Watching the different crowds mill around the Terry Schaivo case this Holy Week brings some thoughts of what has happened since then. Christ was the victim of the death penalty, but at the time of his crucifixion I wonder if there was anyone that questioned the right of the state to put those deemed to be worthy of the penalty to death. Christ certainly never questioned the right of the State to inflict the death penalty as he walked the path to Golgotha, and his insight into matters of "right" and "rights" are a bit beyond those of the talking heads. The ideas of "cruel and unusual" seem like they may have been a bit different then too.
Terry has been sentenced to death for failure to be responsive enough to please her husband. Historically that criteria only worked in India, but maybe we are starting a new trend here, it is often hard for me to keep up. The means of termination in this case is "death by dehydration/starvation", which under these circumstances is considered "humane". I think the standard technique in India was immolation. That sounds painful, but given the "pass out factor", I'm wondering if the speed may not even give it the "kindness winner" by a nose. Those can be tough calls when you have the kind of innocent life that is just begging for termination.
Sadly, the US is an "equal rights for women" country, so I'm a bit concerned for my life. If men get to evaluate their wives for suitabilty to continue life in this world, I must assume that the same right will be extended to wives. Mooses tend to fail to meet requirements on many occasions, and there have been allusions made to "brain dead" more than once cast my way. Both starvation and dehydration would be especially hard on me. I'm almost sure they would prohibit beer on the grounds of it being a fluid, and that seems cruel and unusual right there.
I suppose if a person can still move a bit, one could save their life by committing a crime that would be worthy of the death penalty. Then the left would stand up for you in a hearbeat. In fact, the lower your mental capability, the MORE likely they are to demand that you you live, and there isn't any potential way to kill you that isn't "cruel and unusual" in that circumstance.
In Terry's case however, a long drawn out death is just fine. Death by starvation isn't the panacea that the media seems inclined to make it out to be in this case. I watched a man that I visited as a volunteer at a nursing home die of starvation. He had inoperable cancer that interfered with his ability to eat, and tiny amount of remaining family decided on that end for him. I'm not saying they were "wrong". They had the right, they decided, and I wasn't going to interfere. I just know that it wasn't that "easy". I'm not saying dying of terminal cancer would have been easier.
Those on the left feel that the only kind of human life worth defending is criminal life. No matter what your crime, taking your life is just plain immoral. Innocent human life on the other hand, especially any innocent human life that can't speak directly for itself, may be terminated by any means available. I must stipulate HUMAN life though ... for if you are an owl, snail, beetle, bug or fungus, your "right to life" is suddenly again a matter of grave concern. Want to build a housing development where there is some rare fungus? The left might be able to stand a few rapes of 9 year old girls and letting the offenders even walk free if it was "just once", but don't be making any trouble for the fungus.
The "religious nuts" defend the right to life of the innocent voiceless humans, and the sensible scientific lefties defend the right to life of the criminals and the snails. I guess there is a certain order to the universe if one looks at it just right.
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
The Lament of the Infernal Rot
As I survey what I need to get done before this weekend, the need to scratch one of my PCs to take along to my Father's house to potentially replace his spyware/virus riddled current PC looms large. As a 27 year computer professional, veteran of many machines built from parts, and numerous scratch installs, I'm sure I CAN get to the finish line, but am disgusted by the effort.
All my 78 year old completely non-technologist Dad needs is "email and browser capability". Somehow he managed to find some Spyware, probably with a great big button that said "click here to protect your computer", and the infection began. A previous trip to install Spybot cleaned off thousands of instances, but even though the machine became useable again, the "rot" was apparently permanent, and the best guess is that it is time for a scratch install now since it keeps eating his Internet provider password, and fails to connect.
Given the potential difficulty of that, it seems easier to create a clean machine here, copy over the favorites, email files, and very tiny application to hook up to his Internet provider once I get there, and "be on the road". It can be done, but in these days of $70 1GB SD cards it seems amazing that a machine can't have a non-volatile copy of a enough OS to provide Browser and Email capability without the need to drag a complete machine to Wisconsin.
