Below are the 12 most recent journal entries recorded in neyland_tarr's LiveJournal:

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006
5:25 pm	Adulthood I've just read an opinion post on the subject of the drinking age (http://hatemongers.mu.nu/) that dismisses the "We can get drafted, why can't we drink" argument. I'm not saying the argument is reasonable, but I think that dismissing it is a mistake. At present, in America, we tell 18-year-olds "From this day forth you can be drafted to fight a war on the other side of the globe, you can get married without consulting your elders, you can enter into contracts that will beggar you for life, and to top it off you can vote.... ...but don't drink for another three years." Then we sit back and express amazement that the young men (and women) don't listen to that last caveat with awed attention. If you read much military history you soon run into the adage that one of the first rules of command is "Don't give an order that you know will be disobeyed". Naturally real life isn't that simple, but I think that as regards drinking the principal applies. Either young people are full citizens at 18, or they aren't. If they aren't, then spread the progression from youth to adult over a few more dates. Making a single glaring exception is asking for trouble. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 1st, 2006
6:52 pm	Copyright Issues I have a migraine, so this isn't going to be very well organized. It's more of a laundry list of Copyright and Intellectual Property issues that have been rattling around in my head for a while: 1) Information doesn't 'want to be free'. Information doesn't want jack, because information is not sentient. PEOPLE want information to be free, because people are cheap. The catch-phrase "Information wants to be free" means "I don't want to feel guilty about stealing.". MAybe the people who hold Intellectual Property Rights to movies and music aren't very admirable; that doesn't make it OK to steal from them. 2) At the moment American Copyright Law protects unpublished 'manuscripts' in perpetuity. This has been interpreted to apply to letters and other casually written papers, and to diaries as well as to works probably intended for eventual publication. What this means is that historians are now faced with the task of obtaining permission to publish any large part of any private papers of anyone they are researching, no matter how long dead. Since the "intellectual property" that this new interpretation of Copyright protects did not exist BEFORE the new law was written, it wasn't taken into account as regards inheritance, so to get permission a historian must contact and convince EVERY descendent. this is obviously impossible. This has to be fixed. 3) Somewhere in here belongs the argument over the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance. To hell with 'separation of Church and State', those words shouldn't be there because the man who wrote the thing didn't PUT them there. He was (depending on your sources) a socialist, a communist, an anarchist, and/or and atheist. He didn't put the words 'under God' in his pledge because (right or wrong) he didn't think they belonged there. If we want to use the product of his mind, we should respect it enough to not adulterate it. Id we want a pledge that recognizes God, we need another pledge. (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 31st, 2006
12:26 pm	General Purpose Answer California is contemplating establishing Universal Healthcare - as if the awful examples in Canada, England, and Australia weren't enough - well of course they aren't; the majority of the Media is controlled by Liberals who have no interest in telling people of the gross failures of Liberal policies. So, we need a General Purpose Answer for Liberal proposals. It works for Universal Health Care, and would work for Kyoto-like global warming regulations, Gun Control, or Alternative Energy proposals. I leave other potential uses as an exercise for the bloody minded. "It's been tried. It doesn't work. In fact it's failed almost everywhere it's been tried at all. It costs the flipping earth, and doesn't come close to accomplishing its minimum goals, much less fulfilling its pie in the sky promises. It wastes time and money and costs lives. The only thing it DOES do is take power out of the hands of the people who hold it now, and give it to you Liberals." "No, thank you. in fact, not only 'no' but HELL NO!'". Current Mood: amused Current Music: muttering appliances (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 26th, 2006
8:42 am	Metrosexual I'm hearing the term Metrosexual again, which I thought had fallen from fashion. Somehow it always makes me think of a man who becomes sexually excited by commuter light rail. Of course if my definition is correct, that WOULD explain how so many ostentatiously useless light rail systems get built..... Current Mood: amused Current Music: Humming regfrigerator (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 24th, 2006
8:27 am	New Technology and the Betamax lesson in the early days of the video revolution there were two video tape formats on the retail market; Beta and VHS. Great things were predicted for Beta by the techno-enthusiasts. So far as they were concerned it was a better medium; better picture and better sound. It died. Why? VHS had the fist two hour tape - the first tape that could hold a full movie. That was all it took. The installed base of VHS mushroomed, and Beta never caught up. The lesson? It doesn't matter a hoot what advantages you see in a new technology. If the public - the people who will actually being paying for the perishing thing - don't see some distinct advantage to themselves, it's dead. Compact Disks took over from LP records with blinding speed. The general assumption among music geeks was that the driving concern was sound quality. Yet since the rise of CD's there have been three major attempts to sell new formats at least partially on the basis of sound quality, and all three have fallen flat on their faces. Two of hose formats, Mini-Disk and Digital Audio Tape (DAT), also offered recording, but failed in the face of old cassette tape and new recordable CD. The third - Audio DVD - simply sank like a stone. Many people are not even aware that it ever existed. Why did CD's succeed and the next three technologies fail? I have no polls or figures, but I suspect that CD's replaced records because records wear out and CD's don't. There is also the matter of portability; portable turntables never really worked very well, but portable CD players do. So far as recording went, cassette tape was entirely adequate until recordable