Others will think “Meh” (a collage)

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To jangle a secret we don’t know,
can’t guarantee, the response could be any number;
indifference to anger, to wonderment, to joy.

We have to speak
a load of drivel,
disturbed disturbing visciousness,
futility and pain of his communication.
I didn’t like it.

Uncomfortable unsettled incomplete.
Decide.

I wouldn’t know how;
give me a scrap to match the sofa
with love
to death —
that’s now how I remember it.
Connection, different different different different different,
escape meaning,
religions you didn’t like.

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Conflicted

Dammit. I really think that thief at the bundy ranch is a larcenist, liar, and terrorist. And yet, and yet. The president has taken upon himself the authority, apparently unreviewed by anyone, to assassinate. 

I am fundamentally opposed to gun rights people who focus solely on liberty to the exclusion of the other fundamental necessities of a democracy, chiefly equality. And yet, and yet. The existing power structure in our society seems to be entrenched, oligarchic, and disturbingly secretive. 

I regard libertarians as adolescents, “objectivists as their mentally challenged cousins.. And yet, and yet. The “action” suggested by the progressive, socialist, communist activists whose thinking is closest to my own amounts to signs and petitions, and those seem absurd. Has the time really come for armaments? And are those armaments, as the bundy crowd seem to think, as crude and simplistic as guns? There are other classes of armament.

 

Innoveracy

Horace Dedieu (once again) expresses something so clearly it makes me believe I was thinking this all along. I don’t much like the term “innoveracy” though.

http://www.asymco.com/2014/04/16/innoveracy-misunderstanding-innovation/

What do you call somebody who steals from the public — welfare fraud, or pilfering social security checks or breaking into city hall and emptying the treasurer’s safe — and he gets caught, goes to trial, and loses. And this goes on for years over and over. 

One name for a guy like that is “Cliven Bundy”. He’s a thief who’s been grazing his cattle on public land for decades without paying  for it like everybody else does.

A great deal of land in the western US is owned by the federal government. How did that happen?

In the first decades of the 20th century farming started to become more mechanized. Huge amounts of grassland in the west were plowed, using tractors, and crops were planted. Other areas were overgrazed when ranchers put more cattle on the land than there was grass for them to eat. 

 

Then there was a drought. Droughts are cyclic events, of course, but this time the deep root systems of the plains grasses — root systems that held water and kept the soil intact — were gone. That part of the world can be pretty windy, and the soil blew away; it was a large-scale disaster with its own name: the Dust Bowl. 

The land became valueless, countless farms failed and banks foreclosed on the mortgages. Then the banks failed. That’s how the government came to own the land. The next step was that the government instituted, in the 1930s, programs like the WPA and the CCC (the “New Deal”) to restore the land with huge efforts planting trees and grass over thousands of square miles. 

Isolated individuals, “free” to be as shortsighted and greedy as they wished, destroyed the value of vast swaths of land. Collective effort, in this case in the form of government programs, saved both the people and the land. 

Now, who exactly are the “patriots” in the Bundy Ranch situation?

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B!ang

I am not a gun fancier or hobbyist. Neither am I particularly “anti-gun”. Didn’t grow up with guns, and never had any particular interest in them (after age 8 or so, of course). I’ve shot guns a few times, at targets, and didn’t find it enjoyable or interesting. People who want to own and shoot guns, in the US at least, have a valid point that such a right is in the Constitution. My reading of it is somewhat different; it seems to me to clearly state that the point is a “well regulated militia”, which most closely resembles the National Guard, in my opinion. But it’s not a major point of contention for me. 

What’s puzzling is the stance of gun hobbyists over the whole issue. Virtually without exception they’re snide, sarcastic, sneering, insulting, and argue (to the extent they argue at all) with only one approach: the straw man appeal. The straw man they construct is very often the one that “guns are not the problem, people are the problem”. This is so obviously, patently silly that I just don’t get it. Nor do I understand their whole position, which is only very rarely explained calmly and rationally. Do they really believe these points, or is this just another aspect of a straw man appeal? Do they believe:

• The argument for some (any) control over firearms is not about people?

• There is not a problem with gun violence in this country?

• A gun is actually a defensive tool, in the absence of a game theory approach to any situation?

• The threat of armed revolution with handguns and rifles is all that protects us from a tyrannical government?

• An armed revolution here, which would demonstrate the democratic system does not work, would result in a less authoritarian government?

