Ron prognosticates: the Dems will cave

I generally subscribe to Carl Sagan's admonition that prophecy is a lost art, but in this case I feel fairly safe in going out on a limb and predicting that in the matter of setting a timetable to get troops out of Iraq, Bush will veto the funding bill with the timeline attached, and then the Democrats will cave and give him the money anyway. They will cave because that is their nature. They have no spines, no courage, no convictions. They are afraid of their own rhetorical shadows. Want to scare a Democrat? Just remember three magic words: Weak. On. Defense.

All of which is quite unfortunate, because the Dem's position is quite strong, and they would almost certainly win this fight simply by saying, "No, we did not refuse to fund the troops. We DID fund the troops, albeit with conditions attached that are supported by the vast majority of the American people. It is the PRESIDENT who chose not to accept those conditions and thereby subject our troops to harm." But they will not say that. They will cave. They will meekly say, "I'm terribly sorry, Mr. President. Here's your money, no strings attached. Only please please PLEASE don't call say (shudder!) that we didn't support the troops."

God, I hope I'm wrong. But I don't think I am. If the Democrats don't even have the balls to issue subpoenas in the attorneygate scandal (authorizing subpoenas and actually issuing them are not the same thing), where are they gong to find the intestinal fortitude to stand their ground when something really meaningful is at stake?

Bee afraid

Forget the housing market collapse, there is a much more serious problem looming: honeybees are dying and no one knows why. The seriousness of the problem can be pithily summed up in one sentence:

“If we don’t figure this out real quick, it’s going to wipe out our food supply.”

Youch.

A joke, eh?

Ann Coulter has responded to those denouncing her calling John Edwards a "faggot" by saying that it was just a joke:

"C'mon, it was a joke. I would never insult gays by suggesting that they are like John Edwards. That would be mean."

Oh? Imagine if Coulter, instead of directing her little "joke" against Edwards had decided to attach Barak Obama instead and said, "I wanted to talk about Barak Obama, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word "nigger"..."

Or perhaps, "I wanted to talk about Joe Liberman, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word "kike"..."

Yeah, Ann, you're a laugh riot.

The price of free speech

My latest reply to Cerebrator's comments to my previous post was getting so long I decided to elevate it to a new post:

previous records of copyright infringement

If YouTube shut down every account that had repeated copyright violations there'd be no content left.

Misrepresenting facts, is simply a defamatory move

Really? Who exactly was being defamed? (For that matter, what facts were being misrepresented? Does the Quran not say the things that Gusburne says it does?)

And the TOU I quoted above was clear about that.

Indeed. The part about misrepresenting facts is completely separate from the part about defamatory material. Furthermore, they don't say that you must not misrepresent facts. (Again, if that were the case and were uniformly enforced there would be no content left.) They say that you must not "publish falsehoods or misrepresentations that could damage YouTube or any third party."

So which is it? Is Gisburne being suspended for copyright violation? (And if so, why aren't all the other copyright violators being suspended right along with him?) Or is it because of defamation (in which case, who exactly has he defamed)? Or is it because of "falsehoods or misrepresentations that could damage YouTube or any third party" (in which case how exactly could YouTube or a third party be damaged)?

The fact of the matter is that Gisburne was suspended not because what he published was defamatory or because it misrepresented facts, but because it was offensive (and particularly because it was offensive to muslims some of whom are notorious for using offense as an excuse for engaging in uncivilized behavior). For further evidence, note that Gisburne's video describing his account deletion has also been removed for alleged terms-of-use violations. It had no background music and no offensive quotes, so what is the excuse this time? This is capricious censorship pure and simple.

The problem with censoring speech for being offensive is that free speech, indeed all freedom, means nothing if not the freedom to say (and do) things that offend people. The "freedom" to say (and do) only those things that offend no one is not freedom at all. I am getting sick and tired of all this pandering to people's frail sensitivities. In a free country, the proper response to people who complain about being offended is to say, "Tough. That is the price of freedom. Deal with it."

As long as I'm on the topic let me say a few words about the elephant in the living room: Gisburne is not being silenced merely because his video is offensive. YouTube is chock-a-block with offensive videos (and that is a good thing). No, Gisburne is being silenced because his video is offensive to Muslims and the folks at YouTube are afraid of offending Muslims. And this fear is not without foundation. Some Muslims (a minority to be sure, but enough to matter) respond to being offended by engaging in various forms of uncivilized behavior. They riot in the streets. They fly airplanes into buildings. They kidnap people and chop their heads off. And Muslims engage in these behaviors on a scale that dwarfs any other identifiable group. Christians may bomb the odd abortion clinic, but they haven't engaged in the kind of wholesale slaughter that Muslims regularly undulge in nowadays for a long, long time. The Scientologist engage in all manner of unsavory practices against those they consider "fair game", but they have not to my knowledge ever actually killed someone. And the idea of a Buddhist terrorist is so absurd it could be the basis of a Saturday Night Live sketch.

Silencing people for saying offensive things is wrong even if they are so offensive as to move some people to violence. It is wrong because it sacrifices freedom for the illusion of security. Silencing critics of Islam doesn't quell violence, it rewards violence and thus encourages more violence.

Do my words offend you? Tough. That is the price of freedom. Deal with it.

Protest YouTube suppression of free speech

Reddit today led me to this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRPVsamLaKk

This video is by a fellow named Nick Gisburne. His account was deleted for posting another video that was nothing but a slide show of quotations from the Quran. (That video has since been reposted by at least a dozen other people so it's easy to find.)

This really bothers me for four reasons. First, to deem quotations from a holy text to be "inappropriate content" is outrageous on its face. Second, Gisburne was given no warning. Third, YouTube didn't just delete the video in question, they deleted Gisburne's entire account. And fourth, this makes a mockery of Google's "don't be evil" slogan. There can be no possible reason for this action other than caving to intimidation, and sanctimonious cowardice in the face of oppression is a particularly pernicious breed of evil.

If you share my outrage I urge you to contact YouTube and let them know how you feel.

