Quotes

"All war is based on deception." - Sun Tzu, The Art of War

"The decision to kiss for the first time is the most crucial in any love story. It changes the relationship of two people much more strongly than even the final surrender; because this kiss already has within it that surrender." - Emil Ludwig

"Humankind cannot stand very much reality." - T.S. Eliot

"Machines take me by surprise with great frequency." - Alan Turing

"A culture is made -- or destoyed -- by its articulate voices." - Ayn Rand

"Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity." - George S. Patton

"By virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others." - Frédéric Bastiat

"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile - hoping it will eat him last." - Sir Winston Churchill

"A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for." - Grace Murray Hopper (attributed)

"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away." - Tom Waits

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

This is one of the more legitimate uses of the term... owned!

Mad Science Fo Yo FACE to Sipp

Science!!

Forms of Statism

From http://www.sjgames.com/illuminati/politics.html

FEUDALISM: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.

PURE SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else's cows. You have to take care of all of the cows. The government gives you as much milk as you need.

BUREAUCRATIC SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and put them in a barn with everyone else's cows. They are cared for by ex-chicken farmers. You have to take care of the chickens the government took from the chicken farmers. The government gives you as much milk and eggs as the regulations say you need.

FASCISM: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them and sells you the milk.

PURE COMMUNISM: You have two cows. Your neighbors help you take care of them, and you all share the milk.

RUSSIAN COMMUNISM: You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk.

CAMBODIAN COMMUNISM: You have two cows. The government takes both of them and shoots you.

DICTATORSHIP: You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts you.

PURE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbors decide who gets the milk.

REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbors pick someone to tell you who gets the milk.

BUREAUCRACY: You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk them. Then it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.

SURREALISM: You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

This is John Cheese speaking

I just finished the best book I've read since Cryptonomicon - John Dies at the End. I feel kind of bad that I'm getting something this good for free. It's sort of an action... horror... romance... comedy. It's a romactiohorridy. Here's how the book opens:

In the course of solving the following riddle, you will either reveal the terrifying secret at the very core of existence, or go utterly mad in the attempt.

Let's say you have an ax. The kind that you could use, in a pinch, to hack a man's head off. And let's say that very situation comes up and for some very solid reasons you behead a man. On the follow-through, though, the handle of the ax snaps in half in a spray of splinters. So the next day you take it to the ax store down the block and get a new handle, fabricating a story for the guy behind the counter and explaining away the reddish dark stains as barbecue sauce.

Now, that next spring you find in your garage a creature that looks like a cross-bred badger and anaconda. A badgerconda. And so you grab your trusty ax and chop off one of the beast's heads, but in the process the blade of the ax strikes the concrete floor and shatters.

This means another trip to McMillan & Sons Ax Mart. As soon as you get home with your newly-headed ax, though, you meet the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded last year. He's also got a new head attached and it's wearing that unique expression of "you're the man who killed me last Spring" resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life.

You brandish your ax. He takes a long look at the weapon with his squishy, rotting eyes and in a gargly voice he screams, "that's the same ax that slayed me!"

Is he right?

Changes in Words

Word	Original Meaning
awful	deserving of awe
brave	cowardice (as in bravado)
counterfeit	legitimate copy
girl	young person of either sex
guess	take aim
knight	boy
luxury	sinful self indulgence
neck	parcel of land (as in neck of the woods)
notorious	famous
nuisance	injury, harm
quick	alive (as in quicksilver)
sophisticated	corrupted
tell	to count (as in bank teller)
truant	beggar

The word silly meant blessed or happy in the 11th century going through pious, innocent, harmless, pitiable, feeble, feeble minded before finally ending up as foolish or stupid.

Pretty began as crafty then changed via clever, skilfully made, fine to beautiful.

Buxom began with the meaning obedient and changed via compliant, lively, plump to large breasted.

The word nice meant stupid and foolish in the late 13th Century. It went through a number of changes including wanton, extravagant, elegant, strange, modest, thin, and shy. By the middle of the 18th Century it had gained its current meaning of pleasant and agreeable.

Words are changing meaning now: consider how the words bad and gay have changed in recent years.

Source: http://www.krysstal.com/wordname.html

Let's feel GOOD GODDAMNIT

Your Government Wants to Kill You

It seems that some people still don't want to face the fact that the government lies on a regular basis. And not white lies, or minor lies, or untruths, or something easier to face. I'm talking wholesale, massive, prime-cut, choice lies.

