Month: August 2010

Minnesota Primary Results

Well the (few) votes have been counted and the unofficial results are in for the Minnesota primaries.

Running for governor the Republican Party has Tom Emmers, Democrat Party has Mark Dayton (although by a narrow margin), and the Independence Party (which shouldn’t be a party considering they claim to be independent) has Tom Horner.

The interesting one was the Democrats who seem to be torn between Mark Dayton and Margaret Anderson. She was ahead when I went to bed last night but Dayton was declared the winner when I woke up. The other two parties seemed to be pretty unanimous in their decision.

Honestly the turn out at last nights primaries were so low a ghost town could have obtained more voters.

Ted Stevens Declared Dead

Former senator Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens has officially been pronounced dead in the earlier mentioned plane crash.

Former chief of NASA, Sean O’Keefe, was also in the plane and died in the crash. A total of five people are reported dead with four survivors; two of the survivors are listed in critical condition.

Rest in peace.

EDIT 2010-08-11 11:59: I was incorrect when I stated Mr. O’Keefe died. He and his son both survived the crash fortunately.

Now That’s Blatant

It appears our Senate is in such a hurry to push a piece of legislation they forgot to actually name the fucking thing. Take a look at H.R. 1586 [PDF}:

SECTION 1. This Act may be cited as the
‘‘______Act of____’’.

That’s a catchy name! Boy our Senate is just flat out blatant about not even reading bills anymore. According to the summary the bill is:

‘‘An Act to modernize the air traf- fic control system, improve the safety, reliability, and avail- ability of transportation by air in the United States, provide for modernization of the air traffic control system, reauthor- ize the Federal Aviation Administration, and for other pur- poses.’’

I haven’t a clue what else is in it but it must be important if they didn’t even have time to give the bill a fucking name. Cripes! You’re government at work.

Good Day Sir

Style points are awarded to this man. Apparently a flight attendant got into a kerfuffle with a passenger. Instead of just taking it the attendant brought down a rain of profanity against the passenger and then concluded by pulling the emergency chute, sliding down the inflatable slide, and running from the airport. It is not known if the flight attendant first put on a top hate and a monocle before his brilliant exit.

It is reported that the attendant has been arrested, probably for being way too fucking awesome. As they say play big or go home.

Net Neutrality Redux

I’ve mentioned the looming war over net neutrality before. The more I look at this problem the more I realize it’s a no-win situation. Regardless of the solution found we lose something. Very recently Google and Verizon announced their legislative framework for net neutrality [PDF]. For those of you unwilling to read the document is boils down to this; Verizon is willing to surrender on the net neutrality battle on their wired networks in exchange for being able to ignore net neutrality on it’s wireless network.

There seems to be two options in regards to this battle; ask the government to legislate net neutrality or allow ISPs to control what goes across their wires as they see fit. No matter what solution is arrived at we the people get shafted.

Let us look at option one, government legislation. Anybody with a grasp of history knows government legislation doesn’t every work out as planned. The most dangerous outcome of legislating net neutrality is it will give the government precedence to further legislate Internet traffic. Sure this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal at first right? Wrong. With this precedence all we’ll need is one self-righteous politician wanting to “protect the children” or one politician in the pocket of Comcast to introduce additional legislation. For instance since the government now gets to state what traffic will be neutral (you can guarantee they won’t write a bill saying all traffic, they’ll set a committee in place to decide these things) they will get to change the rules. Maybe one religious zealot will decide pornographic websites must be filtered, throttled, or blocked and change net neutrality to add an exception for said traffic. Another politician might listen to Comcast and claim since BitTorrent is mostly used for illegal file sharing that ISPs have the right to outright block the traffic. It’s a deep and dark hole and we don’t want to travel down.

The other interesting problem with government regulations is their desire to hand out bailouts. How so? Well the newspaper industry has been chomping at the bit for a bailout and the government has been thinking about doing so. One proposal put forth was to charge bloggers a fee which would be sent to the newspapers. The reason? Well according to those proposing this bloggers only steal newspaper articles anyways so they should pay for them. What’s to say such a newspaper bailout isn’t included with any net neutrality legislation? You can guarantee such legislation will have hundreds of pet projects, pork, and other unrelated crap in it. What should take a paragraph will end up being 500 pages with nobody know exactly what’s in the bill.

Then we have option two, allow ISPs to control what goes over their wires. This is equally dangerous as the above because now each company will decide what sites their customers have access to. If you need an example of this just turn to AOL when they were an ISP first getting started. AOL did their best to create a walled garden providing a cleansed Internet experience for their customers. This wasn’t that surprising as when the Internet amounted to bulletin board systems you were mostly restricted to talking to people using the same ISP as you had. Alas this problem is even bigger due to the fact there are a handful of very powerful ISPs. Let’s say Comcast, America’s biggest ISP, decide they are going to block all BitTorrent traffic. Since most traffic crosses a Comcast line at some point they would effectively block BitTorrent traffic for most American users regardless of the ISP they used.

I haven’t answered one question yet, why do I feel net neutrality is a needed thing? Why do I think we have any “right” (I’m not claiming any rights here but it’s a word the better reflects my idea I’m putting forth) to uncontrolled Internet traffic? How can I believe companies can’t control what is going across their wires? Well the answer to all those questions is one simple fact, the Internet was created from public funds. I glossed over the history of the Internet in my previous net neutrality post. But the Internet evolved from ARPANET which was a government funded (in other words tax money funded) research project during the Cold War. Everything from the protocols to ICANN (who control allocation of IP addresses) was created with American tax money. Heck much of the physical infrastructure was paid for through public funds. Because of this I feel we have some say in how the system we paid for is used. We can bitch, whine, moan, and otherwise complain because we paid for it. It wasn’t created by a private company and thus is a public system. That’s why the rules here are different, plain and simple.