Do they believe these things? Or is the whole “movement” just an advertising- and PR-fueled campaign driven by the gun industry to increase their profits? 

 

iot

Zack learned on dognet that lobster bisque is very different from lobster biscuit; never mind the sound. 

Hazel checked catnet and said lobster is good but not as good as tuna.

There are many internets.

Nails with crosshairs

Most people have a natural tendency to want to use the tools they acquire, as captured in the adage “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. From a new coffeemaker to a new computer to a new [tool of your choice here], there’s a combination of happiness and excitement and curiosity surrounding new tools. I think it’s probably human nature. 

This can be a problem when it comes to guns. 

Disquieting juxtaposition

Two very recent news items. 

#1: “Feds want an expanded ability to hack criminal suspects’ computers.”

#2: “LAPD argues all cars in Los Angeles are under investigation.”

(and I haven’t even mentioned the NSA)

Legalization of sociopathy

Quite a number of silicon valley companies colluded to limit both opportunities and income for their employees. This is an individual case in a larger point: there really can’t — and quite possibly shouldn’t — be any trust between humans and corporations. An agreement, for example, is a simple thing. Two equals share a mutual understanding. A contract is simply the formalization of an agreement. The key is that these pacts are undertaken between two parties who deal with each other as equals; that’s the bedrock of the whole idea. Trust is a form of agreement.

An individual cannot be the equal of a corporation. This is so obvious I won’t go into it at length. For one thing, one of the basic purposes of incorporation is the avoidance of responsibility. Individuals who wish to avoid responsibility must actively work at that — one of the means, of course, being forming a corporation. 

The extensions of this are starting to look pretty far-reaching. An individual cannot trust a corporation. You might assume, of course, that a corporation will act in pursuit of its own interests, to the extent those are known. That’s not the same as trust; that’s consistency, and it’s consistency with the corporation’s interests. Again, to the extent those are known. In addition to the impossibility of trust, however, there’s a real question here: can an individual and a corporation — fundamentally unequal parties — enter into a valid contract? 

One of the principles of bodies of law is to “do the same thing we’ve done before”. This is not the only principle, but it’s an important one, and individuals and corporations have entered into countless contracts, many of which have been assumed to be legal. Notwithstanding, that might have been a mistake in the first place. 

The Polar Report

“Primordial gravity waves”. That’s what the BICEP microwave telescope at the south pole detected evidence of. As a non-physicist, it’s taken me a while to work through what (I think) they’ve found and what it means for cosmological theories. They didn’t detect the gravity waves directly (it’s a microwave telescope); they measured a kind of polarization. This is the sort of thing that takes time to wade through when you’re not a physicist; that microwave radiation can be polarized similarly to light, and that there are different kinds of polarization. 

It’s been known since 1964 that the universe is full of radiation (the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB). Point a radio telescope in any direction and there it is, relatively uniformly. Its unexpected discovery, by Penzias and Wilson, is a pretty good story all by itself, and with the happy ending of a Nobel prize for them. It posed a theoretical puzzle to be solved: how can radiation come from everywhere? If you start with a mass of superheated plasma and it suddenly expands enormously, the plasma separates into atoms, and interesting things cascade along. One of the links in the cascading chain of events is the release of photons, which until then had been constrained by the density of the plasma. That is, the original plasma, in spite of being incredibly hot, was completely dark because it was too dense for light (photons) to move. The “expansion moment” is called “inflation”. It was literally a moment: a ridiculously tiny fraction of a second.

When you’re talking about photons, you’re talking about light, and when you’re talking about light you’re talking about radiation. And now you have a testable theory, because you can predict what effects inflation would have to have on that radiation. We’ve already discovered that radiation just waiting to be measured in various ways, so once you predict an effect, all you have to do to test your theory is to find a way to measure that effect. That’s what BICEP was designed to do. 

The effect they were looking for was a particular kind of polarization, because it turns out while polarization can happen for several reasons, the polarization produced by gravity is unique. It’s called “B-mode polarization”, although I’m not entirely clear about the significance of that label. So the test of the theory was basically this: IF the universe starts out as a ball of superheated plasma, and IF inflation occurs, THEN there would be background radiation everywhere (there is), and IF the radiation was produced that way it would be polarized in a particular way that can now be measured. 

According to the BICEP research team, that’s what their results show.