"Restore(s) a little sanity into current political debate" - Kenneth Minogue, TLS "Projects a more expansive and optimistic future for Americans than (the analysis of) Huntington" - James R. Kurth, National Interest "One of (the) most important books I have read in recent years" - Lexington Green
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I’d be more impressed with this supposed epiphany if people like that didn’t define “fascist” as, “someone who told me no.”
The Occupiers are not naive, idealistic, children. They do not act out of a desire for the greater good. They act out of megalomania. They see themselves as some kind of Nietzschean supermen whose superhuman political insight and moral superiority mean they don’t have to follow the same rules as anyone else.
They’re special and get to occupy public property for their sole use. They’re special and get to violate the property and movement rights of others. They’re special and get to cost other people their jobs and livelihood without consequence. They’re special and nobody else has the moral right to restrain them in any way or refuse their dictates. It follows that no one has the moral authority to tell them “no”. Anyone who does tell them “no” is axiomatically evil and the worst kind of evil at that, i.e., fascist.
That includes their fellow ideologues.
Communists and fascists were driven by a similar self-righteous arrogance but both philosophies held that in the grand scheme of things, individuals were unimportant.
Mythbusters is a science popular show on the Discovery channel. They test urban myths and the like using a variety of cleverly improvised experiments. They often say their insurance company has stopped them from doing this or that experiment. I really believe that. A lot of their stuff is clearly very dangerous despite their precautions.
When I see someone sweating something, I often quip, “He looks more nervous than a Mythbuster’s insurance agent.”
Well, it looks like the Mythbuster’s insurance agent really has something to sweat about now. During an experiment at the Alameda county bomb range that involved firing a large blackpowder cannon with what looked like an 8-12 inch cannonball, the ball skipped out of the range and shot through a house in the nearby suburban neighborhood.
Nobody was hurt but it’s California so they’re going to get sued for all kinds of emotional trauma.
When I told this my son observed, “That’s seems like (an assumed) risk of living near a bomb range.” Yep, but that won’t help.
In the newly revealed 20-page memo from FDR’s declassified FBI file, the Office of Naval Intelligence on December 4 warned, “In anticipation of open conflict with this country, Japan is vigorously utilizing every available agency to secure military, naval and commercial information, paying particular attention to the West Coast, the Panama Canal and the Territory of Hawaii.”
That’s supposed to be a significant revelations? What, previous memos only warned about Japan’s keen interest in Minnesota? I hate to tell people who are all a twitter about this memo and other similar “revelations” but nobody in the American military or government was really surprised there was an attack on Pearl Harbor or any other major US pacific military asset. The entire Pacific was under a war warning and the entire US military was prepping for a possible Japanese attack somewhere. The US carriers were not caught at Pearl Harbor because they had been deployed to ferry aircraft to points in the western Pacific where an attack was anticipated, e.g., Wake Island.
Pearl Harbor wasn’t a surprise of intent, it was a surprise of capability.
No one in the US Navy thought the Japanese had the physical capability to strike Pearl Harbor with carrier aircraft. That was the surprise.
Yamamoto surprised the US Navy, and everyone else, because he was a “black swan”, i.e., a rare and unpredictable outlier.
The failure of Aptera and similar designs reveals the real-world functional differences between stated preferences i.e. what people tell themselves and others they want, and revealed preferences i.e. the things people actually end up choosing. People tell car designers and manufactures they want and will buy an inexpensive, efficient, two-seater commuter car but when it comes to putting money down for one they don’t follow through.
The conflict between stated and revealed preferences has significant political ramifications.
Looking back over my previous post on Aptera and the subsequent comments, it’s clear that Aptera specifically failed for three major reason:
It was uni-dimensional design that sacrificed every other functionality for fuel efficiency.
Cars are general tools. Every if people spend 80% of their milage commenting, they still have other task the car needs to perform to some degree. A car that cannot fulfill these secondary task necessitates that the car owner spend time and money finding other solutions. That additional expense usually destroys any economic advantage the unidimensional design purports to offers.
The Aptera specifically represented nothing knew. Everything in the design had been repeatedly tried before and always failed. Specifically, highly efficient, two-seater commuter cars using a wide array of technologies have been repeatedly offered since at least the 1920s in all parts of the world. They all failed to catch on.
