Category: Miscellaneous

Ideas – not exactly a viral infection

I remember a stir not too long after Obama took office – mid-April 2009. He was attending a conference in South America, and Hugo Chavez gave him a book, “Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina”. And people who were already saying he was a disgraceful president who undertook an apology tour decided that the mere possession of a book chronicling the history of American imperialism in South America was just farther proof of his anti-American beliefs. The whole thing struck me as silly – I’ve read Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto. Managed not to become a Fascist or a Socialist. I’ve read stories about unicorns flying over rainbows too; didn’t turn me into one. I didn’t realize that making oneself aware of opposing viewpoints was so controversial.

What makes me think of this incident now? The problems the UC system has had with Milo Yiannopoulos’ speaking engagements. Discourse is civil discussion of issues with people – even if their opinions differ from ours. Compromise isn’t bullying others into taking up your beliefs. To have an effective governance of a large, incohesive population requires compromise. How can there be any compromise between individuals who fear being made aware of an alternative viewpoint? No matter how abhorrent you find someone’s belief, there is generally a reason for those beliefs. And without understanding the reasons, you have no way to find a path that addresses both people’s desires.

It’s easy to dismiss someone as a white-supremacist. Or a fascist. Or an ape, or any other ad hominem attacks that forestall the type of compromise that is necessary to govern effectively. We’re setting ourselfs up for marginalized minorities (even when there are three million MORE people in the “minority”) or radical swings between left and right leaning governments as they trade off every couple of years and un-do whatever the previous administration has accomplished / mucked up (depending on your point of view).

Educational Philosophy

I was discussing educational philosophy with my mom a few days ago — especially early childhood education, which wasn’t either of our specialties. But as Anya is getting older, it’s becoming relevant. And I’m surprised by the rigorous curriculum adopted by one of the local “elite” preschools around here. It’s got a wait list and enormous price tag. And it ignores a great deal of recent research regarding childhood learning – essentially that very young kids form the neural connections that are needed for formal schooling through free play. Not by getting them to sit down and listen to lectures at an earlier age, not by being told what to do and doing it … but by being left to their own devices to use toys “wrong” and run and climb.

Made me think of my experience with education — and I graduated top ten in my class, so this isn’t just “the school is why I’m failing, not me” complaining. School managed to take all of the fun out of any subject. Not sure if that’s just the Puritanical history of the country dictating that work shouldn’t be fun or just a reality of trying to teach 30 kids in a class.

I love reading. And talking with friends about what I’ve read. I do *not* love reading a few chapters and writing a five page double spaced Arial 12 point text essay on the allegory … you get the idea.

I started University as a history major – but I don’t care as much about the exact date that the Treaty of Versailles was signed as much as the socio-political impact the treaty content had on much of Europe. I don’t want a list of the crusades and their dates – but the cultural impact, the religious impact, hell even the political impact that having a large number of military leaders and men roaming across the continent had “back home”.

Chemistry lab experiments were graded on the % deviation between your results and the predicted outcome. You were essentially being tested on your ability to get exactly 12 milliliters into a container. Or you had the good sense to BS your way through the experiment, calculate the intended results, and reverse engineer your experimental values with a variance somewhere between 91% and 97%.

Art – first of all, I find the idea of grading such a subjective subject to be right silly. Personally, I would have graded on attitude and effort. Someone who lacks hand-eye coordination but put a lot of thought into the media and technique may have made an ugly picture … but they got something from the experience. A talented artist may have fobbed off the class but made a beautiful piece. I have to say, I had a physical education instructor who graded with that exact logic. Someone from the girls’ basketball team could grade poorly in the basketball unit not because they didn’t make baskets but because they were disruptive to class and weren’t trying. Someone who was putting forth a lot of effort but didn’t make any baskets could still get an ‘A’. Usually, though, physical education was graded on one’s ability within specific sports.

Maths and physics become a memorization challenge. Foreign language classes were recitation. Any class – they managed to turn it into an unpleasant experience.

Winter Gear

My gloves say they have 40 gram Thinsulate; but every time I would work outside, my fingers would be FREEZING. Oddly, my husband’s gloves – which also say they have 40 gram Thinsulate – keep my hands nice and warm.

Evidently women’s gloves (at least the cute leather ones) do not have insulated fingers. Which is obvious when you consider the distinct lack of bulk in the fingers. I picked up a pair of ski gloves from REI – these are fully insulated.

