Tea Party Politeness

Comments like this:

Fresno had over 7,500 attend the most polite protest I have ever witnessed.

are both a blessing and a curse, really.
You see readers email Glenn Reynolds saying this all the time about protests all across the country: People are so nice, so polite, everyone was very cool, everyone was so calm, no one got violent, smiles were all over the place.
That's neat, and all, I really am glad people can behave like adults.

But this is a protest. This is a protest movement, or at least some would like it to be. Someone needs to get angry and show it. Someone needs to shout something at a cop and get the ball rolling. Politely asking Congress "if you please would you mind not raising taxes? And could you pretty please impeach Mr. Obama?" is kind of like standing in front of a beehive and saying "Bees, would you please let me have your honey? I won't stick my hand in there, honest, but I'd like that honey so I need you to bring the honey out to me."

Of course, I don't condone violence, or riots. But I do believe that a protest movement, if it wants to be effective, needs to have some bullhorns, and the occasional arrest. If you look at the length of American history you see radical change coming not from petitions and sit-ins, but from arrests, angry protesters, and from government taking action when the protest is on the verge of becoming an uprising.

Of course, you have to actually be focused on an issue in order to effectively protest it. People at the Tea Parties really don't have a unifying cause. They are all just sort of there with their own pet complain against liberal government.

I guess I'd really like to turn on CNN and see someone chain themselves to Obama's front steps in Chicago.


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Unmanned Aerial Helicopter

I can understand someone arguing that an unmanned helicopter with guns strapped to it could slip into urban areas and takeout insurgents with less collateral damage than human soldiers...

...but what I don't understand is why they call it the "Vigilante"? A vigilante is someone who gets tired of the actual police force not doing anything and goes on a violent killing spree against criminals. Maybe because DOD checkwriters are a lot more hynotized by the word vigilante than they are by the phrase "soldier saver".

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Iron Man Suits, the neverending thread

Another day, another Japanese robot maker releases some bionic device with the loud disclaimer that it doesn't imbue superhuman strength.

Here, you can read about the new Honda exoskeleton, designed to assist the elderly move around by relieving joint pressure.

Once again I ask myself "Why are scientists using servos?" Linear actuators are way more powerful. I think I have come around to the answer: batteries.

Servos use less power to produce less power. They are about the only feasible option for portable power assist suits, in which I have no interest. I am quite content to require my suit wearers to stay safely plugged (via a long cord) into the wall, for now. Let the chemical engineers invent batteries to accomodate my suit, not the other way around.

In any case, hopefully my suit, or the parts I am working on, will not break during press junkits, as the Honda unit does in the second video on the above link.

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A riddle

On the work bulletin board someone has posted the following riddle:

What is greater than God, more evil than the devil, the poor have it, the rich need it, and if you eat it you'll die?

Now the obvious answer is "nothing", and I am sure that is the intended answer to the riddle. But there are a few other answers I could suggest that might make this more entertaining. Does anyone else have any suggestions?


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Obama Agenda vs. Civil Liberties

This is not something that can be asked and answered in a single post, but in response to my post TPI asked me "in what way is Obama's agenda destructive of civil liberties?"

I'm not going to get into a huge argument about this, but here's my very rudimentary and basic answer: Bush massively reduced the right to privacy via the Patriot Act. He violated our right to be free by torturing suspected terrorists. He violated our right to fair trial by holding detainees for years without a hearing. He violated our right to success by promoting discrimination against arab-appearing Americans.

Obama has not had 8 years to violate our rights, so his list is obviously shorter and less heinous. But what I was getting at with my loaded "but no less invasive to civil liberty" is Obama's two-fold attack on our right to bear arms and our right to prosper. I am not defending the Bush Administration's bungling of the economy, and I did not support their spending spree. But Bush's econ policies seemed...I dunno...like a snowball to Obama's avalanche of money. I'm not one of those hypocrites who says "$300 billion is okay, but $1.2 trillion is too much." I ranted against bailouts from the beginning. Bailouts rob people of the right to fail, of the rights of other intrepid people to establish efficient businesses in the wake of a bad business' colossal failure. Bailouts rob people of the right to spend their money at places they wish to, by forcing it into the hands of businesses that do not necessarily deserve it. Bush, and then Obama, used (and continue to use) "bailout or else armageddon" fearmongering to push upon the American people debts that we will eventually have to pay.
And you have to be either completely in Obama's pocket or have no access to the internet to know that about 15 seconds after Obama was elected, his website dropped their pro-gun talk and took up the liberal, anti-gun mantle. I know, I know, TPI, you don't think Obama is anti-gun. But the problem is that Obama isn't going to stand in the way of the people who are vengefully trying to remove guns from the hands of those of us who have the Constitutionally established right to them.
Obama might not be the bad guy in the anti-gun surge that is building steam in the Democratic party, but I don't see him telling Nancy Pelosi to sit down and shut up.

