Sunday, December 16, 2007

Tea Party '07

On December 16, 1773, American colonists, disguised as Indians, snuck aboard a British merchant ship and dumped tons of tea into Boston Harbor, and act of protest against British tyranny that rallied the colonists and helped spark the American Revolution.

Today, the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, believers in liberty nationwide are rallying behind Presidential candidate Ron Paul, the only candidate who supports the Founders' view of a nation conceived in liberty, bound by its Constitution, and free from government oppression. Today, December 16th, donations are pouring into the coffers of this freedom fighter, as supporters hope to ignite a second, peaceful Revolution, to restore this country to its proper track.

As of this writing (4 p.m. Eastern time), more than $3.5 Million has been donated at <> today. We are hoping to exceed the one-day record of $4.3 Million. Please donate as much as you can possibly afford, and forward this message to every person and mailing list you know.


Ron Paul is a 10-term Republican Congressman from Texas.
He has never voted to raise taxes.
He has never voted for an unbalanced budget.
He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership.
He has never voted to raise congressional pay.
He has never taken a government-paid junket.

He voted against the Patriot Act.
He voted against regulating the Internet.
He voted against the Iraq war.

He does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program.

Congressman Paul introduces numerous pieces of substantive legislation each year, probably more than any single member of Congress.

A medical doctor who has delivered over 4,000 babies, he is known as "Dr. No" on Capitol Hill because he votes against any legislation that violates the Constitution.

Dr. Paul is that rarest of all rarities: an honest politician.

Congressman Paul is the only major-party Presidential candidate who believes in the Founders' ideal of peace, free trade, and limited government. He deserves your support, and now is the time to give it. <> (purchases from <> also count)

View the current fundraising totals at <> and <>.

Also, once you've donated all you can, there is one more thing you can do: Visit two houses of people you don't know and hand out literature. See <> for details. And don't forget to visit <> to do what you can for Congressman Paul in your state.

Please do all you can to restore liberty and the rule of law to America! Support Ron Paul for President!

"I am for preserving to the states the powers not yielded by them to the union; and for preventing the further encroachment of the executive branch on the rightful powers of congress. I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple, and for retiring the national debt, eliminating the standing army, and relying on the militia to safeguard internal security, and keeping the navy small, lest it drag the nation into eternal wars. I am for free commerce with all nations, political connections with none…. I am for freedom of religion, and for freedom of the press. And against all violations to the Constitution to silence our citizens" - Thomas Jefferson on his positions for the 1800 election.

Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Current Thoughts at 12/16/2007 03:25:00 PM

Monday, December 03, 2007

Security for Prosperity and Peace

In his interview with Wolf Blitzer on December 2nd, Ron Paul mentioned a website he called "Security for Prosperity and Peace" in connection with his contention, stated in the November 28th CNN/YouTube Republican Debate, that we were moving toward a NAFTA highway. A cursory Google search on the phrase yielded no relevant results. A little creative searching yielded the government website he was actually referring to: the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. Paul claims that the highway is mentioned on that site. Well, it is: in the Myths vs. Facts section comes this interestingly vague disclaimer:

Myth: The U.S. Government, working though the SPP, has a secret plan to build a "NAFTA Super Highway."

Fact: The U.S. government is not planning a NAFTA Super Highway.  The U.S. government does not have the authority to designate any highway as a NAFTA Super Highway, nor has it sought such authority, nor is it planning to seek such authority. There are private and state level interests planning highway projects which they themselves describe as "NAFTA Corridors," but these are not Federally-driven initiatives, and they are not a part of the SPP.

Note that what they actually deny is that any highway is actually (or will be) designated a "NAFTA Super Highway." Does that mean that the rumors are false? Well, let's dig a little deeper into the site, and we find the Report to Leaders. On page 24 of this PDF document we find a slide labeled "Signature Initiative: Safer, Faster and More Efficient Border Crossings," which is what I presume Paul was referring to. On this slide, under "Key Milestones" is listed

Initiate new studies on the main NAFTA corridors between Mexico and the U.S. and develop a methodology to relieve bottlenecks within the highway network and at ports of entry by mid-2006 (9 months).

