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Friday, 30 December 2011

The Old Man

Posted on 20:37 by hony
There were times that I thought he was incredibly aged. He'd sit on the couch and his eyes would glaze and he'd slip into a nap like a senile cat. He moved so slowly. Sometimes I thought he was just being really careful, other times I thought he was just dimwitted. Either way it left me exasperated.
There was just this way about him, that timeless "you'll see" that every old man says to every young man and every young man subsequently scoffs at, that made me laugh. I knew someday I'd be him, or at least be like him, but I was neither afraid of it nor excited about it. It was just inevitable, so it was a non-issue. Sometimes his wife would tell me (with a roll of her eyes) to "learn" when he'd do something particularly despicable. Like when he'd make misogynistic jokes.
I remember one December day, we were sitting in a duck blind, about 6:45 in the morning. The first hints of sunlight were just appearing, not so much as observable light but as a decreasing concentration of stars in the sky. It was a little below freezing, and we'd had to break through ice to reach our blind. I was wearing a pair of hand-me-down waders that used to belong to the old man. Somewhere, out in the darkness, ducks were babbling to each other and I knew we were about to have a good day. The old man had leaned over, holding his coffee, and said "thanks for coming" as though me being there was his privilege, not mine.
He took me duck hunting, many times. On one occasion, we drove almost 2 hours, in the dead of night, to reach the sweetest honey-hole of duck hunting in the Midwest. We'd put our names in the draw at Bob Brown Wildlife Area and gotten a good spot. As we were breaking ice to create a hole, my waders had split down the middle. To this day, 15 years later, I remember exactly what it feels like to have 32.001 degree water fill both your wader legs up to the crotch. Out of pure love for the old man, I'd kept my mouth shut for nearly a half hour, attempting to hunt despite obvious hypothermia. The old man had been a good sport when, with blue lips, I admitted I was finished. I was 14 years old. It was one of the best days of my life.
When the old man spends time with my daughter he's like Santa Claus - at least in that I've never seen him angry at her. And boy, sometimes she deserves coal. And this is where the aforementioned "you'll see" suddenly becomes poignant. You see, there's this hilarious timelessness that makes me embarrassed: old man tells younger man things, younger man disbelieves, becomes old man, realizes wisdom, and fruitlessly passes it on again.
When I was young, the old man used to laugh and tell me how gleeful he'd be when I was a parent. How he'd look forward to me dealing with my own children, just as he had dealt with his. How he hoped I got "exactly the child I deserved" which I never really knew if it was a compliment or an admonishment at the time.

Here's the thing though: I realize now that when the old man used to say that to me, it wasn't admonishment at all. It wasn't all about the times I was being a miscreant or underachieving in school or lying to my mother or being disappointing in general. What I didn't understand then was there was a flip side. The "child I deserved" was the one that would sit completely silently with me for over nearly two hours, only four years old, during a deer hunt. The "child I deserved" would be the one that was complimented by pretty much everyone for being incredibly smart. The "child I deserved" would love me without hesitation, without qualification, without justification. Just the same way I love the old man.


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LoA

Posted on 11:20 by hony
Holidays 1, Alex Blogging Time 0


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Wednesday, 14 December 2011

Avarice, Ctd

Posted on 16:37 by hony
Look, I don't have much to add to this incredible article. I just want to point out that the American taxpayer has paid/continues to pay Lockheed-Martin $112 BILLION DOLLARS to build 166 aircraft that have never been used in combat and are already planned to be replaced by an even more expensive aircraft -- built by Lockheed-Martin.


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Sullivan for Paul

Posted on 10:41 by hony
Andrew Sullivan and I EXACTLY agree on this:
In this difficult endeavor, Paul has kept his cool, his good will, his charm, his honesty and his passion. His scorn is for ideas, not people, but he knows how to play legitimate political hardball. Look at his ads - the best of the season so far. His worldview is too extreme for my tastes, but it is more honestly achieved than most of his competitors, and joined to a temperament that has worn well as time has gone by.
I feel the same way about him on the right in 2012 as I did about Obama in 2008. Both were regarded as having zero chance of being elected. And around now, people decided: Why not? And a movement was born. He is the "Change You Can Believe In" on the right. If you are an Independent and can vote in a GOP primary, vote Paul. Of you are a Republican concerned about the degeneracy of the GOP, vote Paul. If you are a citizen who wants more decency and honesty in our politics, vote Paul. If you want someone in the White House who has spent decades in Washington and never been corrupted, vote Paul.

Honestly it is as if I wrote that. RP2012.


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Avarice, Ctd

Posted on 07:57 by hony
This is the time of the year where popular bloggers put out "holiday gift guides" and slyly link to amazon with their username embedded so they get a little kickback if you buy the products they represent as awesome. More often than not, they do not disclose this little circle jerk to the readers. I find that disingenuous and reprehensible.