Anyway, we are looking at the sum total of Bush's legacy...Katrina, Patriot Act, Guantanimo, Iraq, etc. and we get the opportunity to go "wow, what a jerk." But with Obama, we're looking at it the ski slope from the top, and we really don't know what the ride will be like. But so far, Obama hasn't really seemed like "the ultimate defender of liberty" but more like "the ultimate enactor of progressive agenda".


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The Difference

From XKCD.

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Dog The Pirate Hunter

Here, Ben Domenech argues that what the United States needs is to follow Ron Paul's advice from 2007: dispatch private mercenaries with letters of marque to dispense low-collateral-damage, low-cost justice on Somali pirates.

Deploying the New Privateers as a blunt instrument against the Somali pirates has some downsides. But I’m unconvinced that these enemies can be negotiated with or stopped without the deployment of an innovative solution — in this case, one that’s a throwback to the era these thieves come from. The cost, difficulty, and risk of a dozen more Maersk standoffs has to be weighed. We shouldn’t be satisfied with better protections for ships, hoping that the pirates will grow bored of their revenge streak, and reorienting our naval force in the region to combat this enemy will take time. Instead, President Obama and the Congress might consider encouraging those individuals who can to solve the problem in their own way — as messy as it may be — so that these seaborne brigands wake up on a morning soon to find their sands are run.

Most people have at least toyed with this idea in their minds. Most of us, deep down, have this idea that people we don't like just need some "Texas justice, Chuck Norris style" and they'll behave themselves.

But as I am sure avid fans are aware, Dog the Bounty Hunter continues to have plenty of work filling bounties. As much as I'd like to send a bunch of vengeful, well-armed American privateers to the Somali coast to take on the pirates, I don't really think that would be a long-term solution. If these pirates can be considered a different sort of land-based terrorist, then the use of force tends to not effectively squash their efforts. Instead they seem to just get wilier. Iraq (and especially Afghanistan) has shown that there is not a quick fix to the problems of terrorism. I suggest the same is true of pirates.

If you want to stop flies from getting in you shut the window, you don't let a bunch of spiders loose and expect the flies to stop coming in out of fear.

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Final (yeah right) thought on Tea Parties

The largest Tea Party in Kansas City was organized and spearheaded by conservative radio personality Chris Stigall, who yells at Democrats like a good little Rushling every morning on some AM station in Kansas City.

This really, really bothers me, because it proves that the liberals are right: THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT HAS BEEN HIJACKED BY HYPOCRITICAL REPUBLICANS.

You see, it was Stigall and his peers who were for the War in Iraq at any cost, and never once piped up that Bush's spending surges were a bad idea. Never did Stigall say "the $600 dollar rebate checks won't help the economy." Stigall recently went after Robert Gates for "cutting" the defense budget, even though it went up, and argued that we still need F-22 fighter planes to protect us.

All of these things cost money, and the people who started the Tea Party movement were the ones against all of the above, not just against all of the above after Jan 21, 2009. But the Republican party has become like...well...

If you have seen the movie "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" you know at one scene near the end of the movie the 3 protagonists sing for a crowd. Gubernatorial candidate Homer Stokes stops the singing, and the crowd turns wildly against him. Incumbent Governer "Pappy" O'Daniel smells blood, and turns the crowd's anger at Homer Stokes into his campaign, pretending to be a Soggy Bottom Boys fan and winning the crowd (and the home crowd on the radio).

I believe this is what Republican leadership is doing. The Tea Party movement started as pure argument for fiscal responsibility, but the Republican leadership (with a hefty dose of coverage from FoxNews) is trying to re-align that growing energy into anti-Democratic sentiment.

"You hate fiscal waste? Well, forget what we did for the last 8 years! The Republican Party officially hates waste too!"


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The Left and Right of (and right to) Tea Parties

TPI has some good thoughts here on Tea Parties (despite his support of Yglesias, who confounds all by calling tax protestors stupid).

Conversely, Douthat also does a good job of fleshing out thoughts from a less-than-extremist conservative on what the Tea Parties represent.

