Author Archive

An era of the conceivable made concrete…And of the casually miraculous.

Adrian Veidt, The Watchmen by Allan Moore

A while back I found a post by pseudo-intellectual Peter Frase, pulling several mental muscles trying to imagine what it would be like to live in a Star Trek utopia if only it didn’t have intellectual property laws. [h/t Instapundit-->Overcoming Bias] That got me to thinking about how our contemporary world stacks up against Star Trek’s utopian vision.

Star Trek is often used as a starting point for musing about this or that utopia because everything in Star Trek seems so wonderful. Star Trek is Gene Roddenberry‘s vision of New Frontier democratic socialism evolved to a utopia so perfect that individuals have to head out into the wilds of deep space just to find some adventure. Watching Star Trek, one naturally begins to wonder what it would be like to live in a world so advanced that all of the problems we deal with today have been resolved or minimized to insignificance.

Well, we don’t actually have to imagine what it would be like to live in a Star Trek-like, radically egalitarian, technologically advanced, “post-scarcity” society because we live in a Star Trek-like utopia right now, right here, in contemporary America.

How can I say that? Simple, Star Trek the Next Generation takes place 353 years in the future from 2364 to 2370. If we were to think of ourselves as living in a futuristic science-fiction society we would likewise look back 353 years in the past to 1658.

Image what modern America would look like to the people of any of the world’s major cultures back in 1658! Any novel, movie, TV or comic book set in day-to-day middle-class America would read like astounding science fiction to anyone from 1658. Our society looks even more utopian in comparison to 1658 than Star Trek world 2370 looks to us today.

I’m not just talking about all the amazing and frightening technology like nuclear power/weapons, spacecraft, cars, cell phones, computers, the Internet, etc. I’m also talking about issues of want, individual dignity and social/political equality.

Just to start, by the standards of anywhere 1658 ,contemporary America is a land completely devoid of material poverty. No one in 1658 would consider anyone in America, even a street person, to be even marginally materially poor. Poor people today in American have a material standard of living that surpasses that of even the wealthiest individual in 1658.

For example, just turning on a faucet and getting safe, clean drinking water would look as amazing to a 1658 person as a Star Trek replicator looks to us today.

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Kids still say “Awesome”, right?

Anyway, this is actually technically feasible although I don’t’ think it would be quite as easy as he thinks.

Depth Perception

You know, I really should have titled the post, “How Awesome Will This Be?”

Well, it will be awesome for most of you out in Internet land but since an obstetrician, whom my grandfather unflatteringly called, “an old horse doctor,” poked my right eye out at birth, I will never experience parallax based 3D because it requires two eyes for stereoscopic vision.

But don’t let that stop your enjoyment. I’ll just set over here and sulk while waiting for holograms.

It is very strange as a Texan to read people in other states lecturing us about how Texas’s supposed good economy is all a mirage.

I mean, I’m right here in Texas and I know what both a good economy and bad economy look like in Texas. Being told by people out of state that Texas doesn’t have a good economy right now is akin to someone on the Internet claiming that it’s raining cats and dogs in Austin when I can look out my window and see sunshine and clear blue skies.

Most of these weird arguments are coming from leftists whistling past the graveyard. Texas governor Rick Perry is basing his presidential aspirations on Texas’s relatively sound economy, so that has brought a lot of delusional people out of the woodwork, all desperately trying to sell the idea that the Texas economy actually sucks. Well, it doesn’t.

In reality, the strongest argument against Perry is that Texas has the weakest governor of any of the states, so he can’t claim the primary credit for Texas’s performance as he might in other states.

Most other state constitutions concentrate significant power in the office of the governor and the governors often have near sole control over the executive branch. The Texas constitution divides executive power over several state offices. The Texas governor must share power with the lieutenant governor, the speaker and the state comptroller. All state senior executives are elected in their own right as are many of the state boards. So, the executive branch’s contribution to economically sound government in Texas is the result of a broad political culture of responsibility that elects a lot of good people to many offices, instead of being the result of a single insightful leader (e.g., Christie in New Jersey).

Texas is sound today because of the actual depression we struggled through alone during the period from 1984-1994 as a result of the oil bust. We jettisoned a century of southern-populist quasi-socialism because we ran out of other people’s money and were forced by circumstance to adopt a free-market approach. An entire generation of future politicians and voters got a hard lesson in the dangers of high government spending 20 years before the rest of the nation did. We learned to keep government small and business-friendly because we had to in order to survive.

