Mr Schraub has some silly things to say on the topic, some remarks on that include (below the fold ’cause it’s long): Read the rest of this entry
So, everybody thinks … and perhaps rightly that Chechin terrorists are a looming threat for the safety of the Sochi Olympics. I don’t understand the following in that respect. So, you’re a dissident or rebel in Chechnia or elsewhere. Why would you set a bomb or attack in Sochi? If you do, you and your cause will be universally reviled the world over. How to you benefit from that? I fail to understand the motives behind an act like that. Why do you want your cause hated and reviled?
Well, we made it home Saturday. Then it snowed. Then it got cold. The diesel didn’t start when we got home (not because of any diesel fuel issue but because of a dead battery). Since it was snowing … and today it was -20 F we didn’t trickle charge it yet. We’re going to charge it tomorrow and then try starting it Wednesday when the temps are supposed to get north of 10. We’ve discovered some things about packed snow, ice, and salt. When temps are below -15 salt doesn’t do squat. Snow melted/softened by salt which then is cooled below 10 or 15 below is hard as a rock. Squeeky snow (which is snow below 0) is very slippery on the roads. The only solution is to go slow … and finally, I live on a road which is on about a 15% grade. You can’t drive up it for the last few days. You can only go down. If your speed gets above about 5mph … you’re out of control and won’t be able to stop without pinwheeling a it. Creeping is only way.
A reminder, the difference between 60 and 20 is the same as the difference between 20 and -20. Think of what you wear at 60 compared to 20. Stay warm out there if you’re out and about in this arctic blast.
Lots of silliness has ensued in the weeks following the shooting in Newton, CT. Gun advocates suggest putting TSA-like agents in every school (as if schools aren’t expensive enough), gun control advocates suggest restricting “assault weapons” (a fictional category for semi-automatic rifles) and “high capacity magazines” (as if the 1-2 seconds to swap magazines would really make a difference) and basically making it far harder to obtain guns (against for example, peer reviewed academic studies showing that the elasticity to gun availability is .1 to .3 out of the 50-60 gun related deaths per 10k people per year. As much posturing as we have on this matter, if the time the President and his Renfieldian co-conspirator Biden have wasted giving speeches on gun control more children have died in auto accidents than did in the incident they pretend is motivating their interest in gun control. But do they go after drivers and car safety? Nope. Read the rest of this entry
Your neighbor across the aisle does not. Here is some unsolicited advice for the left wing on this topic. If you really think this is a problem, and you want everyone, not just your side of the aisle to push for it futilely … Here’s a newsflash for y’all. You’re selling it wrong.
Look at us over here on the right. We think the space program was cool. We love going to flight museums and wistfully wishing we (as a nation) were still flying SR-71s (RS-71 dammit, stupid Presidents). We gawk at daisy cutters and talk about yields and payloads. While we might take up on those government goodies that are “free” it sticks in our craw and we wish that ‘ol time Yankee rugged individualism wasn’t dying out, killed by bureaucratic mind-numbing cookie cutter schools among other things. Read these two books, here and here. That’s good reading. So, do you like Bob? We do.
In a past era, a Democratic President challenged his nation to go to the moon, not because it was easy but because it was hard. You want a nation to get behind you with a climate crises. Challenge them that way. Tell ’em to go out and fix it, not by sucking back our economy and going all green-ified on us, scrimping out toilet paper curbing consumption of interesting toys and things to do.
No. Fix it the old fashioned way, with a hammer, tongs, and big bad-ass technology. Challenge us that way, and you might get a rise out of us.
Of course it might alienate you’re side of the aisle, but you can’t break an omelette without making eggs, or something like that.
(with tongue firmly in cheek … and attempting to ignore the silly season somewhat)
So, did Mr Obama use the Colorado shooting to set the stage for policy changes:
Every day, in fact, every day and a half, the number of young people we lose to violence is about the same as the number of people we lost in that movie theater. For every Columbine or Virginia Tech, there are dozens gunned down on the streets of Chicago and Atlanta, here in New Orleans. For every Tucson or Aurora, there’s daily heartbreak over young Americans shot in Milwaukee or Cleveland.