If only I had "a little time" (weeks? couple months?) I could manage to build myself a very simple Linux Kernel, set it up with Firefox and Thunderbird, and configure it so that it ONLY exposed those functions to my father. How many older folks (and in fact even younger folks) only REALLY need that much computing power in many cases? It seems like such a solution must be done already, but at least from a SHORT Google search of the net it did not materialize and thus I Blog my lament and dream of a better computing life.
All my 78 year old completely non-technologist Dad needs is "email and browser capability". Somehow he managed to find some Spyware, probably with a great big button that said "click here to protect your computer", and the infection began. A previous trip to install Spybot cleaned off thousands of instances, but even though the machine became useable again, the "rot" was apparently permanent, and the best guess is that it is time for a scratch install now since it keeps eating his Internet provider password, and fails to connect.
Given the potential difficulty of that, it seems easier to create a clean machine here, copy over the favorites, email files, and very tiny application to hook up to his Internet provider once I get there, and "be on the road". It can be done, but in these days of $70 1GB SD cards it seems amazing that a machine can't have a non-volatile copy of a enough OS to provide Browser and Email capability without the need to drag a complete machine to Wisconsin.
If only I had "a little time" (weeks? couple months?) I could manage to build myself a very simple Linux Kernel, set it up with Firefox and Thunderbird, and configure it so that it ONLY exposed those functions to my father. How many older folks (and in fact even younger folks) only REALLY need that much computing power in many cases? It seems like such a solution must be done already, but at least from a SHORT Google search of the net it did not materialize and thus I Blog my lament and dream of a better computing life.
Monday, March 21, 2005
Friends of the Reaper
The Terry Schiavo case seems to be pretty high in the national news right now. Some say that is because "Congress is involved", but it seems to me that the media spent less time in the discussion of Tort Reform than this, and Congress was involved in that as well.
Personally, my concerns with Terry are small. It is unfortunate to see a husband and parents fighting over what is left of a person due to tragic circumstance. As a Christian, there is a sense that there is"benefit" to the people charged with the care of a life even at a minimal level of existance under the same principle as "it is better to give than to recieive". The willingness to "be of service" is a core Christian value, and situations like the Schiavo case provide people the chance to be "in the service of life" even though the "rewards" of that service in this world are very likely to be zero.
On the other side of the ledger, my sense is that this is certainly a political loser for the Republican party. The set of people most likely to support them in their efforts to save this womans life aren't likely to vote democrat anytime soon, and it is the wrong time to "energize the base" (little long until Nov '06). So, it is a political net loser for Republicans, but then maybe in the big picture there are more Americans that feel as I do that it is actually very refreshing to see a set of folks go out and do something stupid politically just because they believe it is the right thing.
I'd personally probably not interfere. The relationship of a husband to a wife would trump the parents interests in this case, and even though he may be far from a perfect husband, the incidence of those is rather low.
I do get a kick out of the liberals extreme desire to let a husband effectively put his wife to death for "not meeting requirements" (all be it, in a big way), and apparently get a few funds in the process. It isn't hard to understand the parents motives, why the husband can't just walk away and let her have whatever vanishingly small chance she has is hard to understand.
Liberals are remarkably consistent on being "pro-death" ... if you are very young, very old, infirm, or just depressed and on the path to doing yourself in, they are resolute in their pro-death position. For a set of people for which consistency is usally not a consideration, it is admirable to see them consistently give the Grim Reaper the thumbs up as "their kind of guy".
Personally, my concerns with Terry are small. It is unfortunate to see a husband and parents fighting over what is left of a person due to tragic circumstance. As a Christian, there is a sense that there is"benefit" to the people charged with the care of a life even at a minimal level of existance under the same principle as "it is better to give than to recieive". The willingness to "be of service" is a core Christian value, and situations like the Schiavo case provide people the chance to be "in the service of life" even though the "rewards" of that service in this world are very likely to be zero.
On the other side of the ledger, my sense is that this is certainly a political loser for the Republican party. The set of people most likely to support them in their efforts to save this womans life aren't likely to vote democrat anytime soon, and it is the wrong time to "energize the base" (little long until Nov '06). So, it is a political net loser for Republicans, but then maybe in the big picture there are more Americans that feel as I do that it is actually very refreshing to see a set of folks go out and do something stupid politically just because they believe it is the right thing.
I'd personally probably not interfere. The relationship of a husband to a wife would trump the parents interests in this case, and even though he may be far from a perfect husband, the incidence of those is rather low.
