High Handed Hypocrisy

Gingrich would like to remind everybody that that marriage is between one man and one woman whom you abandon riddled with cancer on her hospital bed while you fuck the shit out of your mistress whom you later marry and cheat on with a third woman while screaming with Godly moral outrage about the infidelities of the president.

From http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2011/02/thrice-married-serial-adulterer-obama.html

Hold whatever view you want.
Then live by it.
But do not use the power of government to enforce your views upon others.

jeesh

Has Anyone Else Read Crichton's "Terminal Man?"

Trying brain pacemakers to zap psychiatric disease

WASHINGTON – Call them brain pacemakers, tiny implants that hold promise for fighting tough psychiatric diseases — if scientists can figure out just where in all that gray matter to put them.

Deep brain stimulation, or DBS, has proved a powerful way to block the tremors of Parkinson's disease. Blocking mental illness isn't nearly as easy a task.

But a push is on to expand research into how well these brain stimulators tackle the most severe cases of depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette's syndrome — to know best how to use them before too many doctors and patients clamor to try.

Michael Crichton was a visionary science fiction author whose message was "be careful what you mess with."

I am not in any way saying this research is dangerous, but I am pretty impressed by the man's vision in a book written decades ago.

Then again, there is a team in Russia working on cloning a Woolly Mammoth. Maybe not from DNA extracted from a mosquito, but still...

We live in interesting times where we can catch up with science fiction in our lifetimes.

Stupid Criminals - REALLY Stupid

Maybe I can get this one up before Leno talks about it.

Say 'cheese': Thief breaks into surveillance camera store

Is it even possible for someone to be this stupid?

I mean really?

Prosecuted for Bad Taste

For sure, I would never hire this guy. He is clearly lacking any kind of judgment.

http://hypervocal.com/news/2011/youtube-musician-evan-emory-faces-20-years-in-prison-for-clever-editing/

But being crass, tasteless, and offensive is not, or at least should not be, illegal.
It certainly should not be a felony.

Yet here we have a prosecutor with, what, nothing better to do than make up ways to charge people who offend him with crimes, going after this guy.

His crime?
Singing a sexually explicit song and putting it up on YouTube.
So what? you ask?
The "so what" is his choice of editing.
Although he was singing alone with his camera, he edited the video as though he were singing to a bunch of little kids.

So now he is being charged with "manufacturing child sexually abusive material."

That law, as absurd as it is, was intended to criminalize making computer-generated graphics of sex acts with kids. Now we see what happens when vague, well-intended statutes get into the hands of people whose agendas go beyond the original intent.

Likely the prosecution will be found unconstitutional, hopefully the law itself will be as well. But this kind of malicious prosecution casts a chill on free expression that is vital for our society to function.

You may laugh at this guy's situation, but consider this:
The definition of "terrorist" is far more vague, as is "terrorist activities."
When do we reach the point when civil disobedience, which in previous times was at most a misdemeanor "disturbing the peace" charge becomes "domestic terrorism?"

We are on a slippery slope of criminalizing things that "people don't like" or worse, that "the government doesn't like" and I, for one, don't like where it is headed.

Ham Handed Foreign Policy

US starts Farsi Twitter account aimed at Iranians

Good gosh, WHY?

Why do we feel the need to meddle in these things?

As long as the USA can be painted as inciting unrest, the governments of these countries will have an easy means of vilifying the movement.

The people of these countries are perfectly capable of overthrowing their governments without any help or interference from anyone else. In fact, that is the only way it works.

Want to know how it is done?

There is a primer on the subject here:

From Dictatorship to Democracy

Read it, then let's discuss why the USA stirring the pot is a bad idea.

Les's End the NCAA Charade of "Amateur Athletes"

Former NCAA player's suit threatens Hollywood

This headline on Yahoo! News is more hype than fact.

Court cases typically are settled with the narrowest possible precedent. 

But there are a couple of interesting issues here that aren't being explored well.

One is the complete duplicity of the NCAA.

