The Only Winning Move

Many thanks to Mr. Tweedy for pointing out that a third party is stealing my content for profit.

I’m appropriately angry, etc. etc. - but I won’t have time to do anything about this until the semester finishes.

I’m sure Mr. Tweedy is right that it will be hard to fix this as long as I’m with Blogger. Since I never inteded to be on Blogger this long to begin with, this is really just a nice kick in the pants to get up and design my own hand-coded blog. I enjoy programming, but I know little about webprogramming - a gap in my knowledge I’ve long meant to correct.

Also, I need to start marketing myself a bit more if I hope to get a good academic job in another year and a half. A solid web presence (with links to papers and programs I’ve written) would be a good idea in any case.

But as one of my academically successful relatives is fond of saying, “gradschool is not a healthy place.” I just don’t have time to handcode a blog at the moment. The best I can do right now is tell iphide to go fuck itself.

Iphide: go fuck yourself!

Sydney, Australia dimmed its lights last night as a “gesture of concern about global warming.”

I’m not exactly sure what it has to do with Global Warming, but as a “gesture of concern about the Kyoto Protocol” it’s completely appropriate.

Restaurants throughout the city held candlelight-only dinners, and families gathered in public places to take part in a countdown to lights out, sending up a cheer when the lights started going out at 7:30 p.m. local time.

A cheer when the lights went out? In other words, this is the first mass display of public honesty about Kyoto since the treaty was proposed. This is exactly the method of cutting greenhouse emissions that the Kyoto Protocol advocates. We’ll just turn off all the lights, scale back industrial production, and in general give up on the Industrial Revolution as a bad mistake.

No thanks!

I like electricity, I like industry, I like technology, and I like the modern world. Solutions to global warming that advocate the scaling back of these things will not earn my support - unless it can be demonstrated (which it has not been) that we’re already past a point of no return where global warming itself poses an even bigger threat to them.

“It’s an hour of active, thoughtful darkness, a celebration of our awakening to climate change action,” said Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett, who attended a harborside function to watch the event.

OK, so Cate Blanchett speaks bullshit more fluently than she speaks Elvish. Considering she’s one of the stars in a series of movies made off of the biggest, most pompous piece of back-to-nature propaganda ever written, it fits. I guess I just don’t see what’s to celebrate about the lights going out. If that’s what you want, there are places where it’s already happened.

Let’s not give up on technology yet, please. The real effects of global warming are a century away. Given the phenomenal pace of technological advancement, I feel confident there will be a technology-based solution before then.

Another cool story from Germany. In this case, a female judge in Frankfurt (aka the ugliest city in the world) refused a Morrocan immigrant woman’s request for a divorce on the grounds that her husband beat her, citing the fact that the Koran allows men to beat their wives.

OK, obviously this is an illegal ruling. Germany (unlike - ahem - some annoying countries) does not generally recognize cultural traditions in legal matters (unless they’re Catholic traditions and it’s in Bavaria). If the law in Germany says you can’t beat your wife (which it does, especially if you’re a “right-winger”) - then you can’t beat your wife, no matter how much time you spent reading the Koran on the jon.

All the same, there’s a mean streak in me that wants to support this on the general grounds that people should have to face up to their own dumb decisions. If this woman is a muslim and has a muslim marraige (which she is, and did), and muslim marriages allow for wife-beating, then in some important sense she gave her consent when she adopted her silly religion and married according to its backward dictates. Because honestly - is there anything in the world more annoying than people who pick and choose bits of religions to believe in? So the Koran is God’s Holy Law, dictated word-for-word to His Prophet - bucept for those parts I don’t like - He was just kidding about them?

Now, if the lesson she’s learned from all this is that Islam is dumb and backward and something she wants nothing more to do with - i.e. roughly Hirsi Ali’s conclusion - then I’m right behind her. But if the lesson is “oh, gee, one or two things in this religion don’t work out so well for me - but I still believe that Allah lives in the sky and writes bestseller self-help books that are near-absolute law,” then she’s a troglodyte and largely deserves her fate (illegal though it be - and should be).

“Right-wing” crimes rose in Germany last year. By 14%!!!! And violent attacks on foreigners are up a whopping 37%!!! Call the younger Eisenhowers - let’s kill this serpent in the shell!