I also got insulated overalls and work jacket on clearance. What an incredible difference. Anya and I shoveled a couple inches of snow, cleaned off the car, and played outside for a while — temperatures in the mid 20’s — and I was warm.

Real and Alternative Facts

Alternative Fact: Mexico will pay for Trump’s crazy wall through a 20% tariff on goods imported from Mexico to the USAs

Real Fact: Umm, that’s Americans who will be paying … anything they buy from Mexico will cost 20% more. Or they’ll purchase goods imported from some other country to avoid paying the import duty and still end up paying for the wall (plus interest on the wall) because that’s how floated debt works in the real world.

Voting Fraud Or The Potential Thereof

There’s been a lot of reporting and chatter about voter fraud. I assumed this was intentional fraud until I started seeing reports that some of Trump’s advisers, cabinet nominees, and even a daughter were guilty of one of the particular missteps against which Trump rails.

I have lived in several states. I have also been registered to vote in each of them. I verified my registration on three different states, and wanted to remove my registration from the states in which I don’t actually live. Spent two hours searching two different Board of Election sites and there’s no published process for rescinding a registration. Checked the federal Election Assistance Commission — they do not even say you need to rescind your previous registration. It’s a “good idea”, but it also says “your new election office uses this information [your former address] to notify your former election office that you no longer reside in that jurisdiction”. Evidently there’s a fairly high failure rate on this process.

This is not voter fraud – it was a failure on my part to properly research the process and then follow up to confirm my non-registered status in other states. There’s a big difference between casting ballots using the same identity in multiple states, voting under multiple identities, etc and unknowingly being registered to vote in more than one state.

Making people aware of the problem – especially if local Boards of Election update their web sites with instructions on removing invalid registrations – is certainly a worthwhile endeavor. I work in IT; I like clean data. Cleaning up the state registries may make analysing data to identify actual fraud easier (i.e. the fact that I show up on three states is more indicative of fraud since it is common knowledge that individuals should be rescinding old registrations). But how much money is going to be wasted hunting for phantom election fraud?

Hunted

I’m not sure what it says about me that I know a lot about evading authorities. There was a show a few years ago where people were challenged to hide a suitcase and a law enforcement professional has to find it … if it stayed hidden, the person won. If the case was found then the law enforcement person won. The show was quite disappointing – both in process and execution.

There’s a new show, Hunted, which is what I thought the show a few years ago was going to be. In this one, pairs of people have to evade law enforcement professionals for 28 days. But these people are absolutely horrible at evading trackers. I assume the show has basic rules — it is NEVER a good idea to record yourself committing a felony. If that weren’t a restriction, I’d jack a car, head up to Mall of Georgia or down to Buckhead, jack another car from a carpark. But, yeah, that’s not something you want on national television.

You have a 48-hour window to leave – you don’t know when in that window you’ll start … but you have a little time, PACK! Have a go-bag ready by the door. Bonus to the people who packed some wigs, but that’s obvious – I’d go hair dye. I’d start off with a blond & pack a dark color. Dye that people use every day so it doesn’t stand out in anyone’s recollection (a dude with a bad Halloween wig, I remember him. Some fake blond chick? Yeah, eighty seven of them the past hour. Why do you ask?). Glasses, clothing no one would ever dream of you wearing. Beef jerky, blanket, matches, knife, fishing hook and line, a pot, and a tent. I’ve got a foraging guide that I’d bring too.

Once you are packed, start getting rid of your evidence and plant false evidence. My servers would give them a lot of contacts that they wouldn’t get anywhere else … but I’m not going to contact anyone so I’d take that risk over actually wiping my data. Let them track down false leads. If you write something, take the entire pad of paper. Don’t print anything (printers have memory). I’ve got a lot of books related to permaculture, homesteading, and foraging … those would get hidden at someone else’s house. I might even pick up a few travel guides for a large city in the hunt area – yank a few pages to take with you. Good for starting fires 🙂

Once you get told to leave, head into downtown. Phone gets given away to form a false trail. You’ve got an ATM card where you can pull 100$ a day (but that access immediately throws a flag for the hunters) and a total of 500$. Either find a small church and offer it as a donation if the pastor gives you the first hundred bucks or chance some random person on the street with the same deal. You don’t have 500$ that way, but they don’t have video of your car (or you, for that matter) and will continue to get false alerts as the card is used the next few days. Get a couple of cheap bus passes to a not-too-far-away city – if you can avoid doing so, don’t buy it yourself. Offer to pay for the cheap ticket of someone if they pick up a ticket for you and your partner. Then get off the bus before it hits its destination. Take off into the mountains and start hiking. Twenty eight days living in the woods – keep moving, don’t stay on main trails, and avoid people.