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Tuesday, 13 December 2011

Lockheed Martin Shows The Raw Power of Unbridled Avarice

Posted on 13:22 by hony
Imagine you were completely crass and immoral. You wanted to extract as much money as you could from as many people as you could. How would you do it? Here's the three things I would do:
1. I'd defeat my competitors by intentionally underbidding every contract. Or I'd come in at the same cost as my competitor but make outlandish scope promises in my bid.
2. I'd make those bids knowing I could weasel contract modifications in later to get more money. This would be accomplished by "buying" Congress. How would I buy Congress? I would open offices for my company in hundreds of Congressional districts, and I'd use the jobs created as leverage. I'd use the plethora of office locations to spread my work around too, and use the capital being pushed into those districts as further leverage.
3. When I missed deadlines, my competition sued, or the client balked, I'd blame subcontractors or the Client. Then I'd use the political capital I'd earned (mentioned in 2.)  and call Congresspersons to make the complaints go away. Then I'd make campaign contributions.

At some point, my company would have offices in more than 140 Congressional districts. I'd be paying tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions. I'd be raking in tens of billions in contracts (pdf) during the deepest recession in nearly 100 years. And I'd be catching hell for missing deadlines and for hundred-billion-dollar cost overruns. But I wouldn't care, because I'm crass and immoral.

What I want to know is this: who are the engineers at these sorts of companies? How can they live with themselves? I used to think that engineers were, in general, an ethical bunch compared to average or at least compared to some, like MBAs or Wall Street money launderers. But all these companies that are, in every sense of the word, invested in warmongering and tax-dollar-hoarding seem to employ a small army of engineers. It makes me sad.


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The Falling Price of Solar

Posted on 06:23 by hony
One thing I can NOT stand about libertarians is their dogged repetition of the idea that "letting the market decide" will somehow end well for humanity. My arguments against this belief usually start with "well nuclear missiles are in high demand, as are human organs...so let's deregulate those, right?"

But seriously. Here's the thing. People (for example Megan McArdle) like to point out that even as the price of solar power decreases, it still costs more than fossil fuel-based energy. And that the price drop is being helped by massive government subsidization. Take away the subsidies, they argue, and the appeal of solar will wane immensely.

Here's my rebuttal: just because a thing is expensive doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. Let me ask my libertarian friends, "which would you rather continue to fund: the war on drugs or solar installation tax subsidies?" The libertarian purists answer, of course, is "neither" but that wasn't really what I asked. My point is that if I have to pay taxes (which I do), I'd much rather pay them so that I can help decrease the rate at which our species is annihilating life on this planet, as opposed to funding bombs that are strapped to drones and dropped on children in Pakistan. I'd rather pay taxes to subsidize wind farms in western Kansas than subsidize a secret detention center for suspected terrorists.

People might counter that these sorts of decisions aren't either/or, and that I'm creating false choices. That's certainly true and I'll cop to it. But I have to ask libertarians one more question: when civil liberties are under attack from all three branches of government, the 2012 Defense spending bill allows the military to arrest U.S. citizens in America and hold them indefinitely, the President can order the assassination of a U.S. citizen with no trial or publicly-available evidence, and when protesters are being arrested all across the nation and portrayed as worthless entitled children...why are you wasting your considerable blogging talents writing about the vileness of solar subsidies?


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Sunday, 11 December 2011

Nightmare Sentence

Posted on 14:09 by hony
Gary Stix:
"If you could deduce every connection point of every brain cell, the strength with which each neuron fires, and the way these firing patterns change as the cells interact with each other, would, in fact, you be left with a copy of you?"
In Gary's defense the rest of the article is fantastic, and I am looking forward to reading Connectome, the book he is reviewing.


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Friday, 9 December 2011

It's Called Living

Posted on 21:00 by hony
Tonight I am sitting at my wife's school (The Abstracted Wife teaches art at an elementary school) on a cafeteria bench watching my wife hold my daughter. It is "pajama night" at the school. They are browsing the tables of "gifts" that kids could buy. Most range in price from 50 cents to 2 dollars. They're "shopping for a present for daddy" while I pretend not to watch. After they pick something out, I will take The Abstracted Daughter around the tables and let her choose a gift for Mommy.

I hang on to these moments. At work they're talking (very seriously) about layoffs. On TV, Presidential candidates vie for "most insane". Student loans choke me. The money we're saving for a down payment on a house takes a hit because I need work done on my truck. The holidays stress me. Trying to start my own company is a constant source of angst. My KC Star article is due Monday (the draft currently sucks) my weekly devotional is due for church (the draft currently does not exist) and on Sunday at church I get confirmed into Leadership Circle and lead the communion prayer (currently unwritten).

And yet, all of that noise is shattered like glass in this one perfect moment, watching my wife and daughter browse tables of trinkets.

There are a lot of things I admit I do not know. But what I do know is this: happiness and family are two different spellings of the same word.


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Wednesday, 7 December 2011

Revolution

Posted on 10:29 by hony
Lately, I've been toying with a number of impossible ideas that could easily and radically alter America for the better. Today's idea is this: What if stocks could be bought but not sold? Or what if they could only be sold back to the company that issues the PO?

