tool

Posted September 26, 2009 by ngzax
Categories: Politics
Tags:

n.
1. a device or implement, esp. one held in the hand, used to carry out a particular function

2. a person used or exploited by another
—-

In 2009, Krugman stated that “deficits saved the world.” However, in 2003, when Alan Greenspan and the Bush administration were destroying this country’s balance sheet, Krugman was scared to death about inflation.

Benjamin Lee posted an excellent article, “Paul Kruman’s Identity Crisis”, on Mises yesterday demonstrating beyond contradiction what a political tool looks like.

Using entirely Mr Krugman’s own words, Mr Lee shows how the Media-Educational Complex [my formulation, not Mr Lee's] uses slick words and constantly shifting positions to keep the majority of people in this country enslaved through their own ignorance of economics.

When the next crash occurs we will again be told that what we need is just a bit more government. Its all the “greedy capitalists” fault after all. Trust your “public servants”

But ask yourself the following:

  • Why are those “greedy capitalists” so cozy with them?
  • Who pays all the “public servants” campaign expenses?
  • Why do you ever think that you would have any influence with a “public servant” when you can give them nothing compared to those “greedy capitalists”?
  • Why, every time they fail, do they get more power?
  • Why do all those “public servants” end up so rich? We don’t pay them that much.

Every thoughtful person should be able to answer those questions or to at least have asked them of themselves.

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democracy

Posted September 25, 2009 by ngzax
Categories: Excogitations, Politics

n.

a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives

—-

“Democracy itself encodes the threat of mob violence in the voting process. The State, as always, belongs to the strongest. Democracy models the process of mob violence, guesses who will win by counting heads, awards the state to the probable winner and skips the actual rioting.”

from “Seasteading, without that warm glow” by Mencius Moldbug on Unqualified Reservations.

This is an outstanding article, ostensibly about seasteading, but which also contains some excellent observations on the current tea party movement and whether or not it can actually affect change in our sclerotic system.

UR is one of the best weblogs extant. Read it.

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coerce

Posted September 7, 2009 by ngzax
Categories: Expositions

verb
persuade (an unwilling person) to do something by using force or threats.
—-

“A person who maintains that the State should solve, by necessarily coercive methods, any problem that individuals are capable of solving voluntarily, is…the very opposite of a liberal. The essence of tyranny is reliance on external, as opposed to internal, compulsion.”

– Felix Morley, “The Power of the People” (1949)

Timeless words, still applicable today. If only the people so intent on “fixing” everything in sight would heed it.

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reform

Posted August 12, 2009 by ngzax
Categories: Politics
Tags:

verb
make changes in (something, typically a social, political, or economic institution or practice) in order to improve it
—-

Another excellent editorial in the Wall Street Journal. This time from the CEO of Whole Foods, describing an outline of what an honest discussion of Health Care reform would look like.

“While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment.”

The easiest way to tell that all the bluster going on about “reform” in the media right now is totally phony is when he gets to his fifth bullet point:

“Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.”

The fact that this point has been *completely* ignored shows how fundamentally dishonest this entire debate has been.

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cronyism

Posted August 6, 2009 by ngzax
Categories: Politics
Tags: , , ,

noun
the appointment of friends and associates to positions of authority, without proper regard to their qualifications.
—-

From today’s Wall Street Journal:

CHICAGO — Two University of Illinois trustees have resigned and a commission appointed by Gov. Patrick Quinn is expected Thursday to recommend that the remaining seven step down following charges that trustees eased admissions for hundreds of politically connected students.

University of Illinois trustee Lawrence Eppley testifies before a state commission investigating school admissions July 14 in Chicago.
Following a six-week inquiry, the Illinois Admissions Review Commission found that trustees created separate admissions criteria for applicants sponsored by elected officials, trustees and donors.

“It became a formal, underground, parallel admissions process that had a structure of its own,” review commission member Zaldwaynaka Scott said at a meeting last week. “It was a completely independent system that operated without regard to academic records, academic potential.”

This is hardly surprising. As the scope and power of our governmental rulers continues to relentlessly expand, politics oozes into every aspect of society. Admission into and continuance of study in the University was one of the many carrot-sticks wielded by the former “citizen tsar” rulers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

This phenomena permeates all political parties. As Katrina shouted at us: Mr Bush was a master.

Unfortunately, as our current president seems particularly enamored with such cronyism, appointing new Tsars faster than you can type out their lengthy titles, I would suspect further similar revelations in our future.

Note to the mainstream press: that tingling in your leg might be your “spider sense” that something is amiss. ;)

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distinct

Posted June 10, 2009 by ngzax
Categories: Encoding
Tags: , , ,

adjective
1 recognizably different in nature from something else of a similar type • physically separate
2 readily distinguishable by the senses
—-

In the course of trying to answer a question for my wife this evening, I ran across an interesting type of query that, though it would seem simple and common, I am fairly certain I haven’t ever written in my entire career.

The essence of the problem is “how do you perform a grouping query while simultaneous removing duplicates.”

