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July 30, 2006
Me-Sa going home!*
I got the job in SF. Not politics, but it is money. My exile seems to be about to come to an end...
*this is a Jar-Jar Binks, reference, if it’s not clear...
** Yes, I'm still on vacation...
Posted by Andrew at 03:16 AM | Comments (3)
July 28, 2006
What I'm reading
Ok, folks, I’m on vacation, and not posting anything. That doesn’t mean that I’m not posting, though. If I find anything worth your reading, I’ll add it to the list below. Check back often...
Posted by Andrew at 09:10 AM | Comments (3)
July 25, 2006
Something to think about...
14.Chances are my elected representatives are mostly people of my own sex. The more prestigious and powerful the elected position, the more likely this is to be true.
15 I can be somewhat sure that if I ask to see "the person in charge," I will face a person of my own sex. The higher-up in the organization the person is, the surer I can be.
read, as they say, the whole thing...
Posted by Andrew at 03:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 23, 2006
Asymmetric
Eccentricity: Asymmetric Warfare
Finally! It dawned on me what asymmetric warfare is. It's what those dastardly Rebels and Colonials were doing -- hiding behind trees and killing Hessian and British troops instead of Coming Out and Forming Squares Like Real Men.The very term belongs to the whiny-assed. It is insane to complain that your enemy is doing things to you that you can't fight back against. And to use that term for someone who commits suicide is the epitome of whiny. Oh yes, kamikazes were masters of asymmetric warfare. I don't think our parents complained about their deaths -- only about the ones they caused.
3 points:
First: Asymmetric Warfare is not a whine, but rather a call to fight by different means. It is important to know whether your enemy is going to invade DC or destroy your banking infrastructure. Calling the warfare “asymmetric” tells us that the latter is more likely that the former...
Second: The American Revolutionaries for the most part formed squares and fought like “real men”. When they tried to hide behind rocks and trees, they got their assess handed to them. The minutemen are great in the popular imagination, but were terribly ineffective in an historical fight. Concentration of firepower and having depth with which to maintain a bayonet charge was important with those weapons. Getting off 1 shot and being killed by your enemies was not so much...
Third: it was our Grandparents who fought Kamikazes. Our parents drank them, not shot at them...
Posted by Andrew at 10:10 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 20, 2006
How an Empire Crumbles
Punmeister123 (1:09:36 PM): what does a "good" teacher look like?
"Friend from work" (1:10:10 PM): on ratemyprofessors
"Friend from work" (1:10:10 PM): lol
Punmeister123 (1:10:26 PM): sure.
but...
what is your criterion for good?
"Friend from work" (1:10:35 PM): good reviews
"Friend from work" (1:10:36 PM): easy teacher
"Friend from work" (1:10:37 PM): lol
Punmeister123 (1:10:43 PM): "easy" meaning _what_?
"Friend from work" (1:10:48 PM): they say
"Friend from work" (1:10:50 PM): "easy A"
Punmeister123 (1:11:02 PM): hm
don't you want to learn?
"Friend from work" (1:11:28 PM): i want to get a 4.0
"Friend from work" (1:11:34 PM): if learning fits, awesome
This may explain my GPA...
Posted by Andrew at 01:14 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 19, 2006
Quickpost
John & Belle Have A Blog: Dead Right
Of course there have been hundreds of such changes – never mind since the Donner party’s day, just since 1945 … But the expansion of government is the only one we can do anything about.All of these changes have had the same effect: the emancipation of the individual appetite from restrictions imposed on it by limited resources, or religious dread, or community disapproval, or the risk of disease or personal catastophe.” (David Frum’s Dead Right (1994)p. 202-3)
I must note-- since any person of decent moral character won't realize this-- that David Frum is explicitly calling "the emancipation of the individual" a bad thing. David Frum is a former speech writer for President Bush. He is one of the premier thinkers of the Republican Party. I cannot even conceive of giving a Republican my vote unless he or she explicitly states that they do not agree with this sort of thinking...
The "Emancipation of the Individual" is the goal of American society. David Frum calls himself it's enemy...
Posted by Andrew at 01:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Status? Green
Apartment: trash free.
Dishes: washing.
Cloths: drying as I type...
Posted by Andrew at 01:02 PM | Comments (0)
July 17, 2006
Want
Just so you know, Dad, this would let the family stay in touch as we exile ourselves all over the country. Just sayin'...
Posted by Andrew at 12:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Title of the song
Posted by Andrew at 02:38 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
July 15, 2006
If anyone wants to buy me this shirt...
I'm an XL...
Posted by Andrew at 01:26 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 14, 2006
U.S. Grant, our greatest president?
