§ I Am Music and I Pick the Songs: Like a Rolling Stone

{Song #12 « Song #13 » Song #14}

§ ≡ One of an ongoing series of posts in which I pick, in my not-so-humble opinion, the best songs of the second millennium. Feel free to offer constructive dissenting opinions; preferably set to music.

Song #13 is Like a Rolling Stone, sung by Bob Dylan.

I am not a huge Dylan fan. But no singer/song list is complete without Bob Dylan. This one is my favorite of all his songs. It also happens to be the top choice of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, as picked by Rolling Stone magazine in November 2004. But, what do they know, am I right? Actually, I like this song a lot!



Post #770 § I Am Music and I Pick the Songs: Like a Rolling Stone

It ain't over til it's over!

{link » The Six-Party's Over}

“Strategic Defense: In the space of two months, North Korea has tested an intercontinental missile and now a working nuke. The really bad news is that experts believe Pyongyang has the ability to put one atop the other. After North Korea detonated a nuclear weapon on Monday with a blast equaling the yield of the Hiroshima bomb, President Obama promptly issued a rebuke saying that North Korea ‘will not find international acceptance’ until it stops its nuclear and missile programs. The problem is that North Korea, a nation willing to brutalize and starve millions of its own people to get to this point, may not care. Both its second nuclear test and its missile test in April were in clear violation of U.N. resolutions. Another resolution won't help. As of a few weeks ago, we still clung to hope North Korea would change. U.S. Special Envoy Steven Bosworth said that ‘there is not a sense of crisis.’ Bosworth also reiterated that the U.S. was ‘committed to dialogue’ and is ‘obviously interested in returning to a negotiating table as soon as we can.’”
 — INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

In my post yesterday, I showed that it is quite plausible for there to be no common ground for negotiation. Unfortunately, there appear to be many people who are of the opinion that if common ground hasn't been found, it must be because the parties haven't looked hard and/or long enough. This is what passes for hope these days.


           Dipshitlomacy

Post #769 It ain't over til it's over!

Conversation as Combinatorial Geometry

{link » Politics as conversation}

“To try to understand better, in its genuine - epistemological - meaning, is always a worthwhile exercise. At the same time, where one's purpose is dialogic, aiming at an understanding that is reciprocal, it is as well to be clear what one's own values are and how they differ from other values. [...] Dialogue with others who do not subscribe to the same values is, indeed, the stuff of politics and it is an indispensable mode of living with others in a morally tolerable way. [...] [T]hough dialogue and a search for common ground are still to the point, the secular liberal would do well to remember that secular liberalism permits more of a conversation than certain types of politics-faith inseparability do[.]”
 — Norman Geras

Some of the points that Norm makes in his interesting essay can be illustrated by 3-D modeling techniques, variously called solids modeling, constructive solid geometry, combinatorial geometry, as well as others.

Boolean Operations in Constructive Solid Geometry

union = box.OR.ball	difference = box.NOT.ball	intersection = box.AND.ball
union is merger of box with ball	difference is subtraction of ball from box	intersection is common to box and ball

We can visualize Norm's discussion by letting the red box represent secular liberalism and the blue ball represent politics-faith inseparability. Then the search for the Holy Grail of common ground is reduced to finding the combinatorial intersection of red box and blue ball.

In this fashion we can easily visualize some general conclusions about such politically charged endeavors. Foremost among these — it is abundantly clear that common ground (i.e., an intersection) may not exist! Its existence depends entirely on the specifics defining the political boundaries (i.e., bounding surfaces) of the potential communicators (i.e., box and ball) and their relative positions in the dialogosphere.

It seems to me that eternal optimists (some may say naive optimists), such as President Obama, may not realize that common ground may not exist in some situations. There are several high profile international confrontations in which parties to the disputes have been seeking common ground for decades, to no avail. Such searches may be futile if a combinatorial intersection does not exist.

Post #768 Conversation as Combinatorial Geometry

That Girl's Daddy Is the Guy on the Left

{link » Why having daughters makes fathers more likely to agree with Left-wing views}

“As a man fathers more daughters, he will gradually be won round by their more Left-wing viewpoints. [...] Sociologist Rebecca Warner from Oregon State University and economist Ebonya Washington from Yale University studied the voting records of the politicians before and after they had children.”

What's that expression about some guy being whipped?

Post #767 That Girl's Daddy Is the Guy on the Left

Memorial Day 2009

h/t Theo

Post #766 Memorial Day 2009

A Straw Tower for Obie-Won in Kenya

{link » Some Obama Enemies Are Made Totally of Straw}

“‘Here's the trick: Take your opponent's argument to a ridiculous extreme, and then attack the extremists’, said William Safire, the former presidential speechwriter who writes the "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine. ‘That leaves the opponent to sputter defensively, "But I never said that"’.

The telltale indicators that a straw man trick is on the way are the introductory words "there are those who say" or "some say". ‘In strawmanese, you never specify who "those who" are’, Mr. Safire said. ‘They are the hollow scarecrows you set up to knock down’.”
 — By Helene Cooper, May 23, 2009

{link » Strawman Straw Slam}

“Think that's a strawman argument? I refer you to our president's absurd speech the other day. It's too bad Cooper skipped that, because Obama was playing an astonishing double-reverse strawman game in that one, quite possibly unprecedented in the scurrilous history of American political chicanery, in which he slammed the supposed abandonment of fundamental American values by the prior administration and its supposedly destructive policies, while adopting them as his own — under a thin veneer of better-likedness. I'd call it a brilliant bit of straw footwork, except that the only people he seems to have fooled [are] the national press. Even his own base isn't buying it. And it transcends the traditional, incidental use of strawmen in American political rhetoric. Because in this case, the president has constructed himself a straw tower, and has taken up residence in it.”
 — Jules Crittenden

Post #765 A Straw Tower for Obie-Won in Kenya

"Surely, you're joking"? "Don't call me Shirley"!

 h/t Theo

Post #764 "Surely, you're joking"? "Don't call me Shirley"!

