The Weblog of Eric Herboso

EricHerboso.com is Now Live!

2008-11-14T07:09:00.003-05:00

After multiple delays, I have finally gotten EricHerboso.com up and running!

Unfortunately, that means that this blogger journal will no longer be updated. Please point your RSS reader to EricHerboso.com/blog/feed/rss to continue to receive updates, and don't forget to visit EricHerboso.com to see my new site!

If You're Going to Present to a Public Audience, Please Do It Properly

2008-10-22T14:19:00.004-04:00

I attended another Google Webmaster chat session today and learned a lot about the most up-to-date facts on the SEO world as it applies to google. But if you're looking for tips I learned there, I would suggest going to check out other blogs for a round-up, or even the Google Webmaster blog itself, as it will post the audio and slides later on this week.

Of more interest to my audience, I think, are a couple of items I noticed while watching Jonathan Simon's presentation. First off, he's using Firefox, not Chrome. Shame on you, Jonathan. You'd think the Google Webmaster Team wouldn't have bailed on Chrome already.

But perhaps more importantly, your IP address is showing.

Next time, I suggest you utilize the option to show the slideshow through the webinar system rather than allowing everyone to gaze at your desktop. (And yes, that's his open menu there, not mine. Apparently he's a fan of adblock, among other things.)

PPI is the Opposite of DPI when it comes to Photo Quality

2008-09-30T11:39:00.005-04:00

As a webmaster, I often have to field tech questions unrelated to my job in the office. Usually this is no big deal; I generally give the answer and then move on. But the other day, a question was posed to me that really threw me for a loop.

I was asked why, when increasing the Pixels/Inch (ppi) in photoshop, a photo became bigger.

If you stop and think about it for a minute, this is a really good question. DPI (dots per inch) is used quite often in print circles; it literally refers to how many individual dots are printed per inch. With a DPI, more dots are squeezed into each inch, and the picture is therefore sharper; with a low DPI, there is more space in between each dot, and the picture is therefore of a less quality.

So when you increase the PPI (which one might assume is the same as DPI, except with pixels), you should be increasing the quality of the picture by making the dimensions smaller, right?

Wrong. If you try this for yourself in Photoshop, you'll find that the photo increases in size when you increase the PPI, thereby decreasing the quality—which is exactly the opposite of what you might at first expect.

It takes a bit of extra thought to understand what the logic is behind this. The key to comprehending this paradox is that while printed materials can vary the spacing between dots, computer screens cannot vary the spacing between pixels. So if you vary the PPI, you are increasing or decreasing the number of pixels in your image, not increasing or decreasing the space between the dots as with DPI.

So what does this mean? In a nutshell, this means that when you increase the PPI of an image, what happens is Photoshop adds in additional pixels, horrendously ruining the quality of the photo while simultaneously making the pixel dimensions increase.

The moral of the story: DPI≠PPI! If you're a print person who is just getting into web stuff, don't make the mistake of thinking that just because DPI count and quality are proportional that must mean that PPI count and quality are also proportional—on the contrary, they are inversely proportional!

And the figuring of this out is how I avoided looking like a fool in front of my non-tech-savvy coworkers. I hope this blog entry will help you to also not look like a fool. (But if it doesn't, it sure as hell isn't my fault.)

Eating Out to End Child Hunger

2008-09-24T13:59:00.002-04:00

As many of you probably already know, my day job is as the webmaster of strength.org, a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring that no child should ever have to grow up hungry. Well, one of our initiatives, the Great American Dine Out, is going on right now all across the country. Simply by going out to eat at one of the four thousand participating restaurants this week (through Sunday, 28 Sept), you can help end child hunger.

View Larger Map

So today I went out to eat at the M Street Bar & Grill with three of my coworkers. It was great. If you're ever in DC, I heartily recommend that you stop by. I've even added it to my custom google map of great places to eat in DC (for vegetarians).

But I of course realize that most of you aren't in DC, and perhaps even fewer are vegetarians. So instead, I want to give you guys links so you can find out which restaurants in your area are participating in the Great American Dine Out. So click on the major metropolitan area you live in to see a list, or type in your zip code here to find participating restaurants near you. And eat out every day this week—remember, it's for the kids!

The Rabbit

2008-09-10T18:56:00.003-04:00

I did not take a picture. I will not take a picture. Yet I feel like I cannot go on without showing a picture. So here is a picture I found on the internet.

My lawn is small. Too small to bother with, really. But the grass was getting long, and weeds were taking over, and Rosina asked me to cut it. So I did.

The lawn mower is a simple machine, powered not by gas but by gears alone. Yet as I plow through the yard, the blades turn swiftly -- far more swift than I imagined possible.

I am oblivious to the world as I mow. A song rages through my head and thoughts on the Large Hadron Collider consume my attention. So it is with surprise when I notice a rabbit jumping away from my feet, mere centimeters from where I had just cut down the grass.

That rabbit could have died, I thought. It almost died by my hand. The thought was sobering. I immediately stopped mowing. The song in my mind stopped playing. The LHC took a back seat to the close call I had just made.

That's when I noticed the rabbit's mate.

She lay behind me, almost invisible in the grasses. I had hurt her. I had damaged her. Not with my blades, but by rolling over her with the wheel of my lawn-mower.

For a split moment, I thought of how lucky she was to have missed my blades. But then I realized it was worse than I'd imagined. One of her eyes was red. She was bleeding internally.

My heart stopped, just as the rabbit vainly tried to jump away, with the entire left side of her body fully paralyzed. She pushed herself in circles, again and again, as I watched helplessly. This is my fault, I told myself.

Through carelessness, I had caused such unnecessary pain and suffering. Through pointless singing and idle physics wonderings that I've no business to think of while handling such dangerous blades.

She was dying, but slowly. Ever so slowly. Blood started seeping from one ear, though the blood in her eye lay locked behind the cornea. I had to kill her now. I had to, to end the suffering.

Rosina directed me to the only instrument of death in the house: a small shovel. I took it.

Carefully, I carried the poor rabbit to the woods beside the house. There, in the shelter of trees, I apologized for the seventh time to the rabbit before me. And I raised the shovel, ready to strike. I wanted to do it one blow.

But I could not even attempt it.

I stood there, shovel in hand, yet could not strike. I could not bear to kill her.

Softly, I returned to Rosina, and asked if she could do it. I asked if she could deal the blow that the poor rabbit needed so dearly. But Rosina, true to form, insisted that she could not. It was up to me. It was up to me, or else the rabbit would die a horrible death of slow agony.

So I returned to the rabbit, knowing I would blog this immediately afterward. Knowing that if I so chose, I could bring my camera to take a picture. But I did not. I could not.

Instead, I cut off her head, then crushed her skull.

)c':

Are Porn Links Good for SEO?

2008-08-29T12:39:00.004-04:00

Ever since I started becoming more knowledgeable about search engine optimization, I've started trying out different things to see how it would affect my traffic. I even did a test run of doing nothing but gathering links to a static blog that wasn't updated (amazingly, the traffic generated was quite impressive, given the fact that the blog had no new content).

But perhaps nothing I've done thus far is quite as noticeable as getting a link from Fleshbot, a fairly popular porn site with a pagerank of 7. (Even the nonprofit I work as a webmaster for (Share Our Strength) only has a pagerank of 6.) As of now, I'm linked from their front page, which is actually pretty cool. (Although the anchored keyword they linked with is pretty lame.)

Of course, it's the search engine spiders' view of the link that's important to me, so it doesn't even matter that no one who reads fleshbot will bother clicking through.

Which makes me wonder: Has anybody from fleshbot actually clicked through? If so, please post a comment. In the meantime, I'll update later with stats on how many referrals one can get from a porn site.

Oh, and also, I think the images fleshbot used were very poor. Here are two better ones I found with a quick google search:

Thanks to KNX News Radio and Progressive Alaska for the photos.

My Morning Ritual

2008-08-21T08:34:00.003-04:00

4:45 AM: The alarm goes off.
4:54 AM: The alarm goes off again.
5:00 AM: My alarm goes off -- it is distinctively less pleasant than the one Rosina uses.
5:03 AM: Rosina's alarm goes off yet again.
...: Skip forward more than a half-hour of repeated alarms going off.
5:33 AM: Absently, I hug Rosina gently as I attempt to wake thoroughly enough for morning sex.
5:42 AM: The alarm goes off at the worst possible time.
6:04 AM: After loading boxes of books into the car, we are finally ready to go. I hold my green laptop bag in my arms and rub the sleep from my eyes as she drives me to the train station.
6:09 AM: As Rosina drops me off, the train is just arriving. I wish her well on her upcoming day at the high school and pull out Anthem while I walk to the train.
6:55 AM: The train pulls into Union Station, as I write in my physical journal about the book I'd just read.
7:09 AM: Breakfast at Au Bon Pain is purchased.
7:20 AM: I walk into my building at work. No one else will arrive for at least an hour and a half. Most will not arrive until 9:30 AM.
8:30 AM: I close google reader and start planning my day of work.
8:31 AM: I pull up facebook scrabble.
8:54 AM: I restart planning my day of work.
8:55 AM: I pull up blogger.com to start writing this entry.

Feedity: Unethical RSS?

2008-08-18T12:55:00.002-04:00

In my position as webmaster of Share Our Strength, I am constantly on the lookout for better and easier methods of generating content to drive visitors to our many websites. One exceedingly easy method is to grab content from outside RSS feeds, allowing a page on our site to have constantly updating content from another site. Working with RSS is so easy that when I'm in a rush, I sometimes grab our own content through RSS, just to save time.

Grabbing rss content to post on your own page is perfectly permissible, both legally and ethically. Firstly, because when you grab a feed, you are not only linking to them, but also driving visitors to their site, but, more importantly, because by publishing an rss feed, they are inviting users to use that content. (People can even monetize their feeds by using Google Adsense for Feeds.)

But what if you find regularly updated content that doesn't use a feed?

