New Super Power Confirmed

No, not SuperPower(TM), the new productdiscipline for the losersfollowers of Scientology, but just the average run of the mill super-powers we all tend to have. For instance, my younger brother has the super-power "coming up roses", which's just what the aphorism would suggest. I'd envy him for it if he didn't also suffer from Instant Karma, which I so don't envy.

But, I've always known my super-power was "all dogs love me" (except for dogs that are either "on duty" or who've been abused). I have now had third-party confirmation to my second super-power, Opiate Resistance. I had to go to the hospital for a migraine, and got a "rather large" (the docs words) dose of Demerol that was supposed to turn me into a complete zombie in a half an hour or less. We had to stop the car so I could toss my cookies (in spite of the large injection of antinauseant preceding the Demerol injection), but otherwise the only ill effects were like being a half-way between being tipsy and drunk, with a dry mouth & slightly tweaky balance in the morning. Maddie says I have a "frightening resistance" to Demerol.

That's really cool: how many people have two super-powers? (Unless this means my dog-oriented powers are waning in the presence of so many catsen.)

Solution to Global Warming

I have a modest proposal to counteract global warming: Nukes.

Remember back in school when they said that a nuclear exchange would result in "Nuclear Winter" and the icing of the globe? That was back before Global Warming started killing off polar bears. If we were to really, seriously, nuke the bloody sh*t out of Pyongyang Tehran Graceland someplace evil, we'd add Nuclear Winter to our Global Warming, and voila!

Just like someone getting chocolate in your peanut-butter, we'd have Nuclear Global Autumn. Sweater-weather for everyone!

Happy Christmas, y'all!

For the few who prefer "Happy Solstice", "Natalis Sol Invicti", "Merry Kwaanza", &c., happy them too.

Cephalopodmas Carols

Here presented, The Carol of the Old Ones, just in time for Cephalopodmas.

No surprise to ANYONE....

The Dante's Inferno Hell Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Very High
Level 2 (Lustful)	Very High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Very Low
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Very Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Low
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	High
Level 7 (Violent)	Moderate
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Low
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Low

Intelligent Design Sort

ID has largely been done to death on this blog. If you believe in it, stop now, because you'll find my "ignorance" insurmountable (and besides, I've blasphemed the Holy Spirit and am therefore beyond redemption, so please just go away). Nonetheless, dead horse though ID is, I ran across something sufficiently interesting as to merit discussion: a fatal refutation of Paley's "watchmaker" thesis (the one underlying ID). In a nutshell, the idea of Paley's thesis is that there's no way all this stuff just coalesced out of stardust and thinking apes evolved to attribute bad poetry to Vogons, so therefore Vogon poetry must therefore have been the will of God.

Here is DangerMouse's succinct tongue-in-cheek destruction of Paley's thesis, under the aegis of informatics (computer-science):

Intelligent Design Sort
Introduction
Intelligent design sort is a sorting algorithm based on the theory of intelligent design.
Algorithm Description
The probability of the original input list being in the exact order it's in is 1/(n!). There is such a small likelihood of this that it's clearly absurd to say that this happened by chance, so it must have been consciously put in that order by an intelligent Sorter. Therefore it's safe to assume that it's already optimally Sorted in some way that transcends our naïve mortal understanding of "ascending order". Any attempt to change that order to conform to our own preconceptions would actually make it less sorted.
Analysis
This algorithm is constant in time, and sorts the list in-place, requiring no additional memory at all. In fact, it doesn't even require any of that suspicious technological computer stuff. Praise the Sorter!

Ok, my usual sarcasm aside, the baseline premise is simple: that ultra-low probability events are occurring all the time and we don't object to them, so why should we object to Darwinian evolution on that basis when there's so much supporting evidence? An example of such an ultra-low probability event would be winning the lottery. But wait, one may object, sure, winning the lottery isn't likely, but in the grand scheme of things, that's child's play compared to the probabilities of quasars, plum pudding and "Reptiles and Samurai", no?

So, here's a simple thought experiment:

1. take a big sack and put in 1000 differently-marked tiles
2. draw out one tile at a time, arranging the tiles in a line
3. continue until the bag is empty.
   

The odds of the tiles coming out in whatever order they will have emerged are exactly:

1 in 402,387,260,077,093,773,543,702,433,923,003,985,719,374,864,210,714,632,
543,799,910,429,938,512,398,629,020,592,044,208,486,969,404,800,479,988,610,
197,196,058,631,666,872,994,808,558,901,323,829,669,944,590,997,424,504,087,073,
759,918,823,627,727,188,732,519,779,505,950,995,276,120,874,975,462,497,043,601,
418,278,094,646,496,291,056,393,887,437,886,487,337,119,181,045,825,783,647,849,
977,012,476,632,889,835,955,735,432,513,185,323,958,463,075,557,409,114,262,417,
474,349,347,553,428,646,576,611,667,797,396,668,820,291,207,379,143,853,719,588,
249,808,126,867,838,374,559,731,746,136,085,379,534,524,221,586,593,201,928,090,
878,297,308,431,392,844,403,281,231,558,611,036,976,801,357,304,216,168,747,609,
675,871,348,312,025,478,589,320,767,169,132,448,426,236,131,412,508,780,208,000,
261,683,151,027,341,827,977,704,784,635,868,170,164,365,024,153,691,398,281,264,810
,213,092,761,244,896,359,928,705,114,964,975,419,909,342,221,566,832,572,080,821,333
,186,116,811,553,615,836,546,984,046,708,975,602,900,950,537,616,475,847,728,421,889
,679,646,244,945,160,765,353,408,198,901,385,442,487,984,959,953,319,101,723,355,
556,602,139,450,399,736,280,750,137,837,615,307,127,761,926,849,034,352,625,200,015
,888,535,147,331,611,702,103,968,175,921,510,907,788,019,393,178,114,194,545,257,223,
865,541,461,062,892,187,960,223,838,971,476,088,506,276,862,967,146,674,697,562,911,
234,082,439,208,160,153,780,889,893,964,518,263,243,671,616,762,179,168,909,779,911,
903,754,031,274,622,289,988,005,195,444,414,282,012,187,361,745,992,642,956,581,746,
628,302,955,570,299,024,324,153,181,617,210,465,832,036,786,906,117,260,158,783,520,
751,516,284,225,540,265,170,483,304,226,143,974,286,933,061,690,897,968,482,590,125,
458,327,168,226,458,066,526,769,958,652,682,272,807,075,781,391,858,178,889,652,208,
164,348,344,825,993,266,043,367,660,176,999,612,831,860,788,386,150,279,465,955,131,
156,552,036,093,988,180,612,138,558,600,301,435,694,527,224,206,344,631,797,460,594,
682,573,103,790,084,024,432,438,465,657,245,014,402,821,885,252,470,935,190,620,929,
023,136,493,273,497,565,513,958,720,559,654,228,749,774,011,413,346,962,715,422,845,
862,377,387,538,230,483,865,688,976,461,927,383,814,900,140,767,310,446,640,259,899,
490,222,221,765,904,339,901,886,018,566,526,485,061,799,702,356,193,897,017,860,040,
811,889,729,918,311,021,171,229,845,901,641,921,068,884,387,121,855,646,124,960,798,
722,908,519,296,819,372,388,642,614,839,657,382,291,123,125,024,186,649,353,143,970,
137,428,531,926,649,875,337,218,940,694,281,434,118,520,158,014,123,344,828,015,051,
399,694,290,153,483,077,644,569,099,073,152,433,278,288,269,864,602,789,864,321,139,
083,506,217,095,002,597,389,863,554,277,196,742,822,248,757,586,765,752,344,220,207,
573,630,569,498,825,087,968,928,162,753,848,863,396,909,959,826,280,956,121,450,994,
871,701,244,516,461,260,379,029,309,120,889,086,942,028,510,640,182,154,399,457,156,
805,941,872,748,998,094,254,742,173,582,401,063,677,404,595,741,785,160,829,230,135,
358,081,840,096,996,372,524,230,560,855,903,700,624,271,243,416,909,004,153,690,105,
933,983,835,777,939,410,970,027,753,472,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

That likelihood is so astonishingly close to zero that you may as well conclude that you didn't do it, because it's just too mind bogglingly small a probability to think that it could have possibly happened. A probability like that might as well be the definition of impossible. No sane mind can possibly comprehend such an improbability. Honestly, physicists aren't entirely sure there are that many distinct countable things in the universe.

That's not only the crux, but also the sovereign flaw, of Paley's teleological argument. When it comes down to it, of course the mind boggles at the idea that all this stuff just happened! But that doesn't mean that it didn't just happen. What it means is that our puny minds aren't up to comprehending it, so we invent a nice placeholder by "factoring out the boggle" and calling it God, inventing some comforting and/or threatening stories depending on where you sit on the spectrum between Bishop Spong & John Knox, and going away secure in the knowledge that you can ponder the universe without your brain exploding. It's the exact equivalent to working with a class of nonsense numbers that can't possibly mean anything much less exist, so long as you remember to write a little cursive "i" next to them. Thanks to religion, so long as you remember to always keep God in the equation, you can go on about your business confident that everything makes sense, or, if it doesn't make sense, that at least it isn't utterly and incomprehensibly absurd.

