Spend All Day In The Sack With You
Dave Pollard writes about factors involved in population growth, with his typically wonderful diagrams.#
So from a systems perspective, we actually have several more variables at work than Quinn suggested. Before the invention of agriculture, the balance of human numbers was preserved at no more than 300 million people, for three million years. Food availability caused numbers to rise, natural predators kept the balance in check. Whenever that failed, as in medieval Europe, the stress balance that Hall describes kicked in: 'naturally' lowered birth rates, and more death from violence and stress-related disease, until the overcrowding was alleviated and adrenal levels could return to normal. It's nature's way of sabotaging the system when it gets out of control. In fact pox viruses, of which there are thousands, affect every species on Earth (except, and only for the last couple of decades, man) and are amazingly species-specific: They flare up only in densely concentrated populations and are nature's (or god's) perfect population control mechanism.
And this is a key point:
Our culture has so indoctrinated us that the very concept of a world with fewer people is inconceivable, even horrifying, to most of us. Our laws, our religions and our culture have reinforced our natural inclination to procreate and perverted it into a fundamental 'right', even a responsibility. Despite this, because we instinctively know something is very wrong
It's interesting because what it comes down to is this: The planet cannot support all of us. Some people are going to have go. But everyone is thinking, It Ain't Gonna Be Me!
Alexander Payne writes about his growing distaste with porn.#
Most young men I know look at porn on the Internet. I have for years, particularly when single. I see it as a reality of being young and male (heck, probably just male, young or not): you're going to seek out visual stimulation one way or another; I'm not going to speak for women. But as porn has become an increasing part of the daily buzz in my news aggregator, the more disgusted I've been with the pornography I view. Having a better sense of the lives of the people, particularly the women, behind those movies and photographs has basically ruined the fantasy of pornography for me. I always had some sense of regret for endorsing, even if just via clickthroughs, the aforementioned ugliness of the porn industry. But hearing about the fall of some coke-addled porn starlet on a glib weblog has turned that ignorable regret into mouse-stopping disgust. I've quit looking at your "standard" porn, and quit reading Fleshbot and company.
There's a new blog on the sphere. Amanda Rochette writes about the lack of insight or explanation from her Laws & Ethics class.#
Besides my wonderful morning, my afternoon was much better. For the past couple of days in my Law/Ethics class we have been discussing Machiavelli. We just read an excerpt from "The Prince" today & discussed in class. The majority of the people in class said that they disagreed with Machiavelli's view on how it is better to be feared than loved. A good percentage of the class said it is undoubtedly better to be loved then feared. I think the thing that bothered me the most about this wasn't necessarily that they disagreed with Machiavelli, rather that no matter how many times I asked them why they thought this, they found the most incredible ways to avoid answering me. Gah!
It seems like a nice thing that say that one should be loved, not feared. There is a problem either way, however, love promotes an exodus of reason or purpose: it encourages people to not think about why a particular edict or law is good or not. It's essentially an appeal to authority of the heart, rather than to reason. And the fundamental problem of both is that they assume that one must be a ruler--a coercive controller of the people and a robber of their pockets.
I think that Leo Strauss, despite looking up to Machiavelli for his ideas (although not because he revealed them,) would probably say that the ruler should be loved, while the law should be feared. The most effective law, for Strauss, is the one that is "written on the hearts" of the people and the ruler is the one who appeals to these laws. The law, however, should be feared because it should be Divine, and thus carries an eternal punishment worse than what the ruler can offer.
The Ruler should be seen as the protector against the vile law-breakers and the messenger of the wonder of the law.
Tangential to the above, Grant Henninger writes about how he takes a position different that his true position in a political science class.#
I find that in many of my political science classes I take positions I do not agree with. For example, I'm taking a class on the National Security Establishment. In this class we will be doing an exercise where each student role plays a different organization. I am supposed to portray the Director of the CIA. As the Director I am going to recommend we assassinate anybody that stands in our way. It is, after all, what the CIA excels at.
In this instance it is clear I'm taking the view of the CIA, but I do this when we aren't role playing in class. I tend to take a fairly hawkish stance, being very aggressive in the positions I take. I'm not a pacifist by any means, but I also don't believe we should be assassinating people or conducting clandestine operations. I do not believe we should engage in wars of choice and I believe we should respect the sovereignty of other nations. But these are not positions I take in class.
