Citizens of the barbaric past!

Do not attempt to eat this page. It is not food, but a message from the future.

I'm broadcasting from the year 2021, where pliant fembots bring me pink cosmos in my nanotech living room.

I do not now, nor have I ever blogged on livejournal. Seekers of the Truth will want, instead, to point their web snorting, user agents of doom to:

Duty now for the future.

Programming Note: You can easily read my taskboy stuff here on LJ by simply subscribing to the Taskboy feed.



Mood: recumbent
Music: quivering saws

I should not engage in pig wrestling. Both the pig and I get dirty, but the pig likes it.

I enjoy much of Ben Steins non-political output, but I do think he speaks less from facts and more from emotion when it comes to economics and politics. Take his American Spectator "We've Figured Him Out". It's full of half-truths, insinuations and F.U.D. Normally, I wouldn't bother much with this kind of nonsense, but there is an increasingly angry, right-wing fringe that just needs some honest book larnin'. If you don't like Obama's policies, that's a matter of political taste. If you need to invent insane conspiracy stories to support your opinions, you're mental.

So, armed with wikipedia and the Google, I will point out the more obvious points of departure from reality Stein (and Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck and Fox news) makes.

The red pullquotes are from Stein's article. The blue are quotes from Obama. The gray are from wikipedia

Item 1: Obama hates Whitey

They ignored his anti-white writings in his books. They ignored his quiet acceptance of hysterical anti-American diatribes by his minister, Jeremiah Wright.

Obama is anti-white? I suppose this is a matter of interpretion, but let's review some indisputable biographical data:

• Obama was born to a white mother (Stanley Ann Dunham of Kansas) and a black father (Barack Obama, Sr. of Kenya)
• From the age of 9, Obama was raised by his mother's parents, who were pretty durn white
• When his grandmother died, Obama was grieved

Obama held his grandmother in high esteem, as quoted in the Huffington Post article:

[My grandmother] is one of those quiet heroes we have all across America, who are not famous, their names are not in the newspapers, but each and every day they work hard. They look after their families. They sacrifice for their children, and their grandchildren. They aren't seeking the limelight. All they try to do is do the right thing. And in this crowd, there are a lot of quiet heroes like that, people like that, mothers and fathers and grandparents who have worked hard and sacrificed all their lives and the satisfaction that they get is in seeing their children or maybe their grandchildren or their great-grandchildren live a better life than they did. That is what America is about. That is what we are fighting for.

That doesn't sounds like Huey Lewis or Malcolm X to me. It sounds like John Kennedy or even Ronald Reagan.

As for whatever Reverend Wright is about, I'm more disappointed that Obama belongs to a church at all. All preachers are a little wacko in my book. They all claim to either talk to or know the will of an invisible man who lives in the sky. People with that kind of behavior who live under bridges are called "hobos."

Item 2: Ultra-left wing

They ignored his ultra-left record as a "community organizer,"...

This claim is pretty funny to me. You'd think that Obama was Che Guevara or Huhgo Chavez. So far, Obama has cowed more to Wall Street and the tiny, balling Republican minority in Congress than I can believe. But that's just my opinion.

Clearly what's more sinister to some is Obama's "community organizer" record. I know the G.O.P. doesn't like Government, except on paydays when they get their checks from it. I've been told that they are the "Law and Order" party, so you'd sort of think that they might actually want to see more non-governmental, private citizen making positive changes in their communities. But apparently, that's not the case. What was Obama organizing anyway? According to Wikipedia: (Emphasis added by me.)

After four years in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago, where he was hired as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes ... on Chicago's far South Side.

So he and the Catholic church were working together in this "community." I think the last person to accuse the Catholic church of ultra liberalism was Oliver Cromwell.

During his three years as the DCP's director, its staff grew from one to thirteen and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000. He helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.

Obama led an organization to help people get off welfare, go to college and get jobs. That's pretty Republican of him. You don't think the problem Stein has with Obama's record is the tenant rights group, do you? I mean, you'd have to be a total slum-lord D-bag to want to see poor renters get hosed even more badly than they already do.