Much more potent to argue that the Christian commandments lead to a nicer world (hint: they do) than to argue that it's impossible that the world could be the way it is randomly.

When IPOD ruled the world....

Ok, like, I can take a joke; ya' know what I mean? But this is getting a little ridiculous....

Important Article

Got this in the mail this morning; worth disseminating to the 3 people who read my blog. It just goes to show you can't swallow the logic of "the CIA denied it so you know it must be true" that Douglas Adams winkingly proposed so many years ago....

AP Gets Caught Working For The Enemy

November 30, 2006: Two blogs, Gateway Pundit and Flopping Aces, have uncovered what appears to be a serious screw-up by the Associated Press in its coverage of Iraq. It appears that this American media outlet passed on terrorist propaganda, perhaps willingly. The mistake in question involves at least ten stories since April 27 in which a Captain Jemil Hussein was a source. Six of these stories involved alleged massacres of Sunni Arabs. Four others involved unknown victims. A second AP source in the Iraqi police, Lieutenant Maithem Abdul Rizzaq, is also proving to be nonexistent, according to Central Command and the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior. This is not the first time the media has been caught with bad stories and invented sources, but this is the most serious.

In 2005, media outlets ran with stories about the Koran being flushed by guards at Guantanamo Bay. These stories proved to be false � the flushing had been done by detainees. This had not come out until after a series of riots fanned by politicians across the Middle East led to several deaths. In another vein, claims of torture were made in public forums (most notably the floor of the United States Senate) and passed on. Later investigation not only failed to uncover such things, but discovered that in some of the very few cases where the line was crossed, there was provocation (such as spitting on a guard).

This also is bad when what the media omits is considered. For instance, the photos used by the media in various reports, as late as 2005, on the detainee camps, also took things out of context. The images used were of Camp X-Ray, a temporary camp that was replaced by Camp Delta in April, 2002. Camp Delta is on par with the latest correctional institutions in the United States. A detainee Time magazine profiled in 2005, was slated to be the 20th hijacker � the fifth person on Flight 93. Another detainee traveled to Pakistan in 1998 with an Iraqi intelligence officer to carry out an attack on the American and British embassies using chemical weapons. Nor has the media mentioned the fact that at least a dozen detainees that have been released have gone back to fighting with al Qaeda. The media has also neglected to point out that al Qaeda manuals instruct members to make false claims of being tortured if they are captured.

What makes this new AP case so bad is the fact that the phony source could have been easily exposed, had the AP bothered to contact Central Command. Central Command's public affairs office has its phone number listed � along with an e-mail address. An e-mail address for Multinational Forces Iraq is also available. Yet the AP failed to check for at least ten stories. Failing to check a source once might fall into the category of an understandable mistake, but failing to check up on sources more than ten times is an incredible stretch. Central Command has informed the AP of these phony sources, but the AP is standing by its stories, claiming that they are using "a wide range of sources". This apparently includes phony sources.

Western media have long allowed themselves to be manipulated by Iraqi Sunni Arabs, largely because these media outlets opposed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the Sunni Arab dictatorship that Saddam ran. The Sunni Arab minority (about 20 percent of the population in 2003, closer to ten percent now) were not only running Iraq, but had long been the wealthiest and best educated segment of the population. Thus is was easy for pro-Sunni Arab Western and Arab journalists to find articulate (often English speaking) Iraqi Sunni Arabs to provide useful quotes and sound bites. With that experience, it was a short step to inventing Sunni Arab sources, which was more convenient. This is an old custom in journalism. For example, Time Magazine was long known for its invented sources, and some avid Time fans would keep track of the names of sources quoted in the magazine, until they found the latest invented one. This was easy to do, because the same name showed up in different par
ts of the country, or the world, and in very different situations.

The current use of phony sources by AP has led to multiple reports that not only paint what appears to be a distorted picture of what is going on inside Iraq, but also reflects poorly on Iraqi police and Army personnel who are fighting terrorists. These reports, based on phony sources, have also misled the American people. But then, many Americans already knew that, because troops in Iraq, usually reported a very different reality. The Associated Press is going to have some serious explaining to do. Those who want to get the straight scoop from Iraq should check out Central Command's newsroom website or the Department of Defense's website. � Harold C. Hutchison

Cthulhu Family Circus

If you're a fan of Cthulhu (and who isn't?), you may enjoy these.

Odds and Ends

1. The long-suffering lemurwife has started a blog wherein to review packets of thinly sliced trees.
2. In a radio symbozium (yes, I spelled it that way on purpose), Kos got something right: the main point of negative ads is to discourage independent voters so that elections remain a contest of faithful vs. faithful. Given that he supports a major party, he didn't add in that the reason for this is so that gerrymandering will continue to work....
3. Although I enjoyed his book "Women, fire and dangerous things", George Lakoff is either a moron or a slippery bastard. In the same symbozium, he made argument after argument that only held water if your reasoning was circular, and touted "framing" as the circularity in logic that made it all possible.
4. In the spirit of Halloween, we voted last night (we do write-ins). I have a deep and abiding respect for the California electorate: the same sort of deep and abiding respect I have for the autistic and deeply retarded.
5. No matter how respectable you are before you're elected governor of a state, you almost immediately turn into a goober. That's why they're called guber-natorial elections.
6. In respect of tradition, there is no number six.
7. My camera is lost! If anyone sees a Pentax LX sitting at a lonely bus-stop with an Emo hair-doo, please ask it to call home.
8. We finally found the whole Masquerade Suite, but as usual it's on vinyl....
   

And just in case you used to think that popular music was ever less lascivious than it is nowadays, I present the first verse of a renaissance madrigal....

Now is the month of maying,
When merry lads are playing,
Each with his bonny lass
Upon the greeny grass.

So long Garrison Keillor

No, not an obituary, at least not for him personally, but A Prairie Home Companion has jumped the shark.

A moment of silence of, please....

Testing, take 2

Testing....

This is a test to see if the following Mimsi code to evaluate a polynomial posts correctly.

evaluate : Polynomial p -> Number x -> Number {
(+)//0 ' (*) << reverse p.coeffs <> ( xVals = (x*) << 1 : xVals )
}

Not terribly important in the grand scheme of things, but the last method I tried failed miserably, and one day I'll need to post info as to how the language actually works (when it's more than a gleam in it's nerd's eye, that is).

Yet another reason to pitch your television

According to a recent Slate article, TV might cause autism. In the immortal words of the great Terpsichorean Lemur, "damn".

Borderlands Books makes the AP Newswire

From the article:

SAN FRANCISCO - Former bodyguard Alan Beatts took a big gamble by opening a bookstore at a time when chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble and Internet merchants like Amazon.com were claiming an ever-bigger share of the market. So Beatts decided to carve out a niche by specializing in the science fiction and horror books he'd always loved. It was a smart move. A decade later, his Borderlands Books is thriving in San Francisco's funky Mission District. He sets up tables at horror and science conventions, and the genres' authors stop by for readings and book signings. Most importantly, nine out of 10 customers don't just stop in for a quick paperback. They keep coming back. "They are very appreciative" Beatts said of his passionate customer base. He estimates he's seen double-digit growth in each year since Borderlands opened. "There's an assumption that we have something in common which doesn't exist in the general interest stores."

Now, I'm actually a fan of Borders Books, but they also seriously depress me. When they came into town where I used to live, the best you could get was a Crown Books or B.Dalton Bookseller, both of which absolutely stink. But instead of killing off all the supid "I buy the important, topical ephemera-du-jour that make me look smart and sophisticated" and "yay for chick-lit! Melrose-Place means never having to think for myself!" bookstores, Borders and it's toxic cousin Barnes & Noble have been killing off all the really cool little independent bookstores instead. So now we've got a world with big soulless megastores where at least you can find Teilhard de-Chardin, and smaller franchise-shops not worth stepping into, but almost none of the high-touch places run by real booksellers (the kinds of people who can not only look at you and tell what kinds of books you like, but can also tell you seventeen other books you've never heard of by your favorite author's second cousin's wife's nephew's little brother and how those books fit into where the genre or sub-genre is heading, not to mention why they complement your favorite author's work so nicely). There's a reason that bookselling has always been the living example of oxymoronity: the prestigious minimum-wage job -- because it's important and can't be replaced by big chains (who seem to be strictly hiring bubblegum snapping teenagers who think they're "so above this" and can't wait until the get out of college so they can have "real jobs"). Perhaps genre-stores will be the last bastion that can remain sufficiently successful that booksellers won't go the way of the soda-jerk. I for one certainly hope so.

What the heck is this?