The ironic thing is what we have right now is the best option. Currently the government wants to legislate net neutrality but need an case to point to for justification. On the other hand ISPs want to begin charging customers more money via tiered (as in site access not connection speeds) Internet access but are know that will be exactly the case the government wants. It’s a stand off. So long as this stand off continues to exist we’re OK and everything is peachy. The second this stand off stops we’re going to start losing.

Why the 9mm is Inadequate

How’s that for an inflammatory post title? Sorry to disappoint but the title has nothing to do with the post, I’m just an ass.

The Firearms Blog linked to a story which involved a man who was shot 21 times and survived:

More than 50 bullets were fired, almost all of them by the police. At least 21 of those bullets pierced Alvarez’s body.

Luckily for Alvarez — whose criminal record includes at least eight prior arrests — none of the bullets hit his brain, heart or major arteries.

This story really brings up why emphasis needs to be placed on shot placement. Yes the human body can survive 21 gunshot wounds depending on where those shots hit. It doesn’t matter what caliber you’re using if you don’t hit something critical you’re not going to stop the threat in a timely fashion and you’ll be putting your life in prolonged danger. Aim the gun and practice shooting center of mass.

Violence by Proxy

So the basis for this post is a story in the Sun. For those of you who are unaware the Sun is kind of the UK’s version of the National Inquirer. The story itself is so loaded and one sided that it opens with this:

PRETTY teenage sisters have turned themselves into angels of death – shooting dead DOZENS of wild animals then smiling for sick photos with the bodies.

Hey at least they aren’t trying to hide behind being “balanced.” I have no problem with bias so long as you don’t try to hide it. But I’m sure you’ve already seen this story and honestly this post isn’t about this story. This post is about violence through proxy.

There are a lot of people who are anti-hunting. They protest the fact that people take firearms into the woods and shoot wild animals. Most of these people claim such acts are barbaric and outside of civilized life. Of course at the lunch you can find these same people eating a burger or ham sandwich (if you’re a vegan or vegetarian you’re exempt from my calling of hypocrisy). Whenever I’m around one of these people I make sure I point such hypocrisy out. Usually they go on a rant about how animals raised on farms are killed in human ways without any sickening blood lust hunters have. Truth be told I’ve seen factory farm conditions which is where most meat used in restaurants originates from and I can tell you hunters are orders of magnitude far more humane than those large farms (you want animals raised on a farm and slaughtered humanely check out your local farmers, they’ll not only have better meat but for cheaper than the grocery store).

In reality these people just don’t like the idea of violence… when done in a personal manner. These are the same people they say you should just give a mugger what they want or flee from your domicile when an invader breaks in. In both cases they state you should call the police and let them deal with the problem. But what does calling the police amount to? Well ultimately you’re asking a large organization to send a nameless person to do violence on your behalf. If there is an invader in your home and you call the police there is a likely chance of a violent encounter occurring when the police arrive if the thug hasn’t already fled.

Buying your meat is the same thing. You are asking somebody else to kill and slaughter an animal for you so you can avoid getting your hands dirty. Hunters on the other hand are willing to take responsibility for their own meal gathering and person the necessary violence themselves. Honestly I believe they creates far more respect for the animals being consumed because a hunter knows the difficulties involved in a hunt.

The bottom line is these type of people are usually ones who proclaim themselves to be pacifists. Of course pacifists can only exist so long as there are other people available to use violence on their behalf. Police officers and military personnel are generally the people who fill such roles. Police and military personnel don’t carry guns because it’s a deterrent to crime, they carry them because they may need to use violence to defend their lives. Even in the UK police usually have some form of weapon be it a baton, Tazer, or pepper spray.

The main point here is simple, if you are anti-hunting but eat mean you’re a hypocrite. If you are anti-self-defense but call the police upon a thug entering your home you’re a hypocrite. Violence is violence regardless of who is doing it. By using violence by proxy you are showing an unwillingness to take responsibility for your own well being and a willingness to put other peoples’ lives in harms way to defend your own. I’d go so far to say you’re selfish and a total bastard by proclaiming your life is worth more than another’s since you are willing to throw them into harms way.

Violence exists, it can’t be avoided. You either are willing to realize that fact and live with it or unwilling to realize that fact and pretend it’s not true.

Abandon Earth

Stephen Hawking is known around the world as being a pretty smart man. Due to his intelligence when he speaks people actually listen (whether or not they process what he says is a different matter). Well Mr. Hawking made another statement saying humanity needs to leave Earth or face extinction.

This is the reason I’m such a strong supporter of advancing space exploration. The bottom line is we need to get off this rock as soon as possible. Furthermore we need to find a means of expanding beyond this solar system as well but right now the immediate goal should be to make another planet habitable. Any number of things could cause the destruction of this planet including a sizable chunk of space rock, nuclear war, and of course a pair of wolves swallowing the sun and moon.

Either way the priority of our race has been survival but few seem to understand that continued survival requires we take some of our eggs from this basket and move them to another basket.

EDIT 2010-08-09 12:49: Hawking and Hawkings are slightly (completely) different. Edits made to reflect this slight oversight. Also I can’t type. Thanks for pointing it out Jeff.