So, for example, if you had the following data set:

A B C
a b c
a b c
a d e

If you were to do the standard GROUP BY 

select a, b, count(c) from test group by a, b order by a, b;

against this table, you would get the following: 

 a     b     count
 ----  ----  --------
 a     b     2
 a     d     1

However, my wife didn’t want that duplicate “c” in column “C” counted. Here’s the query I used (in PostgreSQL) to achieve that: 

select a, b, count(b) from (select distinct a, b, c from test) AS t group by a, b order by a, b;

resulting in:

 a     b     count
 ----  ----  --------
 a     b     1
 a     d     1

QED

In retrospect, the reason this probably never came up is because with good data, you really shouldn’t have duplicate rows, but you don’t always control your input data. :)

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multiple

Posted May 28, 2009 by ngzax
Categories: Encoding

adjective
having or involving several parts, elements, or members : multiple occupancy | a multiple birth.
—-

I have recently had to design some personal websites for friends and have been using the iWeb application that comes bundled with Mac OS X. It is a surprisingly good program and I have been pleasantly surprised with both its quality and ease-of-use.

The one thing that always bothered me was that it seemed like you had to have all your “Sites” within a single structure. This seemed very limiting as the sites I was developing were completely unrelated.

Fortunately, I ran across this article on iWeb Tips which contained a tip on how to accomplish this.

What you do is make copies of the ~/Library/Application Support/iWeb/Domain file, 1 for each separate “Site Collection” you need. You then just open that file and iWeb opens with the selected sub-Sites. It works great.

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thermodynamics

Posted May 26, 2009 by ngzax
Categories: Excogitations, Politics

plural noun [treated as singular]

The branch of physical science that deals with the relations between heat and other forms of energy (such as mechanical, electrical, or chemical energy), and, by extension, of the relationships and interconvertibility of all forms of energy.

—-

It is a sad day for clear thinking people when judges at the highest levels are praised for being the proper ethnicity and valuing empathy over reason.

Thus, it was with great pleasure that I read the article “Obama and the ‘South Park’ Gnomes” in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Obama’s energy policy goes something like this: Phase One: Inaugurate the era of “green” energy. Phase Two: Overturn the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Phase Three: Carbon neutrality!

As my readers know, I have been in the energy industry for more than 20 years. I am also an avid outdoorsman and environmentalist. I take very seriously humankind’s stewardship of the Earth.

I also know as an engineer that you can’t wave a magic wand and expect wind and solar to replace fossil fuels in our lifetime. A much more thorough and balanced approach, which *will* include nuclear power must be discussed.

It is deeply dishonest for supposed “environmentalists” to hijack true concern for the environment as a cloak for their true motives, which are collectivism and anti-capitalism.

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doublespeak

Posted May 15, 2009 by ngzax
Categories: Excogitations

noun
deliberately euphemistic, ambiguous, or obscure language : the art of political doublespeak.

“On Tuesday, it was Geithner’s turn to dribble out the bad news. He reported that both Medicare and Social Security were rapidly running out of money. In fact, Medicare would be broke by 2017–and that the only way to keep it solvent was to “control runaway growth” in health-care spending. Apparently, such control means offering health care to all those Americans that can’t afford it.” [emphasis mine]

from “Mean Street: Obama’s Big Fat Fibbing Budget” by Evan Newmark

The fact that Geithner would lie so blatantly is is not remarkable. That’s what politicians do. What’s astonishing is that people eat this up.

It appears that there are people in this country who are willing to believe that you can “save” by spending. Perhaps endless advertising and an excess of entertainment have doomed our nation.

Maybe banks should start accepting credit card payments for savings deposits!

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shame

Posted April 13, 2009 by ngzax
Categories: Politics
Tags: , , , ,

noun

a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior

—-

“I have no doubt that Notre Dame would never bestow … an honorary doctorate in divinity to a theologian who is an unrepentant apologist for racial apartheid and white supremacy, regardless of what these three individuals may have accomplished or how well their celebrity may be received by the wider culture and its influential institutions.”

“Why then would the University of Notre Dame bestow an honorary doctorate of laws on someone who for his entire public life has enthusiastically fought for a segment of the human population, the unborn, to remain permanently outside the protections of the law? Not only that, he has also demanded that our legal regime require that his fellow citizens, including Catholics, underwrite the destruction of these prenatal human beings. And not only that, he is right now preparing to remove by executive order protections that were put in place so that pro-life physicians, nurses, medical students, and others in the health care field may not be forced to participate in abortions or be discriminated against for refusing to do so or even harboring such beliefs.”

from “Barack Obama and Notre Dame: Juris Doctor Honoris Causa?” By Francis J. Beckwith.

This is a great article. Please read the entire thing.

I appreciate the fact that many people have become tired of fighting this issue over the past 40 years. It is quite exhausting to fight for God and Human dignity. No matter. The fight must go on. Look how many years the Abolitionists fought. And how many died. One hundred years from now, people who support unrestricted abortion will be perceived just as 19th century slave owners are today.

It is shameful for this historically significant institution to capitulate to popular culture on a matter of such grave importance.

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