Sat 13 June 2009 10:31 PM
Great Experiment
"Among them [members of the Association Againts the Prohibition Amendment who had originally supported the Anti-Salloon League and Prohibition] was Hentry Bourne Joy, the retired president of Packard Motor. Joy had donated to the ASL and favored the Eighteenth Amendment. But in the mid-1920s, horrified by the lawlessness rampant in the region near his home in northern Michigan, he threw his weight, and his money, behind the AAPA. So did the three Du Pont brothers, Pierre, Irenee, and Lammot. Irenee was particularly vocal about the evils associated with Prohibition: He was shocked by the amount of money earned by bootleggers, money that was not taxed and so did not contribute to the national treasury or the nation's well-being. He was appalled, too, by the extent to which a taste for hard liquor had taken hold among young people. Pierre support the AAPA for different reasons: He was outraged that private property in the form of breweries and distillaries had been shut down, and through no fault of the owners. He also abhorred the intrusion of federal power into private lives, a clear violation, he believed, of the treasured American concept of states' rights. All of it--the amendment itself, the shoddy and usually corrupt enforcement, and the increase in crime and invasions of privacy--constituted 'an outrage to American institutions'.
These ideas resonated with a nation weary of arguing, weary of crime, and by the time the Wickersham report appeared, already weary of an economic disaster that had barely begun. As the depression deepened, more critics called for repeal in the name of taxation. They reminded Americans that for decades, brewers, distillers, and vintners had paid heavy taxes, monies that had dried up when the Eighteenth became law. Bring alcohol back, and jobs, paychecks, and tax revenues would return, too."
We know the ultimate result. Americans came to their senses and repealed the 18th, and yet the same situation adheres to this day for an array of other intoxicating substances including marijuana and our sitting President claims legalization of these drugs is not a good way to raise tax revenue at a time when the Federal government is handing out billion dollar stacks like lollipops. I take this as evidence that as much better as Obama is than that unfortunate non-Abortion G. W. Bush and as happy as I am that I voted for him, our president, being a Democrat (one of the two parties controlling the power establishment) is not and cannot be an agent for real change in the Federal government.
These ideas resonated with a nation weary of arguing, weary of crime, and by the time the Wickersham report appeared, already weary of an economic disaster that had barely begun. As the depression deepened, more critics called for repeal in the name of taxation. They reminded Americans that for decades, brewers, distillers, and vintners had paid heavy taxes, monies that had dried up when the Eighteenth became law. Bring alcohol back, and jobs, paychecks, and tax revenues would return, too."
We know the ultimate result. Americans came to their senses and repealed the 18th, and yet the same situation adheres to this day for an array of other intoxicating substances including marijuana and our sitting President claims legalization of these drugs is not a good way to raise tax revenue at a time when the Federal government is handing out billion dollar stacks like lollipops. I take this as evidence that as much better as Obama is than that unfortunate non-Abortion G. W. Bush and as happy as I am that I voted for him, our president, being a Democrat (one of the two parties controlling the power establishment) is not and cannot be an agent for real change in the Federal government.
Thu 11 June 2009 4:34 PM
Pussy
The policy on atheists in my boys' Cub Scout pack is "don't ask, don't tell" because if you are "vocal" about being an atheist then the BSA will track you down and kick you out. So, I've recently received some friend requests on Facebook from people who I've through the pack. Today, I pussied out and removed "Atheist" from my profile to avoid any potential problems because apparently my service to the pack as a leader and my devotion to working with my boys on their Cub Scout badges and taking them to over 80% of the events this year isn't what matters. What matters is whether I have an imaginary friend or not.
I hate the LDS Church and their perverted agenda to turn the BSA into an organization that discriminates and I hate myself for compromising my principles to appease that one lone asshole out there that may see Atheist on my profile and cause trouble for me and my sons.
I hate the LDS Church and their perverted agenda to turn the BSA into an organization that discriminates and I hate myself for compromising my principles to appease that one lone asshole out there that may see Atheist on my profile and cause trouble for me and my sons.
Thu 4 June 2009 5:31 PM
Gmail Tips
This is something that has bugged me. If you have labels with spaces in the name, the obvious search (such as label:my label or label:"my label") fails to return any messages.
You have to replace the spaces in your label name with dashes/hyphens. So label:my-label will return messages labeled "My Label".
You have to replace the spaces in your label name with dashes/hyphens. So label:my-label will return messages labeled "My Label".
Sun 31 May 2009 5:37 AM
Why AOL Sucks
I got a raise in December, so like a good consumer I bought a new Dell.
On my old Dell, I had the last version of Winamp prior to AOL purchasing it - with automatic updates turned off. The install file for that version of Winamp got lost in the great Windows Re-Installing of '08. So, last night (um, last night ws sometime back in January and this post has been sitting in limbo since because MARVIN couldn't serve files to outside visitors) I downloaded the latest version of Winamp 5 from their website and installed it.