Green Guacamole

{link » Euroamericans?}

“Like most skeptics of the new Obama frontier, I’d simply trust in the ancient wisdom that one cannot get something for nothing — so creating $9 trillion in new debt either ruins the currency or burdens those not born to pay for it. One cannot tax a productive class into oblivion and not kill the proverbial goose. One cannot mandate equality by result without extreme coercion and endemic cynicism. The experimentation and utopian tinkering by a paternalistic overseeing class, Ivy-League trained but without experience in private enterprise or the underbelly of American life, can never prove successful. These are age-old truths that transcend Obama, but apparently must be rediscovered to our great pain each new generation.” [emphasis added]
 — Victor Davis Hanson

Hello? Is there anybody out there whose brain has not yet turned into green guacamole? All this shit has been tried before. It doesn't work! Why must we keep re-inventing the the square wheel?

It is so much more efficient to read a book. Sigh.

Post #763 Green Guacamole

Adding Irony to Insult

{link » Man's Search for Meaning}

“In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” [Astoundingly, emphasis in the original!]
 — Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (First published in German in 1946)

I have no doubt that at the time Viktor Frankl wrote those emphasized words it made sense to him. Today, those same words are the apotheosis of irony.

Given any number of contemporary examples of out-of-control machinations representing and representative of California, a "Statue of Responsibility" built on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay would be a fitting absurdity for the most absurd state in the Union.
 h/t Theo

Post #762 Adding Irony to Insult

Darth Vader Spawns Liz Skywalker

{link » CNN's Anderson Cooper vs. Dick Cheney's Daughter "Liz"}

Having witnessed in recent months a number of ambitious women (Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Caroline Kennedy come to mind) running the gauntlet of political assassins in the mainstream media, and failing to make it through unscathed for a variety of inadequacies, along comes Liz "Skywalker" Cheney and makes mincemeat of her mainstream-media "opponent". Game; set; match. No contest. Next!

It is so refreshing to see a bright, fresh-faced, obviously capable, articulate, quick thinking, knowledgeable, un-flustered, young woman enter the beast's lair and cut his stupid head off. Will someone please find a senate seat she can campaign for. I've got money I need to donate.

Post #761 Darth Vader Spawns Liz Skywalker

The Dickhead Corollary

“In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
 — Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle

“He who claims to walk on water is walking on the floatsam of the Peter Principle (which see).”
 — Dr. TheBigHenry, The Dickhead Corollary

It is quite clear to everyone that the likes of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Read are Cum Laude graduates of the School for the Perpetually Perplexed, and have risen to their level of incompetence in accordance with the Peter Principle. It may not be so clear to everyone that President Obama has climbed on the shoulders of those mental giants, because I have only just formulated my corollary to the Peter Principle.

Obama's view is a lofty one indeed. But be not swayed by the mere height of his vantage point, for its foundation is as hollow as Pelosi's skull.

Post #760 The Dickhead Corollary

American Juice

{link » 4 Men Arrested In Plot To Car Bomb Temple In Riverdale}

“Four men due in court Thursday to face charges of plotting to bomb Jewish sites and shoot down military planes were arrested after planting what they thought were explosive devices near a synagogue and community center [Riverdale Temple], authorities say.”
[Disclosure: I once attended a wedding in this Riverdale Temple. — TheBigHenry]

American Jews are like Jews everywhere else. Aside from a handful of cretins like Noam Chomsky, they love America for the simple reason that Abraham Lincoln stated best — America is "the last best hope of humanity".

American Jews are like other Americans who love America. They know full well, perhaps even fuller than most, that this great country of ours is not perfect, but it is way ahead of whatever miserable choice currently occupies second place. This is why people who hunger for what America has to offer have been laboring against all obstacles to become Americans for over 200 years.

Everyone is familiar with the pejorative slurs that Jew-haters everywhere love to perpetuate. My favorite one is "Jews are clever with money!" I like that one especially because it reveals, albeit in a slanderous contortion, two well-known attributes of many Jewish people: they have always emphasized education ("clever") and they have a high regard for opportunity ("money"), which has been severely restricted from them through the ages.

Nevertheless, no people are faultless. As Moses discovered during the Exodus, Jews can at times be a pain-in-the-neck:

And the Lord said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people.

Jews have an annoying tendency to root for the underdog. I suppose if you have been the world's favorite scapegoat for millennia, it kind of makes sense. In the New York Metropolitan area, which had 3 Major-League-Baseball teams prior to 1958, the Jewish kids were likely to be Brooklyn-Dodger fans because, except for the magical year of 1955, the Yankees always beat the Dodgers in the World Series, and the Giants killed the Dodgers in that miserable 1951 pennant-playoff game with Bobby Thomson's shot-heard-'round-the-world. [As an aside, that day in 1951 was when our very first television (an Admiral brand) was delivered to our home; I remember, because Thomson's home run was the only news clip they showed on TV all night long!]

Likewise, American Jews were big supporters of the 1960's Civil Rights Movement. And it was no surprise that they supported Barack Obama to the tune of 77% of the Jewish-American vote, only exceeded by the 92% of the African-American vote for him. Despite the ominous signs during the campaign, most especially the Jew-hating and America-hating videos of Obama's pastor, American Jews chose to ignore such hateful associations and proceeded to drink the Kool-Aid in droves.

I wonder how many American Jews have noticed the growing trend of Jew-hatred in our land of opportunity since Obama's election.

Post #759 American Juice

Life's Transitoriness

“Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.”
 — Victor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

Every reader now and again encounters words that give him pause — and a fresh outlook on life as well as an unexpected insight. So it has been for me in reading Viktor Frankl's reflections on his own life experiences. He survived some of the worst of man's inhumanity to man, and lived to discover human value in his ability to endure it.

As I have opined before (cf., here, here, and here), perspective is essentially all that matters in life. Lo and behold, I discover from my readings that not only the currently-chic forward-looking perspective can yield life-value, but so also can reflection on one's own past experiences, not all of which are those that "inspire envy"! Might this insight be that elusive "free lunch" so many people hunger for?

Post #758 Life's Transitoriness

Incredible goal! Insane announcer!!

