Jan 12 2010

Everybody and every group and every ideology is equal in everything…. NOT

Category: left,politics,right — harmonicminer @ 9:12 am

In a recent discussion here, I tried to illustrate that saying about a negative behavior that “everybody does it” is generally misleading, unless some numbers are put to the observation. Yes, some groups have some bad apples. But some groups have a lot more than others. Some ideologies have had unfortunate consequences… but some have had far worse consequences.

Especially perverse is the notion that both sides have the same numbers of people with equally good motivations, so that we must “respect” all those on the other side as if they really want the same things we do, and have the same values we do.  So in a fit of undoubtedly childish sarcasm, I illustrated the absurdity of the notion that “everybody does it” and “everybody really means well” this way:

There is no difference in behavior between the right and the left. Both sides are equally respectful (or disrespectful) of the other. Both sides are equally right. Both sides are equally wrong. Both sides have the same tendency to speak hatefully of the other. Both sides have the same number of radicals. Both sides care equally about everybody and everything. Both sides have the same number of people who are committed to doing the moral thing. Both sides have the same numbers of people who are committed to their perspectives for purely selfish reasons. Both sides lie exactly the same amount. Both sides celebrate equally the personal misfortunes of the other.

Everyone is just as equal in everything as it is possible to be. We’re all just the same. No one is any more correct than anyone else. There are no absolutes, no one knows any more than anyone else, and everything is up for reconsideration at any time.

Furthermore, the communists in the Soviet Union were no worse and no better than any other political party or entity in any other nation, because everyone is basically the same, and there are no real moral differences between people who believe different things honestly.

In fact, the Chinese Communist Maoists were no worse than the Whigs…. just different. Who is to say whose values are better than whose? What gives anyone the right to say that one side’s values and policies are better than the other’s?

After all, good Christians were in favor of slavery, and quoted scripture to support it.

So nobody really knows anything with any certainty. In fact, stating one’s opinion too strongly is probably a sign of intellectual immaturity and possibly colonial intentions.

Can’t we all just get along?

(my tongue is starting to hurt, and I will now remove it before it becomes permanently bonded to the inside of my cheek)

Manifestly, everyone and every group and every ideology is NOT the same in negative consequences, negative motivations, and just plain evil.  I believe that it is far more often the Left that makes the claim of a false equality, especially by saying “the Right does it too” when some really obvious transgression is pointed out regarding the Left.

Very simply, I have the impression that the Left is rarely embarrassed, or will admit being embarrassed, by anything that anyone on the Left says or does. On the other hand, when someone on the Right goes over the line, they are likely to be chastised FROM the Right.   For example, very many on the Right were very critical of the overspending, pork barreling, and ear marking of the Republican congress before 2007.  So were many on the Left.  But the Democrat congress has topped Republican excesses by at least an order of magnitude…  and the Left is mostly silent about it.

The difference is telling.

Jan 11 2010

The end. The very end. Fine.

Category: technology — harmonicminer @ 10:11 am

I hope this wasn’t one of the Transformers.

Jan 09 2010

I Can’t Help But Wonder

Category: appeasement,Bush,government,Obama — amuzikman @ 8:45 am

The Financial Times on-line has an article entitled “America is Losing the Free World”

The last paragraph of the article reads:

Mr Obama is seen as a huge improvement on George W. Bush, but he is still an American president. As emerging global powers and developing nations, Brazil, India, South Africa and Turkey may often feel they have more in common with a rising China than with the democratic US.

After reading this article I note the last paragraph would seem to be oxymoronic.  If Obama is “seen as a huge “improvement” then why the apparent worse-than-ever relations between us and these other democracies?  To some the answer will be America’s tyrannical and oppressive legacy of strong-arming their allies in an attitude of oft-repeated international arrogance.  To others it will be yet another chance to point a finger at George W. Bush and his “cowboy diplomacy”.  But is it even remotely possible that Obama himself has something to do with this?  Is there a shred of possibility that our current president is not seen as someone to be taken seriously?  Could it be that his international Apologize-For-America tour, along with his continual actions of appeasement towards terror-sponsoring regimes, his unwillingness to declare victory as our goal against Islamofacism, and his frequent rebukes and snubbing of our allies has created a perception that this president is weak and lacking in resolve?

