Thursday, January 24, 2008
Holy Hell, This Is Funny...
And it rings of a great deal of truth.
It's so easy to forget how things used to be.
The lost 1994 pilot episode of 24
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Posted By: geekWithA.45  
So, if socialism is supposed to be such a great system...
Then how come they systematically can't seem to keep people fed?
Isn't making food available to everyone a fundamental essential of any society? Isn't it one that we solved completely, thoroughly, and utterly like 100 years ago?
Just sayin, is all.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
My Take on Fred...
Well, my initial reaction was to vote for HildeBeeste or Chuthulhu, or whoever would hasten the apocalypse, based on the theory that if the end of the Republic is to happen in my lifetime, I'd hate for it to arrive when I'm too old to enjoy it properly.
It's not often I get into a scorched earth frame of mind, but it does happen, once in a blue. Usually, it shakes off after an hour of contemplation.
There are several dark moods that I've learned are signs of the need to look deeper.
For example, whenever I find myself doing something in the mode of passive aggression, which is the offensive mode of children and people in weak positions, I have to ask myself why I am restraining my Inner Klingon and forsaking the joys of open aggression. When I look deeper into the matter, I usually find that my subconscious is trying to illuminate some overlooked vulnerability or chink in my armor, and is advising me to attend to the matter before going on the offensive.
Alas, sigh, business before pleasure!
Similarly, I find that visions of scorched earth are usually signs that I have some issue with the World itself.
There's a lot of anger out there being leveled in Fred's direction, and I'm sure some small portion of it is earned.
I think that the bulk of the anger is actually about something else.
Whether you can articulate it or nor, anyone whose had any significant work experience has experienced the phenomena that there are fundamentally two sets of skills that count in the workplace. The first are those skills that are about making shit happen and getting things done, that is, the substantive skill in the relevant discipline. The other set is those that are related to obtaining advancement.
They are two completely separate, unrelated skill sets.
In a perfect, just world, the philosopher-kings of benevolent management implement a meritocracy that rewards the best ideas, dilligence, hard work, and results, in a context of cooperation and rational self-interest.
In our world, however, that's not always the case. Whether the hard work that actually makes shit happen and keeps the company running is recognized and rewarded is more often entirely up to other factors entirely.
The cultivation, fostering, and management of these other factors that lead to advancement is an entirely separate skill set.
As we've all observed, it's entirely possible for people to advance on a minimum of competence, and a maximum of that advancement skill set. It's also all too common a story for the competent folks who keep the fire burning and the flags flying to be overlooked.
In my younger, less judicious days, I'd considered it a question of flash vs substance, but I can see that it's actually a bit deeper than that.
This phenomena is in the same family with, but not quite exactly the thing that in my view went on with Fred.
My take on the thing is that Fred was the man with the right substantial ideas, but without a campaign or infrastructure to back them up and make them happen.
Sure, he tried to build a campaign, but he was starting from a position of overwhelming deficit, attempting to marshal resources from out of a depleted and picked over field, and simply could not compete with people who had starting laying out their infrastructure groundwork YEARS ago.
The case of Fred illustrates for us, in living color, just exactly how far superior ideas go in the 21st century: They’re not worth much without an infrastructure to back them up.
In fact, as much as we want to believe otherwise, the man with the inferior ideas and superior infrastructure wins, and this pisses us off, it supremely offends our sensibilities.
In fact, that inferior, even outright demonstrably wrong ideas should prevail simply because they have infrastructure around them frightens and offends us to the very core.
Our anger is much less with Fred, and much more with this vulnerability, this whisper of the Republic's possible mortality.
A contest of grand ideas is invigorating and ennobling. A contest of infrastructures is ... pedestrian. So... banal.
What of Liberty's infrastructure?
Failures of this magnitude also forces us to confront the other elephant in the room.
Are we not Liberty's primary infrastructure, ourselves?
Are our people themselves broken? Have we become a degenerate people, unable to sustain a political thought more complex than "what should the government give us for free?" on a widespread basis, without having it predigested and broken down to spoon fed nursery rhymes?
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
2+2=4
Quote: {emphasis mine}
-----------------
BE IT ENACTED by the Senate and General Assembly of the State 5
of New Jersey:
1. (New section) The State of New Jersey hereby enacts into
law and enters into the “Agreement Among the States to Elect the
President by National Popular Vote” as set forth in this section, and
substantially as follows:
-----------------
From NJ's new Electoral College law. (pdf), brought to my attention by the Barking Moonbat Early Warning System *.
and
Quote:
----------------
No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, ...
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US Constitution, Article I, section 10, brought to my attention by Reader Bill.
Busted.
*BMEWS also get my nomination for best post title of 2008 with "Great, now I’m disenfranchised too. Virginia is for lovers, New Jersey is for BRAIN DEAD STUPID ASSHOLES".