I recently found a site that had data that I wanted to pull, but no RSS feed existed of the content I wanted. The webpage is American Towns, and it shows regularly updated local events content for a specific city. (The content in particular that I am interested in is "Local Events", on the left.)

So, after a bit of thought, I did a quick google search and found Feedity.com. In less than five minutes, I had created an RSS feed that takes JUST the info I want from the American Towns site.

Feedity allows you to define the opening and closing tags of anything yo want turned into RSS; in this case, I chose <div class="event"> to begin each RSS link, and </a> to end it. This allows me to get just what I want in the feed I'm creating: the event name with a hyperlink to more info on the event.

From there, feedity did the rest, and I had an RSS feed ready to go.

Had I been making the feed for my private use, I would not feel s weird about it, but since I was creating this feed for the purpose of making dynamic content on one of my sites, I realized that perhaps this kind of feed was not quite as ethical as feeds that are put out by the content owner. After all, the feed I am pulling here was not intended to be pulled by the content owner. Even though I am linking to their site while pulling the events list American Towns publishes, at no point did I get even an implicit nod concerning the usage of this data on my own site. I was, in a way, just framing their content without their permission.

Because of this moral quandary, I decided not to go through with using feedity in this way. But now that I am aware that the possibility exists of taking content straight from other sources like this, it occurs to me that one could mass produce sites that could be automatically generated from ANY site, just using completely customized RSS from feedity. Each site would literally take less than thirty minutes to create, once the general design was chosen. Pop a few adsense fields on the page, and tailor it to a specific audience who would find the info useful, and profit inevitably results. Hell, I've done testing on this site where I go for multiple months without posting a single blog entry, and I STILL take in a few dollars each month from adsense. Yet what I'm describing through feedity is upwardly scalable in terms of the number of sites, and requires absolutely no upkeep to maintain.

In short, Feedity makes it possible to easily create completely unethical sites that can consistently generate income in the aggregate without maintenance. This makes me almost want to mark my link to them as nofollow, but since most users of feedity probably use the feeds for their personal use rather than for website creation, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, I use feedity to keep track of my thirteen year old sister's fan website, TwilifyMe.com, and that's a lifesaver all in itself.

Also, in case you're interested, I did NOT get paid to write this entry.

Consequentialist Ethics in an Infinite Universe

2008-05-05T13:39:00.002-04:00

A Consequentialist Argument for Weighted Consideration of Interests
~~or: How an Infinite Universe Affects Consequentialist Ethics~~

A common argument against consequentialist ethics is the empirical fact that most persons seem to place more weight on the consideration of interests of those they know than on those they don't. While not fatal, it is true that most consequentialists tend to regard as a fundamental premise the idea that all persons deserving of consideration should receive equal consideration; thus when one points out that, in practice, most persons choose to regard the consideration of interests for friends and family as of higher importance than the consideration of interests for strangers or others outside their sphere of knowledge, the dedicated consequentialist usually has to retort by maintaining that 'true ethics is not decided by popular vote', or that it is merely a biological and psychological necessity that humans can only intensely relate with ~150 other persons, but that this should not have anything to do with how one should act.

However, I believe that a different counterargument can be raised: that the consequentialist position may in fact _necessitate_ that a person give extra weight to the consideration of interests of those they know more closely. While this new argument relies on a few extreme conditions that cannot yet be verified scientifically, I nevertheless believe that it will soon become clear to the reader that if these conditions are allowed as premises, then this new way of looking at consequentialist ethics will be hard to dispute by resorting to weighted consideration of interest arguments.

While not all consequentialist ethics are the same, generally they all agree that in order to decide on which set of consequences is preferable, we must have a way to measure those consequences against one another. Usually this is done using units of some type; for ease of understanding, I will use 'good' units in this argument, where those consequences that have a higher cardinality of 'good' units are strictly preferable to those consequences that have a lesser cardinality of 'good' units. My reason for using mathematical terminology here will soon become plain. (A higher cardinality set means merely that there is 'more of' that set in relation to another.) I am avoiding the ordinary usage of the word 'maximize' here for two reasons: first, that there may be multiple realizations of a maximized result, and second, that there may be no maximally realized result. Again, this will become clear momentarily.

Traditionally, consequentialist ideas have been described in terms that only work with a finite number of possible consequences. For example, we may consider whether to do X or Y, where X has consequence X1, and Y has consequence Y1. Solving this conundrum consists only in comparing the cardinality of 'good' units in X1 and Y1 and determining which is greater; hence we would then choose to do the action associated with that consequence. Of course, reality is much more complicated; not only is it nearly always extremely difficult to predict consequences accurately, but the number of possible actions one may take is limited mostly by one's imagination. Nevertheless, the basic idea remains: were we able to predict the future and compare cardinalities of all possible consequences, then we would be able to choose which actions had the highest cardinality (in a finite set, at least one and as many as all may have the highest cardinality). In this finite instance, it makes sense to speak of 'maximizing' the cardinality.

But it is possible that the total set of actions one may take is not finite in number, but infinite to some degree. In this case, 'maximizing' may no longer make sense at all, since there might always be some action which produces a higher cardinality consequence than any individual action you choose. In other words, in the special case where there are an infinite number of possible actions, it may be true that there is no 'best' choice, just as there is no 'highest' number.

(It should be noted that it is possible to have a highest (single or tied) cardinality even when the number of possible actions are infinite, but it is no longer necessary as it is when the number of actions available are finite.)

But even more alarming is when you consider the possibility that the cardinality of 'good' units in total is infinite. If the total sum of 'good' units is infinite, then choosing a consequence where unjust genocide occurs (normally a net negative) or choosing a consequence where world peace comes about (normally a net positive) makes no difference at all! For if the total cardinality of 'good' is infinite, then subtracting or adding ANY finite amount, no matter how large (or even any _infinite_ amount!), makes no difference to the total amount of 'good' in the world. Mathematically, the cardinality remains unchanged.

(Before continuing this argument, I would like to address the issue of whether or not an infinite number of possible actions is possible in principle. If units in space are infinitely divisible, then obviously an infinite number of possible actions arises as a consequence. But that space is infinitely divisible is not clear; quantum physics, at least, seems to suggest that at some minimal distance, further subdivision is not possible (or at least that further subdivision does not alter observable causation). But this is not the only way that an infinite number of choices need be present. You may also have an infinite amount of space, a concept that cutting edge physics seems to think is much more plausible, whether in the form of a multiverse interpretation of quantum theory, or an infinitely expanding universe that procreates through new 'big bang's. But even if you find both of these types of infinity hard to swallow, there is also the idea that time may continue on indefinitely--even pre-Einsteinian physicists were ready and willing to believe in a steady state universe of infinite duration, and I believe most people would admit this kind of infinity into the universe even if they dismissed the other forms.

In the case of infinitely divisible partitions of matter, the first half of the above argument, relating to the irrationality of a maximal 'good' consequence, is most relevant; but the second half, regarding the concept of an infinite amount of 'good' is not possible when that universe is finite in both extent and duration. However, in the case of an infinitely large or infinitely durable universe, there may only be a finite number of possible actions one can take, but the total 'good' in universal terms may very well be infinite in extent, so the second half of the above argument applies perfectly well, while the first half of the argument does not seem to apply. Please note that for the rest of this essay, I will concentrate only on infinite extent/duration universes.)

Assuming some possibilty of extent/duration infinity in the universe, and further assuming that the total cardinality of 'good' units in the universe is infinte in amount (this is possible, I hurry to note, even if 'good' is scarce in the universe, just as primes are scarce among integers even while they are both infinite in extent), then consequentialism seems to fall apart completely. For no longer does the addition of any amount of good or ill make any difference in the total 'good'; even if you chose an action which made the universe infinitely worse off, consequentialist ethics would not be able to warn you against that choice (because infinity minus infinity is still infinity). But this seemingly insurmountable objection can be avoided in two different ways.

First, there is the psychological defense: As stated earlier, humans, for biological reasons, are capable of keeping only ~150 other persons in their world view at one time. While this makes no difference to what ethical prescriptions may be, it does mean that we are incapable of seeing the infinite extent of 'good' all at once. We instead see portions of the 'good' and can then see quantifiable results by adding to that finite amount through consequentialistically decided acts. While not affecting the total 'good', we are increasing the amount of 'good' in a given area, making it more dense in the region of our surroundings. While I am not making the argument that this means we should pay attention to the region of our surroundings while ignoring everything else, it does explain why in practice most persons act this way. It is rational for us to expect the average consequentialist to feel like she is making a difference by acting locally even while ignoring more pressing issues halfway around the world. As oxymoronic as this previously sounded, the concept of an infinite amount of 'good' makes it possible for someone to be regionally minded and rationally consequentialist at the same time.

Second, there is the mathematical defense, which is not descriptive like the psychological defense, but is rather purely prescriptive: When cardinalities are equal, we should choose that class of action which, when universally applied, has the consequence of possibly bringing about the densest amount of 'good'. This overly complex statement requires clarification.

If you were asked to choose a random integer (assuming we both understand the meaning of 'random' when used in this sense), the probability of your chosen integer being a prime number is effectively zero (assuming we both understand 'zero probability' to mean what it means when used in this sense). This is because the non-primes so overwhelm the primes on the higher end of the scale. But you'd have a fully 50% chance of your random integer being an even number. This is what is meant by 'density' here. The evens are far more dense among integers than primes are. This is true even while all three categories, integers, primes, and evens, all have the same cardinality. (While irrationals crowd out rationals among reals just as much density-wise as evens crowd primes among integers, the irrationals form a different cardinality altogether, and so do not serve as a good example here.)

So if there is an infinte amount of 'good', then while any given action will not be able to change the cardinality of 'good', there may be _classes_ of actions which, when always applied, can modify the density of that 'good'.