If Obama is such an improvement, then why are those who should be our strong allies turning instead more than ever to form alliances elsewhere?

Jan 08 2010

Tougher on journalists than possible terrorists

Category: freedom,government,justice,liberty — harmonicminer @ 9:55 am

Armed TSA Agents Threaten Travel Journalist

At 7:00 p.m. on December 29, armed TSA agents banged on the door of photojournalist and KLM Airlines blogger Steven Frischling’s Connecticut home. “They threatened me with a criminal search warrant and suggested they’d call up my clients and say I was a security risk if I didn’t turn over my computer to them. They said ‘we could make this difficult for you,'” Frischling told me in a telephone interview the following afternoon. By then, TSA had removed Frischling’s computer from his home, made a copy of his hard drive, and returned the computer to him.

The federal agents, dispatched form the Transportation Security Administration’s Office of Inspection, had wanted Frischling, a respected travel journalist, to name names. They wanted Frischling to tell them who had given him “TSA Security Directive SD-1544-09-06,” which Frischling and another blogger had posted online three days earlier.

“It was a double-edged sword for me because I did not know who sent me the document. And it was absurd because that document had been seen by approximately 10,000 airline personnel around the world, including personnel in Islamabad, Riyadh, and Nigeria, so the idea that it was somehow in their control” was false, Frischling said.

Frischling explained that he posted the document because he wanted people to be able to read it and form their own opinions and ideas about it. The document was not marked “classified,” and it had already apparently been posted on some airline websites. The email had been sent to him anonymously from someone with a gmail address. TSA believed it was one of their own and wanted to know who, exactly.

For Frischling, thinking beyond the immediate safety of his three children, alone with him in the house, was difficult. His wife works at night and was already gone.

“I stood talking to the agents with my three-year-old in my arms,” Frischling told me.

While the agents were intimidating him, he feared if he were to be arrested then his children would be left without a parent present. He telephoned an attorney, who suggested he cooperate with TSA since there was no federal shield law to protect him in matters deemed national security threats. Besides, the agents “made it clear that if I said ‘no’ to letting them have my hard drive, they were going to come back with a search warrant,” Frischling explained.

If this report does not make you lividly angry, if it does not provoke a certain amount of adrenalin, if it does not leave you wanting take specific action against government goons who abuse their authority, you are already a sheep, I’m afraid.

And the wolves have your number.

We are individually and corporately responsible to fight this sort of thing.

The issue almost doesn’t matter that led the federal thugs to this man’s door.  They should have gotten a warrant first, or stayed in their office.  This kind of intimidation is not appropriate in any case except perhaps with known criminals or terrorists.  It certainly isn’t appropriate for private citizens with no criminal background or intent, and is especially egregious when used to intimidate journalists.

I know who the criminals are in this story.  Of course, if this had been done in the Bush administration, perhaps under color of the Patriot Act, the media would have been all over it.

Hint: people who make threats to intimidate the innocent ARE the bad guys.

Jan 07 2010

Forcing Virginia to recognize “gay marriage” in Vermont?

Category: judges,justice,left,marriage,religion,society,theology — harmonicminer @ 9:22 am

Christian Mother Fails to Transfer Daughter to Former Lesbian Partner by Deadline

A Christian woman in Virginia who was ordered to turn over her daughter to her former lesbian partner in Vermont did not do so by the set deadline, a lawyer for the second woman reported.Lisa Miller had been ordered by a judge in Vermont to turn over her daughter, Isabella, to Janet Jenkins by 1 p.m. Friday, but has not shown up, Sarah Star, Jenkins’s lawyer, told the New York Times.

Officer Tawny Wright, a Fairfax County police spokeswoman, meanwhile, said the Jenkins family had called the police and that a detective is investigating.

For the time being, the case remains a civil matter, Wright added.

Last week, Vermont Family Court Judge William Cohen, who awarded custody of Isabella to Jenkins on Nov. 20, noted that Miller appeared to have “disappeared with the minor child” and ceased communication with her attorneys.