Or not. Actually, there were only 511 “violent” attacks on foreigners last year - which in a country of 85million with a significant foreign population is not really all that bad. And of course, as any reader will notice, it’s not statistically difficult to get a 37% spike in numbers in the hundreds in any given year for crimes of this kind.

But the really cool lines in the article are these:

The total number of politically motivated crimes, which also includes crimes by leftist groups, rose by about 10 percent to 29,050 cases.

Oh, nice - so the lefties count too, but the leading sentence of the article is still “BERLIN - Crimes by right-wing extremists and attacks on foreigners rose in Germany last year, the government said Friday.” Right.

Earlier we’re told that there were 18000 “right-wing” political crimes in Germany last year - so if these numbers are right, then there were roughly 6,000 more “right-wing” political crimes than there were “left-wing” political crimes. So, clearly, the right-wingers are the bigger problem.

Or maybe not. Consider that:

Inciting racial hatred, denying the Holocaust and displaying Nazi symbols are all crimes in Germany.

Gee - so the political opinions and symbols of expression of the right wing are banned, but the beliefs and symbols of the left are not, and the groups whose symbols and opinions are banned just also happens to be the side of the coin that accounts for those “excess” 6000 “political crimes?” Who’da thunk?

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that most of these 6,000 political “crimes” involve things like giving a stiff-armed salute to the police while drunk, or being caught reading some Holocaust-denial literature without a proper license on the subway. In other words, things that in a more reasonable country would be protected free speech - a right and not a crime.

The lesson to be learned from this article is that lots of politics is self-fulfilling prophecy. If you make a particular political opinion a “crime,” don’t be surprised to find that believers in that creed disproportionately account for “political crimes” in your country. If you make even harmless drugs like marijuana illegal, don’t be surprised to find that there is a “drug epidemic” in your country. If (as a friend points out yesterday) you raise taxes dramatically on oil, don’t be surprised to find that prices go up “necessitating” more funding for “alternative” energy sources.

The point is that we should concentrate our energies on fighting real problems. The police can only do so much - but if what the police are doing is tracking down child molesters and murderers, then I’d say that’s what they’re for and more power to them. If, on the other hand, they’re slapping artificial price tags on gas to justify someone’s ethanol subsidy, or telling me when, where and how much I can pay for crappy government healthcare, or arresting people for expressing opinions the government doesn’t like - then we really have to ask ourselve why we fund them at all?

At any rate, this is just another in a long series of stories about Germany’s complete inability to learn from its past mistakes. You can’t fight fascism with fascism, kids.

This it too rich! Apparently ethanol is a giant conspiracy by the US to starve the rest of the world. I kid you not - I have this straight from Fidel Castro.

Castro wrote that during a Monday meeting between the U.S. president and American automobile manufacturers, “The sinister idea of converting food into combustibles was definitively established as the economic line of the foreign policy of the United States.”

The “sinister” idea. Wasn’t this the same US that supposedly invaded Iraq to steal its oil? At least, that’s what his line was back in 2005. And before that, in 1998, it went something like this:

According to the calculations of renowned economists, the world economy grew six-fold and the production of wealth and services grew from less than five trillion to more than twenty-nine trillion dollars between 1950 and 1997. Why then is it still the case that each year, 12 million children under five years of age die — that is to say 33,000 per day — of whom the overwhelming majority could be saved?

In short, as far as Fidel Castro is concerned, whatever the US does is just bad. Invade Iraq? It’s for the oil! Wait, they’re trying to introduce an alternative to oil? Those filthy bastards are stealing the world’s food. ON PURPOSE! Wait, I said in 1998 that they produce way more food than the world needs and are too greedy to share? Um…well…

What a nutjob. Here’s the truth: ethanol is NOT a conspiracy to starve the world. The world is capable of feeding itself several times over. The reason it doesn’t is not because the US is “too greedy” to feed it for free - it’s because feeding people for free is immoral. Or, more accurately, feeding them for free when they’re capable of feeding themselves is immoral. All that foreign aid does is prop up despicable regimes. The reason, for example, that Ethiopia is starving is NOT becuase the US refuses to give it food. The US gives it TONS of food. It’s because Ethiopia’s economy was destroyed in the 70s by Marxists, and Castro helped them do it. Ditto virtually every other failed state in Africa. Consider, for another example, how well Angola is doing now thanks to all Castro’s generous “assistance” in the 70s. The pattern couldn’t possibly be clearer. If there are 12million children that die before age 5, then roughly all 12million of them live in Socialist countries. Give a man a fish, he eats for a day - teach him how to fish, he eats forever. It doesn’t matter that the US wants to turn corn into ethanol. We made the damn corn, we can do with it what we want. If someone else would care to make some corn, he is free to give it to the oppressed masses - but it isn’t going to do them a whit of good. The only thing that helps people is allowing them to produce and keep the products of their own labor. Castro advocates a system that does just the opposite - expects people to produce, but doesn’t let them keep what they make. THAT is why Cuba’s economy is a shambles. And THAT is why Africa is a shambles. It’s the Marxism, stupid - not western “greed.” People - surprise, surprise - won’t make things if you just go and take it from them as soon as it gets produced!