There is a demo.mp3 that installs with Winamp for the purposes of a) being cool and b) testing that your install completed successfully.
demo.mp3 pre-AOL
demo.mp3 post-AOL
AOL sucks.
On my old Dell, I had the last version of Winamp prior to AOL purchasing it - with automatic updates turned off. The install file for that version of Winamp got lost in the great Windows Re-Installing of '08. So, last night (um, last night ws sometime back in January and this post has been sitting in limbo since because MARVIN couldn't serve files to outside visitors) I downloaded the latest version of Winamp 5 from their website and installed it.
There is a demo.mp3 that installs with Winamp for the purposes of a) being cool and b) testing that your install completed successfully.
demo.mp3 pre-AOL
demo.mp3 post-AOL
AOL sucks.
Sun 31 May 2009 5:07 AM
Anglo-hexon
Anglo-hexon.net is back up on port 88.
Thu 7 May 2009 2:15 AM
Excerpts from 'Letter to a Christian Nation' by Sam Harris
Really, isn't this getting tiresome? How much discussion is really required about imaginary friends not existing? A lot apparently.
From pp 30-32:
"But let us assume, for the moment, that every three-day-old embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. Embryos at this stage occassionally split, becoming separate people (identical twins). Is this a case of one soul splitting into two? Two embryos sometimes fuse into a single individual, called a chimera. You or someone you know may have developed in this way. No doubt theologians are struggling even now to determine what becomes of the extra human soul in such a case.
Isn't it time we admitted that this arithmetic of souls does not make any sense? The naive idea of souls in a Petri dish is intellectually indefensible. It is also morally indefensible, given that it now stands in the way of some of the most promising research in the history of medicine. Your beliefs about the human soul are, at this very moment, prolinging the scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings.
You believe that "life starts at the moment of conception". You believe that there are souls in each of these blastocysts and that the interests of one soul--the soul of a little girl with burns over 75 percent of her body, say--cannot trump the interests of another soul, even if that sou happens to live inside a Petri dish. Given the accommodations we have made to faith-based irrationality in our public discourse, it is often suggested, even by advocates of stem-cell research, that your position on this matter has some degree of moral legitimacy. It does not. Your resistance to embryonic stem-cell research is, at best, uninformed. There is, in fact, no moral reason for our federal government's unwillingness to fund this work....
The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics. The link between religion and "morality"--so regularly proclaimed and so seldom demonstrated--is fully belied here, as it is where religious dogma supersedes moral reasoning and genuine compassion."
From pp 39-42:
"Christians like yourself invariably declare that monsters like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim Il Sung spring from the womb of atheism. While it is true that such men are sometimes enemies of organized religion, they are never especially rational. In fact, their public pronouncements are often delusional: on subjects as diverse as race, economics, national identity, the march of history, and the moral dangers of intellectualism. The problem with such tyrants is not that they reject the dogma of religion, but that they embrace other life-destroying myths. Most become the center of a quasi-religious personality cult, requiring the continual use of propaganda for its maintenance...
Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the danges of political and racial dogmatism. It is time that Christians like yourself stop pretending that a rational rejection of your faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma."
From pp 50-52:
"Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture, and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of six billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl's parents believe--as you believe--that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?
No.
The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, "atheism is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist".... An atheist is simply a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87 percent of the population) claiming to "never doubt the existence of God" should be obliged to present evidence for his existence--and, indeed, for his benevolence, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day."
From p 91:
"This letter is the product of failure--the failure of the many brilliant attacks upon religion that preceded it, the failure of our schools to announce the death of God in a way that each generation can understand, the failure of the media to criticize the abject religious certainties of our public figures--failures great and small that have kept almost every society on this earth muddling over God and despising those who muddle differently.
Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well--by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God. This letter has been an expression of that amazement--and, perhaps, of a little hope."
From pp 30-32:
"But let us assume, for the moment, that every three-day-old embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. Embryos at this stage occassionally split, becoming separate people (identical twins). Is this a case of one soul splitting into two? Two embryos sometimes fuse into a single individual, called a chimera. You or someone you know may have developed in this way. No doubt theologians are struggling even now to determine what becomes of the extra human soul in such a case.
Isn't it time we admitted that this arithmetic of souls does not make any sense? The naive idea of souls in a Petri dish is intellectually indefensible. It is also morally indefensible, given that it now stands in the way of some of the most promising research in the history of medicine. Your beliefs about the human soul are, at this very moment, prolinging the scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings.
