I am engaged in a discussion at ElectricMinds.org about our recent actions in Iraq and the administration's direction in pursuing the war on terror.
I am posting my next reply here on my blog because I feel it's a bit long for the format at ElectricMinds, and also I wanted a chance for other visitors here to read it and perhaps comment.
Get this through your heads, you socialist ninnies! There is not a big, limited pot of wealth that is filled with the Magic Sweat of Authentic Third World Laborers, that America uses its military to steal from when we run out of wealth here at home.
Here’s something even the dimmest hippy protester / poet should be able to wrap his mind around:
You buy a legal pad: $1.29
You steal a Bic pen from the counter at Kinko’s: free.
You write the script for Weekend at Bernies 3: Bernie’s Revenge!: free.
You hire someone to type it: $30.00
You have Kinko’s print 5 copies: $62.20
You mail the 5 copies: $7.82
5 idiots in Hollywood love the idea: free
They enter a bidding war: free
You get a check for: one…million…dollars!
So let’s see…that $1,000,000, minus the $101.30 in expenses…uh…that means…You, the village idiot, have just raised the Gross Domestic Product by, uh, one million freaking dollars, and have made a personal profit of $999,898 dollars and 69 cents.
Where did the $999,898.69 come from? It came from thin air! You created it, out of nothing. You added value to the stock of paper and ink you started with. From the monumental talent you posses, the gift of intellect, the pen that made Shakespeare weep with envy, you have created WB3. You’ve given millions of people two hours of side-splitting hilarity, for which they will part with $8.00…and you have created wealth. What’s more, when you go and blow it all on the pointless material crap that makes life so much fun, you’ll be bringing in a little extra for the Sea-Doo distributor, the BMW dealer, the girls at Cheetahs in Las Vegas, and all the others. Not to mention putting – I dunno – maybe half a million freaking dollars into welfare, Social Security, Medicare, the National Endowment for the Arts and the world’s first fusion-powered, laser-armed, flying stealth submarine, the USS George W. Bush.
You did not have to steal $999,898.69 from a farmer in Angola.
Oh, I get it now... so if I get my friend Bob to pay me $200 for spitting on the sidewalk, and then I pay him $200 for pissing on a tree, then we've created $400 of wealth? THAT explains why our country is number 1! Yay! Go USA! Go Capitalism! Go Monsanto and ExxonMobil and Enron and Halliburton and Carlyle Group!
MyJewishLearning.com has an article tracing the ways modern philosophers have dealt with the free will "problem" vis-a-vis the inescapable "mechanistic" causality of physics. Most troubling (to me) is this excerpt:
Perhaps more importantly, modern quantum physics has revealed that what is actually happening at the sub-atomic level is not mechanistic in any traditional sense. Without the presumption of simple causation, a major obstacle to our self-conception as free decision-making individuals is removed.
This is just hogwash. Semiconductors, PN-junctions, lasers, and particle colliders are all quite mechanistic. Oh, sure, you have to use matrices and wavefunctions instead of classical variables, but that does not undermine causality.
Kant may have had a point, at least, in speaking on the fundamental limitations of perception and human understanding of the world. I think Kant would have loved to know even a fraction of what is taught in a modern undergraduate course on Perception or Cognitive Science. Fundamentally, the issue of free will can only be resolved by those who have set aside their egos and their presumptions and ethical imperatives, and who approach the issue with a beginner's questioning mind.
From Time.com's "Verbatim" pages, here's what Britney Spears has to say about the war:
"Honestly, I think we should just trust our President in every decision that he makes, and we should just support that."
There is a very informative comment on my a while back about Tranquility Bay, the private detention camp where kids are punished and disciplined by a bunch of religious fanatics. (Scroll to the bottom to read the last comment.)
Bill Gates says that Longhorn will be late because it's driven by technology and not a release date. He then goes on to make predictions about how much RAM desktop users will need:
"64 bit is coming to desktops, there is no doubt about that," he said. "But apart from Photoshop, I can't think of desktop applications where you would need more than 4 gigabytes of physical memory, which is what you have to have in order to benefit from this technology."