Since we learned our lesson, the people of Texas have repeatedly elected pro-economic-creative, pro-growth and small-government politicians to all offices across the state. Perry deserves some credit for our sound economy because he has been one of the principle political leaders of the last decade but, frankly, if it hadn’t been Perry it would have been someone else just like him, because that is what the political culture of Texas demands. Perry is a cork bobbing in a torrent of responsible Texans en masse.

In the end, it is not political leadership but the wisdom and discipline of the people that counts in America. Texas is better off than the rest of America because our depression taught us all that it is economic-creatives that generate a sound economy and not government. If the rest of the country doesn’t learn that lesson, it won’t matter if Perry or another responsible candidate is President or not.

TraditionalGuy makes a tongue-in-cheek comment on this Althouse post [h/t Instapundit] on the damage the Wisconsin Democrats’ budget would have done the state:

Wisconsin can always balance the budget for needed re-distribution spending by immediately withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
And think of the Bullet Train, windmill and solar panel jobs sprouting like weeds everywhere for free after the coal industry has been fully deemed illegal by King Obama I.
 
The GOP just lacks the necessary fantasy life to govern.

One constant refrain from leftists is that non-leftists just don’t have the “courage” to imagine a better world. Leftists actively credit themselves not for actually making the world a better place but for making intense emotional investments in delusional, fantasy utopias such as the communist utopia predicted by Marxism.

It’s childish. Leftists congratulating themselves on their “courage” to fantasize is akin to a geek like me congratulating myself back in the day for the exploits of one of my Dungeons & Dragons characters.

Marxism is just an elaborate roleplaying fantasy for pseudo-intellectuals. It constructs a fantasy about a world in which material equality and the eradication of social classes leads to a society in which only “intellectuals”, i.e., individuals skilled at persuasive communications, would stand out from the individually undifferentiated ”masses”. As Marx himself said, in the future communist utopia, men would be differentiated only by their “innate intellects”. It’s clear what Marx and all his educated followers since thought about their own intellects relative to the rest of population.

For anyone with intellectual pretensions, embracing Marxism doesn’t take courage any more than it takes courage for anyone else to fantasize about winning the lottery and marrying a movie star.

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I accidentally DVR’d the President’s speech on Sunday night. I didn’t watch the speech itself, because I don’t watch any speeches these days, but I did catch Brian Williams’s (MSNBC) intro to the speech and it was an eye opener. Here’s my transcription of the intro with Williams’s verbal emphasis bolded:

President Obama has requested air time from the television networks tonight to speak from the East Room of the White House and tell the American people that unless the debt ceiling is raised the US will suffer incalculable damage and the economy will default. And in keeping with the back and forth nature of what has become a toxic debate in Washington, two minutes after the Presidents finish we will go to the Speaker of the House.

The “economy will default”? What the hell? And since when is the opposition response considered part of a “toxic” debate?

Note also the phrasing that turns the President’s expected assertions into statements of objective fact. He will “tell the American people that…” instead of something like, “he will make his case to the American people that…”

I can’t decide if this scares me, disgusts me or heartens me. It scares me to see how deep the major media are in the tank for the Democrats. It disgusts me that they continue to use public resources to promote their partisan agenda. However, it heartens me to see how incompetently they go about it.

“The economy will default”. Heh.

So, my gut and my right foot have been bothering me since March-ish and over Memorial Day while visiting relatives, I stood up in the hotel and something just popped in my right foot and I said a few choice words. After a couple of weeks, the foot still hurt a bit and my stomach wouldn’t settle down so I went to the doc.

The verdict? My gall bladder was stoning up and I had broken the 3rd, 4th, and 5th metatarsals in my right foot. Crap. So, a week later I’m getting my gall bladder yanked and the foot doc says that while the 3rd metatarsal has healed, he doesn’t think the 4th or 5th will heal on their own and that I will need surgery to put pins in.

Yipee. A summer of two surgeries.

So, yesterday, my left foot began to hurt a little bit and it woke me up hurting worse this morning at 5am. By 8 o’clock it was really aching and my spouse says, “hmmm, sharp pain in joint of big toe? Sounds like a classical presentation of gout.” Unfortunately, my spouse is pretty smart.

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[Note: If you or a loved one is currently fighting cancer, you might want to skip this post.]

Whenever I hear someone with cancer talking about fighting the disease by adopting some supposedly super-healthy diet or taking some supplement, I always wince inside because I strongly suspect they are actively harming themselves.