The last reason brings me to the “Smart” car. Marketed as “unboring”, “uncluttered” and the “uncar”, they should have added “unusable” and “unsellable”. The Smart car is another in a long, long, long list of attempts at a highly efficient, two seater, urban car. Arguably, it could be the best attempt ever made. It’s failure should, but won’t, drive a stake into the two-seater commuter car concept.
Ayers, you may recall, is the leftist intellectual’s Timothy McVeigh (without McVeigh’s murderous competence). The comparison to McVeigh is not hyperbole. The psychology of political terrorists has been well studied by many people in many different countries. All studies conclude that such terrorists are megalomaniacal sociopaths who latch on to the most visible political movement of their time and location and then use that movement’s ideology to justify their crimes. They don’t actually care about the good the ideology purports to accomplish.
Instead, they care about exploiting the ideology to advance their own interest. The ideology merely justifies their sociopathic vainglory. The strategy behind both Ayers’s and McVeigh’s terrorism was to trigger a broad-based political upheaval that would leave individuals such as Ayers and McVeigh on top of society. They rationalized that by killing they could make themselves the pebble that starts the political avalanche. They desperately convinced themselves that they could murder their way to the top like Lenin or Mao.
Ayers never cared about all the things that contemporary leftists care about, and he never will. He doesn’t care about anybody or anything other than himself (although, like all sociopaths, he is very good at convincing people he does). Ayers isn’t a basically good person who went too far in advancing a good cause, he’s just evil. In another era, he would have killed for right-wing causes just as readily.
This makes the contemporary Left’s continuing embrace of Ayers, Dorn and other Weatherman sociopaths even more disturbing. They simply don’t care what these sociopaths did nor what they continue to profess. (Ayers has never recanted his terrorism and even let himself be photographed trampling an American flag in a grimy alley for a NY Times story published on 9/11.) Neither are leftists concerned in the least that such an individual moved in the same small political circle and continually interacted with the person who is currently the President of the United States. Neither are they concerned that Ayers et al all heartily approve of Obama.
Worst of all, they are utterly unconcerned that Ayers is a prominent national educator with significant influence on the K-12 education of America’s children. In the video where he makes his admission, he is speaking to a group of teachers unionists and urging them to corruptly use their positions of trust as educators of children to advance Ayers’s political agenda. The audience has no problem with doing just that.
I really think that someone in the Chicago area needs to crowd source the tracking of Ayers and to publicly link him to every group or policy he adopts. The hardcore Left doesn’t care about Ayers’s sociopathy and murderous megalomania but I imagine others will.
I’m thankful that I can crush my enemies and see them flee before me, that I can take their horses and belongings and hear the lamentations of their women.
Okay, I’m not thankful for that today but 1,000 years ago I probably would have been. Today, I am thankful that we do not have to repeat the mistakes and evils of our ancestors but that we can go forth to make our own, hopefully lesser, mistakes.
What else?
I thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
If it is sad that good people do not live forever, it is joyful that evil ones do not as well. I think Shakespeare’s Anthony was wrong and it is the evil that men do that is (eventually) interred with their bones. The good we leave behind accumulates over the generations. This would not happen if everything lived forever. So, I am thankful that nothing lasts forever and that things and people change. I am thankful even when that change is death.
I am thankful that the preacher of Ecclesiastes was literally wrong and that there are new things under the sun and that each day brings some new wonder to explore. I am thankful that, even if he was correct in his metaphor that human nature never changes, then at least we can change how we act on the impulses that come from that nature.
I am thankful that I live in America, where each morning is the beginning of the great tomorrow promised yesterday. I am thankful that I have the right to strive, to experiment and to improve. I am thankful I have the right to fail, to fall and get back up again.
Most of all, I am thankful that I know to be thankful for these things.
Following on my previous post on the “We are the 99%” people who seem to view education as more ritual than the acquisition of practical skills or knowledge, it occurred to me that many of these young people may not understand that they aren’t really, despite the time and money spent, actually educated.
The liberal arts of today are those fields with little or no empiricism. In other words, if the field doesn’t have a lot of math, the information it deals with is subjective and untestable. Even supposed “soft” sciences in the liberal arts like sociology or psychology lack true scientific rigor. Given that, how do liberal-arts graduates know that they’ve really been taught something worthwhile? How do they know they haven’t been loaded up with gibberish?