I do get a kick out of the liberals extreme desire to let a husband effectively put his wife to death for "not meeting requirements" (all be it, in a big way), and apparently get a few funds in the process. It isn't hard to understand the parents motives, why the husband can't just walk away and let her have whatever vanishingly small chance she has is hard to understand.
Liberals are remarkably consistent on being "pro-death" ... if you are very young, very old, infirm, or just depressed and on the path to doing yourself in, they are resolute in their pro-death position. For a set of people for which consistency is usally not a consideration, it is admirable to see them consistently give the Grim Reaper the thumbs up as "their kind of guy".
Sunday, March 20, 2005
Don't Think of an Elephant
I finished the subject George Lakoff book (pamphlet?) titled. The book is a NYT bestseller, with a foreword by Howard Dean, and raved about by the left as "This is how to start winning elections again". The book can be summarized by "There are two kinds of people, those that make ridiculous oversimplifications in classification, and those who don't". Well, joking, but only a little.
George claims that there are two models of families: "The Strict Father Model" ... life is hard (competitive), kids are born (“bad”), children need discipline, and adults need self discipline. Hard work, the nuclear family is the core, fathers are important, individuals have to do a lot, they ought to have power, right living etc should be rewarded, there is a God, he has an agenda, if you don’t follow his agenda (rules) there are consequences. (this is was formerly known as "the real world")
George claims that there are two models of families: "The Strict Father Model" ... life is hard (competitive), kids are born (“bad”), children need discipline, and adults need self discipline. Hard work, the nuclear family is the core, fathers are important, individuals have to do a lot, they ought to have power, right living etc should be rewarded, there is a God, he has an agenda, if you don’t follow his agenda (rules) there are consequences. (this is was formerly known as "the real world")
There is really only one other big picture claim in the book, and that is that the only way that people can think about things is by “framing”. Simple words "activate a frame", and then at least most of us are “stuck in the frame”. Republicans have been successful lately because they “control the media”, and they are really good at this framing. George is going to clue in the liberals, and once he does, the poor “strict father” conservatives are toast! He uses the term “progressives” often.
One of his favorite Republican frames is “tax relief” – evil because it makes it sound like a good thing (“relief”), and also diabolical because it is a “strategic agenda” because it enables a whole raft of other Republican strategies including the dismantling of ALL social programs and destruction of the known universe, since there will be no money for ANY of the good stuff. He may not have looked at the Bush budget which includes 1.6 TRILLION in social security, medicare, and sundry other social programs out of a 2.6 trillion budget, but looking at this kind of boring stuff likely isn’t what the “nurture types” focus on. Oh, yes, only the “progressives” (I can’t help myself from using that, it must be what he means by framing!) look at facts and discuss programs "honestly".
That may seem kind of odd on the surface, since the “strict fathers” believe in rules and the world being competitive, one could jump to the false conclusion that they might do odd things like look at both sides, facts, and maybe even read the other sides pamphlets, but that would have to be wrong, so I must be “out of frame”!
Other nasty frames include “Partial Birth Abortion”, “War on Terror”, “Defense of Marriage”, “No Child Left Behind”. I’m not sure where George has been, but he must have missed “Woman’s right to choose / control their bodies”, “Lockbox”, "Risky Privatization Scheme”, “It’s about the CHILDREN!”, and even failed to think of “Progressive” as a frame. It could be that since he only listens to NPR, his horizons are limited.
This isn’t in fact a joke, a lot of his “breakthrough in thought” here arises because some conservative that he knew mentioned James Dobson, and George had never heard of him because he wasn’t on Public radio and that is all George listens to. The revelation that Dobson existed and millions of people listened to him led George on this path of discovery … although one wonders if his understanding of “conservative thought” might be missing a couple thousand years of writing, it is important to start somewhere.
One of the other sad things for liberals is that conservatives have “a huge head start”, since they deviously fund “think tanks” like the Heritage foundation, and have been spending “billions” on their ideas and control of the media, while the penniless liberals are at a HUGE disadvantage (George Soros is one of the guys that recommends the book). The depths of their poverty are so great that one is almost driven to send them a donation!