Now I'll be honest: This isn't an issue that I care deeply about. I believe Paul is taking the wrong tack on immigration; instead of being paranoid about securing our borders against peaceful immigrants (emphasis on peaceful), I believe we should focus on eliminating the government benefits that induce them to come here and drain our tax dollars away. Frankly I believe we should eliminate most of these government-aid type benefits for everybody, but particularly for non-citizens. Then peaceful immigrants would only come here looking for work, which only benefits our economy.


Looking at this site, can we really say that, while obviously not one single mammoth government project, the spectre of a "NAFTA highway" speeding people and cargo from Mexico to Canada and points in between is "illusory"?

Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Current Thoughts at 12/03/2007 04:53:00 PM

Friday, October 05, 2007

Ishmael II



p. 143–4:

p. 147–8:



p. 167:

p. 169:

p. 173–4:

p. 204–5:



p. 217:

p. 218–9:

p. 220–1:

p. 238:


p. 242:

        "Whatever happened to him?"



p. 56–7:




        Thank you, Mike, for reminding me.

Epistemology—What is it to know?
Metaphysics—What kind of world do we live in?
Theory of Evidence—How can we tell what is true?


p. 127:
        Let's see why:

p. 132:






Monday, June 04, 2007


Okay, xkcd is an awesome webcomic about, as it says, "romance, sarcasm, math, and language." Actually, science should be thrown in there somewhere too. But the "Powers of One" strip is particularly awesome. As with several webcomics, there's a little additional joke in the tooltip (mouseover) text, and in this case, it's cooler than the actual strip. See the strip to understand what's going on, but I'm adopting the tooltip joke as a new quote: "It's kinda Zen when you think about it, if you don't think too hard."

That so sums up much of Zen-type stuff for me. That's how I believe a lot of Zenlike stuff (I'm not really dissing Zen itself here; Zen philosophy is too complex for the kind of light treatment I'm giving here. So let's say this applies to some actual Zen stuff and a lot of pop Zen, or Zen-like, stuff) is. It sounds all cool and spooky and paradoxical until you actually examine it closely enough to understand it. For instance, I got an email from a friend today that said, "My father's mother once said 'I'm not a feminist. I'm not particularly feminine' and she was both right and wrong." Now, I'm not poking fun at the author of this email; she knew exactly what she meant, and so did I. But this is the sort of quote that could be interpreted all Zen-ly: oooh, something's both right and wrong at the same time, there's no absolute truth, we've just got to go with the flow and take a lot of drugs (or meditation, or whatever) so we can try to grasp, non-intellectually, the ultimate, seemingly contradictory Truths of the Universe.

Poppycock. For someone with an intellectual, scientific mindset, this is a simple problem (and I realize I didn't choose a particularly difficult example; if someone has a better one on tap, I'd gladly use it). Either this was intended to mean "she was both right and wrong at the same time and in the same way," in which case it's utterly contradictory, therefore it was nonsensical, therefore there was no meaning in the statement whatsoever; or it meant "she was right in at least one way and wrong in at least one other way," in which case it makes perfect sense, but isn't creepy or mystical or contradictory in any way, it's just couched in a shorter, more-interesting-sounding way (this is precisely how it was intended to be understood in this case, by the way).

Again, I realize I used a simple, almost straw-man example, but I really view a lot (if not all) of the seemingly-contradictory, mystical statements of the Zen-loving crowd this way: either they're actual contradictions, in which case they're both meaningless and utterly useless, or they're not, and a little analysis will uncover what's actually going on, thus removing the spooky mysticism from the situation. Yes, sure, this removes a little of the mystery from the Universe, but isn't the point of mysteries that it's fun to try to solve them? There's plenty more mysteries in the Universe to uncover, and meanwhile, you've increased your understanding of the world, which in my mind is more important than maintaining unnecessary mysteries.

Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Current Thoughts at 6/04/2007 09:57:00 AM

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

South Carolina Republican Debate











Update 2:

Update 3:


Friday, March 30, 2007

You have no right to a speedy trial

I'm speechless.



I'm waiting.

Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Current Thoughts at 3/30/2007 01:12:00 PM

Thursday, January 18, 2007

The Hidden Costs of Socialism

I’m still a college student, and I found myself this semester retaking a Precalculus class that I had begun a couple of years ago but had to pull out of, largely for military reasons. I was pleased, upon reading the syllabus, to see that the same book that I had used for the previous class was still assigned; it would save me having to purchase another $100 textbook. I wasn’t sure whether the same edition was still being used (the syllabus didn’t specify), but I figured I would give it a shot; even if the edition I had was out of date, I figured it would be usable. After all, how much could mathematics have changed in a couple of years?

Everything was going fine until I got about halfway done with my homework and realized that several problems were assigned that did not exist in my text. Frustrated, I went to Morris to check out the current edition from the Reserve room. The answer to the question of how much mathematics had changed in a couple of years was not much; there was very little difference between the readings portion of the two texts. In fact, the only difference I noticed was the removal of a tidbit I had thought interesting about the origin of the word “Algebra.”

The Exercises portion, however, was another story. It was completely different from what was in my old text. Problems had been added, existing problems had been moved; sometimes the only noticeable change was that the problem sections had been rearranged and renumbered. Why? Was the new format somehow superior to the old, aside from the additional problems? No; it was about the same, just reworded and renumbered. Why then? For one purpose: to stiff poor college students like myself.

It’s a cute trick; leave the text substantially alone, but rearrange the exercises in order to instantly outdate the old textbook and force students to buy the expensive new edition instead of purchasing the old one used. It’s particularly transparent in mathematics, where (at least on the undergraduate level) things change so slowly that publishing a new edition every two years is patently silly. But it’s a trick that is used throughout the massively profitable textbook publishing system. Publish a new edition, discontinue the old edition, and rearrange things sufficiently so that the old edition is incompatible with the new. This bit of skullduggery, along with the exorbitant price of textbooks, combine to jilt college students out of millions of dollars every year.

How is this possible? How is it that in a free-market economy where it seems that nearly every other commodity or service seems to get better and/or cheaper over time, can textbook publishing be stuck in this Dark Ages cycle of ripoffs and exploitation?

The answer, oddly enough, would seem to be socialism. In particular, socialist colleges and universities. “Huh?” you might ask. “What socialist universities?” There’s one right before your eyes. I attend one. SIUC is a state-owned, and therefore socialist, school. Its tuition rates are subsidized, particularly for state residents, so that its tuition rates are substantially below market rates for a comparable education.

So how are state schools responsible for textbook prices? Simple: socialist schools have no incentive to keep costs low for their students. Their tuition rates are already low, so they can expect high enrollment even if they heap other, hidden costs on the students (although SIUC, amazingly, seems to be doing a horrible job at enrollment, even so). What’s more, the low price of state schools removes poorer students from the free market for higher education, so that (except for the intellectual cream) private schools rarely even attempt to entice them. This results in reduced price competition between private schools. Someone who is paying $20,000 a semester (or whatever it is now) to attend MIT is unlikely to balk at a $500 textbook bill.

If state schools did not exist, low-cost private schools would spring up in their place, and (given the magic of the free market) would likely be providing a superior education at equivalent or lesser cost within a few years. What’s more, a free market in education would tend to solve the textbook problem. If schools could compete freely for the poorer students, textbook cost would likely become a factor.

And the solution to the textbook problem is astonishingly simple: Textbook cost should be counted as part of tuition. Students don’t pay room-rental fees for their classrooms; they don’t pay electricity fees for the energy they use while in class. All of that and more are part of the cost of tuition. If textbooks as well were considered as part of this cost by a majority or substantial minority of schools, textbook prices would plummet. Why? Because schools, trying to minimize their textbook cost, would press professors to choose cheaper texts, and those that are not updated more often than necessary. A market for cheaper textbooks would spring up, and publishers would move to fill that market. In fairly short order, this ridiculous stranglehold publishing companies have over students would be abolished. As of now, there is no market for cheaper textbooks. Sure, you want a cheaper textbook, but you are not the one who chooses the textbook you have to buy; your professor is. And your professor is not the one who has to pay for it, so he will rationalize the cost to himself, and you are, once again, screwed.

So remember: The next time you think government would do a better job than the market at providing some service or good, don’t forget the hidden costs.

Posted by Calion to Carbondale Bytelife at 1/18/2007 8:12:46 PM