Classes of action make no difference in terms of cardinality: If I choose the action that brings about world peace, the cardinality of 'good' may not change, even if we chose that action based on a rule that said we should always bring about world peace when possible. In other words, even if world peace came about everywhere, at all times, the cardinality would not change. In this sense, talking about classes of actions does not help. (Infinity plus infinity is still just infinity.)

But in terms of density, classes of actions can bring about huge differences. Using that same example, if world peace came about everywhere, at all times, then, depending on the relation between constant world peace with other possible actions, that class of action of always bringing about world peace may increase the density of 'good' even while leaving the cardinality the same. Thus, we would want to take that class of action, knowing that if it is always followed, then the density of 'good' may increase.

You'll have noticed, I'm sure, that I've used the modifier 'may' here. This is because I cannot think of a reliable way of demonstrating that a particular class of action will increase the density of 'good' when universally applied. Nevertheless, it _may_ increase the density of 'good', and that is enough to justify doing so, given that the alternative is to definitely not increase the density of the good at all. In general, if a class of action is equally dispersed among possible actions, then that class will add to the density of 'good'. If that class of action is diminishing in dispersion among possible actions, then if the rate diverges, it will not add to the density of 'good', while if it converges, then it will add to the density of good. As to how you can tell whether or not a class of action is equally dispersed, let alone converges or diverges, I have no idea. (For example, imagine the 'good' is 0 mod3, every third integer among integers, making the density 1/3. Choosing a class of action that makes 1 mod3 'good' will then increase the density to 2/3 (even 1 mod27 will increase the density to 1/3 + 1/27). But choosing a class of action that makes primes 'good' will add only zero to the original 1/3, and the density will remain the same.)

In practice, choosing a class of action that, when universalized, may increase the density of 'good' could take the form of 'help your neighbor' or 'give preference to your family'. In this sense, the consequentialist may rationally give preference to one's own while ignoring admittedly greater needs of strangers. Helping the strangers may bring about a higher finite amount of 'good', but since the cardinality is equal to helping one's own, this is not a pressing difference. On the other hand, helping strangers may bring about an increase of the density of 'good', but it is not clear that it would be a greater increase than helping one's own instead! Indeed, it seems possible that 'helping one's own' and 'helping strangers' may very well increase the density of 'good' equally well, and so choosing between these ideals would be totally arbitrary! (Of course, it may turn out that they increase the density by different amounts, in which case consequentialism would demand one choice over the other. But the point is that it remains unclear as to how each choice may affect density, and so you cannot blindly say that helping whomever needs most help will take precedence.)

Thus these are the two arguments, psychological and mathematical, descriptive and prescriptive respectively, that show why a rational consequentialist might weight the consideration of interests of one's own more highly than that of strangers, if they are faced with the possibility of an infinite universe in extent or duration in which the total good is nonfinite. With this additional reply added to their arsenal, I imagine the consequentialists will have an easier time defending their doctrine against those who argue that friendship comes first.

The Landscaped Yard

2008-04-29T15:36:00.008-04:00

Hesitsantly, I knocked on the front door. There was a doorbell present, but somehow using it would have taken too much away from the occasion, and I really didn't want to kill the mood. After all, I'd been planning this for over a month now.

When she answered the door, I couldn't help but to think that she wasn't what I was expecting, even though for the life of me I cannot imagine what it was that I was expecting. She looked to be in her early sixties, in a floral print dress that has long been out of style. Her (assumedly) graying hair was wrapped in a towel, almost as though she was coming from the shower, but she showed no sign of it otherwise, so perhaps it was just a cultural thing.

"Hello, my name's Eric, though I don't know why I'm telling you that; we don't know one another, and since I'm just passing by, it won't do you any good to know my name." I was already screwing it up. She gave me a strange look, and I thought for sure she'd shut the door on me if I didn't get straight to the point. "I'm not selling anything, if that's what you're thinking. And I'm not here to spread the word of God or some other notion I may have. I just..." Pausing, I glanced inside her home. It was clean, perhaps too clean, with flowers everywhere.

"I walk past your home nearly every day on the way to the library, or the metro, or for nearly anything else for that matter. And I just wanted to say: every time I pass by your yard, I cannot help but to smile. Your garden is absolutely beautiful."

She blushes, thanking me in a midwestern accent. She's clearly not from here. "I don't know if it your doing, or your husband's, or just your gardener's, but the beauty you have in your front yard is simply too much for me to not have stopped by to thank you for it. I cannot relate to you how many times I have passed by in a foul mood and been jerked back to happy thoughts by your azaleas. And that tree--forgive me for not knowing its species--its blossoms bowl me over no matter how heavy a load of books I am carrying back home."

She responds kindly, in her own way, and in the background I can see that a tall man has come to stand nearby, just out of sight. I see this because he does not notice his shadow falling within my field of vision.

"No, I couldn't possibly intrude on you this evening", I reply to her hesitant invitation; then, nodding toward my backp-ack of groceries, I explain: "I am on my way home now, and cannot really take the time to stay for much longer than I already have. Besides, I don't really want to get to know you." Her look of puzzlement is plain, and I find myself wondering what look is on the face of the tall man just behind the corner. But I continue my (somewhat rehearsed) speech nonetheless. "I am not a particularly social person. I don't relate well to very many people. It's just..." I seem to struggle to get out the words, even though I know in advance what I will basically say. I've thought of nothing else these past few days. "Most people speak of inconsequential things to people who do not deserve to be spoken to: they gossip with coworkers or pass along confidentialities to second cousins. But I prefer to say what is deserved to the deserver, regardless of whether or not they happen to work where I do or share my same bloodline. You garden is why I've chosen to stop by here today, and it is why I'm saying this to you. But if I get to know you, it will be different. It will degrade this conversation, and when I write of this moment in my journal later tonight, the memory will be marred by the fact that you and I differ strongly on politics, or religion, or perhaps psychology. If I get to know you, then this memory will be of you; I would rather it be of the gardener behind this yard. If I shared a cup of tea with you, I may end up hating the experience, and every time I pass your yard on the way to the metro, I will think of you, when I really just want to appreciate the beauty of your garden. So no, I will not come inside. I wished to only give a compliment and leave; and that is what I will do."

So I left.

There was so much I didn't say that I had planned on. I wanted to tell her about how I was not the only one who enjoyed her garden. I wanted to tell her of the many car-goers who passed too quickly by in admiration, and I wanted to tell her of the pedestrians who did not stop because they would think it too silly to stop for, or because they needed to get to the bus stop in a hurry so they could get to their minimum wage job, or maybe because they did not know any English at all. I wanted to tell her that I was their spokesperson. That though I was the one to knock on her door to give this compliment, it was a compliment shared by countless passers-by, who all had brightened days due only to the beauty of her landscaped front yard. But I said none of this.

In fact, I said none of this at all. I planned to. I even stopped in front of her house, and willed myself to walk to her front door. But it was too late. I was tired. There were groceries in my backpack. It was dinnertime, and I didn't want to be a nuisance. All these and more onbjections came to my head, and so I walked home without saying anything at all. And as I walked home, I imagined the sixty-ish floral clad figure with a towel wrapped around her head. I imagined the shadow of her companion, and the cleanliness of her home. And I know that I will not be saying any of this to her, nor to whomever may actually live there. Because, as uplifting as it may be to that mystery resident, it would just be too mean from my point of view. After all, her garden is despicable.

Oh, it is landscaped and well-groomed. With red flowers surrounded by stones and a row of bushes cut as though they were meant to a enjoy a fully right-angled existence. But seeing it every day makes me sick. Others look at with smiles on their faces--yes, I see these others taking enjoyment from that yard--but it is all too very fake to me. The lawn is cut, the weeds are all pulled, and the sterility makes me long for the sparse woodlands of my youth, path-ridden though they may have been.

No, I won't ever knock on her door, though I fantasize complimening her on making a yard that is somehow even more devoid of nature than those who have nothing but grass cut to its shortest extent. If I did speak to her, I would be kindly in words, giving a rehearsed speech on behalf of the idiots who actually like the beauty of her yard, but it would all be a lie, because I HATE her yard, and I don't wish to lie to this complete stranger just so I can fulfill this relentless fantasy of speaking to whomever it is that has such a backwards heart to care enough of plants to bother with gardening so thoroughly yet cares so little to take those same plants and keep them in a sterile, fake, zoo-like environment. (I abhor zoos.)

No, I will instead just write up what I imagine the encounter may have been like, and then start on my new library books. I'm looking forward to Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones--the movie was so good, I can't imagine not enjoying the book. And I wonder how much Miyazaki changed when writing the screenplay.

I will be very disappointed if the book turns out worse than the film. That hasn't happened to me since Bridges of Madison County, and I fear the day when I meet another book that pales in comparison to the film vesion.

Vegetarianism Issues, The Crazy Dude, and a Published Secret

2008-04-15T19:49:00.005-04:00

"A #2 with a coke, please; but, if you could, hold the meat and add extra lettuce and tomatoes."

"You mean you don't want the meat?"

"That's right. I'm vegetarian."

"Would you like to get the vegetarian sandwich meal instead?"

"No, I don't particularly like whole grain bread, nor do I enjoy the particular type of veggie-burger you serve here. I'd really just like the sandwich made the same way you make all #2 sandwiches, except don't put meat on it, and add extra lettuce and tomatoes."

"So instead of fries, you want the apple and side-salad, right?"

"No, I'm not a health freak; I'm a vegetarian. There's a difference. Just make the same kind of meal you would make for any meat-eater, except don't include the meat. That means I want the same greasy fries you serve to everyone else."

"Okay."

--five minutes later--

"Hi, I just ordered a #2 without the meat, but when I got my order, it had meat on it."

"You want your money back? You already opened it."

"No, I don't want my money back. I just want to get what I ordered initially. I was supposed to get a #2 without meat, but with added lettuce and tomatoes, but instead what I was given had meat in it. You did get the extra lettuce and tomatoes thing correct, though."

"Okay, don't worry; we'll get it taken care of."

