morning this afternoon

interesting, but pointless

I guess I can say I'm not surprised this came up, but I don't really see the point. Just don't have your kids baptized, at least let them make that call. Simple really.


Also, I had a dream in my fitful hours of sleep about being in a mafia. Either that or a drug company (the pharmaceutical type, not the narcotic type).

It was hard to tell the difference.

what goes around

comes around...

Good times all around. It never fails to amaze me that people don't understand putting additional power into an institution, failing to properly oversee it by placing limitations on its mission and authority to carry out a task, and allowing it to persist long after its intended purpose has been served, doesn't work out the way that we all were told it would.

As I usually intone, whatever party actually limits the power and scope of government's ability to invade our individual rights is the one I'll support. I won't support parties that pay lip service to such things, ala the GOP, only so long as they're not in power (and while they busy themselves oppressing various social freedoms for no apparent reason in addition to this higher crime of oppressing general individual liberty, this merely pushes things over the edge into total hypocrisy).

Obviously one should fail to surprised that this vast expansion of power hasn't immediately dissipated with the expulsion of the Bush administration. I had some hopes merely because Obama was something like a Constitutional scholar that we'd have some provisions that again protect the privacy and primacy of individual rights. But considering much of his legal advisers are being held up by the Senate confirmation hearing process, I guess that rebelling against these silly notions will take time.

During which, of course, I could be labeled as a dangerous and subversive radical (not that I mind). More to the point, all those people who went around with the calling card of "if you've got nothing to hide...", will suddenly discover they do have something to hide. Funny for me. I get to get in a few "I told you so"s. Giving such power of censorship or a sort of broad data mining of subversion in the futile attempt to control a few thousand potentially violent anarchists is pointless in the face of a few random nutcases who could show up at any point at a church or school armed to the teeth. Such witch hunts tend to only demonstrate the ability of power to corrupt as it will sooner or later turn its ugly gaze into places that it has no business being in.

this seems to be the problem

If there were no God, there would be no Atheists. - Chesterton

This seems to be the essential argument of theists, that atheism is more about the disbelief, or the negative act of belief, than about either a) skepticism, or b) the lack of interest. I'm pretty sure that atheists generally attest less to "negative belief" and more to lack of belief (and interest in disbelief). Most of "us" do not care to reference deities in discourse on subjects other than religion or mythology (and to lesser extents, history or anthropology).

I think the core problem is that theists tend to assume that we might believe otherwise if we were to be convinced by some argument constructed of faith, or that our secular notions of life are in and of themselves a construction of faith. They are not, nor are they wholly incompatible with people who live within their own personal constructions of faith. This is the fallacious sentiment proposed with the idea that Darwinian evolution necessitates atheism, with the idea being that secularism is its own distinct philosophy fundamentally requiring the absence of god to function. Generally secularists do not care whether god exists or not, the issue for them is still centrally how human beings should conduct themselves regardless of faith or lack thereof and/or learn about their surroundings in order to live in accordance with it. The sort of extremist proposition being waged as a cultural war is annoying and diverting from attention areas on which human beings can amass real and fundamental understandings of things, as opposed to these purely metaphysical constructs of faith.

speaking of fundamentalists.. the news and weather from the perspective of sanity

British understatement

Hilarity ensues when observing the commentaries of American (and British) newscasts and the descent of madness. In most cases, the mere presentation of events is sufficiently humorous, at least until one realizes that there are human beings in this country that persist in this mindset and one eventually has to attempt to reason with them. As a warning, there is about 10 seconds of a ridiculous country music song.

wow they're morons...

Good times. Hitchens can be an abrasive bastard, but he's right. And Blackwell isn't able to get in a sentence that makes any coherent sense. It might have been a fair fight if they had put in someone who could actually debate, instead of any random conservative of the present variety. I think Hitchens wins anyway, but this was embarrassing.

The whole point about theocratic institutions made at the end was probably the centerpiece of debate (one Blackwell was keen to avoid), and may well be the institutional problem that religion has had for centuries that has been struggled against with varying levels of success and many positive levels of failure (namely that organized religion is perhaps the most prone to abuse organizational system available, with only nationalist sentiments being in the same ballpark).




In a related story, Sullivan is perhaps the most prolific blog in terms of content I've seen. Even if each individual post is merely a sentence or two on a topic, the amount of data that must cross that desk is insane.. Even I take the time to reflect on some things long enough to contextual post an opinion rather than mere distribution, but to be able to do so in a sentence take is probably more efficient.

equal rights sounds nice, but not inevitable.

politics as usual
rational analysis

As usual, I take a somewhat unpopular position as it regards individual liberties, or rather, the present tendencies to repress individual liberties where they create disconcerted opinions in the minds or feelings of a disconnected and aging, but vigorous, minority of Americans.



