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Monday, May 30, 2011

The Angry-Arabs Game

Angry birds; angrier Arabs.


SAN ANSELMO, CA - MARCH 18:  An image of the p...Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Related source » Video Game Design
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“Angry birds [the video game called Angry Birds] is brilliant because it touches several of our most basic impulses. The player flings birds from a slingshot and tries to destroy various structures and kill the pigs within. It's a basic hunting metaphor, and pigs are a symbol for food in Western cultures. That part is obvious. The less obvious part of the addiction is the joy of destroying structures that are man-made. I believe this taps into our basic need to tear down the accomplishments of others in order to feel better about ourselves. It's Shadenfreude - the satisfaction or pleasure we get from the misfortune of others. Someone unknown built those structures, and presumably they would be unhappy to know you knocked them down. The game would be far less satisfying if you were destroying trees or other natural creations.”
— Scott Adams, May 30, 2011 (dilbert.com)



I'm not a gamer. The only video game I ever tried was Pong, back when computing required job control instructions, software, and data input, all submitted to a big-iron mainframe via punched cards. I am sure this makes no sense at all to today's gamers.

But there is a non-video game that's a favorite in the Arab middle east today, which has its roots in the dark ages: the Angry-Arabs game. This game has imaginary goals but very real consequences, all of which are deadly. The imaginary goals involve an allocation of virgins-in-the-sky, in return for homicidal mayhem perpetrated by angry Arabs against Israeli Jews, the latter having created, by sheer inspiration and tenacious perspiration, an oasis of modernity in the midst of seventh-century depravity.

Like its video counterpart, the Angry-Arabs game offers visceral joy to its enthusiasts. They not only get to murder and maim those whose accomplishments they envy, but they also win favorable status among their bloodthirsty peers, as well as the anticipation of sexual favors from those virgins they've been having wet dreams about ever since their raging hormones kicked in.

The most disgusting aspect of this medieval depravity is the perverse insistence of Jew-hating enablers in the West that this homicidal game is merely an expression of protest for just grievances.

Post 1,642 The Angry-Arabs Game

Memorial Day 2011

Related source » Memorial Day 2011
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“Memorial Day 2011 is a United States federal holiday observed on the last Monday of May (May 30 in 2011). Formerly known as Decoration Day, it commemorates U.S. soldiers who died while in the military service. […] Begun as a ritual of remembrance and reconciliation after the Civil War, by the early 20th century, Memorial Day was an occasion for more general expressions of memory, as ordinary people visited the graves of their deceased relatives, whether they had served in the military or not.” [emphasis added]
— 30th May in 2011 (memorialday2011.org)


Your Sunshine misses you, still …
Mom and her Sunshine (circa 1950)
My Mom was born on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, the day the Great War ended.

She passed away 80½ years later on Memorial Day (the traditional date) May 30, 1999.

I miss her.

Post 1,641 Memorial Day 2011

Saturday, May 28, 2011

This Week's Best of Rule 5

Image via Русское фотосообщество №1

Post 1,640 This Week's Best of Rule 5

Of Men and Menschen

David Mamet for President!


Related source » Like shooting fish in a barrel
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“It's like a middle-school baseball team playing the Yankees.”
— Craig Newmark, May 28, 2011 (newmarksdoor.com)

Related source » David Mamet Explains His Shift to the Right
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“[NYT] While reading your new book, “The Secret Knowledge,” I thought, My God, in crucifying liberals, this guy is going to infuriate a huge chunk of the people who pay money to see plays. Are you concerned that you’re alienating your public?
[DM] I’ve been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When “American Buffalo” came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, “How dare he use that kind of language!” Of course I’m alienating the public! That’s what they pay me for.

[NYT] Years ago, you described “American Buffalo” as being about “how we excuse all sorts of great and small betrayals and ethical compromises called business.” In this book, you defend enormous payouts to C.E.O.’s working for failing corporations. You seem to have changed radically.
[DM] I have. Here’s the question: Is it absurd for a company to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to a C.E.O. if the company is failing? The answer is that it may or may not be absurd, but it’s none of our goddamned business. Because as Milton Friedman said, the question is not what are the decisions but who makes the decisions. Because when the government starts deciding what’s absurd, you’re on the road to serfdom.

[…]

[NYT] Sometimes in the book I thought you were just trying to anger some of your liberal friends, like when you wrote the West sees the Middle East conflict as “entertainment.”
[DM] No, I think that it’s true. There has always been a different standard for the Jews. We’re like “honorary Aryans,” as Hitler said of the Japanese. That means that we’re human beings only when it suits the world to treat us as human beings. There’s a pretty good book on the subject — the Torah.”
— By ANDREW GOLDMAN, May 27, 2011 (nytimes.com)



David Mamet really measures up. He is that rarest of Jewish Americans who was a traditional liberal while feeling his oats as a youth, and then became a mensch when he grew up and saw the liberal left for the insane asylum it had become.

It helps to read some serious non-fiction along the way to maturity. Obama's memoirs are not serious books. They are political campaign pamphlets, and it is not clear whether they qualify as non-fiction.