Our intuitive model of fighting disease comes primarily from our experience fighting infectious diseases and the degenerative diseases of aging. In the intuitive model, anything that is good for the body’s cells, tissues and systems, e.g., eating “right”, taking anti-oxidants etc, helps the body to build immune cells and to repair damage caused by infection or life’s wear and tear.

However, cancer isn’t like any other disease.

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Instapundit ask: Why have driver’s licenses at all?

Driver’s licenses began in America back in, IIRC, the 1840s when drivers of large cargo wagons in urban areas were licensed, supposedly to insure that they wouldn’t let the horses and the rig get out of control and plunge thorough crowded city streets. More likely, it was a tool to create a barrier of entry to protect established cartage companies against competition. The cry “it’s for safety” is a powerful economic tool of established concerns.

Supposedly, the government requires automobile drivers to have licenses to demonstrate that they have at least minimal driving skill and understanding of traffic laws. However, I’m not sure that is really the case anymore.

Take this recent story from here in Austin, Tx:

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Abraham Lincoln like to start his Cabinet meetings with a little humor to relax everyone. On September 22, 1862 he began the Cabinet meeting by reading the following little nugget by the then popular humorist Artemus Ward (spelling in the original.)

High-Handed Outrage at Utica

In the Faul of 1856, I showed my show in Uticky, a trooly grate sitty in the State of New York.
 
The people gave me a cordyal recepshun. The press was loud in her prases.
 
1 day as I was givin a descripshun of my Beests and Snaiks in my usual flowry stile what was my skorn disgust to see a big burly feller walk up to the cage containin my wax figgers of the Lord’s Last Supper, and cease Judas Iscarrot by the feet and drag him out on the ground. He then commenced fur to pound him as hard as he cood.
 
“What under the son are you abowt?” cried I.
 
Sez he, “What did you bring this pussylanermus cuss here fur?” and he hit the wax figger another tremenjis blow on the hed.
 
Sez I, “You egrejus ass, that air’s a wax figger–a representashun of the false ‘Postle.”
 
Sez he, “That’s all very well fur you to say, but I tell you, old man, that Judas Iscarrot can’t show hisself in Utiky with impunerty by a darn site!” with which observashun he kaved in Judassis hed. The young man belonged to 1 of the first famerlies in Utiky. I sood him, and the Joory brawt in a verdick of Arson in the 3d degree.

I have no idea why this story is supposed to be so funny. That in turn tells me that I am missing an important understanding of the culture of the era and the mind of Abraham Lincoln and others of that generation.

Supposedly, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton didn’t get the joke either and grumbled about the waste of time. To placate Stanton, Lincoln hurried along to the real work of the meeting: announcing his intention to finally release the Emancipation Proclamation. Stanton didn’t think that was funny either.

I think that the trivial and/or popular works of an era tell us more about the tenor of the times than do the tiny minority of works in any era that time eventually elevates to canon.

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Somehow, despite my deep and broad lifelong study of world and American history, it never jelled in my mind until just recently that the (arguably) two most pivotal battles of the American Civil War concluded on the same day.

In 1863, the Siege of Vicksburg ran from May 18 – July 4 and the Battle of Gettysburg occurred over July 1-3. On July 4th, 1863, the fall of Vicksburg gave the Union control of the Mississippi slicing the Confederacy in two. On July 4th 1863, Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia were in full retreat from Pennsylvania having received a savage mauling. From that point on, the Confederacy lost all hope of foreign intervention and any chance of winning the war.

While we eat our hot dogs and watch our fireworks, it behooves us to recall what others have suffered for us:

Casualites for the Vicksburg campaign:

Union casualties for the battle and siege of Vicksburg were 4,835; Confederate were 32,697 (29,495 surrendered).[4] The full campaign, since March 29, claimed 10,142 Union and 9,091 Confederate killed and wounded. In addition to his surrendered men, Pemberton turned over to Grant 172 cannons and 50,000 rifles.[42]

One of my great-great uncles, IIRC a Col. Brown, was killed at Vicksburg, vaporized by a direct hit from a 88-lb explosive mortar shell fired from a Union ironclad bombardment barge.

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My good Internet friend and blog mentor Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit falls victim to the Internet rumor that Apple has patented a technology that will allow anyone to disable an iPhone’s camera against the wishes of the user.