The mind works in mysterious ways

I just a truly surreal experience. It actually started a month ago, when I was in Portland, Oregon for the holidays. I had just driven from Portland to Seattle for a day trip to do some interviews for the film. I got back to Portland at about 9 PM, just in time to catch my family finished dessert at a downtown restaurant. Because I still had my car I ended up driving back home by myself. I was listening to the radio and they started playing a song that struck me as a perfect addition to the soundtrack for the film. I was just rolling up to the house as the song was winding up. I had the volume cranked up loud, and my wife and her sister heard the last bars of the song. I mentioned to them that I thought the song would be good for the film, and they both agreed.

A few days later we were back home and I found that I had totally forgotten what the song was, and so had my wife and her sister. I called up the radio station and asked them to run down the playlist at the time which they very graciously agreed to do, but none of the songs that were on the air around the time I was driving home seemed to be the one I was looking for.

I figured that song was gone forever.

Then today as I was waling my dog (funny how so many of the key events in this saga seem to be connected to my dog) a little snippet of melody suddenly popped into my head, just half a dozen notes, but somehow I knew that this was part of the long-lost song. I kept humming that little bit of tune to myself over and over again, and slowly enough of the song reassembled itself in my brain that I was able to recall a bit of the lyrics, which let me look it up on Google, which led me to iTunes, which led me to... 'Question" by the Moody Blues!


I'm looking for someone to change my life
I'm looking for a miracle in my life


That was it! It also explained why I didn't recognize the song when I was going through the playlist. "Question" is almost like two songs in one, a hard-rock intro and a soft ballady ending. I remembered that the song was a ballad, and so when I heard the hard intro I thought that couldn't be it and moved on.

Funny how the mind works.

Now, if I could just find the sunglasses I lost in Las Vegas over the weekend...

Spare change

Ran across this old poem I wrote many years ago. Seems kind of apropos given that I'm making a film about homeless people.

---

SPARE CHANGE
(Copyright (c) by Ron Garret, all rights reserved)

The man says, "Got any spare change, mister?"
Now as it happens I do have spare change.
There are seventy-seven cents in my coat pocket.
I know because I just bought myself a Snickers bar
And paid with one of three crisp dollar bills
That were up against the fives
That were up against the twenties
That came from the magic money machine.

The man looks at me with burning, sunken eyes
That look as if they saw one day too many on the street
About a year ago.
The hair that once was golden
Now is black and stringy, greasy
The hand that holds the broken paper cup
Is sun-dried leather
The clothes that hang like flying-dutchman sails
From bony shoulders
Are as dirty as the street they know so well.

Poverty makes strange bedfellows.

"Got any spare change, mister?"
The man does not repeat himself.
The paper cup speaks for him.
The paper cup, the hands, the hair, the eyes
Peer through my stoic facade and into my coat pocket
At seventy-seven cents.
The eyes gaze at me with a longing and desperation
That I have never known for anything
At seventy-seven cents.

Response comes thick and fast and automatic:
My mouth says, "Sorry, no."
My head bows in regret
My legs pick up the pace
And I walk briskly away
As if only the urgency of my business prevents me
From acting on my true nature
And giving him my seventy-seven cents
And asking his name
And shaking his hand
And offering him a meal and a bed and a shower.

As I walk away I think of a thousand good reasons
Why I'm doing the right thing.
Funny, though, none of them really sound convincing.
But they are enough
To keep me from turning around
And going back.

Gald you noticed

I'm glad that someone besides me is starting to recognize that Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil is turning out to be disturbingly prophetic.

Slouching towards 1984

And you thought that Big Brother was a fictional character.

America is no longer a free country

Wow, I really thought (hoped) this would go the other way. The Supreme Court today refused to hear a challenge to a law that requires people to show ID when travelling. Why is this significant? This "law" is not actually on the books. It was never passed by Congress. It is a secret law, the very antithesis of free and open democracy. By refusing to hear this appeal the Supreme Court effectively sanctioned the transformation of the U.S. into a totalitarian state.


Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper:Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?
This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down (and you're just the man to do it!), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!


-- Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons

We have cut down the law to get at the devil. Heaven help us now, for the law surely will not.

This seems like the right answer

Much as it surprises me to say this, it looks like Chevrolet has found the right answer for the car of the future. It's called the Volt, and it's a hybrid but with a design tilted more towards an electric car than a gas-powered one. Basically, the gas tank is there to provide range when needed, while short trips (up to 40 miles) run on batteries. It also doesn't look nearly as goofy as previous hybrids/electrics, though it's not quite as cool-looking as the Tesla roadster.

I sure hope Chevy can make a go of this. I hate watching the U.S. auto industry go under.

Why I bash Libertarians

[NOTE: I originally started writing this last December.]

Reddit this morning led me to a book by Henry Hazlitt presumptuously entitled Economics in One Lesson. And since rounding out my collection of articles on why everyone but me is wrong about everything seems like as good a way as any to sign off this disastrous year I thought I'd take a swipe at the Libertarians and critique Hazlitt.

Hazlitt's argument is seductively self-evident: any argument for government intervention in the free market is wrong because it focuses myopically on the benefciaries of that policy while ignoring the (invariably far more numerous) victims. According to Hazlitt, "Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man" because of:

"... the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.

I decided to pick on Hazlitt because he himself suffers from the very same myopia which he credits as the source of so many economic fallacies. It is an instructive exercise to read Hazlitt even if only to see whether you can see past his critiques of what other people have overlooked and figure out what he himself has overlooked. It is easy to get caught up in the fun of demolishing other people's arguments, even if many of them are just straw men, and so miss the fact that you are being snookered. Go on, give it a go. I'll wait.

Did you figure it out?

Identifying Hazlitt's myopia is challenging because most of his arguments are actually correct. Government intervention in free markets usually does lead to all manner of negative consequences. Unfettered capitalism really does lead to increased productivity and societal wealth. Minimum wage legislation really does increase unemployment. And so on and so on. So what's the problem?

Hazlitt himself leads the reader half-way there:

Our study of our lesson would not be complete if, before we took leave of it, we neglected to observe that the fundamental fallacy with which we have been concerned arises not accidentally but systematically. It is an almost inevitable result, in fact, of the division of labor.