For the past five years, Miller and Jenkins have been engaged in a custody battle over Isabella, who was conceived when the two women were living together in Virginia. Miller, a born-again Christian, had renounced her homosexuality just a few years after entering into a civil union with Jenkins in Vermont in 2000. Jenkins, on the other hand, is today still an active lesbian and has expressed disapproval in raising Isabella in a Christian home.

More at the link.

It’s about the welfare of the child, which I think is very clear in this case.

Jan 06 2010

The opposite of “little white lies”

Category: global warming,government,Group-think — harmonicminer @ 9:30 am

It Didn’t Start With “Climategate”

The whistleblower at the University of East Anglia who leaked emails and other documents that reveal the fraud that is being perpetrated by the world’s leading global warming alarmists did us all a great service. But it is important to realize that the deception didn’t just begin: rather, the global warming hysteria movement has been shot through with fraud from the start.

So begins a thorough accounting of the deception that has been integral to the eco-panic movement’s rush to judgment on global warming’s presumed, proximate cause, human use of fossil fuels.

The central point is that Leftist politics triumphed over science.  Given that governments have funded “global warming research” at a level an entire order of magnitude greater than that provided by private industry to “disprove it,” the motivations of some of the scientists are pretty obvious.  Nothing succeeds like government research grants.

The motivations of the statists and socialists are pretty obvious, too.  Anything that gives them more power via more intrusive government is a clear plus in their corrupted worldviews.

Sadly, these two groups, co-opted scientists and professional statists, have convinced large numbers of well-meaning people (and possibly some scientists who have mistakenly trusted the work of others) that global warming is largely caused by human activity, and that we can do something about it with enough determination.  The solutions they prescribe would wreck national economies, and cause far more human suffering than even Al Gore’s dystopian fantasies would entertain.

The irony is that lies told in the service of Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” are just fine in the minds of the eco-panic crowd.  After all, what’s a little white lie in the face of certain disaster if we don’t take over the world’s economy right NOW?

Thankfully, more and more people are waking up to the lies.   The real “inconvenient truth” is just how many lies are involved in the global warming movement.

You can’t fool all the people, all the time.

The only remaining question is whether enough public pressure can be brought to bear in time to prevent true economic disaster in the service of environmental non-crisis.

50 million people have died in the last decades because the world stopped using DDT to control malaria carrying mosquitoes, under pressure from a similar “environmental movement.”   Would the use of DDT have killed even 1% of that number?  And just think, now the eco-pagans are very proud that they hand out mosquito nets.  It’s like people who sprinkle around broken glass on the beach being oh-so-proud that they hand out band-aids to injured sun-worshipers.

How many people will we starve to keep the temperature down by half a degree…  if we even can?  How many of the world’s poor must languish in relatively undeveloped nations as the “first world” tries to convince the world’s governments to restrict economic development?  And will we salve our consciences by offering them a dried tofu cracker or two as we prevent them from growing enough food to actually stay alive?

Jan 05 2010

Leftist Schadenfreude

Category: left — harmonicminer @ 9:46 am

Showing the true nature of the condition of their souls, Leftist Blogs Take Glee in Pope Attack

It was only minutes after Pope Benedict XVI was violently attacked on Christmas Eve by a woman described by authorities as mentally deranged, but leftist blogs lit up with joy over the assault.

The Daily Kos’s “Late Afternoon/Early Evening Open Thread,” for example, featured this posting at 8:10 PM Eastern Time: “Having just about enough of this male dominance bull—t, one bold Italian woman ran up and knocked down the Pope and a Cardinal!”

The woman, Susanna Maiolo, 25, was actually Swiss-Italian, and while the Pontiff himself came out of the episode unhurt and able to complete his celebration of Midnight Mass, 87-year-old French Cardinal Roger Etchegaray was left with broken bones requiring hip replacement surgery.

The comments that soon appeared on blogs known to be critical of the social teachings of the Catholic Church were so harsh that even fellow bloggers of similar ideological bent were outraged.

In a Dec. 26 a Daily Kos article entitled “Anti-Catholicism,” a “former Republican” Catholic woman and “forester/biologist” from the Deep South wrote, “I logged onto HuffingtonPost.com and read about the Pope getting knocked over by a mentally disturbed woman.