--five minutes later--

"Hi, I'm sorry to be such a bother, but the replacement meal you just gave me is on a whole-wheat bun. I wanted a #2."

"Yeah, with no meat, right?"

"Yes, with no meat. But I didn't want the vegetarian sandwich--I wanted the #2 sandwich, but with no meat."

"Okay, we'll get this fixed for you. Don't worry."

--five minutes later--

"Excuse me, but I overheard the troubles you've been having getting your order fixed up correctly."

"Yeah, it's okay, though. I'm used to it."

"Well, I just wanted to let you know that they do it on purpose. I'm a regular here, and every day they find someone to pick on and deliberately get their order wrong over and over."

"Are you serious?"

"Yeah, they think it's funny as hell. But I'm going to show them. Next time I order, when they get it right, I'll tell them they got it wrong, and if they get it wrong, I'll just eat what they give me. It's the perfect plan, you see."

"... Yes, that sounds like a good plan. ... Uh, thanks for letting me in on it. But I really should finish eating now. I'm in a bit of a hurry."

"Yes, yes."

--30 second pause--

"You know, you could start out this perfect plan by giving them back your half finished food and saying they got it wrong again. I mean, I know they got it right this time, but it'll really get them back if you tell them it's wrong."

"Um..., no, ... no, thank you. I think you'll do quite fine by yourself when you order your food tomorrow. After all, if I do that today, it might warn them of your perfect plan for tomorrow, and that wouldn't be good."

"You're right! We can't let them know about my plan. Hey, you're a pretty smart guy. Maybe you can come eat here tomorrow with me and we can fool them together--that'll really get them!"

"I appreciate the offer, but I really do have to go, and I won't be available tomorrow. Thanks for letting me in on your plan, though. I'll keep it a secret."

"Yes, yes, keep it a secret. Don't tell anybody! If they find out, who knows what could happen! You promise you'll keep it a secret?"

"I won't tell anyone but my diary, at least not until after tomorrow."

"Good."

Certainly Not What I Expected

2008-04-01T10:38:00.002-04:00

Went to a speech by Karl Rove. Two hecklers cursed him out in the middle of his talk; apparently, this is quite common with him.

Rove pointed out, quite accurately, in my opinion, that it is dishonest for Obama to pledge that he wants to run a different kind of campaign, and yet continues to harp on McCain's '100 years of war' statement.

It's really weird to realize that I went out to a speech by Karl Rove, got irritated at the hecklers who called him nasty names because I was trying to follow what Rove was saying, and in the end agreed with him far more than I disagreed with him. Certainly not what I expected.

If the many anti-Rove documentaries I've seen tell truthful stories, then Rove is a complete dick. But his speech at George Washington University was actually pretty good, and about three-quarters of what he said actually made a lot of sense to me.

Certainly not what I expected.

Update: Three days later, Obama gave a speech in PA and was asked by a member of the crowd if he thought he was going too far by mischaracterizing McCain's '100 years' comment for political advantage. Obama staunchly denied this, stating unequivocally that he felt he was being quite fair, and said that he was referring to an exact quote. "We can both go back on youtube to see exactly what he said," Obama told the questioner. "He was quite clear that he would stay in Iraq for 100 years." (paraphrased)

Of the remaining candidates, since Nader has no chance in hell, I'm an Obama supporter. But this is just plain wrong. Obama himself said that he would keep troops around similar to what we now do in Germany and Japan, and that is exactly what McCain clarified that he meant in his statement as well. I'll still vote for Obama, but I'm very disappointed in him for this. .:sigh:.

Shitstorm at US House of Representatives

2008-02-14T18:17:00.002-05:00

A shitstorm just happened today in the U.S. House of Representatives.

(I'll start with a quick summary, and then go into detail for those who want more info.)

A congressman died not long ago, and the service was held this morning at the House. But Republicans interrupted it midstream with political talk, which got Democrats riled up. Then democrats refused to vote on FISA, which got Republicans all riled up, too. So every time anything happened afterward, the republicans retaliated by using the House rules to annoy Democrats as much as possible. Then Democrats retaliate by deciding to authorize a deputizion of a civil force to potentially arrest White House officals, and Republicans are so pissed that they boycott the vote and stampede out.

This all really happened today in the House of Representatives. CSPAN was never this good before.

Okay, so for the 10% of you who want to know more, here's the rundown.

First, on Congressman Tom Lantos' service interruption, the details I have are still sketchy. I'll update this later once I get more info.

Second, on FISA: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expires this weekend. Once it expires, if a new category of target needs to be surveilled, the surveillance of thoe targets has to wait until a new FISA bill is passed. This is not as bad as Bush and other republicans are making it out to be; it's not like current terrorists will cease to be surveilled, nor is it true that new terrorists will not be able to be surveilled, so long as they are a part of a group we are already aware of--at least for the next year. It really isn't that big a deal at all, but hearing Bush speak, you'd never realize that. He is saying that because of the House not passing a bill on this, they are putting Americans at risk.

Anyway, the reason the House is not passing the bill is very easy to understand: they don't want to give the Telecom industry retroactive immunity from the violations of privacy law they perpetrated after 9/11. Bush's argument is that if they don't get immunity, then in the future, the Telecoms won't actively help us out in surveilling terrorists. This is true enough. But it leaves out the fact that if we know of a terrorist that needs to be surveilled, we can always get a court order to force the telecoms to help. Their voluntary help is not necessary, and I for one feel much better living in a world where the telecoms are scared to just volunteer information that they think might interest the gov't. And no, that doesn't make me a terrorist.

The second reason the House isn't passing the bill is because as currently written, the Senate bill cedes authority to the Executive branch that allows them to have surveillance powers beyond what is regulated in FISA. In effect, this would give a blank check (albeit to an account with limited funds) to Bush to trample over even more civil liberties. The House would prefer a FISA bill that has exclusive control over foreign surveillance.

In addition, I should mention that it is not like they just up and said they're not going to pass FISA. They offered a limited short term extension to the current FISA so they can debate more and come to a consensus later on. The republicans passed on this, trying to force the democrats to pass their version of FISA instead. It would've worked, too, since it appears that there are enough votes in the House to actually pass the republican's version. But democrats siderailed a vote by instead voting on other things.

This whole time, the republicans were doing everything they could to annoy democrats during the proceedings. Someone would say: "I'd like to call for an early adjournment", and then another republican would second. This forced Pelosi to call a vote on the issue: she would ask all who wanted adjournment to say 'aye', and those opposed to say 'nay'. Nearly everyone would say 'nay', of course, since they were in the middle of doing their work for the day--even Republicans didn't really want to adjourn, since they were trying to get the democrats to hold the FISA vote. So Pelosi would proclaim that the nays have it, and another republican would dispute this obviously correct assessment, and another rep. would second it. Which means that they'd have to take a written vote, one by one, which, by the way, takes at least fifteen minutes in the House. Then after it was clear that the nays were in the majority, they'd go on to the next item on the agenda, and another republican would then call for an early adjournment again, and the whole ordeal would repeat itself. This happened ALL DAY LONG.

Democrats were so angry over this that they then passed a bill that takes the rather extreme step of stipulating that they will deputize a civil force to arrest Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers on the charge of contempt of Congress. (You might recall that during the former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales fiasco a while back, Bolten and Miers cited executive privilege and flatly refused to even show up when the House summoned them to appear.) They did this because the current Attorney General Michael Mukasey announced that he would not prosecute against White House officials who refused to testify in this manner, since they likely did so based on the advice of the former Atty. General.

I should mention that the wording they used described this mechanism as a civil lawsuit which, if the judge ruled in the House's favor, would allow the judge to compel Bolten and Miers to testify or go to jail. That's right, you heard correctly: a civil lawsuit that allows jailtime. If this happened, and the Atty. General refused to enforce it, this would require the deputization of a civil force to enforce the judge's ruling.

The whole idea of this pissed off the republicans so much that instead of voting on it, they all boycotted the vote en masse and just left the House floor. It passed overwhelmingly, of course.

This is why I love living in DC. I live for this kind of thing. Anyway, I'll update the above with links as I get access to them later in the day. The first draft of this article comes straight from listening to CSPAN radio as the events took place in real time.

And since the writer's strike is over, I'm expecting big things tonight with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I'll be very displeased if they don't cover this story as well as I envision them being able to do.

Moving Beyond Capitalism (But Not Through Socialism)

2008-02-12T00:34:00.000-05:00

Before you read this post, you have to watch this video:

When you're done watching, read on. I'll wait for you.

Okay, finished watching? Good. Now I have a few things to say. But before I start, I want to share the first thing I wrote down when I first watched this:

I'm still trying to think about how a cooperation-based economy would be fundamentally different than a capitalist economy. I'm not entirely sure I followed where he was going with this talk....
Is he saying that we might be able to create a new form of economy where each of us works together in ways that create wealth for us all as opposed to just ourselves? His mention of the ultimatum game seems to be used as evidence to show that even when we lose out in a capitalistic sense, we may have an innate desire to cooperate in such a way that everyone gains fairly in the end. Is he extrapolating this to say that the new economy will be one where a companies might start doing things that help everyone, even when self interest ceases to be a motivating factor, simply because to not be fair is to invite the wrath of a public which expects cooperation no matter what?

Regardless of whether this is what he was in fact thinking, this is where his talk has taken me. The altruistic punisher effect, as he showed it, is quite small. On the large scale, the only thing close to it is a society which bands together via taxes to impose regulations on others. But a HUGE portion of society (I'm talking about you Ron Paul fanatics who visited this blog for the sole reason that this entry came up on google blog search for the "Ron Paul is awesome" quote that I just gave) does not feel that these regulations are a good idea. (Even Ann Coulter has publicly stated that when she listens to Ron Paul speeches, she starts to fall in love with him up until he talks about foreign policy, at which point she says she regains her sanity.) Is it possible that while the altruistic punisher idea works consistently on the small scale, it breaks down at larger scales?