NCAA sports is a multi-billion dollar business.

Everyone makes lots of money.

Coaches, sponsors, promoters, the schools, the media.

Thousands of people are employed and made decent incomes.

The professional sports leagues, especially the NFL and the NBA, get a free farm system.

Everyone gets something, that is, except the talent.

What do they get?

IF they were recruited, they get a scholarship to maintain the illusion of the "student athlete" while devoting most of their emotional energy toward athletics rather than academics.

They get a lottery ticket for making it as a pro.

What this lawsuit is about, in reality, is that the talent who makes all of this profit possible gets nothing. The defendants are making it a 1st amendment issue because, frankly, it is the only way they have a chance of winning. But it isn't a first amendment issue.

Let's end the charade about "amateur athletics" being somehow more pure. The idea of "amateur status" actually originated in Victorian England as a means for the rich guys to exclude more talented, but "professional" athletes from their games. Those "professionals" couldn't afford to play for free, so a class system was established to demean their "professional" status as somehow mercenary.

The Olympics have gotten over it. Professional athletes routinely compete, because they want to attract the very best competitors.

Here is an idea. As radical as it sounds.

Pay them. 

Create a fund, as a percentage of gate, licensing and other revenue, that is equally distributed to the players. Don't put it in escrow or anything, just give them the money.

Idea #2 -

Play then school. Let's acknowledge that this is an entertainment industry. Let the athlete opt to play for his period of eligibility and then be eligible to get x years of scholarship at any NCAA school later. That is a win for everyone. If the player gets drafted, he can pursue that career, but he has something to fall back on if he is injured or cut. Some players might not pursue the  scholarship. And by making the scholarship eligible for any NCAA school, a more mature person can make more mature decisions about what he wants to pursue.

Simply put, if we treated the players fairly, this issue would have never come up. That is all Keller wants.

Google Law

New York Times reporter David Segal broke a story about how J.C. Penny had managed to rise to the top of Google searches for just about anything they sell.

Within days, hours actually, of informing Google of these results, Penny's place in these searches dropped from #1 to #70 or so.

J.C. Penny, of course, denies having anything to do with the scheme to plant tens of thousands of links in link-farm sites, but they did fire their search optimization consultants.

What is interesting to me, though, is how Mr. Segal uses the word "illegal" when describing search optimization strategies that violate Google's policies.

As pervasive as they are, Google is a private company. They may make whatever policies they choose about their search algorithms. They may publish guidelines of things they consider to be acceptable and unacceptable ways to raise your results. And they may sanction transgressions in any way they choose, so long as those sanctions to not run afoul of real laws.

But nothing you do, or do not do, to manipulate your Google search results is "illegal." There are no laws against it - except perhaps undisclosed collusion as the E.U. regulators are alleging.

Google's policies, though, are not laws. They do not carry the force of law. Let's stop using the term "illegal" to describe things that other people simply do not like.

Chief Marketing Officer of Wikileaks

This post on Gizmodo is an excerpt from a new book bring published this week, Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website.


Based on the excerpt, I stand by my opinion that Assange is, most of all, a narcissist, and perhaps even crossing the clinical threshold.

On numerous occasions, Julian accused the Icelandic police of keeping him under surveillance. He also informed our-no, sorry, his-Twitter followers that two operatives from the Ameri­can State Department had followed him onto a plane while he was en route to a conference in Oslo. Our hotel, too, had been watched, Julian trumpeted, and unmarked cars had tailed us. He loved these stories because they assured him of a rapt audience. Once, he terrified a woman he was spending the night with so much with his secret-agent stories that she fled and was too scared to return to her own apartment. Julian stayed behind and made himself comfortable.

These actions, and others cited in the article, are those of someone who has constructed a world around him, a world where he is the center of everything.

This will be entertaining to watch.

Jules Verne - Happy Birthday

Author C. Clark is famous for saying "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." By pushing the envelope so far ahead of current engineering, the author actually lowers the threshold for suspension of belief.

