Archive for the 'Misc.' Category

Frank Demolition

June 9th, 2010 :: Misc., Environmentalism

Here, Wendy Milling provides a refreshingly bright and forceful defense of Capitalism.

Assaults on capitalism are rooted in a crybaby metaphysics [:)], and they rely on obfuscations, equivocations, and an attitude of militant evasion. One trick is to make inappropriate demands of capitalism, then stomp and pout and denounce capitalism when those demands are not met. [amusement mine]

In the wake of the current gulf disaster, so many are quick to join the BP lynch mob without considering the influence of statist environmentalist policies.

Observe that the government, beholden to an insane environmentalist ideology that views nature as an intrinsic value and superior to human beings, forbade oil companies to drill nearer to the coast line where there were shallow waters. In the shallow areas, an oil leak could be directly accessed. Instead, companies were only allowed to drill in areas too deep for current technology to address.

Wonderful to see her rub the nose of Mr. Frank in his own cognitive slobber.

Busy Is Good

August 4th, 2009 :: Misc., Sam, Language, Life, Joy

Work:
I’ve stayed pretty much heads-down in programming over the past few weeks… hopefully things will slow down towards the end of this week. I ended up developing a full Java-based SQL parser that generates ad-hoc model objects for complex queries. The persistence framework now supports standard one-to-one entity/table OR’ish generation and the “sql2java” utility will handle any cross-sectional data that transcend table boundaries, but don’t align wholly with full relational objects, i.e., “Select two columns from every table”. The generation tool just takes the tedium out of setting up such data views. I’ve also templatized support for most of the prevalent MVC-type api’s. Essentially, you point the tool at a schema, generate the entities, generate any cross-sectional models, specify which front-end, and push the go-button. The result is end-to-end CRUD and precise finders for all entities and read-only views of the sectional models. Technically, ~75% of a java based web application will be up and running - depending on how fancy the front-end is.

Music
It’s Galax week. I’ll be heading up for an afternoon or two. Five years ago, I’d be burning a week of vacation to go Monday-Sunday and play music 10-12 hours a day until my fingers literally cramped to a halt - this year I’ll be totally content with a few hours total. Life changes.

Culture
Lots of stuff going on with health care “reform” and economy… none of it good. ;] The only positive I can cite is that it *seems* that more people are waking up to the deadly threat facing us with socialized medicine. Of course the growing objection is only on practical grounds, but this starting point creates a chance talk about the more important moral case for objection. That conversation gets a lot more interesting.

Home
Sam has changed. The first signs of a new sense of independence and freewill caught me a bit off guard. The ubiquitous terrible-twos are here I’m afraid. After seeing him transition into this phase, I’m convinced that all kids reach a point where their expressive cognition exceeds their language and reasoning. How long they stay in this phase and to what extent they actually escape it is largely due to how we as parents navigate the storm.

We’ve established very structured and consistent boundaries with Sam from the beginning and that work is already paying off. He has melt-downs, but in just about every case he can be reasoned out of the mindset. He does very well with either-or negotiations - binary reasoning. An example from a recent melt over leaving our shoes (flip-flops) on at the pool.

Mom/Dad: Either we take our shoes off, or we leave the swimming pool - your choice… but those are the only two options.

Sam: Shoes off….

The options have to be reasonable, and more importantly, they have to be absolute. To abandon the established options, e.g., allowing shoes in the pool, is a recipe for terror.

I find his ability to manage and accept this type of communication very promising.

Rational Reads

July 2nd, 2009 :: Misc., Health Care

Economic Reads

June 22nd, 2009 :: Misc., Economics

Sowell Goodness

April 9th, 2009 :: Misc., Life, Favorites

Tom Sowell’s random thoughts are always worth reading.

I am so old that I can remember when music was musical.

Now that the federal government says that it will stand behind the warranties on General Motors’ automobiles, does that make you more likely or less likely to buy a car from GM? If you were a rising young executive with a promising future, would you be more likely or less likely to go to work for a company where politicians can fire you?

We have become such suckers for words that politicians can spend our tax money like a drunken sailor, provided they call it “investment.” At least the drunken sailor is spending his own money but people look down on him because he doesn’t call it “investment.”

Barack Obama seems determined to repeat every disastrous mistake of the 1930s, at home and abroad. He has already repeated Herbert Hoover’s policy of raising taxes on high income earners, FDR’s policy of trying to micro-manage the economy and Neville Chamberlain’s policy of seeking dialogues with hostile nations while downplaying the dangers they represent.

We seem to be moving steadily in the direction of a society where no one is responsible for what he himself did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did, either in the present or in the past.

You should read the whole thing.

Interesting Reads

March 20th, 2009 :: Misc.
  • Is this the end of America?: Helicopter Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve is dropping trillions of fresh paper dollars on the world economy, the President of the United States is cracking jokes on late night comedy shows, his energy minister is threatening a trade war over carbon emissions, his treasury secretary is dithering over a banking reform program amid rising concerns over his competence and a monumentally dysfunctional U.S. Congress is launching another public jihad against corporations and bankers.
  • House passes bill taxing fat AIG and other bonuses Denouncing a “squandering of the people’s money”… (There certainly has been a squandering, but not by AIG…)

Products Of A Mixed-Economy

March 17th, 2009 :: Misc., Business, Meddling

This story highlights the type of mind that result from and thrive in an economy rife with Government meddling - Faux Capitalists.