Nevermind the Downing Street Memo, that's milquetoast. There's an even more incriminating document; its existence has been confirmed by The New York Times as well as two other British officials. In it, George W. Bush (that's the president, mind you; he controls the nukes) says that one great pretext to be Iran would be to paint up a United States surveillance plane in United Nations colors and fly it around Iraqi airspace in hopes of drawing fire. Totally public, mainstream news, not debatable. But the White House just says it's not true, it's no big deal, your government loves you.

It's great - Bush was asked about it, and after denying it, he says that he did not want to go to war at all, and that it's the hardest thing he does as a president. This is in direct contradiction to the statements he made in private at these meetings with Tony Blair; furthermore, Bush loves sending troops into war. He told his biographer back in the late '90s that he wanted to be a war president, because you have unlimited power.

And another thing - of course the government is going to deny that what is said in this document is actually true (against all reason) - they're the guilty party! Can you imagine what would happen if Donald Rumsfeld or George Bush got up on television and said, "we totally staged all the pretexts so that we could artifically go to war for our benefit?" The United States would immediately turn into hundreds of lawless warring factions. But I guess for some people, the government denying it is enough.

Hell, this stuff dates back to way before Iraq - what about the Northwoods document? I'm not even going to bother putting in a link, you can go right to Wikipedia and there are multiple links to the document in .pdf and searchable .html format. Operation Northwoods was the official United States government plan to stage terror attacks in the US, blow up planes filled with US citizens, blow up ships, and so forth. This was to create a pretext to invade Cuba and perform some good old fashioned regime change. This plan got approved all the way up to Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense at the time.

Or what about the USS Liberty? That was when we wanted to invade Egypt. When the ship came under attack and fighters were launched to defend it in international waters, McNamara called Admiral Moorer, with a bunch of officers listening in, and told him to stand down. Moorer refused; told him that they know that they're attacking an American ship, and that they were broadcasting on emergency frequencies because the American ones were being jammed. Moorer hangs up on McNamara. Do you know who called back about a minute and a half later? The President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson. And he tells Moorer, "I want that goddamn ship going to the bottom." Eventually, a Russian ship unexpectedly showed up and they had to call off the attack. Moorer and multiple officers have all been interviewed and they confirm that this is the case.

Now, of course, we're supposed to believe the government that Iran is cooking up nukes. In reality, they're just insisting on their right to nuclear energy, but in doing so, they're walking into a trap. Troops are already positioned on the border of Iran, I'm sure that they've got maps out right now in Washington figuring out who gets what oil (not that it's primarily about oil, but that's beside the point)... basically, you can take it to the bank. We're going to invade Iran. Meanwhile, Chinese generals routinely threaten the US with nuclear strikes (1) (2) if we make a wrong move, bragging about what cities they're aiming at. But hey, who cares! Let's just export more capital and jobs to China as they gas their own people in mobile execution vans (I've seen articles from China's own state-controlled newspapers that brag about this) and take their organs. It's all part of freedom.

A response to a blog that is not homeomorphic to this blog in any way

Update: Nevermind, just follow the discussion here, as I don't feel like updating this post over and over again.

Natural Rights and Responsibilities: A Response

This essay starts off well, but seems to disregard its own premises and initial conclusions.

So it is reasonable, if survival is the source of rights, that the society as a whole also bears the responsibility to care for an orphaned child. But how can the society as a whole fairly distribute responsibility for the child without taking from individuals? Common solutions are unsatisfactory.

This is correct; sacrificing the individual to the group is fundamental to all tyranny.

A capitalist would say that we must simply rely upon the charity of individuals; however, strict capitalism provides no guarantee that anyone will actually donate any labor or goods, and inevitably delegates the responsibilities of the entire society to a small group of individuals who are dedicated to making sure the society fulfills its obligations.

Here, the logical conclusion is made, with respect to the above premises. An individual does not have the right to survive; that is impossible, as everything dies. An individual does have the right to secure his own survival. This is the foundation of human rights.

A communist would say that every individual must contribute according to his or her potential to produce. Unfortunately, this solution ignores both the great difficulty of determining an individual's capacity to produce, and the fact that spending time not producing goods or services can also have an impact on an individual's ability to survive.

Fair enough, but this is more a pragmatic argument, rather than an argument stemming from moral principle. Regardless of what an individual's wealth or survival ability is judged to be, rights are 100% inviolate.

An appropriate solution is to distribute the care of orphans (and of others who are similarly unable to produce and not provided for by other means) evenly among all capable individuals. Rather than requiring that all production go to a central organization (as does communism) or that all production go to the producing individuals (as does strict capitalism), we simply require that able individuals invest a small portion of their spare time providing for those in need.

This is where the argument goes sour, seemingly ignoring the previous conclusion that common solutions are "unsatisfactory." Who requires this, and by what right? This proposal resembles the mandatory military service common to many socialist wastelands, which is an affront to human rights.

My point is that although the Capitalist approach seems to just be ignoring the problem, the reality is that in any free society, there is enough wealth and charity that orphans, etc, will always get taken care of, rather than statist societies, where everyone is forcibly reduced to equivalent levels of poverty.

Also deferred for later discussion is an alternate mechanism by which individuals need not contribute any labor whatsoever to fulfill their obligations, removing altogether the dependence of any individual on the labor of the rest of society.

This could be a much more sensible proposal; I have a feeling it involves robots. No, really.

The Weirdest-Sounding Language Ever

Believe it or not, the weirdest-sounding language ever is Irish. Don't take my word for it - check it out for yourself.

The English Language

A Working Dynamic Memory Allocator

This one was a bitch. I spent an entire three-day weekend on it without a break.

Nonsense Blogs

What exactly is this plague of blogs that appear to be entirely assembled out of sentence fragments from news reports? They're not hard to find, just hit Next Blog. A few examples:

• http://the-wisconsin-title-loan.blogspot.com/
• http://see-direct-loans-service.blogspot.com/
• http://be-nexium-homepage.blogspot.com/
• http://be-illinoislotto.blogspot.com/
  
• http://see-purchase-femrelieve.blogspot.com/
  
• http://casino-specials.blogspot.com/
  
• http://see-transderm-scop-cheap.blogspot.com/
  
• http://my-bankruptucy.blogspot.com/
  
• http://the-zyprexa-class.blogspot.com/
  
• http://fha-loan-rates.blogspot.com/

I'm just trying to find some damn German blogs.

The Most Dangerous Myth about Communism

http://lolcommunismlol.ytmnd.com/

Best Name for a Chili Product Ever

The Wages of Socialism

The other day I came across this article and found it very revealing with respect to what socialism does to an economy and a nation. The article describes how Germans are practically attending college in perpetuity these days; the average age of a German college student is 23, and some students stay well into their 30s. They're able to do this because Germany's socialist government provides free education - primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary. Students want to do this because Germany's job market is barren; it's easier to find a job as a student than as a degree holder. Why?

To hire a student, all you gotta do is pay him. But to hire a non-student, it's not enough to just pay him, oh no. The state requires that you also provide a pension, all kinds of insurance, and so forth. This is based on the socialist belief that corporations are run by sick evil freaks who hate their employees, and government has to step in or everyone will starve to death.

But you can't evade reality; the laws of the economy are non-negotiable. Every time you force a company to pay a pension that it otherwise wouldn't, every time you insist on some benefit that might not exist otherwise, you do so at the expense of someone else's job. It's the same thing with minimum wage; 90% of economists agree that it destroys jobs, because it forces employers to pay more for labor than it's worth, thus, they can afford less of it.

The funny thing is, part of Angela Merkel's plan to assuage Germany's unemployment problem is more of exactly what's caused it - statism. Specifically, pensions will be frozen, wage and price controls will be enforced, etc. Didn't we learn anything from Nixon? He imposed the same kind of controls, and we ended up with a recession. You couldn't get a job pushing a broom if you couldn't prove that you'd been doing it for ten years. Then Reagan reversed it with a return to a relatively free market, which brought the prosperity of the '80s. But that's a whole other story.

Downing Street II

What is said in public


What is said in private

This is exactly what happened with Iraq. It's the same game plan.

The Weather Underground

The Weather Underground is a magnificent example of the isomorphism between Communist philosophy and mass murder. Its members were mainly trendy rebels without a clue, with a few obvious psychopaths thrown in for good measure. The group protested the systematic slaugther of innocent civilians by systematically attacking innocent civilians (as well as their buildings, infrastructure, and so forth).

This clear doublethink was justified by things like changing definitions. Definitions are the guardians of rationality and the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration, so it’s no wonder that the Weather Underground decided that violence was living your white life in your white suburban house in your white community and ignoring all of the supposed turmoil that is going on around you. Why not just change all the definitions? Let’s just change “murder” to “happiness” and that way there won’t be any more murder.

The war dragged on for years, the efforts of this group, their terrorism, and their incoherent communiques notwithstanding. When the war ended, the group, lacking any sort of real cause or principle other than violence (and perhaps a vague “revolution,” presumably of the same kind that failed in the USSR and elsewhere), fell apart like any other set of contradictions. The most important lesson that they can teach us is that Communist philosophy, like any morality of death, will always result in mass murder, because it is a philosophy that holds that individuals have no rights, only collectives. For this reason, I was not the least bit surprised when Weather Underground leaders decided that mass murder would now be acceptable.

What determines ownership of private property?

In various discussions with a friend, I've come across an interesting problem in ethics, politics, and human rights - how do you determine who actually owns a given piece of property? It's an issue that arises from, shall we say, our sordid past.

This idea that pretty much all land is stolen from someone else, and that someone else in turn stole it from a third party, yea, even unto four or five generations, is the fulcrum of political philosophies like (I think) geolibertarianism and libertarian socialism, the conclusion being that all land is essentially publically owned. This is an interesting problem, and I've had it on the back burner for a while. I think I've developed a solution; not a particularly ad-hoc one either, as it's derived from several principles regarding property, particularly how newly discovered land comes into someone's possession.

There was a real world example of this. I don't remember any of the specifics, as I think I came across this story at some point during the Clinton administration. Basically, there were a group of Native Americans who claimed to own a huge portion of some state (let's say, for sake of argument, Nebraska) and wanted it back. The thing is, they were able to produce in court incontrovertible proof that yes, they did indeed, own a huge portion of Nebraska. The judge said, well, clearly you own the land, but I don't think we can just give it back to you; there are towns and schools there and such. They were offered compensation for the land, but, being Native Americans, they declined the offer and simply went away.

So, the problem here is, you have a group that has had possession of the land for a long time, but it was originally ill-gotten. My conclusion is, the group that has current ownership of the land should retain it, but not because of how long they've had the land (there's no statute of limitations on human rights), but because they've mixed the land with the work.

This is usually only an important quantity when considering initial ownership of the land. Take as an example the Louisiana Purchase. The government didn't actually sell the newly acquired land; they distributed plots of land to farmers, and said, you work this land for five years and it's yours. Libertarians consider this the ideal way of distributing new land.

Of course, as Truman was once told, the whole world's already been explored already, so this sort of thing won't need to happen until serious colonization of the Solar System begins, if then. The basic principle behind it, however, is the important quantity when dealing with this sort of long-term land theft problem.

Ultimately, the land has changed ownership, because of the work that has been done with it by its new occupants. However, as the former occupants were wronged, financial compensation to that party must be mandatory, the exact amount probably to be determined in a court of law based on the value of the land at the time and other factors.

This should basically be considered a tactic for the transition to a completely free society; eventually, all ownership problems have been settled and no piece of private property is in question. Furthermore, stealing land and immediately working on it (say, building factories) cannot be used to forcibly acquire land in any free society for obvious reasons; also, if the original party who stole the land is still around, they should (if they still own the land) be forced to give it back (for obvious reasons), or (if they do not) be forced to provide the aforementioned financial compensation. In general, I'm discussing cases where the original thieves of the land are dead and gone, which are much more difficult because it concerns innocent people who are essentially in danger of suddenly losing their land.

The Third Wave

No, not that third wave - rather, the third wave of figures who are going public with their doubts of 9/11. Charlie Sheen went public about two weeks ago, and the story went supernova by the standards of the 9/11 truth movement. Alex Jones even appeared on CNN's Showbiz twice, in the process becoming the first member of the 9/11 truth movement to go onto mainstream media and say "they DID it," not "they had prior knowledge" or "they didn't take action." (According to his radio show, Jones was scheduled to appear a third time, but CNN higher ups told them to "kill it," even though the show got its highest ratings of all time while covering the Sheen story.)

The first wave was the group of informed patriots who went public shortly after 9/11. The second wave was government figures and people of similar prominence, such as Paul Craig Roberts, Michael Meacher, Andres von Bulow, Professor Stephen Jones, and so forth. The third wave is people who already have a media platform, such as Charlie Sheen, and Ed Asner, who went public shortly after Sheen. The fourth wave will presumably be people of prominent positions in the Bush administration at the time of 9/11.

Predictably, there has been a backlash to the Sheen story, with hit pieces coming out in embarrassing profusion in both print media and television. They are all quite formulaic, and yet some of them stand out.