The most interesting post there though was this one

I am curious about the disconnect between normal discriminatory notions and the sudden revulsion against a homosexual teacher. As with soldiering, I'm not impressed by the conception that a homosexual cannot properly fulfill their duties. We are free, if Silver postulates, to be offended, even in discriminatory manner, by the private habits of others (even where these are natural or biological in form, such as sexuality, or in other forms caused by actual mental disorder). And in an environment such as I suggest for "public" education, we might even be free to remove or to require the sexuality be an issue for the instructor of our children. This does not however inquire properly into the ability of any such people to perform the duty of providing an educational opportunity for others.

I suggest it implies a serious disconnect to the idea of how homosexuality occurs, in other words, that a gay teacher could spread their homosexuality to their precocious flock of children, similar to the marginal opposition of adoption by homosexual couples. Or the still common misconception that homosexuals are inherently child molesters could be a factor.

Other curious points, it is generally government that is permitted by the absorption of cost inefficiencies to be discriminatory. Silver sort of obliquely touched on that by the curious double standard that we might prevent private enterprise from discrimination against gays but allow the hiring practices of teachers to include such restrictions. I'm not sure there are actual costs that are imposed in a free market sense in this case however. If a teacher is capable, their private sexual orientation should not be a factor of their hiring or performance. In a market environment such a person would be difficult to dismiss. But in a government sense, we still can use the power of government to repress the ability of people to live openly in accordance of their behavior without fear of dismissal from gainful employment for factors that do not impact their job functions. This is probably a good reason to avoid using government for things of a social imposition unless it is to be used to protect the rights of a minority of some sort. And not the other way around.

I also am amused by the notion advanced by right wingers that this is an inevitable social result, the acceptance of homosexual rights and marriage. This may well be true in the form of demographics. Young people are accepting of all sorts of things (a theory advanced by their unprecedented and broader support of a black American for President). But this is not yet a generation in charge of the agenda. And what it often makes up for in the forms of tolerance lacking in previous generations, it generally lacks of political dynamism to make up the ground of repression.

postponed on account of rain

stevens no!

I guess we don't need to convict corrupt public officials, or at least, the ones who did something corrupt. Instead we need to have a system of government corruption lawyers who aren't corrupt capable of trying the case without violating ethical standards and practices and at least give us the possibility of convicting other corrupt public officials.

What a great country... We can get off most of the opening day baseball games on a day in April where it snows in parts of the country. But we cannot convict a blatantly corrupt public official and have to let him off on what amounts to a technicality because we apparently don't have a justice system that is fair and impartial anymore. I like our sense of priorities (even though I love baseball too).

final four and off to bed

In my quest to recurrent insomnia, I sat up again immersed in various historical texts. So I return now to relate the banality of my more normal interests, and that yet again, they have reaped no immediate financial rewards. But perhaps they will allow me to retire for a few hours of restful sleep devoid of the brain feeding on imagery.

I do have two sheets on ESPN's 5 million brackets competition that are in the top .5%, mostly because they both nailed the championship game and final four. This isn't an unusual place for me to end up; I was even higher when Georgia Tech played Connecticut. And last year, despite all the chalk, I was in the top 5% simply because I took Kansas over Memphis and Chalmers hit a three when Rose et al couldn't make free throws.

Thanks again to President Obama for perhaps convincing the better part of half the nation to take a final four that had 3 wrong, not that some of my sheets looked any less boring than that. I at least stayed away from Louisville usually, and Pitt was clearly overrated as well...Memphis is another story, I will be glad when Calipari starts at Kentucky so I don't have to worry about those guys anymore being hard to pick....

I will presume Carolina wins out Monday night since they won by 35 points in an embarrassing effort in the same building earlier in the year, but if they get upset, I guess some people will pass me. Not a whole helluva lot, most people didn't pick MSU nearly this far. I did notice one new trend to stash away for next year. Well, its not new, but it's one I had underestimated heavily this year. Pac-10/Pacific coast teams traveling east got hammered. Jet lag is a bitch apparently.

random compendium mas o menos

More strange dreams. I think I was swimming with dolphins trying to negotiate a peace treaty with some aliens or something in the last one. Less history reading on international relations would be helpful. Fortunately even that dream was apparently like the Simpsons' episode with the dream quest that was spiced up with Homer's search for Lincoln's gold. There appeared to be a side event with some guy trying to scam a corporation to steal the alien ship or some such. And he got left in the middle of the ocean for his trouble. Strong work.

Anyway, since I got a new monitor, I decided the best way to test it out was to play a non-graphic intensive strategy game. So I fired up Civilization. I promptly found the widescreen high resolution very useful...but not much better than what I had before (not nearly as much of an improvement as I saw with spreadsheets, DVDs, and L4D). What I did find by playing this round was a confusing set of ethical boundaries that didn't quite apply in the game and I don't think they do in real life much either (at least, not anymore, but they could have for many years). Late in the game, I was bordered by the Dutch to my south and Romans to my East. The Romans had been basically aligned with the Dutch since they ended up at war with virtually the entire world and I took several cities from them.