In a primitive community, or among pioneers, before the division of labor has arisen, a man works solely for himself or his immediate family. What he consumes is identical with what he produces. There is always a direct and immediate connection between his output and his satisfactions.

But when an elaborate and minute division of labor has set in, this direct and immediate connection ceases to exist. I do not make all the things I consume but, perhaps, only one of them. With the income I derive from making this one commodity, or rendering this one service, I buy all the rest. I wish the price of everything I buy to be low, but it is in my interest for the price of the commodity or services that I have to sell to be high. Therefore, though I wish to see abundance in everything else, it is in my interest for scarcity to exist in the very thing that it is my business to supply. The greater the scarcity, compared to everything else, in this one thing that I supply, the higher will be the reward that I can get for my efforts.

(Emphasis added.)

Hazlitt continues:

Just as there is no technical improvement that would not hurt someone, so there is no change in public taste or morals, even for the better, that would not hurt someone. An increase in sobriety would put thousands of bartenders out of business. A decline in gambling would force croupiers and racing touts to seek more productive occupations. A growth of male chastity would ruin the oldest profession in the world.

But it is not merely those who deliberately pander to men's vices who would be hurt by a sudden improvement in public morals. Among those who would be hurt most are precisely those whose business it is to improve those morals. Preachers would have less to complain about; reformers would lose their causes; the demand for their services and contributions for their support would decline.

If there were no criminals we should need fewer lawyers, judges and firemen, and no jailers, no locksmiths, and (except for such services as untangling traffic snarls) even no policemen.

Under a system of division of labor, in short, it is difficult to think of a greater fulfillment of any human need which would not, at least temporarily, hurt some of the people who have made investments or painfully acquired skill to meet that precise need.

Now it is often not the diffused gain of the increased supply or new discovery that most forcibly strikes even the disinterested observer, but the concentrated loss. The fact that there is more and cheaper coffee for everyone is lost sight of; what is seen is merely that some coffee growers cannot make a living at the lower price. The increased output of shoes at lower cost by the new machine is forgotten; what is seen is a group of men and women thrown out of work. It is altogether proper—it is, in fact, essential to a full understanding of the problem—that the plight of these groups be recognized, that they be dealt with sympathetically, and that we try to see whether some of the gains from this specialized progress cannot be used to help the victims find a productive role elsewhere.


So far so good. Here is where he goes off the rails:

But the solution is never to reduce supplies arbitrarily, to prevent further inventions or discoveries, or to support people for continuing to perform a service that has lost its value.

Really? Why not? On this point Hazlitt is silent. He simply takes it as axiomatic that the more goods and services are being produced the better off the world is. He sees only the forest and misses the trees. And, unfortunately, in this case the trees are people. To someone on the street with no money and no marketable skills it matters not a whit if economic progress has produced cheaper coffee (Hazlitt's example), he still can't afford to buy a cup. Disposing of excess buggy whip makers is a much thornier problem than disposing of excess buggy whips. But Libertarians try to pretend that these are structurally comparable issues.

Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. There are lots of things you can do with buggy whips that you can't so easily do with human beings. You can put buggy whips in warehouses or landfills, but you can't do that with buggy whip makers, at least not in a civil society.

The Liberatarian answer is that when buggy whips become obsolete the buggy whip makers should find something new to do. But this is not always so easy. A fifty year old who has spent his whole life making buggy whips might not have such an easy time learning a new trade, particularly in a world where productive occupations often require decades of training.

The fundamental problem with Liberatarian economics is that there is a positive-feedback effect that tends to put capital in the hands of those who need it the least. This gives those lucky few the leverage to effectively turn everyone else into indentured servants who have to work their entire lives to pay off their debts. Or, even worse, it lets some people slip through the cracks even if they are ready, willing and able to be productive simply because they don't have the capital to find a market for their services (a.k.a. a job).

Certainly in the aggregate the world is better off if we can simply take excess people and, like excess buggy whips, warehouse them or discard them or otherwise turn them into somebody else's problem. But is that really a better world? I think not.

Finding the right quality metric for an economy is not easy, and Ron's First Law applies: all extreme positions are wrong, which in this case means that all facile positions are wrong. The Right wants to increase the average while the Left wants to decrease the variance. Those extremes lead to lassez-faire capitalism and Marxist communism, both of which the world has rightly decided are pretty bad ideas.

The right answer is some sort of engineering compromise: free markets encourage innovation and increase productivity and standards of living, but then I also think there ought to be some government intervention to recycle some of the capital from the top back to the bottom to prevent people from falling into abject poverty and despair. Yes, it's inefficient. Efficiency needs to be tempered with (but not sacrificed to) compassion.

Imagine that

I am shocked -- shocked! -- to learn that a security flaw has been found in Microsoft's new Vista operating system.

Also, Peter Gutman's detailed analysis of Vista's inherent design flaws is getting a lot of attention. Could Vista be the beginning of the end for Microsoft? The Zune disaster doesn't seem to have made much of a dent. But maybe the new year will bring with it a ray of hope that the world will at long last throw off the Microsoft yoke.

But I wouldn't bet my life savings on it.

I'm going to have nightmares for weeks

I stopped eating foie gras a long time ago (along with veal) because I heard descriptions of how the stuff is produced. But nothing prepared me to actually see it with my own eyes.

Be warned: if you care for animals at all you will find this video very, very disturbing.

At least we know he won't hijack the plane

Just when you thought that airport security couldn't get any weirder the LA Times reports:

A woman going through security at Los Angeles International Airport put her month-old grandson into a plastic bin intended for carry-on items and slid it into an X-ray machine.

An interesting experiment

The balance of power in the Senate now hangs on the health of South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson, who would almost certainly be replaced by a Republican if he should become unable to serve.

Interestingly, South Dakota law only allows Johnson to be replaced if he actually dies. As long as he's alive it doesn't matter that he can't perform his duties. The presumption is that he will recover eventually, so he can't be replaced. Which makes me wonder: if Johnson were in a persistent vegitative state, would the Republicans be as eager to insist that he be kept alive as they were in the case of Terry Schiavo?