Let’s consider what would happen if we accepted Castro’s suggestion that we just hand over all our surplus corn to people who aren’t going to pay us for it. Do you think even for a minute that we would maintain the same stunning level of agricultural production we currently do if we stopped paying our farmers? Yeah, gee, thanks for all the corn you grew, Mr. Smith. We in Washington have determined that you don’t really need it, so we’re going to take it from you and give it to other people. And we’ll pay you only for what we think you really needed to produce, how ’bout that? Really, I don’t think anyone should be surprised under such a system to find that the next year Mr. Smith only produces as much corn as they’re going to pay him for.

This stuff is so basic. Why is there Socialism? I just don’t get it. As for Castro - go ahead and die already, you old fossil. The world has already suffered enough from your ideas. We don’t need a repeat.

More cool math from Reuters. Today’s example comes from this article on the captured British seamen. Reporting on the “effects” of the “tension” on commodities markets, we get:

With the United States conducting naval exercises in the Gulf, the rising tension rattled global markets. Oil prices jumped by $5 overnight to more than $68 a barrel before they settled back to around $64. Gold jumped to a four-week high on safe-haven buying before prices eased.

Let’s consider what these figures mean. Oil jumps $5 to some vague figure of $68 plus alpha - and then sinks “to around $64.” If I’m not mistaken, that means it sunk $4 plus alpha - so, almost $5. In other words, the price of oil remains essentially unchanged, nothing to see here.

For gold, we don’t even get any figures. It “jumped” to a four-week high on “safe-haven” buying. See, I just don’t know what that means. Is there some blank on the certificate for purchase of gold that says “Reason for purchase,” and a larger-than-usual number of people penciled in “worried about inflation due to skyrocketing commodity prices?” Yeah, somehow I don’t think that’s how it works. This “safe-haven buying” phrase is really just convenient wording for Reuters. Truth is, we don’t know why people were buying gold more heavily yesterday than at any time in the preceding four weeks - but personally, I don’t think there’s anything alarming about gold prices reaching a four-week high in and of itself. I mean, for any period of four weeks, one of the days has to post the highest prices, right? It might as well have been yesterday. What would be alarming is if the price of gold spiked sharply and unexpectedly - but of course we have no numbers here to indicate that it did. For all we know from the complete lack of useful information given, the price of gold has been steadily rising starting three weeks ago, and yesterday just so happened to continue that trend.

Assuming that’s the case, an accurate translation from Reuters-speak to English would be “Even with the United States conducting naval exercises in the Gulf, the rising tension completely failed to rattle global markets.”

Amazing what a few choice adjectives can do for you when you want your facts to say something they don’t.

I predict that this doesn’t end up selling very well. It’s a cellphone that doubles as a cigarette case - for sale in China (where cigarette smokers are rumored to still exist).

What I want for Christmas is definitely this. It’s some sort of sketching tool that has the potential to be the Coolest Whiteboard Ever. Basically, you draw on it, and it converts what you draw into computer representations of objects in an environment - so that the objects can interact with each other, etc. , Rube Goldberg style.

For classroom technology, this would be absolutely brilliant. See, one thing you can do with it is draw a line around part of something. If your circle connects back in on itself, the board highlights the region in red, and you can then move it around, or else delete it by drawing a slash through it. Further features someone could add would be, say, handwriting recognition - so that your messy prof can scribble on the board and it converts what he writes into something aligned, neat and readable. Or else, maybe, it could have built-in abbreviations so that you write out only part of a word and it completes it for you. Hell, spellchecking might even come in handy! And the best part, of course, is no laborious erasing over chalkdust and/or whiteboard crap.

