Important Thoughts

Sky is Illusion

2012-01-30T18:59:00.004-05:00

or Hope(Yes Hope(No))

Death and birth meet at the skyline.

A thin divide pressed together like,

lips whispering a secret

impossible to define.

Colors and waves abort all the mundane.

A furious fire bursting from not like,

stars collapsing to novae

impossible to constrain .

And

Under this bloodstained canvas,

which somehow can encompass

all the thoughts I entertain,

Nature has reminded me

that truth, and peace, and equality

Man will one day rise and obtain.

Until that awaited transformation,

a glorious aberration

to render all souls sublime,

Nature like we all must be

our form and function in harmony

and desires silenced like a mime.

But

Time and spin quell the sky’s refrain.

A violent death of the spirit like,

devils prisoning a jesus,

impossible to unchain.

Hope and dream fade like the sunshine.

A stupid belief meeting reality like,

childs believing in Santa.

Impossible too impossible.

A Poisoned Well - Unsavory Campaign Contributions

2012-01-20T14:25:00.000-05:00

The American public applies a peculiar logic to their elected officials causing a bifurcation of expectations into seemingly contradictory paths. Would be electors simultaneously ignore abjectly immoral acts of their rulers which the masses of people would usually condemn and overreact the rather insignificant occurrences which voters commit without thought of wrongdoing in their personal lives.

Politicians wallow regularly in vast bastions of corruption where they lie, cheat, steal, commit fraud, and sometimes even murder. A president can order an assassination and be met with cheers and jubilation. A general may approve an operation leading to hundreds of civilian casualties, with women and children laying slaughtered in the wake, and the many will not blink an eye at this “collateral damage” or simply the “nature of modern warfare”. A senator may make an impressive list of promises and pledges which he dismisses like spoiled clothing as soon as reaching elected office, but he does this merely in the name of compromise, bipartisanship, and just playing the game. Ridiculous justifications for these actions flow from the halls of academia or the annals of the old media to be eagerly gorged in a buffet style by the majority. Nearly a single member of the public would accept this sort of behavior in their personal life among acquaintances. Perhaps not a single one would commit these actions and allow themselves a comfortable night’s sleep. Yet they afford politicians such carte blanche with a jejune faith in their good intentions.

This could simply be explained by a general naivety applied to the ruling class, as I may as well call them. However, this explanation would easily be dispatched by the countless examples of people quibbling over mundane details which occur in political life. Hypocritical voices abound to lambast politicians for taking vacations as pressing issues sit in their queues, while they take ample vacation from their own jobs every year. In particular, the source of campaign contributions becomes scrutinized more heavily than salient features of a politician’s campaign such a voting record and the intricacies of their economic policy. Libertarian and internet favorite Ron Paul has been censured by many because of campaign contributions received from white supremacist leader of Stormfront, Don Black. Obviously, I posit that such accusations are hypocritical and unnecessary.

Essentially two real arguments may be levied against those taking contributions from unsavory companies or individuals. Either the contributions suggest that the candidate will use his political power to reward the donors to his campaign or the candidate shares some moral culpability with the individuals who finance his campaign. Although only the latter argument is generally applied to the specific Ron Paul case, both could be justifiable cited and so we will examine each of them.

The first objection suggests a necessary quid pro quo agreement between the politician and donating party. Given the substantial sums of money necessary to finance a campaign, and similarly the substantial sums of money stood to be loss or gained due to a particular governmental law or regulation, the temptation becomes nearly insurmountable even among good intentioned individuals to strike a back alley deal of this sort. I often criticize candidates based on just these grounds, but we should recognize an important distinction of not just mere expediency. A differentiation must occur between explicit cash for policy exchanges and de facto advantages acquired by beneficiaries if the supported candidate wins. Although important, this distinction becomes volatile and sometimes dependent of personal philosophies regarding the scope of proper government. To be explicit: A hypothetical contribution to the Obama campaign from British Petroleum, under the agreement that in return for the money Obama will give preferential treatment to BP including damage caps and exclusive drilling contracts, should be viewed differently than a contribution to the Paul campaign from IBM, because the company supposes that Paul’s lifting of sanctions on Iran will allow IBM to expand its market. The former agreement extends privilege to one party at the expense of another. The former agreement persuades a candidate rather than just financing his views. The former uses the might of government aggressively, rather than stepping back and allowing free transactions.

The Don Black support may very well be of the second agreement. Ron Paul champions civil liberties including those freedoms of press, speech, and assembly. Ron Paul alone among the candidates supports the right of association among private individuals and entities. Finally, it must not be ignored that even racists have other issues they may feel passionately about and such a contribution could easily represent support for the abolition of the income tax. It seems unlikely that his contribution indicates intent by Paul to promulgate a white supremacist agenda. His voting record would indicate unwillingness to compromise over his thirty year political career. The small contribution would hardly buy much in terms of influence, and Paul’s decentralized campaign relies on legions of small donors rather than a few particular keystones. Even ignoring these points, reason would dissuade anyone pursing this route. As reality demonstrates, it is simply much easier to use statist means for rent seeking purposes than attempting to work through the enterprise of free exchange.

While the Paul campaign may escape any potential slings and arrows screaming corruption, does he evade any collective sin by accepting such soiled money? Should the money be returned? Media pundits bombard him with these same questions, of course with the implicit suggestion that the money must be returned to avoid any guilt by association. To begin my criticism, many pundits argue this point using a straw man that can be particularly alluring before the fallaciousness of hypothetical becomes apparent. The complaint usually proceeds by saying, “Suppose Mr. A supports several concerning and morally devoid principles. If through his morally devoid actions Mr. A acquires a sum of money and if Mr. A gives this money to Mr. B , then Mr. B must return the money. Morality compels him to do so since the money originated in unscrupulous waters and since the acceptance of the money compels Mr. B to use it according to Mr. A’s dark intentions.”

Neither of these reasons actually hold true under close examination. The confusion in the last point comes from an inability to distinguish between two different transfers of money: a purchase and a donation. A purchase of goods involves the holder of the money transferring it to another party under the assumption of receiving something explicit in return. A donation simply entails a transfer of goods from party to another which may occur for a variety of reasons. In the latter, the recipient is not bound legally or morally in the specific use of the funds. We should be especially cognoscente of this point since the intentions of the donor will only be truly known by himself. More importantly we should reject the blind prerogative which requires one to return money to people we find to be socially undesirable. This moral edict could very well marginalize groups considered fringe that nonetheless deserve a place in political discourse, but as too often occurs, incur a radical label simply to suppress their influence.

Further, let us consider each of the two possible actions a candidate may take. As we have already seen, accepting the funds does not bind the candidate to use them in a particular fashion or to support a particular ideology. The candidate may then keep the funds and use them to further their personal political agenda, one of peace and freedom in the case of Ron Paul. Contrast this with the scenario where a candidate returns the donated money to the bigoted group from whence it came. Here we see a candidate removing funds from the relatively innocuous political process, funds which could be used to promote good moral principles of government, and returning them to the seedy organization originally providing the money. This case essentially entails the candidate donating money to the organization, thus ensuring that the money will be used to further morally abject philosophies. This mode of action appears to guarantee the very outcome it hopes to avoid.

While the public should no doubt pay close attention to a candidate’s funding, often times we focus on the more source of the money while diverting our attention away from the candidate and his platform itself. A donor list may suggest a great deal about a candidate and his positions, but it does just that. It will only suggest. Voters should diligently amalgamate great scores of information about each candidate when evaluating each situation and forming an opinion as a whole. Furthermore, voters would do well to remember politicians should not be readily absolved as such high crimes as murder and grand theft because they feebly hide behind curtains of prestige and office. If we evaluated politicians a little more as we evaluate our neighbors, our democracy might more closely approximate a rational system.