I was looking for some entrances to tantalizing backroads that I can see from I-280 near some really photo-worthy scenery, but couldn't figure out how access worked. I dialed up Google Maps, and found the above picture. Any brainiacs have any theory as to what kind of building keeps three white spheres on top? Any chances of getting shot if I drive by too slowly?

UPDATE: There is no LOS to this facility from any public road. The actual road up to it is "private, no tresspassing". It's in the middle of an "open space preserve" (CA has tons of them) -- it's definitely not a school. The picture now links to the google maps page; if you scroll around, you'll see a whole lotta roads that don't seem to go anywhere. If you go north, eventually you'll find this:

game pointers

On Photography

I've been thinking a lot about what the heck I'm doing with my photography lately. Someone I know thinks I should sell my stuff on his or her website, but I'm nowhere near ready yet. In the five years I've been shooting I've amassed maybe 12-18 "keepers", but have yet to take a picture I'd call a "show-er". Sometimes I rather despair that I'll ever take a picture of real merit. The other day though, my latest issue of LensWork came, and in it there was an editorial by some guy named Brooks Jensen:

We photograph nostalgia so that we can remember; abstracts so we can play with the patterns in our visual mind; flowers so we can marvel at the wonders of creation. These are worthy, soaring pursuits, even if our results remain grounded and somewhat pedestrian.

If I've ever given an "amen" in my life, that surely earned it!

The article came into my lap the same day I bought an adapter so I could mount my 4x5 camera onto my my tripod. Sadly, the little Bogen ball-head on my wooden tripod isn't up to holding a Cambo Legend, so I had to put it on my little aluminum Manfrotto tripod, which has a panning head that's just fine, but the tripod isn't up to the job. But I decided to risk it anyway, and went shooting on Sunday. As I shot, I was thinking the whole time about what makes a picture worth taking. Most of my friends think I'm a cracker-jack photographer, but I've done enough of my homework to know I'm only approaching basic competancy (not there yet). Like I said, no "show-ers" yet.

The first stage of competancy with a photograph is whether or not it is correct. Sadly, I am seeing more and more product photography in magazines where my first impression isn't the composition or the lighting, but "it's out of focus!" (I wonder if the trend towards digital has put more photogs onto auto-everything cameras that aren't so friendly to manual focussing as the older ones. Autofocus lenses have much shorter "throw" than traditional manual lenses, so getting critically sharp focus is often much harder with them.) To be considered correct, the photograph must be free from error. This means:

• Everything that's supposed to be in focus is in focus,
• The exposure must include everything in the frame (special effects like sunset silhouettes exempted),
• No branches sticking out of people's heads or other errors of composition.

This is a paltry list, though. Not so much something to aspire to as something to be ashamed of when it happens. If, as a snapshooter catching memories, one of these flaws surfaces, no biggie. But for an aspiring artist to commit one of these errors is to show that one simply wasn't paying attention to what one was doing. That'd be like a professional boxer not keeping his elbows down -- a neophyte like myself must suffer the inevitable uppercut, but the pro-boxer would deserve it.

But what then does a would-be artist aspire to when making photographs? So far as I can see, photographs worth taking accomplish one of the following:

1. Information -- The photograph informs us of something we should know, or reminds us of something that should not be forgotten. The classic photo of U.S. Marines raising the Stars and Bars over Mount Suribachi and that napalmed girl in Vietnam are two good examples. This is different than "archiving an experience" as I do snapshotting with my belt-camera.
   
2. Esthetics -- The photograph should produce a pleasing image, regardless of whether the photo has any figurative content. Still-lifes of flowers and most of Ansel Adams's landscapes fall into this category (sunset beaches generally do not -- a beautiful subject and a beautiful image are two different things).
3. Emotion -- The photograph brings about an emotional reaction in the viewer, be it awe, mystery, lust, chagrin or empathy, here the point is to be moved, to have some part of your being touched and shared through the silver halide.
   

My working hypothesis is that a nice photograph will succeed in one of these, a good photograph must succeed in at least two conditions, and that no great photograph fails to succeed in all criteria. Maybe I'll see things differently in another five years, but for now that's my $0.02 and I'm sticking with it.

Noam Chomsky & Howard Zinn's Tolkien Commentary

A charming diversion for Thursday morning:

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Unused Audio Commentary By Howard Zinn & Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002, for The Fellowship of the Ring Platinum Series Extended Edition DVD, Part One

But put down your coffee first!

Why People Don't Use Mass Transit

There's a great article from a few years ago still available on a psuedoscience debunking site called Why People Don't Use Mass Transit. If you need to shut up collectivist nitwits this's a good article to use. The only flaw is that it "Don't" should be replaced with "Will Never".

80 MPG Mini Cooper

I'd like one for Maddie.

The Housing Panic Begins!

Here's a chart of home prices that's rippling through the memesphere; the conclusions should be obvious, yes? (hint: no)

Semi-Fractional Banking

Well, the Fed's guys said they may have to raise interest rates again after all, and the equity markets are in the predictable tizzy(plus USDJPY is happier -- piffle). I've been thinking for a while about currencies, given that if I can accumulate a nest-egg large enough for the work to be worthwhile, I want to start trading again. I could pro'lly scare up about $5k and do so now, but even if I'm very successful at %30/yr (not unrealistic with proper risk management), the return on only $5k isn't worth all the work required. But anyway, like I said, I think about currencies a fair bit. If you think about currencies long enough, you have to think about economics, since states' economies are the determinators of currency rates. For example, I was recently thinking about whether the ill health of the Iraqi Dinar (which I'd be happy to sell, without reservation) makes it a viable "sideways market" trading target, which got me thinking about hyperinflation, and, if you're a Mises kinda guy, that old bugaboo, Fractional Reserve Banking.

For background (note that this's an innaccurate "simple-minded" explanation -- see Mises.org for gorey details), fractional-reserve banking is the "modern" system of banking -- with FRB, a bank that has $100 in its savings accounts is free to lend someone $110 dollars. In our system, the Federal Reserve offers banks a Faustian deal that states that if they hold a certain amount of reserves (say, ten cents on the dollar) against deposits, the Fed will insure the deposits in case too many people all try to collect their debts at once. In the "non-fractional" system, you could only loan $110 if you have $110 to lend, and then you can't lend out any more until some comes back -- this is colloquially called the "money warehouse" school of banking. There's more to it that, but that's enough in a nutshell to get the next point, which is that fractional-reserve banking is inherently inflationary. The reason why is that if I have $100, and can lend you $110 dollars, you now have $110 and can loan someone $121 dollars -- so where did the extra $21 dollars come from? That's inflation. You now have $121 dollars representing $100 dollars of actual economic value, and thus each dollar is worth less than it was before. This is the real definition of inflation, not the commonly used proxy, "price inflation". In the absence of financial gimmics (like the Fed Funds Rate), price inflation almost instantly mirrors monetary inflation (assuming a free market). The Feds adjust the interest rate at which banks may lend each other money, which thereby adjusts the supply of money that banks can "invent" through loans. Note that the Fed Funds Rate is never negative! Go figure, huh? It all sounds like hanky-panky, and relative to true economic value (goods, services & property) it is, but so long as all countries are playing the same game, currency rates remain largely indicative of a particular state's economic performance (modulo central-bank interest-rate differences).

The big problem comes in because there's always pressure to have more money available, aka "cookies for everyone!" Too much money inexorably leads to hyperinflation, which is really, really bad (just ask the Turks -- they issue 20,000,000-Lira bank notes!). In order to avoid hyperinflation, the banks end up having to rein in the economy by raising interest rates above the pure-market "time-value of money" rate, which tends to cause recessions -- this gives rise to the "boom/bust" business cycle. The Business Cycle is completely avoidable with total-reserve banking, however, as Alexander Hamilton knew oh so well, if you're restricted to lending only "idle, unused" money, it's awfully hard to raise funds when you need them for wars and roads. Total-reserve banking makes for incredibly inflexible fiscal policy, and it's really hard to run a nation that way.

So I have a modest proposal: semi-fractional banking. Instead of having a total-reserve currency, with all its attendent virtues and inflexibility, or a fractional-reserve currency, with it's attendent vices and flexibility, why not have both? We could issue two separate currencies under different rules; let's call them Values and Credits:

• Value banking is total-reserve, money-warehouse banking. The interest rate charged over time for a bank to lend Values either to retail customers or to other banks is determined solely by the free market. Values are legal tender for property, wages and interest.
  
• Credits are fractional-reserve currency; the Federal Reserve controls deposit-reserve requirements, repo & funds rates, &c., just like it does for USD today. Credits are legal tender for all goods and services which are neither property, wages nor interest.
• The exchange rate between Values and Credits is determined by the free market.
• Taxes must be levied in Values.
  

N.B. The definition of "legal tender", btw, doesn't mean that you have to use that currency; it means you must accept that currency if offered. If the electric company is willing to accept payment in oil-packed tuna, that's great, but if I offer them dollars, they must discharge my bill in dollars.