[Ford CEO Alan Mulally] was a guest recently at this newspaper’s ECO:nomics conference in Santa Barbara, where he outlined his efforts to revamp the struggling car maker. He said one problem is that America didn’t have an “integrated energy policy.” On the one hand, the government “regulated” smaller cars by “mandating average fuel mileage improvements,” but on the other hand “with low fuel prices and low interest rates over the years, the U.S. consumers have chosen generally larger vehicles.”

Mr. Mulally offered his own solution to the mismatch, artfully explaining that we needed to “involve the consumer in our energy policy.” In case anyone missed his point, Michael Jackson, CEO of AutoNation, the largest auto dealer in the country, was more explicit: “Mr. Mulally said it very elegantly last night and I will say it more straightforward. We need more expensive gasoline.”

In other words, they want to leverage illegitimate government force to compensate for the mediocrity (lack of market share) that results from previous illegitimate government force. Yet another example of the recursive nature of statist regulation, i.e., controls breeding controls.

So: The U.S. government mandates fuel-economy standards that force Detroit to make cars Americans don’t want to drive. When Detroit loses money on those cars, Washington throws taxpayer dollars at its mistake, and the car makers demand a tax increase that would prod Americans to buy the unpopular cars that Washington mandates. As for what the American consumer or taxpayer wants — or can afford in today’s economy — who cares? Welcome to government-run energy policy.

I would correct the last sentence… welcome to government run anything. The mindset of these mixed-economy barons inevitably serves to further blur the line between economic and political power that so many fail to see. When most American’s hear successful supposed Capitalists calling for such measures it only reinforces their confusion of the proper role of Government in a free nation’s economy.

Schiff Economics

March 7th, 2009 :: Misc.


They Just Want To Help Us

February 10th, 2009 :: Misc., Collectivism, Altruism, Health Care

Apparently there’s no turning back from America’s suicidal shift into Socialized Medicine. The foundation is laid and the plumbing is on order. The “stimulus” bill has proven to be the ultimate power grabbing utensil.

Republican Senators are questioning whether President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill contains the right mix of tax breaks and cash infusions to jump-start the economy.

Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.

Tragic indeed - that the left and the right are virtually indistinguishable variants of the same poisonous philosophy. Both consider Government as the supreme agent of egalitarian engineering. Both favor the collective over the individual. Both consider self-sacrifice as their moral standard. Both see man as his brother’s keeper. Both are willing to force their moral tenets on citizens. Both are willing to mandate human misery and trample mounds of human corpses if necessary in order achieve their vision.

Senators should read these provisions and vote against them because they are dangerous to your health. (Page numbers refer to H.R. 1 EH, pdf version).

They are, in fact, dangerous to our health, but they should be opposed as measures outside the role of a proper government precisely because they require the violation of individual rights on a tremendous scale.

The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.

What would be beneficial is for individual interaction with the health care market to remain private and determined solely on the voluntary judgment of the involved parties. My medical history is the business of myself and those which I choose to interact with.

But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.

And another bloated, inappropriate and menacing arm of the Government is born. By what right does the Government deem the appropriateness or cost-effectiveness of my private health concerns? America justly discarded such guiding notions in 1865, but collectivist-statism has smuggled them back in. The only moral and practical guide for private decisions is the rational judgment of the individuals involved.

What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make.

The stimulus bill does that, and calls it the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (190-192). The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.

Could the threat to our standard of living by Socialization be any more clearly identified than in this sentence?

Diminishing innovation is an inevitable result of socialized medicine that proponents typically dismiss, but here stagnation is explicitly favored over progress in order not to “drive up costs” - a result which history and economics prove as inherent to government intervention in any economic segment. Only in a socialized scheme would experimental treatments drive up cost for anyone other than the patient seeking them. In response, the statist solution to the problem enabled by their unjust system is to prohibit costly medical innovations, which also coincides with their egalitarian notions that no individual should “have access” (earn the right to consume) to better care than others - quite the irrational death-cocktail they’re serving.

The stimulus bill will affect every part of health care, from medical and nursing education, to how patients are treated and how much hospitals get paid. The bill allocates more funding for this bureaucracy than for the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force combined (90-92, 174-177, 181).

We’ve digressed to a nation which, due to the devastation of altruism, spends more looted wealth on regulating when, where, how and with whom individuals endeavor to raise the quality of their lives - a system of voluntary trade to mutual benefit - than towards the military infrastructure dedicated to the rightful defense of our sovereignty.

Unless we discard self-sacrifice as a virtue, discover the supremacy of the individual, and assume reason as our guide, America has seen her brightest days.

[UPDATED]
Stay on top of the fight against Socialized medicine @ FIRM.

Three Years!

February 10th, 2009 :: Misc.

I’m three years into this blogging endeavor and I really value the experience. I’ve refined my thoughts, improved my written and verbal communication, and spread my ideas and thoughts to friends and family.

I’m not even close to where I want to be as a writer. I still make horrendous grammatical errors and I don’t proof as much or as diligently as needed.

My goals for the next year are:

  • improve my grammar, punctuation and spelling
  • extend and refine my vocabulary
  • strive for clarity
  • Thanks to all my visitors, readers and linkers.