{link » Golaço do Nilmar Narração Rádio Guaíba HD BEST GOAL EVER}

h/t Craig Newmark

Post #757 Incredible goal! Insane announcer!!

An Urgent Plea to the Independent American Voter

{link » Paper Tyrants}

“Congress: Of all the ways of killing liberty, from pistols to propaganda, the cleverest yet devised may be to smother the populace with endless words. Quick votes for colossal, unread legislation violate Congress' oath.
[...]
Any time a bill is so long and convoluted that it takes someone who speaks 586 words a minute to read it into the record, it's a good indication that it shouldn't be passed into law at all.”
 — By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Dear Independent American Voter,

For the love of God and sanity, please throw the incumbent bums out. I am begging you. In the next Congressional election (November 2010), please vote against every incumbent, regardless of party affiliation. This is what I intend to do. I am asking you to join me in an effort to retrieve sanity from beyond the pale.

Our two party system has proven impervious to amelioration via third-party incursions. But I strongly believe that my strategy can win the day. Party members will not be swayed under any circumstances; they will prefer to vote for a yellow dog rather than an eminently qualified candidate who is not of the same party. The only hope of restoring a semblance of sanity to the United States Congress is for independent voters everywhere to vote for the challenger in every single case! This strategy, in effect, will impose consecutive-term limits on all Congressmen and Senators. After three such cycles (which is required for a fresh start in the Senate), if we do not succeed in shaking-up the corrupt and broken system currently ensconced, then I'm afraid we are all f*cked anyway.

And I implore you all to vote against the incumbent Presidential candidate too. This will effect a lame-duck mentality on every President, such that he or she will realize that getting re-elected is NOT job one! Job one for any government official should be to truly serve the best interests of the American people, not the personal interests of the official, which is what they all currently think of first, last, and foremost.

Post #756 An Urgent Plea to the Independent American Voter

§ I Am Music and I Pick the Songs: Stayin' Alive

{Song #11 « Song #12 » Song #13}

§ ≡ One of an ongoing series of posts in which I pick, in my not-so-humble opinion, the best songs of the second millennium. Feel free to offer constructive dissenting opinions; preferably set to music.

Song #12 is Stayin' Alive, sung by the Bee Gees.

The latter part of the 1970's was my demi-decade horribilis. Don't ask; it's a long story. In any case, the song that best described my state of mind in those days was Stayin' Alive.



Post #755 § I Am Music and I Pick the Songs: Stayin' Alive

Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh

{no-longer-missing link » Missing link found?}

“A team of researchers Tuesday unveiled an almost perfectly intact fossil of a 47 million-year-old primate they say represents the long-sought missing link between humans and apes.”
 — Daily News Writers, Updated Tuesday, May 19th 2009, 12:57 PM


The 47 million year old fossilized remains of a primate is seen at the
American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Where were you when Scopes needed you? Remarkable resemblance to a certain speaker is noted.

Post #754 Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh

Victoria Beckham's $120K Handbag

{link » Victoria Beckham}

“After a fire door was found to be lodged open, it was thought that there had been an assassin there, and Beckham later revealed that she was terrified by the experience.”

{link » Victoria Beckham Is A Bag Lady}

“This crocodile Birkin is called the Silver Himalayan, is encrusted with ten carats of diamonds and sold for one hundred and twenty thousand dollars.”

Ms. Beckham was so terrified by the attempted assassination that she immediately granted every man whose wife likes to shop an iron-clad defense for justifiable homicide.

Post #753 Victoria Beckham's $120K Handbag

The Crazy-Joe Biden Life Insurance Policy

{link » Biden Reveals Location of Secret VP Bunker}

“Vice President Joe Biden, well-known for his verbal gaffes, may have finally outdone himself, divulging potentially classified information meant to save the life of a sitting vice president.”
 — By Jonathan Passantino, FOXNews.com

I know everyone thinks Joe Biden is nuts. Perhaps some of those hair plugs got anchored too deep? But I have an alternate explanation: Joe Biden is President Obama's life insurance policy!

Think about it. Can our national disaster-in-the-making get any worse? You betcha, with Crazy-Joe at the helm it would be. That's why Obama created the Crazy-Joe Biden Life Insurance Policy.

And just to be extra, extra cautious about the President's well being, Obama supporters also put in place the Bat-Out-of-Hell Pelosi Supplemental Insurance.

Post #752 The Crazy-Joe Biden Life Insurance Policy

Useful Idiots Who Happen to Be Juice

{link » What Is To Be Done?}

“A different strategy is to join with the accusers to accuse. Throughout the history of Jew-hatred, there have always been some Jews who choose to ally themselves with the haters. We shouldn't necessarily be too hard on such people. Being Jewish at a time when this is increasingly unpopular is not a comfortable business, and seeking to escape disapproval and contempt by throwing in your lot with the principal condemners is an understandable, though unlovely, response. Such compliant Jews are naturally of great value to anti-Semites, especially in a populist political regime, since they can be paraded to legitimize anti-Semitic activities; hence the rewards these Jews can gain, in terms of approval and esteem from people who are effectively their social superiors, are very great. So even where the role they play is a contemptible one, it is nonetheless understandable that some Jews will be unable to resist these temptations. But most people of course will not want to take that road.”
 — by Eve Garrard via normblog

Eve Garrard presents a reasoned discussion of the resurgence of world-wide Jew-hatred, formerly misnomered as anti-Semitism. Before I continue my own remarks, be assured that the title of my post does NOT presume to include Eve Garrard among those that I am calling "Useful Jewish Idiots".

Neither does my title refer to such cretins as Noam Chomsky and Bobby Fischer, a dwindling group of anomalies (Fischer having thankfully dropped dead and gone to hell) for whom I reserve the title "Useful Jewish F*cking Idiots". Nor am I including in my present discussion such Holyshitwoods as Steven Spielberg and Barbra Streisand, for whom is reserved the distinguished title "Useful Jewish Stupid Idiots".