Gretel, your breadcrumbs are bleeding.

2012-01-18T15:28:00.004-05:00

A thud thud and plop plop!
Showed and telled bodies drop .
Lifeless long before they meet the ground,
their cotton skins hardly sound.
A brooding storm coupled by
some companions from a child’s eyes.

Look and see her Noah’s arks!
Floating through winter’s dark.
Two black clouds which precipitate
the deluge they try to abate.
And today this polyethylene betrayed
breaking like promises her sister made.

So on and on Amelia she walks
while on and on her sinister leg balks.
Longing for home sweet home,
she trudges on all alone.
Until finally she’s home with mother greeting,
safe and warm, just in time to receive her beating.

!Written about an experience someone shared with me at work. It formed a particularly vivid and depressing image in my head.!

Abandonment (I bring)

2012-01-03T16:17:00.003-05:00

As the grand sun waxes, the shadow wanes,

Subtending his arc, indifferent,

to the fading properties of shadow.

Selfish sun,

Concerned more with his geometry

Than you shadow.

Shadow say,

how you misplaced your humanity.

Lonely shadow.

What majestic phenomenon, obsessed over by the greatest men of man, documented by the finest of scribes, feared by the commonest of common man, caused this curious discontinuity?

What ancient magic, administered by the mightiest gods of God, conjured by the holiest of priests, feared by the commonest of common man, fractured shadow’s being for eternity?

How did I not hear the Earth’s shattering shriek when such injustice came to be.

How did I not feel the Earth’s crushing quake when such evil did this deed?

Why only silence?

Why only nothing?

Interference patterns decay you like disease.

Existence ebbs and flows like dream.

Now noon comes,

Now nothing comes

Now is noon

And

You is nothing.

After the noon less dark, than the before,

In light of this bro-ken symmetry,

Did grand sun blink? Did grand sun think?

!Maybe more of a draft than a finished product, maybe!

Egalitarianism

2011-12-29T21:59:00.000-05:00

Here
these ears.
They do not hear.

Eyes
eye iris,
skin splashes skin.

Ears?
Not ears.

Nose
notice nose.
Always, tongue tastes tongue.

Ears.
Oh ears.
Envious little ears.

Ears!
You thing.
Your mirrors where?

What's the Point of Transparent Metaphors?

2011-11-17T10:35:00.001-05:00

Ian Pilfre lives a comfortable life, entrenched in the world of the American upper-middle class, due to a prestigious position he holds at a Pennsylvania engineering firm. Imperium, a subdivision of this firm focusing on military research and development, draws its funding mainly from the Federal and State governments. However, staunch political pressure has resulted in a dramatic overhaul of funding levels causing Imperium to significantly curtail its operations. As a result, Ian faced the choice of either demotion or termination. He wisely chose to the former, but now Ian has several important decisions to make in his life.

Ian still earns a considerable salary which allows him to comfortably provide for his family. His family will not have to deal with the horror losing their house, going hungry, or falling into debt. All is not perfect though for the family. Throughout the years, Ian’s lofty salary had made them accustomed to certain amenities which now seem unsustainable. Being an amateur art collector, Ian has several fountain sculptors on his property which he likes to keep running continuously. Ian’s wife Eve has grown accustomed to lavish jewelry and other gifts that allow her to brag to her coworkers. His children have been spoiled with elaborate vacations to theme parks and tropical locations throughout the year.

Ian sits at a crossroad. How should he react? His income no longer warrants these expenses. However, it is difficult to tell his loved ones that they will no longer be able to continue living in this manner. Further, he fears this could place unnecessary strain on his relationship with his wife due to pernicious fights which have been occuring. He sees three possible solutions to his dilemma. He could bite the bullet and go through with the necessary lifestyle changes. This is the least preferable of his options. This will be his last resort.

His more insidious and preferred scheme is to raise revenue through two complementary means. He will first begin to take a small amount of money from the pockets of those in his community. The people in his geographical area live comfortably and will not miss the tiny amount he requires from all of them. He understands that this may not cover all of his expenses and that the method on a large scale will be infeasible. The remainder of his funds will be acquired by taking out loans in his neighbors names. Again, the loans will be small when divvied up among his community so they need not worry about the cost. He feels he is justified. After all, when he has these amenities it allows him to work harder and more efficiently. He kids and wife will be happier. Since his business contributes to all of society by providing defense, everyone will benefit since they’re only paying for something that enriches everyone.

Finally, as a middle ground, Ian could lobby to have Imperium increase the costs of its products to raise the additional revenue. He realizes that this will not be doable to cover all of his lost income since the shareholders of Imperium are hesitant to pass costs on to its customers and wary of the long-term decrease in demand that could occur from such policies.

Ultimately, Ian successfully combines the second and third options to continue his lifestyle. What should we make of this? Specifically, is this moral and is this the method which optimizes utility?

Local community colleges face this choice. A majority of them have chosen the same path as Ian. One’s overall opinion of the need for funding public education does not necessarily factor into this discussion. Waste abounds in these institutions. Professional development budgets are absurdly high and offer little besides bragging rights for professors and opportunities to take college paid vacations. Utilities run constantly for aesthetic purposes. Events are organized with little educational value that target only small groups of people. Professors and administrators apply for new toys on the taxpayers’ dime which contribute nil to the education of students.

Instead of making the tough decision to take away these unnecessary niceties from faculty, schools have opted to raise tuition and lobby for more funds. The former is of questionable morality to me given the circumstances. At the very least, it describes poor business that stands antithetical to the philosophical mission of a community college. Rather than trimming useless and frankly despicable practices, community colleges force marginal consumers to opt to not seek an education. The latter practice is criminal. Regardless of your views of taxation (be it present or future), taking ever greater sums of money, in times of economic turmoil, under the false justification of providing cheap education is unjustifiable. Education is not at risk here. Only the egos and fancies of spoiled professors and administrators face extinction.

You Know You Work in Government when the Least Intelligent People Have the Most Powerful Jobs

2011-10-06T11:47:00.000-04:00

Recently, lost in the abyss of state funded academia, I found myself in a group discussion with other professors and administrative personnel. A nameless woman in charge of assuring academic excellence in teaching moderated the discussion. This highly educated woman had accumulated all the knowledge known to man regarding the process of learning and imparting information. Here I stood in this room, being paid to hear her teach about teaching, rather than teaching the students in need of teaching because of my absence from my regular duties. Like most establishment minds, she and I did not see eye to eye.

The friction between us turned to a spark when, as a passing comment, she said, “… when you are lecturing, well you know what I mean, I hope nobody in this day and age is still lecturing…”. Being an instructor who almost exclusively lectures, I asked her why lecturing need go extinct. Her response: It has been shown that lecturing is an inferior form of instruction; studies have shown it over and over again. I snidely responded, “Inferior for whom? Inferior for what?”. Expressions in the room led me to believe that questioning this fact bordered on taboo. The expression on the woman’s face led me to believe she didn’t know anything about instruction. Since simple English questions seemed to overwhelm her, she asked that I rephrase the question.