Following this system, we're free to inflate our economy as much as we like, but our indebtedness must be financed with real money, our wages must be paid with real money and real property (land) must be purchased with real money. On the other hand, our iPods, car washes and battleships can be paid in flexibly money that we're free to invent as necessary. Our true economic situation would be apparent to everyone, as would the real cost of the things we purchase, because we'd be unable to finance our purchases with financed money. If we over-inflate the money supply, we'll either see the pain right away, or, if it's really necessary, delay the pain but see it loom ever larger on the horizon.

Semi-fractional banking would not come for free; we'd pay the piper with service-charge friction converting between the two currencies (although I suppose that, much like ATMs, your own bank wouldn't charge you if you have an account), but the stability and openness we'd get in exchange would more than make up for the friction.

It would be the best of both worlds.

I've shrunk!

I had an appointment with the allergist, and as part of the checking-in procedure I was weighed & measured. I'm fat, which's not news to anyone, but I'm 5'11.25" ! Holy crap! I used to be 6'0" -- that's a lot of less height.

Yours lemurly is creeped out.

Why Christianity isn't Wrong, or, Atheists Suck Too

Truthy, adj: quality of a proposition held to be true because of coinciding with an individual's existing biases -- see "faith".

So, I've been beating up on fideists a lot lately (defined for my purposes as those who go by faith without regard to reason; for a better definition, consult your local U.D. graduate). I tend to mainly poke at Christian fideists, because they're the ones that drive me crazy personally -- if I lived in Gujarat, I'd be harping on the JDP and Hindu fundamentalists instead. But, as an American, it's the folks like the "fish"-oriented dental assistant who can't believe that I don't go to her megachurch, much less to any other church, and think's it's really weird that I don't keep my mind buzzing in a vacuum of "how can I praise Him enough" songs -- her ilk creep me out even worse than Furries (and, I have to say, if you ever have the chance to stumble across a Furry Convention, don't -- you'll sleep much better that way). Nonetheless, there's another group of fideists that I can't stand, either: atheists. Most prominantly you'll see the writings of Richard Dawkins, who's so close to being "spot on" that he just couldn't be more wrong if he tried. I've attended Southern Baptist churches when I was the guest of a True Believer, and, being a guest, wasn't about to insult my hosts by not attending with them, and I agree with Dawkins that the larger ones can definitely have a queasy sort of Nuremburg Rally kind of feel to them. It's that whole "hey, we don't need reason; we have faith" thing. Creepy.

Atheists like Dawkins suck too, though. They take the fact that there's no real evidence in support of religion (and by evidence, I mean empirical data, not "an old book says so", "I can't explain everything any other way" nor "I managed to quit drinking") and therefore conclude that since there's no evidence for God, that there must not be a God. Need one say that this is patently rediculous? Even from the perspective of simple logic, modus ponens (A implies B) says nothing about B when A is false. That sort of fallacy actually has a name: "denying the antecedant". Yet presumably educated people run around stating with conviction that there's no God (and that therefore Christianity, Zoroastrianism and the Flying Spaghetti Monster are all false).

As far as I'm concerned, these people are guilty of a sin: rationalism. Rationalism is the belief that reason is sufficient to explain life, the universe and cheesecake, without the need to apply the guesswork of religious faith. The sad thing is though, that the belief that sufficiently well-developed use of reason (multiplying scientific truths throughout the ages, yada yada yada) is sufficient to explain everything is itself a religion! By extension, so is Atheism.

The standard arguments of faith versus atheism all rely on faulty epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge). In order to know something, the following must hold:

1. It must be true
2. It must be believed to be true
3. The believer must have sound reason to believe it to be true

Religious people, including atheists, rely on Aristotelian logic, since it suits their agenda. Specifically, they rely on the notion that if something is not true then it must therefore be false. From an epistemological point of view, this is not only a dead end: it's intellectual masturbation. This was found out by the failure of Descartes's project to ground truth on some unchallengeable edifice, and to thereafter derive all the other things we need to know. He famously chose St. Augustine's cogito ergo sum (and falsely took credit for it, I might add, the bastard), and thereafter immediately ran out of progress, so he invented a cock & bull story to show that God exists, and therefore went on to prove black is white and got himself killed at the first zebra crossing. Or not. But he did end up having to invent a story to explain God's existence purely on the basis of his own, and his explanation is so full of holes that college sophomores can pull it apart. (He should have stuck with analytic geometry (genius!).) There's a solid reason why DesCartes had to cheat and invent an argument for God to save his project, and that reason wasn't just trying not to get in trouble with the Church (although I suspect that did weigh upon him heavily). Standard Aristotelian logic is what is called truth-preserving. This means two things: first of all, if you start out with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, this logic will only give you the truth as a result. If you start out with a falsehood, on the other hand, all bets are off. By pulling in a false argument for God, Descartes could then make other arguments that he couldn't make just by relying on his own existence. He needed to do so for another good reason: truth-preserving logics cannot create new information; they can only rearrange the expressions of truth you already know, rearranging them into a form that is so direct that you can't miss it. No truth that doesn't already exist within the axioms of such a logic system can ever be derived by one -- Aristotelian logic cannot create new truths. Therefore, this sort of logic can't perform any explanation that doesn't really beg the question, using circular arguments. In Aristotelian logic, truth may neither be created nor destroyed. Basing claims to something unclaimable on the basis of this kind of logic is therefore appealling to people whose primary motivation isn't to find new truths, but to support something they already hold to be true.

The way out of this problem is to use a different kind of logic, namely, intuitionistic logic. Intuitionistic logic isn't truth-preserving, but it is knowledge preserving. At any given time using such logic, you always know that whatever you've derived is sound. But in the process, you give up the notion that anything is true unless you can directly demonstrate the fact -- specifically, you have to give up the notion of the exluded middle. That Christianity cannot be proven to be true thus does not mean that it has been proven to be false; it just means that it can't be shown to be true. Thus, to actually know that there is no God, in addition to believing there to be no God and there in fact not being any God, one must have a direct intutionistic proof that God does not exist. A proof that religion is false, or, that some particular religion is false, does not suffice. So far, I'm not certain that anyone has been able to formalize just what might constitute evidence of God's nonexistence, but I feel pretty comfortable wagering that no-one has found any so far. By weight of the three tests above, if anyone tells you there is no God, you can rest assured that they're acting on faith (or bias), because they simply can't know such a thing.

Worse yet for the sin of rationalism -- we've actually proven rationalism to be wrong. The nutshell version goes like this: there was a guy named Godel, who proved that an arithmetic (any arithemetic, not just base-10 number-stuff) cannot be both consistent and complete. This pretty much blew everyone's mind but Einstein's (Einstein was more mystified that Godel voted for Eisenhower). This poked a hole in the balloon that everyone had been carrying around since the Enlightenment, that there was a big theory of it all that we could learn and then we'd understand it all. Everyone sighed and said that it was probably hubris that we thought that mere mortals could have learned it anyway, but this didn't stop people from trying to patch the balloon (anyone remember "Gott wurfelt nicht"?) Eventually Alan Turing (the "Turing test" guy) started studying this mess, which by now had been named Godel's incompleteness theorem. Leaning on this work, he defined what it meant to be a full-fledged programming language, then proved that no computer, no matter how powerful, can ever decide whether or not a given program will eventually halt except by actually running the program. Everyone who wasn't a computer-scientist yawned and went back to their knitting, but eventually a guy named Chaitan came along. Remember the balloon that Godel popped? Chaitan blasted it to smithereens with a shotgun. What he did was to think about programs, reasoning that some programs halt properly, and some programs don't. Therefore, there must be a percentage of programs that halt, which's the same thing as saying that there must be a probability that a randomly selected program will halt. We also know that this probability is greater than zero but less than one. He went on to show, based on Turing's work, that this probability, called Omega, cannot be computed. This isn't like saying "what's the last digit of Pi" (there is none), or saying that you can't compute one-hundred-million factorial factorial factorial (impractical, but not impossible). What he proved is that the number, which does exist, cannot ever be known. And I don't mean "can't be known by humans because we're not smart enough", I mean as in "if the number is known, it can only be known by God, because unless you already know it you can never arrive at it". Omega thus falsifies the rationalist hypothesis.

You can have faith that God exists (you can even have faith that a desert-dwelling bronze-age nomad named "Abraham" was chosen to beget a nation that God authorized to commit genocide, if you really like), or you can have faith that God doesn't exist. But you can't know either. In the words of Militant Agnostics everywhere, "I don't know, and neither do you."

Christian political dispepsia

With President Bush's 1st ever veto today (veto'ing the use of embryos that would otherwise get freezer-burn & be discarded because if they weren't already going to be thrown away they could possibly become human life) I'm reminded more than ever of the Reverend Bill Hick's prematurely praising Jesus that the conservative Christians were out of office (that was in the beginning of the Clinton era).

If only there was someone to actually vote for instead of voting with these folks to avoid putting statists in power.... urg.

Janus's Cat Avatar Born -- Eschaton at 11

More fundamentalist bashing

I'd confess to more than a small impulse towards fundamentalist-bashing, but that would be kinda like Saddam Hussein confessing arrogance. I have reasons why fundamentalists stick in my craw so badly, most of them having to do with interacting with "tolerant" Mormons in Idaho, toxic Southern Baptists in Virginia Beach and even more toxic "Christians" throughout the Virginias and Carolinas.

It was therefore with some hesitation that I decided to post the following, because, well let's face it: who wants to listen to a scratched record? But then I thought better of it and decided to post anyway, so, in the spirit of fun, specifically the fun that I get poking these Pharisees in the ribs, here's something from a Craig's List posting (adding link for credit, but reproducing here in it's entirety):

Top Ten Signs You're a Fundamentalist Christian

---

Date: 2006-06-02, 1:10PM MST

10 - You vigorously deny the existence of thousands of gods claimed by other religions, but feel outraged when someone denies the existence of yours.
9 - You feel insulted and "dehumanized" when scientists say that people evolved from other life forms, but you have no problem with the Biblical claim that we were created from dirt.
8 - You laugh at polytheists, but you have no problem believing in a Triune God.
7 - Your face turns purple when you hear of the "atrocities" attributed to Allah, but you don't even flinch when hearing about how God/Jehovah slaughtered all the babies of Egypt in "Exodus" and ordered the elimination of entire ethnic groups in "Joshua" including women, children, and trees!
6 - You laugh at Hindu beliefs that deify humans, and Greek claims about gods sleeping with women, but you have no problem believing that the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary, who then gave birth to a man-god who got killed, came back to life and then ascended into the sky.
5 - You are willing to spend your life looking for little loopholes in the scientifically established age of Earth (few billion years), but you find nothing wrong with believing dates recorded by Bronze Age tribesmen sitting in their tents and guessing that Earth is a few generations old.
4 - You believe that the entire population of this planet with the exception of those who share your beliefs -- though excluding those in all rival sects - will spend Eternity in an infinite Hell of Suffering. And yet consider your religion the most "tolerant" and "loving."
3 - While modern science, history, geology, biology, and physics have failed to convince you otherwise, some idiot rolling around on the floor speaking in "tongues" may be all the evidence you need to "prove" Christianity.
2 - You define 0.01% as a "high success rate" when it comes to answered prayers. You consider that to be evidence that prayer works. And you think that the remaining 99.99% FAILURE was simply the will of God.
1 - You actually know a lot less than many atheists and agnostics do about the Bible, Christianity, and church history - but still call yourself a Christian.

Pirates of the Caribbean Sucked

I don't know where to even begin to start criticizing this Piece of Rat Dung flick -- if you haven't seen it you'd be much better served following more laudable pursuits like buggering kittens than giving this movie any money.

What I'll miss in TX

TX Planning and Internet Access

So, I've been thinking about planning for TX. I plan on eventually pitching the boss on working 1 week/month in CA and the rest of the time from TX out of the house. This would keep me earning a CA-grade income on a TX cost of living, which would help me kill off some very long-term-annoying debt much more rapidly and possibly help me accumulate scratch for restarting my currency trading. To do this effectively, though, I'll need rock-solid internet access that allows me "local" quality access to Oracle X-Window clients (client & server is backwards in X) over a VPN, not to mention real-time web-conferencing -- an aggregated DSL line is not going to cut it. Any advice from y'all networking geniuses out there? I know at least SuperBiff knows something about this kind of stuff, but I'm a Luddite and don't know anything more than I have to.

If the cost is not too high, I was also thinking I could open up a WAP for members of the hive....

Frog Taxi, Eschaton at 11

How NOT to win hearts & minds

Anyone who reads my blog knows my staunch disagreement with Zionism (aka Racism for the Vulture Elite). Well, as part of the whole mess, either:

1. Some yahoos in the Israeli military decided to take out a family that had been on the beach.
2. An old mine killed a family at the beach
3. Someone screwed their indirect fire and accidentally whacked a family
   

In any case, though, the result has been quite inflammatory. With videos like the following being relatively common, is it any wonder that the Middle East hates the U.S. for supporting Israel? Warning: if dead bodies and young girls crying make you unhappy, don't open the link.

There's debate about what really happened, but with vested interest ranging from thugs like Hamas to Christian fundamentalists trying to bring about the eschaton by getting all the Jews back in Israel, we do know the current situation is untenable. Much though I loathe Israeli policy, their current guy has it right: build a big damn fence and force everyone to retreat to a neutral corner for a while. Otherwise, incidents like this will just continue feeding the various propaganda-mills.

Apparently, Dumbledore is not Dead. Maybe.

For my lovely wife: Dumbledore Is Not Dead.

To Christian Fundamentalist Moonbats

I'm getting really annoyed at the fundamentalist moonbats who think there's a war between Good and Evil going on in the Middle East, with a righteous Christian USA eventually to win. There may be a war of civilizations between the West (founded upon law with various religions) and the Middle-East (founded upon religion plus law), but that's a different story. The particular moonbats I mention have got me frothing at the mouth, so therefore I must rant:

Begin Rant

There are many who seem to believe that the deistic rationalists who founded the United States (Washington, Jefferson, &c) founded the nation on Christian principals. That a group of people so hostile to the clergy in their writings, so devoted to the superiority of "natural philosophy" to religion, could be believed to be have based a nation on religion is a testament to the power of willful ignorance. Some people claim that English common law, begun in roughly 500AD based on Roman Law somehow injects Christianity into our legal system. To directly arguing against such nonsense gives it too much respect, so instead I'll cite the Treaty of Tripoli, signed by George Washington on 11/4/1796 and published to no controversy in the Philadelphia Gazette on 6/17/1797:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

We're not based on Christianity, we're based on the rule of law and principal that "tyranny of the masses" shall not prevail over the rights of individuals. If the words of George Washington, Adams, Jefferson, et. al. aren't enough to convince you, then you're a moron -- please proceed to the nearest bridge and perform a swan dive.

End Rant

The ULTIMATE Wal-Mart Apology

(By apology, btw, I mean as in "apologetics", not Clinton-esque "I'm sorry you caught me this time -- I'll do better in the future.")

The boffins over at the Mises Institute have come out swinging in favor of Wal*Mart. I haven't had time to finish the article yet, but so far it's spot on the money. People really hate Wal*Mart the same way many people really hate Amazon: because they've done lots of logistics homework and ironed so much cost out of their operations that they're nearly impossible to compete against. There's a reason K-Mart is dead, Sears is on life-support, and all my bookselling friends have heart-conditions: you can't fight economics, and these companies know it.

But let's face it: they're cheap. Really cheap, in that numbing, soul-less IKEA kind of way that makes you feel like your behavior there has been optimized on a spreadsheet (hint: it has!). If you buy Levi's Jeans at Wal*Mart, you're not buying real Levi's, but cheaper knock-offs that Levi's puts their label on, specifically so Wal*Mart can sell them more cheaply than real Levi's. Snapper won't sell lawn-mowers in Wal*Mart, because Wal*Mart refuses to sell them at a price-point that will let Snapper keep up their quality standard. This has led to a ton of class-based prejudice against Wal*Mart (usually from leftists, ironically enough), whereupon Wal*Mart is seen as the place where cracker hick welfare Moms go for shoddy trash while the more clueful run next door to Target (just as soulless but a higher price-point. My late Mom used to make fun of this prejudice by pronouncing Target in the pseudo-frog "tarjay"). But just like peope get so mis-led watching the difference between the rich and the poor that they don't notice how relatively well off the American "poor" are (ask any of my Chinese or Indian co-workers about poverty in America and they'll burst their spleens laughing at you), it's really easy to miss the real significance of Wally World -- sure, the goods are low quality, but it's better to have a low-quality version of some good than to have to do without.

If you want to see a real-life enactment of Socialist Heaven, look no further than your local Wal*Mart, because Wally World is the social leveller of Carl Marx's wet dreams. The real reason people hate Wally World is, of course, that while Socialist Heaven may look really good to a Nigerian surgeon making $7,500/year (supporting an extended family of 20, on average), those of us who are accostumed to free-market capitalism really hate being treated like proles. And, make no mistake, Wal*Mart treats both customers and employees like proles in a spreadsheet. We don't like soul-less mechanization of our society! We want to treated as uniquely special individuals, not trackable widgets in the Great Machine. Soul-less, dispassionate Wal*Mart is adept at providing those Great Machine heebie-jeebies socialists pine for, complete with an insincere smiley-face to remind you of how happy you are to be there.

For those of us who don't make ends meet on $8.50/hour, there are other options. I, for one, will never buy a cordless drill in a Wal*Mart. But I would buy a crescent wrench or an Excedrine there, and that's the flip-side of such cheap goods. Our manufacturing and shipping technologies have gotten so good that for many items, "cheap" no longer implies "shoddy". Our little Toyota Echo, at a thousand times the expense of a crescent wrench, is shoddy as hell (and hopefully will be replaced two years from now), but the six-dollar crescent wrench in Wal*Mart, while not up to the standards of a professional garage, will certainly serve me well enough throughout my lifetime.