You believe that "life starts at the moment of conception". You believe that there are souls in each of these blastocysts and that the interests of one soul--the soul of a little girl with burns over 75 percent of her body, say--cannot trump the interests of another soul, even if that sou happens to live inside a Petri dish. Given the accommodations we have made to faith-based irrationality in our public discourse, it is often suggested, even by advocates of stem-cell research, that your position on this matter has some degree of moral legitimacy. It does not. Your resistance to embryonic stem-cell research is, at best, uninformed. There is, in fact, no moral reason for our federal government's unwillingness to fund this work....
The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics. The link between religion and "morality"--so regularly proclaimed and so seldom demonstrated--is fully belied here, as it is where religious dogma supersedes moral reasoning and genuine compassion."
From pp 39-42:
"Christians like yourself invariably declare that monsters like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim Il Sung spring from the womb of atheism. While it is true that such men are sometimes enemies of organized religion, they are never especially rational. In fact, their public pronouncements are often delusional: on subjects as diverse as race, economics, national identity, the march of history, and the moral dangers of intellectualism. The problem with such tyrants is not that they reject the dogma of religion, but that they embrace other life-destroying myths. Most become the center of a quasi-religious personality cult, requiring the continual use of propaganda for its maintenance...
Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the danges of political and racial dogmatism. It is time that Christians like yourself stop pretending that a rational rejection of your faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma."
From pp 50-52:
"Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture, and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of six billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl's parents believe--as you believe--that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?
No.
The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, "atheism is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist".... An atheist is simply a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87 percent of the population) claiming to "never doubt the existence of God" should be obliged to present evidence for his existence--and, indeed, for his benevolence, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day."
From p 91:
"This letter is the product of failure--the failure of the many brilliant attacks upon religion that preceded it, the failure of our schools to announce the death of God in a way that each generation can understand, the failure of the media to criticize the abject religious certainties of our public figures--failures great and small that have kept almost every society on this earth muddling over God and despising those who muddle differently.
Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well--by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God. This letter has been an expression of that amazement--and, perhaps, of a little hope."
Mon 4 May 2009 10:02 PM
American Trappist Ale?
This raises an interesting question, if there were a Trappist monastery/brewery in the USA, what would their beers taste like? My most recently bottled batch of homebrew might be an example of such a beer. I brewed a Belgian style single and then dry-hopped it with Saaz hops for an interesting combination of banana, clove, and hops. More than an excuse to promote my own beermaking endeavors, I think my point is to say, I think it's cool to acknowledge beer styles are historical entities and to imagine from time to time how the styles would be different if they had evolved in a different place and time.
Wed 22 April 2009 2:15 AM
TAG
Nate recommended I look into the Transcendental Argument for the existence of god. It is his opinion that it is the strongest argument for the existence of god. So, I'm reading the wikipedia article, and, of course, must excrete my thoughts on the matter here.
Interestingly, these points are quite similar to statements Nate has made:
"One aspect of the TAG regards moral absolutes. The argument asserts that an omnibenevolent God provides the basis for attributing right and wrong to any thought or action. In creation God equips humanity to act as moral beings, and in self-revelation God demonstrates how people should act, and commands them to do so. People then have an absolute standard of morality by which to condemn evil thoughts and actions (or to commend good ones).
The argument furthers states that moral relativists, by contrast, cannot condemn theft, rape or genocide (nor commend generosity, marriage, or the preservation of life) without relying on the assumption of absolute morality. No moral assertions, it is argued, can be explained by the relativist's own worldview; they are instead derived from unconsciously "borrowed capital" from Christianity, proving the truth of the Christian worldview."
and they are patently absurd.
God is the basis for attributing right and wrong: Christians who take god himself to be the standard of what is good have no way a priori to know what is good (or evil) and therefore commend (or condemn) such acts. They can only know after the fact what was good, and then only if it was recorded as being an act of god in the Bible. The rebuttals I offered to Nate were Abraham and Isaac, the "Conquest" of the Promised Land, and the suffering of Job. These stories from the Bible teach us quite clearly that there are contexts wherein it is good and right to murder one's child (or at least attempt to murder), to commit genocide, and to disregard (or even aid in the exacerbation of) human suffering. If the voice in his head says its god and tells the Christian to drown his children in the bathtub, the Christian has no yard stick by which to judge this command if god himself is the standard of what is good. He must have faith, obey, and find out after the fact if the voice was really god or not.
Borrowed capital: The puddle also marvels at how perfectly it fits into its depression. There is no surprise that generic human morality (which shares remarkable similarities to the morality of other social animals) should be consonant with the less despicable aspects of Christianity. It is Christianity that is borrowing from general human nature - I assert. For the sake of argument, it is equally plausible that Christianity is borrowing from some general inborn moral sense that evolved from our primate ancestors as it is that moral relativism is borrowing from Christianity.