Discuss amongst yourselves.
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Circumcision, Once Again

Posted on 09:21 by hony
Martin Robbins:
Try this thought experiment. Imagine waking up tomorrow morning to find yourself tied to your bed and rendered mute, your naked genitals exposed to the harsh glare of hospital lights. Your parents have decided that some skin should be hacked from your penis; perhaps so you can be forced into their religion, perhaps because they don't trust you to clean yourself in the shower, or perhaps simply because they think your penis should look more like your father's.

If you don't like the thought of this happening to you, if this offends your belief in self-determination or the rights you have over what happens to your body, then how can you justify this practice being inflicted on infants?

Now, try this thought experiment.
Imagine waking up tomorrow to find yourself a writer on a deadline who finds circumcision revolting. You want to write a compelling argument against it but you use citations from Wikipedia and Youtube. Then, you appeal to people's desire for "self-determination" when you try to compel them to follow your opinion.

If you don't like the thought of reading weak arguments, or if you believe that arguments that rely on using scare-words and wikipedia to compel the reader are worthless and degrade the argument in general, then how can you link to these articles on your incredibly popular blog?

Look, here's my problem with circumcision opponents, be they Andrew, Freddie, the people writing these hilariously one-sided wikipedia articles, or even members of my immediate family: mind your own damn business. It's my kid. I don't tell you that your children are screwed up by your decisions, so leave mine alone. That is, if you even have kids (I'd love to see a statistic of how many circumcision opponents are childless). The disgusting, bygone cultural practices that my parents followed and I follow cause you revulsion (I'd love to see a statistic of how many circumcised men are anti-circumcision for their sons)? The seemingly uncivilized cultural practices of Africans or Asians or people from not-your-culture cause you revulsion? Well, sorry to hear that. The diversity of cultures on this planet is one of humanity's strengths. I'm sorry that my penchant for desensitized, easy-to-clean penises frightens you, and makes you think I'm an evil scumbag. But it's my culture. It's different than yours. Deal with it.
There's this trend, (when 'modern' people write medical-ish opinion articles) to suggest that some sort of homogenous medical future could exist, where we all had the exact same top-of-the-line health care and that we'd all be better for it. Typically these people say "look how healthy people are at location X, someday maybe people at location Y and Z could have that same level of care" and then they extend that to basically attack every part of that culture Y and Z that differs from Culture X as unhealthy or unethical and therefore unhealthy.
As though every culture would be better off and happier if the people could live 85 years like we try to do. And that if we just assimilate all cultures into a giant, tapioca, planet-spanning mega-culture that does all the same things and acts in the same ways and has the exact same standards for morality and ethics the world will be a better place for it.

And yet there's a deep hypocrisy here, and it deserves to be mentioned: these people who would desire my conformity to their ethics for the sake of the children are quite happy to expose their children to any number of carcinogenic compounds, suicidally-unhealthy foods, violent behaviors and culturally-inherent risks.
All of us backwoods, violent, evil parents that will circumcise our children will end up with 117 infant deaths (per year in the US), according to some statistics.
Guess how many infants die in vehicular collisions in the US in the same period? Ten times as many. So you parents that are putting your children in cars and driving them around? You offend me by essentially attempting to murder your child. What? Putting your kids in car seats and driving around is part of your culture?
You parents that give your children pillows? You cause 900+ infant deaths a year. Good work, MURDERERS. What? Sleeping on something other than dirt and animal skins is part of your culture?

There's a solution: make circumcision safer. The arguments against it typically come in two fronts: either 1) the child is being put in unnecessary risk by having an elective procedure or 2) the child has some sort of right to defer the procedure until older. To the former, the reverse of logic is true: higher prevalence of circumcision would lead to a decrease in risk: more doctors doing it more often would make them better at it and lower their risk of error. Standardizing it as part of physician training in residency would help as well. To the latter, I have to ask: if there were clear, indisputable evidence that infant boys would grow healthier, smarter, happier, and live longer because they were circumcised...would you still argue that it is genital mutilation? Would you still find it morally reprehensible to force it upon a victim/child even though it would clearly help them? If so, I applaud your purism but are you also against Vitamin K injections? Routine vaccinations like tetanus and diptheria? Diapers? Making children take naps? Making them go to school? Making them brush their teeth? Ask me to make a list of things I've "forced" on my child the last 4 years and then bring me a ream or two of paper. Conversely, if clear medical benefits of circumcision would cause you to change your objection to it...well if I can erode your argument that easily why are you even bothering?

Look, I'm never going to convince anyone who opposes circumcision to suddenly be okay with it. Similarly, nobody is going to convince me that I was "mutilated" as an infant when I was circumcised. And that is the crux of a world with different cultures: there is no normative ethic for circumcision, just my applied ethic and your applied ethic. People don't seem to grasp that.


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      • The Old Man
      • LoA
      • Avarice, Ctd
      • Sullivan for Paul
      • Avarice, Ctd
      • Lockheed Martin Shows The Raw Power of Unbridled A...
      • The Falling Price of Solar
      • Nightmare Sentence
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      • Circumcision, Once Again
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