The target group of my disgust is that specially vile set of pampered and privileged youth who populate the campuses of our formerly elite universities, most especially my own alma mater, Columbia University. These "Useful Jewish Idiots" (UJI) are the extermination-camp capos-in-training of the next and probably final Holocaust, who will earn their brief respite from the real final solution by being the errand boys and girls for their Jew-hater superiors. These UJI are the ones most likely to be the ushers at Columbia's next gala event in honor of that scumbag I'madinnerjacket.

Today's UJI are just the latest in a recurring generational series who are ordinarily spawned from leftist-minded individuals caught up in some frenzy of idealistic goals contorted into a hero-worshiping cult. In the first half of the twentieth century they were the worshipers of Lenin and Stalin. Today, they worship other messianic pied pipers. These UJI are the antithesis of the youth of Israel, all of whom, with extremely rare exception, serve their country with pride. Today's Israeli youth are the cultural descendents of the magnificent Jonathan Netanyahu.

There isn't much that can be done to counter humanity's desperate need for scapegoats. That is simply our fate as a species. If there were no juice, humanity would invent them. There isn't anything to be done about Jew-hatred because Jews have evolved over the ages into humanity's ever convenient and favorite scapegoats. Nevertheless, perhaps there is something that can be done. As Viktor Frankl wrote:

“What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life — daily and hourly. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”

Currently, my own task in life, as I see it, is to expose the UJI for what they are: useful idiots for Jew-haters everywhere, and useless pieces of shit for everyone else, most especially for themselves.

Post #751 Useful Idiots Who Happen to Be Juice

She asserts; she lies; she's a skank!

Full Disclosure: The following is an opinion piece. I have formulated my opinions based on my own readings of the issues discussed, and on my own interpretations of those readings. My interpretations are, in turn, based on a lifetime of study, research, and contemplation of information I trust to be factual. If you have an opinion substantially different from mine, that's fine. Just don't bother marshaling your "facts" in a futile effort to convince me of the error of my ways. Unlike you, I don't give a shit what your opinion is. If I did, I'd be reading your blog, and possibly commenting on your posts.

Nancy Pelosi makes assertions. Nancy Pelosi lies. You want another opinion? OK, Nancy Pelosi is a skank. But you already knew that. It is not my intention here to pile on evidentiary material; that would be boring. Rather, I would like to discuss that which seems obvious to me (and perhaps to you as well) but which I have not observed to be much discussed in the course of the unfolding saga of the lying skank.

My disclosure notwithstanding, there are those whose opinions interest me very much. These people are among those whose commentary I follow regularly. Some of these, like Norman Geras, tend to consider important issues of morality and ethics from a philosophic standpoint. Others, like Victor Davis Hanson, are more pragmatic in their approach. Be that as it may, virtually everyone who expresses an opinion has an agenda.

The vast majority of opinions expressed, however, are assertions masquerading as truth, with an assemblage of referenced assertions masquerading as proof. But truth is not assertion; and assertion is not proof. You can quote me on that.

None of this is meant to imply that opinions have no value. The specific value, however, depends very much on the source, on what your expectations are, and, crucially, whether or not you know how to optimize the opinion's intrinsic value. The key to such optimization is in properly weighting the opinion per se with your understanding of the source's agenda vis a vis your own expectations.

I have lived long enough to have experienced good times and bad, and as a result have had ample time to prioritize a set of expectations for a rewarding life. And, since no man is an island (you can quote me on that, too), I seek the opinions of those whom I respect and whose agendas I perceive to be not at odds with mine. Along with my own world view, such valued opinions serve to guide me through the minefield of life. So far, so good.

Post #750 She asserts; she lies; she's a skank!

Don't PC On Me!

You just never know. Having recently concluded that no amount of effort can persuade anyone with strongly held opinions to change his mind about anything, along comes a revelation that contradicts such a gloomy conclusion, leaving me bewildered by what I have read, and more importantly, somewhat hopeful about the human condition.

I do not usually quote an entire post written elsewhere, but I felt compelled, in this instance, to save you the minor effort of clicking on the link to the original, in the hope that that would improve the chances you will read it.

{link » Letter of Amends from a Recovering Liberal in Berkeley}

Dear friends, family, loved ones, conservatives, Republicans, libertarians, my brother in law, Sam, and my cousin Joe: I am sorry and you were right.

These are not easy words for anyone to utter, much less a leftist from Berkeley, or a recovering leftist, that is. Even though I've been in recovery for 14 months, 2 weeks, and 3 days, leftists are always right in your face, in an I-hate-you-if-you-disagree sort of way. Hence, this letter of amends to all the people I've lectured, scolded, ranted and raved at, and otherwise annoyed during my 30 plus years of "progressive" politics.

My recovery program urges a fierce moral inventory, a cleansing of heart and mind (kind of like a "forgiveness tour" but without the scary dictators), so here goes:

To my brother in law, Sam, for blasting you in that Chinese restaurant for voting for Reagan, mea culpa.

To my cousin Joe for calling you a traitor when you became an MBA, started holding a real job (as opposed to most of us Berkeley types who are psychotherapists, massage therapists and aromatherapists), and became a conservative, my bad.

To my goddaughter whom I told when she was l0 years old that Republicans were bad, Democrats were good (yes I really did say this), and who got confused and tearful because she lives in a suburb where most people are Republicans, kid, what in the world was I thinking?

To my leftist friends, with whom I agreed that 9/ll was the US's fault, you and I were all such jerks.

To those potential friends whom I dumped when I found out you were conservative, your gain is my loss.

To all those columnists and editors whom I harangued with angry letters and e mails, sorry, sorry, sorry.

And finally to me, Robin, for installing you for the last 27 years in the far left cult of the People's Republic of Berkeley, where Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the SLA, where the Black Panthers had their violent beginnings and the heads of the Black Muslims are jailed for murder and rape, my apologies, girl.

I didn't know any better. I thought the whole world lived in areas where the streets are filthy, aggressive street behavior is allowed because the perps are victims of capitalism, and where you can easily get mugged walking down a street or eating in a restaurant at noon. (By the way, with the Left in charge, expect gangs, crime, indoctrination of 5 year olds and general anarchy to be coming soon to a neighborhood near you.)