George is a professor at Berkley US
I was forced to break out in laughter that a guy that IS actually an intelligent guy (I’ve read his book “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things”, and he knows what he is doing on classification and language), could be so blind as to not understand that the biggest reason that conservatives have been forced to fund “think tanks” is because the many billions being spent on public universities over the past over 50 years have funded just the kind of idea generation on the left that he abhors on the right.
This is getting too long for a blog entry, so I’ll just desist. There are many further revelations in this book of the operation of the liberal mind, but the biggest thought that I’m left with is that they will clutch onto literally any straw rather than face the fact that they may have a lot of BAD IDEAS in a post-communist, globalized world, and their ideas are certainly not the ONLY ideas -- although they REALLY want to stamp out any ideas except their own!
They know all about framing -- you have to be pretty good at it to name a rigid ideology of totalitarian state control as "liberal" or "progressive"!
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Deep In Snow / Stealing Elections
Rochester received something around 20" out of the snowstorm that went through yesterday. The kids were off school and it was very nice to have 4x4s to get around with, so our activities were not curtailed very much.
I like to read more than one book at a time, and finished up a couple of somewhat interesting ones in the last couple of days. The first one, "Stealing Elections" by John Fund brought out a number of things that the mainline media has never covered. First "Motor Voter", the first bill pushed through and signed by Bill Clinton in '92 mandated that requiring that drivers license bureaus and other government service outlets would register anyone applying and offer mail-in registration with no identification, and forbid government workers to challenge new registrants. This legislation is an invitation to fraud, but of course gets no discussion in the mainline media. The whole concept of absentee ballots as a way of voting is more prone to fraud, one can draw their own conclusions as to why Democrats find that to be an "acceptable risk".
The other fun discussion was about the FL election. All the focus has of course been on Democrats and media people trying to "prove that Bush stole the election". So far, not one of those attempts has found a way to show that Gore won. What has been missed (and generally stonewalled in the key counties) is any attempt to see if the Democrats had good reason to fear the election being stolen, since they were trying to steal it.
In Palm Beach county Bush was weaker than the Senate and House candidates, but the Democrats running got LESS votes than Gore. In Palm Beach county, Bush got less than 60% of the Republican votes, and had the lowest rates of votes among registered Republicans of all the counties in FL. It looks like 15K Republicans went to the polls in that county, and failed to vote for Bush ... OR?
I like to read more than one book at a time, and finished up a couple of somewhat interesting ones in the last couple of days. The first one, "Stealing Elections" by John Fund brought out a number of things that the mainline media has never covered. First "Motor Voter", the first bill pushed through and signed by Bill Clinton in '92 mandated that requiring that drivers license bureaus and other government service outlets would register anyone applying and offer mail-in registration with no identification, and forbid government workers to challenge new registrants. This legislation is an invitation to fraud, but of course gets no discussion in the mainline media. The whole concept of absentee ballots as a way of voting is more prone to fraud, one can draw their own conclusions as to why Democrats find that to be an "acceptable risk".
The other fun discussion was about the FL election. All the focus has of course been on Democrats and media people trying to "prove that Bush stole the election". So far, not one of those attempts has found a way to show that Gore won. What has been missed (and generally stonewalled in the key counties) is any attempt to see if the Democrats had good reason to fear the election being stolen, since they were trying to steal it.
In Palm Beach county Bush was weaker than the Senate and House candidates, but the Democrats running got LESS votes than Gore. In Palm Beach county, Bush got less than 60% of the Republican votes, and had the lowest rates of votes among registered Republicans of all the counties in FL. It looks like 15K Republicans went to the polls in that county, and failed to vote for Bush ... OR?
There were 19K over votes in Palm Beach county. An over vote is where the voter votes for more than one candidate for an office. Punch ballots have a notorious weakness that somehow has been missed by the general media. Take a stack of ballots and use a sharp object to punch through the hole for Gore. If it is already punched, no problem (for YOU), if it isn't punched you either just voted, OR, you created an over vote and invalidated a vote for another candidate (Bush).
But vote fraud never happens. Right?
But vote fraud never happens. Right?
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Choices, Walls, Models
I am reminded of the story of the person fleeing the old USSR confronted with the set of choices of "soap" in a grocery store in the US. In the USSR they could MAYBE get a bar of soap, but here there were tons of bars, liquids, hair, body, scents, colors ... simply too much choice. They were paralyzed with indecision.