I'm thinking about it, and it certainly makes sense that if the ultimatum game is played with a million dollars, and player A claims $900 000, you'd have to be crazy to turn down the $100k. Yet then he starts to give examples of companies that are starting to go altruistic today. As more and more companies fall into this mold, will it happen that we as a society will come to expect such behavior, and then punish those companies that don't exhibit it? If so, then companies will HAVE to be cooperative, even if it is to their detriment, since if they don't, society will make it even further to their detriment.

... To be honest, I'm still really fuzzy on all this. If you ask me again tomorrow, I may hold an entirely different view. But today, as I write this, the idea seems not only plausible, but also the evidence Howard Rheingold gave seems to actually support the idea that we could be moving in that direction as we speak.

What do you think?

Skateboard Accident

2008-02-08T16:12:00.000-05:00

So I'm sitting in my top floor office with a window (I'm just special like that, apparently), working off my three hour recording session for our weekly thirty minute podcast by reading Dilbert cartoons, when all of a sudden I hear someone screaming at the top of his lungs. Due to a certain someone who shall remain nameless for now, my immediate thought was that I'd just experienced witnessing my first stabbing. After all, living in the DC metro area is apparently very different from the bible belt of southern alabama. (Though to be fair, there don't seem to be many KKK members up here.) But after looking out my window and verifying that whoever perpetrated the incident was running away, I rushed outside, phone in hand, to render whatever help I could.

The young man was lying in the middle of the street, howling in pain. A skateboard lay upside down on the curb some two meters to the side. Being a philosophy/physics/math person, I never bothered learning anything in the field of biology, so I literally knew nothing to do other than rush to his side. Thankfully, the person I'd seen running away through the window was a companion that was running to get a car to take the guy to a hospital. While doing my best to help steady him, I lifted him into the car after only a few short minutes, and then the two of them drove off.

This marks, I think, my first 'emergency'-style experience, unless you count the time that Phoe stabbed me with a katana blade. But I was on the receiving end that time, so I don't think it counts. I hope I did the appropriate thing. I sometimes worry that perhaps I won't be any good in an emergency, but I think I did okay in this one. Certainly I did better than anyone else in the immediate area, as not a single other person ran out to help the guy, though I did see a couple of people come out as the car was driving away.

Anyway. Back to Dilbert.

Emoto's Emotive Water Crystals

2008-02-06T18:57:00.000-05:00

You may have heard about Masaru Emoto before--he's the guy who claims that emotions, when directed at water just prior to freezing, will cause the water molecules to freeze in patterns that are associated with the emotion in question. He is, as you might imagine, completely fucking retarded.

Nevertheless, because the US gov't is also completely fucking insane, they actually fund studies to deal with such issues from time to time (okay, all the time). The one I want to bring to everyone's attention today was sponsored by the National Institute of Health.

I will quote directly from the abstract:

A group of approximately 2,000 people in Tokyo focused positive intentions toward water samples located inside an electromagnetically shielded room in California. That group was unaware of similar water samples set aside in a different location as controls. Ice crystals formed from both sets of water samples were blindly identified and photographed by an analyst, and the resulting images were blindly assessed for aesthetic appeal by 100 independent judges. Results indicated that crystals from the treated water were given higher scores for aesthetic appeal than those from the control water (P = .001, one-tailed), lending support to the hypothesis.

For those of you who skipped over the primary source quote because of some delusion that secondary sources are better, what this is saying is that they tested whether or not water crystals looked "more aesthetically appealing" after "positive intentions" were directed at the water prior to freezing, and the result was statistically significant.

I bet Emoto peed his pants when he found out the results were in his favor.

But for those of you who think I am showing this because I want to convince you to the Emotive Water Hypothesis point of view, please stop being an idiot. The point, instead, is to explain why even when a double blind experiment takes place, its results are not necessarily conclusive.

Whenever someone does an experiment, you get a result. If you do the experiment well, you'll get lots of results, because you'll do things lots of times under exceedingly similar conditions, and compare them to control conditions. The idea is that if you just do the experiment once, you may get a result which is not ordinary; perhaps because there was some error in the performance of your experiment, or even just because you happened to get a high maximal result or a low minimal result of a range of results that you could have gotten.

By this, what I mean is that if you measure the length of a board only once, you may have accidentally measured incorrectly. Or you may have measured in a specific place which gave the longest possible measure of the board. The only way to really get an accurate measurement is to redo the measuring multiple times. If you get the same result twice in a row, that gives you more confidence in your result. Even better if two separate measurers get the same result. And likely there will be a range of answers--some results will be high, and some low. The 'real' measure is somewhere in between. (For you philosophers out there, the existence of a 'real' measure is actually disputed itself, but that's a topic for a future journal entry.)

Anyway, the hope is that by measuring multiple times, you are more likely to not have all the measures be too high, or too low, or consistently mismeasured. This is why, in the NIH experiment with Emoto's water, you have multiple people on every side of the experiment, all giving results multiple times. They were attempting to make it less likely for all the measures to be consistently incorrect.

But even though you have lots of people working together on measuring and remeasuring, there is still the possibility that everyone will, wholly by chance, consistently measure too long a length. We want this chance to be as small as possible, so we say some results are statistically insignificant, even if they give results higher or lower than expected.

For example, let's say the length of board is 100 units (u) long. If we do the measurement twenty times, then depending on the method of measurement used, we might expect to get results back of 98u, 101u, and maybe even a 105u. 90% of the time, these are the results we would get back from measuring. So if we got these results back, and the hypothesis was that the board was 100u long, we'd say that these results corroborated the hypothesis. But remember I said that these measurements are of the kind you might expect 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time, you might get twenty measurement results of which ALL are 102u and above. This would be a statistically significant difference. If these were the results, we'd say the hypothesis that the board is 100u long is less likely true than an alternate hypothesis that said it was 105u long. And we'd say this EVEN IF the 'real' measurement was just 100u long.

Rearrange the above figures so that instead of just a 90% probability, you instead use a 99.9% standard, and you can see even more extreme distances. .1% of the time, a multiply repeated experiment might result in concluding that a hypothesis of the board being 125u long is corroborated, even if it is only 100u long. This is a rather extreme example, but you get the idea.

The end result is that this NIH study is a lottery winner. It is a true rarity--it gives corroboration to the 125u long hypothesis, even though that hypothesis is wildly incorrect. Over time, if the experiment is repeated again and again, you'd expect the results to get closer to reality. But that would mean the NIH would have to sponsor yet another study on emotive water with American tax dollars.

Now I'm going to go eat a cold slice of pizza as a reward for actually updating this blog.

Huckabee Announces Chuck Norris as both Head of Homeland Security & Secretary of Defense

2008-02-02T21:45:00.000-05:00

Presidential Candidate Huckabee, at a rally in Alabama today, announced that if he gets elected President, he would appoint Chuck Norris as both Secretary of Defense and Head of the Department of Homeland Security. I am NOT kidding. I predict Huckabee will now win Alabama's vote.

Update: Here's a link. The link only mentions the sec of def part; but he said in his speech that he'd appoint him to both simultaneously. As soon as I get a news source to verify, I'll post another link.

Correction: Apparently I misheard on cspan. Chuck Norris is just going to be secretary of defense. He's appointing Nature Boy Rick Flair as Head of the Department of Homeland Security. This is still fucking unbelievable, though.

Are tasers safe?

2007-11-26T18:11:00.000-05:00

TASERs have been in the news a lot recently. A student was tasered at John Kerry's speech just a few months ago, and more recently an Oakland cop killed someone with a taser. Then there's the Vancouver guy who was tasered to death in the airport, and in the UK, one man actually burst into flames after he was shot with a taser. He died, too, of course.

Perhaps even more frightening is the Georgia police that unnecessarily tasered a man four times in 40 seconds killing him. Seeing such unnecessary tasering just makes one's stomach churn. Especially when you realize it is everywhere, even when someone is just stopped for a speeding ticket.

The issue, of course, is that because it is considered nonlethal, police seem more apt to utilize it in a situation. But with all these recent deaths, one starts to wonder if it really is nonlethal. That's why the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) in the UK decided to do a study specifically to find out how harmful tasers really are.

Because the cause of death from electric shock generally seems to be a problem with the heart, the researchers focused in on the possibility of cardiac arrhythmia occurring with the use of M26 and X26 commercial tasers. They chose guinea pig hearts to test on, due to the similarity of its electrocardiographic-wave configurations in comparison to human hearts.

The results were surprising for me, though I suppose that's only because I was unfamiliar with similar findings from the past. The current densities of both devices had to be increased by at least a factor of 60 before erratic heartbeats were seen. In other words, tasers are safe when used properly.

There is apparently a wide safety margin between the intensity of a taser strike and the level at which a human heart would beat irregularly. The research team did, however, warn that "consumption of alcohol or some drugs, or an existing heart condition" might "reduce this safety margin in some individuals".

"I have many concerns about TASERs, but the induction of a cardiac arrhythmia appears to be less of a problem," stated Brad Roth, associate professor in the department of physics at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. So it remains to be seen why, exactly, so many taser deaths have occurred recently.

Perhaps it just in misusing them that the problems occur? But even if someone is tased four times in forty seconds, how does that compare to the finding that tasers are sixty times too weak to cause irregular heartbeats? These are very unclear questions, and I certainly don't have any answers.

What do you guys think?

Update: PhysicsWorld has an article on today's study, and also I was informed that the UN now considers tasers as torture.

19 Planes Virtually Destroyed In US Skies

2007-11-15T17:52:00.000-05:00

The administration likes to say that they're doing a great job with homeland security, since no significant attacks have been made on US soil since 9/11. But today that story has been proved to be nothing horseshit.