Tsk tsk tsk... when will you learn, billg? Two words: Immersive Porn. (<strongbad>"you gotta have blue textures.."</strongbad>)
'Nuff said. This is a nice primer about ClearChannel. It contains nuggets of interesting information for those acquainted with this entity, however. Excerpt:
On the other hand, Clear Channel has not been opposed to all forms of political organizing. In 2003 the company paid for pro-war rallies around the country to support the invasion of Iraq as well as for a 33,000-pound tractor to smash a collection of Dixie Chicks CDs, tapes and other paraphernalia, at an event in Louisiana, because the bands had the arrogance to protest against the war.
Here is a wonderful analysis and description of our nation's electrical grid. Neat stuff!
A report from the front lines about what our soldiers are going through in Iraq.
"These guys shot at some of our guys, so we lit 'em up. Put two .50-cal rounds in their vehicle. One went through this dude's hip and into the other guy's head," explains Brunelle. The third man in the car lived. "His buddy was crying like a baby. Just sitting there bawling with his friend's brains and skull fragments all over his face. One of our guys came up to him and is like: 'Hey! No crying in baseball!'"
"I know that probably sounds sick," says Sellers, "but humor is the only way you can deal with this shit."
And just below the humor is volcanic rage. These guys are proud to be soldiers and don't want to come across as whiners, but they are furious about what they've been through. They hate having their lives disrupted and put at risk. They hate the military for its stupidity, its feckless lieutenants and blowhard brass living comfortably in Saddam's palaces. They hate Iraqis--or, as they say, "hajis"--for trying to kill them. They hate the country for its dust, heat and sewage-clogged streets. They hate having killed people. Some even hate the politics of the war. And because most of them are, ultimately, just regular well-intentioned guys, one senses the distinct fear that someday a few may hate themselves for what they have been forced to do here.
Added to such injury is insult: The military treats these soldiers like unwanted stepchildren. This unit's rifles are retooled hand-me-downs from Vietnam. They have inadequate radio gear, so they buy their own unencrypted Motorola walkie-talkies. The same goes for flashlights, knives and some components for night-vision sights. The low-performance Iraqi air-conditioners and fans, as well as the one satellite phone and payment cards shared by the whole company for calling home, were also purchased out of pocket from civilian suppliers.
Warning: this article on the state of affairs in Afghanistan is highly depressing. Don't miss it. Excerpts:
"Two girls who went to school without their burkas were killed and their dead bodies were put in front of their houses," she said. "Last month, 35 women jumped into a river along with their children and died, just to save themselves from commanders on a rampage of rape. That is Afghanistan today; the Taliban and the warlords of the Northern Alliance are two faces of the same coin. For America, it's a Frankenstein story - you make a monster and the monster goes against you. If America had not built up these warlords, Osama bin Laden and all the fundamentalist forces in Afghanistan during the Russian invasion, they would not have attacked the master on September 11 2001."
...
The Taliban were offered 15 cents for every 1,000 cubic feet of gas that passed through Afghanistan. Although these were the Clinton years, pushing the deal were the "oil and gas junta" that was soon to dominate George W Bush's regime. They included three former members of George Bush senior's cabinet, such as the present vice-president, Dick Cheney, representing nine oil companies, and Condoleezza Rice, now national security adviser, then a director of Chevron-Texaco with special responsibility for Pakistan and Central Asia.
Condoleeza Rice was a director of Texaco?!? WTF?! Is a healthy crude oil habit a pre-req for serving in the Bush White House? "Scotch? No thanks, the President is strictly on the wagon. Hey, how 'bout some 89 octane?"
Brilliant link from David:
"Sign an affidavit stating that you didn't blow CIA agent Valerie Plame's cover. The point is to show President Bush - who expressed doubts that the ongoing investigation will go anywhere - that he has a fairly easy means of shaking down the White House staff."
Nice little article at Wharton about why the RIAA's lawsuits against its customers are dumb. Excerpt:
Worse still, the RIAA’s wholesale use of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to obtain the names of telephone company customers for its lawsuit program has sparked a legislative reaction based on privacy concerns. Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas recently introduced a new bill in the Senate to require judicial review of subpoenas such as those used by the recording industry to fuel its downloading cases. When Kansas Republicans start lining up with liberal Democrats against your industry, you’ve got a whole new kind of legal strategy problem.