After rephrasing, she answered my inquiry with equivocation. Stripped of the verbal pomp, she believed that all students and all subjects and all instructors should be taught and teach in the same manner, one that involves minimal lecturing. Moving past this, my follow up question was , “Which studies showed this? How did they measure this?”. What ammunition did she possess for her counterattack? Nothing. A blank stare. Then, I whimper of “I’ve read articles that show it.”

I’ve already talked about the problem of homogeneity in education. I won’t say much more. Asking the questions, “lecture is good for whom?”, “lecture is good when delivered by whom?”, and “lecture is good for teaching what?”, is incredibly important in this situation. If a person gives boring, dry, unimaginative, or confusing lectures maybe he shouldn’t be using that mode of instruction. If a person lectures like some artists write novels, then maybe it’s a very good idea. Don’t force round pegs into square holes and expect results. What works to teach advanced linear algebra to gifted graduate students does not work to teach beginning algebra to continuing education students. Don’t expect these kinds of courses to remotely resemble each other.

Now onto my bigger point, besides the obvious point that the public education system is a rotting corpse of misinformation and waste, up to and including the community colleges. Intelligent people do not read a newspaper article about a study. An intelligent person reads the study. An intelligent person reads the actual study. Intelligent people do not just read the abstract and the conclusions. That is not science. That is not thinking. Reading a journalist’s summary of a study, or the author’s summary of a study, is worthless. One may as well just invent truths from nothingness. An appointed expert in the field should especially not be partaking in this behavior. Researchers do two important things which require that you read their actual work: they lie, and they make mistakes. They’re human. They have agendas, and they have flaws. They want money, fame, and power like most people. The peer review process does not nullify this. Similarly, you must know two things about journalists: they rarely understand what they’re writing about, and they report stories not the truth. Journalists are writers. They’re not scientists. They usually don’t have the skills, or the will, to do rigorous research into the actual results and methodology of a study, and more importantly, they want money, fame, and power. The headline, “Research shows that current teaching methods work for some people and not for others. Results were largely inconclusive.”, doesn’t exactly bring much attention to you and your work. The headline, “New research shows sweeping reform needed in our educational system.”, has a much better shot. Read the studies and questions them.

I must say that the closer to a problem you are, the more depressing it seems.

Why Oh Why Did Why Die?

2011-09-21T16:09:00.002-04:00

To begin part 2 of n in my series on pedagogy, I want to share a story. If I possessed a time machine, and inexplicably used it to go back to meet my childhood self, myself would probably describe myself as a strange frustrating child. I liked to ask a lot of questions, especially to things that most adults see as having no answer. In preschool, we were treated to a series of books wherein letters of the alphabet would go about their daily lives interacting with lots of objects that happened to begin with the same letter. I loved these books because they entertained my imagination which had the sneaking suspicion that each letter had its own personality. On this particular day that I’m recalling, Mr. M went to the market. Mr. M was in the produce aisle. Mr. M was buying melons (can’t remember this exact detail, it may have been mangos which are also delicious) because they were his favorite fruit. I raised my hand and had roughly this exchange with the teacher:

Me: Why were melons Mr. M’s favorite fruit?

Teacher: They were his favorite because that is what he enjoyed the most.

Me: But why were they his favorite?

Teacher: Well I’m not sure why they would be his favorite. The book just says that.

Me: Why would the book say that though?

Teacher: The author must have thought that melons would be a good favorite fruit.

Me: But why would they be the favorite?

Teacher: Patrick. If you keep asking me questions the rest of the children won’t be able to hear the end of the story.

Me: Maybe you should do a better job of answer them then you unimaginative bitch.

Okay that last thought may be my present self projecting, but I think we get the point. This experience taught me a valuable life lesson that would be reinforced every year of school until I entered a field predicated on breaking this lesson, “Don’t question authority.”

Of course, there’s nothing particular to the teacher mentioned. This occurs constantly, in one form or another, in educational institutions across the nation. Now as a shepherd of man I have two huge problems with the actions of the teacher in the above example.

1) The supposed purpose of the education system is to educate. The actual system we employ more resembles a process by which inquisitive and creative children forcibly deteriorate into automatons who access information from a database, placed in them by visionless hacks called teachers, like computers. Which is more indicative of an educated and successful person: the accumulation of dates, facts, and trivia or the desire to see the world, question what one sees down to the core, and to be excited about the process of the discovery? The former makes me a jeopardy champion while the later makes for an intelligent person. The former can be learnt by any person and some lower species while the later cannot be taught and is rarely reacquired after it has been snuffed out. We focus on one of these aspects and complete discourage the other. Questioning is actively discouraged in the classroom. There’s a variety of reasons. Teachers are petty and don’t like being questions. Teachers are too stupid to know the answers to the questions. Teachers are too lazy to deviate from the format of a lecture. Teachers are stressed out by the system. Kids need to learn a certain set of material, in a certain frame of time, and pass certain tests to prove that this has been done. Whatever the particular reason in your sample classroom happens to be, it is a given that this process occurs. Questioning should be encouraged and rightly be seen as fundamental to the education process. Questioning by a student is now viewed more as a weakness rather than as strength. We should be actively trying to reverse this perception.

2) This response to a question reinforces the flawed flow of information present in classrooms. The current delivery method mimics the sprinkler you use to water your lawn. The water comes from a single sprinkler which delivers the nourishment to the grass. The water flows in one direction only. The sprinkler alone possesses water and needs no water. The grass needs the water but has none of its own. Information flow should more resemble natural selection. Ideas are generated freely and without guidance from each individual member and brought into the classroom environment. At this point the classroom tests the knowledge. Those items surviving the questioning and thought process survive as true information. Those deemed insufficient are left to die. Obviously the teacher still has a focal role in weeding out the bad ideas, but the responsibility does not rest solely with the teacher.

Now I may be somewhat contradicting myself going through this whole rant. I did just say in my prior post that no method can effectively work for all students. However, certain methods will be more effective in general. Changing the information flow in classrooms and the role of the student will go a long way towards rearing a more intelligent population. It took me several years to recover from the horrors of current education system and regain the ability for independent thought and excitement about acquiring knowledge. My philosophy of education stems from two basic beliefs: Children are educated, and children love to learn. We’ll go a long way if we simply stop destroying what is already basic to children.

The Continuum Hypothesis: You Can't Count for Shit

2011-08-17T15:10:00.003-04:00

Warning: TL;DR

In an effort to write more, and to watch SportsCenter reruns less, I’m beginning a series of blogs which will (hopefully) present an understanding of The Continuum Hypothesis and its “solution” to the lay person. The Continuum Hypothesis is suitable for a number of reasons. Most importantly it’s a result primarily in logic, so it requires little formalized mathematics, which can be stated fairly easily. It’s interesting to me because it does not resemble math and has absolutely no application to anything in the corporeal world.

Mathematics’ ability to force one to reexamine, and frequently discard, long held assumptions about the nature of the world interests me immensely. It’s one of the reasons I find the discipline so fascinating. For example consider the following, if you have two groups of things, group A and group B, such that group A contains everything in group B and more, then you would say that group A must be bigger than group B. As young children we deduce this, and it serves us well throughout our lives. If I draw two circles, one surrounding the other, then the surrounding circle must be bigger. If you have every single comic book that I do, plus a collector’s edition that I don’t have, then you have more comic books than me. The logic seems to check out. In general though, this assumption is unfounded.

The give us some minimal technical jargon, mathematicians like to call any group of stuff a set. If something is in a set, we simply say it is an element of the set. If set A has everything that set B has in addition to something that set B doesn’t have, we say that B is a proper subset of A or dually that A is a proper superset of B. To be concrete we could say set A is the group of numbers {1,3,5,8} and set B is the group {1,5,8}. B here is a proper subset of A. You don’t care about what grey bearded aloof professors call things though. I just dropped a bombshell on you. You want to hear more about that.