Post 1,639 Of Men and Menschen

Friday, May 27, 2011

Silencing the Lambs

  The Art of Stupefying Perversity


Western wall in Jerusalem at nightImage via Wikipedia
Related source » What Obama did to Israel
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“The very idea that Judaism’s holiest shrine is alien or that Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter is rightfully or historically or demographically Arab is an absurdity. And the idea that, in order to retain them, Israel has to give up parts of itself is a travesty. Obama didn’t just move the goal posts on borders. He also did so on the so-called right of return. Flooding Israel with millions of Arabs would destroy the world’s only Jewish state while creating a 23rd Arab state and a second Palestinian state — not exactly what we mean when we speak of a “two-state solution.” That’s why it has been the policy of the United States to adamantly oppose this “right.” Yet in his State Department speech, Obama refused to simply restate this position — and refused again in a supposedly corrective speech three days later. Instead, he told Israel it must negotiate the right of return with the Palestinians after having given every inch of territory. Bargaining with what, pray tell? […] Obama’s response to this relentless Palestinian intransigence? To reward it — by abandoning the Bush assurances, legitimizing the ’67 borders and refusing to reaffirm America’s rejection of the right of return. The only remaining question is whether this perverse and ultimately self-defeating policy is born of genuine antipathy toward Israel or of the arrogance of a blundering amateur who refuses to see that he is undermining not just peace but the very possibility of negotiations.” [emphasis added]
— By Charles Krauthammer, May 26, 2011 (washingtonpost.com)


Of course Charles' "only remaining question" is rhetorical, given that it relates to "perverse and ultimately self-defeating policy". And reasonable people have by now concluded beyond reasonable doubt that there is nothing genuine about Obama, especially where Israel's survival is concerned. And, unfortunately, he is not a blundering amateur. He is, in fact, a master of unrelenting stupefying perversity. He has raised Stalin's "Big Lie" stratagem to an art form.

Are you getting tired of hearing such harsh criticism of Obama? It's working. That is Obama's grand strategy. He has cultivated a vast herd of sheeple who yearn for a guaranteed lifetime of cradle-to-grave entitlements that will relieve them of all their worldly cares, including the burden of personal accountability. Now all he needs to do is provide his herd with a target for projecting any vestigial guilt they may experience for such coddling. That, dear reader, would be his harsh critics, who, by the way, are also getting bored with the constant need to point out the obvious.

I think we have underestimated this Conniver-in-Chief. He has managed to camouflage his grand strategy with banal repetition of seemingly-amateurish blundering and/or difficult-to-accept (for decent Americans) perversity of intentions. And the heavy mendacity-soaked ball is in our court. We, the bored yet much concerned critics of this slime-ball of Jew-hatred must continue batting this evil hatred back at him.

And so we shall.

Post 1,638 Silencing the Lambs

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

The Achilles' Heel of Joshua

 "The Children of Israel Crossing the Jordan"
by Gustave Doré

Related source » Joshua and the Exodus
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“As Moses' apprentice, Joshua was a major figure in the events of the Exodus. He accompanied Moses part of the way when he ascended Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. (Exodus 32:17) He was one of the twelve spies sent by Moses to explore and report on the land of Canaan (Numbers 13:16-17), and only he and Caleb gave an encouraging report, a reward for which would be that only these two of the spies would enter the promised land (Numbers 14:23-24).” [emphasis added]
— From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


After Moses had ascended Mount Sinai to receive God's Commandments, the Children of Israel succumbed to their fears of their unfamiliar circumstances and forced Moses' brother and deputy, Aaron, to make for them a golden idol to worship as a (false) god.

In his fury upon witnessing such lack of faith, Moses broke the Tablet of Commandments in two when he descended Sinai. I personally believe he determined, as a consequence of their blasphemy, that the Exodus required him to wander in the desert with his stiff-necked followers until such time that his followers comprised only those who had not experienced slavery in Egypt first hand. This weeding-out process lasted forty years.

Ultimately, Joshua and Caleb were the only two Israelites, from the generations who had departed from Egypt, who were given the privileges of crossing the Jordan River and of entering the Land of Israel. Therein lies the seed of Moses' greatest mistake.

The mistake was not that Moses overlooked the (future) great bounty of oil east of the Jordan River. It was that he allowed any of his own generation (not even excluding himself) to survive the forty years of wandering in the Sinai and to cross into the Promised Land.

Thus, the weeding-out from the Israelites' their slavery-induced mind-set, which was to lament their loss of familiar misery in Egypt so as to quell their fear of unknown challenges ahead, was incomplete. That inclination for self-delusional wishful-thinking is, I believe, the antecedent of what I refer to as the "Achilles' Heel of Joshua" or "Joshua's Flaw".

In the centuries since the Exodus, the so-called Joshua's Flaw has come to the fore repeatedly in the face of everlasting threats of annihilation by Jew-haters the world over. It remains the single most dangerous psychological flaw of Israel's (Jacob's) descendants.