I just had a revelation - contrary to my previous thinking, time travel is not paradoxial. It's so obvious that I don't know how I could have missed it for so long. The old question of "well, what if you travelled backwards in time and killed your ancestor?" is a red herring - if you managed to travel back in time, then you could not have killed your ancestor. "But," you ask, "what's to stop me?" The simple answer: the Universe. If it hadn't, you wouldn't have been around to travel.
The flow of events is consistent; time travel is not paradoxial; there are only closed loops. The only only stumbling block to realizing this is the illusion of "free will".
But that ceases to be a stumbling block as soon as you realize that morality exists outside of human action.
The Miami Herald has an article about the current administration's attitude towards Syria, following Israel's recent strike at a base there.
Hawks at the Pentagon haven't given up on the idea of "regime change" in Damascus and recently asked the CIA to come up with a list of Syrian notables who might one day succeed Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to a U.S. official who requested anonymity.
...
Syria "is living on borrowed time," a State Department official said recently, referring to the mood in Washington. He spoke on condition of anonymity.
Woot! Let's look for WMD in Damascus, too!
In June 2000, Playboy magazine interview Matt and Trey, creators of Southpark. The whole interview is a great read, but some of the most interesting bits involve the pair's tangle with the MPAA and the ratings on the South Park movie. I've mirrored the transcript here, and below is a lovely excerpt:
STONE: We submitted it seven times to the MPAA. The last submission we got back was NC-17, two weeks before release. And one of the marketing guys from Paramount calls and says, "Matt, Trey, you need to cut this again, because we need an R." So I called Scott Rudin and freaked out. Rudin called somebody at Paramount and freaked out on them. Somebody at Paramount called some body at the MPAA and freaked out on them. And the next day the movie was rated R. Not one frame of the movie changed. That's what fucking bullshit it is. And we have it all documented. They can't take us to court for libel because it's fucking true. It is such a fucking shame that no one in this town has the balls to stand up to them. And we're stupid, and I'll probably end up dead in a fucking ditch tomorrow.
PLAYBOY: Assuming the MPAA lets you live, would you really prefer government regulation of movie content?
STONE: You know, I used to definitely be on the side of Hollywood when I'd hear Al Gore and all these politicians say we need to do something about violence in movies. I used to be like, "Fuck you, First Amendment, blah blah blah." But when you start examining how fucked up the self-regulation in this industry is, then you start to see Al Gore's point of view. All he knows is that his kids can go see The General's Daughter and see all that depraved bullshit in a fucking terrible movie. Al says, "Hey, can you do some thing about violence in movies?" And Jack Valenti walks up with a little martini and says, "We're doing it, don't worry. They want kids to see R-rated movies, that's the bottom line.
PLAYBOY: Why?
STONE Because they make a lot more R rated movies, and they need kids to see them. People don't understand that the MPAA isn't just this cool not-for-profit holy organization. The MPAA is the studios. Jack Valenti is paid by them. It's a trade organization, it's a lobby, and he's a fucking hack. He paints himself as this moral arbiter this guy who stands for the parents of America, and he's a fucking politician.
The San Francisco-based Mercury News has a nice slam against talk radio on the heels of the recent Rush Limbaugh fiasco. (No, not his drug abuse, the racial comment stuff.) I hadn't really thought about it, but I guess he *has* called Hillary a murderer and refers to Tom Daschle as the devil. Wow.
Wacom is holding a photo contest - prize is a 40gb iPod and a thousand bucks!
I had no idea Mark Twain had composed a piece called "Adam's Diary", purportedly the diary of Adam when Eve first joins him in the Garden of Eden. You can read it here. An excerpt:
Saturday
The new creature eats too much fruit. We are going to run short, most likely. "We" again -- that is its word; mine too, now, from hearing it so much. Good deal of fog this morning. I do not go out in the fog myself. The new creature does. It goes out in all weathers, and stumps right in with its muddy feet. And talks. It used to be so pleasant and quiet here.
Businessweek has an article about the rise of the Mac in corporate IT.
A couple of my friends who go to LinuxWorld say they saw more Linux lovers toting PowerBooks than ever before. These are people who appreciate the Apple interface and the desktop software but also like being able to do heavy Unix and Linux lifting if need be.