While several people pointed out the Pope’s age and how this could have easily resulted in a broken hip, many more rejoiced in the event.” One blogger’s “attack on Catholicism and Catholics was met with near universal approval within the HuffingtonPost community.”

She added, “I have read numerous, nearly identical comments and posts at Daily Kos.”

A number of HuffPost bloggers were also amazed at the venom of some of the responses, like one woman who observed, “This incident with the Pope has brought lots of Christmas cheer to the HP community. Wow.”

No doubt someone will say that “the right does it too.”

I invite those wishing to make such an assertion to provide examples. It will take a LOT of them just to “balance” this single incident.

Jan 04 2010

Getting radicalized

Category: Islam,jihad — harmonicminer @ 9:15 am

The Christmas Day Bomber invited a prominent ‘jihad’ cleric to address British students

The Christmas Day airline bomber invited a radical cleric who has advocated dying while ‘fighting jihad’ to address British students.

While president of the Islamic Society at University College London, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab helped arrange for Abdur Raheem Green to speak.

The cleric, who converted to Islam from Roman Catholicism, has written that conflict between Islam and the West is ‘ordered in the Koran’, and that Muslims and Westerners ‘ cannot live peaceably together’.

He has also claimed: ‘Dying while fighting jihad is one of the surest ways to paradise and Allah’s good pleasure’.

In 2005, shortly before Abdulmutallab arranged for him to address UCL, Green was barred from entering Australia after opposition leader Kim Beazley accused him of ‘spreading hate’.

The revelation adds weight to the belief that Abdulmutallab was radicalised during his time studying in London, where he read mechanical engineering and business at UCL between 2005 and 2008.

It is simply not supportable that jihad is a response to poverty and oppression, or the rest of the world’s poor would be doing what upper-middle class and wealthy young radicalized Muslims are doing… killing the innocent for Allah, or some other god.

But it doesn’t happen, does it?

The problem is 7th-century Islam in the 21st century.  Of course, 7th-century Islam was a problem all along.

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Jan 03 2010

the Impossible dream?

Category: science,Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 9:43 am

For 50 years we’ve been Waiting for ET to phone us.

West Virginia. It is 6 am on an April morning in 1960 and Frank Drake is freezing cold. He peers up towards the focal point of the radio telescope. He mounts a flimsy ladder to the top and climbs into a space about the size of a garbage can. For the next 45 minutes, he tunes the receiver inside, which feels like starting an old car. He climbs back down and begins to listen.

Drake and colleagues were conducting a seminal experiment: the first modern search for extraterrestrial life. For four months, the researchers used the Tatel Telescope in Green Bank to listen for any intelligent signals from the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani that might be hidden on the same wavelength as radiation emitted naturally by hydrogen. Drake named the effort Project Ozma after the princess in the 0z books by Frank Baum, who wrote that he used a radio to learn of events there.

April 2010 will mark the 50th anniversary of the start of Project Ozma, and those involved in the search for extraterrestrial life, or SETI, will be raising a glass. Not only did the experiment inspire countless people to continue the search, it brought alien-hunting into the mainstream and arguably seeded the science of astrobiology.

Other famous searchers for things that were never found:

Albert Einstein and Unified Field Theory.

Don Quixote and defeatable windmills

Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth

Isaac Newton and a way to turn lead into gold

AI researchers and actual machine intelligence

Modern physics and cold fusion

You get the idea.  Some things just SOUND plausible, even likely.  The argument that “the universe is just so big that there has to be intelligent life out there” is like that.  It just instinctively sounds right.

That doesn’t make it right.

And even if they are there, the aliens are almost certainly far, far ahead of us, so far that we wouldn’t recognize one of their artifacts or communications methods if we saw it.  Or, they are so far behind us that they’re still working on inventing the bow and arrow, or controlling fire.  The odds of intelligent aliens in a detectable state of technological development anywhere near us (i.e., in detectable range) are so small as to be risible.