Today, in the midst of a vengeful resurgence of world-wide Jew-hatred, a mere six and a half decades after its most cataclysmic eruption in millennia of persecution, we witness another episode of mass hysteria among the tribe of stiff-necked people. These, largely leftist, Jewish-Americans have concentrated their self-destructive behavior in Obama-idolatry, seemingly oblivious to Obama's clear intentions to subvert the greatest achievement of human will to survive and prosper after near annihilation.

How else can one comprehend Jews clinging, not to their bibles and guns, but to their perverse support of a baldfaced-lying Jew-hater? It is inconceivable to me that anything other than a psychological flaw of biblical proportion can account for such stiff-necked insistence on drinking hemlock-laced Kool-Aid.

Post 1,637 The Achilles' Heel of Joshua

Monday, May 23, 2011

Liberty, Creativity and Free Enterprise

All the rest is Shiite and Scheiss.


In this Rosh Hashana greeting card from the ea...Image via Wikipedia
Related source » The Unquenchable Envy Of Mounting Irrelevance
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“The Jews, many of whom have said a not-so-fond farewell to Europe to build a garden in the midst of an unrelenting desert, stand as testimony to the bankruptcy of the Left-wing Euro social philosophes still wallowing in the amoral Parisian gutters of Rousseau and Voltaire. The European economy makes virtually nothing that is not subsidized by taxpayers or protected from competition by trade restrictions. Europe has become a fat, lazy, and indebted continent of social parasites and government-protected jobs. […] We see the same attitudes from the American Left, as it seeks to subject the American people to a tax burden and regulatory regime invented in Europe, as well as to foster the demise of the Jewish state. Israel stands in sharp contrast to the Islamic world, having built a thriving, open economy on a culture of achievement, despite having no natural resources to speak of (unless a recent major gas discovery turns out to be real) and despite being in a state of almost constant warfare with envious, hateful, neighboring dictators awash in oil revenues.”
— Secular Apostate, May 23rd, 2011 (secularapostate.net)



The lines of demarcation are rapidly emerging from the chaos promulgated by leftists, big-government hacks, and terrorists. Time for people to roll-up their sleeves, smell the coffee, and throw the parasites out.

Over at "Secular Apostate" central, a refreshing update on how the healthy part of the world is faring. Go forth, and prosper.

Post 1,636 Liberty, Creativity and Free Enterprise

Sunday, May 22, 2011

A Camaraderie of Despicable Beings

The self-loathing Noam Chomsky

Cropped version of Noam chomsky.jpg.Image via Wikipedia
Related source » American Jews: breaking with old ideas
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“Another leading American Jew voicing doubts now about Obama is Alan Dershowitz. Will these people ultimately have the courage of their convictions – or are they not as brave (or talented) as Mamet? We shall see. We are back to the 1930s when German Jews thought it couldn’t happen to them.”
— May 21st, 2011 by Roger L Simon (pajamasmedia.com)

Related source » OBAMA TRYING HIS DAMNDEST TO START WW3
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“If I may be so bold, Netanyahu needs to take a page out of my playbook. He needs to give Obama the @$$kicking of a lifetime in his address to Congress. These Obama/Soros people are common gutter-scum street thugs, and need to be treated accordingly. TAKE OFF THE GLOVES AND BRING THE BEAT-DOWN. Because it is either that, or World War 3.”
— BY ANN BARNHARDT - MAY 19, AD 2011 (barnhardt.biz)



In times of stress and sorrow I have occasionally contemplated whether or not the multi-millennial persecution of my people could possibly be offset by sufficient benefits attendant to membership in the Jewish community. To date I continue to have my doubts. The accumulation of suffering strikes me as completely overwhelming any possible earthly accrual of benefits. As for benefits deferred to a supposed afterlife, I am personally quite skeptical.

Nevertheless, I am not, nor have I ever been in doubt about the horrific malevolence of Jew-hatred. Therefore, I am convinced there are but two ethical alternatives to continued suffering from the insanity of Jew-hatred: either support of the Jewish State of Israel, or the authentic conversion to another religion. The choice made by many, mostly leftist, Jews, however, is neither of those alternatives. It is, instead, to seek favor with Jew-haters by adopting, nay exceeding, their insane hatred. This option is completely and unforgivably unethical.

It is not only unethical; it is cowardly, traitorous and, ultimately, suicidal because the non-Jewish Jew-haters hate Jews no matter how hard those Jews try to emulate their oppressors.

The demonstrated self-loathing of Jew-hating Jews is not a unique example of such self-loathing psychosis. There exists a variant deviance such as exhibited by Michael Moore, for example, who spews his capitalism-hatred from the comfort and safety of his capitalistically acquired fortune. There is the Sean Penn deviant who spews his America-hatred from the comfort and safety of his Constitutionally protected American homeland. I could cite many more examples if I felt I could weather the sudden onset of intense nausea.

Suffice it to say that all such self-loathing deviants are members of a greater camaraderie of despicable beings.