The GAO released a report today that detailed how teams at 19 different airports were able to smuggle bomb parts and liquid explosives right past security to get onto the planes. These bombs were built out of $150 worth of materials commonly available at hardware stores, and a video they showed in session with congress today showed just how powerful such an explosion would be. (I will upload the cspan footage onto youtube shortly and post it here.) I think it was clear to all who watched that the resulting explosion could easily destroy any plane it went off in, although TSA chief Kip Hawley just had to point out that since such an explosion has not been tested inside a plane, "no one really knows" what would happen if it went off in mid-flight. (I guess they'll have to check Mythbusters for that one.)

While it is clearly troubling that in 19 attempts, 19 successes were had, perhaps it will be even more troubling to realize that when they saw how easy it was to get through, they tried AGAIN, but this time triggered the special screening to see what would happen. They STILL got through in 19 out of 19 tries.

But believe it or not, this is not the worst part.

The worst part is that last year, the GAO did the same exact thing and got the same exact results. There has been no improvement in the intervening year, even though last time, Congress told the TSA to train their people to protect against this threat. TSA chief Hawley insists that "as of right now, our airports are safe. We have fixed the problem", yet immediately afterward, the GAO official (sorry, but I didn't catch his name) retorted that "we used the same exact methods we did last year, and had absolutely no problems getting through", though he admitted he also used new techniques in some cases and additionally smuggled in liquid explosives, which they didn't do in last year's exercise.

What this means, in a nutshell, is that we apparently can't guard against this stuff. This problem was brought to the attention of Homeland Security and its TSA division last year, and were told to at least fix this breach, yet a year later, no progress has been made. It remains obvious, therefore, that no progress can be made, since I refuse to believe that these people actually want security to be so easily broken.

The simple fact, then, is that anytime terrorists want to, they can blow up passenger planes in American airspace. With all that this gov't has tried to do to limit such threats, nothing has worked. The fact that we haven't had a major terrorist attack recently, I then conclude, is not because of hotshots behind the scenes who are taking out the badguys Bond-style, but rather because the would-be terrorists simply haven't yet had the willpower to see such plans through. If they did, then numerous planes would already have been destroyed.

Or do you think I'm being too harsh? What do you guys think?

Update: Summary of the GAO report is available at their website. Also, apparently CNN did a short piece on this as well.

Put Mike Gravel on Democracy NOW!

2007-11-05T07:00:00.000-05:00

Mike Gravel is falling back. NBC's decision to kick him out of the debate reeks of corporate censorship by General Electric, one of the companies who profit so much whenever we go to war.

We need to stand up and do something. Mike Gravel needs exposure, and he needs it NOW. What is most astonishing to me about Gravel's lack of progress in the polls is that whenever a blind poll is put out, where people must choose the issues they care about, rather than the candidates behind those issues, Mike Gravel consistently comes out on top, followed closely by Dennis Kucinich and Al Gore. I'll repeat that for those who are just scanning through this paragraph: Mike Gravel LEADS the polls whenever issues are chosen rather than faces. Not only is Mike Gravel the best candidate for President, but the US public seems to know it, too!

Furthermore, if we just let Mike Gravel fade away after what NBC did to him, then what does that say about us as a people? Corporate media cannot be allowed to dictate who can and who can't be our next President! If we let GE throw Gravel out of the race without a vote, Ron Paul will be next! And Kucinich right after that. It's not right--the whole point of having a vote is for people to vote! We MUST allow the people to have their say, rather than to let big media continue to dictate to us who can and who can't be our next President!

There are two easy things that YOU can do to help stop corporate media from pushing us around. The first is to make sure NBC's attempt to throw out Gravel is unsuccessful.

Whether you like Mike Gavel or not is beside the point. What matters is that we DO NOT LET GE WIN. Gravel must be allowed to stay in this race until it comes to a vote; if, at that time, the people decide not to go with him, then so be it. But it must come to a vote!

To accomplish this, Mike Gravel must get the exposure he needs to force the next huge media conglomerate that they must allow him in the debate. So here's what I need all of you who are reading this to do right now.

Go to Democracy NOW! and request Mike Gravel as a guest on their show. Democracy NOW! doesn't have the audience base that NBC does, but the people who watch Democracy NOW! are committed to helping good causes. If we can get Mike Gravel on that show, that could mean a huge increase in volunteer effort! Please, go to Democracy NOW! now!

Second, we must actively engage the public. We need to tap into the mainstream, and get people talking about why GE would do such a thing to Mike Gravel. I have an idea for this, and it involves Stephen Colbert and Ron Paul. But I still need to work out the kinks before I propose it... I'll have a proposal up on this blog by tomorrow.

In the meantime, if you care anything at all about keeping this country free, then go to Democracy NOW! now to help get Mike Gravel on their show!

Update: By request, I am posting the blind poll that shows Gravel on top. Another recent blind poll put Al Gore on top, but in that one, Gravel, Kucinich, and all republicans were not included. Ron Paul has so far not won any blind polls, though he consistently does well in nonblind straw polls.

Starting to Think About Ron Paul

2007-10-31T21:26:00.000-04:00

I've been avoiding talking about Ron Paul for a while now. But I don't think I can continue without saying a few things.

There's something about this Ron Paul guy.

And I'm not just talking about the fact that he is currently third in raising funds. I'm not just talking about the fact that he wins straw polls left and right, often by a huge margin. (81% in my home state of Alabama (2nd place was 5%), and 28% in my current state of Maryland (2nd place was 24%), to name just two examples).

I guess what I'm talking about is the fact that his message seems to resonate with so many people.

Let me say up front that I am a Mike Gravel supporter. But I want to give an honest rundown of Ron Paul, so that everyone can see what I see whenever I hear about him, which seems to happen more and more often lately.

The one thing that shines through about Ron Paul is his sincerity. He has very strong opinions, and his votes on the hill never deviate from them. One thing that he is very strong about is his absolute refusal to vote on any measure that he believes the constitution does not authorize the congress to oversee, even if he is in fact in favor of hatever that measure is trying to address. The man is a constitutionalist, through and through, and he has stood up against special interests and lobbyists of all kinds throughout his tenure. In fact, it is so well known that he remains true to his core beliefs that few lobbyists even bothered to try with him, at least up until his presidential campaign got up to speed.

Many times, looking at congressional voting records is difficult, as there are almost always extenuating circumstances with different bills. But not so with Ron Paul; his voting record is clean as the driven snow.

He has NEVER:

voted to raise taxes
voted for a budget that wasn't balanced
voted to raise congressional pay
voted for a bill that he believed was contrary to the constution, including any and all bills restricting gun ownership of any kind, and any bill that would have granted the executive power additional powers

In addition, he voted against the Patriot Act.
He voted against regulating the internet.
He voted against the Iraq war.

Furthermore, he refuses to accept anything more than a minimal salary; he does not participate in the congressional pension plan, and he returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the US treasury every year.

Furthermore, he is one of the most active congressmen I've ever seen. When compared to any other single member of congress, he has introduced the most pieces of legislation, though to be honest, not many are able to get through, due to his unwillingness to work 'behind the scenes' and participate in quid pro quo policies.

In short, Ron Paul is honest, decent, and truthfully believes in his convictions. It is rare to see such a person running for President. It is even rarer to see them actually starting to do really well, as Dr. Paul is.

His foriegn policy is very similar to Mike Gravel's. He wants to pull our troops out, not just from Iraq, but from most everywhere else, too. To quote Mike Gravel on a point that Ron Paul agreed with: "Policing the world is just their way of enforcing our American empire."

Ron Paul's ideas on free trade are quite confusing. He is libertarian, yet... Ron Paul believes that free trade deals and world governmental trade organizations like ICC, NAFTA, GATT, WTO, and CAFTA are bad for our nation. To quote Dr. Paul: "We must withdraw from any organizations and trade deals that infringe upon the freedom and independence of the United States of America."

Ron Paul also strongly believes in privacy, even though he does not agree that constitution has a privacy clause in it. He's against a national ID card, against the use of a social security number in the private sector (he wants it to be gov't only), against letting medical insurance companies see your medical info, against the current US law that notifies the US gov't wheneveryou deposit $10k or more into a bank, etc.

He is also strongly against birthright citizenship. "As long as illegal immigrants know their children born here will be citizens, the incentive to enter the U.S. illegally will remain strong." And Dr. Paul believes that removing incentives is the only way to properly enforce laws.

He is for what he calls 'health freedom', which he describes is your ability to take care ofyour health the way you best see fit. This includes a move against the FDA, possibly to the point of shutting them down, and an opposition of any bill that would require US citizens to be immunized from any disease, such as the recent HR 5005 that authorized the forced vaccination of American citizens against small pox.

He is very strongly pro-life, as he was a practicing medical doctor for many years, and delivered many babies himself.

He is even more stringently against taxation, wanting to minimize taxes to the extreme. He wants to abolish the IRS and replace it with NOTHING. He points out that the loss of income tax will bring our national income level to about where it was in 2000. He thinks that cutting spending to that level shouldn't be that difficult. He also wants to start backing every dollar with something physical, so that the US gov't has to stop taking loans out by printing more money. He is an extreme fiscal conservative.

He wants to eliminate social security for all younger people, and yet still pay out top dollar to those depending on it, as well as actually increasing what they receive, because he believes that all taxes on social security income should be immediately repealed. This would be paid for by reducing the military.

I could go on and on. But you get the idea. His issues are pretty straightforward, and he believes in them all fairly strongly.

There are a number of things that I disagree with. But the weird part is... If he were president, most of this stuff he'd never be able to implement. And the stuff that he would be able to implement is stuff I basically agree with.

So, in a weird way, I almost wouldn't mind if he were president.

Please don't get me wrong; I support Mike Gravel. And I think removing the FDA is just as ludicrous as his consistent voting record to allow citizens to legally handle submachine guns. But I have to hand to it to him that at least he's consistent. And when you think about it, only congress has the authority to deal with gun legislation. Only congress has the authority to deal with birthright citizenship. Only congress has the authority to back the dollar. And since Ron Paul is so sincere, I cannot imagine that he would use the executive branch to subvert his own ideals in order to bring those policies into place. No, if he were president, these insane ideas that I wholeheartedly think are stupid would never come into play at all.