Interestingly, these points are quite similar to statements Nate has made:
"One aspect of the TAG regards moral absolutes. The argument asserts that an omnibenevolent God provides the basis for attributing right and wrong to any thought or action. In creation God equips humanity to act as moral beings, and in self-revelation God demonstrates how people should act, and commands them to do so. People then have an absolute standard of morality by which to condemn evil thoughts and actions (or to commend good ones).
The argument furthers states that moral relativists, by contrast, cannot condemn theft, rape or genocide (nor commend generosity, marriage, or the preservation of life) without relying on the assumption of absolute morality. No moral assertions, it is argued, can be explained by the relativist's own worldview; they are instead derived from unconsciously "borrowed capital" from Christianity, proving the truth of the Christian worldview."
and they are patently absurd.
God is the basis for attributing right and wrong: Christians who take god himself to be the standard of what is good have no way a priori to know what is good (or evil) and therefore commend (or condemn) such acts. They can only know after the fact what was good, and then only if it was recorded as being an act of god in the Bible. The rebuttals I offered to Nate were Abraham and Isaac, the "Conquest" of the Promised Land, and the suffering of Job. These stories from the Bible teach us quite clearly that there are contexts wherein it is good and right to murder one's child (or at least attempt to murder), to commit genocide, and to disregard (or even aid in the exacerbation of) human suffering. If the voice in his head says its god and tells the Christian to drown his children in the bathtub, the Christian has no yard stick by which to judge this command if god himself is the standard of what is good. He must have faith, obey, and find out after the fact if the voice was really god or not.
Borrowed capital: The puddle also marvels at how perfectly it fits into its depression. There is no surprise that generic human morality (which shares remarkable similarities to the morality of other social animals) should be consonant with the less despicable aspects of Christianity. It is Christianity that is borrowing from general human nature - I assert. For the sake of argument, it is equally plausible that Christianity is borrowing from some general inborn moral sense that evolved from our primate ancestors as it is that moral relativism is borrowing from Christianity.
Wed 15 April 2009 3:55 PM
Jesus Won't Friend Me on Facebook
I've been slowly friending all the Krises on Facebook (or attempting to friend them). I thought it's possible I might come across a couple distant cousins who would have family tree information of their own that could assist me in filling out my own genealogical data.
Anyway, I got a message from one Krise in Illinois that I send a Friend Request to last night. She was so sorry to see I was an atheist she had to send a smarmy message but not sorry enough to confirm friendship.
--
Somebody Krise
Friend Requested
Today at 11:25am
Report Message
beowulf,
I am a Christian and am so sorry to see that you are an atheist. What if you are wrong? Eternity is a long time. God Bless you. If you ever need Christ in your life, he will still be there.
beowulf Krise
Today at 11:49am
Why that's a silly argument for why I should believe in god. It is basically a re-hash of an argument called "Pascal's Wager", and the problem with Pascal's Wager is that it incorrectly assumes there are only two options: Christianity or atheism. In fact, the chances that you may have picked the wrong god are immense considering the number of gods that have ever been postulated (Hinduism alone has millions). Anyway, I know all of this will fall on deaf ears. No hard feelings.
I just hope that should I ever come to need Christ in my life he's more willing to friend me than you were.
Thanks,
beowulf
Anyway, I got a message from one Krise in Illinois that I send a Friend Request to last night. She was so sorry to see I was an atheist she had to send a smarmy message but not sorry enough to confirm friendship.
--
Somebody Krise
Friend Requested
Today at 11:25am
Report Message
beowulf,
I am a Christian and am so sorry to see that you are an atheist. What if you are wrong? Eternity is a long time. God Bless you. If you ever need Christ in your life, he will still be there.
beowulf Krise
Today at 11:49am
Why that's a silly argument for why I should believe in god. It is basically a re-hash of an argument called "Pascal's Wager", and the problem with Pascal's Wager is that it incorrectly assumes there are only two options: Christianity or atheism. In fact, the chances that you may have picked the wrong god are immense considering the number of gods that have ever been postulated (Hinduism alone has millions). Anyway, I know all of this will fall on deaf ears. No hard feelings.
I just hope that should I ever come to need Christ in my life he's more willing to friend me than you were.
Thanks,
beowulf
Wed 15 April 2009 2:11 PM
VSS
Constant database corruption? Really? How is it that I'm always missing out on these constant problems people have with MS products? I've been using VSS for 6 years and have never lost source code to database corruption. I have never had corruption that couldn't be fixed by my nightly run of ANALYZE, either.
Maybe VSS breaks down with more than 3 concurrent users or maybe these donkeys don't run ANALYZE frequently enough. Heretofore, I've had no problems at all with Visual Source Safe.
Maybe VSS breaks down with more than 3 concurrent users or maybe these donkeys don't run ANALYZE frequently enough. Heretofore, I've had no problems at all with Visual Source Safe.