Where did the logic go wrong? Well as children we did something that makes every mathematics professor cringe and every beginning mathematics student bomb a test he thought he passed, we made a tacit assumption. The assumption probably seems good as children. It probably seems pretty good to most adults. We assumed that we can count everything and give it a number. In the above I can say that set A has 4 elements. It seems like a good bet that we can always do this, but unfortunately we can’t. When we can, our childhood logic holds true. The “proof” goes like this: Set A has everything that set B has. I can count the things in set B. Set B has x elements. Set A has things that set B doesn’t have. I can count those things. Set A has y things that set B doesn’t have. Therefore set A has x+y things. x+y things is more than x things. So set A is bigger than set B. So sets are always bigger than their proper subsets. Sometimes though, this breaks down.

A common breakdown in logic occurs when we attempt to jump from familiar finite cases, which we test through our daily experiences, to the world of the infinite, of which it seems we have a poor understanding. Suppose we had the set of numbers, called the counting numbers (N), {1,2,3, …} and the set of numbers, called the integers (Z), {…, -3, -2, -1, 0 , 1, 2, 3}. Which one is bigger? By our faulty logic, Z contains all of N, plus a bunch of stuff N doesn’t have, so that Z is bigger. But we can’t say this. We don’t really know how big either of them are. How many things are in N? The way we usually count doesn’t work here. We can’t assign a usually number to the size of N. We can’t physically count all of them up. The same applies to Z. The “proof” used earlier to verify our logic breaks down here. How many elements are in N and Z? How many more elements does Z have? These questions can’t be sufficiently answered. There’s no number to assign to the size of each.

Let’s bypass this problem. Instead of worrying about giving a name to the size of each, let us just find a way to say if two things are the same size. Consider the following thought experiment. We have a classroom of students. There’s some number of kids in the classroom. There’s some number of desks in the classroom. I want to know if I have the same number of students as desks. If I could count each up, this would be an easy exercise. However, we want this method to work for things infinitely big so we can’t do that. I propose a different method. I’ll take each kid and assign him to a desk. I’ll assign every single kid to one desk and only one desk. I will assign no two kids to the same desk. If at the end, I see that every desk is filled with no kids left, I can say that there is the same number of kids as desks. Simple right? Take a moment to make sure you agree that this method captures the essence of two things being the same size. Make sure you see the importance of the fact that every kid gets only one desk, every kid gets his own desk, and every desk is filled.

Here’s some more jargon to impress the ladies at the bar. A function is a way of assigning things from a set A to exactly one thing in another set B. In the above, me assigning kids to desks was a function from the set of kids to the set of desks. If no two kids share a desk, that is if a function sends everything to a different place, it is called injective. If every desk is filled by a kid, that is if a function ensures that everything in set B has something from set A sent to it, the function is called surjective. If we have an injective and surjective function from what set to another, we can say that the two sets are the same size. Now back to the narrative.

Now that we have a way to compare sizes, what can we say about those two sets that previously eluded our examination? Can we say that Z is bigger than N? The shocking answer is no. These two things are actually the same size. Cool huh? To see how, we’ll start assigning students to desks. The elements of N will be our students, and the desks here will be the elements of Z. I’m an idiosyncratic teacher so here is how I tell the students to get in their desk. I’m going to tell student 1 to sit in desk 0. Now for every other student who has an odd number, I’m going to have him sit in the desk that is half than one less of his number ( [x -1]/2). In this way student 3 goes to desk 1, student 5 goes to desk 2, and so on. Now for all those students with even numbers, I’ll have them sit in the desk which half of his number and negative (-x/2). In this manner, student 2 goes to desk -1, student 4 goes to desk -2, and so on. With this method of assigning seats, I’ve given every student a place to sit and only one place to sit. I’ve also done it in such a way that every desk will be filled. Therefore, contrary to popular belief, the two sets are the same size even though Z has infinitely many things in it that N does not. Behold the power of arcane mathematics.

Objection! Objection! says the weary observer. I claimed that every “desk” needed to be filled. How can that possibly happen here? It is true that in physical reality we can never have every single desk filled in this manner. However, in reality the sets themselves couldn’t exist. It should be remember that infinity is really just a concept. You could never actually have every number in N. Instead I would say that for any number you can think of, N contains a number that is bigger. In the same way this desk assignment process, think of any number of desks that you wished to have filled. The process detailed above will fill more than that if you give it enough time. It we imagine that this process could carry on forever, in this imaginary land of infinity I would actually fill up all the desks.

Let’s briefly go back to my method of assigning desks. What did I actually do? Since I was assigning the number {1,2,3, …} to each desk labeled by Z, in reality what I was actually doing was counting the desks. Imagine the Z desks were lined up in order. You are standing at the zero desk with the positive desks extending forever to your right and the negative desks extending forever to your left. What I described was a way to count these. My method told you to first point at the desk right in front of you and count it as one. Then you were to go to the first negative desk and call it two. Next we go to the first positive to call it 3. To finish counting them all, you just need to keep alternating between positive and negative as you count. For this reason, sets that are the same size as N are frequently called countable sets. Notice that the way that I counted was very important. If I just attempted to first count all the positive desks, and then count all the negatives, I would never have been able to count everything. When calling something countable, or when showing two sets are the same size, we only need to find one way to do the assigning. If there are billions of ways that we can’t count the set, but just a single way that we can, the set is still countable.

The German mathematician Georg Cantor introduced these concepts in 1874. The mathematical community at the time violently reacted to his work. Unfortunately, scientists conduct themselves no differently than the average man. They are biased, selfish, and blinded by their beliefs. His work gradually gained acceptance after a period of ridicule. Georg Cantor spent the final days of his life driven to the brink of insanity pondering the extensions of this simple idea of counting. He died in a sanatorium consumed by what became to be known as the Continuum Hypothesis.

To fully introduce this idea, next time we will ask whether there are sets that cannot be counted. Intuition begs us to call this question absurd. As we have seen though, intuition has no place in the realm of the infinite.

The Solution to our Education System : There is none.

2011-08-16T16:55:00.003-04:00

This post begins a series that I will pen (in theory only) to reveal the superficialities of my theory of pedagogy. I’ll point out what is wrong with the American Education System, as I now find myself to be firmly a part of it. My overall belief is that the system will never be fixed. To do so would require that many rich and powerful people losing their money and prestige, common folk accept extremely discomforting realities and the education system attempts to educate children rather than adhere to its historical purposes.

Education progresses cyclically. Every two decades or so a new revolution in reaching occurs which quickly claims to eradicate our education woes. The zealots of the movement cite some loosely related, over-reaching articles drawn from the social sciences to give credence to the unstoppable force that is this new theory. The fact that this approach to education mimics a previous failed approach never gets mentioned. Millions of dollars are spent in training, curriculum reform, textbook changes, and new school projects to accommodate the “new” untested solution which has won over a select group of bureaucrats and politicians, forced to make some change as inaction spells political suicide. Another massive failure reveals itself as false hope subsides, and another faux solution rises from the ashes of previous ineptitude.