On the other hand, everything that I do agree with is stuff that he would then have authority to start realizing: foreign policy, trade agreements, int'l organizations, etc. The only thing, in fact, that he would have power over that I don't immediately like is the possibility of his appointing new supreme court justices. But Ron Paul seems so honest... I can't imagine him appointing anyone that wasn't a strict conservative constitutionalist. And those types of people would never repeal earlier decisions by their own court without overriding need, and so they would not vote to overturn Roe v Wade, for example.

So with Mike Gravel getting beaten back left and right, and with Dennis Kucinich saying incredibly stupid things like "I saw a UFO" on live national television, I'm really starting to think hard about Ron Paul.

And I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet.

Kucinich: "I saw a UFO."

2007-10-30T23:28:00.000-04:00

Kucinich: "I saw a UFO."

.:sigh:. Look: I'm for Mike Gravel, and I back him 95%. But if he doesn't make it, the only choice I have left is Dennis Kucinich. So it really irks me that he's so idiotic as to say something like this during the democratic presidential debate.

Why can't truly intelligent people ever make it in US politics? Why is it that of all the contenders that are left (if Gravel's run is over), the last person I feel capable of voting for is someone who claims to have seen a UFO?

I really want to move to another country. )c:

Watch Gravel at NBC Presidential Debate

2007-10-30T19:22:00.000-04:00

Mike Gravel, who was banned from the tonight's democratic presidential debate by NBC is going to answer all the debate questions from across the street, and broadcast this live on the web at Gravel2008.us.

If you plan to watch tonight's debate, then you should also watch Gravel's webcast! If we let GE and its subsidiary, NBC, dictate who is and who is not allowed to become president, then it is not Mike Gravel that loses out, but all of democracy itself! How can we claim to have a free society when this kind of thing occurs, and no one acts to stop it? Why are we not revolting in the streets right now, as they would be doing in any respectable developing country? We cannot--we dare not allow the giant news corporations to dictate to us who is allowed airtime on these presidential debates! If we want to call ourselves free, then we must push for freedom!

Watch the debate live tonight, at Gravel2008.us! (6pm pst/9pm est)

Update: Now that the debate is over, here's the video of the event. Be aware that the audio was messed up in the first two minutes, but it quickly clears up.

NBC is Offered $1,000,000 if They Let Gravel Speak

2007-10-26T23:25:00.000-04:00

Recently, NBC decided to screw Mike Gravel by setting up arbitrary requirements specifically designed to bar Gravel from participating in the upcoming 30 October democratic presidential debate.

Well, now one of Gravel's supporters (who is apparently also a Ron Paul supporter) has decided to stand up and put his money where his mouth is. Gregory Chase, multi-millionaire, sent this letter to five executives at NBC, DNC chairman Howard Dean, the President of Drexel University, and also published it as an advertisement in four newspapers. Here is an excerpt:

If it would help get Senator Gravel back into the debate, I offer to purchase $1 million of advertising from NBC, or simply pay NBC $1 million in exchange for the service of allowing Senator Gravel to participate in your debate.

But he doesn't stop there. He also posted this youtube video, where he personally offers $25,000 to whomever produces the Gravel youtube video with the most views through the end of the year.

Furthermore, Mr. Chase has personally purchased advertising space for every day from now until the end of the year in the three major New Hampshire newspapers: the Monitor, the Manchester Union Leader and the Nashua Telegraph.

Stay tuned for additional updates as this story moves forward.

Update: Jon Kraus interviewed Gregory Chase, and Bryan Bissell reported it on his blog.

Second Update: From Jon Kraus's interview:

Chase said that he had spoken with an election lawyer who advised him to make dependent expenditures on behalf of Gravel, where his name would have to be attached to any advertisements he made, along with a notation that it was not involved with the campaign. Furthermore, Chase mentioned that he has never met Gravel, and for that matter has never been to a political rally in New Hampshire.

Kraus also mentioned that Gregory Chase is also a supporter of Ron Paul in the interview. I amended the copy above to reflect this.

NBC Bars Mike Gravel from Attending Debate

2007-10-23T16:45:00.000-04:00

At the last second, NBC has set up new arbitrary requirements for entering the 30 October democratic presidential debate and informed Mike Gravel that because he did not meet these requirements, he would be barred from the debate. These new requirements were arbitrarily chosen specifically to bar Mike Gravel from participating in the debate.

Furthermore, they enacted these new requirements at the very last moment, so as to ensure that Gravel could not possibly meet the requirements on time. This isn't right; it's a clear example of a giant news media corporation deciding on their own who should hear which candidates. If General Electric (who owns NBC) were doing this to Ron Paul, then you can be sure the internet hordes would flock to his support. But it is just as wrong for this to be happening to Mike Gravel, so I hope that all of you reading this will sign the petition to include Mike Gravel in this debate!
[ http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/letgravelspeakoct30 ]

If you really feel strongly about this, then you should also flood the e-mail of execs at NBC that are behind this fiasco. You can send any upset mail to [ chuck.todd@nbcuni.com, viewerservices@msnbc.com, directors@corporate.ge.com, ombudsperson@corporate.ge.com, jeff.zucker@nbcuni.com, lynn.calpeter@nbcuni.com, steve.capus@nbcuni.com ]. You should also e-mail the DNC to let them know how you feel about this outrage: [ http://www.democrats.org/page/s/contact ].

For the record, the new arbitrary requirements NBC decided to enforce are:

Campaign in Iowa/New Hampshire at least 4 times
Polling at at least 5%
Raise $1 Million

Although NBC claims he has not met all three new requirements, in fact Gravel HAS campaigned well over 14 times in those states since he declared his candidacy in April '06, and a recent CNN poll puts him tied with Biden, Kucinich, and Dodd.

In fact, the only criterion he has not yet met is the $1 million raised; but Gravel is proud of the fact that he doesn't accept money from special interests. In Mike Gravel's own words: "The reason why Senator Hillary Clinton seems to have a fundraising scandal every month is because money has corrupted our democracy. By stifling my voice on the basis of fundraising dollars, NBC is reinforcing the power of money over our national political discussion and our freedom."

Furthermore, it is quite clear why NBC is doing this to Gravel. GE, who owns NBC, is one of the world's leading military contractors. They hold over $2 Billion in military contracts right now. If it weren't for Gravel bringing up the vote to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization in the last debate, no one would have even been aware of the gravity of such an event occurring in our Senate.

We NEED Mike Gravel. That's why I urge you all to sign this petition, whether you plan to vote for Gravel or not.

[ http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/letgravelspeakoct30 ]

Update: The money restriction was just solved! Apparently, a Gravel supporter with a lot of cash on hand decided to pay $1,000,000 if NBC would just let Gravel speak a the debate!

Ahmadinejad at Columbia University

2007-09-24T19:17:00.000-04:00

Today, I saw Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speak at Columbia University. I'd like to share a few highlights of the encounter, and I don't just mean the novelty of dealing with secret service agents staring down the visitors, nor the protesters outside, nor the fact that if you got up to use the restroom, you weren't allowed back into the auditorium. Instead, I want to share what I heard, as well as what I felt.

The event started with the President of Columbia University "introducing" Ahmadinejad--but what started as a simple introduction turned into a speech all by itself. Columbia President Lee Bolinger remarks included this amazing initial salvo:

"Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator...."

Bolinger then listed item after item pointedly asking President Ahmadinejad about policies such as his statement two years ago that the Holocaust did not happen, and whether he was using nuclear threats to hide the fact that he was an incompetent president of his people. He said that either Pres. Ahmadinejad was "brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated". He claimed that Iran is the leading country in executing minors, and asked very pointedly why women, members of the Baha'i faith, homosexuals, and academics have all become targets of prosecution in Iran.

Bolinger's 'introduction' lasted thirty minutes. During this time, President Ahmadinejad patiently waited for his chance to speak.

Finally, Pres. Ahmadinejad took the podium. He started, as most Muslims of his type do, by reciting verses from the Koran, which really turned me off, but you really have to put up with such cultural eccentricities, I suppose, if you ever want to mount a successful dialogue.

Then he finally started, thanking God for his chance to speak to an academic audience. His initial words I am copying here from the Associated Press reports that came out, instead of by memory:

"At the outset, I want to complain a bit about the person who read this political statement against me. In Iran, tradition requires that when we invite a person to be a speaker, we actually respect our students and the professors by allowing them to make their own judgment and we don’t think it’s necessary before the speech is even given to come in with a series of claims and to attempt to provide a vaccination of sorts to our faculty and students. I think the text read by the dear gentleman here, more than addressing me, was an insult to information and the knowledge of the audience here, present here. In a university environment we must allow people to speak their mind, to allow everyone to talk so that the truth is eventually revealed by all."

The audience bursted into applause at this point. I don't usually applaud unless I really appreciate a point, but I have to admit that I ended up clapping, too.

Pres. Ahmadinejad then went on to mention that he would indeed answer Pres. Bolinger's questions, but that first he had much to say. He added that many of Bolinger's facts were incorrect, and that they were in some parts exaggerations and in other outright lies.

Then Ahmadinejad went into that mode of speech that I so came to despise back at Spring Hill College: logic combined with religious crap. Think apologist-style, for you catholics out there. Something about science is illumination, god loves illumination, therefore god loves science; also science isn't just experiments and hypotheses, but also divine truth as told by the prophets; science is a light source by which we may see the reality of knowledge, but we must not ignore knowledge which remains occluded by shadow; but science's light is best used by scientists, and "some world powers" that choose to use science against humanity are wrong to do so; etc., ad nauseum. I expect this was his written speech, prepared well in advance. It sucked big time.

But afterward, and before he moved on to taking questions from the audience, he decided to respond to Bolinger's earlier attacks in his 'introduction'. This is where it got good.

First, he responded to the holocaust denial accusation.