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Math vs Tyranny...
One of the dangers of being any sort of public writer/speaker is that you must take certain things as writ, which is to say that you just have to take for granted that you and your audience share a certain amount of values and background material.
For example, below, I commit the sin of presuming that people understand how and why our curious electoral and voting system is a bulwark against tyranny, and that they agree that this is a good thing.
Inevitably, when one discovers that not to be the case, you can either spend a lot of time retroactively explaining, or you can just be grouchy about the whole thing.
Fortunately, many hands make light work, and Reader Steve brings to my attention this article, Math against Tyranny, which explains the thing in understandable detail.
As Steve paraphrases,
Quote:
------------------
The basic premise is that it's better than direct election for the same reason that the world series is not decided by the total runs scored during the series. The winning team has to win the most games - the hard ones as well as the easy ones.
It's a fire stop - it stops the dead people in Chicago from determing the outcome for the whole country. He's able to show, mathematically, that the individual voter has a higher degree of representation for all elections - not just the close ones.
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I'm not going to pick quotes from the article itself, y'all are just going to have to go read it, because whatever you think of the electoral college and our first-through-the-post, winner takes all system one way or the other, your opinion on the matter is simply uninformed until you understand this material.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Converting a Republic to A Mere Majoritarian Exercise...
I want everyone to take a good, long look at this picture:
Our voting system was specifically designed to create a Republic, not an exercise in mere majoritarianism, aka Democracy, in part to prevent the red dots on this map, alternately known as "areas of population density" or "cities" from dictating terms to the rest of the country, which they could easily do, as something like 69% of the population live in urban areas > 50k in population.
There is a concerted effort (dead link: http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/) to dismantle the mechanisms of our Republic, and it is making headway.
Naturally, NJ is leading the charge.
Basically, the gist of the thing is that the Electoral votes of NJ will be cast not for whoever the voters of NJ decided, but whoever wins the national popular vote.
My take on it is somewhat complex.
On the one hand, strictly speaking, the Constitution leaves to the states to determine how they shall to cast their electoral votes. The president is elected by the STATES, not the people. It is a state power.
Quote:
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Article. II.
Section. 1.
The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress...
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Therefore, it is actually constitutional for a state to decide that it will entirely disregard its voters, and throw away cast its electoral vote based on some other means of deciding, be it a national popular vote, the entrails of a dove, the whim of the state legislature, or a random process like dice throwing.
The fact is, though, that until MD/NJ, all states chose to have their electoral votes cast in accordance with the will of that state's voters. Usually, the method that the state chose was to award all of the states electoral votes to the overall state winner (one state splits itself into two districts, rather than one), but it's always been a possibility for a state to proportion its electoral votes according to the state's popular vote.
In this case, however, NJ and MD have decided not only to disenfranchise their voters, but to also disenfranchise their state, rendering their votes entirely up to the national popularity contest, no matter what the outcome.
Ironically, through an act of Orwell-speak, this is characterized as "empower(ing) states as well as individual voters".
By their fruits, you shall know them
"By their fruits, you shall know them". "Follow the money." "Who benefits?"
These statements all point to the same method for determining the hidden motives for a proposition.
In this case, we don't need hidden motives, and we frankly needn't be concerned with whether the intention are honorable or not.
What we need to be concerned with is what the effect of the change will be.
The effect of this initiative will be to ensure that power is not distributed and shared. The result of this initiative is to ensure that power is concentrated in the cities.
Study this, if you haven't seen it in while:
It is naive to believe that the cities are anything other than deeply clenched in the grip of machine politics.
They are Blue citadels and bastions of power, pure and simple, and the ultimate effect of this proposal is that it exploits the "states making side deals" blind spot in our constitution to implement a bald power grab on the part of the cities.
Having studied history carefully, I've got to say that this is the sort of thing that future historians may well file under chapters with grim titles.
IMPORTANT UPDATE!
Please scroll to the "Math vs Tyranny" post, above, for an important update.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Brilliant Man Tells His Government To Take a Hike.
Summoned to a kangaroo court interogation in Canada for publishing the Mohamed cartoons
Ezra Levant rips the Canadian "human rights commission" a new one.
Quote:
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Today at 2 p.m. I will appear before an Alberta "human rights officer" for an interrogation. I am being interrogated for the political crime of publishing the Danish cartoons in the Western Standard nearly two years ago.
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Seriously: go to the man's blog and read his thoughts and reactions. Above all, watch all the videos. They're 4-10 minutes each. Watch a master unload on his government with both barrels. It's time well spent.
That is what a free man looks like.
$DEITY knows we need more like him.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Friday, January 11, 2008
Help Chris and Melody Save Their Kids From a Gun Bigot
UPDATE!