For example, I don’t know much about music, so someday I want to take some courses about music. How would I know whether any particular instructor was teaching me anything valid? Since I have no real knowledge about music, how would I know if I was paying someone to fill my head with nonsense?
Some music education would teach concrete skills, e.g., reading music or learning to play an instrument, so I could evaluate whether I had been educated by my ability to read music or play an instrument.
I’ve been reading through the “We Are the 99 Percent” and other related web sites. A constant refrain is that young adults went tens of thousands of dollars into debt for degrees and now they can’t find even minimum wage jobs. I don’t think they really understand the purpose of education.
This one complains that, “I have a Magna Cum Laude BA, and not even the grocery store will hire me.” This one says, “I’m over $100k in student loan debt and my career isn’t even in the field I went into copious amounts of debt over.” This one says, ‘My husband and I both went to college like we were “supposed” to do.’ This one says, “I am 25 yrs old and months away from a master’s degree. My bachelor’s is in literature/9-12 education…Well over $30K in student loan debt.”
Carefully missing from most of the complaints is the type of degree they got, but I think it’s fairly clear that most of these people got liberal-arts degrees. Moreover, there is no evidence that they pursued these degrees with any eye towards practical economic returns for their considerable financial investment.
I really get the sense that many of these people simply don’t understand that an education is supposed to equip you with skills that make you valuable to other people. Instead, I think these kids have somehow got the idea that college is more of a ritual you have to go through, a kind of right of passage, that entitles you to a middle-class or better life-style while pursuing a job you find interesting and emotionally fulfilling.
They’re just shocked and amazed that they’ve gone through all the rituals, got the degrees and the accolades of their professors and nobody out in the real world gives a damn.
We need to think long and hard how so many young people simply don’t understand the purpose of education. Where did they get the idea that a liberal-arts degree automatically entitled them to a middle-class income that could easily pay off tens of thousands in student loans?
Is it just coincidence that Herman Cain is now facing the same charges of sexual impropriety as Clarence Thomas? Of all the charges to level, why have both of the most prominent black conservatives of the past 20 years been targeted by sexual allegation? Why don’t white conservatives get similarly accused? Why does the Left seem to find such charges against black conservatives so credible? Why do charges of sexual impropriety against conservative black men”stick” so readily in the minds of the Left?
I think that the Left has fallen into a psychological rut worn deep in our collective cultural conscience by a century of scientific racism. I think they are all primed to see black men as sexually impulsive. That is why they instantly think such charges as credible.
Classical racism (pre-WWII) held that non-white races were less evolved away from animals than whites and therefore had more animalistic natures. Under the non-Darwinian concept of evolution ascendent at the time, the “scientific consensus” held that natural forces were pushing all living things along a predetermined development towards some “higher” or “perfected” state. In humans, that meant our brains grew larger, increasing intellect and emotional control but at the same time weakening the body.
Non-whites were believed to be less evolved and therefore mentally and emotionally inferior but with the relative strength and stamina of animals. In a time when most men still performed manual labor for a living, the era’s progressives argued that the “lesser” races had an unfair advantage in the free-market when it came to competing for manual labor jobs so the government had to step in. Most Jim Crow laws, unions and immigration restrictions on Asian were supported by the era’s progressives with the argument that “greedy” business owners would hire non-whites because they could do the job better without paying attention to the “socially responsible” need to maintain white supremacy.
One side effect of seeing non-whites, particularly black people, as more animalistic, was that they were also seen as being more sexually virile. Read the rest of this entry »
This article isn’t unusual. Microsoft seems to be disappearing from the casual computer related “chatter”, such as the Wired article. I’m not talking about the Microsoft specific press like PC World or the like but rather the less specific and more general press and blogs that sometimes writes stories about computer issues.
Five years or more ago, you simply did not see computer stories that didn’t mention Microsoft. When Apple did something there was always some notice paid to how Microsoft might respond. More importantly, Microsoft showed up in political, economic or cultural writing that weren’t computer specific. Microsoft was on the minds of the general public, not just computer geeks.
The Apple ads center visually on products themselves. The Apples ads just linger on showing the Apple hardware and software in use. Apple believes that the products speak for themselves and all Apple has to do is show the products in action. Basically, the ads just say, “Here’s our stuff. Isn’t it neat?” This works because the Apple products are finely tuned by a focused and discipline design, production and support system. There is a definitive iPhone, a definitive iPad and a definitive iOS operating system.