But, OK. Stein can look at Obama's record in Chicago and call it liberal. That's an opinion. Surely, he wouldn't make a bald-face assertion that's easily dismissed?

Item 3: Obama has no academic achievements

The American people ignored his total zero of an academic record as a student and teacher, his complete lack of scholarship when he was being touted as a scholar.

Obama's academic record, or a portion of it, is cited on the linked to wikipedia pages. But here's a taste:

• Selected as editor of Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year
• Became president of the journal the following year
• Graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law

That's not the record of an academic slouch. That's the record of a superstar. Stein was Valedictorian for his class at Yale. Perhaps Stein's problems with Obama stem from the well-known Harvard-Yale rivalry. Stein's own academic record makes me jealous, but Obama's record is in all ways objectively superior.

Item 4: Obama hates America

Barack Obama is ... not a fan of this country, way, way too cozy with the terrorist leaders in the Middle East, way beyond naivete, all the way into active destruction of our interests and our allies and our future.

Why is it that Republicans, who lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction and Saddam Hussein's linked to Al Queda to get us into a costly and futile war, ceaselessly accuse all Democrats of hating America and wanting to destroy it? I guess that's what psychologists call "projection."

Not only is there no evidence that Obama "is not a fan of this country," substantial evidence has been presented in this essay to the contrary. If you still believe Obama hates this country and likes terrorists, you're literally delusional.

Does Obama want to talk with Iran? Yes. That's called diplomacy and it's something that countries run by mentally stable adults engage in frequently. Does Obama's willingness to talk to America's competitors mean that he seeks to harm the U.S.? No. On the contrary, you can often learn things from talking to competitors that benefit you and help you anticipate their future actions. That's a good thing.

Item 5: The Stimulus Bill was a failure

The American people have already awakened to the truth that the stimulus bill -- a great idea in theory -- was really an immense bribe to Democrat interest groups, and in no way an effort to help all Americans.

Whether any awaken has been done by any American ever is a matter of debate, but that the stimulus bill has not helped America is untrue. Cast your mind back to the fall of 2008. The biggest financial institutions were either collapsing or about to collapse under the weight of toxic assets and crippling credit default swaps. A bailout of Wall Street bankers was conceived called the Trouble Asset Relief Program of 2008 that was initiated and passed under the Bush administration. It gave Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson complete and auditless power to distribute $750 billion to whichever institution he deemed worthy. Now for bonus points, which interest groups do you think T.A.R.P. served and which party receives the most money from them? And was that party in power when T.A.R.P. was passed? Do you see a pattern?

But, in fairness, Stein specifically mentions the Stimulus bill, referring to the one passed in Feburary, 2009 under the Obama administration. I am not qualified to say whether the stimulus was efficacious or not, but the economists I listen to (*cough* Krugman *cough*) say that it is too early to feel the full effects of it. It does appear to have blunted the free-fall of the U.S. and world economies. At least technically, the Fed believes that the Great Recession is over. So all Americans actually have benefited from the stimulus package already and are likely to benefit from it more in the future.

Was the stimulus a bribe? Certainly, it did benefit a lot of traditional Democratic interests groups. However, I recall the G.O.P. being a bunch of cry babies about the process and not participating in it. I heard them whine about Pelosi shutting them out of the process, but then again, they were the minority party. In American politics, to the victor goes the spoils. Certainly, I learned that in 2000 and 2004.

Item 6: Health Reform is Bad

Now, Americans are waking up to the truth that ObamaCare basically means that every time you are sick or injured, you will have a clerk from the Department of Motor Vehicles telling your doctor what he can and cannot do.

Apparently, Stein doesn't have health problems or he'd be talking with a clerk from his health insurance company who would tell his doctor what to do. Honestly, the critics of health care reform have some weird-assed plan that I've never had. Health care is a bureaucratic apocalypse right now. It needs to be cheaper and more efficient. Why would an honest Republican not want that? Here's a bit of Obama on the "efficiency" of our current system:

More and more Americans pay their premiums, only to discover that their insurance company has dropped their coverage when they get sick, or won't pay the full cost of care.