Sometimes I do this to, or rather more specifically I just try to take the position that I think the rest of the class will not take. The purpose is to force them to beat me and prove to themselves that they are right.
But... Unjust speech can always beat just speech if properly trained. Ut oh.
Chip Gibbons interprets Leviticus 18:22, "You shall not lie with a male as with a women, this is an abomination."#
The order to not lie with a man as with a woman is pretty easy to obey. The fact is that a man is not a woman so when I lie with a man, I'm not lying with him as with a woman. In order for me to lie with a man as with a woman, my man partner would have to have the body of a woman. When two guys 69 it is not like when a man and a woman do it. It is impossible for two men to lie with each other, or have sex with each other, as a man does with a woman. Duh!
This command is saying that we should not violate the Law of Identity which says that A=A, a man is a man and a woman is a woman. So when a man is with another man, he should not be pretending that he is with a woman. In other words, he should not lie about who is his lying with. He should be honest with himself and those around him. This is consistent with Jesus' condemnation of divorce.
Political people don't generally like civil disobedience, unless it's for a cause that they support. Witness the spectacle going on in my former domicile, San Francisco. (And enjoy the punctuation problem that kept the restraining order from going out. It makes this former editor and current teacher's heart absolutely warm.) Conservative religious groups are foaming at the mouth at the act of mass civil disobedience to California's unjust law defining marriage as only occurring between one man and one woman. But just a few months ago, when Roy Moore's Ten Commandments monstrosity was being fought over in Alabama, civil disobedience of the law was all the rage with this same group of people.
My point above is not profound. People are hypocrites, especially when it comes to questions of power or perceived power. But it still surprises even cynical me when hypocrisy occurs in public and we all see it. Same idea's going on with all the hullaballoo about "activist judges" -- they only seem to be "activist" when they rule against you; when they're for you, then the judges are just upholding the rule of law.
Yes!
Gene Callahan writes about why it is okay morally to be opposed to U.S. military intervention as a libertarian.#
To answer that question, we should consider what will transpire if some person, out of sympathy for the oppressed citizens of Ruritania, successfully prompts the US government to invade that nation. Does the interventionist himself rush off to Ruritania liberate the people? In the infrequent case that he is on active military duty, he just might. However, generally speaking, he has no intention of going anywhere near the place during the war. Does he sacrifice his own resources to help liberate the Ruritanians? To the extent that his taxes might go up a bit to help pay for the war, he does to a very minor extent. But basically what an interventionist does is to encourage his government to forcibly extract resources from a bunch of other people, whether or not they share his belief in the morality or likely effectiveness of the proposed intervention. The government will then use the resources it has seized to send yet another group of people off to risk their lives attempting to free the Ruritanians, the folks for whom the interventionist has so much compassion.
Aaron Swartz proposes to use a wiki to decide the truth... WikiCourt.#
Then there'd be the argument phase. A wiki page would be created where each side would try to take facts from the evidence and use them to build an argument for their case. But then the other side could modify the page to provide their own evidence, expand selective quotatins, and otherwise modify the page to make it more accurate and less partisan. Each side would continue bashing the other side's work until the page gave the best arguments from each side, presented in such a way that nobody could object. (You may think that this is impossible, but Wikipedia has ably proven that it can work.)
The Black Saint announces a new series on the WB.#
The WB announced on Friday that it was not renewing Angel for a sixth season, which leaves an opening in the post-Smallville timeslot. Kelso and I put our gin-soaked minds together and decided that the best way of retaining Smallville's audience is to produce a shameless ripoff of Smallville itself.
We've decided to capitalize on all the hype Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ has received and pitch Nazareth to the WB. Like Smallville, it will focus on the early years of a legend. Like Smallville, it will maintain a dubious fidelity to the source material and won't make a whole lot of sense sometimes, but the cast will look fabulous.
Ian Bickling rants on XHTML.#
Semantic markup is supposed to be meaningful markup. The reality of web pages is that they are a visual, published medium. People think about these mediums visually, not in terms of a taxonomy of expression. When I want italics, I want italics. There's no underlying desire. I don't want "emphasis". I can reflect, and decide that I was intending to express emphasis, but that desire is retroactively determined, it is not my true desire at the moment when I was in the midst of composition. My true desire at that time really was "I want this text to be slanty with little curls".