Given that the media is pretty much censored (good luck finding a conservative book in your local "independent" book store or hearing a Republican speak anywhere), you didn't know that a party of grown ups even existed that didn't advocate screaming at others as the preferred mode of communication. So to my dear Robin, apologies for what I put you through, what I deprived you of, and my pledge to do better.

Cousin Joe, Sam, et al, you may be wondering how I did a l80 in 1 1/2 years. How did I go from a rabid, sanctimonious liberal whom you steadfastly avoided at family gatherings to a fan of Limbaugh, Hannity, and Savage? Recovery encourages us to share our story, so here's mine:

In February of 2008, I saw a new client, a bright and sensitive young woman who came in looking like she just escaped a war zone. In some ways she had; she had innocently shared with others at her job that she voted for Hillary rather than Obama. Immediately she was being targeted for abuse that put her in fear for not only her job, but her life.

We both suddenly became aware that something had grown really dark in the Democratic Party. I started hearing about many other incidents where loyal Democrats were being physically and emotionally threatened for supporting Hillary. A woman in Berkeley had her front window broken because it displayed a poster of Hillary. Randi Rhodes, an Air America talk show leftist, called Hillary a f______ witch. (Rhodes was recently promoted to a national talk radio show, illustrating another disturbing trend: the deafening silence about what Rush Limbaugh has dubbed the new "thug-ocracy.)

An acquaintance had her car broken into, and the only item stolen was a NoObama bumper sticker. A South Park episode featured an episode where a nuclear weapon was being aimed at Hillary's genitals. My local greeting card store sold very flattering cards about Obama, insulting ones about Hillary, and a Hillary "nutcracker." When I complained, the young male manager literally laughed in my face.

Things went from bad to worse when Sarah Palin entered the scene. When Geraldine Ferraro ran for Vice President, there was no debasement of her character, no sexual threats. But with Palin, a full scale "wilding" ensued that chillingly reminded me of the random sexual attacks on women by gangs of men in New York. She was called every vile name in the book by both male and female liberals.

Actress Sarah Bernhardt hoped a gang of black males would rape her. When Palin's church was torched with children inside, the press was missing in action (somehow I imagine the press would have been all over this if Obama's church were torched). Not only was the misogyny disgusting, but the classism was abhorrent. The Democrats, by ridiculing Palin's voice and her education, were acting like arrogant snobs. The party had changed, I had changed, and the differences looked irreconcilable.

The final straw for me was when a close friend flew into a rage at me when she learned I wasn't supporting Obama. The political became personal when she began impugning my character. Worse yet, she tried to intimidate me into changing my mind by threatening to dump me.

Suddenly a light went on. The peace and love and flower power of the old left was dead and gone (if it even existed to begin with except in my imagination). The Democrats had morphed into a power hungry Thought Police, and I was done with them. My new motto in life: don't PC on me.

So this is my letter of amends, and I hope that I can be forgiven by all whom I've offended. I knew not what the heck I was doing. But now the problem is: how in the world does one be a conservative these days? How to stay brave and committed when conservatives are being targeted, punished, and shunned on a daily basis? How to sleep at night knowing that the country I have finally come to love may be destroyed from within by a massive Big Brother government?

I guess I'll just have to do a step one, as we 12 stepper's call it, and turn it all over to my Higher Power.

Love,

Robin

Post #749 Don't PC On Me!

Zaniness in a Dinner Jacket

{link » I Guess You Had To Be There}

The Barack Obama Celebrity Roast

(Thundering tympanies, swirling spotlights)

Announcer

Live! From the fabulous Turtle Bay Ballroom at United Nations Headquarters, it's the Rat Pack of Evil All-Star International Celebrity Roast of President Barack Obama!

(orchestra fanfare: 'Make 'Em Laugh')

With Pyongyang funnyman Kim Jong-Il! Borscht Belt headliner Vlady Putin! Queen of Mean Liz Windsor! Saudi Sheik of Schtick King Abdullah! Beijing jokeslinger Hu Jintao! Wacky al Qaeda Caveman Ayman al-Zawahiri! Nick 'the Knife' Sarkozy! Sassy Wanda Sykes! South-of-the-border slapstick team Hugo Chavez and the Castro Brothers! Taliban Madman Mullah Omar! Jon Stewart! Lovable Libyan lush Muammar al-Ghadaffi! Grovelin' Guvner Gordy Brown! Bashar "The Chin" al-Assad! The Hamas Fattah Dancers! And starring your Master of Ceremonies -- that suntan man with a plan from Iran -- that Persian with a nuclear perversion -- Sheckyyyyyy Ahmedinejad!

(applause)

WARNING: Not for the thin-skinned, faint-of-heart, Kool-Aid drinking, Wanda-Sykes-loving, Jon-Stewart-Fan-Club set. But recommended for just folks.

Post #748 Zaniness in a Dinner Jacket

Glazed Eyes Devoured by Free-Lunch Society

{link » Live Free or Die}

“And now the last holdout, the United States, is embarking on the same grim path: After the President unveiled his budget, I heard Americans complain, oh, it's another Jimmy Carter, or LBJ's Great Society, or the new New Deal. You should be so lucky. Those nickel-and-dime comparisons barely begin to encompass the wholesale Europeanization that's underway. The 44th president's multi-trillion-dollar budget, the first of many, adds more to the national debt than all the previous 43 presidents combined, from George Washington to George Dubya. The President wants Europeanized health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized education, and, as the Europeans have discovered, even with Europeanized tax rates you can't make that math add up.”
 — Mark Steyn, Eugene C. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism, Hillsdale College

The lunatic left is neither daunted nor deterred by what the Europeans are just discovering. They know that the masses being herded to the slaughter of European-style government are too lazy, fat, and stupid to even consider the ultimate consequences of this Free-Lunch Society that is being established right in front of their glazed eyes.