But here's why it's important to remember and honor Grant. While Grant didn't succeed in creating the racially just nation that he sought, his legacy was a memory of a short time when blacks did have equal rights and elected their own representatives to state and federal government -- a memory that would fuel a new civil rights movement in coming years.And it's worth remembering that it was the democratic will of the country to have that equality, that it was only anti-democratic racist violence and a rightwing court system that frustrated that American ideal. Too many liberals buy into a myth that Jim Crow was democratically supported in this nation which just feeds its historic legitimacy.
Posted by Andrew at 01:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Capitalism without money
You may have heard of This guy, who, through a series of trades, turned a giant red paper clip into a brand new house. My friend afaeyremaede says that she still think[s] it's interesting how this goes against the capitalist model. Usually, we want something better for less, not something "worse" for more....
What she doesn’t seem to see is that this is exactly what capitalism is all about. Each person in the system freely (if it’s not “freely”, it’s not capitalism) exchanges something they feel to be of lesser value for something they feel to be of greater value. For instance: I exchange 8 hours of my day for the money with which to survive the other 16...
To look at it slightly differently: I was once musing about Ebay with a stock-owning friend. I asked what was stopping Ebay from selling stock. She replied that Ebay was an auction site, whereas stock prices were... well, stock prices. I just looked at her blankly “who do you think set’s stock prices?” She replied (very hesitantly) “Alan Greenspan?” I tried not to gape. I also tried not to make a single comment about the value of inheritance taxes...
Afaeyremaede is exhibiting a similar—but much more understandable—misunderstanding. The entire economy is one giant auction. Every transaction is a bid on the value of an item. Since prices in the Western Economies tend to be “set” by stores, this process is usually unscrutinized. Most bookstores have a “former best sellers” section, in which books that used to go for US$30 are now going for US$5. Does this “go against the capitalist model”? No! it is rather the very workings of capitalism: the buyer was unwilling to buy at US$30, but is totally willing to buy at a much lower price. Other buyers knew that if they could just wait the price would be lower. To them, however, having the book now was worth an extra US$25...
This is what capitalism is all about. Parties trading for things that are worth less to them for things that are worth more. The aggregate of these trades create what we call “market value”, but market value is not an objective measure of “true value”. It is merely the summation of many people’s subjective valuations...
If I’ve explained this point poorly take a read at Naked Economics. It’s a wonderful book about the (second) most important subject there is...
Posted by Andrew at 12:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 13, 2006
demon duck of doom
'Ferocious fossils' found in Australia - Yahoo! News
Nature is weird.
A saber-toothed kangaroo and a giant 10-foot-tall, 881-pound bird scientists nicknamed the "demon duck of doom" were among the largely unknown species uncovered in the dig, Archer told reporters Wednesday.
Calling Monty Python...
(Via afaeyremaede)
Posted by Andrew at 11:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Ken Lay unChrist-like...
Whatever: When Ministers Say Goddamned Stupid Things
Nothing important to add. Click! click!
Posted by Andrew at 01:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 12, 2006
Weirdest Ad of all time
Posted by Andrew at 12:08 PM
Buy me some peanuts and Crackerjacks!
The very cool Afaeyremaede took me out to a ball game this weekend. I had forgotten how much I enjoy that game. It didn’t hurt at all that my team (the Oakland Athletics) were playing the team I most despise (any team from south of Fresno). And even though the Good Guys in Green lost, I was still able to walk away with a smile...
Baseball is a game of yards in which all the important measurements are done with centimeters. It is this quality which leads to the improbable statement that “baseball is boring”. It’s true—if frenetic motion is the only measure of excitement a fan can understand baseball has very little to offer. Any pitcher can hurl a ball faster than a young athlete can force a Ferrari; putting it within a dime’s diameter of where he wants it requires the skill which allows him to only get community service for trying...
Pitcher battles batter ninety, or a hundred or more times. All the while the pitcher gets more tired, less able to put the ball where he wants it. He begins to give into the temptation of simply letting the ball go forward down its most predictable arc...
Batter battles pitcher—Casey stands ever ready. Perhaps this will prove more explicable to baseball foes. The difference between a game winning home run and a game losing pop fly is less than a single inch—a half an inch before the ball is even released. The entire less than one second the batter has for the ball to travel 726 inches is eaten up in hauling the bat into position. Imagine pool played out at 85 miles an hour! It seems remarkable that batters are ever able to connect by more than accident...
And then a rally gets going. These are the rare moments of electricity. The pitcher throws a rock and the batter is all over it with paper. The next batter chooses sees paper forming in the pitcher’s mind and so brings forth scissors. The pitcher has now been dominated; both the bat and ball are now instruments of the batter’s will. The pitcher tries to shake himself out of it, slam his algorithms into new pathways. He can’t take too long between pitches, though—the runners might decide to advance themselves. The pitcher either gets himself out of it, or is replaced by someone who hasn’t been owned by the opposition...