The game gave a side event to build a large navy and the reward was a pile of nukes or some unit bonuses (uh...duh, get the nukes..). But this was on a map with one giant continent, so a navy was pretty useless. I built one anyway, but lost out on the reward by a couple turns to the Dutch I think. The result was now I had this huge army massed on my borders, more than enough to hold off their combined army and strike back into their territories, but a now nuclear threat that could vaporize it when it moved out. So I did the most logical thing I could think of with this army, I invaded the Zulu/Ottoman alliance to the south-east, behind the Roman/Dutch frontier, with my entire offensive force and my huge navy in support along the coast, well behind the initial front lines. The result was actually pretty interesting.

I managed, of course, to crush the Zulu empire down to scattered bits (which I was still in the tedious process of mopping up). But they screamed for help and got the Roman/Dutch alliance to declare war on little old me. The game provides a missile shield project to build, which I had, and the Romans had, which shoots down about 75% of incoming missiles. But the Dutch hadn't built theirs. And I had, since I didn't need more troops, stockpiled ICBMs. The Dutch-Roman army had "tactical" nukes, which do just about as much damage in game but have limited range (basically one state to the next). The result was they nuked a couple border towns, managed not to take over any of them in the chaos that creates (seeing them vaporizing several dozen units at once is not a pleasant experience) and I replied with a full nuclear strike on their core cities. Not on their border towns with troops in them, which I could counter by moving around armies to places they couldn't reach with their own pitiful, but numerous nukes. The 3 biggest Dutch cities each got a nuke. The Romans did try to lob a couple ICBMs at two of my bigger cities (with token garrisons, no troops basically), but they got shot down. I'm not sure how this was ethically sensible, but it did have the necessary side effect of cutting down the Dutch's ability to win the game in the cheap "culture victory", by amassing culture in 3 major cities. Killing several million people and coating the surrounding terrain in fallout will do that. This isn't very common to occur in the game because usually the computer creates a non-nuclear proliferation treaty through the game's UN and nobody builds nuclear bombs. So it was different in that I was bored enough to share.

Anyway, after this whole scenario was painted out (and I had won the game, something not really possible with a nuclear war involved in real life), I got to thinking about our own nuclear strategy starting back in the 50s, that basically crafted an all-nothing war system for conventional forces (which we attempted briefly to suggest nuclear bombs were simple conventional weapons, or at least that some of them, non-H-bombs maybe, were). That game scenario was basically what that would have resulted in, in the appropriate crisis. We kept using the "we have NUCLEAR WEAPONS, obey or die" threat in serious foreign relations and occasionally it worked. Eventually somebody might have been crazy enough to say, you know what, we're going to go ahead and invade anyway in this country here and you're not going to stop us (that somebody would have been me in this case, invading and crushing the hapless Zulu/Ottoman frontier with a huge conventional army, in real life it might have been Russia or China invading some territory we didn't want them in, one such threat was issued over Vietnam in the mid-50s to China). If that someone had nuclear weapons of their own, they very well might feel that those weapons give them some measured impunity from useful international scrutiny. And the result was a full nuclear exchange devastating huge cities and regions of the world, vaporizing millions of people.

Thus far, American policy has basically been to use conventional forces (we have uesd "unconventional forces" more often than this) only to pick on countries without the nukes, or at least, countries without the range to attack us directly (we have picked on Pakistan since they joined the nuclear club). But what this basically reads like to our potential enemies is "Get nukes". That's why we have this eternal situation with Iran and enriched uranium, the threat for many years of Saddam doing so (even though he wasn't able to, and the public was greatly overblown in its fear), the DPRK doing missile tests and occasionally blackmailing others by building a nuclear reactor to produce weapons grade material, Syria and Iraq having a reactor bombed by Israel, that sort of thing. It seems like the cheapest option is still to pay off people not to build the weapons, but it might also be cheaper to cut down what we have. This seems like the policy we've pursued since the mid 80s when there were 3 times as many warheads out there (and fewer countries with them). Seems like, for once, it makes sense.

comings and goings

1920x1080 resolution is very clear. Now I just need to get a longer cable to link my DVD player to my computer instead of the TV. Maybe a TV tuner, I dunno.

I have been submitting the idea on VP abolition, I'll see what sort of public support it can garner, and against which it must defend (thus far the sort of resistance common to traditional inertia). But considering the extensive staff, the prestige/publicity, and the lack of real features to the position, all of which come at great cost to the public resources, I'm guessing this idea can use reason and get a more serious movement for a Constitutional amendment made at some point.