CD got cheap - there wasn't a gap in capability. Fm the evidence it looks to me like sound quality - beyond a certain point - was simply not an issue. MP3 is taking over from CD because of another functionality issue; the ability make and quickly change entirely flexible play lists. Added to that is the ease of recording from a wide variety of sources (downloading). So, why do I bring this up? There are two new Video formats battling it out in the marketplace; Blu-Ray and HDVD. Both are being pushed HARD by their industry factions. My prediction? Both will fail. HDTV is beautiful .... if you can afford it. An HDTV screen is (as yet) an order of magnitude more expensive than a convention TV tube the same approximate size. Moreover, beautiful as that HDTV picture is, I think that people are going to find that it doesn't matter all that much. My personal experience is that I only notice picture quality if a) it is very bad or b) the story, direction, and performance in the video I'm watching are so bad that crispness of picture becomes the driving issue .... and I turn off movies that bad. I harbor the deep suspicion that, once a certain minimum has been achieved, picture quality is far less important to the buying public than the aggravation of switching to a new format and the expense of HDTV and its adjuncts. HDTV may survive - it has a Congressional mandate. I think Blu-Ray and HDVD won't. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006
3:44 pm	Prediction renewed A while back I predicted that both the 2006 and the 2008 elections would feature media scandals similar to Rathergate. In the wake of the various 'manufactured news' scandals out of Lebanon, I stand by my prediction. No news service, network, or paper is cleaning house over these revelations. None of them are taking more than token action to combat the impression that they simply don't care that they are being used to spread terrorists' propaganda, and many aren't taking any action at all that I can see. 2006 will see small scale scandals involving posed pictures, edited images, manufactured news, or some combination of two or three. 2008 will see, probably in October, a devastating anti-Republican revelation that will turn out to be a total fantasy, supported by nothing whatsoever. In both years the Media will be astonished at how little the voters are paying attention to the Media, and in both years they will offer all kinds of reasons that don't even touch on the fact that they have become uninteresting partisan hacks. Current Mood: cranky Current Music: none (1 Comment |Comment on this)
2:56 pm	Israel Were I spokesman for Israel right now, I would be holding a press conference and making the following statement: "All you countries and extra-national organizations that shoved this cease-fire down our throats; you have 24 hrs. to make serious, sizable, long term commitments of troops and support services to peacekeeping in Lebanon, and one week for those people and that equipment to start arriving. Thereafter, if a serious peacekeeping force is not in place, we return to sorting out the odds and sods in Lebanon." Current Mood: stressed Current Music: birdsong and insects (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 2nd, 2005
8:18 pm	Abortion rights fading away.... Although I am by and large Conservative, I am also generally in favor of legal abortion. I don't believe that any stage of a fetus is human, probably because I believe that humanity is developed rather than inborn. I've simply known too many supposed adults who didn't really qualify.... But regardless of my beliefs and opinions about abortion, I predict that the next few decades will see abortion rights slowly fade away, and that the people responsible for this will be Abortion Rights activists. The people behind the various campaigns for Abortion Rights have lost few opportunities to turn public opinion against themselves. Trying to silence Pro-Life protests by using the RICO statutes to bankrupt them was one hell of a tactical blunder; in the final Supreme Court case on the matter the ACLU filed a brief for the defense, and if your position is so far out that the ACLU is defending your Right Wing opponents, you've screwed up. The whole mess smelled of the most overt kind of fascism, and lost a lot of public goodwill. Opposing Parental Notification laws is idiotic. No such law that I have read fails to provide for a loophole in cases where a Judge feels that the girl is in physical danger. But never mind the details; parents are going to want Parental Notification. Parents vote. Opposing Parental Notification is a political nightmare. Partial Birth Abortion always had Political Poison stamped all over it in large crimson letters. Lying about how common it is was idiocy squared. It is a cause that cannot do anything but hurt the general Abortion Rights position. The Pro-Choice people should have dropped it like the hot potato it was the moment it became an issue. But they don't think that way. They apparently have no appreciation of the facts of life in a democratic society. They cannot get beyond the feeling that they are in the right, and to hell with what anyone else thinks. The real danger to Abortion Rights is not the composition of the Supreme Court; if the Court reversed itself on Roe v. Wade tomorrow all that would do would be throw the question into the laps of the States. The danger is that, sooner or later, some group of Pro-Choice nitwits is going to smuggle a minor across state lines in order to avoid Parental Notification, and get caught doing it. The Pro-Choicers simply won't leave it alone. And every time they get caught doing something similar, they will lose more sympathy. Laws will be passed to prevent their flouting of the public will. Eventually such laws will simply outlaw abortion, as an expression of outrage. In a democracy the citizens rule, and it is never wise to cross the Ruler. Current Mood: Sardonic Current Music: Peeper frogs (Comment on this)
Friday, September 30th, 2005
5:42 pm	It's all good..... OK, Roberts has been confirmed, and now we get to go through the whole thing over again. The Liberals crying that it isn't FAIR for Bush to nominate another conservative. The Conservatives muttering that it isn't FAIR for the Democrats to try to block each nomination. Phooey! IT"S ALL GOOD. So long as both parties stay within shouting distance of the rules, it's all fair. This is Democracy. It's messy, time consuming, and costly - just not nearly as hazardous to life, limb, and Civil Liberties as an efficient government would be. The Democrats have an absolute right to use any process open to them - including a filibuster - to keep the make-up of the Court to their liking. Similarly the Republicans have an absolute right to use any process open to them - including a rules change - to force a vote on terms they consider favorable. This is called parliamentary politics, and it is only polite when once side overwhelms the other, or one party isn't doing its job. Personally, I hope we get a Court that believes in reading the law as written, with an eye to history, as opposed to using scrying crystals and tea-leaves. But whatever. So long as, in the end, the government answers to the voters. Current Mood: aggravated Current Music: evening insects (Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 27th, 2005