The notion that there is a “science of astrobiology” is especially humorous.  How can there be a science of something with no data?  Without a single example of its presumed subject?  Medieval alchemists were closer to turning lead into gold.  At least that turned out to be possible, albeit very difficult, using nuclear transmutation.  So I suppose we could be said to have a science of alchemy now, though it is nothing like what the ancients thought it would be.

We know more about mental telepathy in human beings than we know about alien life.  See what reaction you get from most scientists when you discuss the “science of telepathy.”

Since we have no useful theory about how terrestrial life began, we have no useful theory about whether there is or can be alien life, other than a philosophical commitment to “non-exceptionalism” regarding Earth-life.  That may or may not be true….  but philosophy is not science, and a priori commitments are not data.

The only data that “astrobiology” provides are observations about what conditions would make terrestrial-style life impossible.  While that is an exceedingly long list, it doesn’t automatically follow that there is extra-terrestrial life anywhere that terrestrial life could survive.  The funniest part, to me, though “astrobiologists” don’t get the joke, is that they develop “arguments from plausibility,” not data, exactly as they accuse believers in Intelligent Design of doing, whose perspectives they mostly despise.  Somehow, theories of essentially infinite numbers of universes are still considered science, although they aren’t really testable, either.  It’s very simple, of course; any theory is “scientific” if it doesn’t involve God the Creator, regardless of how many ridiculous assertions and intellectual back-flips it contains, or how many just-so stories upon which it depends.

Astrobiology could be seen as a sort of “science of the gaps,” except that that there aren’t any gaps for it to breach.   There isn’t anything for it to explain, yet, and there may never be.  So rather than “science of the gaps,” it is the science of hope, rather like theories of the multi-verse.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’ll all for funding more SETI, though I’m not acquiescent about more active approaches.  ET may not be nice, if he/she/it is there at all.

But I don’t expect much to be found.

Jan 02 2010

Putting the “New” in New Year!

Category: capitalism,Congress,global warming,government,healthcare,legislation,Obama,taxes — amuzikman @ 1:37 am

John Updike once said, “Americans have been conditioned to respect newness whatever it costs them”.  I think he’s right – after all, newness is a part of our heritage.  For one, we live in what was referred to by Christopher Columbus as “The New World”  We’ve got several states and cities given names that are a combination of the word  “new” with names brought by the pilgrims  from the “Old World”.  New Jersey, New Hampshire, and New York are on the “new” list of states.  The cities list includes New Orleans, New Haven and New Brunswick.  Yes we do seem to be attracted to all things new.

Our music is saturated with references to newness.  We all remember the big Disney hit, A Whole New World.  And can you imagine even for a minute that James Brown would have sung, Poppa’s Got A Slightly Used Bag?  You Make Me Feel Brand New, Brand New Day, New Kid On The Block….the list goes on and on.  In fact there is an entire genre of music known as “New Wave”.  Of course classical composers have jumped on this bandwagon too.  Dvorak penned the New World Symphony and he wasn’t even American..go figure!

Our politics (The New Deal), our literature (Brave New World), our advertising (“new & improved!”), and our vernacular speech (“turning over a new leaf”) all attest to our love of new. We compliment others when we say, “it’s the new you!” And when someone has been ill we give encouragement by telling them that in no time they’ll be “good as new”.

Nothing displays our love of new more demonstrably than the celebration of New Year’s Day.  We mark it as a fresh start, an annual genesis, a time to initiate personal improvement.  We make New Years resolutions, we begin a new calendar year.  It’s “new” at it’s best.

Politicians understand Americans and their love of “new”, and they use it as a very effectively campaign tool.  With each election cycle and with debate on major issues like health care, taxes, banking, finance, the military, etc, we are told new is good and old is bad.  Political candidates who successfully market themselves as a part of “new” and completely disassociate with “old” usually stand a pretty good chance of being elected, especially if “old” is unpopular.

In many instances we embrace “new” and equate it with “better” even though most of us have had experiences with new versions of something that does little more than make us long for the old version (software!).  And who hasn’t picked up a familiar food product in new packaging to note that there is now less of the product inside the package, but it costs more!

But “new” is NOT always “better”.  And we need to learn that lesson once and for all. I think John Updike is right.  However, this time the price tag on “new” is costing us more than we or our children can ever afford to pay.

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