Julie Leung sees right through my foreign language charade.#
I didn't put two and two together until I began thinking about this post, but I realized that one of the men in that class - not the joker - did ask me out later in the semester. It was significant for me since I can count all the guys who asked me out in college - or in my whole life for that matter - on one hand. I don't think it had anything to do with the joke I cracked about why I was taking the class. But I guess I don't know that for sure. Ted and I were Getting Serious at the time, so I turned down the date, turning down the opportunity I had to meet a guy through biochemistry studies.
No I didn't meet Ted in class. That's another story. For another post.
But perhaps Jay McCarthy's studies in Italian and French will turn into other kinds of studies....ratios in Romance language classes I imagine are a bit better than p-chem class (the Romance language course I took had only one guy and umpteen girls) .
Right now I'm working on my compliments. Sei cosi carina, cara.
Erin Judge writes about the horrible homosexual marriage that's going on all over an otherwise decent country.#
I do feel bad for all the hitched straight couples in San Francisco, because now their marriage licenses are no longer worth the parchment they're printed on. Also, I just found out that if any homo ever graduated from the same college as you, your diploma is now worthless as well. And don't even get me started on what happens to somebody's birth certificate upon coming out of the closet, AND the birth certificates of every other baby born in that hospital on that day.
The bottom line is that gay marriage is letting evil homasekshuls wreak havoc on our American way of life. These people have an agenda, and it's all about non-procreative relationships between consenting adults, and we all know the Catholic Church won't stand for that. I mean, what could be more immoral, horrifying, and disgusting than this?
Chip Gibbons is as upset about the election as I am.#
There is nobody to vote for in this election and I'm tired of being told how great it is to live in a free country when the only people running for election are all bought and paid for by special interests. George Bush has got to be the worst president that I've experienced in my lifetime. The only reason that he has a chance of winning reelection is because the Democrats are so pathetic.
Whenever I see a report about the election on TV I think about how we're going to have one of these losers for president for the next four years and that doesn't make me very happy. Four years is 7.7% of my life;
Michael Feldman writes about travel and living abroad.#
Despite these setbacks the Dowbrigade continued to travel and work abroad. Why? Quite simply, we believe that a healthy outlook requires a variety of viewpoints. In a way impossible to imagine until one has lived outside the US for an extended period, everyone in this country, despite the incredible variety of lives, ages, sexual orientations, political views and family backgrounds, shares a certain version of reality. To a high degree, the American version of reality is painted on a backdrop of constant advertising, corporate realityscaping, major media news and entertainment, and intense cultural chauvinism. This isn't the only version of reality available.
Jorrit Wiersma writes about his daughter, Silke.#
This morning she was jumping on our couch and the whole time she was laughing and saying "fun, hey?" And then I'd have to confirm that it was fun. When I didn't, she became pissed off and starting shouting madly "FUN, HEEEY!!" I felt as if we were in some cheap sitcom.
Matthew Thomas on usability problems with Mac OS X.#
So, smartypants, why don't you report these bugs to Apple?
Because in the long run, that would be a waste of time. Apple could employ their own quality assurance people and programming people and project management people who would make sure these sort of usability problems were fixed. And indeed they used to. An equivalent list of simple usability problems I found after using Mac OS 9 for three years would be less than half as long as this list I compiled after using Mac OS X for two days.
My point is that the quality of Apple's human interface has declined and continues to decline.
Philip Greenspun writes Something About Airplanes...#
As we were starting up N505WT a good-sized business jet was taxiing in. A van drove up to meet the passengers at the side of the $10 million twin-turbojet-powered plane. "What luxury!" we thought. "This is the only way to travel. They're probably just back from a resort in Mexico." A couple of guys got out of the van and walked around the plane wearing guns. Security for someone important! The one passenger got out, a teenager wearing a rather plain jumpsuit. Then we noticed that his legs were chained together...
Yet another thing that America's richest and poorest citizens share: traveling by private jet.
Julie Leung writes a little bit about meeting Ted.#
We went to the concert - along with a few other people - and ate some more ice cream then too. At Toscanini's that night we discovered we had each chosen the same two flavors: Grapenut Raisin and Banana Orange. So it seemed clear we were destined to be together....
It was another six months or so before we started dating and then years until we married....and if anyone had told me right then and there that Ted was the One I probably would have run. Run right out of the ice cream shop, Toscanini's or not. Getting married wasn't on my mind or in my agenda, not even in my Five Year Plan (Well I didn't have one of those, but Ted did, in his planner, and I'd tease him, when we were dating, if I was in there, scribbled on a page in the future...)