Not that I hope we ever get a chance to actually do that experiment. I'm pretty sure I know what the outcome would be.

Proof that God is a Republican

Democratic Senator Tim Johnson has apparently suffered a stroke which will probably result in the balance of power in the Senate shifting back to the Republicans.

Although I intended the title of this post to be darkly humorous, there is no doubt in my mind that millions of Americans see the Right Hand of God at work here.

UPDATE: The LA Times is reporting that Johnson did not suffer a stroke after all.

So this brings to mind a very strange thing that happened to me the other day. I was having dinner in a restaurant with some friends and we had just polished off a very nice bottle of Riesling and were starting on a 2004 Seghesio Old Vines Zin when I suddenly started feeling woozy. Long story short: I passed out, my wife thought I was having a siezure, and they ended up hauling me away in an ambulance. They ran a full battery of tests on me, including a CAT scan and a tox screen, and found absolutely nothing wrong. Even my blood alchohol came back as 0.000! (That's a trick I need to learn how to repeat!)

Fast forward two weeks. We're at Thanksgiving dinner. My wife has two martinis, which usually doesn't even register, and she starts to feel green around the gills! She ended up losing her lunch and spending four hours conked out in our host's guest room while we chowed down on turkey.

Maybe there's a bug going around that makes people pass out? If so then Johnson's prognosis is good. Neither I nor my wife have had any relapses.

DNS attacks do happen

Reddit is down. Not the site itself (as far as I know) but their DNS servers, which are hosted at name-services.com. That site is now full of adwords spam. It's probably been hacked, and any site that used them for DNS service is effectively off the air.

It's odd how addicted to Reddit I have apparently become. I keep hitting reload in the vain hope that the problem will fix itself even though I know it will almost certainly be hours or days. Ironically, reddit itself is almost certainly still up, but there's no way to get to it without knowing its IP address, and the only way to find that out (unless you happen to have a cached copy or wrote it down on a post-it) is, in reddit's case, to get it from name-services.com.

I should look into getting some backup name servers for my own domains. But I probably won't.

UPDATE: Shimon Rura points out that every cloud has a silver lining.

Fuck you, John McCain

John McCain wants to extend Federal anti-obscenity laws to blogs. To which I say: Senator McCain, with all due respect (which apparently isn't very much): fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Better yet, fuck you with the horse you rode in on. What part of "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press" do you not understand?

And liberals wonder why no one takes them seriously

I decided to wander over to the Huffungton Post this morning just to see what was going on. The very first sentence of actual text on the front page was from a blog entry by Nora Ephron:

"I met Condoleezza Rice last weekend. She was much prettier than I thought she was going to be."

It gets better (or worse depending on your point of view):

Condi was the hostess of the dinner, and she stood up to speak about each of the honorees. She was completely competent. She was, however, not at all funny. She tried to be, but she wasn't.

I wonder how Nora would feel if the shoe were on the other foot:

I read a blog entry by Nora Ephron today. Her picture was so tiny that I couldn't tell if she was good looking or not. I think she might have been trying to be funny, but I really couldn't tell. I guess that means she's not a very good writer. Maybe she should stick to hosting dinner parties, at which she professes to be an expert."

Truth and reconciliation

These two posts do a pretty good job of elucidating the point I've been trying to make (badly apparently) about what is wrong with the confrontational style of atheism promulgated by Richard Dawkins et al.

Confessions don't start with the word "if"

God help me, I cannot believe I am actually writing about O.J. Simpson, but the number of people taking seriously the proposition that his book ought to see the light of day because it's a confession really steams my clams. Hello! Earth to Timothy Noah! Confessions don't start with the word "if". If O.J. waned to confess he'd go to the police and say, "I killed them. I'm terribly sorry. Lock me up." Or at the very least he'd start to pay the civil judgement he owes to the Goldman family. But "If I did it" is no confession, it is twisting the knife. It is a spoiled narcissistic scum-sucking murdering brat whining about the fact that no one pays any attention to him any more. "Hello," O.J. is saying, "I got away with murder, remember? Everyone pay attention to MEEEEEEE!" It's a scene more suitable to an episode of South Park than to real life. Anyone who treats this animal or anything that he says or writes with anything other than unmitigated contempt ought to be ashamed of themselves. That is, until he drops the "if".

I've found my spiritual home

So here I am writing all these rants lamenting what a jerk Richard Dawkins is when this falls in my lap. It took me less than half an hour to see the light: I am a Realist! Halelujah!

Seriously, I think this guy has a much better approach to spreading the Word than Dawkins does. Joining the Church of Realism also comes with fringe benefits.

Holy crap, this guy is prolific. And some of his writings are real eye-openers. I'm gonna be up half the night.

What's so great about evidence?

Right on cue Richard Dawkins answers the charge of being an atheist fundamentalist :

"Fundamentalists know they are right because they have read the truth in a holy book and they know, in advance, that nothing will budge them from their belief. The truth of the holy book is an axiom, not the end product of a process of reasoning. The book is true, and if the evidence seems to contradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out, not the book. By contrast, what I, as a scientist, believe (for example, evolution) I believe not because of reading a holy book but because I have studied the evidence. It really is a very different matter. Books about evolution are believed not because they are holy. They are believed because they present overwhelming quantities of mutually buttressed evidence. In principle, any reader can go and check that evidence. When a science book is wrong, somebody eventually discovers the mistake and it is corrected in subsequent books. That conspicuously doesn't happen with holy books."

To which I respond: What's so great about evidence? Is not your belief that evidence is a reliable guide to Truth just a matter of faith?

I can only imagine how Dawkins would respond to that, but there is only one answer that I can think of so I'll argue with myself and say: the difference between evidence and faith is that the holy books are mutually and internally contradictory, and there is no principled way of resolving those contradictions. Scientific evidence, by contrast, is consistent and independently reproducible, and therefore everyone at least agrees on what the evidence is even if they might differ from time to time about the implications.