Baseball plays itself out in small increments. On any given pitch any given outcome might occur. It may not—and probably won’t. Over the course of an entire game, though, it will. When that happens it is because everything was in simple and perfect alignment. Few things in life are more beautiful than watching everything work out perfectly...
Posted by Andrew at 02:13 AM | Comments (1)
July 11, 2006
Random news:
New speakers + Wynton Marsalis = hot jazzy time...
Also: I have an interview today. And possibly one on Monday. Wish luck...
Posted by Andrew at 01:05 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 10, 2006
Why schools fail:
HBO: The Wire - Behind the Scenes - Ed Burns
Well, it's how damaged these kids are. I mean, it's profound. You get a class of 35 kids, of which five or six are thugs—what the DSM calls "oppositionally defiant children." So they're fighting and disruptive and cursing you like sailors.[...]
Their needs are so phenomenal on the educational level. And then, as you get to know them, you realize that that is just the crust on the cake. Kids are seeing people killed in front of them. In the first year I was teaching, there were 120 kids in our group; thirteen had been shot. This was in seventh grade. Lots had been stabbed. All of them had been abused, one way or the other. So when you put them in a classroom with a curriculum that doesn't compute with their world, everybody has a way of surviving, right?
For the record: I was stabbed in homeroom—at a private school...
I have never seen a theory of education reform that accounts for this. Other than “reform our whole F---ing society”, I don’t know that I will. Ultimately, our school’s failures are a small example of the larger failures of American Society. Fixing us will fix the schools. Nothing else will do much...
Posted by Andrew at 03:16 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
July 06, 2006
Ok, but why does he write these strong female characters?
Posted by Andrew at 10:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Follow the money
Cheneys betting on bad news? - MSN Money
Vice President Dick Cheney's financial advisers are apparently betting on a rise in inflation and interest rates and on a decline in the value of the dollar against foreign currencies. That's the conclusion we draw after scouring the financial disclosure form released by Cheney recently.
Either Cheney believes what he’s doing is best for America—and his financial advisors are smarter than him—Or Cheney is playing America for suckers. Cheney strikes me as a smart guy...
Posted by Andrew at 02:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Religious bigotry
A large Delaware school district promoted Christianity so aggressively that a Jewish family felt it necessary to move to Wilmington, two hours away, because they feared retaliation for filing a lawsuit. The religion (if any) of a second family in the lawsuit is not known, because they're suing as Jane and John Doe; they also fear retaliation. Both families are asking relief from "state-sponsored religion."
To contrast that, I was taking a practice test for citizenship. One of the questions was “why did the pilgrims come to the New World.” The answer, of course was “to escape religious persecution.” It’s sad to know that the most recent of recent immigrants have a better grasp of American History and what it means to be an American than do many residents of America’s First State...
Do I even have to talk about how unconscionable this is? Is it necessary for me to mention that this is the United States of America. These sorts of things are not supposed to happen in this country? I suppose some might call it a step forward that it’s not Protestants and Catholics at each other’s throats. Perhaps that’s the problem: now that American Catholics and Protestants have begun to believe that-- at core-- they are both Christian. Neither group fears that what the State will begin teaching their children will be antithical to their own. In the mean time they’re able to use their combined strength to beet up on the rest of us. Lovely...
Posted by Andrew at 12:38 PM | Comments (0)
July 05, 2006
submitted without comment
Well, mayhap a whimper of homesickness...
Posted by Andrew at 01:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 04, 2006
Why we Revolted
The conventional story, of course, is that America could not stand the burden of taxation. This is not untrue, but misses everything important. Ezra makes this same mistake...
The point we have to keep in mind is that by 1775 His Majesty’s North American Colonies were a part of a world-wide empire. This empire was run for and by the convenience of His Imperial Majesty. The only check on his power was that money was granted to him by the Parliament...
The roots of antagonism spread back to the 7 Years war. The American colonist wanted the War in order to protect themselves against the French-allied Indian Tribes—and thereby have an easier time of spreading into Indian-held Ohio. The Crown wanted the war to increase his own world-wide dominion...
The end of the war saw American blood spilled—but the objective for which they fought was denied to them. The Proclamation line of 1763 seemed to put a halt to westward expansion. And then the British crown imposed Taxes to pay for the whole thing...
This is the colonial complaint about taxation without representation. They had been asked to fight a war, then-- after being denied the spoils of said war-- pay for it. They were asked to pay for it because no one who had a voice in Parliament wanted to...
Puerto Ricans and Washingtonians are asked to pay the same federal taxes everyone else in the country is—and whatever local taxes they themselves decide on (another right denied the colonial Americans). The day congress pass a series of taxes designed to make them pay for the Iraq war they will both have some grounds for secession...
Posted by Andrew at 01:12 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack