I just thought this was funny

During the instapundit podcast interview with Orson Scott Card (which I highly recommend) Card was talking about these idiots in the media. Then as he said that they exist on the right as well and he wasn’t going to name names. Then he said he might name the name. A few seconds later he said, “those guys who you wonder, have they ever read a newspaper, okay its Savage”. I find it amusing that Savage is so reviled by all except for the fawning callers he lets on.

Bless You Charlie (Rangel)

Apparently the Democrats have decided that with election easily in hand they could let up their guard and directly insult the troops. No John Kerry type “joke” which could be referring to the President. Charlie Rangel said straight out that the troops were only there because they had no other career options and that no amount of money incentives will make somebody go to Iraq. I don’t know which is more shocking, his complete ignorance of statistics about the military or his complete ignorance of Economics 101. I can think of nobody who thinks that people don’t respond to incentives and that people won’t put themselves in danger for money. Furthermore if Rangel thinks that paying an extra $20,000 for troops to volunteer to go to Iraq won’t work why does he think troops won’t run off to Canada for an implicit cost of around $20,000.

Of course I can’t stress enough how stupid Rangel’s draft proposal is. The cost would be in the trillions per year once you factor in the oppurtunity costs. Furthermore, instead of reducing America’s military will it would redirect to UN type actions where nobody gets hurt and nothing gets done. In addition I find it hard to see how a draft during peacetime is constitutional despite what the Court has said.

Polygamy

A standard conservative objection to the court permitting gay marriage is that if you allow that then you’ll have to allow polygamy as well. While I find both of these things distasteful, I find gay marriage far more so.  Polygamy is presumed and at times considered good in the Bible and was common in many religious cultures. There are social problems with polygamy to be sure, but these would probably be smaller than critics claim. I have no reason to believe that monogamy is essential to our country as a commenter on Captains Quarters did and polygamy would be rare for obvious reasons. I don’t see it as a serious social issue. However the major impact of the Supreme Court saying this would be to lower the States in the Union to 49. Utah was forced to sign a treaty saying that they couldn’t allow polygamy in order to become a State. Although that has constitutional problems already (it sort of abridges the republican form of government requirement) the treaty would be obviously unconstitutional if the Supreme Court said polygamy was a constitutionally guaranteed right. In fact Utah would retroactively have never been a state and any law which passed by the margin of Utah’s votes would be void.

Unsurprisingly this issue will never be brought up, unless we have another 2000. The loser of the election might decide to gamble on that argument to the Supreme Court. Maybe not.

Hasgachah Pratis (a Bayesian approach)

For a long time you’ve heard that there is no such thing as coincidence and that everything is Hashgachah Pratis. In fact you’ve been told that this is a basic Jewish belief. In fact there is an opposing view which saysthat how much Hashgachah Pratis you get is dependent on your righteousness. This can be taken two ways, at least for the purposes of this.

1. Hashgachah Pratis is directly related to your merit or h(m)=km where m and h are less than or equal to 1, or your hasgachah pratis equals k which equals 1 times your righteousness.

2. Hasgachah pratis increases at a rate of km or dm/dh=km or h(m) equals the integral of km or h(m)=.5km^2 but since h(0)=0 and h(1)=1 C=0 and k=2 so h(m)=k^2 where m and h are less than or equal to 1, or your hasgachah pratis is equal to the square of your relative merit.

After we have these formulas we can assess what the probability of an event being hasgachah pratis is if we know how righteous somebody is. We can do this with Bayesian reasoning. This formula can be used for many other things. For example, if somebody says he won the lottery and you know he tells the truth 999 times out of a thousand and that his chance of winning the lottery is one in a hundred thousand the odds that he is telling the truth are .9%. So our formula for the odds of Hasgacha Pratis for an event with Probability A are for

(1-A)m/((1-A)*m+A*(1-m)) or the probability of it happening with hasgachah (its nonrandom probability times the probability of hasgachah pratis) divided by that number plus the probability of it happening randomly. For the second case the probability is the same but with m^2 replacing m.

 

I really think that the Republicans learned nothing.

To elect Trent Lott as your second in command in the Senate is insane. Republicans chose somebody not known for his choice of words. Also Trent Lott is a leading earmarker, and the Republicans were thrown out largely because of that. Lott has egg on his face and is a representative of the old guard who merely desire to stay in power. I don’t know if the Democrats are doing any better, but at least they didn’t choose a Senator liked by perhaps 25 people outside of his state.

An expected irony.

The previous post had been submitted to the school newspaper and not surprisingly was totally rejected. As my principal/censor put it, I showed it to a number of people and the concencus was that printing this article would guarantee a sub 20 person freshman class.

Gay Pride in Jerusalem

The gay pride people backed down and held their event inside because of threats of violence. Doesn’t this seem like its ruining the whole point?

Unlike most of you I wasn’t that enthusiastic about the sequence of events. First of all can you really consider it to be good that people are worried that a religious Jew is going to kill them? Furthermore, any argument presented against it boiled down to we don’t like gays. That’s a valid opinion, but it isn’t a stance Israel can take. Israel is a democracy and is not a theocracy. Israel has standards of human rights and one thing is that you can’t discriminate against gays.
Of course you might say, “Why should I care about the gays, I’m not one of them.” However to quote the famous Niemoller poem,
“When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out”
This is not a hypothetical possibility, the same arguments were made in another controversial issue, arguments such as, “We can’t afford the soldiers to protect these people,” and “Why can’t they just go somewhere else?” and “They’re inciting violence.” I don’t think I have to continue for you to recognize the arguments as those used by the pro-disengagement crowd. This doesn’t automatically mean that the arguments have no validity, but it should give you pause before you confidently say them to the world as your basis for discrimination.
The principal argument I heard made was that Israel was a Jewish state and therefore should keep the gays from marching especially in Jerusalem. However, if you are going to make this argument you faced with serious dilemmas. What do you do to adulterers and gays, kill them? Israel is a Jewish state, but until Mashiach comes it is also a secular one. No matter how much you dislike the march and no matter how offensive it is to you, banning the free speech rights of a group because of it is an extremely dangerous path. Because to be logically consistent you should say that any group which offends a large enough segment of the population should be denied the right to march or to say what they want in public and that is the last thing the religious community should want because they’re outnumbered. So hold your nose and even go and protest the next march, but don’t try and remove their right to peacefully march because your side doesn’t like it. Just remember that the table can be turned and have been in the past.

This is somewhat strange.

My nephew wanted to know what the flag of china looked like. So I typed in flag of china to my google search. When the screen pops up I get a message saying that my computer is making some sort of connection with CIA.gov. This may be unique to my computer but I urge you to check it out. This is possibly illegal and seems highly immoral. It also seems strange in a why would they do this kind of way.

Paper or Silicon?

This is an article I just wrote for my school newspaper. You are probably the first to see it.

Election season will have already passed by the time you read this and odds are that some close race will be decided in the courts with some accusation of voter fraud on one side or the other. In fact as I write this on election night Keane in New Jersey has already accused Menendez of voter fraud in his win (not without justification, New Jersey is famous for corruption and the winner is under a federal investigation for corruption). Lawyers on both side are arrayed for the mammoth legal battle to follow over the next dimpled chad. Meanwhile in Milwaukee voter turnout is above 100% due to the busses from Chicago. Our election system has serious problems with it and there is no real will to revise our system. The system as presently constructed has 3 specific problems with it voter fraud, machine error, and voter error. All these problems have solutions of the high and low tech variety.

The most serious problem is voter fraud. There are a few reasons for this. The main one is that voter fraud is an error which can influence elections while the other problems can only swing the closest elections. In order to vote in elections now you only need to verify your signature. That’s right politicians make a big stink about an 18 year old drinking and stores proudly announce that they card while we wink and nod at the felonies committed by the people who vote several times in the election. I have heard no good reason why there should be no photo ID requirement for voting. The politicians who like the current system give the excuse that not all voters have a photo ID. So give one at registration or let them cast a provisional ballot and make them show a valid ID within a week or two. We put far stricter restrictions on things far less serious to society, but apparently we don’t care about the dead voting. As to multiple votes there are two solutions. One is one we perfected in Iraq-fingerinking it’s simple and it works until somebody discovers a cheap way of cleaning the ink off. The other is an electronic registry which is synchronized in all the precincts.

Then there is machine error. Despite the claims of a few crazies there is no conspiracy by Diebold or any other voting machine company to throw the election to the Republicans. However there was a worrying report from Princeton researchers who showed that one could easily hack into the Diebold machines and replace voting records with your own made up ones and have it erase all your tracks. For the most problem the worrying things about electronic machines is that they can be tampered with so easily. For example in Washington State in 2004 the Republicans were up 2000 votes in the governors race. Later a batch of votes were discovered which lowered the lead to around 200 then more ballots were discovered and still more until the Democrat had a comfortable lead. Until we fix this fraud we might as well go back to the ballot box and the last minute comebacks. A paper receipt for everyone is a must as well as a way for people to check that their votes were counted. The cost of giving people a random, secret number to search a database with to check how their votes were tallied. Of course you could just switch to paper ballots. The possibility for fraud is increased but the possibility of error is reduced and combined with this database we could have security.

Voter error is actually the least of the problems. It generally doesn’t make a difference because it is pretty random. Even a huge number of errors is unlikely to swing a race by more than a few hundred votes. However, simply showing people what they have voted would reduce the fraud by a large factor and eliminate the problem of people’s votes becoming meaningless.

I personally favor the low-tech options because they are cheap and simple. A paper ballot can’t be hacked and a inkstained finger can’t be forged. But, anything is better than the way we currently run our elections.

Kerry’s Kerfuffle

    I tried posting this earlier but the post got erased so I’ll retype it.

A few days ago, as you all know, Kerry said an incredibly stupid thing about the troops. The basic gist seemed to be that if you don’t try hard in school you’ll end up in Iraq. If this was what he meant it would be horrible and false.

Kerry first said that he would apologize to nobody for messing up a Bush joke (If you don’t get educated you lead us into Iraq. Hah Hah Hah) then showed himself to be a liar by later apologizing for anybody who misunderstood the joke.

I personally think that he meant it as a Bush joke because it fits the Kerry mindset. Attacking Bush makes sense attacking the troops doesn’t. Also I think the whole Freudian slip theory is completely bogus and not even worthy of consideration (along with the rest of psychoanalysis).

On the other hand it really annoys me that Kerry decided to go the offensive after this. You messed up and did it in a bigger way than choking on a pretzel. Be a man, apologize, explain and wait a bit before lashing out at the nearest person.

The second half of the story which disturbs me is the conservative reaction. Sure outrage is understandable and a valid response. However the whole idea of the troops feel insulted so therefore it must be meant as an insult is an insult to intelligence. What troops think he meant is of no relevance to what he actually meant. This is an affliction which even spreads to the Hugh Hewitt show which is usually quite moderate. The tactic is frequently used by liberals when the soldier agrees with them. Of course, when he disagrees he’s just an uneducated naive jock, but of course they support him and his pointless, evil mission. Kerry is wrong to say that the military is made up of the illiterate idiots, but it isn’t a place which has any unique insight into policy issues.