The problem with this is, interestingly, a manifestation of the Universal Asymmetry that I pointed out in my last post on this topic. Dawkins may have come to his beliefs by studying "the evidence" but very few people have this luxury. The vast majority of the people in the world do not have direct access to "the evidence." At best they have access to books written by people (scientists) with access to the evidence. And the vast majority of such books are written specifically to be inaccessible to the layman. (To be fair, many of Dawkins' own books are notable exceptions to this rule.) Take me, for example. I believe in evolution, but not because I have actually studied the evidence. I don't have time for that. I believe in evolution becuase it makes sense to me. And people who believe, say, that Christ died for their sins, believe that for the same reason: because it makes sense to them.

Make no mistake: I absolutely believe that those who deny evolution are wrong. The difference between me and Dawkins that I understand how someone might reasonably come to a different conclusion and Dawkins doesn't. He believes despite evidence to the contrary that all non-scientific worldviews are unreasonable. They are not. They just start with different premises and life experiences. Until Dawkins and his ilk come to understand and accept this (and adjust their rhetoric accordingly) I predict they will make little progress towards their stated goals.

P.S. It is not true, as Dawkins claims, that there is are no corrective processes in religion. The text of the holy books may not change often (although it does happen) but the interpretation of the holy books is in constant flux, just as the interpretation of scientific evidence is.

Now he tells us

Henry Kissinger says that victory in Iraq is no longer possible.

Damn those latte-sipping sandal-wearing terrorist-mollycoddling liberals. I'm sure it's all their fault.

The elephant in the atheist living room

Richard Dawkins shows off his finest fundamentalist form when he attempts to discredit any possible reason an atheist might have to tolerate religion. Dawkins to my mind is no better than the assholes who work the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica waving their Bibles and spouting off about the evils of homosexuality. [UPDATE: This is worded too strongly. I should have said something like: some of Dawkins's rhetoric is no better than...]

I personally subscribe to a variant of I'm-an-atheist-but-ism #2: people need religion. There is palpable irony in seeing the Great Logician himself trying to refute this argument by saying that it is condescending. Even if it were (I don't think it is), so what? Aren't we supposed to judge the truth of falseness of a proposition by the evidence rather than on whether or not we think someone might be offended? By rejecting this argument on the grounds of political incorrectness Dawkins shows himself to be just as much of a hypocrite as all the other religious fundamentalists.

But the problem runs even deeper than that because not only is Dawkins arguing ab-political-correctness, he is also knocking down a straw man: It is not that people need relgion, it is that they want religion! Some people, to the perennial chagrin of people like Dawkins, simply prefer existence with the sense of purpose that faith can provide (and frankly I can muster a great deal of sympathy for that position if jerks like Dawkins are the role models for the alternative). This is simlpy a fact. People choose religion of their own free will. It is the height of condescension to suppose, as Dawkins does, that choosing religion is ipso facto an unsound decision, and to appoint yourself as the arbiter of what they should have chosen for themselves.

It gets worse still because there are manifest sound reasons why someone might reject science in favor of religion, not least of which is that there are important questions that science cannot answer. Science, being objective by definition, is by its very nature unsuitable for addressing questions of subjective experience. We can tease out, say, all the chemical reactions that occur when one eats a chocolate bar and still have made no progress towards an understanding of what it is like to eat chocolate.

Science is likewise impotent in the face of mystical experience. Scientists tend to write it all off as delusion, but that is unjustifiably facile. Imagine that there were a genetic mutation that made one unable to taste chocolate, a sort of color-blindness for your taste buds. (When I was in my twenties I caught a weird virus that actually made me completely lose my sense of taste for a few days. It was a very distressing experience.) Someone with this mutation would be utterly unable to grasp the subjective experience of eating a chocolate bar, and if there were enough of these people they might suppose that all the folks waxing rapturous over the wonders of chocolate were (no pun intended) nuts.

Although we are making astonishing progress in understanding how the brain works, the mind is still a deeply mysterious phenomenon. Science cannot yet eliminate the possibility that some minds might be in contact with something extra-physical (or even just complex and subtle, but nonetheless real that we do not yet understand), and so to dismiss religion on the grounds that it is a priori untenable is, at best, premature. But, as ever, it's actually much worse than that. There is an elephant in the atheist living room, a question that is both obvious and unanswerable by science. It is this: why am I me? From my point of view there is this very obvious asymmetry in the Universe that the symmetric laws of physics not only cannot account for, but with which they are in fact fundamentally incompatible. The facile answer -- that the situation is symmetric because everyone experiences this -- is not an answer but an evasion. It does not address the question, which is why do I have this particular subjective experience.

I am personally content to let that question remain unanswered and revel in the delicious mysteriousness of it all. But I see no rational reason for passing judgement on those who might choose to do otherwise.

Chasing a dream

After watching the events of the world unfold over the past few years I've grown a pretty touch hide, but this still made me cry.

The terrorists win

If George Bush is to be believed, terrorists around the world have won a major victory as Democrats take control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Good thing George Bush is not to be believed. It's a little early to say that my hope in the American electorate is restored, but just maybe there is hope for the world yet.

Good night, and good luck.

The chaos begins

Reports of problems with electronic voting machines are coming in from everywhere.

The stakes

Robert Parry has a really good summary of what is really at stake in tomorrow's election. Worthwhile reading.

Sniveling cowards

Just when you thought the policies coming out of the twisted little brains of the Bush administration couldn't possibly get any more perverse we learn that they want to prevent torture victims from talking to lawyers because


"Improper disclosure of other operational details, such as interrogation methods, could also enable terrorist organizations and operatives to adapt their training to counter such methods, thereby obstructing the CIA's ability to obtain vital intelligence that could disrupt future planned terrorist attacks"


And what of the innocent people who are accidentally caught up in this secret web of kidnapping and torture and God only knows what else because of bad intelligence or vendettas or political agendas or less-than-iron-willed people who are willing to say anything to stop the pain? Unfortunate but necessary "collateral damage" in the war against terrorism you say? Then what exactly is it that distinguishes us from the terrorists?

Actually, I can think of one thing: the terrorists are not willing to sacrifice their principles to save their own skin.

It just keeps getting better

From AP via Yahoo! News:

"A Republican congressman accused of abusing his ex-mistress agreed to pay her about $500,000 in a settlement last year that contained a powerful incentive for her to keep quiet until after Election Day, a person familiar with the terms of the deal told The Associated Press."

Ye gods. Are there any Republicans left who aren't involved in some kind of scandal?

Idiocy has a silver lining

This is supposed to be funny, but it's actually the inevitable result of following Dubya's rhetoric to its logical conclusion. Surely if it's true that "if the Democrats win then the terrorists win" then anyone who votes Democratic is supporting the enemy and can therefore be rightly declared an enemy combatant.

Happily, Dubya has never been very good at logic. But there is staggering irony in the possibility that the only thing keeping the opposition out of Gitmo is Dubya's inability to reason.

Disaster looms

Ars Technica has a good round-up of why we can expect chaos come election day.

Bye bye, Democracy. It was fun while it lasted.

Found and lost

Not 24 hours after John Kerry found his backbone he lost it again.

Sigh.

Porn prevents rape

It has always seemed plausible to me, and now there's scientific proof that internet porn reduces the number of rapes. This is not speculation, not overhyped extrapolation from some laboratory experiment. This is real data from the real world. Where the Net goes, reduction in the number of rapes inevitably follows. Having had a little firsthand experience with the annoying effects of hormone overdose (no, not that -- I'm talking about the natural kind that comes along with puberty), this result is not too surprising. If you provide a safe way for randy boys (ah, youth!) to vent their excess testosterone, so to speak, in the privacy of their own homes they will be less likely to take out their frustrations on other people.

Voting fraud continues

First it was Florida, now it's Texas. (Gee. Imagine that.)


Friday night, KFDM reported about people who had cast straight Democratic ticket ballots, but the touch-screen machines indicated they had voted a straight Republican ticket.

Some of those voters including Lamar University professor, Dr. Bruce Drury, believe the problem is a programming error.


Ya think? Wow, those profethorth are tho thmart. I wish I wath ath thmart as them.

John Kerry finds his spine

Finally.

Beginning of the end? Or the end of the beginning?

Iraq is starting to unravel:


Sunni insurgents have cut the roads linking the city to the rest of Iraq. The country is being partitioned as militiamen fight bloody battles for control of towns and villages north and south of the capital.

As American and British political leaders argue over responsibility for the crisis in Iraq, the country has taken another lurch towards disintegration.

Well-armed Sunni tribes now largely surround Baghdad and are fighting Shia militias to complete the encirclement.

Voting fraud begins

Reports are already coming out of Florida that electronic voting machines are changing votes. You get three guesses as to which way they're changing them.

So... can I send you my business plan? Advice for the cash-strapped entrepreneur

I've been meaning to write a lengthy response to one of the comments to my earlier post about geek business myths. Joseph J. Loew (would it be a low blow for me to call him Joe Loew? ;-) wrote:


Ron, are you ready to fund a company focused on Highly Targeted Advertising for music and video? Vibe Technology will do for media content what AdSense did for direct marketing text ads.

My goal is upwards of 30% conversion rates.

Ready to put your money where you mouth is??? :-)


In other words, "Can I send you my business plan?"

The short answer is: Of course you can. Why do you think I went to the trouble of writing the myths post?

But the longer answer is: if you have to ask the question, then the chances that I'll actually be interested in funding your business are pretty slim. There are an awful lot of business plans out there looking for funding. In LA it's a tossup between bizplans and screenplays, and in both cases most of them are not very good. Nine out of ten startups fail. My job is to find the one in ten that will succeed, which is, of course, more art than science.

It's helpful to think about this from the VC's point of view. The way a typical VC works is they will take money from rich people and pool it into a fund. They then take that money and dole it out to startups. If the VC doesn't make those investments, they don't get paid, and if the investments they make do badly they will have a hard time raising their next fund. (Most VC's actually structure their deals so that they make money even if their investments tank. But you can't stay in business long that way.)

The point is that VC's are highly motivated to find good businesses to invest in. That's our job.

It's not an easy job. It typically takes between two and six months to close a deal, most of which is spent doing due-dilligence. Bcause it takes so long, the cost of doing due-dilligence is enormous, both in terms of actual cost and in terms of opportunity cost. This is the reason that many VC's don't like to do small deals. The overhead of doing due-dilligence is so large that they can't turn a profit on a deal worth less than a few million dollars.

The upshot is that it's really really important for a VC to develop a good instinct for recognizing fundable companies before the due-dilligence process begins. So we have a few rules of thumb that we apply to filter out the clueless people before we waste too much time with them. And heading the list of dead-giveaways to cluelessness is issuing a challenge like the one above, because it demonstrates very clearly that the issuer doesn't understand how we do business.

Since the top-ten list format seemed to be so popular, here's my top-ten list (with nine items this time instead of eleven) of things you should never do when approaching someone to invest in your company:

1. Don't ask them to sign an NDA. Instead, ask them verbally not to pass the information along. The actual value of an NDA is virtually zero. To capitalize on it you'd have to prove in a court of law that a particular person leaked the information. The chances of your being able even to find out the origin of a leak, let alone prove it, are vanishingly small. Sophisticated invstors know this, and if you ask them to sign an NDA all you will be accomplishing is demonstrating that you don't know it. If you ask them simply to promise not to pass the information along you are demonstrating that you trust them, which is actually much more likely to achieve the goal of having them keep the information to themselves. But most new entrepreneurs worry about this way too much (see geek business myth #3).

2. If you're cold-calling, don't send anything longer than a paragraph or two. Just introduce yourself, give a few sentences about your background and what you're up to, and ask if they'd like to know more. I once got a cold-call email that began, "I would like to ask your advice..." and then went on for, no exaggeration, ten pages. My response was, in its entirety: my advice is never to send an email this long to someone you don't know.