Post #747 Glazed Eyes Devoured by Free-Lunch Society

The First Killer App of NKS

{link » 7 years of NKS—and its first killer app}

“But here is the crucial point: because those computations are not part of what we have historically studied or discussed, no systematic tradition of human language exists to describe them. So when we use natural human language as input to Wolfram|Alpha, we are inevitably going to be describing that thin set of computations that have long linguistic traditions, and are computationally reducible. Those computations cover the traditional sciences. But in a sense it is the very ubiquity of computational irreducibility that forces there to be only small islands of computational reducibility — which can readily be identified even from quite vague linguistic input.

If one looks at Wolfram|Alpha today, much of what it computes is firmly based on OKS (the “Old Kind of Science”), and in this sense Wolfram|Alpha can be viewed as a shining example of what can be achieved with pre-NKS mathematical science. And curiously, after all these years, it is also perhaps the first clear consumerized example of universal computation at work. For now, for the first time, anyone will be able to walk up to a computer and immediately see just how diverse a range of possible computations it can do.

So what about NKS? NKS is certainly crucial to the very conceptualization of Wolfram|Alpha. And even today one can use Wolfram|Alpha to do a little NKS: one can type in "rule 30″, or ask about other NKS systems that can readily be specified in linguistic terms. But in the future there is tremendous opportunity to do more with NKS in Wolfram|Alpha. Today, Wolfram|Alpha uses existing models from science and other areas, then does computations based on these models. But what if it could find new models? What if it could invent on the fly? Do science on the fly? That is precisely what NKS suggests should be possible: exploring the computational universe on request, and finding things out there that are useful for some particular specified purpose.

Whether today’s computers are fast enough to do this well I do not know. But perhaps by next year, Wolfram|Alpha will not only be a killer app made possible by NKS — it will also provide an outlet for the full richness of the computational universe that has been revealed to us by NKS. But for now: tomorrow (May 15) is the day we begin to make Wolfram|Alpha live — the first killer app of NKS.”
 — Stephen Wolfram

Looks like Wolfram|Alpha launches tomorrow. Bon voyage!

Post #746 The First Killer App of NKS

§ I Am Music and I Pick the Songs: Ain't That a Shame

{Song #10 « Song #11 » Song #12}

§ ≡ One of an ongoing series of posts in which I pick, in my not-so-humble opinion, the best songs of the second millennium. Feel free to offer constructive dissenting opinions; preferably set to music.

Song #11 is Ain't That a Shame, sung by Fats Domino.

I started my first job in the summer of 1955. The salary was zero, but it came with a decent benefits package: room and board; health care; and my parents' tender-loving-care. And to top it all off, there was a daily ham-and-cheese sandwich for lunch, which it was my duty to buy at the deli down the street for my father, his partner Frank, and myself. I was "helping" my father in his typewriter store in Elmont, New York, home of Belmont Park, the major thoroughbred horse-racing facility.

Another perk of my job was to listen to the radio on the workbench where I took apart the typewriters my Dad's customers left to be serviced. The song I remember best from that summer before my first year in Hicksville High School was Fats Domino's original version of Ain't That a Shame.



Post #745 § I Am Music and I Pick the Songs: Ain't That a Shame

Living in the Moment

{link » That Was Then, This is Now…}

“The current furor over the three water-boarded terrorists is right out of the old Greek idea of excess leading to hubris leading to nemesis leading to destruction. Do we really wish to revisit 2002?”
 — Victor Davis Hanson

If you Google the title of my present post you will get 95,300,000 results, the vast majority of which are in favor of it (I did the math). Not to put too fine a point on it, this explains many ills of our enlightened society.

The concept of "living in the moment" has a duality that is the scourge of civilization, namely "re-inventing the wheel". I have touched upon this issue previously (see for example, here, here, and here). Re-inventing the wheel, of course, is what people must do after having been bombed into the stone age by their ancestors who ignored the lessons of history.

The real problem with living in the moment is not the intent of the sophism, which is a prescription for self-fulfillment. The problem stems from our inclination to extrapolate everything to the extreme, thereby subverting a prescription for self-fulfillment to a prescription for self-destruction through ignorance of history's lessons.

Instead of guiding our younger generations to progressively better lives through the leveraging of past achievements, often gained at great cost in lives and limited resources, we encourage a self-actualization that is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, each cycle of vicious repetition occurring at vastly diminished natural resources. Johnny is not academically challenged. Johnny's future has been stunted by his parents' misguided nurturing of naivety, ignorance, and the worship of trivial accomplishment.

Every child is a potential genius. The mistake most parents make, along with those who worship at the alter of political correctness, is that genius will spring forth fully formed like Athena, the favorite daughter of Zeus, born fully armed from his forehead after he swallowed her mother, Metis. But even the great genius Isaac Newton stood "on the shoulders of Giants".

Is there a point to all this? Yes — namely this: The best way to live in the moment is to read a book.

Post #744 Living in the Moment

Blonds — gotta love 'em!

Q: What do you call a blond who wants to write a novel?
A: Alexandra Dumbass!
 — TheBigHenry

 h/t Theo

Post #743 Blonds — gotta love 'em!

What is wrong with you?

The short answer is that you have little sense of proportion.

Humans occupy the midrange of the dimension scale between the Planck length and the distance to our cosmological horizon. Though the extent of this physical scale is virtually unfathomable, it is instructive to examine it mathematically. Let's choose the meter [m] as our unit of measure because it represents an easily grasped unit of length. For example, 1.8m is a typical height for a man.

At the small end of the length scale is the Planck length, which is the smallest distance or size about which anything can be known. This incredibly small size is 1.6×10^(-35)m [in scientific notation: 1.6 times 10 raised to the negative power 35]! That is 35 orders of magnitude (i.e., factors of 10) shorter than a man!

At the long end of the length scale is the distance to the edge of the observable universe, which is now located about 46.5 billion light-years away. We need to convert this length to meters. First, the number 46.5 billion is 4.65×10^(10) in scientific notation. Next, a light year is the distance light travels in one year, which is about 9.46×10^(15)m. Multiplying these two huge numbers give us 4.4×10^(26)m! That is 26 orders of magnitude longer than the hight of a man! Together with the 35 orders of magnitude on the short end, we have a length scale totaling 61 orders of magnitude with which to compare lengths!