Post 1,635 A Camaraderie of Despicable Beings

Saturday, May 21, 2011

This Week's Best of Rule 5

Image via Русское фотосообщество №1

Post 1,634 This Week's Best of Rule 5

Thursday, May 19, 2011

The Languishing Stiffness of Neck

Debbie Wasserman SchultzImage via Wikipedia
Related source » Jewish Donors Warn Obama on Israel
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“The Obama campaign has asked Penny Pritzker, Mr. Obama's 2008 national finance chairwoman, to talk with Jewish leaders about their concerns, Ms. Pritzker said. So far, she said, she's met with about a half dozen people. She said the campaign is in the process of assembling a larger team for similar outreach. "I do think there's an education job to be done, because there's lots of myths that abound and misunderstandings of the administration's record," she said. "The campaign is aggressively getting the information out there." […] Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D., Fla.), chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said the speech on Sunday should help set the record straight. "There's nothing like hearing it straight from the president of the United States—his expression that he is strongly pro-Israel." Some say the appointment of Ms. Wasserman-Schultz, who is Jewish, to run the DNC, is helpful in itself. […] Mr. Koch, a Democrat, said he had been considering voting Republican in 2012, but then he saw the House proposal for privatizing Medicare for people under age 55, which he opposes. He now expects to support Mr. Obama again. […] And last year, a poll by McLaughlin and Associates, a Republican polling firm, found that 46% of American Jews said they would consider voting for someone other than Mr. Obama.”
— Laura Meckler, MAY 19, 2011 (wsj.com)



Quick, someone please pass me a double-dose of industrial-strength antiemetic.

Where to begin? How about "she's met with about a half dozen people". Let me see, now. That amounts to roughly 6 people. She is on the brink of double-digit encounters!

Moving right along, we have the following dollop of tripe, "misunderstandings of the administration's record". Needs more work on the clarity of the message, don't you know? You know the type of misunderstandings here referenced, of course: When the administration revealed it was merely lying for campaign contributions and votes, it had no idea that people would have taken those lies seriously.

Then it reaches risible levels of hilarity: "There's nothing like hearing it straight from the president of the United States"! This president? Why, Obama is the personification of the spoken empty-word. That and the stuff coming out of the other end of his alimentary canal are indistinguishable.

So, 46% of American Jews said they would consider voting for someone other than Mr. Obama? You mean to tell me that 54% would not even consider voting for someone else? Are there really that many useful idiots loose on the streets of the United States?

How monstrously masochistic do you have to be to eat that much shit and come back for a second helping? And why hasn't Ed Koch exploded from all the shit he's ingested?

As David Mamet wrote in "The Wicked Son":
The rhetoric of sad reason, that Israel is an "experiment that has failed" is but the coward end of a spectrum whose bold extension is "kill all the Jews and drive them into the sea". [...] Ben-Gurion said, in the late forties, that the world was divided into two halves, those places the Jews could not stay and those to which they could not go. What has changed? The world still hates the Jews.
The blind and unthinking refusal to assess one's own duplicity and self-abasement is beyond belief. It is suicidal. Barely a generation beyond the grossest atrocity ever committed against any ethnic group of people, their direct descendants are willing, eager even, to engage in a world-wide debate about their own legitimacy within the community of nations and peoples!

Have the people of the Torah, whose multi-millennial history produced exemplars of brilliance in scholarship, ethics, theology, justice, medicine, technology, math, science, the arts, ... , lost their collective mind?

Post 1,633 The Languishing Stiffness of Neck

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Misdirection as Policy

   It's horseshit.


Image via Wikipedia
Related source » Slaves to Words
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“President Barack Obama's constant talk about "millionaires and billionaires" needing to pay higher taxes would be a bad joke, if the consequences were not so serious. Even if the income tax rate were raised to 100 percent on millionaires and billionaires, it would still not cover the trillions of dollars the government is spending. […] Then and now, people with the highest incomes have had the greatest flexibility as to where they will put their money. Buying tax-exempt bonds is just one of the many ways that "millionaires and billionaires" avoid paying hard cash to the government, no matter how high the tax rates go. Most working people don't have the same options. Their taxes have been taken out of their paychecks before they get them. Even more so today than in the 1920s, billions of dollars can be sent overseas electronically, almost instantaneously, to be invested in other countries-- creating jobs there, while millions of Americans are unemployed. That is a very high price to pay for class warfare rhetoric about taxing "millionaires and billionaires." Make no mistake about it, that kind of rhetoric wins votes for political demagogues-- and votes are their bottom line. But that is totally different from saying that it will bring in more tax revenue to the government.”
— Thomas Sowell, 2011/05/17 (townhall.com)



Politics has always been a dirty business. Yes, I know that everybody knows that. But The Obama has elevated dirty politics to an art form: Misdirection as Policy. The Won is The Conveyor of Crap; Purveyor of Putridity; Surveyor of Shit; Destroyer of Decency … . In a word, He is The Anti-Midas — everything He touches turns to shit. And the little people gobble it up like it was bottomless hot-fudge sundae.

Which all begs the question: Why do the billionaires like Big Bill the Gatekeeper, Warren the All-You-Can-Eat Buffet, and all those media millionaires and glamor gillionaires cheer Him on? Because they pretend to champion the little guy, while their money can't be touched. They have tax loopholes (cf., tax-free bonds, etc.) to shield their cash flowing all the way to those untraceable Swiss bank-accounts. The working stiffs have W-4 forms.

Don't you see? Gates and Buffet and all the rest can even pay an order of magnitude more than the amount of taxes collected from middle-class individuals, and it doesn't amount to stamp-money for them. But for the middle class it is, to quote that asshole VP, "A big effing deal!"

The shit-storm unleashed in 2008 is absolutely stifling to behold. The Englishman supposedly doesn't know enough to come in out of the rain. But the American working-stiff doesn't know when it's raining cat- and dog-shit.

Image via Theo Spark


Post 1,632 Misdirection as Policy

Monday, May 16, 2011

Opinions, Facts, Rights, and Privileges

“You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“You are entitled to rights, but you are not entitled to privileges.” — TheBigHenry

Rebecca Pidgeon at the premiere of Redbelt at ...Image via Wikipedia
Related source » Converting Mamet
A playwright’s progress

[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“[Mamet] saw he was Talking Left and Living Right, a condition common among American liberals, particularly the wealthy among them, who can, for instance, want to impose diversity requirements on private companies while living in monochromatic neighborhoods, or vote against school vouchers while sending their kids to prep school, or shelter their income while advocating higher tax rates. The widening gap between liberal politics and liberal life became real to him when, paradoxically enough, he decided at last to write a political play, or rather a play about politics. […] “But I saw the liberals hated George Bush. It was vicious. And I thought about it, and I didn’t get it. He was no worse than the others, was he? And I’d ask my liberal friends, ‘Well, why do you hate him?’ They’d all say: ‘He lied about WMD.’ Okay. You love Kennedy. Kennedy didn’t write Profiles in Courage—he lied about that. ‘Bush is in bed with the Saudis!’ Okay, Kennedy was in bed with the mafia.” […] How did the happiest, freest, and most prosperous country in history sprout from the Hobbesian jungle? “I realized it was because of this thing, this miracle, this U.S. Constitution.” The separation of powers, the guarantee of property, the freedoms of speech and religion meant that self-interested citizens had a system in which they could hammer out their differences without killing each other. Everyone who wanted to could get ahead. The Founders had accepted the tragic view of life and, as it were, made it pay. It’s a happy paradox: The gloomier one’s view of human nature—and Mamet’s was gloomy—the deeper one’s appreciation of the American miracle. […] “They were risking not only their own jobs but the jobs of everyone who had nothing to gain from the [screenwriters’ strike of 2007-08]—the drivers and scene painters and people who are on set 14 hours a day working their asses off. These working people were driven out of work by the writers—10,000 people losing their jobs at Christmastime. It was the goddamnedest thing I ever saw in my life. And for what? They didn’t know what they were striking for—just another inchoate liberal dream. The question occurs to me quite a lot: What do liberals do when their plans have failed? What did the writers do when their plans led to unemployment, their own and other people’s? One thing they can’t do is admit they failed. Why? To admit failure would endanger their position in the herd.” […] Finley is rabbi at Ohr HaTorah in Los Angeles, where Mamet attends services with his wife, the actress Rebecca Pidgeon, who converted to Judaism after their marriage in 1991. Mamet’s religious practice, along with his sensitivity to Israel, has deepened since he moved to Southern California and joined Ohr HaTorah. In 2006, he published a scorching book of essays, The Wicked Son, rebuking secular Jews for their (alleged) self-loathing and reluctance to defend Israel. The Wicked Son is dedicated to Finley. He is a creature who is not supposed to exist in nature: the Republican rabbi of a liberal congregation packed with show people. “For most of my congregants, I’m the only Republican they know,” he said.”
— MAY 23, 2011, VOL. 16, NO. 34 • BY ANDREW FERGUSON (weeklystandard.com)



Most people have an opinion on any given subject; most Jewish people have more than one [joke!]. This is as it should be, for freedom of thought (unlike freedom of speech) is unrestricted in any enforcible way. This is why people may fantasize at will, so long as they do not insist that their own fantasies are indistinguishable from facts. Facts are things that are indisputably the cases under consideration, at least in theory. Although in practice there is often dispute about what is or isn't a fact, such disputes can be adjudicated in a court of law. This is why our nation of laws is such a great country.

Rights, such as our right to free speech must be restricted to some extent, if only to prevent the ensuing mayhem caused by a false cry of "Fire!" in the proverbial crowded theater. We all cherish the rights vouchsafed by our Constitution, even as we acknowledge the accompanying restrictions necessitated by the sharing of those rights by a large population living in close proximity.

Privileges, however, are not the same as rights or entitlements. In most cases they must be earned by compliance with prescribed rules or regulations. The United States exists as a nation of laws. Privileges may be granted to individuals or groups of individuals in accordance with prescribed legal procedures. But they are not guaranteed in the manner of our Constitutional rights.

Why all this hemming and hawing about legalistic distinctions that we all learned from our parents, teachers and sensei? Because people tend to conflate opinions with facts and rights with privileges. If I had to guess, I would guesstimate that the vast majority of disputes, arguments and flame-wars erupt when one or both parties subsume fact with opinion and/or confuse privilege with right or entitlement. And once such conflation occurs, tempers flare, f-bombs explode, feelings are hurt, and rage rages on, most likely into the night and the following day.

Post 1,631 Opinions, Facts, Rights, and Privileges

Sunday, May 15, 2011

This Week's Best of Rule 5

Image via theospark.net

Post 1,630 This Week's Best of Rule 5

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Toujours la Moore's Law

Western Civilization Loves Moore's Law


Image representing Intel as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase
Related source » Moore’s Law Lives: the Future Is Still Alive
Why your life and the lives of your children and grandchildren are going to be a whole lot better than they might have been.
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

Intel Corp. announced Wednesday that Moore’s Law isn’t going to end anytime soon. Because of that, your life and the lives of your children and grandchildren are going to be a whole lot better than they might have been. Today, almost a half-century after it was first elucidated by legendary Fairchild and Intel co-founder Dr. Gordon Moore in an article for a trade magazine, it is increasingly apparent that Moore’s Law is the defining measure of the modern world. All other predictive tool[s] for understanding life in the developed world since WWII — demographics, productivity tables, literacy rates, econometrics, the cycles of history, Marxist analysis, and on and on — have failed to predict the trajectory of society over the decades … except Moore’s Law. Alone, this oddly narrow and technical dictum — that the power, miniaturization, size, and power of integrated circuit chips will, together, double every couple years — has done a better job than any other in determining the pace of daily life, the ups and downs of the economy, the pace of innovation, and the creation of new companies, fads, and lifestyles. It has been said many times that, beneath everything, Moore’s Law is ticking away as the metronome, the heartbeat, of the modern world. […] So, what made this week’s announcement — by Intel — so important? It is that almost from the moment the implications of Moore’s Law became understood, there has been a gnawing fear among technologists and those who understand technology that Moore’s Law will someday end — having snubbed up against the limits of, if not human ingenuity, then physics itself. Already compromises have been made — multiple processors instead of a single one on a chip, exotic new materials to stop leaking electrons — but as the channels get narrower and bumpier with molecules and the walls thinner and more permeable to atomic effects, the end seems to draw closer and closer. Five years away? Ten? And then what? What will it be like to live in a world without Moore’s Law … when every human institution now depends upon it? But the great lesson of Moore’s Law is not just that we can find a way to continuously better our lives — but that human ingenuity knows no bounds, nor can ever really be stopped. You probably haven’t noticed over the last decade the occasional brief scientific article about some lab at a university, or at IBM, Intel, or HP, coming up with a new way to produce a transistor or electronic gate out of just two or three atoms. Those stories are about saving Moore’s Law for yet another generation. But that’s the next chapter. Right here and now, the folks at Intel were almost giddy in announcing that what had been one of those little stories a decade ago — tri-gate transistors — would now be the technology in all new Intel chips.” [emphasis added]
— May 8, 2011, by Michael S. Malone (pajamasmedia.com)


In "Physics of the Future" [©2011] Michio Kaku writes:
Around 2020 or soon afterward, Moore's law will gradually cease to hold true and Silicon Valley may slowly turn into a rust belt unless a replacement technology is found. […] Transistors will be so small that quantum theory or atomic physics takes over and electrons leak out of the wires.
But somehow Intel's new architecture for its tri-gate transistor provides a workaround strategy that, at least for the time being, will enable Moore's law to operate beyond 2020, before the Heisenberg uncertainty principle again imposes its inexorable limitation for confining electrons within atomic-scale wires. Perhaps by that time, we will have solved the technological problems that currently confront quantum computing.

In any case, our technology giants such as Intel have extended the shelf life of the almighty Moore's Law, which has been keeping Western Civilization several steps ahead of those agents of mass-murder and seventh-century chaos arrayed against us. Long live human mind over human detritus.

Toujours la Moore's Law!



Apropos Moore's Law, M. Gordon Moore ranks #71 on the Forbes 400 Richest Americans, weighing-in at a net worth of 4.8 gigabucks (as of September 2012).

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Post 1,629 Toujours la Moore's Law

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

The Big Cruel World of Employers

It's so unfair!