The goal has been reached!
Chris and Melody's gratitude and update here.
The long story is here
The short story:
---------------------
Cliff Notes: Mel’s ex-husband has been trying to get custody of the kids for years. Every argument he’s made has been tossed out on its ass. Now he’s appealed to the 9th Circuit in SanFran, asking for the case to be transferred to CANADA. The argument he’s using is that Chris and Mel have an “unsafe environment” for the kids because of their guns.
Needless to say, the GFW argument has failed in AZ, but in Canada?
Chris and Mel need about $30K in the next couple of weeks to pay their lawyer to go to SF and argue their case.
Please help them.
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{Cliff's notes cribbed from Kim duToit}
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
A practical hydrogen-fueled vehicle?by Egregious Charles
If hydrogen-fueled vehicles are ever going to become practical, I think the best first candidate is large trains. Hydrogen takes lots of energy to produce, so it's not so much an energy source as a energy storage medium. Either you produce it by converting natural gas, which seems kind of pointless, or by electrolysis of water, which takes as much electricity as you could theoretically get out of the hydrogen in a magical 100% efficient system later. As an enegy storage medium it has its advantages.
Locomotives have been hybrid vehicles for decades. They are diesel-electric serial hybrids: a diesel engine turns a generator that makes electricity that powers electric motors to turn the wheels. A heavy but pretty efficient system; electric motors have fantastic low-speed torque, so starting a heavy train isn't a problem.
The most efficient system we've got to turn heat into power is the steam turbine, but it has a number of limitations: it has little torque at low speeds, and it is only really efficient within a narrow speed range (nearly maximum speed). They are light compared to a piston engine, but require a heavy boiler so weight is a problem.
Gas turbines, where combustion gases produced by burning jet fuel or gasoline are fed directly into the turbines, have been tried in trains. They are very light for the power produced, so they're used in military helicopters. Like a steam turbine, they are inefficient except at maximum speed. They also have short lifespans and require exotic construction due to the very hot, dirty gas (smoke) they consume.
What I'd like to see is a boilerless steam system: you burn hydrogen with air producing superhot but clean steam (mixed with leftover air), inject some water to produce a larger volume of cooler steam, and use that to drive a steam turbine very much like a gas turbine. If the gas is clean and not too hot, like power plant steam, the turbine design is a problem solved long ago. The turbine powers the generator, the generator charges batteries and powers electric motors, and the motors drive the train.
Adding the batteries allows the boilerless steam turbine to run only at its most efficient maximum speed and shut down the rest of the time. (Which isn't really possible with boilers because they take a long time to heat).
Hydrogen distribution to fuel stations next to train tracks isn't the problem it is for passenger cars. The hydrogen could perhaps be produced by electrolysis at trackside plants a few miles from nuclear or other non-fossil-fuel plants, and trains would be an obvious choice to transfer the hydrogen to other trackside storage stations. Trains have relatively few accidents so the explosive propensities of hydrogen are much less of a problem than for cars.
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Posted By: EgregiousCharles
Saturday, January 05, 2008
D.C's Brief for Heller...
Is Here.(pdf)
I'm up to my butt in alligators, so I won't get a chance to read it for myself for a while.
An analysis is here.
Summary:
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"We ain't got shit your honors, but here goes."
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{h/t: David Hardy}
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Friday, January 04, 2008
I knew it'd be New Jersey, before I even clicked the link...
Frequent Readers will be astonished at the sheer amount of this sort of thing that goes on, and that it invariably starts in Jersey.
High school institutes mandatory Breathalyzer tests...
Quote:
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"I'm all for it because if your child isn't doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide," parent Barbara Fede said.
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Reaction:
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"I'm sorry. You disgust me."
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More Quote:
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Pequannock school officials say they avoided running into any privacy issues by making students sign a contract which states they must submit to a Breathalyzer if they want to attend a school social event.
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More Reaction:
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Sorry, contracts made under duress are null void.
Furthermore, minors are incompetent to contract, also rendering said "contract" null and void.
Therefore, the privacy issues still exist in their full glory, despite the attempt to swindle the kids.
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Yes, I'm well aware that this sort of thing is legal, and that the 4th amendment has been somewhat curtailed when it comes to school students under certain circumstances. The possibility of doing things like this has preserved against judicious use in times and places of need.
However, certain cultural values, which clearly no longer exist in New Jersey, served to restrain people from implementing this sort of thing as the normative routine, because it's simply not compatible with normal American values.
Schools teach kids a lot. The lesson here is plain: line up in silence, and prepare to submit to inspection!
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Bill Whittle's Been A Postin'...
Over @ Eject3.
This is good.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Happy New Year, Gang!
Well, we're cetainly in for an interesting ride, this year.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
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