Personally, I think what liberals like Yglesias are forgetting is that in 2002-2003 when they were all boldly marching against (and chaining themselves to the Bush Ranch in opposition to) the War in Iraq and liberal extremists talked of planted explosives in the Twin Towers and of missiles shooting down planes, the Right collectively called the protesters stupid, and said the conspiracy extremists who were extolling government's hand in the terrorist attacks were undermining the self-confidence of the country and helping the terrorists win. Then, when it became slowly clear that the War in Iraq was...ill advised to say the least...the Left "grassroots organized" and collectively gathered to themselves the ever increasing masses of people who disliked the Republican Party and elected Barack Obama.

So there's this potential parallel going on here. You had 9/11 early in Bush's term when he was uber-popular and then things didn't go well and protesters were all over the place, then he slowly lost the country and became a laughingstock and the lamest duck in 30 years. Now you have Obama as the uber-popular one, preaching and enacting major change (of a different kind than Bush but no less invasive to civil liberty) and protests and rallies are breaking out (three different Tea Parties in Kansas City drew an estimated 10,000 people between them), you have people using stronger anti-leftist rhetoric than ever, and you have Obama's approval rating standing strong...but starting to wane towards the median. Could it be we will all face collosal tax increases in 4-6 years to pay for the uptick in debt from the current Administration's agenda, and the whole thing will blow up into another "I told you so" swing, this time massively to the Right?

I find it highly possible.

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Cloned Goats Yes, Nukes No.

International peace organization called for the immediate halt of all Iranian goat enrichment facilities, claiming they may be used to create cloned "goat bombs." This admission came late this afternoon after Iranian scientists announced the first successful goat cloned in their country. When asked to comment, U.S. security officials said: "Iran must not have cloned goats. Our experts tell us that Iran has definite plans to use their cloned goat herds against Israel. The current Iranian regime has openly admitted its hatred of Israel, and has clearly defined its goal to wipe out all Israeli born goats by 2012."
When asked for comment, Israeli officials said: "If the Iranians do not immediately cease goat cloning operations we will initiate bombing strikes on any Iranian science facility we believe involved in cloning of goats."

Iranian officials were surprised and outraged by the foreign leaders response. "We simply want to develop cutting edge science facilities for the economic benefit of our country." When asked about possible use of cloned goats against Israel, the Iranian official said: "Israel has cloned goats. The United States has been cloning goats since the Clone War. Many other countries have cloned goats. What is the problem with Iran obtaining harmless cloned for the benefit of Iran?"

The U.N. has proposed sanctions against Iran if goat cloning continues.


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Britain's Got (editing) Talent

In England, American Idol is called "Britain's Got Talent" and it is actually a quality program. Gone is the fake, stupid dialogue between Ryan Seacrest and Simon Cowell.

Instead you get amazing editing and uplifting moments.

Absolutely worth the 7 minutes. If you can't view youtube at work like I can't, just search for "Susan Boyle" on google video.


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Stinky Pee Post

During Easter dinner I had some delicious ham, potato salad and asparagus. Later that afternoon, I noticed the tell-tale odor in my pee that I always smell after eating asparagus. Don't hide it, many of you know of what I speak. That sort of fruity, rich smell that comes 15 minutes -12 hours after eating asparagus, cabbage, or drinking some varieties of wine or champagne.

This is caused by your body breaking down a molecule found only in certain foods and drinks into a small group of highly aromatic molecules that your kidneys send directly (and very quickly) to your liver.

Here's the kicker: only 22% of people report that smell. Scientists (including myself) jumped to the conclusion that the metabolic pathway for turning asparagus into funny smells was genetic, and only 1 in 5 of us were able to create the smelly compounds. But a smart-thinking scientist tried a test: he took pee containing the smelly compounds and held it under people's noses. Turns out everyone makes the compounds, but only 1 in 5 of us can smell them! The genetic difference is in your nose, not in your intestines.

So the next time you eat asparagus and smell that funky smell, count yourself a part of the minority who still have prehistoric scent glands in their noses. Or if you don't smell anything strange in particular, consider yourself lucky; you're a higher organism than I. You've proudly evolved a less sensitive nose!


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Don't Judge A Racist By His Statistics

Here at work, the repairman has spent the morning dissecting the $45,000 copy machine we have in the plot room, trying to fix its consistent tendency to paperjam during large print jobs. I just overheard him telling a coworker of mine that part of his difficulty is that the innards of the copier are very small, and the space he has in which to move his hands is very small. "The Japanese design these things around their smaller hands," he argued.

My first reaction was "what a racist chucklehead." But as I sat there, pondering it, I wondered if this is truly racist. And I realized racism is a question of statistics, and the interpretation of those statistics.

If there are statistics that support that as a race, the Japanese have smaller hands than Americans, then it is possible the copy repairman is not racist, but rather just well read in biological literature. However, this must be coupled with evidence that the Japanese have designed copy machines (and presumably other machines) around Japanese anatomical averages, and not the anatomical averages of middle-aged, overweight American copy repairmen.
So the racism in this case is a question of statistics.