Verne took much more risk. He was writing in Victorian times. The pact of technological advancement was just approaching a level where it could be noticed in the course of a working lifetime. His vision was clearly anchored in Victorian engineering, and he was extrapolating that into a near-term future. It was fantastic, but at the same time, it was not presented as magic. It was presented as "we will be able to do this some day, and in that day people will be pretty much the same as they are now." All in all, I'd say he got more right than wrong.

So, a nod to Jules Verne on his 183rd birthday.

The Risk of Atheism

As an atheist, I am sometimes asked what proof I have that there is no supernatural being or, for that matter, that The Force does not exist.

Of course I have no proof, and none can be offered since non-existence of something cannot be proven. I can only say "there is no evidence."

In doing so, I am opening myself up to the possibility that I am wrong. But this is what science is about. If scientifically compelling evidence is offered up, and my hypothesis cannot stand up to that evidence, I will gladly alter it.

With this stand, I am assuming all of the risks. Only I can be proven wrong.

Consider the opposite stand.

"There is a supernatural being."

Because this position is impossible to refute, it is the easiest one to adopt. There is no way to prove this statement to be wrong. It is not even a "stand" in my mind, because it requires no risk, no effort, no curiosity, only a blind acceptance of what others have said.

Of course we have to laugh sometimes, so I present Rowen Atkinson's "Warm Reception."

I guess my special moment would be at around 2:15.

Enron

Son of Jeffrey Skilling found dead

This is breaking news, so nobody knows the cause of death yet, just that some prescription medications were found by his bed.

But extrapolating, even to an accidental overdose, this tragedy continues to ruin lives.

Still, Enron was nothing more than the run-up to the crash of 09. The same behavior that took down Enron is what took down the entire global economy. 

We have, at some point, passed from an era of looking at what is right and wrong to looking at what is illegal, and assuming everything else is OK.

"Everything is permitted, except that which is explicitly forbidden."

As free as that sounds, freedom comes with responsibilities. Among those responsibilities is to grasp the idea that if everything that is "legal" is "right" then the laws eventually drift toward the opposite:

"Everything is forbidden, except that which is explicitly permitted."

Ironically, the U.S. Constitution was written this way for the government's powers. That is the whole concept of enumerated powers. It was an acknowledgment that government power tends to accumulate over time (which has been the case anyway, even if slowed somewhat by constitutional restrictions).

I wish I had a solution. Perhaps I am too idealistic.

Yes, this wandered off the original topic.

I'm like that.

Does Social Media Destroy Marriages?

After writing Reflections I rolled through my post list and remembered this incomplete draft I had started:

Talk about burying the lead.

Granted, any London tabloid, like The Daily Mail, is far less concerned with presenting an accurate story than it is in selling the newspapers. But then even stories in Pravda have (had?) a grain of truth running through them.

Here is the headline:

The marriage killer: One in five American divorces now involve Facebook

A staggering 80 per cent of divorce lawyers have also reported a spike in the number of cases that use social media for evidence of cheating.

So what we have is that divorce lawyers are using Facebook as evidence of cheating, not that Facebook is causing it.

See the difference?

What we really have is a platform for people to escape their daily lives and create an "if only" fantasy world, and live in it. They re-connect with old flames, share a few flirty chats, and think they have a relationship.

Jealous spouse discovers this, goes nuts, and we have a divorce.

Which begs the question - how strong was the relationship to begin with?

One of the interesting (to me) things this brings up is that one of the first signs that an abusive relationship is forming is social isolation. The abuser attempts to gain control over who the victim can associate with, communicate with, in order to make the victim dependent on the abuser for a basic human need for connection. The victim will gladly accept abusive, hurtful connection as the only alternative to no connection at at all.

While I can gladly stand on "being right" for all of that, and take special delight in the link back to social isolation in abuse, I think I have to stand corrected a bit. Yes - these relationships are often constructed in fantasy, but what I have come to realize is just how easy it is for someone to slip down this hole without even realizing it until the emotional damage is done.