Naturally, these things are from MIT.

Can I call ‘em or what? The dreaded budget vote happened yesterday in Commons, and the government survived with support from the Bloc. The NDP joined the Liberals in opposing the budget (I declined to call that one), but it passed 176-119. Harper will stay in power for at least a few more months, and there will be no spring election.

Of course, the press is still predicting that Harper will engineer a confidence vote to take advantage of his boost in popularity in the wake of the budget. It’s true that his position is a bit precarious. With the budget vote behind us, the Liberals will undoubtedly start turning up the heat on environmental issues (and possibly “First Nations” issues) since that’s pretty much all they have left to gripe about. Kyoto may yet prove a weakness for Harper.

I doubt it, though. I think, much to the press’ (apparent) dismay, the Conservatives’ recent boost in popularity is not a fluke. It won’t last forever - and Harper does need an election within the next year, I would say, if he ever wants that majority - but there is still time. Whether he can get a majority right now, though, is anyone’s guess. Waiting for his lead to grow a bit is a gamble likely to pay off.

Here is a nice illustration of the absurdity of slavery reparations. A protester interrupted a memorial service to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the UK (it wasn’t abolished in the empire until 1833, and most slaves weren’t technically “freed” until 6 years after that, as the Imperial Abolition required 6 more years of “apprenticeship”).

A shouting protester got within metres of Queen Elizabeth II at a service Tuesday marking the 200th anniversary of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade, demanding she apologise personally.

Why should the current Queen have to apologize for something that was abolished 200 years ago??? I suppose the heads of some African tribes are going to apologize to Europe for the African enslavement of Europeans that preceded this, then?

The 200th anniversary has left political and religious leaders wrestling with how Britain should face up to its past role in the slave trade.

Oh please! Britain should be proud of itself, if anything, for having abolished the slave trade before most African nations did. Yes, that’s right folks, after Britain’s 1807 abolition, and even well after the 1833 Imperial “Abolition,” Africans kept happily trading themselves as property back and forth for almost 100 years after this. Slavery was, for example, only officially abolished in Ethiopia in 1923. And nope, it doesn’t make it any better that this was “domestic” for the following reasons:

1. How could it possibly mitigate the violation of the rights of the enslaved that it was “his own people” doing the violating? Is murder a lesser offense if it’s black-on-black violence?
2. In most cases it wasn’t “domestic” anyway since the various tribes enslaving each other did (and still do) think of themselves as members of their tribe first, members of their political nation second, and Africans a distant third.
3. Arabs were busy enslaving Africans and being enslaved by them. They were also enslaving Europeans.

“This nation has never apologised, there was no mention of the African freedom fighters. This is just a memorial of William Wilberforce.”

Wilberforce was the driving parliamentarian behind the landmark change in the British law which abolished the slave trade.

Which really does beg the question, doesn’t it, of why not have a memorial for William Wilberforce? I mean, if he convinced Parliament to abandon the slave trade, doesn’t that mean he did a good thing? Or are you only a hero in the anti-slavery movement if you’re not white?

Williams, the leader of the world’s Anglicans, called slavery an offence to human dignity and freedom.

“We, who are the heirs of the slave-owning and slave-trading nations of the past, have to face the fact that our historic prosperity was built in large part on this atrocity,” he said.

Oh grow up! It was nothing of the kind. Africans owned slaves before Europe came along and continued owning them afterward, and look what that’s done for the prosperity of the continent! I’m really not clear on what the connection between the past existence of slavery and current economic prosperity is? If I’m not mistaken, the overwhelming majority of the United States’ wealth, for example, was created well AFTER slavery was abolished - and that indeed the weakness of the slave-based plantation economy in the South was one of the major contributing factors to its crushing defeat in the American Civil War. America is prosperous BECAUSE it abolished slavery, not the other way round.

I, for one, say hats off to the UK for waking up faster than the US, and indeed most of the rest of the world, on this issue. These celebrations should be festive, as befits the commemoration of a proud and noble moment in the nation’s history.

The protester

…said he was from Ligali, a British-based lobby group which sets out to “challenge the misrepresentation of African people and culture in the British media.”

I would like to humbly suggest that he rededicate his time to fighting the misrepresentation of the British people, and indeed all people of Northern European descent, in the world media. There is, it seems to me, a lot more work to be done in that area than in correcting white impressions of Africans.