The Android ads by contrast don’t show the actual devices or Android itself in use. They are not Android specific at all. They might as well be snippets cut from some Sci-Fi movie or video game. The actual Android products are largely hidden. Instead of showing the hardware and software in action, they instead nearly try to associate the Android brand with cool and exciting Sci-Fi imagery.
Most Android ads, regardless of who makes them, fit this pattern. Android devices are seldom seen, when seen they seldom hold prolonged focus and are seldom seen in use. Basically, the ads say, “Look at the girl in leather fighting robots! That’s cool right? So, Android must be cool too!”
I post to StackOverflow, a site/community for answering technical programming questions. One of my highest rated answers addressed the question of which mobile OS a startup should target. Back in Oct 09 I observed:
I think the last stanza sums up the emotional lives of these people. They are all convinced they are special somehow and that the greatest proof of the current world’s inherent injustice is that they don’t get the income, status and regard they innately deserve. They really do believe they’re better than the business people who actually provide all the material benefits of modern life. They chafe that mere executives, bankers and inventors get the money and status that should rightly go to them.
They dress all their rage up as concern for the poor and victimized but they’re really only upset about how the world treats them individually. Their “concern” is really thinly discussed selfishness.
That selfishness is the base reason why all their policies always hurt more than help the nominal targets of their concern. Their selfishness means that any policy or programs must first and foremost advance their interest. Any program that doesn’t do that is violently resisted regardless of its potential or proven ability to help those who need help.
All this rage, rioting and posturing is really just a thinly disquised shout of, “me, me, me!”
Every year, thousands of boy and girl scouts head out into the wild and set up camp sites. They even do so on a scale of thousands when they have Jamborees. Even more impressively, the vast majority of the people organizing and doing the work are just teenagers. We see the same level of impressive self-organization when natural disasters hit. Strangers instantly come together to pool limited resources and help each other out. Within hours, they can create a physically safe and emotionally supportive ad hoc community while they wait for outside help to arrive.
Given all that, just how pathetic is it that the various “Occupy” mobs can’t even come close to providing the same level of effective self-organization in their little campground cum shantytowns? Even the most trivial decisions take hours of protracted debate that often end without deciding on an action. The “Occupiers” in many cities have rioted, attacking random individuals and destroying businesses large and small. Almost all of the sites nationwide are plagued internally by violence and theft. The New York Occupy campground has even had to establish a women’s only tent to prevent rapes.
Do these pathetic, immature, egocentric twits actually expect the rest of us to allow them to influence any major public policy? When people are losing jobs and homes and entire communities and even states are sliding into bankruptcy, why would we turn to such overt incompetents for leadership? If they can’t manage a campground or honestly manage 500,000 donated dollars, why would we think they can manage a city government or regulate a bank?
With violent crime in New York on the rise, nanny mayor Bloomberg has involved himself in Virginia’s internal legislative process in an attempt to restrict the Second Amendment rights of the people of Virginia. His rationale for doing so is that New York criminals buy guns in Virginia, and since Bloomberg can’t control those criminals in New York itself, the law abiding citizens of Virginia have to give up some of their rights.
In reality, Bloomberg is just another impotent and incompetent big city mayor with a expensive, bloated, unionized, dysfunctional and often corrupt police force who cannot provide basic civil order to many parts of the city they notionally “serve and protect.” Rather than admit that he can’t actually perform the most basic duty of his office, Bloomberg desperately tries to shift the blame to some group outside his jurisdiction over which he can plausibly claim he has no control.
Bloomberg’s message boils down to: “Hey, you can’t blame for me runaway crime in New York because it’s all the fault of those ignorant rednecks in Virginia over whom I have no control!”
Blaming outsiders for internal woes is the oldest political trick in the book.
German chancellor Merkel recently made a statement that mirrors sentiments voiced by virtually all European leaders and EU proponents:
“Nobody should take for granted another 50 years of peace and prosperity in Europe. They are not for granted. That’s why I say: If the euro fails, Europe fails,” Merkel said, followed by a long applause from all political groups.