But maybe that’s against the rules — go homeless in a major metro. It’d be a different metro than the travel guide in my house … but one with a large enough homeless population that you’re not THE ONLY homeless guy there. Either way you are hard to find — two random people in the Appalachian mountains or two among the hundreds of homeless in downtown Atlanta.

A Lie Is A Lie

A friend of mine started a thread on Facebook about why the media doesn’t call out Trump’s lies, using the example of his claim that the Lincoln Memorial is never/rarely used for inauguration events. And how his representatives can call these lies “alternative facts” with any seriousness. Trump lies so often and about so many ridiculous things (DC is sold out of dresses, really??). The thing is, media outlets do call him out(https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/donald-trump-says…/… or http://time.com/4640346/donald-trump-lincoln-memorial/ for the Lincoln Memorial example).

Why don’t these become big stories? Why is the constant flood of lies not a big story?

Trump supporters that I know tell me it’s hyperbole (what *is* the difference between hyperbole and lying?) and negotiating positions (I remember being a sixteen year old kid asking for a tattoo as a negotiating position when I wanted Manic Panic hair coloring … not sure what it says that our new President’s negotiating tactics and teenage kids differ only in scale) and I shouldn’t take everything he says so seriously.

I’m still not sure how to take that argument. I use rhetorical hyperbole too. I haven’t literally told Anya a million times to clean up her toys – that would be 650 times a day each day of her life. I try to be careful to say “It *SEEMS* like I’ve told you a million times to get the books on the bookshelf”. But it doesn’t seem harmful when I say “dude, I’ve told you a million times. Seriously, pick up the books!”.

I am willing to believe that people don’t mind being lied to by Trump … what I cannot figure out, then, is why they considered Clinton to be offensively dishonest. It’s a different type of lying — using technicalities. When I would do it, my mother called it lying by omission — you make a statement that is technically true because of some technically valid meaning of a word  and/or some incorrect assumption the other party makes about your statement. Consider Bill Clinton’s “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” statement — there is a difference between present and past tenses. If you ask me if I’m driving a Jetta, I can accurately say no because *right this second* I am sitting on the sofa typing … you assume I sold my Jetta, which from the perspective of a legal proceeding really is the interrogating attorney’s fault, but when you’re fifteen … you don’t get far telling your mom it’s her fault for not being specific enough or making erroneous assumptions 🙂

And maybe this is why I get so offended by Trump’s lies but don’t mind Clinton’s — I enjoy studying law and the challenge language adds to legal proceedings. To me, someone answering a present tense question ignoring past facts is clever (and highlights a flaw in the line of questioning). Essentially I don’t feel like I was lied to, I feel like someone outmaneuvered me. On the other hand, someone making an outright stupid provably untrue statement insults me.

I could see someone making an inverse conclusion, though. That uppity lawyer thinks he’s smarter than me, the LIAR! But is any amount of hyperbolic lying acceptable just because it’s a rhetorical technique most use occasionally. Do people condone it because they do it? Or the liar is seen as a ‘real’ person because he engages in the same rhetorical techniques they use?

Ethics, or the lack thereof

So Trump businesses are going to donate the profits from foreign governments directly to the Treasury to avoid the appearance of impropriety. And they release this information to the public – the receipts, the cost analysis to determine profit, and a copy of the transfer so donations can be verified? But let’s assume that becomes part of their public accounting processes – that the Trump Organization now has a web page with this accounting, along with an image of the cancelled donation cheque. How does this avoid the appearance (and the fact) of corruption??

Buying influence is not limited to foreign governments, and to imply otherwise is insulting. Boeing wants a lucrative contract, so they book all of their corporate conferences at Trump properties. Hell, Syria wants the US to leave them alone so the second cousin of every high-ranking official rent out a floor and a ballroom for the year.