Humans have been able to accomplish an awful lot. We’ve tackled seemingly more difficult problems than the question of how to properly educate our children. To invoke the mantra of every complaining S.O.B. on the face of the Earth, “We can send a man to the moon, but we can teach Johnny to add fractions?” In the face of such monumental failure to solve a problem well within our means to solve, it helps to examine the underlying axioms that theorists use. For centuries, astronomers were unable to explain the precession of the perihelion of Mercury despite the extraordinary success of celestial mechanics. The problem, as Einstein eventually revealed, was that everyone operated with the innocuous and friendly assumption that time is an unyielding constant. Bad assumptions give you junk results every time. The educator’s assumption is just as seemingly benign as the physicist’s. Educational theorists began with the axiom, “There is a solution.”

Unfortunately, there isn’t.

Malcolm Gladwell touches on this same point in a TED talk (here if you’re interested). He talks about sauces, but the overarching principle remains valid. Social scientists have a nasty habit of treating people like physical scientists treat control populations: heterogeneous and indifferent to the act of observation and experimentation. However, an individual’s subjective evaluations vary remarkably from person to person. The population of people to be educated gives a myriad of differing curiosities, strengths, weaknesses, educational levels, social pressures, desires, career paths, learning styles, and reactions to stimuli. We’ve been operating as if we’ve failed because we’re trying to jam a round peg into a square hole. We could succeed if only we could find the right dimensions to carve. In reality, we’ve been trying to jam thousands of fractal images into neat polygons that we carve one at a time.

With this idea in mind, centralized academic control is a cancer to society. This isn’t a Republican talking point. I’m not suggesting that we just need to abolish the Department of Education, offer a voucher system, or let kids pray in the classroom. The issue is much, much deeper. This is an admonishment of private schools as much as it is of public schools. Returning education to State control would allow for some heterogeneous products. However, State’s are still behemoth sized beings. Most families do not have the fluidity necessary to move across State lines just for a set of educational standards. Add to it the fact that these would still be at the whim of feeble minded, reactionary bureaucrats and this is even less of a feasible solution.

To truly provide the diversity of instruction methods to meet the abound diversity of the individual, all forms of regulation on the delivery of knowledge must be eradicated. Education cannot exist alongside academic standards. All forms of (governmental) accreditation and certification must be thrown into the dustbin of history. Along with them must follow the laws which dictate mandatory attendance in institutions of learning.

This is the first step towards a coherent system of education with this one being more of an organization than a pedagogical nature. Nobody has the correct answer for how to educate the nation. The answer doesn’t exist. However, methods can be devised to educate the person, but the mechanics which will do so cannot operate bound to a small group of individuals’ preconceived notions of what is right or proper. This is not a free market argument. The nature of the individual dictates this regardless of what economic system is actually ideal.

Wiki and the Elite

2011-06-16T13:12:00.000-04:00

If I tasked you with imagining the most boring event possible to occupy a summer afternoon, you probably wouldn’t think of attending an academic conference in a subject area of absolutely no interest to you. The answer you give would probably be less fitting than that one though. This is exactly where I found myself a few weeks ago. After being coerced by coworkers, there I was patiently listening to the keynote speaker at a conference for incorporating technology into the classroom.

The first thing you notice at any academic conference is that distinguished professors act like absolute children during every presentation. The second thing you’ll notice is that the catered lunch is usually less than what you would expect given the registration fee. Lastly you’ll find that instead of listening to a speaker, you focus on one tangential comment that they make and ignore the rest of the presentation. Thus instead of listening to the keynote speaker prattle about whatever her talk claimed to be about, I thought about Wikipedia.

The impetus for this daydreaming was a comment that sent the audience into an uproar of disapproving head shakes and horrified acceptance. The speaker, talking generally about information, brought up the dangers of the internet and the promulgation of too much information which can confuse students. She lamented the current generation which now views Wikipedia as a source of knowledge and a reference. As a result, disgust from the educators in the crowd about the situation and disgust from me at their disgust.

From where does this disdain stem? For most professors, it is probably completely innoculous. Wikipedia tends to be one of the least formal works you can consult and often has errors or spurious claims attached to its articles. Also, many older professors simply reject newer means of information storage since they obviously were brought up with a dependence on paper books and articles and microfilm. However, I believe a more insidious philosophy accounts for this in other cases. The academic disdain for Wikipedia is paralleled by the State’s disdain for Wikileaks. On the surface both may appear strange since neither the misinformation on Wikipedia nor the true information on Wikileaks have been that damaging in terms of what has been revealed. This is because the damning aspect of a Wiki is not only the information itself, but instead the implication of that dissemination of knowledge.

The State views itself as Prometheus bringing fire to the lowly mortals. Truth does not exist outside of the watch of the State. In the eye of the government, statements become truth when spoken through the edifice of government. All other claims outside of this organization remain spurious until verified by the regime. This operation of government is quite independent of political party, form of government, and time except in severity. This of course is a method to control the populous. Wikileaks acts as a threat because it points out that the emperor has no clothes. It hints towards an objective reality independent of government. It exposes that governments lie. It exposes that governments are not omniscient. The details of the information need not be a smoking gun which will topple the entire structure of government. Wikileaks acts perniciously by eroding the holy façade in which the State drapes itself. It takes the bumper sticker “Question Authority” and turns it into a true warning that the official story released by a talking head is no different than any other piece of information floating around in the chaos of everyday life. Like all information this must be judged by the discoverer against his own logic, in context of the situation, and with reference to all other available resources. Governments fear the truth and people who can find the truth more than anything else.

Academics behave in about the same manner. Part of this stems from our current system where academia, academic research, and government have merged into some horrible Cerberus. This is not the entire story though this the duplicity and childishness of academics extends back throughout history. Many of the famous feuds and blunders of science serve as a testament to this. The other part of the story comes from the hubris embedded in all forms of the elite. Academics, just as the State, must see all knowledge first pass through their doors. A narrow clique of sometimes petty academics control the flow of the knowledge into peer reviewed academic journals and books released through major publishing companies. Wikipedia poses an identical problem to these people. It reveals that science itself is full of conflicting opinions and doubts. It reveals that scientific truths are independent of the academic world. It provides a way of sharing information and science which the mainstream has decided sometimes arbitrarily to shun or depress.

The true academic, the true professor who cares about educating a generation of students rather than training them like dogs, should be extolling the virtue of Wikipedia. A good dose of question authority and think for yourself should be present at the forefront of every class. Great intellects don’t come from assimilating data handfed to them. They are those who have radical ideas and challenged the accepted thought of the time. Wikipedia is a great resource along these lines. Those who refuse to acknowledge that are charlatans in an instructor’s skin.

Slow Friday: Random Thoughts

2010-11-19T14:21:00.003-05:00

Storage Wars

I will be shocked if this show produces even the slightest bit of enjoyment for me in my lifetime. Even accounting for quantum uncertainty, I will say unequivocally it will be zero. Nonetheless, I'm forced to hear several commercials for it every day due to their radio advertising campaign. During their standard spot, the advertisement claims that every day over 10,000 abandoned storage units are sold to the highest bidder.

It's hard to have an intuition about large numbers which we can hardly understand. Compounded with the fact that the workings of the public storage market is far from a topic of interested, I would be very understanding if my intuition led me wrong here. However, doesn't this just seem like a ridiculous number?

Census.gov estimates that in 2010 there are 114,825,428 U.S. households. Of them, data suggest that 1/11 own storage units. That would imply that we have 10,438,675 storage units in the country. If 10,000 are auctioned off everyday, that would mean we see 3,650,000 sold off per year. This then accounts for 35% of the total storage units in the country. 35% of all storage units become abandoned/foreclosed upon? That seems a tad ridiculous, even for a country struggling with numerous economic problem. In the worst counties in the country we have a home foreclosure rate of less than 1%. Certainly homes rank much higher on one's priority list and face a far lesser chance of being unfunded, but still something seems fishy about this to me.