Having 9 computers around the house if I count desktops and laptops including work machines for my wife and I, an e-mail and web-page site on a local magnaspeed.net, as well as a Mac laptop and at least a place to PUT a web page at Mac.com and I find myself with something akin to that paralysis. So for my "unscented bar", blogger.com for now ;-)
Listening to NPR and the rest of the lefties today I was struck by their level of glee and starvation for ANY " bad news" from Iraq. In a week when the newly elected Parliment is just getting down to business, we get breathless reporting on the "CRUMBLING coalition" because Italy is going to pull out. Those that want success and democracy of course always live with the concern that "bad things are just a bomb away". It has, and always will be easier to kick down the barn door than to build a new one. The left has made their bed with "The Disaster of Iraq", and if reality doesn't match their dire view their credibility will be further eroded, so they hunger for things to go badly.
Even the local liberal paper today raised the ugly spectre (to them) of "What if Bush was right?". If I make a simple prediction, like "it will snow tomorrow", there is always SOME chance I will be right. The decision to hold Saddam to the UN resolutions was never that simple, but like any choice, only a fool (or apparently a liberal) would decide there is ZERO chance of the choice being shown to be correct.
One definition of intelligence is "the ability to predict the future". Reagan said that the USSR was an "evil empire", and that we would "consign them to the ash heap of history". Liberals told us he was a fool, the USSR wasn't evil, and any idea that they were going away was so wrong as to be a sign of insanity. Today of course, they tell us it was "obvious all along, and Reagan had nothing to do with it". Their model was completely non-predictive, and what is more, they have failed to learn from their lack of prediction, so are unable to improve on their model for future use.
This time they have staked their reputation on Iraq not becoming a democracy and the situation there never improving to the point where it can be seen as a good decision to free the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussien. If the elections in Iraq turn out to be "The Berlin Wall of the Middle East", the liberal model will have failed to make a correct prediction about the future in a major way for the 2nd time in a generation.
How obvious is it that the liberal position is more intelligent?
Having 9 computers around the house if I count desktops and laptops including work machines for my wife and I, an e-mail and web-page site on a local magnaspeed.net, as well as a Mac laptop and at least a place to PUT a web page at Mac.com and I find myself with something akin to that paralysis. So for my "unscented bar", blogger.com for now ;-)
Listening to NPR and the rest of the lefties today I was struck by their level of glee and starvation for ANY " bad news" from Iraq. In a week when the newly elected Parliment is just getting down to business, we get breathless reporting on the "CRUMBLING coalition" because Italy is going to pull out. Those that want success and democracy of course always live with the concern that "bad things are just a bomb away". It has, and always will be easier to kick down the barn door than to build a new one. The left has made their bed with "The Disaster of Iraq", and if reality doesn't match their dire view their credibility will be further eroded, so they hunger for things to go badly.
Even the local liberal paper today raised the ugly spectre (to them) of "What if Bush was right?". If I make a simple prediction, like "it will snow tomorrow", there is always SOME chance I will be right. The decision to hold Saddam to the UN resolutions was never that simple, but like any choice, only a fool (or apparently a liberal) would decide there is ZERO chance of the choice being shown to be correct.
One definition of intelligence is "the ability to predict the future". Reagan said that the USSR was an "evil empire", and that we would "consign them to the ash heap of history". Liberals told us he was a fool, the USSR wasn't evil, and any idea that they were going away was so wrong as to be a sign of insanity. Today of course, they tell us it was "obvious all along, and Reagan had nothing to do with it". Their model was completely non-predictive, and what is more, they have failed to learn from their lack of prediction, so are unable to improve on their model for future use.
This time they have staked their reputation on Iraq not becoming a democracy and the situation there never improving to the point where it can be seen as a good decision to free the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussien. If the elections in Iraq turn out to be "The Berlin Wall of the Middle East", the liberal model will have failed to make a correct prediction about the future in a major way for the 2nd time in a generation.
How obvious is it that the liberal position is more intelligent?
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
The First Post
Hello Blogging world. A normal day with no reason to start a BLOG other than it was on the list of things to do for this year, and it IS this year!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)