That sure sounds like invasive bureaucracy to me. However, the bureaucrat isn't working for the government, so I guess that's better in Stein's book.

Finally, I'd like to note that Stein was on Fox news in 2007 happily yapping about the health of the financial market. He thought Merrill Lynch was an "astonishing well-run" company. 13 months later, Bank of America bought Merrill, which was fatally weakened by CDS liabilities, in a shotgun wedding forced by the Paulson. Even more interesting, Thane, head of Merrill, argued at literally the last minute for millions of dollars of compensation for Merrill's top brass. So, Ben's not so good on predicting the future or frankly observing the present. Oh yeah, he hates atheists too. Still, I'd drink scotch with him anytime he wants and talk about what an ass Jimmy Kimble is.

angry

I find it vaguely insulting when advertisers create ads targeting developers with copy
that's made to look like pseudo-code. It's not like when I met up with my Perl friends, we speak in a series of regular expressions or a stream of dollar and at signs. When I last checked, developers in the US (the target audience of this ad) are all quite fluent in English. Some of them may even read fiction completely unrelated to computers, even.

I know I shouldn't get worked up over this, but it's like seeing an ad targeting the Latin American market using spanglish: "Tu Quieres A VACATION?! Ay Caramba!"

«But Darwin may have done religion -- and God -- a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped -- even primitive.»

--Karen Armstrong Wall Street Journal

I was recently exposed to what can only be called atheist proselytizing on youtube by Fighting Atheist. He is a formerly a southern Christian who, through researching the defense of religion, became an atheist. Like an ex-smoker, he now seems interested in helping his theistic friend "see the light of reason." His story is much like that of Bart Ehrman, who was deep into textual analysis of the Bible (that is, determining what the earliest, "truest" versions of the New Testament actually looked like) when the scales fell from his eyes. These fellows got me thinking about my own atheism and the daily struggle I have with magical thought.

Atheism is one of the most reviled belief systems in the U.S. today. Theists of all stripes tend to tolerate each other (more or less), but reserve a certain mistrust and antagonism for those who do not acknowledge the existence of an uncreator Creator. There can be little doubt that this antagonism is often returned by atheist. Of course, both sides would do well to simply tolerate the other and find common ground where it exists. I believe there is there is more overlap in the total of what theists and atheists believe than divergence.

But there's that word again: belief.

Theists, of course, have an easier time than atheists. After all, to believe in something is a more comfortable position than to doubt the existence of something. Just look at the US in 2002. It was easier to believe that Iraq was building WMDs than to believe they weren't. To not believe is to doubt. Doubt is based on the absence of cogent evidence. Believe requires no evidence at all. Doubt is a fickle and silent friend in the minds of most people. Belief is a solid, supportive companion. However, there is more to life than comfort.

I do not claim to speak for anyone but myself. I find a world explained by cause and effect more congenial to my mental health than one run by magic. However, there is much that we do not understand about ourselves and our world. Religious myths have always been about man, not Gods. The Abrahamic myth stories are more illuminating of human nature than the divine. Used as a tool to understand the irrational way we human behave towards each other, religion is salutory and beneficial.

However, religion and myth cannot be used to override discoverable chains of cause and effect that is the perview of science. That is an abuse of religion. Those fundamentalists who seek natural laws out of holy books merely find rationalizations for they believed before ever reading their texts. It's hard for a rational mind to see religious literalism as anything but a species of madness or self-serving deceit.

There is a saying: "There are no atheists in a foxhole." This is to say that under the looming threat of death, anyone will believe a supernatural savior. While I have not had this experience, I might suggest the following reformulation of that aphorism. As a kid, many of us become concerned that a lurking horror awaits under our beds. Most of us grow out of that notion. However when the conditions are right, say on a stormy and lonely night, this old fear of monster lurking in our homes still comes back to us.

Irrationality is strong component of humanity. It is folly to read too much into it. It is also folly to suppress rationality, since it is our only light in a dark world.

contemplative

From Substitute's entry, here is my own list of books, differently categorized.

The following is a list of the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.