Does this make the players any less responsible? Of course not. And my question still stands - "How strong was the relationship to begin with?" But an online or virtual relationship, I have come to realize, can seem to overcome the limits of a real world one.

The feeling of attachment can be just as strong, or stronger. But in a real-world relationship we pick up on cues that contradict that feeling of attachment. We must actively seek to confirm or refute this evidence, and can only do it by taking more emotional risk.

But online those negative cues are nearly absent in the limited bandwidth. Subtle might not work here, and sometimes bluntly direct doesn't work either. This means no need to take so much emotional risk before building a belief that the connection is deeper.

Fantasy is a powerful thing. And what we have here is an emotional affair, not with anyone real, but with a partially fictional character that is constructed around the live interaction.

The only way out of this is to grasp reality and to accept the emotional risk of rejection in the real world - a far more dangerous place to play.

Reflections on the Thin Blue Wire

Now and then life presents a learning opportunity.
Sometimes it is subtle.

When that occurs, I often seek someone out to debrief myself.

My purpose in doing this is that, in reconstructing the events, I see more detail, and sharpen my own skills for spotting cues I may have missed.

The other reason I do it is that these things often leave feeling a little vulnerable, and I am seeking out a connection.

This isn't about debriefing something, it is about that connection.

Connection is an interesting thing. We humans depend on it. We are driven to seek out emotional connection with others. Those drives are primal.

It does not truly happen unless we are open and vulnerable to rejection. The vulnerability is offered up, anxiety builds, and when that vulnerability is embraced and accepted, there is a flush of relief and peace. This happens over and over, as the people go deeper.

At the point where one person or the other stops offering up vulnerability, the relationship freezes in place. It may be OK, but it gets no deeper. If one or the other seeks a deeper connection she or he will offer up vulnerability. If it is rebuffed, then that anxiety builds but is not released. Yet this anxiety seeks release. This is the point when people begin contemplating seeking that release elsewhere. They may establish many shallow connections, or pseudo connections to try to fill the void, to gain that flush that comes from the embrace of acceptance.

We evolved when connections were established face to face. We can see, hear, touch, sense the other person in all of the nuances of communication that operate well below our awareness.

Now fast forward to the present day. We were never equipped to establish and maintain those connections over a thin blue wire. Yet, I feel something. I translate that feeling into a stream of language, and my fingers follow, completing and breaking electrical circuits. Those impulses are encoded, and sent over that little blue wire, and the words I am thinking to express what I am feeling appear on a screen to be taken in by the eyes of another human being.

At the other end, those words are taken in, interpreted and invoke feeling in that other person. It is an incredible process.

As sterile as this is, emotions are created and exchanged over these little strands of copper. Such is not so much the power of the network, as the power of the human capacity for connection.

Or is it?

When I feel a connection in this way, what is real, and what am I filling in? What is actually coming over the blue wire, and what actually is created within me, from my own experiences and imagination? 

Connections that feel or seem amazingly deep can be established this way. Why?
My theory here is that the distance, the abstraction, makes it far easier to offer up vulnerability because the rejection doesn't hurt as much. Deeper vulnerability is offered because there is less downside. When it is accepted, though, the relief of embrace is just as strong. Simply put, there is a higher return on the emotional risk.

Add to that the natural human response to fill in details from fantasy, and a rich world is constructed in which great depths of vulnerability are offered up, exchanged, and accepted. Each person is building that fantasy, and because the bandwidth is so narrow, no evidence is ever presented to refute it.

Think about how rich relationships are built in a purely virtual fantasy online world where there is no pretense of anything being real.Yet the feelings are still there - intimate connection between fictional characters that are nothing like the people who created them. It is no wonder people get sucked into these worlds - the "hit" on primal parts of the brain is stronger than heroin.

Now what happens when a person who has reached the depth limit in a personal relationship wants more?
Where is the easiest place to get it?
That thin blue wire beckons.

I can't say for sure, but I think recently I was at the other end of that blue wire.
Time for Sam to look in the mirror.