Of course Apple did no such thing, but for the purposes of discussion let’s assume that they did. Now, should I be panicking that I will someday have pranksters, evil concert promoters, corrupt police and authoritarian governments disabling my iPhone camera anytime they want?

Nope, not worried in the least. Why? Is it because I think the people who run Apple are so good and noble that they would never do such a thing? No, it’s just the opposite. I am confident I will always control my iPhone camera because I think Apple is run by a bunch of “greedy” bastards.

Let me put it this way: Everyone who would pay hundreds of dollars for an iPhone that had such a camera-disabling “feature” in it, please raise your hand.

What? Nobody?

Exactly.

Economic self-interest (that’s “greed” for you leftists) is the most powerful protector of liberties that exists.

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I got into a pissing match with Eric S. Raymond, the famous programmer, author and Open Source Software advocate. I want the opinion of others, preferably people with no specialized programming knowledge, to tell me if I read one of his responses correctly.

I objected to what I regard as a hysterical over reaction to a patent application Apple filed for an infrared augmented reality tag system. The technical issues aren’t that important at the moment.

I would like you good readers to read one of my comments and Raymond’s next response and then answer some questions after the jump. Please don’t read my questions until you read Raymond’s response because I don’t want to prejudice your impressions.

Here is my comment. The only thing you really need to know before reading Raymond’s response is that it was he who used the phrase “complete control” in the parent post.

Here is Raymond’s response.

The parent post is here if you want to read it.

Now, here are my questions:

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Lying about Apple, especially the iPhone, seems to be a fad these days.

The usually mostly reliable Register seems to be caught up in some kind of anti-Apple hysteria lately. Today, they breathlessly report:

The leading computer company plans to build a system that will sense when people are trying to video live events — and turn off their cameras.[emp added]

Small problem, nothing in the articles supports that breathless assertion. It is, quite simply, a lie and journalistic fraud.

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Noted internet alcoholic Stephen Green takes the pseudo-intellectual Alan Siegel to the woodshed for Siegel’s pompous and error filled critique of the John Hughes ’80s classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Here’s my take:

Siegel is simply revealing his own egocentrism in his review. In the guise of lambasting Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, he is really shouting, “This movie isn’t about me! It doesn’t make people think about me and how I should be more important!”

Siegel wants people to care more about the political issues Siegel is publicly identified with and by extension to make Siegel more important. Virtually all leftist criticism of art comes down to this dynamic. They like art about themselves and art that makes them feel more important. It’s kind of disturbing how deeply the modern American Left has absorbed the world view of the fascist and communist wherein politics was the only valid purpose of art.

I think Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a great movie because it explores universal human themes.

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Sorry I haven’t been posting much recently but the truth is that the Cartoon Network has been showing reruns of old classic Warner Brother’s cartoons, so I’ve been preoccupied with…uhmmm… cultural research.

Okay, I haven’t. Truth is that I’m trying to boot strap a little software company and that means coding 12 hours a day. So, no blogging or much of anything else save a little family time. I haven’t even been listening to the news or reading Instapundit. When I really have to concentrate, I shutout the news and blog reading because if I hear something that piques my interest I have a terrible urge to write about it and I don’t want the internal distraction of the urge.

However, the Cartoon Network has been showing old Loony Toon cartoons and I have been watching those during my regrettable “brain off” periods.

I really enjoy those old cartoons far more I think than a person of my theoretical maturity should. They evoke for me not childhood but an almost tangible cultural history. They are redolent with the rich undertones of the era’s popular culture. By their very nature as mere schematics, their creators perforce had to anchor the stories, gags and iconography on concepts widely understood by the audiences of the time. As such, they capture the feel of their times in way that other art forms just can’t quite convey.

Ah, who am I kidding? I’m just a sucker for pre-political correctness cartoons. Give me the old stuff with firearms, explosives, falling anvils, cross-dressing and moonshine!

David Foster’s post on the cost to industry of EPA overreach gave me an idea of how to pit one group of Leftists against another group of Leftists.

The upper-class, white, environmentalist Leftists might not care if Shell lost 4 billion (with a b) dollars when forced to shelve their exploration plans in Alaska but I wonder if, say, an African-American redistributionist Leftist struggling to find funding for urban social-welfare programs might care about all the Federal tax revenues lost when Shell is forced by the environmentalist to forego the profits they would have made pumping the oil.