However, if I were to say "Black men are more violent than white men," I'd clearly be a racist. Or would I? Statistics show that nationally, crime is perpetrated much more commonly by black men than by white men. But statistics are always open to interpretation. Although statistically black men are evidently more prone to violence than white men, statistics also show that areas of crime have a higher population of blacks. Statistics also show that these areas are low income areas. So it could be heuristically argued that poor people are more prone to crime, and it's simply coincidence that those poor people committing crimes are predominantly black. Or you could as easily argue that certain areas (like the urban core of cities) encourage crime, and the people living there are simply following social cues. Racism, in this case, is a question of interpretation of the statistics.

So what of our copy repairman, who called out Japanese as small-handed? Personally, I chalk that one up to racism. I have my doubts that he actually has studied statistical comparisons of American versus Japanese hand size (my quick internet search returned zero results). I also doubt the copy manufacturer neglected to think of the American market (and ease of repair) when designing their $45,000 copier.


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How to increase blog readership

I was highly pleased this morning when I discovered that my daily page views had topped 100. That means that people who visit this site (around 70/day) are clicking to other, older articles that were missed back when I was my only blog reader.

Now I don't harbor ambitions of being the next Ross Douthat; mostly I just enjoy writing, and practicing my sarcastic, conservative-bent analysis of mostly technology, sometimes politics, sometimes God, and sometimes whatever else. But now that I have crept into the triple digits, I feel like I should really take it up a notch.
I've deduced that the best method to this end is by writing articles that pertain to issues about which many people want to read, they find me on google, and come here. Like my circumcision thread, or my charity thread, both popular, according to my sitemeter. By having the right keywords in my posts, people invariably wander here and hopefully get hooked.
So I came up with a foolproof set of keywords today that will absolutely boost my blog readership into the thousands:

"Lindsay Lohan lesbian nude sex video with Megan Fox and Angelina Jolie."



Don't judge me.
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One Step Closer To The Dyson Sphere

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I have discussed before on this blog that a massive amount of energy could be harnessed by space-based solar panels. In science fiction, a massive sphere of solar panels located around a star is known as a Dyson Sphere.

Now, Earth is making its first leap in that direction. California's Pacific Gas & Electric has tentatively signed a deal with Solaren, a start-up that promises to launch and maintain an orbital solar collector, capable of sending 200 Megawatts of energy to earth over 15 years.

Anyone who has been reading this blog for a while can imagine my ten paragraph diatribe about insurmountable technological hurdles being ignored for the sake of politicians who appear to be "doing something dammit!" The can imagine me complaining about space dust blocking the mirror arrays, or about trying to get the mirror arrays stable enough for precision transmission of sunlight, or about the photocells degrading quickly because of the massive amount of energy being generated by them. The regular reader can imagine my face when I think about the engineers who claim this is feasible, and how irresponsible it is to do things like this when environmentally friendly energy is readily available on the terrestrial surface, if people would just have the wherewithal to build it. You can imagine me thinking about how much this will cost taxpayers. You can imagine my sarcastic comment about the debris from the collided satellites could easily destroy this solar array, and if California was depending on that power, brownouts could occur for months until terrestrial backup power could be acquired. You can imagine me not being a fan. Then you can imagine my final words being something like "although this technology is cool and futuristic, I think we should be solving our terrestrial problems first, then working on space-based problems later." You can imagine me linking to my previous eviscerations of pointless, expensive Mars missions and mega-telescopes used to find exoplanets we'll never reach and how against another manned moon trip I am.

I guess I'll believe it when I look up in the sky and see it.


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Easter

Is there a more noble act than human sacrifice for the survival of others? Christian teaching tells us there is not. The Supreme Being appeared in flesh, and then sacrificed himself for the saving of all believers. This tells me that although Jesus said the first commandment is to "Love your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength, and the second is to "Love your neighber as your self," that the act of sacrificing your life so that others may live supercedes all other behaviors. No amount of charitable donation, no amount of goodwill towards others, no amount of responsible behavior or penitence can compare to the simple act of giving up your life that someone else may live.

Easter always remind me of 9/11. I always think about (and mourn) the firefighters who climbed up into the Towers to bring people down, and how although they did not know they were doomed, the accepted their own demise as a very real possibility, and climbed the stairs anyway. Self-sacrifice is one of the only things I can argue is truly a "human" trait, you do not find animals (outside of hive-collective groups where there is not technically an individual) were self-sacrifice is a wide-spread and noticeable trait. Parent animals will often viciously and self-destructively defend their young, but this is simple Darwinism; it is easily argued the parents are not protecting their young out of love, they are doing so out of love of their own DNA. Humans, and as far as I know humans alone, will sacrifice their life for a complete stranger.