The most obnoxious hit piece, in the print media category, is Marina Hyde's article in the UK's Guardian Unlimited; you have to read it for yourself to appreciate the sheer, distilled obnoxiousness above and beyond the normal obnoxiousness of such pieces.

But it is George Bush's assertion that he saw the first plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Centre before any footage of it had been released that tells Charlie he's on to something. "I guess one of the perks of being president is that you get access to TV channels that don't exist in the known universe," he continued in a manner which in no way suggests he once had a monstrous coke problem. "It might lead you to believe that he'd seen similar images in some type of rehearsal as it were, I don't know."

The arrogance is astounding, in that she brings up a factual point that he raises, and responds with an ad hominem attack. This is the formula of most of these attacks; ignore all the points that were made to focus on Sheen's past. This is after Sheen's second appearance on the Alex Jones show, where he specifically challenged his critics to "challenge him on the facts."

This has a happy ending, however - Hyde was inundated with emails from incensed readers to the point where she had to write this sheepish followup article, claiming that she was just poking fun at the subject. This is further evidence that the tide is turning against the mainstream media and their hit pieces.

Best in show, however, goes (as always) to the Hannity & Colmes piece. Most of the guys on the show weren't too bad, saying that we should "refute" Sheen, and/or encourage questioning authority; but Hannity, with his typical insufferableness and his face that cries out for a fist in it, was actually asserting that to question the official 9/11 story is to spit in the face of the victims' families. (It's actually been my observation that a lot of the victims' families are the ones who are most vocal when denouncing the official story - for instance, they asserted that the GOP chose NYC for the 2004 RNC in order to capitalize on 9/11.

But the main point of the Hannity & Colmes piece was this guest they had on, who was saying that 9/11 conspiracy theories are popular because they provide an alternative to the "terrifying reality" of Islamic terrorism - shadowy, could strike at any moment, we're helpless, and so forth. Let's set aside the fact that this theory was presented without any evidence whatsoever and instead take a gander at this list of questions about 9/11 that weren't brought up (taken from infowars.com):

- Does fear of Islamic terrorism answer why NORAD completely reversed its standard operating procedure on the day of 9/11?

- Does fear of Islamic terrorism answer why three steel buildings, one that was not hit by a plane, collapsed from fire damage for the first and only time in history?

- Does fear of Islamic terrorism answer why firefighters and WTC workers reported bombs going off inside the towers?

- Does fear of Islamic terrorism answer why several of the named 9/11 hijackers are still alive?

- Does fear of Islamic terrorism answer why Pakistan ISI Director General Mahmud Ahmad instructed Ahmad Umar Sheikh to hotwire $100,000 to the alleged 9/11 lead hijacker, Mohammad Atta and why Mahmud Ahmad on the morning of 9/11 was meeting with former clandestine CIA officer and CFR member Rep. Porter Goss and Skull and Bones/CFR member Senator Bob Graham. Does it answer why since September 4th, he had met with top brass at the CIA, the Pentagon and the White House, including Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, Joseph Biden and George Tenet?

- Does fear of Islamic terrorism answer why on September 10th 2001 according to Newsweek, "a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly cancelled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns."

- Does fear of Islamic terrorism answer why a record number of 'put' options, speculation that the stock of a company will fall, were placed on American and United Airlines in the days preceding September 11th. This despite a September 10th Reuters report stating 'airline stocks set to fly.'

- Does fear of Islamic terrorism answer why a leaked FBI document, 199I WF213589, outlined disgust at a Bush administration directive that succeeded in blocking anti-terrorism investigations related to the bin Laden family and Saudi charities that were front groups for Al-Qaeda?

- Does fear of Islamic terrorism answer why the secret service allowed President Bush to remain in a known and completely unsecured location amongst hundreds of school children when he could have been a target?

- Does fear of Islamic terrorism answer the thousands of other physical, circumstantial and eyewitness evidence that directly contradicts the official fable of 9/11?

Perhaps Ms. Hart can tell us just where all these fearful Islamic terrorists are? Would we have caught some in the net at Guantanamo Bay? Turns out not to be the case, unless you think delivery drivers, chicken farmers, sack makers and taxi drivers are hell-bent on blowing up stuff.

These questions will all be addressed sooner or later, because people are beginning to wake up and seek alternate sources of information; it's becoming obvious how controlled the mainstream media is. With every individual who goes public, pressure increases on the mainstream media - what are they going to do when, say, Tom Hanks goes public?