Not everything in life is supposed to be a Lotus X180 (my dream car). Neither is Wal*Mart.

Apparently, Keanu Reeves Does NOT Suck

I've always rather liked Reeves's acting, and his willingness to work in movies that would seriously strain the dignity of normal hollywood-types (any oxymoron?).

Anyway, you make the call -- I seriously doubt if Reeves is that concerned about it, but Keanu Reeves Does NOT Suck, And [Jay] Can Prove It.

Housecat Vanquishes Bear -- Eschaton at 11

(click photo for story)

The Dirty Little Secret about Tax Cuts

The dirty little secret the liberal types don't want you to know: the reason that the defecit isn't WORSE is thanks to the increased economic activity that lowered tax friction causes. Here's a nice (but slightly out of date) picture:



If only Bush wasn't spending $$ like water....

FairTax Talking Points

Washington, D.C. (June 8, 2006) - Representative John Linder (R-GA) this week before the House Republican Policy Committee, as part of a Tax Reform Panel that also included former U.S. Senator Connie Mack (R-FL) and Representatives Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Phil English (R-PA), and Michael Burgess (R-TX), outlined and answered questions regarding his FairTax proposal, H.R. 25. The FairTax will repeal the current income tax system and replace it with a revenue neutral personal consumption tax.

In prepared testimony, Linder outlined eight key principles he believes Congress must consider when debating any fundamental tax reform proposal. These principles are:

1. Fairness: It must protect the poor and treat everyone else the same. No exemptions – no exclusions – no advantages.

2. Simplicity: It must be easy to understand for all Americans – no matter one’s education, occupation, or station in life.

3. Voluntary: It must not be coercive or intrusive.

4. Transparency: We should all know what the government costs. There must be no “hidden” taxes.

5. Border-Neutral: Our exports must be unburdened by any tax component in the price system, while imports carry the same tax burden at retail as our domestic competition.

6. Industry-Neutral: It must be neutral between businesses and industries.

7. Strengthens Social Security: Fundamental reform must address the long-term solvency of Social Security.

8. Manageable Transition Costs: It must not be costly or difficult to implement.

“I truly believe that the principles I have outlined cannot be compromised. My bill is the only tax bill that ensures all of these qualities are met and allows our booming economy to compete globally,” said Linder.

More . . .
http://www.theweekly.com/news/2006/June/08/FairTax.html

ih

For a nice overview of FairTax, view:
http://www.investing-news.com/artman/publish/article_1195.shtml

Left Behind Video Games

In a spate of fiendish cleverness, the fundamentalists have realized that their kids wanna shoot things up on TV screens too, so now there's Left Behind: Eternal Forces. So you too can demolish cities and kill people you don't like, but this time it's in the name of God!

...because as we all know, boys and girls, Jesus said we must judge the wicked and slay the sinners, for revenge is ours!

The Democrats want a draft!

You can't make this stuff up!

Microsoft are Arrogant Bastards

Ok, so due to some weird security setting I wasn't able to use an online conferencing tool from work on my home box, so I went ahead and reset "Internet Explorer" settings to their default. Did you know that the "default Internet Explorer Settings" include removing Start Menu links to the Firefox executable, replacing them with Internet Explorer in the pinned section, and just removing them in general in Firefox's own folder so it looks like a bad install?

Luckily, since they only "pretended" to uninstall Firefox, aka make it completely unavailable to a normal end user, I was able to get all my bookmarks back. The arrogance of those bastards is utterly astounding.

Wow, what do you say?

You know, I love my family, especially the small subset of my family that acts as if my brothers and I are members of it. Some of my family actually treat my brothers and I like we're members of the family, and it's really nice.

Now, no-one's family is perfect, so there are always family things that you do regardless of their vapidity or the general bored disinterest of all participants. It's part of the grease that lets families exist. For the past calendar year we've already performed the normal holiday "since we're co-located at the moment, let's play nice & pretend we care" rituals like:

Aunt: So... when is the wedding?
Madeline: We were married in April.
Aunt: Oh, well I guess we'll have to get that present right in the mail!

or

Aunt: So how come you never let us know when you're visiting?
Me: I called you the last three times I was in town.
Aunt: Oh.

So, when I checked my email this morning, the last thing I expected was this:

Hi Jim

Hope you and Addy are doing fine!

I want to get you both a gift certificate for your wedding gift. Sorry............. this gift is quite tardy, but I am trying to catch up. Where would be a good place for you all to have a gift certificate?

If you are ever in Dallas, give us a buzz. We would love to see you.

Let me know what you think about the gift certificate.

Love, ******

If it's true that it's the thought that counts & not the gift... do they really sell gift certificates that small?

The Inner Ring

Available at BigCSLewisFan. This made the rounds thanks to reddit, and since I hadn't seen it before, I wanted to put it up. You can see the parallels to events in Surprised By Joy. Its funny how much "Middle-Aged Moralists" can teach you -- things you already sorta knew, but never fully got your finger on top of.

The Truth About Women

In the spirit of all the fun that gets poked around vis-a-vis male/female relations, I thought I'd cite Myths and Truths, which's a little on the jaded side, but very entertaining in that "been there, done that" kinda way. Even with the broad generalizations (pun intended), my dating life would have been so much happier if I'd have seen this when I was young....

UPDATE: Two women have told me they read this and thought "Yeah, women are just like that! Hey, I'm not like that....!" I'm not saying his statement applies to all women any more than all men like football. But I did marry one of his stereotypes my 1st time around....

Pentagon & Boeing 757 Engine Investigation

If you've had a hard time dismissing the "tin foil hattery" that's been going on about with theories that postulate the Pentagon brass sending a missle onto themselves instead of Flight 77 crashing into it due to the sheer lack of facts to analyze, here's a handy analysis. I know that it's tempting to want to dismiss a conspiracty-theory out of hand (like any significantly-sized group of soldiers would whack their own buds), but even stopped clocks are right sometimes, so I think it's important to address theories directly. Anyway, here's the link.

Amen, Brother!

From my brother, Boxing Alcibiades:

Juan's going to the Sandbox, and when he gets back, for Physician's Assistant training. Not bad for a kid who used to be a migrant worker -- when he's done being "exploited by the Pentagon" (for those of us not steeped in '68er cant, that translates as "expensively and exhaustively trained") he's going to easily double my slightly-above-average middle-class salary).

My buddy, The Lizard Queen, has a doctorate now, and is, in theory, an official member of the intellectual elite. Her Mom grew up in a bamboo hut.

And people wonder why I have no patience for cringing, whinging, suck-ass leftist whiners who bitterly harp about how there's no social mobility left in this country.

The 'Day Without Immigrants' Backfires

By "Cinnamon Stillwell" (I can't imagine that's her real name), a freelancer from San Francisco. Could it be that at least someone in my town has a freakin' clue?

Judge for yourself at The 'Day Without Immigrants' Backfires.

Couldn't resist it....

'Nuff Said on Public Education

Shangri-la

My rapidly becoming favorite bloggerette in the universe over at Headrush has posted an entry on the so-called "Shangri-La" diet, which I've been investigating for some time. It seems the anecdotal evidence is starting to pile up in favor of it, so I'm going to go ahead and give it the plunge. Yet another triumph for Dennett and the school of "mind is what brains do"?

Mimsi lives

After a brief hiatus to decide if it's really worth it or not, the Mimsi project is back on. There are so many fun projects to code, like Jonathon's political analyzer, etc, that I just had to stop & ponder if maybe it was worth it to settle for Ruby after all (I code Java at work and won't do it at home -- it isn't fun enough). Well, Ruby is beautiful and elegant, but as an "I like seatbelts" static-typing all the way-type coder who doesn't want to have to test invariants he could just tell the compiler about, it doesn't work for me. Plus, Ruby doesn't give you free multi-tasking. So if I "owe" you a computer program or three, don't worry, I haven't forgotten; it'll just be written in a language no-one's every heard of. :0)

'Nuff Said on Mathematics

"

(a love note to my wife)

Simone DeBovoire Eat Your Heart Out

In yet another stunning upset to the postmodernist theory that gender roles are "mere artifacts of an unbalanced society" and in affirmation of Simone de Bovoire's lament that "biology is destiny", it turns out that gender-related toy-choices are biologically determined, as shown in this study on monkeys.

"Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change."

Apparently a guy named Tyler Drumheller just gave a rather important interview to CBS. It seems he was our chief spook in Europe, and he claimed that in early 2002 before the invasion of Iraq that the CIA finally got high-level HUMINT penetration in Iraq, and that Rumsfeld, Cheney et al. were very excited to hear this. That is, they were excited to hear this until the Iraqi declared that there were no WMD or WMD programs active in Iraq at that time. Then they were immediately disinteresed, and claimed that since he was just a single source, that they shouldn't weigh that too heavily, even though they'd been happy enough to accept other single-source inputs that fit their presuppositions. When Mr. Drumheller objected, saying "Hey, what about the intel", the reply was "Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change."

So here's the scary idea. Let's face it, Bush's a theocratic twerp who doesn't even pretend to be a conservative any more. Ok, we were sorta coming to grips with that, and hoping that maybe he hasn't destroyed all the momentum we'd built up on the Republican side of things. But what if the tinfoil asshats on the left are actually correct, and the president really was out for empire? I'm all for what's gone down if the claims really were true to the best of our knowledge at the time, well except for Shit-secki (misspelled on purpose -- he's an ass whose people hated him) getting his successor named years before his retirement because he said the obvious, that we'd need a lot of troops to maintain order. But what if the Bush really had gone into the war on false pretenses? I find that very disturbing. I find it doubly disturbing that I'm not hearing ANY denunciations of this guy's statements in the MSM; I've been waiting for the "ok, he's full of it and here's why", but nothing. Near media-silence. Is this CBS interview total tin-foil-hat and the left-wing twinkies have been wasting my attention or what?

Or, in the immortal words of the bard, whiskey tango foxtrot over.

It's begun ...maybe

This's a snapshot of a weekly US-Dollar <-> Japanese Yen chart. I've been waiting for a month now (since the 3rd solid blue bar from the right) for what just happened yesterday. See the vertical gap? That's called, in typically high-falutin' trader-speak, "gapping down", and is generally the result of traders with pent-up demand to pull the trigger on something all rushing to do it at the same time, sorta like "on your marks, get set, wait for it! wait for it! wait... go!".

The market's been waffling over whether or not we should be having a bear market vis-a-vis the USD or not, with most pressure downwards. Now that Russia has come stating it'll price oil in both Euros and (US)Dollars, with the implication of pricing its oil solely in Euros sometime in the future if it doesn't cause too large a diplomatic row, and with the IMF being asked to request for China to allow the yuan (CNY) to float, this could be the beginning of the end for the post-WWII dollar regime that's been around since Bretton-Woods collapsed.

Or not. The charts never lie, but nor do they predict (ever).

Is this guy a total wingnut, or is what he's saying sensible: you political guys please opine.

Vikram's Weblog - A Journey Through Life: Could George Bush be impeached from presidency ?

The U.S. Government Finances in Pictures

Hello once again, it's time for your regularly scheduled impetus to pre-pay your mortgages as fast as possible. I know I'm a broken record on this subject, but today I thought I'd present things in a more visual fashion. The following charts are true; their identities have not been changed to protect the guilty. Specifically, they're from the Treasury Department's little-used accrual-accounting version of what the government's up to. Accrual-accounting, you know, the way that everyone but the Feds manages their books? Well, they don't manage their books that way, 'cuz what does 500 years of business management experience have to do with government, right? They do, however, publish this data in a report available here.

Now, on to the pretty pictures!



You can see here what a good conservative Bush is: over 2.5 trillion dollars of debt with his name on it.


Is eleven-trillion dollars of liability enough for us? Wait till you see what's below....


Our public debt is over 30% of GDP. Anyone think we're going to grow our way out of the problem?


Does anyone honestly think that Social Security will be worth a damn?


How are we going to fund that?


Just in case Social Security weren't scary enough; how'd you like to spend 1/8 of GDP on Mediscare, much less private medical care?


Remember, those numbers are in billions!


That's right, Parts B & D alone are aiming at 10% of GDP. I don't have any collated data on the projections for all entitlements as a % of GDP, but would 30% be a bad guess?

This financial situation brought to you by the Democrats and Republicans, who're both too cowardly to admit it to the citizenry of our nation. And don't forget that the Federal Reserve is already printing money faster than you can say "wascally wabbit".

Evolutionary Timeline

If you want to put evolution into temporal perspective, here's a neat Evolutionary Timeline. Be sure to scroll manually to get the proper effect. Note that there are two comment-boxen, one up top, the other below. And people wonder why we haven't evolved an artificial intelligence yet... sheesh!

Empirical Theology of Intelligent Design

Everyone by now who pays any attention to the news at all, even as a temporary distraction from the more important issues being discussed in US Magazine is aware of the whole debate over Intelligent Design, wherein the Scientific Creationists, having been slaughtered in the courts try to slay the theory of evolution by citing the central insight of William Paley's teleological proof for the existence of God. Just in case you aren't aware of it though, the proof, in a nutshell is to look at all this stuff that we've got, think about it having all come about by happenstance and shout "No f***-ing way!" I don't know if there's a latin term for "Argument via appeal to common sense", but that's it in a nutshell. It's a really good "gut feel" argument that God exists. (Of course, common sense tells us the world is flat and the sun revolves around the Earth, too.) By pretending to be a scientific theory yet failing to do what all scientific theories must do, namely to make predictions, Intelligent Design has no credibility with people honestly employing their reason. ID still has many followers, however, because faith and reason often are in opposition to each other. Among Evangelicals, fideism is the great censor: anything may be true so long as it doesn't appear to violate the principles of faith; therefore Evangelicals hold superconductivity to be scientific fact, but evolution as corrupt heathen bupkis inspired by the devil.

Arguing about the nature of science is fruitless with people whose answer to everything is either "God loves us and wants it that way", or, if the issue is thorny, "God put that there to test our faith" (as satirized by Bill Hicks's famous dinosaur monologue). Instead, the only real way to address the shortcomings of Intelligent Design is to hold a mirror up to it from a theological perspective and say "do you really believe this"?

The following information isn't original. Heck, most of the text is cut & paste, and can be found on The eXile, a web-zine I can only recommend to those truly keen on seeing just what a fetid philosophy nihilism is. But, the nihilists at The eXile have come up with something worthwhile: the Schopenhauer Awards. Like the Darwin Awards, they're exemplars of theory in action, only, in this case, it's Schopenhauer's theory that the only purpose to the universe is suffering and misery. As a Buddhist, I don't agree with that, as I don't think there's any purpose to anything (nor any need for purpose), but I noticed that in addition to making the case for God being a sadist, they also realized that Intelligent Design only looks good when you look at kittens, lemurs and other cuddly things. If you expand your perspective, you find things in the world that one can easily believe evolved, but which challenge the idea that someone designed them.

If you have a weak stomach, or don't like to see the kinds of things that nightmares are made of, just take my word for it and stop reading now -- you'll be happy you did.

The Evidence:

Ascaris Lumbricoides, the Roundworm

The Roundworm devotes all its energy to the production of more Roundworms. The female can lay up to 200,000 eggs every day. The eggs are laid in the small intestines of a human being or a pig--because the Roundworm, like the eXile, sees no real difference between people and swine. The Roundworm is not only the most common of human parasites, but one of the biggest. A full-grown female, the kind who pops out all those eggs every day, can be up to 18 inches long. A big worm can easily clog your intestines, bursting them and killing you. The Roundworm seems to go out of its way to make infestation even more painful and horrifying for its human host. It doesn't just squirm down to your guts and start popping out babies. No, it goes through a grotesque, horrifying and apparently useless trip up through your body, only to end up back where it started. You eat a few thousand worm-eggs, and they hatch in your small intestine. So far, so good, so to speak. But then the "juvenile" worm chews its way out of your guts, into your lungs. The lungs react to these thousands of parasites by swelling up and producing more mucous to try to expel the foreign bodies. This leads to a special form of pneumonia, ascaris pneumonia, which can kill you. But in most cases you simply develop a bad cough which will last as long as you live. And instead of coughing up the worms, you'll cough them into the pharynx and then re-swallow them. That's exactly what the worm-larvae want, because the worm can only grow to adulthood where it started, down in the small intestine. Biologists admit they're puzzled by this "migration." It seems to challenge the idea that evolution moves toward efficiency. The Roundworm is a persistent traveler, and may just decide to migrate on its own. The worm doesn't like anesthetics, for example, and when a human who's carrying a gutload of Roundworms is given anesthesia for an operation, the worms he or she is hosting often decide to leave the toxic neighborhood. They wriggle up from the small intestine, through the digestive tract, and slither out the patient's nose and mouth just as he or she is lying on the recovery table, thinking that the worst is over.