3. Don't fake it. If you have no clue what your market size is, don't pretend that you do. It's much better to know than not to know, but it's far better to admit you don't know than to pretend that you do and get found out. Honest ignorance will get you much further than bullshit. Also, don't assume that just because no one is calling you on it that we don't know that you're faking it. We can tell, even if we don't let you know. And think about this: do you really want to do business with someone who is so easily duped that you can con them?

4. Don't get too excited if a VC shows interest. I learned this one the hard way. Until the check clears (and sometimes not even then) the deal can fall through. Some VCs will string you along even if they are not actually interested. Maybe you are a potential competitor to a company that they've already funded (a good reason to do your homework on a VC before you approach them), or maybe they want to keep you in their bullpen, or maybe they're just assholes and want to mess with your head. Remember, this is business. It's not about your hopes and dreams, it's about money. A certain amount of detachment and hard-nosedness is required to succeed. It takes a very strong person to get through the process with all of their humanity intact.

5. Don't need money. What I mean by this is: don't think of yourself as a supplicant asking for a favor, think of yourself as somone providing a scarce product that VCs want: an opportunity to make effective use of capital. In that regard you can think of a VC as a customer. It's not quite the same attitude as you take with your actual customers (since the product your providing is very different in both cases) but the attitude should be the same. If you show desperation to sell, no one will buy. That's true whether the product is apples or investment opportunities.

6. Don't spend too much effort polishing your business plan. Spell check it and make sure it looks reasonably presentable, but don't agonize over the format. Don't put fancy covers on it. Don't put bullshit sections in there just because you think (or even because someone told you) that they need to be there. (See point #3 above.) Just describe the opportunity as simply and clearly and straightforwardly and completely as you can. Always start with a one-page summary.

7. Don't go it alone. Make friends with a good bizdev person. A bizdev person (a.k.s. a VP of business development) is someone who knows how to ferret out and talk to customers. He or she is the kind of person you mostly didn't hang out with in school because they were the cool kids who went to all the parties while you stayed in your dorm room and hacked. Now is the time to seek those people out and make friends with them. Get them excited about your product. Find one you like, who seems to get along with everyone, who has a lot of energy, and wants to make money, and ask them to join your company.

8. Don't try to start a company without any background. A few people have done it successfully, but getting some experience under your belt first makes it so much easier. And I'm not talking about taking a salaried position at IBM. Join someone else's startup, preferably one being started by someone with experience, and the earlier the better. It doesn't even matter much if you don't like the company's prospects (ask for salary instead of equity in that case). You can often learn more from watching a company fail than you can from watching one succeed. Join it with the expectation that you will get nothing but an education out of it and you will not be disappointed (and then if the company makes it you will get a nice bonus). Alternatively, work for a VC firm for a year or two.

9. Stop asking for advice and just do it. There is no formula for success. Every successful business person has to figure it out (or stumble on to it) on their own. Also, there are some things that sophisticated collaborators will just expect you to figure out without your being told. And no, I'm not going to tell you what those things are. But here's a hint: there's no excuse for not knowing something that you can learn with a Google search.

Good luck.

This is the way freedom ends...

...not with a violent coup, but with the quiet passage of a bill that, among other things, authorizes the President to declare martial law whenever he deems it necessary to "suppress public disorder." This effectively repeals the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibited the U.S. military from being used in law enforcement actions against U.S. citizens. This seems to have gone all but unnoticed by the mainstream press.

So maybe all that sabre rattling about Iran was just a clever ruse to distract us from the real plan, which is to give the President the power to call in the Army to "suppress public disorder" in case people get upset over, say, not being allowed to vote on November 7. Unthinkable? I would have thought so. But at this point, if Bush decides to turn the Army against U.S. citizens it will be legal. And it's not at all clear what we could do about it then.

Let's take stock:

1. The votes are being counted by machines that are manufactured by a company whose CEO is a rabid partisan Republican. The machines have had myriad security problems, and are known to be very easy to hack.

2. The President now has the power to imprison and torture anyone he deems to be an enemy combatant (which is to say, anyone he wants) indefinitely without trial and without access to an attorney.

3. The President now has the power to use the U.S. Army against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

4. The President believes he's on a mission from God. And so do a lot of other people.

At this point, if the Democrats officially win (as opposed to actually win, which is not the same thing nowadays) the election and the transition of power happens peacefully I will be genuinely surprised.

I predict that November 7 will be a good day to be out and about with a video camera. It's going to be an interesting day.

It's a miracle!

Dilbert creator Scott Adams has become the first person in recorded history to recover from spasmodic dysphonia, a weird condition where you lose your ability to speak. Even stranger, he did it by reciting a nusery rhyme. I kid you not.

Funny thing, Scott's an atheist. God truly works in mysterious ways.

Einstein, eat your heart out

Your's truly has received a patent on a device that allows faster-than-light communications. :-)

Now we know

I have long suspected that there are truly no depths that Republicans will not sink to in order to maintain their grip on power, but now there is proof.

On the virtues of doubt

Traveling through Tennessee recently I spent quite a bit of time listening to conservative Christian radio stations. They've become much more prevalent since I was a teenager. Nowadays it's hard to turn the dial without tripping over half a dozen of them.

I grew up in the South and I've spent a fair bit of time studying religion in general and Christianity in particular, but nothing prepared me for some of the things I heard. Substitute "Allah" for "Jesus" and it could have been Taliban Radio. To cite but one example: there was an entire show devoted to the question of whether women were more easily taken in by lies than men, with the obvious Biblical launching pad of Eve and the Fruit of the Tree. But though it began rather gently and furtively, it didn't end that way. Fifteen minutes or so into the program the advocate of the women-are-more-easily-fooled-than-men position was saying that women are "absolutely worthless" (an exact quote) except insofar as they have a relationship with Jesus, and ranting about how horrible it is that some people to try to teach young girls to have self-esteem (can you imagine?) because it diminishes their true source of worth, which is Jesus, etc. etc. It was so extreme it almost seemed like the sort of thing that Richard Dawkins might come up with to parody religion. But this was no parody.

And, of course, the person saying these things was a woman.

But what shocked me the most is that over three days and many hours of listening I never once heard even a hint of dissent or doubt. Not once did anyone ever say, "Whoa, hold on just a second, are you sure about that?" Every comment, no matter how extreme, was met with, essentially, "Amen, Hallelujah, and furthermore..." The only hint of a moral qualm came from a caller who was agonizing over who to vote for now that the Republicans have been exposed as child molesters because "the Democrats just want to hand the country over to the homosexuals."

A pickle indeed. I felt the caller's pain.

I have never worried much about religious fundamentalism in this country because I have faith (yes, faith) in our evolved moral intuition, that when push comes to shove common sense (and commerce) mostly prevails. I decided to put that faith to the test with a little experiment: I would post on the Internet an ironclad logical argument that according to the Bible, cannibalism is not a sin.

The result that I was expecting -- hoping for actually -- was that people's moral intuition would take over and make them say to themselves, "Whoa, hold on just a second, that can't be right." (I was also expecting a lot of angry responses from people telling me I was going to burn in hell, which is how True Believers generally deal with cognitive dissonance.)

Instead there was just a deafening silence, and two people saying, essentially, "Gee, he might be right."

I find that very scary. If without even trying very hard I can convince people that God thinks it's OK for them to chow down on their children, just think of what someone who is really skilled and charismatic could do. If people won't raise their moral hackles at the thought of cannibalism, if women can't be bothered to dissent when they are told they are "worthless", I fear we may be in for some truly horrific times before we emerge from our collective nightmare. The Taliban are not in Afghanistan, they are in East Tennessee.

When I was 30 I read a book called The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism. The first question is "Can one doubt the existence of God and still be a good Jew?" The answer is: not only is it possible, it is required to maintain at least a little bit of doubt about His existence because absolute certainty leads to fanaticism. I think the world would be a better place if that creed were more widely spread. Maintaining a little bit of doubt about whatever you believe is a good thing if for no other reason than that it keeps you humble, which even the most ardent Christian at least ostensibly believes is a virtue.

This, I think, is the central evil of both the religious and political Right nowadays: they have transformed people's perception of doubt. On the Right, doubt is not a virtue. It is not a tempering force that can keep you out of trouble. It is instead a distraction, an emasculating influence that robs you of focus and purpose. Doubt is a Bad Thing that must be eliminated.

The problem with this point of view is that it only works if you're God. If you're a fallible human you will occasionally make mistakes, and sooner or later reality will get in your face with the fact that you are not always Right About Everything. At that point, if you have hewn to the belief that doubt is bad, you have to start invoking some serious psychological defense mechanisms, like denial.

Alas, denial seems more fashionable than humility at the moment.

All your space are belong to U.S.

Today Iraq, tomorrow the galaxy.

THE US has adopted a new space policy that rejects future arms-control agreements and claims a right to deny access to space to anyone "hostile to American interests".

A Biblical bombshell

I don't normally argue with evangelists any more, but there's a group that works the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica for whom I will occasionally make an exception. These people are really a piece of work. They cart in an entire audio-visual setup: big-screen projection TV, laptop PC running Power Point, video cameras, microphones, and a PA system. They set up one microphone for the audience to ask questions. The result is usually a pretty good show, and they always gather a crowd. They are so obnoxious that even Christians will stop to argue with them, which doesn't seem to faze them at all.

A few weeks ago one of them was preaching about moral relativism: if we don't have an authoritative source of revealed morality, how do we decide what is right and wrong? (Never mind that there's actually a Biblical answer to this: we know Right from Wrong because Eve ate from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But I digress.) Imagine you meet up with a cannibal who wants to eat you. Is that OK? He thinks it is. Who are you to dispute him?

That was an opening I couldnt' resist. I stepped up to the microphone and asked, "Is it OK to eat someone who has died of natural causes? And if not, where in the Bible does it say that?"

The guy didn't miss a beat. (He never does. He's very, very good.) "No, it's not OK. There's a story in Isaiah about some women who are in a besieged city who conspire to murder and eat their sons, and God clearly condemns this action."

"But wait," I responded, "that's not on point at all. Obviously if they have to kill their sons before they can eat them that's wrong because murder is wrong. But that wasn't my question. I asked about eating someone who has died of natural causes."

He sputtered for a moment, said something along the lines of, "It's in there somewhere -- go look for it," and shut the microphone off. (I always count that as a victory.)

Not being the sort to shirk a homework assignment I decided to try to find the story the guy was referring to. So I finally got myself an on-line copy of the Bible (can you believe it's taken me this long?) and started grepping (that's searching for you non-computer-geeks out there) for the word "flesh." I wasn't able to find the story the guy was referring to (I suspect he was blowing smoke, though he does know his Bible pretty well). But I did find this:

Jer19:9 And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege and straitness, wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives, shall straiten them.

That's God speaking. Is it possible that God did not actually follow through on this threat? No. If he did not follow through then God will have spoken falsely. One can quibble over whether or not an omnipotent God is theoretically capable of lying, but it doesn't matter. If he actually did lie then that undermines the entire foundation of fundamentalist Christianity, which is that the Bible is True irrespective of the abstract theoretical issue. So because God said that he would "cause [people] to eat the flesh of their sons" we have no choice but to conclude that He actually did it. So it is not possible that Cannibalism is a sin, because God, being perfectly good, would never force anyone to sin. Such a thing would clearly be abhorrent to His nature.

So the Bible is clear: cannibalism is unambiguously not a sin.

It's actually much worse than that. Not only is cannibalism not a sin, it is in fact endorsed (and inflicted!) by God Himself as a punishment for sin! (The people who are being forced by God to chow down on their children are sinners, of course.) According to the Bible, cannibalism is a Good Thing! It's unpleasant to be sure, but it's for your own good (kind of like stoning).

Can't wait to hear what the Third Street gang has to say about this.

Pardon me while I pick my jaw up off the floor

George Bush -- yes, that George Bush -- has said that Iraq 'Could Be' Vietnam All Over Again.

Deja vu all over again

The Republicans have a secret plan to end the war:

Sen. Conrad Burns said at a debate Tuesday night that President Bush does have a plan for winning the war in Iraq, but he isn't about to share it with the world.