5:04 pm	An election prediction It is too soon to be saying who will be the next President of the United States; so much about the 2008n election cycle is still up in the air. Nevertheless, I would like to go on record with the following prediction about the next race for the White House. Sometime in 2008 - probably in October - the 'mainstream' (read 'far out committed left-wing fascist') media will break a story devastating to the Republican nominee, and to Republicans generally. The story will spread like wildfire from usual suspect to usual suspect, maybe lasting as much as twenty-four hours. Then it will explode. The documents on which it was based will prove to be moderately transparent forgeries, or the 'source' will stand exposed as an obvious partisan/crook/imbecile, or important details will be contradicted by long-available public records. The explosion will end the career of at least one 'important' reporter, and will knock 5-10 pts. off of the Democrats' poll numbers long enough for election day to come and go. There may well be a similar incident in 2006, but the one in 2008 is very nearly locked in stone. The Democrats, the Far Left, and most importantly the Media have learned absolutely nothing from Rathergate. They don't understand how the Blogs could effect things so fast and so thoroughly. They don't understand how the story could spin out of their control. They don't even understand why it matters that the documents the story was based on were flagrant forgeries. And because they do not understand any of this, they also do not understand what an absolute catastrophe another such incident would represent for the Democrats.The minions of the media think of themselves as Batman, James Bond, Woodward, and Bernstein all rolled into one, but they have grown lazy and careless. Groucho, Bozo, Moe, Larry, and Curly would be more like it. They are going to try again, and they are going to get caught. My guess would be that the crux will be altered photographs, but the arrogance of the media is such that it may very well be more ink-jet documents supposedly from the era of typewriters. But don't take MY word for it. Wait...... Current Mood: pensive Current Music: The humming of my 'fridge (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 26th, 2004
11:40 am	Thoughts for the Liberal Intellectual Radical Progressives: The Gods of the Copybook Headings, Rudyard Kipling: 1919 As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race, I Make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place. Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all. We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn: But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind, So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind. We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace, Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place. But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome. With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings. So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things. When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease. But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe, And the Gods of the Copybook Heading said: "Stick to the Devil you know." On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life (Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife) Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death." In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die." Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew, And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four -- And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more. * * * * * As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man -- There are only four things certain since Social Progress began -- That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire -- And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return! Current Mood: frustrated (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 21st, 2004
12:13 pm	Post Election If Kerry Wins - Gods help us - he is going to have to expend a great deal of energy sweeping various examples of Democrat excess enthusiasm under the rug. I am not one of the Raving Right who thinks that the Democrats are systematically plotting to steal this election, but they are going to have a great deal of explaining to do either way. The problem is that many on the Left simply cannot see that if they do not agree with election law, that does not make flouting it acceptable behavior. OK, maybe convicted felons should be allowed to vote (in fact they can apply to the courts to have their franchise returned, and such requests are routinely granted). Registering them to vote without changing the law is still vote fraud, and calls the resulting election into doubt. The Right probably is not totally innocent of this kind of thing, but the Right does tend to show a reverence for the forms of the Law that sometimes amounts to a fetish. the Left, by contrast, seems to feel that good intentions trump the letter of the law in almost all cases, an attitude that often has them going off half-cocked. If Bush wins, the Left is faced with the task of explaining to themselves how they could expend that much effort and money and fail. Based on past behavior, my personal prediction is that they will blame their loss on some dark conspiracy and also tell themselves that they "didn't get their message out". This is roughly what they did in '94, 2000, and 2002. It should be entertaining, in a morbid way, to see how they spin their decision to run a candidate with the personal charm of a stunned toad on a blatantly anti-American platform as the product of a Republican plot. I am coming to agree with H. L. Mencken, who once suggested that life in these United States would be far more pleasant if, the dat after the inauguration, all failed candidates were taken to the top of the Washington Monument and thrown off. Current Mood: cranky (Comment on this)