So the philosophical question doesn't become "what separates humans from animals?" but instead becomes "what connects humans, and humans alone, to the Divine?" The answer, I believe, is self-sacrifice. The answer is Jesus.


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Zaphod Beeblebrox reference of the year!

Woman has developed imaginary third arm.

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Tea Party Protests

Yglesias:

I haven’t said a great deal about the burgeoning “tea party” “movement” because (a) it’s incredibly stupid, and (b) I knew some colleagues were working on some more in-depth efforts in this regard than I could possible stomach.

Boy he sure sounds like William Rutledge all of a sudden, doesn't he?

Having attended a "Tea Party" tax protest myself, I have to feel a little incensed when someone tells me that something I had done was incredibly stupid. I felt neither stupid nor incredible when I was at the protest. All I felt was a sense of belonging to a large (and growing) group that felt tax increases, even for the most altruistic reasons, would not aid me or the economy.

People like Barack Obama. Not everyone! 30 percent or so of the people say they disapprove. And in a country of 300 million, that means it’s easy to get together a big meeting of people who really hate Obama. But it’s clearly a relatively modest minority of the population, comparable in size—and probably largely overlapping with—the group of people who approved of the job George W. Bush was doing all the way ’till the end.

Believe me, there are not a lot of Bush supporters at the tax protests. If anything, independents and hard line conservatives are the rule there. Many tax party protesters felt Bush was as fiscally irresponsible as Obama will probably be. Many at tax party protests are Ron Paul supporters.

I like James Robertson's comment to Yglesias' post:

Hmm. So it’s absurd because you don’t approve. As opposed to the anti-war protests (which have magically fizzled out - makes me wonder about the principles of those people), of which you approved.
Right….
Bear in mind that the original tea party in Boston was in favor of a policy that very few colonials approved. But then again, I’ve seen Matt yearn for an alternate reality with no revolution, so I guess it all makes sense.

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Earthicidal Starbursts May Have Caused Dinosaurs to "Cease Existing"

I had never heard the term "Earthicide" until about ten minutes ago, when I read this uplifting piece of writing.

When a binary system collapses into a black hole, which astronomers call 'coalescence' (a euphemism which makes 'heated debate' a valid description of World War II), it can release a gigantic burst of gamma rays. Gamma rays are the ultimate high energy electromagnetic radiation, and while the burst lasts less than two minutes it can contain more energy than the entire mass of the sun converted into energy by E = m c^2. You'll notice that the mass of the sun and the speed of light, c, are extremely large numbers

Basically, all that garbage Newt was saying about EMP blasts in space causing the electrical grid to be disabled, or all that stuff I said about solar flares washing the Earth in gamma rays...imagine that multiplied by about a factor of...infinity.

On the upside we'll never see it coming. The EM-burst travels the speed of light so the only warning we'd have is dying - which most people will accept is a little too late.

The idea here is that a star 100,000 light years away could have exploded and sent out a wave of gamma radiation at us 100,000 years ago and we won't have a clue until it gets here and wipes us out.

"Here that sound, Mr. Anderson? That's the sound of inevitability." - Agent Smith, The Matrix


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Spinning the Numbers Helps Obamaniacs

Am I the only one who thinks that when 53% of people find capitalism better than socialism, and 20% of people find socialism better than capitalism, that means that nearly 3 capitalists exist in America per socialist? How are we not cutting this as a massive majority of capitalists?
Further, it is mentioned that

Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided.

I once heard a quote: "If you're old and liberal, you have no money. If you are young and conservative you have no heart."
Young people have always been more liberal (read: socialistic, idealistic) than their older counterparts. This is exactly what the trends in the Rasmussen poll show!
So when Yglesias says:

The generational change here is interesting.

I have to ask what exactly he means by change? 20-somethings are more socialist than old people? Seems like business as usual to me!

If there has been a shift towards acceptance of socialism, it is because the Democratic party has done a great job of making people believe the following equation: economic collapse + greed + George Bush + AIG execs / your 401k = capitalism. When really, it should be like this: hard work + sound investment + freemarket capitalism = comfortable retirement.

And while I am doing math equations to describe policy, here's socialism:
your tax dollars/everyone else - your hard work - your personal freedom + government inefficiency + bureaucracy*infinity - happiness = future

That's right. bureaucracy*infinity. Happy Friday!

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