Hmm. Which policy? Restrict guns or reinforce traditional marriage? Which is more likely a root cause, restrictions on guns or broken families and single/absent parents? The latter is more likely the cause, the former the more likely policy in mind.
Murphy’s law and others give not exactly hard and fast guidelines for prediction of events and interpretations. My (just coined as such) first Rule is the following
Conventional Historical Wisdom is always wrong.
In what follows this will be applied to the third rail of historical discourse … vis a vis to suggest that the Jewish narrative concerning the Holocaust is wrong. This may or may not be a historical third high voltage line as suggested above, but there are blogging/pirate rules that state any you mentions Nazis loses the argument … and Nazis will be noted in this piece.
For a long time references to the Holocaust have bothered me, in that the focus on that particular feature of German/Nazi atrocities has overwhelmed our historical recall of other Nazi (and concomitant Soviet ones). When one recalls mass murders in the mid 20th century …. with rare exceptions only one thing will be recalled and the others minimized or forgotten. This is wrong. Do not misunderstand, the fault for this lies with historians, teachers and educators … not with the Jewish people. Their memory, their remembrance is apt and warranted. What is not is for the rest of us to forget that this was just a small part of a larger horrific picture.
If, in a recent non-mass killing like that at Columbine, if 10 persons had been killed of which 4 Muslims had been killed if conventional wisdom called this an attack on Islam that would be wrong. It would not be wrong for Islamic faith communities to remember this in their own way. It would however be wrong for everyone to do that. Similarly remembering the mass murders of the 20th century in Eastern Europe as being only about the Holocaust would also be wrong. This is however, the conventional story.
Recently some conversation of (university) clubs came up. University is in parens there because it seems that it isn’t required for the following discussion. a distinction can be made between types of social groups. Those that form on the basis of an activity and those which form on the basis of an identity. My intuition is that the former are far healthier (and a sign of a healthier culture) than the latter. There is a little overlap in this definition. A club of bike racers or cyclists may likely hold for themselves an identity as being a cyclist. However, they do not get together on account of that shared identity, but to share an activity, specifically riding.
It was said that disallowing particular clubs is a sign of unhealth of a culture/society, e.g., a school that prohibits GALA clubs.
So am I correct in this? Is my intuition that activity clubs are a healthy sign and the existence of identity clubs is not. This might just be me. I’ve never been drawn to or wanted to be part of any identity group, and hold such with some amount of distaste.
But I don’t know why. Do you share that? Reject it? Do you have intutions why?
Recalling my last Subjunctive TV post, based on the notion borrowed from Douglass Hofstadter’s Achilles/Tortoise dialog wherein a TV was imagined where sports replays included “what if” features. These features began with standard, “What if they had run the ball instead of passed” and devolved eventually to more outlandish suggestions like, “How would that play have gone if 13 was not a prime number.” In that vein, for a short time anyhow, longer if it catches some interest, I’m going to try more “Subjunctive TV” speculative posts.
James Madison and a few of his friends (and some likely not-friends) gathered in the late 18th century and penned a Constitution based on the modern theories of man and government at the time. A few years have passed since then and just a few things have changed in the world since that time. So the premise shift offered for today’s viewing and consideration is what sort of government might our founders suggested if:
We’ve had our current Constitution for just over 200 years. Some things went really well. Their back of the envelope estimations of power and principle and how to balance that was darn good. Yet people are increasingly of the feeling that government is too distant and too remote. It is very powerful but their input is irrelevant. The separation of the people in power from the problems they try to address and the complexity of those same problems is an increasingly obvious flaw. In the past, I’ve pointed out that the skill set required to be successful in the election process are almost completely disjoint from the job requirements and fail to test fitness to meet the demands of the jobs for which the elected official is to fill.
I would suggest that if Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness was the end of government … then we might be able do design a government depending on and using different ways of getting peoples input and suggestions, finding solutions, and insuring freedoms in ways that, for example, don’t require taxation with so little representation. Could Facebook (of all things) and Open source software collaboration offer any models toward a completely new way of viewing government or …
How might the Constitutional Convention have played out if it was held today by technologically savvy politically astute men. How would a convention staffed by people like a Wozniak/Madison, Hamilton/Knuth offer for the nation?