CONCORD, CA - DECEMBER 17:  Jan Dean (C) with ...Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Related source » The 'Education' Mantra
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“One of the sad and dangerous signs of our times is how many people are enthralled by words, without bothering to look at the realities behind those words. One of those words that many people seldom look behind is "education." But education can cover anything from courses on nuclear physics to courses on baton twirling. Unfortunately, an increasing proportion of American education, whether in the schools or in the colleges and universities, is closer to the baton twirling end of the spectrum than toward the nuclear physics end. Even reputable colleges are increasingly teaching things that students should have learned in high school. […] When it comes to postgraduate study in tough fields like math and science, you often find foreign students at American universities receiving more of such degrees than do Americans. […] Too many of the people coming out of even our most prestigious academic institutions graduate with neither the skills to be economically productive nor the intellectual development to make them discerning citizens and voters. Students can graduate from some of the most prestigious institutions in the country, without ever learning anything about science, mathematics, economics or anything else that would make them either a productive contributor to the economy or an informed voter who can see through political rhetoric. On the contrary, people with such "education" are often more susceptible to demagoguery than the population at large. Nor is this a situation peculiar to America. In countries around the world, people with degrees in soft subjects have been sources of political unrest, instability and even mass violence. […] In other central European countries, between the two World Wars a rising class of newly educated young people bitterly resented having to compete with better qualified Jews in the universities and with Jews already established in business and the professions. Anti-Semitic policies and violence were the result. […] Such people have proven to be ideal targets for demagogues promoting polarization and strife. We in the United States are still in the early stages of that process. But you need only visit campuses where whole departments feature soft courses preaching a sense of victimhood and resentment, and see the consequences in racial and ethnic polarization on campus.”
— Thomas Sowell, 2011/05/10 (townhall.com)



Thomas Sowell is a man of color, a man of scholarship, a man of wisdom. He is a realist who is unafraid to express his views that often go against the grain of conventional "wisdom", a euphemism for politically correct dogma. Thomas Sowell is one of my heroes.

Sowell is an African-American, a Doctor of Economics, and a Christian. I am an Ashkenazi-American, a Doctor of Nuclear Physics, and a Jew. We frequently express very similar views in our posts. Can't we all just get along? Yes, we can. But a prerequisite, it would seem, would be a meaningful education.

It is hardly surprising that American university campuses are a hotbed of leftist nonsense. I believe it was Churchill who once quipped, "I wouldn't trust anyone who in his youth was not a communist." The important word in that bon mot is "youth". A related aphorism, "Youth is wasted on the young," recognizes that the young are naive, impressionable, idealistic, and would rather engage in panty raids than read books. This is why American parents spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of having their little darlings cavort in orgies of drinking, whoring, and spouting nonsense at idiotic protest rallies. And then, after earning a semi-worthless diploma in "gender studies", a subject they are all expert in by the time they enter high school, they go out into the big cruel world of employers, who amazingly demand some useful skills in return for gainful employment.

It's so unfair!

Post 1,628 The Big Cruel World of Employers

Saturday, May 7, 2011

The Insufferable Contrariness of Being Liberal

The Philosophy of "On the Other Hand"


Montage of the War on Terror.Image via Wikipedia
Related source » Evil does not die of natural causes
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“Two months and a day before 9/11, terrorism expert Larry C. Johnson published “The Declining Terrorist Threat,” a New York Times op-ed decrying the fact that “Americans are bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism,” when, in reality, “the decade beginning in 2000 will continue the downward trend” in lethal terrorism. Not quite. A decade later, Osama bin Laden is dead and the old chorus of pre-9/11 complacency has returned. The war on terror is over — yet again, it seems. Bin Laden was but “a distraction,” writes Peter Beinart, and the war on terror “a mistake from the start.” 9/11 was nothing more than “an isolated case,” argues Ross Douthat. And “bin Laden was always the weak horse.” The new post-bin Laden dispensation is that the entire decade-long war on terror was an overreaction — as shown by the bin Laden operation itself, which, noted one critic, looks a lot like police work, the kind of law enforcement John Kerry insisted in 2004 was the proper prism through which to address the terror threat. […] ”
— By Charles Krauthammer, Published: May 5 (washingtonpost.com)



I think I am beginning to comprehend what makes the Left tick. I've been trying to understand their mentality by assuming they have a rational basis for their worldview, and their goals stemmed from their philosophical views, which presumably became unrealistic because of faulty logic or false premises or both. But I am no longer treating the Left's agenda as a rational, albeit unrealistic, alternative to that of their political opponents.

The Left's objective is simply to be in opposition to anything a non-Leftist says or does. That is it in a nutshell. Theirs is the philosophy of "on the other hand". It's a great strategy if your goal is merely to be a gigantic pain in the ass. It is easy to do. Simply note what rational people say or do, figure out what the obvious objective is that motivates such statements or actions, and then concoct a diametrically opposed position. If they are called out for their frequently incoherent positions, they simply manufacture any old assertions that presume to support their positions.

Their ultimate goal is to gain enough support from the naive, the ignorant, the illegal, and the malevolent so as to acquire positions of power and wealth. That is the only single stratagem that has the potential to explain every disagreement between leftists and everyone else.


Post 1,627 The Insufferable Contrariness of Being Liberal

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Caption Contest

Supply an alternate caption in the comments section   …


 (Image via Theo)           "I've always wanted to be a cowboy." 