Considering the immensity of the numerical sweep described above, it is small wonder that our brains have evolved to make absolute comparisons for only small numbered quantities, let us stipulate numbers in the range one to a million (to be generous). Everyone can visualize a single dollar bill. We can visualize ten of them, and even a wad of a hundred bills fairly easily. It gets increasingly harder as we progress to one thousand, ten thousand, and a hundred thousand individual bills. A million bills is a stretch.

I doubt anyone can visualize a billion individual dollar bills, which is a thousand times larger than my generous estimate of our capacity to visualize a million. What about a trillion, which is a thousand times larger than a billion? No you can't!

Have you ever noticed how often people mix up the words million and billion when discussing the economy? I have, but I'm used to dealing with large (and small) numbers expressed in scientific notation. We may not be able to visualize large numbers, but we can conceptualize them. This means that we can't make sense of comparisons involving huge discrepancies unless we express them on a scale for which our brains are wired, namely meters when comparing lengths (for example). If we discuss money (for example) most people understand what it means to have an annual salary of $40,000 and that a cup of coffee costs about $1.20 anywhere (well, maybe not at Starbucks).

When President Obama asked his Cabinet to come up with budget-cuts totaling $100 million, many people saw how ridiculous that proposal was, because if the $3.6 trillion Federal budget was scaled down to a personal budget of $40,000 the President's $100 million cuts amounted to a mere cup of coffee.

So the President upped the ante. He is now proudly proclaiming Federal budget-cuts totaling $17 billion, which, he posits, is "big bucks even in Washington D.C."! Really, Mr. President? Really?

This "great new budget-cut" is 170 times larger than his first one. BFD! So now, instead of bragging about an annual cup-of-coffee, he's bragging about a cup-of-coffee every other day!

What is wrong with you? The short answer is that you have little common sense.

Post #742 What is wrong with you?

My Response to the Wolfram|Alpha Webinar Survey

{link » Wolfram|Alpha Webinar}

Dear [Senior Research Associate, Wolfram|Alpha Team],

I was impressed with the concepts of Alpha as demonstrated by Stephen Wolfram. Please feel free to visit my blog where I posted my first impressions after the webinar:

God's Gift to Inquiring Minds — Wolfram|Alpha

As to the specific questions for which you would like to have feedback:

1. • I have been retired (from Los Alamos National Laboratory) for seven years now, so I am no longer an active researcher. My main interest is to observe and reflect on our civilization's struggle to outwit the forces of ignorance that wish to drag us into the dark ages, only this time with depleted resources. I think that Alpha is an important victory for the good guys in this ongoing struggle.
   • My wife is a budding researcher in the area of cognitive linguistics, and I intend to cooperate with her to see how she can utilize Alpha's potential. I think it will prove to be a fruitful effort.


2. • I believe Alpha is here to stay, albeit as a living and evolving entity, because of the brilliant minds behind this initial effort.
   • I am not a business-model specialist so I don't think in terms of "for profit" planning. Nevertheless, I feel strongly that Alpha is well planned to support the owners' capitalistic aims (nothing wrong with that), and simultaneously serving the civilized world's needs at relatively low cost. I think an obvious route to this end is to blend proprietary data with some form of open-source means for others to curate their own special sets of data.
   • I also envision a feed-back loop for Alpha to generate knowledge data bases for its own use.


3. • As to things that can aid in getting a foot-hold for Alpha such that its potential can germinate, again that is not really my area of expertise, but I can intuit a few things.
   • I don't believe it would be cost-effective to try to appeal to the masses who flock to Facebook. Perhaps some day everyone will find a use for Alpha, but not until the thirst for knowledge becomes more popular than the thirst for power, money, and information about Paris Hilton.
   • A firm foundation for an evolving system is crucial.
   • Concentrate on robust flexibility, because I think it's hard to predict Alpha's evolving capabilities, just as it was in the early days of personal computing, when most people couldn't think of anything other than trivial "balance your checkbook" applications.

I am looking forward to your launch, and I wish you good luck in your revolutionary endeavor.

Best, Henri

Post #741 My Response to the Wolfram|Alpha Webinar Survey

§ I Am Music and I Pick the Songs: Only the Good Die Young

{Song #9 « Song #10 » Song #11}

§ ≡ One of an ongoing series of posts in which I pick, in my not-so-humble opinion, the best songs of the second millennium. Feel free to offer constructive dissenting opinions; preferably set to music.

Song #10 is Only the Good Die Young, sung by Billy Joel.

Joel attended Hicksville High School, and was expected to graduate in 1967. However, due to playing at a piano bar, he was one English credit short of the graduation requirement; he overslept on the day of an important exam, owing to his late-night musician's lifestyle. Faced with a summer at school to complete this requirement, he decided not to continue. He left high school without a diploma to begin a career in music, later telling an interviewer he'd told the Hicksville Board of Education, "I'm not going to Columbia University, I'm going to Columbia Records." Columbia did, in fact, become the label that eventually signed him.

Columbia University, in fact, was where I earned my master's and doctorate, after graduating from Hicksville High in 1959. During my student days in Hicksville, America was known as the great Melting Pot of the world, referring to it's status as the nation of immigrants. In 1949, I had been one of those immigrants. In those days there were very few Jewish kids in Hicksville High. Although they were not required to wear a yellow Star-of-David on their shirt, it was common knowledge who they were. They were the kids whose names appeared at the top of the school's honor roll. One of them was known to be dating a pretty, blond, blue-eyed, Irish-Catholic girl. That's how the great American melting pot worked.



Post #740 § I Am Music and I Pick the Songs: Only the Good Die Young

Twitter and the Holographic Principle

{link » Limit on information density}

Entropy, if considered as information, is measured in bits. The total quantity of bits is related to the total degrees of freedom of matter/energy. In a given volume, there is an upper limit to the density of information about the whereabouts of all the particles, which compose matter in that volume, suggesting that matter itself cannot be subdivided infinitely many times, and that there must be an ultimate level of fundamental particles. As the degrees of freedom of a particle are the product of all the degrees of freedom of its sub-particles, were a particle to have infinite subdivisions into lower-level particles, then the degrees of freedom of the original particle must be infinite, violating the maximal limit of entropy density. The holographic principle thus implies that the subdivisions must stop at some level, and that the fundamental particle is a bit (1 or 0) of information.