These estimations are rough at best. The 1/11 of households ratio could be slightly misleading. I assume it was calculated by dividing storage units by number of households, but it could just be the ratio of families owning at least one storage unit to total families. This would make the numbers more favorable, but I'm inclined to say BS on this one. Or is my intuition just flawed?

Black Holes

It's pretty obvious why physicists are in love with black holes. The public at large too tends to love things that are mysterious or those that offer all the interesting aspects of a hard science without all the hard work. Black holes in the popular science realm satisfy both of those categories. This said, perhaps part of their appeal comes from the human fascination with death?

We don't know what happens inside a black hole. We have lots of theories, but no consensus. All we know is that the physical world as we know it ends. The laws of physics breakdown. It's a completely different kind of place.

The event horizon appears to be a mundane thing. You can't see it. You can't measure it. When you pass through it, you won't even know it happened. However, once you do nobody on the other side can ever reach you. This is a poor explanation, but since I've started studying them it's a connection which is constantly in my mind.

Social Security: A Creative Solution

2010-10-12T11:55:00.004-04:00

2010 Social Security beneficiaries will not receive a cost of living increase.

Before all you grannies forcibly dependent on government retirement get your panties in a bunch, please realize that this non-action represents a gain for retirees. You see, over the past year we bore witness to a period of negative inflation. Thus, constant payment rates result in a net gain in terms of purchasing power.

I heard this story on the radio this morning while commuting to work. The otherwise rainy day became instantly brighter. I nearly had to pull over to fully enjoy the hardy laugh this story deserved. We've experienced a negative inflation rate?

During the 20th century, the economical sciences experienced a change in nomenclature. Inflation used to refer to an increase in the money supply. This is often derogatorily referred to as the "traditionalist" definition. The term was replaced by a pair of terms: monetary inflation and price inflation. Monetary inflation took on the meaning of the "traditionalist" definition while price inflation referred to an increase in the overall price level.

As one of their many astute observations, the Austrians recognized the superfluous nature of the price inflation definition. Price inflation follows inevitably from monetary inflation. Calling the cause and the effect by two separate names only obscures the link between them. Any attempt to combat the former while ignoring the latter will be doomed to failure.

Under the Austrian/Traditionalist definition, one can not think of a more eggregiouis lie than to claim a negative inflation rate from 2009 to 2010. Although official M3 data has not been released for political reasons, currency numbers, M1, M2, and the Rothbardian TMS have all exploded in the last year. We already have inflation. Prices may be momentarily held down, but the inflation is here.

Unsurprisingly, government tends to manipulate price inflation numbers in their favor. As powerful as semantic manipulation may be, nothing confuses a government educated populace like cold hard numbers. So enters the CPI as a measure of price inflation. Besides the futility of examining price inflation rather than monetary inflation, CPI provides easiest means for the state to change data in the shadows. To quote the Bureau of Labor Statistics: "The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of consumer goods and services." Without going into messy details, the problem with this as a scientific definition comes when we try to define a "market basket". The elusiveness of this term allows governments to easily mask inflationary expenses. If agricultural prices are experiencing positive velocity, simply remove agriculture from your measured basket and replace it with another commodity. Measurable inflation? No problem, just change your basket goods. The ball is in the government's court. They know what to do with it.

So here we have government's solution to Social Security. The system is bankrupt. Everyone knows this. How do we reduce the costs? We simply redefine inflation. We change our CPI basket. To hell with reality, reality can't compete with the handy, easily referenced numbers provided by the CPI. It's quite easy to erase growing costs when you can keep them from growing while convincing the public they're not losing anything.

The real secret about social security isn't that the system is going to fail. It is that the system has already failed. It's insolvent. It's time to move past unsustainable government promises, and back to reality and personal responsibility.

A Traveler's Dilemma: Dilemma?

2010-10-12T10:46:00.003-04:00

The Traveler’s Dilemma describes a situation which is seen as somewhat of a paradox by game theorists and economist. Loving a good supposed paradox, I became interested in it after reading a cursory mention in a footnote. After reading the problem, I certainly realized the troubling gap between the game theoretic solution and the common-sense solution. I must examine the literature further on this to see some proposed fixes. This blog isn’t about that though. Often times, when translating technical mathematical statements into easily digestible colloquial speech, the actual mathematical result is oversimplified and loses its meaning. I think a bit of that is occurring here. Let’s look at the dilemma.

Two passengers are returning to the United States from abroad. Upon departure of the plane, the passengers realize that incompetent TSA workers, after invading their privacy and searching their bags, had caused the destruction of an antique had purchased outside the country. The two antiques were identical. The passengers file a claim form with the government seeking compensation. Now the TSA’s claims department, being too lazy to do proper research, does not know the true value of the antique. However, they have a plan. They tell each passenger to write down a value on their claim form between $2 and $100. If both passengers write down the same number x, they will each be rewarded with $x. If two different numbers are claimed, call them m and n (assume m < style="">, the lower value m will be taken as the true value. Being social engineers as the government is one to do, it is decided that the "honest" passenger claiming m, will receive $(m+2) as a reward. The "lying" traveler will receive only $(m-2), with $2 taken away as a punishment. Now, what value should the passenger claim?

Upon my first reading, I naively answered “however much the souvenir cost”, completely missing the paradox. Ditching any sense of morality then, how much should we claim thinking only of our gains? Did you answer $100 dollars? Or a value close to it? You naïve layman with your feeble reasoning skills. The game theoretic solution tells us that each passenger should claim $2, which we denote by (2,2).

The strategy (2,2) is what’s called a Nash Equilibrium. In this sense, we call it a solution to the problem. The paradox manifests itself here since we would intuitively be able to reach a much higher gain by simply claiming a higher price. Yet game theory tells us (2,2) is optimal. A Nash Equilibrium has the property that neither party can improve his gain by unilaterally changing his strategy. To see this assume the first traveler claimed $2 and the second claimed any value other than $2, so that we have (2, y>2). Then, by the game parameters, $2 will be the accepted value. Traveler 1 will gain the $2 value, plus his $2 truth bonus for $4. Traveler 2 will receive $2 minus his $2 penalty for no gain. Similarly, the strategies (x>2, 2) would yield unfortunate results for Traveler 1.

Part of the communication breakdown comes from the meaning of optimal in the vernacular and as a technical definition. In regular speech, an optimal solution would mean the best possible solution. In Mathematics, what we mean is that the strategy will maximize a player’s minimum gain (or equivalently minimize the maximum loss). Claiming $2 clearly does this, as it guarantees a gain of at least $2. Claiming any other price leaves open the scenario where the other player claims $2 and you gain nothing. Keeping this in mind, the solution becomes much less puzzling. It is only a solution in the sense that, assuming some conditions about known information and rationality, it meets a narrow technical definition of what properties we desire in a solution.

Nash equilibriums are helpful when there’s a threat of your opponent outplaying you. If a Nash Equilibrium exists in a given game, you equalize the playing field by employing one. For no matter how outmatched you are by an opponent, you force him into also playing the Nash Equilibrium, essentially removing the skill disparity. In this situation, a Nash Equilibrium may not be the strategy we wish to employ.