Post 1,626 Caption Contest


Wednesday, May 4, 2011

One, two, many

A plastic yellow bucket.Image via Wikipedia
Related source » The Two-Bucket Mind
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“My hypothesis is that we humans automatically sort topics into two opposing viewpoints, or buckets. In the rare cases when we encounter a third opinion, we can't easily process it because our brains don't have a third bucket. For example, on the topic of using waterboarding to get useful information from terrorists, the two opinion buckets are:

1. Waterboarding works and we should do it.

2. Waterboarding doesn't work and we should not do it.

Dershowitz expressed a third view that I had never heard until last night: Waterboarding works, but we shouldn't do it. […] I came up with the two-bucket hypothesis by observing how some people react to this blog. When I float an idea that doesn't fit into one of the two standard buckets for a given topic, people assume I am an enemy from the other bucket and post comments to that effect. Notice how often the commenters here argue against what I write as if my posts must be supporting one of the two existing buckets. That's the two-bucket phenomenon in action.

I wonder if our brains are natural two-bucket processors or if we have been trained that way by our adversarial political system. In the United States, every issue seems to get sorted into two buckets, with Democrats generally favoring one bucket and Republicans generally favoring the other. I wonder if our political system is making citizens dumber by encouraging us to think that there are only two valid opinions for every topic.”
— Scott Adams, May 4, 2011 (dilbert.com)


Scott Adams is very insightful. I recently had a phone conversation with someone I have known a long time. It was a normal conversation (if there is such a thing) until he suddenly veered into the political arena, to wit:

He
So, what do you think of Obama?
Me
[surprised pause #1] Not much.
He
What!? You support Palin and the tea-baggers?
Me
[surprised pause #2] I don't think we have anything further to discuss.
That was the end of our conversation.

Mind you, he is a very intelligent, highly educated person. But I can not, and will not, tolerate any discussion whose working premise includes such a two-bucket mentality (as described by Scott Adams in the above excerpted article).

As if the only conceivable alternative to worshiping Obama is to be a Palin and/or Tea-Party supporter (with the implication that such an alternative is irrational). Au contraire! Most leftists will accuse you of being a racist if you are not in awe of the Won. But, to be neither an Obamanoid, nor a Palin supporter, and also not a racist ... well, that is just incomprehensible, don't you know?

Whence comes such an arrogant, insulting, and aggressive posture? It's been many millennia since humans had assigned names to numbers beyond "one" and "two". As the old joke has it, when you ask two Jews for an opinion about any issue, you will invariably get at least three opinions!

Post 1,625 One, two, many

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

This Week's Best of Rule 5

Portrait of the School

Post 1,624 This Week's Best of Rule 5

Pop Quiz for Civics-101

Second round of the French presidential electi...Image via Wikipedia

Wifey and I were discussing our respective worldviews this morning, something we typically do over breakfast. Our discussion prompted me to compose the following pop quiz for the interested reader:

Consider a scenario wherein you have been elected to the local government of the municipality in which you reside. Your government is apprised of an issue of public concern, and legislation has been written, which is presented for a vote.

Assuming you have evaluated the pros and cons of the legislation to the best of your ability, you have concluded that there are, broadly speaking, three possible consequences of the proposed legislation:
  1. It will improve the situation it addresses substantially.
  2. It will worsen the situation it addresses substantially.
  3. It will have no substantial effect on the situation it addresses.
Answer the following questions:
  • Which of the three possible consequences is, in your estimation, the most likely?
  • Which of the three possible consequences is, in your estimation, the least likely?
  • Will you vote yea or nay?
For extra credit: Explain why you decided to vote the way you did.

Wifey and I have come to the understanding that something akin to this sort of analysis makes sense for a representative democracy such as ours.

What do you, gentle reader, think?

Post 1,623 Pop Quiz for Civics-101

Monday, May 2, 2011

The Eleventh Commandment

   "Thou shalt not f*ck with America!"

USS Abraham Lincoln      (h/t Theo)
Related source » The Fun Part
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“This is the sort of event that defines our national sense of self. The United States didn't stop trying to kill Bin Laden for ten years. We Americans might not do things right on the first try, but betting against us in the long run remains a very bad idea. I'm proud to be an American. I want to be on the team that will gnaw through a concrete wall to get it done, even if it takes ten years. Tomorrow we'll go back to criticizing one another and complaining about just about everything. That is our way. It keeps us sharp. But today, for just one day, let's enjoy a collective victory. Let's remember those who died on 9/11 and in Afghanistan thereafter. Let's think about the level of bravery and professionalism that went into this operation. And let this remind us that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.”
— Scott Adams, May 2, 2011 (dilbert.com)



This must have been how the Russians felt when the charred remains of Adolf Hitler were found by troops of the Soviet Third Army, in 1945. The Russians, however, probably felt it much more intensely, given the tens of millions of lives lost during the Second World War.

Closure is a human craving. And the killing of Bin Laden by American Navy Seals is as satisfying as closure gets. Our armed forces have given America a well deserved respite from a decade of unremitting strife and turmoil. I am not naive enough to think it will be for long, for many serious problems still lay ahead, and they can not be ignored for long.

But at least for this brief moment, it feels good, once again, to be an American.

[CAUTION: STRONG LANGUAGE]

Uploaded by Simmyisdead on Feb 28, 2007

Post 1,622 The Eleventh Commandment