He said that two years ago, he raised two questions, both of which he feels are valid questions, and should be asked. Yet instead of getting answers, he instead has been ridiculed by the press and insulted by Bolinger concerning his asking of these questions.

I will quote him directly, again copied straight from AP, so that you can see what he said for yourself:

"You know that my main job is as a university instructor. Right now, as president of Iran, I still continue teaching graduate and Ph.D.-level courses on a weekly basis. My students are working with me in scientific fields. I believe that I am an academic myself, so I speak to you from an academic point of view. And I raise two questions. But instead of a response, I got a wave of insults and allegations against me. And regretfully, they came mostly from groups who claimed most to believe in the freedom of speech and of information.

"You know quite well that Palestine is an old wound –- as old as 60 years. For 60 years, these people are displaced. For 60 years, they are being killed. For 60 years, on a daily basis there’s conflict and terror, for 60 years, innocent women and children are destroyed and killed by helicopters and airplanes that rake the houses over their heads. Children in schools are being tortured, for 60 years, the slogan of expansionism, from the Nile to the Euphrates, has been chanted.

"Given that the Holocaust is a present reality of our time, a history that occurred, why is there not sufficient research that can approach the topic from different perspectives?"

His 'two questions' are these:

Why is there no further research on the Holocaust? Why is there only one perspective shown in every historical narrative of the Holocaust?
Even if everything traditionally said historically about the holocaust is true, why do the Palestinians have to pay for atrocities the Axis powers committed?

He did not mention the Iraq invasion in this part of his speech, but the implication was clear: Just as Al Qaeda attacked the United States, and we took it out on Iraqis, the Germans attacked the Jews, and in retaliation, the West decided to kick out the Palestinians so that the Jews could have their own state.

"We need to still question whether the Palestinian people should be paying for it or not. After all, it happened in Europe. The Palestinian people had no role in it. Why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price for an event they had nothing to do with?

"They had no role to play in World War II. They were living with the Jewish and Christian communities in peace at the time. They didn’t have any problems. Today, too, Jews, Christians and Muslims live in brotherhood in many parts of the world. Why is it that Palestinians should pay a price -– innocent Palestinians -– for five million people to remain displaced and refugees abroad, for 60 years? Is this not a crime? Is asking about these crimes a crime in itself? Why should an academic like myself face insults for asking questions like this?"

He went further than this, noting that those few Western academics who try to research the holocaust from an alternate perspective are not only ridiculed, but jailed for doing so. Personally, I can think of no such example offhand. but I hesitate to flatly deny this accusation of his, especially since I have seen reports of holocaust deniers being thrown off faculties and the like in the past. Of course, if I was a University President, I'd probably throw out Holocaust deniers, too, for fear that they were incompetent. But maybe I'd be wrong to do so automatically.

Pres. Ahmadinejad then concluded quickly, under duress, noting that he had much more to say, but that Bolinger had spoken just as long as he had, and stolen the time available for Ahmadinejad to talk. He mentioned the nuclear issue, stating that Iran has been a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for years, and that the organization's bylaws allow all members to use nuclear energy freely--and he pointed out that IAEA inspectors have repeatedly shown that Iran is following correct protocols, and it is only "two or three world powers" who keep objecting to Iran's development of uranium. (Amusingly, the interpreter found it particularly difficult to say "IAEA" correctly, and this problem was compounded by Ahmadinejad's repeated use of the term.)

He mentioned that yes, other countries have offered to give Iran uranium rather than let Iran develop it themselves, but Ahmadinejad demurred, stating:

"Why do we need the fuel from you? [meaning 'why should we have to get fuel from you?'] You’ve not even given us spare aircraft parts that we do need for civilian aircraft, under the name of embargo and sanctions under the pretext that we are against human rights and freedom. We want the right to self-determination, to be independent."

He said that he does not trust the Western nations to give him fuel; Iran needs to develop this capability by herself. He then cited contractors from America, France, Germany and Canada that promised to help Iran benefit from nuclear energy, and pointed out that "unilaterally each and every one of them canceled their contracts with us as a result of which the Iranian people had to pay the heavy cost in billions of dollars."

At this point, the moderator (not Bolinger) stopped Ahmadinejad, stating time restraints, and the question/answer section was started.

Question one:
Do you, or your country, call for the destruction of Israel?

(This question is in relation to previous statements of his for the past few months that give that effect.)

Ahmadinejad danced around the question, stating that he had no problem with Jews, that he liked Jews just as he liked every other nation. He pointed out that many Jews live peacefully in Iran, and that they even get a special status in the Parliament, where they get more representatives than the Iranian constitution technically requires them to have. But it was apparent that Ahmadinejad drew a sharp distinction between Jews and Israel. "Palestinians should be free to choose their own destiny. Let them decide what should happen there."

The moderator was not satisfied with this answer, and responded back quickly: "I think most of the members of our audience would prefer a real answer to this question. It can be answered with a single word: yes or no?"

Ahmadinejad's consternation was clear. He responded by saying that "you have asked the question, but you do not like the answer." He claimed that what was important was that Palestinians should choose for themselves what happens in their lands. For sixty years, the Palestinians have lived in exile. "Let them--all of them, jewish palestinians, muslim palestinians, all of them--pass a free referendum. "Let the people of Palestine freely chose what they want for their future."

Question two:
Why does Iran sponsor terrorism?

(This question is in regard to Gen. Betrayus' testimony earlier last week that claimed that terrorist attacks in Iraq had grown to a level that could only indicate that Iran was sending weapons and training.)

Ahmadinejad's reaction to this question was strong. "Iranians hate terrorism." He denied sponsoring terrorism, and then accused the United States of being the true sponsors of terrorism. "The groups your country sponsors in Iraq right now--these are the same groups that killed members of my parliament. They are terrorists many times over, and the United States actively supports them today." He went on, reminding the audience that Saddam Hussein was also sponsored by the United States, and pointed out: "We need to address the root causes of terrorism and eradicate those root causes.” He then said that where he is from, in the middle east, "It is clear which powers incite terrorists, support them, fund them."

"Our nation, the Iranian nation, through history, has always extended a hand of friendship to other nations. We’re a cultured nation. We don’t need to resort to terrorism. We’ve been victims of terrorism ourselves. It’s regrettable that people who argued they are fighting terrorism — instead of supporting the Iranian nation — are supporting the terrorists and then turn the finger at us. This is most regrettable."

The next few questions dealt with women in Iran, and more Holocaust stuff. Unfortunately, the questions and responses on the Holocaust stuff was very similar to what I quote earlier, so I won't go back into it. But on women, Ahmadinejad was very defensive, stating that "when a woman is born to a family, they are ten times as blessed", and gave many specifics about women in high positions of authority in Iran. He even made a jab at the United States' low voter participation rate, mentioning that in Iran, "we are a free people, and we all vote, 80-90%, and half of these are women. Women in Iran are free, with true freedoms."

Question five:
Why are so many people put to death in Iran? Women, academics, homosexuals?

Ahmadinejad answered by pointing out that Iran puts people to death the same way the United States does. When a criminal kills people, Iran makes an example of them. He went on and on in this vein.

But then the moderator interrupted, saying: "The question is not about criminals, but about homosexuals and women. Why do you put homosexuals and women to death?"

Ahmadinejad paused, took a breath, and then stated:

In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country. We don't have that like in your country. [audience laughs] In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have this.

That was probably my favorite quote of the afternoon.

He then went on about women again. I won't repeat his restatements.

The next question was about what he would have said if he had been allowed to visit ground zero at the world trade center, to which he claimed confusion as to why people would think it disrespectful for him to pay his respects for the lives that were lost on Sept. 11.

And he was asked again about nuclear weapons. I won't go over most of his rehashing, but he added at the end:

"If you have created the fifth generation of atomic bombs and tested them already, what position are you in to question the peaceful purposes of others who want nuclear power? We don’t believe in nuclear weapons, period. It goes against the whole grain of humanity. Leaders--politicians who are interested in nuclear weapons are backward--they are retarded."

That was a great jab at Bush, by the way, what with our recent nuclear bomb developments.

And finally, after thanking his audience, he extended an invitation to the Univeristy faculty and students to come to Iran whenever they wanted, and they could speak at any University they chose. Plus, he added: "When you come, we will treat you with respect."

It was a very interesting experience.

Welcome to the Weblog of Eric Herboso

2007-08-20T17:55:00.000-04:00

The start of a new blog is always a momentous occasion for me, but I think that this time it is even more special. Because along with starting this new blog, I am starting my new life.

I suppose I should introduce myself, since this is my first entry. I always have problems with self-description ( I get flashbacks of Gödelian-self reference), but I suppose I can quote a short essay I wrote back in 2005. It does the job fairly well, I think.

At heart, I am a philosophy person with a pronounced bent toward mathematics and logic in general. Yet I possess a strong sense of right and wrong that is not justified, but only felt. It is this moral sense that predominately guides how I live my life.
I also have a strong passion for writing. It is only through the written word that I am fully able to best express myself; due to a slight speech impediment and an infamous knack for forgetting suitable synonyms unless I am seated w/ a pen in my hand, I will never be much of a speaker, however well I may write speeches.

Despite these quirks, I remain a hopeless romantic--a lover of love itself--constantly looking forward to the day when my hopelessness will be disproved by counterexample.

I am vegetarian, with aspirations toward veganism; I am a fervent pacifist, with ideals far from what is practical in today's world; I am socially liberal, with leanings toward a Tolstoy-style anarcho-socialism; I am a determined skepticist, a strict agnostic, and a beleaguered instrumentalist; I am argumentative, painfully outspoken, and dreadfully afraid that my subconsciousness is but temporarily hiding a closet capitalist nature, fully bent on rugged individualism and the justice of the capable serving above and without the worthless.

I am Eric Herboso. I am me, and no other. I am.

And with that out of the way, I'm looking forward to a productive blog full of experiences and thoughts, rants and teachings. I hope you'll join me for the ride.