Books I've read at least once:

I have read the bolded books more than once

• Dracula
• Treasure Island
• The Hobbit
• The Aeneid
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• The Scarlet Letter
• A Clockwork Orange
• Anansi Boys
• Catch-22
• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• The Silmarillion
• The Odyssey
• A Tale of Two Cities
• The Iliad
• The Canterbury Tales
• Brave New World
• Frankenstein
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• 1984
• The Inferno
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Gulliver's Travels
• Dune (Don't read the rest of the series)
• The Prince
• A Short History of Nearly Everything

Books I've started, but could not finish

• A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
• The Brothers Karamazov

Books I cannot abide

I have read the bolded books. The others are loathed on reputation alone.

• Dubliners
• Cryptonomicon
• The Sound and the Fury
• The Catcher in the Rye
• The Grapes of Wrath
• Ulysses
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
• The Kite Runner
• Atlas Shrugged
• The Fountainhead
• The Satanic Verses
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Corrections

Note: The following authors can suck it: Ayn Rand, James Joyce and Charlotte Bronte. Yes, we all know how clever you are. Now go away.

Books I'd like to read

• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• Vanity Fair
• The Once and Future King
• Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• Crime and Punishment
• The Name of the Rose
• Moby-Dick
• Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• Foucault's Pendulum
• The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Books I'm not interested in reading

• Les Misérables
• Oliver Twist
• Tess of the D'Urbervilles
• To the Lighthouse
• Mansfield Park
• Angels & Demons
• Middlemarch
• The Historian: a novel
• Quicksilver
• Middlesex
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
• American Gods
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Great Expectations
• Emma
• The Blind Assassin
• The Time Traveler's Wife
• War and Peace
• Don Quixote (abridged version)
• Life of Pi : a novel
• Wuthering Heights
• Anna Karenina
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Beloved
• The Mists of Avalon
• Oryx and Crake: a novel
• Cloud Atlas
• The Confusion
• Lolita
• Persuasion
• Northanger Abbey
• On the Road
• The Three Musketeers
• David Copperfield
• White Teeth
• Gravity's Rainbow
• Watership Down
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values
• Angela's Ashes : A Memoir
• The God of Small Things
• Neverwhere
• A Confederacy of Dunces

Want to know something even sadder than me organizing this list? I wrote a Perl script to do the markup.

sleepy

If you are interesting in reading my mind, please visit taskboy.com. Thanks.

mischievous

My Fellow use.perlers,

When, in the course of human events, it becomes
necessary for one programmer to dissolve the blogginating bonds which have connected him with others, and to assume among the powers the Web, the separate (but not quite) equal station to which the laws of CGI and of CGI's God (St. Berners Lee) entitle him, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that he should declare the causes which impel him to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that not all blogs are created equal, that some are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable features, such as posting pictures and controlling background colors.

We, therefore (meaning me), appealing to the Supreme Judge of public opinion for the rectitude of our (mine, actually) intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good readers of my blog, solemnly publish and declare, that this blog is, and of right ought to be a free and independent site.

And may God have mercy on my poor soul.

That is all.

[Original post and comments].

«Just like the previous two modes, to figure out on the spot what major
scale you need to be playing. Let's say you are jammin with your friends
Bob and Pete and the chart they give you says you have to play a solo over a
G maj7#11 vamp. You need to figure out what major scale you need to
be playing so you just remember your lydian scale mode rule which is: lydian
mode = major scale up a perfect 5th. Remember how this works? If G is on
the third fret, D is a perfect fifth from that note. All you have to do is
play a D major scale over the Gmaj7#11 chord and you'll be groovin' away with
the lydian mode.»

Friends don't let friends vamp on Gmaj7#11 chords. Only junkies messed up
on Chic Corea or the Mahavishnu Orchestra would have such abnormal and
unclean thoughts.

UPDATE: What's sad is that I googled for both of these names and still got them wrong. Sigh...

[Original post and comments].

[Original post and comments].

Dogs can be territorial, but this is absurd. Doesn't he know that a dog divided cannot stand?

[Original post and comments].