I’ll close with one final thought. When we speak of optimal or best solutions in regular life, the closest game theoretic analogue (which I know of at least) is the dominated strategy. We say Strat A dominates Strat B, when the payoff from Strat A is greater than or equal to the payoff for Strat B, regardless of what strategy the opposing player chooses. To give an example: Suppose one is playing Texas Hold’em. On the river you hold a Royal Flush, and your opponent bets into you. You then have three strategy options: Fold, Call, or Raise. The strategy of raising dominates all other strategies. For no matter what cards your opponent holds and no matter how your opponent responds, you will gain more from raising than you do by either calling or folding. Domination is a strong criterion than Nash Equilibrium and rarely applies in real games. Notice that in the Traveler’s Dilemma , no strategy dominates any other. As an example, claiming $2 does not dominate claiming $100 dollars, since the payoff for (2,100) = 2 < 100 =" (100,100).

Marriage: Why?

2010-09-26T20:05:00.008-04:00

Why does marriage as we know it exist? I can hardly think of a more ridiculous and asinine institution. There are many activities which go completely unquestioned by the American public. Marriage is a major one. As happens in far too many debates, the public discusses two sides of a topic, both of which rest on an underlying assumption which is never mentioned. As Ayn Rand was often fond to point out, both political parties suffer defeat because of the axioms they swallow without questioning. The wrong question: What groups of people shall we allow to wed? The right question: Why should government have a say in marriage?

There exists thorough documentation of the changing conception of Western marriage from its time as a method of social engineering by totalitarian governments, to a spiritual bond between two individuals, to sexual/spiritual bond between man and women, to its highly contested state now. Often, the volatile realization of the concept has been used as a justification for the allowance of gay marriage. The other side responds to this attack with appeals to morals and essentially a structural fundamentalist social philosophy exalting the preeminence of the family. The debate itself is interesting enough, but it is not the one we should be having.

Why need government sanction marriages? First consider the functions of a marriage. Essentially it constitutes a contract between two consenting individuals concerning ownership of assets and rights of visitation. There is no need for this particular contract to be enforced separately under the moniker of marriage. It may be handled like any other contract in our legal system. Indeed, those choosing to be marriage in a religious/spiritual sense could do so and be free of any legal entanglements. The only potentially troublesome aspect of this view of marriage comes as a result of the complete ineptitude of the income tax code. The federal income tax disgusts me on many levels. It should not exist. If it is to exist however, it certainly should not be a means of providing incentives or disincentives for particular behaviors the government is fond of at the time of its writing. Quite simply, remove the income tax or remove this particular moronic provision of the code, and we may safely move forward with “private” marriages.

How would the two most prevalent sides of our marriage debate react to this?

Religious people should not be troubled by this. Surely, government sanctioning of marriage should be completely irrelevant, as the sacrament of marriage is a bond between man and wife witnessed by God. Government approval should be completely foreign to the equation. In fact, the religious should be insulted that government claims some stake in marriage. Government cannot oppose God, nor can it bend his will. Any attempt for it to do so should be seen as an affront to its true nature.

Homosexuals, polygamists, and the incestful should rejoice. They would be free to enter into the same contracts as heterosexual, monogamous, unrelated couples. Since no marriages at all would be of interest to government, there would be complete marriage equality under the law. The ugly age of marriage exclusion in the United States would end.

In reality I doubt the scenario would play out as ideally as it would in a rational world. Statism runs deep. The religious in particular are guilty of using the government for their whims. Having their conception of marriage exist is not enough for some religious folk. It must be the only such option. The desire to dominate all too often intertwines itself with creeds that preach submission to a higher power. Throughout history religions have allied with government to swell their numbers and spread their accepted behaviors. Those in favor of non-standard marriage would also likely reject this. Marriage as a government institution is sacrosanct. People have a sick need for government to validate their choices.

The current system is disgusting. Government has no authority to sanction marriage. It’s just a further example of the undeniable tendency of government to spread its insidious grasp over the daily minutia of our lives. It’s insulting. It’s degrading. It stifles basic freedoms. The solution to the tired, biased debates on the subject sits easily and immediately right in front of us with the change costing us nothing. However, as happens constantly, it will never even be discussed by our politicians. Anyone suggesting it would be laughed at as a nut or feared as a radical. It’s a shame. As long as government holds its ground, no side of the debate will be happy.

Dumb Laws

2010-09-07T10:06:00.005-04:00

Most of us at some point have stumbled over to DumbLaws.com or at least heard snippets of its content. The website exists not for any informative reason, but instead to entertain us. We see these arcane laws as reflections of a quaint time in our nation’s past. It amuses us to discover that such laws could ever be enforced or even enacted. But should the appropriate response be humor? Is something more insidious present in these laws than mere naivety? And why do we so easily laugh at past legislation without blinking an eye at our current laws?

Consider some of these ludicrous examples:
- Dominos may not be played on Sunday.
- It is illegal to sell peanuts in Lee county after sundown on Wednesday.
- It is illegal for a driver to be blindfolded while operating a vehicle.
- Motorized vehicles are not to be sold on Sundays.
- If you’ve been convicted of drinking and driving you may not apply for personalized license plates.
- You may not slurp your soup.

After reading through some examples one begins to notice a few trends which we may generalize. The laws attempt to legislate morality, are too specific and clearly reactionary, or involve the state trying to protect us from ourselves (really just a subset of legislating morality). What we laugh off as dumb laws we should really despise as tyrannical laws. In all of these cases we see a legislature reaching beyond its proper functions. The humor comes easily when they’re viewed as relics of the past, but we must be open to the reality that people were prosecuted under such laws. The gentlemen handed fines and subject to court appearances for slurping their soup would hardly find the law to be humorous.

It may seem silly to refer to such seemingly minor laws as tyrannical. Surely, the punishments for such infractions were not debilitating and were seldom enforced even that the time of their passage. However, we should not stay our outrage on those grounds. Minor injustices are still injustices. Further, dumb laws leave the door ajar for seriously despotic laws to arise. Once legislatures claim the ability to impose their morality and way of life upon us in principle, they will not hesitate to do so in action. Our overseers forbid us to sell automobiles on Sunday to keep their Sabbath holy, and we begrudgingly accept without serious complaint. When we do so, we accept their premises and give validation to their methods. Then we stand flabbergasted as violent video games are swept from store shelves and homosexuals are forbidden from entering into marriage. We must realize that the acceptance of one leads to inception of the other.

What then are the dumb laws of our age? I’m amazed at the hypocrisy of our elected officials who would scoff at the laws in the DumbLaws.com archives and turn the next day to vote against medicinal marijuana. The great body of laws forbidding personal drug use constitute the dumbest of the dumb laws we’re forced to abide by today. We suffer through the needless prosecution of these laws which will one day be laughed at as relics of a past, simpler, society. I hope however the situation is slightly different. I hope that instead of humor our descendents look upon them with disgust. Instead of laughing their blood should boil at the audacity of a government drunk on power, subjugating its people to slavery under meaningless, unjust laws. I hope that they remember the billions of dollars spent, the thousands of lives lost, and the hundreds of thousands of poor souls who had to rot in prison or pay a fine just to feed the appetite of a legislature’s bloody crusade for their morality.

To all of the victims of dumb laws past, present, and future, I’m not laughing.

Obama: Muslim in Disguise?