{link » Entropy (information theory)}

The entropy rate of English text is between 1.0 and 1.5 bits per letter, or as low as 0.6 to 1.3 bits per letter, according to estimates by Shannon based on human experiments.

Armed with the holographic principle, as briefly outlined in the above excerpts, we are in a position to estimate the value-added contribution of an individual tweet to the repository of human knowledge. This is what I aim to do in this post.

As everyone knows, if an infinite number of monkeys were typing on an infinite number of keyboards, sooner or later one of them would eventually replicate Shakespeare's Hamlet. It follows that millions of Twitter users can do better. The question is, "How much better"?

Let's make the very reasonable assumption that the entropy-rate of English text is 1 bit per letter (or, more generally, any character on a standard keyboard, including the "space"). Let us stipulate, further, that 140 arbitrary characters, namely a tweet, constitutes a value-added unit of human knowledge. Furthermore, we make the simplifying assumption that the Earth is an effective black hole (a technical term) of information storage, whose event horizon would have a radius equivalent to that of a cranberry.

Now, according to Leonard Susskind:

Adding one bit of information will increase the area of the horizon of any black hole by one square Planck unit.

A Planck unit of area is the incredibly small number of 10^-70 square meters! The scientific notation means that this size area is calculated as the reciprocal of the number "1 followed by 70 zeros", in units of square meters!

Moving right along, we proceed to guesstimate the surface area of a cranberry. If we take the nominal radius of a cranberry to be 10 millimeters, its area is 1257 square millimeters, which for convenience we round up to 1400 square millimeters (for obvious reasons). Dividing by 140 bits per unit of value-added human knowledge, we get 10 square millimeters of effective storage area available for Planck units of human knowledge on Earth.

Now we compute the ratio of 10 square millimeters to one square Planck unit of area, viz.

(10 square millimeters) / (1 million square millimeters per 1 square meter) = 10^-5 square meters;

10^-5 / 10^-70 = 10⁶⁵ units (maximum) of human knowledge that can be stored on Earth

Finally, the reciprocal of the above computed ratio allows us to conclude that the value-added unit of human knowledge contributed by a typical tweet is the remarkably small number 10^-65.

Seems hardly worth the effort, though admittedly, your mileage may vary.

The Holographic Principle

Credit & © E. Winfree, et al. (Caltech)

Post #739 Twitter and the Holographic Principle

Virtuous life is straightforward; the devil is in the details.

“It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”
 — President Bill Clinton

Not only is President Clinton's famous remark funny, but it is also profound. What it says to me is (and, yes, the latter word is subject to interpretation): Life may be straightforward in principle, but it is not a simple matter of multiple choice. As Big Al used to say,

“Things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
 — Albert Einstein

When Egypt attacked Israel in 1973 on the holiest day of the year in the Jewish calendar, the IDF did not feel compelled to wait till sundown to fight back. The Commandment to keep the Sabbath holy must not be interpreted to mean "For thou art a stupid f*ck."

Our spiritual forefathers who "brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" did not, I am convinced, intend for this nation, the best the world has ever produced, to become a nation of stupid f*cks.

The spiritual, moral, and legal infrastructure of the United States is documented in our American Testament: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, in which Lincoln defended the Declaration and Constitution. This great Nation, the unique combination of brilliant antecedents, heroic defenders, and a preponderence of well-meaning, generous, and common-sensical citizenry, must not be allowed to perish from an earth filled with human detritus and barbarism.

Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, ..., Lincoln, ... did not dedicate their lives to a nation that would risk its continued existence by allowing the human detritus of the uncivilized, as well as the semi-civilized European, world to dictate to us the rules of engagement. We have not, will not, and need not engage in the barbaric tactics favored by our adversaries. But we must not succumb to the mindless self-destructive rage of the stupid f*cks among us.

The waterboarding of known terrorists is neither akin to premeditated murder of thousands of civilians, nor is it morally equivalent to beheading individuals with dull knives. Life is not a simple-minded exercise in multiple-choice at Disney World for the purpose of canonization. Life in the real world is a risk/reward analysis of prudent measures for the purpose of survival.

Post #738 Virtuous life is straightforward; the devil is in the details.

God's Gift to Inquiring Minds — Wolfram|Alpha

{link » Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming!}

“Some might say that Mathematica and A New Kind of Science are ambitious projects. But in recent years I’ve been hard at work on a still more ambitious project — called Wolfram|Alpha. And I’m excited to say that in just two months it’s going to be going live”
 — Stephen Wolfram, March 5, 2009

And when it does, within a few weeks time, I predict it will become the long awaited killer app that will transform the way the civilized world processes data, information, and knowledge.

Having been invited to participate in a webinar this afternoon, wherein Wolfram himself presented a one-hour live demo of the soon-to-be launched system, I came away feeling the kind of excitement with which I first greeted the Web itself 15 years ago. I sensed then that the online experience will transform the way in which we will conduct our daily activities. I now sense that Wolfram|Alpha will transform the way in which we will think about things.

I predict Wolfram|Alpha, which basic computational knowledge engine will be available online free of charge, will eventually become the indispensible tool for education, business, and academic research.

{link » Stephen Wolfram discusses Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine}

“There's been great anticipation around Stephen Wolfram's ambitious project to create a comprehensive "computational knowledge engine." The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University will host a sneak preview of the Wolfram|Alpha system, and a discussion of its underlying technology and implications. Participants will include Wolfram|Alpha founder Stephen Wolfram and Professor of Law Jonathan Zittrain. Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, the author of A New Kind of Science, and now the creator of Wolfram|Alpha. He is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research.”
 — Berkman Center, April 28, 2009

Post #737 God's Gift to Inquiring Minds — Wolfram|Alpha