“We have a historical obligation: To protect by all means Europe’s unification process begun by our forefathers after centuries of hatred and blood spill. None of us can foresee what the consequences would be if we were to fail.” [emp added]
So, as an American, I have to ask: How crazy dangerous are contemporary Europeans anyway?
I mean, from reading the statements of these EU leaders and EU proponents, people outside the EU could easily get the idea that the majority of the EU population are nothing but a bunch of war crazed psychos quiveringly eager to drop the hammer on their neighbors at the slightest provocation. And here I thought you Europeans were all better now and so morally advanced compared to the rest of the planet. Have you been keeping secrets?
If Europeans are so irrationally war prone, is the EU really a good idea?
In an otherwise excellent article, John Stossel repeats a historical fallacy that is one of my pet peeves. He says:
The railroad didn’t make economic sense at the time, so the government subsidized construction and gave the companies huge quantities of the best land on the continent. [emp added]
This is one of those assertions that gets repeated endlessly until it becomes widely viewed as unquestionable fact. Indeed, it does seem self-evident because one need only look at a map of the 19th century land grants to see that the grants covered vast stretches of land that today are some of the most productive and valuable agricultural lands in the world.
There is just one problem. Most of that land today, and even more so in the late 19th century, is valuable for only one reason:
My spouse works for Apple in the finance department and today took over 30 calls from finance contacts, e.g., accounts payable, comptrollers and the like, who called to express their condolences to the company on the passing of Steve Jobs. Note that these weren’t people who expressed condolences in passing during a routine business call, these were people who called specifically to express their condolences.
My spouse mused, “If Bill Gates died do you think people would call Microsoft just to say how sad they were?”
I gonna go with, no, no they wouldn’t.
It’s strange to see a billionaire entrepreneurial executive lionized and mourned like a heroic soldier or a great artist. Most business people, regardless of the good they do or how much they change the world for the better are hated and resented by the greater public. People seldom believe they’ve earned their wealth or deserve respect for their work. Jobs was different.
Noting the passage of the creator of the Doritos chip who recently died at the ripe old age of 97, Glenn Reynolds quips, “I think the preservatives in junk food keep you young.”
Actually, there is reason to suspect that he might be right.
One of the most common preservatives is butylated hydroxyanisole also know has BHA or E320 in food labeling. BHA keeps foods from growing rancid by preventing the oxidation of fats by oxygen free radicals.
Say, what do you call a substances that controls oxygen free radicals? It’s right on the tip of my tongue…
… Oh, right, an anti-oxidant! You know, those things every other organic food product is advertised as having.
Benzoic acid, probably most commonly seen as Sodium Benzoate (E211) is another common bugaboo. In fact, its probably the poster child preservative being one whose name most people will recognize.
I remember once when I was eleven I got a new mountain bike. It was really sweet at the time though in retrospect it was not the greatest bike in the world. It had push button gear shift which meant that under any kind of duress the bike would shift into the most inappropriate gear possible. So Im riding my new bike on this dirt trail when I come across these really gnarly jumps and I think to myself I should take my new bike off of these rad hills and totally get some air. Well, the first one I went off of I landed wrong because I didnt know what the hell I was doing, I flipped over my handlebars and dislocated my knee. I also wrecked my new bike and had to hobble home carrying it. Anyway it was a way better time than this movie.
From the Princess Bride: Vizzini has just cut the rope The Dread Pirate Roberts is climbing up Vizzini: He didn’t fall? Inconceivable! Inigo Montoya:You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Of course, Montoya is correct. Vizzini isn’t actually using the word inconceivable correctly. Inconceivable means “not capable of being imagined” but Vizzini uses the word to mean, “I didn’t plan on that happening when I set up this little political kidnapping.”
Right now, the word “extremist” is much bandied about in Washington these days but clearly it doesn’t mean what people seem to think it means. People claim that this or that group of “extremists” in Congress have hijacked the federal government, and hyperventilate about it endlessly.
By defining as “extremist” people who are in fact not at all “extreme” people end up in a delusional world of political plans that fail as “inconceivably” as Vizzini’s did, and if they don’t start thinking clearly, their political fortunes could end up sharing Vizzini’s fate.
The word “extreme” means, “furthest from the center or a given point” and that concept is extended metaphorically to people to give us “extremist”, meaning someone who holds political views far from the center of the political spectrum. So what constitutes “far from center” in the context of America’s political system?