2010-09-06T21:52:00.003-04:00

A recent pew research poll shows that 18% of Americans believe that Barack Obama adheres to the Muslim faith. Perhaps more shockingly, 43% confess to not being certain of what religion the man follows. These polls reflect increased American uncertainty about the president in wake of the mosque “at” ground zero controversy. Suddenly the question of Obama's true faith seems even more pressing than it had in times past. Conservative media outlets are attempting to use this to whip the public into a illogical fervor about the president's secret Muslim beliefs. Liberals take the defensive, insisting that the conservatives' conclusions are rash, unfounded, and almost exclusively political in nature. Once again both political parties share an identical ideology, surrendered to arguing about the mere petty details.

This situation unequivocally demonstrates to us the wholesale acceptance of collectivism by our dominate political parties. Never is the question asked in the public discourse: Why does it matter? If the public were even to entertain this question it would shake the establishment to its core. Both parties require that the masses' minds remained mired in a primitive sort of tribalism. People must be regarded as soulless vessels filled only with the meaning that their respective labels grant to them.

The Republicans rely on this mentality, despite their supposed defense of individual liberties (how can they exist without acknowledging the individual?), most importantly to support their agenda of perpetual war and the justification that produces for the usurpation of civil liberties. With a rational view of mankind, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and soon to be Iran, would not be supported by the public. However when individualism is eroded away and replaced by the identity “Muslim”, these wars become instantly justifiable. Muslims are at war with the United States. Muslims are terrorists. Muslims want to destroy our freedom. The equating of “Muslim” with “terrorist” combined with the a collectivist mentality provides the necessary foundation for the Republican platform of perpetual war, a police state, and crony capitalism.

I don't wish to suggest that Democrats aren't equally at fault in this context. One need not look further than any Democrat's opinion of capitalism or big business to see this. However, their faults are outside the scope of this post.

To the question of Obama's religion I give the response: Who cares? Certainly not me. And unfortunately we will not see a free America until the majority holds my position.

Healthy Government

2010-07-11T09:37:00.006-04:00

With recent talk of a "soda tax" in Philadelphia and pundits warnings/support of further government intervention in American dietary habits due to its increased place in health care, I've been thinking a lot about F. D. Roosevelt and one of his pets, the Agricultural Act of 1938. Why is that?

The more one begins to perceive the workings of our government, the more one sees plain as day the complete philosophical bankruptcy of our leaders. Our politicians meander through life as jackals preying on the public and working to fatten the purses of themselves and a few close friends. Our government shows no consistency and frequently outrightly contradicts itself.

Although taxation as a means to curtail undesirable behavior should be recognized as evil and a hallmark of despotism in itself, such goals are too lofty at this stage. However, most can probably agree that government should not jointly penalize unhealthy behavior in one domain and subsidize it in another. Unfortunately government has been partly doing this for years.

Ever walk around the supermarket and wonder why all the cheapest items are so bad for you? You can get an economy sized pack of fudge cookies for the same price as a bunch of bananas. This stems largely from governmental policy. Junk food consists mostly of sugar which is dirt cheap in our country. But raw unprocessed sugar has a hefty tariff imposed on it (not for any health reasons only to protect inefficient domestic producers), so these sweet products are produced using High Fructose Corn Syrup.

This brings us back to FDR and his cronies Henry Wallace and Rexford Tugwell. Passed under the guise of relief (somehow farmer prosperity and farm prices were linked to overall economic health in a series of poorly manufactured causal chains) the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 included federal subsidies for six "basic crops": corn, wheat, tobacco, cotton, rice, and peanuts. In reality the bill was a payoff to huge farm lobby in return for political support. As Economist Donald Paarlberg explains,

"The top 1% of farmers got 21% of the benefits. ... Left out of the program were more than 100 other crops... More, in fact, was left out than was included. The politically influential basic crops produced only about 20% of the industry's income but received 75% of the program benefits."

Relief indeed. This farm bill continues until this present day with benefits being renewed every 4 years without much debate. Notice the content of those basic crops? Not exactly the health conscious person's preferred list of goods. Just looking at recipients of the subsidies in PA we have some startling numbers. In 2009, only 28% of PA farmers collected any form of farm subsidy. In addition, 10% of our state's farmers collected 58% of the subsidies totaling 868 million since 1995.

Corn subsidies in that time frame? 640 million good for the top spot of all subsidies received. In the top 10 there's not all that much I can say promotes good obesity fighting health. Soybeans totaled 96 million and apples 12 million some 17% of the corn expenditures.

So before we talk about a "soda tax" maybe we should talk about subsidies. These expenditures are not necessary and subsidize unhealthy eating. Of course most politicians lack the logic to see the problem in pursuing both courses of action. And any plea to a common health argument is all smoke and mirrors meant as a feeble justification for any new gorging scheme our benefactors intend to impose on us.

(As a side note some studies suggest that HFCS may contribute to increased appetites and body fat compared to sugar. The jury seems to still be out, but it's worth noting)

Cafeteria Greenery

2010-07-10T15:41:00.003-04:00

When I'm in the cafeteria I enjoy having the luxury of using a tray to carry my various plates and drinks to my seat. However this decadent luxury has been revoked by the fine people at Aramark for the unassailable reason of saving the environment. Naturally given their intentions I have no grounds upon which no complain, and no argument to offer against their noble crusade. As napkin holders tell us (now housing 100% dye free recycled napkins) not having trays allows us to save the environment by saving water and soap while reducing food waste caused by trays. The fact that trays cause food waste is undeniable as shown by objective statistics compiled by Aramark using the grand sample of one day of food waste from our University (details such as the control, data gathering process, etc are unnecessary). And the atrocious wasting of non-replenish-able natural resources such as soap and water speak for themselves.

Who believes this facade? Without even trying to compare the inconvenience of making four trips just have a meal with the carbon footprint associated with washing a 18"x 12" piece of plastic, can anyone take this seriously? This whole ploy, like most "green movements", is just designed to save money and not doing a damn thing for the environment. If the company could just be upfront and say "We're cutting simple commodities in an attempt to reduce costs and keep prices fixed.", I would actually respect their decision. As it is I'm just annoyed. Even if they were telling the truth, the result would be a negative one. If research would be spent on more reasonable things, eventually technological advances will come along which will lead to safer environmental practices. Look at Poland Spring. In attempt to reduced costs they find an optimized design for their water bottles which maximizes volume while minimizing surface area. As a result their bottles use less plastic. Here we see a technological advancement helping the environment, while providing no discomfort to the consumer. Aramark removes trays, slightly improving the environment, and greatly annoying the consumer.

Politicians and Their Logic

2010-07-10T13:29:00.003-04:00

I was reading a LA Times article today published after the ratification of the sixteenth amendment and I came across a quote I just had to share with the nobody people who will read this. This piece of wisdom comes from long former Tennessee representative Cordell Hull:

"One of the important results on an income tax will be a curbing of unnecessary federal expenditures. When a great part of a government's income is derived by direct tax upon the citizens of the nation, they will scrutinize more carefully the appropriations made by congress."

To which of course the only appropriate response is lol or perhaps a rofl. Now I don't believe that Hull actually spoke such absurd words truly meaning them; I'm sure he was giving his best Billy Mays to the public trying to push ratification. Apparently he did a good job making people think giving a government more power as a means to curtail power is a good idea. Given America's mental dependence on the federal income tax as a sacrosanct, eternal fixture of our law, it seems the idea really took.

Of course the amendment was a long time coming after the tax's first "necessary" establishment during the Civil War, but still that idea that all but 6 of the then 48 states voted for ratification a mere 137 years after the revolution amazes me.

What bothers me the most is how anyone who attempts to bring the morality or necessity of the federal income tax into public debate is automatically labeled a nutcase and instantly discredited. How did we come so far?