called OpenSCAD.
What Kris Kobach Should Have Said
According to Kris Kobach (somebody I had never heard of until today):
If you really want to create a job tomorrow, you can remove an illegal alien today
That should be: If you really want to destroy a job tomorrow, you can remove an unregulated customer today.
Without Contact with Reality
The title of this post is one of my favorite phrases to describe how leftists will pass a supposed fact from one to another without contact with reality. Congressman Akin showed that we wingnuts do it too. To Leftists: Your reaction to Congressman Akin's statement is similar to our reaction when we hear you say that the Supreme Court declared that corporations are human beings or that Coca Cola is using up all the phosphorus on Earth or that desalinization will make the sea saltier or …
Never Bring a Knife …
… to a stapler fight:
A robber high on drugs held up a bookies with a kitchen knife - then fled when a female clerk pointed a stapler at him. Jonathon Ridley, 21, burst into a Betfred shop in Ryton, Gateshead and threatened staff with a knife as he demanded cash. But when the manager grabbed a stapler and told him to get out, he was taken aback and left without a penny.
Next week, the British government will pass a law requiring background checks before each stapler purchase.
Another Anachronistic Technology Speculation
What if lenses had been invented during the Roman Empire or Republic? I think they had clear glass by then. If they had microscopes, it might have been possible for Hellenistic philosophers to discover the germ theory of disease. Using telescopes, Rome's military would have been able to see enemy forces long before the enemy can see them. If Rome had Lensmen…
Famine, Corn Laws, and Ethanol
According to The Daily Beast, Paul Ryan supports the free-market policies they imagine contributed to the famine in Ireland in the 1840s. The famine was aggravated by export of grain to England even during the famine. That, in turn, was due to the Corn Laws that kept England from importing grain from elsewhere. The Corn Laws were based on the idea that being independent of foreign resources was more important than feeding people. The present-day equivalent of that policy is the corn ethanol mandate. Paul Ryan opposes it. Maybe it's the Irish in him. I can hardly wait for Megan McArdle to get back to work.
Possible Reactions to Nationalizing Facebook
According to Philip N. Howard:
…it’s time we start discussing an idea that might seem crazy: nationalizing Facebook.
Possible reactions:
- Incredulous stare.
- “You cannot use the Ring. It's nature is evil, and those who use it will be consumed by it.”
- This guy is Canadian. Can we deport him? (No … because we can't use the Ring either.)
- Can we nationalize The New York Times first? No?
- Can we at least nationalize Slate first? No?
- I looked up “nationalize AOL” on Google. I got 7 responses, 6 sarcastic and 1 spam.
- First it's your guns then it's your library card. (From a Usenet .sig block)
An Electro-Steampunk Speculation
Could Charles Babbage have created a relay-based computer? Could it have been combined with telegraphs to form a Victorian Internet?
Invention Wanted: Fenton Silencer
The Fenton Silencer from “Silence Please” by Arthur C. Clarke might be the best way of handling hecklers.
Am I in the Onion World?
First, I read:
As a rising star in Hungary's far-right Jobbik Party, Csanad Szegedi was notorious for his incendiary comments on Jews: He accused them of "buying up" the country, railed about the "Jewishness" of the political elite and claimed Jews were desecrating national symbols. Then came a revelation that knocked him off his perch as ultra-nationalist standard-bearer: Szegedi himself is a Jew.
WE ARE EVERYWHERE! Next, I read:
Americans demand Canadian-free shopping at Costco
BLAME CANADA!
A Well-Intentioned Law Backfired
Ademo Freeman was convicted of wiretapping for recording police activity. The anti-wiretapping law was probably passed in the first place by people who imagined it would not be used on independent citizens keeping track of possible government abuses. Even the best-intentioned law can go awry. The Great BluffThe reason so many people are suspicious of wiretapping and other recording might be due to what I think of as the Great Bluff of the mid-20th century—in which statists convinced people who should know better that technology would always be on the side of the State. As a result, there is a common assumption that wiretapping would only be used by the State and that anti-wiretapping laws could only be anti-authoritarian. Another instance of the effects of the Great Bluff was C. S. Lewis's opposition to space travel. On the contrary, it might be used to escape the Planners. “God's quarantine regulations” can be used by space travelers to quarantine the State. This might even account for the belief in some quarters (discussed here) that nuclear energy must be a State technology.
This News Should Be Tweeted
More Nonsense I Haven't Seen Lately
I've noticed a curiosity about the plutonium-powered Curiosity Mars Rover. It doesn't seem to have inspired much in the way of protests—unlike the plutonium-powered Cassini probe. Where are the kooks of yesteryear?
Answering a Feminist Question
Lizz Winstead asks:
If creating jobs is the number one priority for politicians in this country, why are they so focused on my uterus?
She has a point. The State should not have to pay for Sandra Fluke's uterus.
A Fallacy I Haven't Seen Lately
I just realized that I haven't seen the claim that paying higher wages is good for the economy because it enables workers to buy more in years, possibly decades. On the other hand, that might be the cue for leftists to revive it.
Where Do Libertarians Fit In?
Steve Yegge has divided the programming world into conservative (reliability comes first) and liberal (ease of development comes first). As for where libertarians fit in, I suppose we should prefer a system in which you can do what you want, provided you pay for it. I suppose that would be mostly static typing but all errors are warnings ….
More Consistent Than It Looks
Many of my fellow wingnuts are highly critical of the supposed hypocrisy of leftists who protest the alleged hate crimes of the Chik-Fil-A management while turning a blind eye towards far worse persecution of homosexuals in the Middle East. This supposed inconsistency becomes more understandable once you realize that the fundamental principle of leftist thought isn't “defend dissenters” or “be fair to the poor” or even “progress.” The fundamental principle of leftist thought is “follow the crowd.” (The progress part comes in when they try to save time by getting ahead of the crowd.) The persecutors of gays in Iran, etc. are thought to be following the local crowd and are thus acceptable. The Chik-Fil-A managers are thought to be dissenting from the crowd and are thus unacceptable. Similarly, a politician who opposed gay marriage a few years ago was acceptable then because he was following the crowd at the time, provided he has changed his mind since. The ideal leader of the left is, of course, President Everybody.
A Near Miracle
Menachem Cohen has been compiling a definitive edition of the Hebrew Bible:
Poring over thousands of medieval manuscripts, the 84-year-old professor identified 1,500 inaccuracies in the Hebrew language texts that have been corrected in his completed 21-volume set. The final chapter is set to be published next year.
Speaking as somebody who started working in publishing before the days of word processors (and if you don't believe me I shall hit you with my slide rule), in my professional opinion this is a nearly-miraculous degree of accuracy for something that was hand copied for centuries.
Not an Argument against Vouchers
According to Mother Jones, school vouchers have paid for textbooks that Mother Jones readers disagree with. On the other hand, I regard the claims in their examples 7, 8, 9, 13, and 14 as plausible. Even if you accept the claim that the examples are idiotic (I agree on example 11), if they didn't have a voucher system each school district in Louisiana would be one election away from fundamentalists taking over. There's also the minor problem that government schools also teach absurd stuff (back-up evidence seen here) and fail to correct left-wing fallacies. There's an even bigger problem: When all schools are run by one organization, everybody will be making the same mistakes. When schools are run by many different organizations, any fallacies stuffed in “young skulls full of mush” can be corrected after graduation by people who learned better.
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