If Shell was going to spend $4 billion in development, then they planned to make at least twice that in profits. With the 35% US corporate tax rate, the means that the Federal government alone just lost $1.5 billion in tax revenues. That’s a bit simplistic of a calculation but nevertheless once you take into account the loss of income and social security taxes from the jobs that won’t be created, the EPA’s actions just cost the government a lot of tax revenues.
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An anonymous reader of Instapundit, in writing about the Left and Libya says:

I’ve really been enjoying your take on things since the bombing in Libya started this weekend, even more than I normally do. For eight long years, well-meaning people on the right have been accused of all manner of hate, dishonesty, stupidity, and wickedness, from a bunch of people who believe their own neighbors are the primary cause of suffering in the world.[emp added]

That is Leftism in a nutshell. Leftism is nothing but a continuously shifting series of excuses for why Leftist should have the right to use the violence-based coercive power of the state to dominate and control their own neighbors. For the Leftists there are no true external enemies, every problem in the world is ultimately caused or controlled by someone within our own society. For Leftists, there is only the near enemy, the people they see everyday.

No where is that more clear than in foreign policy. Read the rest of this entry »

Gaddafi is relying on foreign mercenaries to serve as his security troops just like Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu relied on hired Palestinians. This is a sure sign that his regime has little to no internal support.

My spouse and I were explaining this to our son who asked, “So, since they’re mercenaries, couldn’t we just outbid Gaddafi?”

We laughed at the idea at first but then stopped to think. Back in the day when mercenaries were far more common, they could sometimes be bought off especially if it looked like their current employer would never be able to pay up. The basic economics of a mercenary life has not changed so maybe Gaddafi’s mercenaries would be just as susceptible to financial inducements as their historical predecessors.

Gaddafi supposedly has a lot of money to pay his mercs with but I think it safe to say we have more and a much better track record of paying off.

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The Wallstreet Journal on the Fed’s new media campaign to spin its inflationary policies:

The former Goldman Sachs chief economist gave a speech explaining the economy’s progress and the Fed’s successes, but come question time the main thing the crowd wanted to know was why they’re paying so much more for food and gas. Keep in mind the Fed doesn’t think food and gas prices matter to its policy calculations because they aren’t part of “core” inflation.
 
So Mr. Dudley tried to explain that other prices are falling. “Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful,” he said. “You have to look at the prices of all things.”

Here’s the thing: The iPad was always going to provide more bang for the buck regardless of what the Fed did or didn’t do. The cost drop for the iPad is due to the rapid technological change in the computer field. Moreover, without the Fed destroying the value of the money in people’s pockets, the cost to performance ratio change for the iPad would have been even more dramatic.

How can the Fed claim they aren’t causing problems by pointing to a factor over which they have no influence. Shouldn’t we hold the Fed accountable for the factors they do influence?

Improving technology automatically improves the standard of living but that has nothing to do with inflation. Yes, it’s great that you can buy a much more powerful iPad2 for the same price as an iPad1 but it’s not so great if you can’t afford even the price of an iPad1 now because your food and gas prices have increased to absorb all the excess income you had budgeted to get a new iPad!

Inflation is the most dangerous of all financial strategies. It destroys real wealth and utterly disrupts the price mechanisms that drives the entire economy. To the extent it works, it does so by transferring vast amounts of wealth from ordinary people to those who get the inflated currency first. In this case, it is the large banks that the Fed are trying to re-inflate after the housing bust sucked all the capital out of them.

Even if is necessary, and I’m not saying it is, the Fed should have at least have the good grace to explain things straight to us instead of trying to convince us that our rapidly decreasing purchasing power is nothing to worry about. Inflation is just a form of taxation. They are taking money from us to prop up our financial institution. That taking will leave us all with a lower standard of living than we would have had otherwise. They should be honest about that.

Just because Steve Jobs is very good at his job doesn’t mean the Fed doesn’t suck at theirs.

Growing up on the farm, I got more than my fair share of mouthfuls of gasoline, diesel, stock tank water and other liquids-I-don’t-like-to-think-about, all while sucking on a hose trying to start a siphon.

That is why I was pleased when I stumbled on an innovative siphon hose while web surfing for parts for my death ray.

The hose has a little one-way valve mechanism in one end. When you put that in the liquid you wish to siphon and jiggle it up and down, the one-way valve functions like a pump and lifts the liquid up the hose until it hits the tipping point that establishes the siphon and the liquid flows down hill as nature intended.

It’s great! No more sucking, wheezing, gagging and thinking, “Wait, that wasn’t diesel. What the hell did I just swallow?”

So, without further ado: The Super Jiggler Siphon Hose.