The Candiru

It's just a little freshwater fish, the Candiru, only an inch or two long. It's classified as a "parasitic catfish," but it doesn't have much in common with Mark Twain's good-eatin' Mississippi catfish. If there had been Candiru in the Mississippi, Huck and Jim would've spent the whole trip downriver huddled together in the middle of the raft, screaming like Chef in Apocalypse Now, "Never get off the boat!" Luckily for Huck, the Candiru only haunts the rivers and streams of the Amazon Basin. The Amazon may be romanticized in every PBS nature show, but it actually deserves its old name: "the Green Hell." And of all the nightmare critters infesting that Hell, the most horrific is our own little Candiru. The Candiru is the only vertebrate parasite on Earth to target humans. Think about that. We're good at picking parasites off ourselves and each other. It's a primate specialty. How would any parasite big enough for us to spot and grab manage to avoid our nimble ape fingers? It would have to wriggle into a place we couldn't reach. The Candiru, you see, has a nose for urine. When it gets hungry, it sniffs the current of its stream or river for a urine trail, then follows the trail upstream to the source: someone pissing into the water. The Candiru wriggles up the victim's anus, then gnaws its way into the urinary tract. The pain is reportedly agonizing. And once the Candiru is in place, it's impossible to dislodge, thanks to several sharp, back-pointing spines which pop up when the critter has reached its destination. Men who have been Candiru-ized have an option, at least: cutting off their penis. The pain and horror of infestation is so great that victims not only accept but beg for this radical therapy. Women aren't so lucky. They have no way at all to get rid of the spiked hook inside them.

Synanceia horrida, The Estuary Stonefish

This bottom-dweller is a perfect poster-child for Schopenhauer's claim that life is nothing but ugliness and pain. As evil as it looks, this critter is much creepier once you know what it can do. You see, the Estuarine Stonefish is basically a big, ugly hypodermic needle filled with poison. It can hardly move. It doesn't need to. It just settles into the muddy bottom of shallow bays and estuaries, perfectly camouflaged as a lump of mud and algae, and waits to envenom an unlucky fisherman or wading child. Every year, thousands of people step on this little booby-trap. Within seconds, they're screaming in agony, because this sluggish, slow-swimming lump of flesh has one suberbly designed feature: a set of spines sticking up from its back, perfectly angled to jab deeply into your foot. The spines are sturdy and sharp. Once they've pierced your foot, a very efficient set of four venom glands start squirting poison into your flesh. Stonefish venom can kill you -- but only if you're lucky. Most researchers agree that a stonefish sting is the most intense pain a human being can experience. An Australian surfer who was stung wading out to the waves said that even though the doctors gave him shot after shot of morphine, the pain was unendurable, completely beyond anything he'd ever experienced. He only stopped screaming to beg the doctors to cut off his leg. When they refused, he asked them to kill him. When he lunged for a scalpel to stab himself with, they tied him to the bed and let him scream. The agony went on for months. Even when the pain fades, the victim is likely to suffer nerve damage and will never walk properly again.

The Scabies Mite

Of all the mites, the species which has created the most misery is the scabies mite. You can't look at a photo of this thing very long if you want to maintain the belief that Nature loves you. It's a "pearly white, plump, oval, eyeless mite with rudimentary legs." Instead of legs, the mite has "stout, blunt spines" which project from the fat belly, designed to help the mite embed itself more firmly under your skin. Its eight legs are too short to be of use, though the wet-noodle-like extensions from the tips of the legs come in handy once inside its human flesh burrow. In short, it looks like a vampire blimp with ropes hanging down. Humans are the only species S. Scabiei parasitizes. We're its home, its planet, and its prey. You shaken hands with any strangers lately? Y'have? Well, you might want to wash your hands, preferably with pesticide, since the Scabies Mite is especially fond of the creases and thin skin on the webs between fingers. It can also live for up to 48 hours outside of human flesh. Say, for example in a hotel bed. The mite plunges into your skin and sets up home in the top layer, the most sensitive and tender. It chews tunnels through your flesh, creating little egg-sites as it goes like queen monster in Alien. The itching caused by Scabies mites is the most intense known to man. And itching, as a recent study confirmed, is actually harder to bear than pain. Victims usually rip their skin off in the attempt to get at their tormentors and stop the itch. In babies, AIDS victims & other "immunologically compromised" people and bedridden paralytics, the skin becomes "honeycombed" -- that's the term they use -- with tunnels full of mite-shit and mite-eggs. Patients with this sort of scabies commonly beg for death and often kill themselves if they can..



The Guinea Worm

"If there's anything in nature that might call God's plan into question, it's the Guinea Worm." -- Tom Paulson 3/23/2001, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The Guinea Worm got its start in Africa. It's a big parasite, growing up to three feet long. By the time it pokes its head out of the victim's skin, it's as wide as a strand of spaghetti. It's a slow developer, spending up to a year squirming through the victim's body. Europeans first learned of its existence when they saw people limping through African villages in obvious agony, holding long sticks which seemed to be attached to a white string emerging from a leg or arm. Africans explained that these unlucky villagers had become hosts the Guinea Worm. The reason victims were walking around with the worm twirled around a stick was that the worm could only be coaxed out a few millimeters per day. Those who tried to pull it out soon died a terrible death: the worm's head came off, and its body died and putrefied inside the victim, who rotted while still alive. Victims must hobble around in pain, an object of loathing to everyone, while winding the worm around the stick a little more each day, keeping it close, waking and sleeping. If they drop it, the worm breaks off in their body and they die, putrefying from the inside out. As Africans explained to the European travellers, dozens of Guinea Worms often develop inside their victims at different rates. So a few hours after the victim has finally gotten rid of a worm, another is getting ready to chew its way through the skin and greet the world.

On 1st blush, one's initial thought is to shake one's head and think "Yup, the world's a nasty place, and things'll getcha." But stop and consider just these five horrors. There are others, but I think these suffice. If you believe in Intelligent Design, then these guys didn't just come about by exploiting ecological niches -- God designed them that way! God specifically made a parasite that burrows needlessly into the lungs just so it can inflict permanent painful coughing just to get back where it started in the first place. God created a fish whose only function is to sit on under water and make people scream in pain. God specifically engineered a mite to make people litterally tear their own faces off in despair. God created organisms whose purpose, whose design is to inflict misery, terror and agony. How easily God could have either not had these creatures, or else modified them to be less harmful. We've already got dust-mites and eyelash mites that do their mite-y things just fine; why on earth should we have a mite whose sole purpose is to cause people to commit suicide and go to hell? Or a worm that doesn't just kill its human host, nor does it merely eat it alive from the inside out, but inflicts constant terror that at any instant a wrong move could sentence him or her to a slow death by rotting(!) alive?

Who would engineer such things? The designer of creatures like these (and there are plenty more to choose from, especially if you expand the victims to include non-humans) makes Pol Pot look like Santa Claus! Stalin, Hitler, MacCarthy, Nero... all of them wrapped up together don't match up to the sheer malice of the designer and creator of creatures like these. If you really believe in intelligent design, then you have to believe that God wants us to suffer, and to suffer dearly. This isn't just the normal theological "problem of suffering/evil" like Dostoevsky talks about, the "why does God let people be evil to each other" question -- these terrors come straight from the hand of God, no human interference necessary.

If you're a Christian and believe in Intelligent Design, you have to do one of the following:

1. Insist creatures like this are the result of Adam & Eve's fall: People for thousands of years being tormented and punished because two people who were literally created not to know right from wrong didn't do as they were told. What kind of a jerk would do that? We call that kind of behavior evil. You might as well believe God and Satan are the same being.
   
2. Explain that the world is a vale of tears designed for us to suffer in, in the immortal words of Screwtape: "a world where moral issues really come to a point". Not necessarily a bad escape hatch, but only if you're willing to do like the Catholics and High Protestants (Church of England, &c.) and accept the reason for such: to guide our actions, or, in other words, you have to give up on the whole "faith is all you need" garbage and actually read the Epistle of James ("Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the demons also believe, and tremble! But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?") But even the Catholics don't believe this! Both Pope Benedict and the Archbishop of Canterbury believe in and support the theory of evolution. Even they, with all their penances & fasts, won't go that far.
   
3. Take the zealot's approach, and consider that the poor victims of these species are being punished, that this's God's way of hitting the "smite" button on his keyboard. Or, the superficially gentler but more insidious tack of calling them "chastisements to bring people back to virtue" that was so popular during the Inquisition. Although this kind of rhetoric is very popular among 700-Club types (you know, the people who terrorize their own children with threats of perdition for reading Harry Potter or for trick-or-treating?), can you honestly say that a four year old child could do anything to deserve howling pain that even morphine can't diminish, for the added crime of stepping on something that looks like a rock?
4. Abandon your faith & embrace the Manichean Herisy: If you claim that God only created the nicer creatures, and nightmares like the creatures above are the works of the devil, then you're claiming that the devil has the power to create, that God is not the sole creator of the universe, but that he's one of them and will (hopefully) prevail over the bad guy at some point in the future. Wrong answer! The devil's only power is to tempt and seduce; if you claim that the devil has the power to create, you are not Christian.
   
5. Disregard one of the principal messages of the New Testament, that "God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son so that whoever believes in Him might not perish but have everlasting life" and go back to the Book of Job wherein it's said "God screws us over as he pleases, and that's all there is to it." (Yes, I'm disregarding the happy ending that the Jews bolted onto the end of the story because its original contents were too bleak and depressing.) I have never heard of a sect of Christianity that, in wanton disregard of the gospels, claims that God is unmoved by our tears and heedless our suffering, but if you want to start such a church, good luck to you.
   

Or, you can give up on Intelligent Design. Isn't that so much easier?