I was hoping that the President would approach for a few questions, but at the bottom of the stairs he hooked a quick right and headed for his waiting helicopter, Marine One. I knew I only had time for one question.
“Mr. President,” I shouted. “Cake or pie? It’s too loud to hear your answer out here, so if it’s cake, just give me a wave.”
And there you go. All good, decent, real Americans (and cute Japanese robot girls) prefer pie, except at birthday parties and weddings. (A good pineapple-upside-down cake properly done in an iron skillet is the outstanding exception.)
Cake is simply sugary bread with sugary cream squirted all over it that looks prettier than it tastes. It’s insubstantial, disnutritive, bland. Mix up the batter, pour it in the pan, bake, and stuff yourself till you’re sick. Add ice cream for further dental caries, or candles to remind the childish and senile of how old they are.
Pie, on the other hand, is complex, nuanced, balanced. Making and baking pie is inherently an expression of skill, yet pie requires no decoration other than an artfully woven or slashed top crust, and even that serves a crucial purpose. Ice cream, if present, balances the fruity tartness of the filling. Eating pie is an expression of mature discrimination regardless of the age of the eater, each bite a timeless act of graceful passion.
After this insightful probe, there can be no question of where the O stands. No pie for him!
Ladies and gentlemen, this is about managing the immutable reality of mechanical systems. People can bullshit each other — and even themselves — over concepts in all sorts of ways. When concepts are forged in steel, that becomes impossible. You don’t get to bullshit your way around a 5/8″ bolt. You just don’t. When you’re dealing with a flywheel pilot bearing, no mental substitutions — whether from sloppiness or outright psychosis — will suffice: that bearing is only what it is, and your mind had better be right about everything about it.
Robert Pirsig once wrote a very ridiculous book, but he wrote it about a very serious subject.
There is great philosophy in machines.
Accompanied by some heart-warming shop photos.
[Hey, Billy! I've done a couple of head rebuilds, and my question is, where are you getting the gasket sets for this beast?]
I was standing in front of a green hooded idling number of about half the age of Beck’s specimen, while the man I was there to do business with slowly hand pumped diesel into the fuel neck from a large tank out behind his corn crib. Over the rumble, he pointed to the name plate at the prominent place on the nose and asked, “Ever see one of those before?” The plate said, “Deutz”, and I allowed that I hadn’t. He said it was a three cylinder, air cooled.
…
[He] remarked, “I’d like to buy a new one of these, but they don’t make them anymore.”
I asked, “Did they go out of business?”
“No. They just can’t make them. The government says they have to be water cooled, now.”
And that opened up whole new areas of conversation.
I’ve whacked out about half of that; see the whole thing for the flavor.
I’ve done volunteer teaching of fifth grade science labs. They stopped doing that;it was too damn much trouble, too messy, too loud.
I don’t know how much science got through, but if I managed to get across the faintest glimmer that the universe does what it does, and not what you think it ought to do, I succeeded.
Anybody who thinks economics doesn’t follow that same principle is advocating ruin, death, and chaos.
Texas Republican Rep. Kevin Brady says in a release that committee analysts actually couldn’t fit everything in: “This portrays only about one-third of the complexity of the final bill. It’s actually worse than this.”
I have some quibbles about the graphic itself — primarily, I wish it were interactive, so you could choose which aspects of the tangle to concentrate on — but the reality they represent is horrific.
Things to looks at:
Red circles with dark orange interiors are “Rationing Potentials”.
Orange circles with light blue interiors are “Involvements with the health insurance market”.
Note that the Patient, lower right hand corner, is not directly connected to the Physician, lower left hand corner. I suspect, I hope, I pray, that this is a fault in the chart, not a true representation. If it is true, this means that I, cash in hand, cannot go to my doctor, pay him, and be examined and treated without getting some kind of government approval. [update]OK, close examination of the chart shows that the lines are actually labeled with the section number of the Obamacare act establishing that connection. Unless Obamacare breaks the existing patient-doctor connection, no wonder it does not appear on the chart.
One more charting quibble: I’d like to be able to click on one entity and see all the other entities it connects to, and how.
My title asks if you trust the Post Office. This chart shows that you have to trust several non-health-care related agencies, including the IRS, which has a history of being openly hostile to citizens. Other agencies include Justice, Homeland Security, Labor, and Treasury.
It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.
In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?
Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
More evidence that putting the educated elite in charge of our lives is a bad idea.
My sense is that academics and bureaucrats must be as susceptible to this as anyone else, perhaps even moreso, because they are, effectively, trained to think that they are right, and they are totally isolated from real world consequences if they are wrong. Instead, their assumption that the stupid ignorant mundanes just didn’t take their advice strongly enough, and so they must be forced.
Individuals may well fall victim to the problem, but if they act on false assumptions, they will fail, and they will not be able to force their failure on those around them.
I now propose Moore’s Arrow:
All sources of bias arising from education are arguments for reducing government power.
The only bulwark against this seems to be Popper’s discipline of falsifiability. This demonstrably works, however slowly and unreliably.
Many in the progressive world, believe that our founding fathers were racist. As their evidence they point to Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution:
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
To the liberals, the 3/5th figure is an indication that our founding fathers were a bunch of racists who thought that the African Slaves were less than human.
The truth is that the founders from the northern colonies who opposed Slavery, insisted on counting the slaves as less than “full persons.” The reason for the insistence, is to prevent the slave states from getting too many congressman and electoral votes as to dominate the government and prevent Slavery from ever being abolished.
Fascinating article, read the whole thing.
There’s another version of the argument, which I first heard from my brother in California; apparently put forward by Howard Zinn. As I understand it, the three fifths compromise was not based on opposition to slavery, but purely to increase Northern power at the expense of Southern power.
The essential point, however, is that the Founders had no good in them; their failure to create a perfect Socialist state ab initio with equal outcomes for all is proof that they were merely replacing the English nobles with a new class structure based on economic power.
The idea that Senator Joe McCarthy was correct about Communists infesting the government and entertainment industry is gaining currency. The Beeb is among the latest to realize this:
David Aaronovitch thinks the unthinkable about the McCarthy period.
The hunt for the so called ‘Reds under the beds’ during the Cold War is generally regarded as a deeply regrettable blot on U.S history. But the release of classified documents reveals that Joseph McCarthy was right after all about the extent of Soviet infiltration into the highest reaches of the U.S government.
Thanks to the public release of top secret FBI decryptions of Soviet communications, as well as the release under the fifty year rule of FBI records and Soviet archives, we now know that the Communist spying McCarthy fought against was extensive, reaching to the highest level of the State department and the White House.
We reveal that many of McCarthy’s anticommunist investigations were in fact on target. His fears about the effect Soviet infiltration might be having on US foreign policy, particularly in the Far East were also well founded.
The decrypts also reveal that people such as Rosenberg, Alger Hiss and even Robert Oppenheimer were indeed working with the Soviets. We explore why much of this information, available for years to the FBI, was not made public. We also examine how its suppression prevented the prosecution of suspects.
Finally, we explore the extent to which Joseph McCarthy, with his unsavoury methods and smear tactics, could have done himself a disservice, resulting in his name being forever synonymous with paranoia and the ruthless suppression of free speech.
The programme airs Sunday at 13:30 on BBC Radio 4 (FM only).
I distrust that last bit, about McCarthy’s “unsavoury tactics” being to blame for his failure. It was McCarthy’s fault that the Bolsheviks weren’t unmasked? I wait to be convinced that what saved the Bolsheviks of that time and place was Joe McCarthy’s ineptness. I prefer the more obvious explanation, which is that the very Bolsheviks who had, as McCarthy rightly claimed, dug themselves into the US government were the ones who stopped him.
This may also be available on the Web; I hope so, because it’s an important topic.
there is very little feedback from the free market to the State. The State conjures deficit money from thin air, and believes itself capable of sustaining unlimited losses in the service of a “just cause.” Ideology is pursued in defiance of cost and benefit analysis. Politicians rarely suffer personal consequences for disastrous economic decisions. In fact, they have a good chance of manipulating such disasters into golden opportunities to acquire more power for themselves.
The State is exceptionally poor at analyzing the true value of anything. The lens of ideology is filled with clouds of hatred, occasionally sundered by blinding flashes of righteousness. The actual value of health care and medical insurance was almost completely invisible to the architects of ObamaCare.
…
The great lesson of socialism will be repeated one more time, as it has played out around the world, without exception: governments redistribute poverty, not wealth. Some people will find ways to make money in the dreary twilight of an economy where the light of knowledge through value has been blotted out. You probably won’t be one of them.
And this:
The masterminds behind ObamaCare will quietly relish the collapse of the private health insurance industry, which was one of their primary objectives all along.
It’s crucial to understand that this is their objective because they believe the marketplace is inherently evil. They think they’re doing the right thing, that they are making the world a better place.
They believe that wealth is money, gold, wampum. Beads and trinkets.
Doc has it right: what has real value is information. “Information wants to be free,” yes, but socialists believe that the government can own all the information, and hand it out in equal little chunks out to everybody. They don’t understand that different people in different situations place different value on a given piece of information.
First I saw this:
[Click for full-size]
Amusing and dead on, some of them — except the best ones aren’t actually libertarians at all, just authoritarians looking for an excuse to misbehave while ordering other people around.
And the actual libertarian summary, “no first use of force”, aka “Oh noes! The libertarians are in power, and they refuse to tell us what to do!” doesn’t make an appearance.
And the interesting thing here, of course, is that none of these guys are betraying their principles; this is the socialist paradigm, straight up.
One small tweak to the socialist version, although this doesn’t work if they’re labeled “authoritarians”: the last frame should stay the same: “stoned”.
Multi-part video documenting charges of voter intimidation and outright voter fraud during the Democratic Primary by the “Chicago-style” Obama machine versus Hillary Clinton supporters.
This was put together by Democrats; it’s not a Republican or Tea Party hit job.
It makes me wonder three things:
First, what’s going to happen this November? I may sign up as a poll watcher.
Second, what did they threaten Hillary with to get her to accept the Secretary of State position?
Third, where was the press during all this? Heh, heh, just joking, of course; we all know where the press was: on its knees before its Lord’s zipper.
Anyway, posting first of five parts; follow links at youtube for the rest.
rickety at name of blog dot com
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[again, click for full size]