Je Suis Charlie

Islamic radicals, with their usual style, have asked the world to repeat Everybody Draw Mohammad Day. As before this has caught me by surprise so I will simply repeat my earlier entry.

Is it draw Mo day already?

Here's something from the Mohammed Image Archive, a reproduction of Islamic art. 

 

Ok, I'm ready for my fatwa now.

This sort of image of Mohammed, illustrated by muslims, is just as blasphemous to the iconoclastic primitives who just murdered a dozen french satirists in Paris as any of the other cartoons and drawings floating around. I picked it because we should not forget that these barbarians want to murder Islam's past as much as our present.

#IAmCharlie

Unions Against Hospitals

If you made it up, nobody would find it believable. The Koch brothers donated $100 million dollars to help build a new outpatient facility at New York-Presbyterian hospital. Unions protest the donation. David Koch has deep ties to the hospital and sits on its board of trustees.

The New York State Nurses Association is against more nursing jobs in the new ambulatory care center as is the SEIU local 1199 who was there protesting against more work for their members. The NAACP was also on hand to lend support to the protest. But let's not leave out the ladies who were there to join in as an international women's day tie in. It was an absurd, surreal scene.

For the record, here's the full list of organizations that spoke out against better health care in NYC:

1199 SEIU, New York State Nurses Association, NAACP New York State Conference, African Services Committee, ALIGN-NY, Bailey House, Center for Popular Democracy, Community Voices Heard, Doctors for the 99%, HIV Prevention Justice Alliance, Healthcare-NOW! NYC, GABRIELA-NYC, Healthcare for the 99%, Interfaith Coalition, La Aurora, Left Labor Project, National Alliance for Filipino Concerns (NAFCON) Northeast, Make the Road New York, Met Council on Housing, Metro New York Healthcare for All, National Dominican Women’s Development Center, National Action Network, National Organization of Women-NYC, New York Communities for Change, Philippine Forum, Physicians for a National Health Program-NY Metro, QUEEROCACY, Rockaway Wildfire, Strong Economy For All Coalition, VOCAL-NY, Washington Heights Corner Project, Working Families Party.

Diversifying my information sources

I'm a little creeped out by people who have no clue what's going on outside their own little circles. Epistemic closure, a sort of intellectual isolationism is something I find repugnant. Google plus makes it easy to get out of that because people share circles of hundreds of others and you can just grab them, sight unseen and find a whole new world. That new world has really upped may daily consumption of cat pictures but also of people who think significantly differently than myself and who I can have a discussion with. I foresee circle building and pruning is going to be a regular activity for me going forward and it doesn't come naturally for me. It is good for me though.

Why Tim Cook is Right and Richard Branson is Wrong

On the surface, Richard Branson is a Tim Cook fanboy. He's two thumbs up on Tim Cook's advice for NCPPR to get out of Apple stock. But I think that Branson misunderstood what was going on and why Cook, rightly, took NCPPR to task. NCPPR was doing two things, not one. The first was pushing Apple on climate change. The second was seeking to get Apple to apply conventional ROI calculations on all that it does. NCPPR's account of the event stresses the fight on the first issue but it was the second issue that prompted Tim Cook's invitation to sell the stock.

This invitation makes sense. It's a core value at Apple that they are willing to chase after long-term projects that don't conventionally show value but do pay off in the long run. NCPPR's desire to fit Apple into the conventional mode of profit seeking analysis violated a core value that underpins the company and its stock so Tim Cook just said, in essence, "that's okay, its not for you".

Branson, like much of the media coverage, thinks that this is a fight about global warming and the freedom not to seek profit. But here Branson's dead wrong. The fight over environmental sustainability is something that Cook isn't taking off the table because one way or the other that fight doesn't touch on Apple's core values of making insanely great products.

Apple's already gone through one round of conventional ROI leadership in the past. This period was known as the death watch years when Apple fell behind and was on virtually everybody's list of dead corporation walking. If they're smart, they'll never go in that direction again.

Lobotomy by Bureaucracy

What does St Paul do to its school personnel that they thought putting a sopping wet kid dressed only in a swimsuit outside in sub-zero weather was ok? Is it the union? Is it that it's government work? Do they put chemicals in the water cooler in the teacher's lounge to reduce good judgment? Does it really take a case of frostbite to drive home the point that sometimes the rules have to bend?

The conditions were 5 below zero (-20C) temps with 25 below (-28C) wind chill barefoot, wet, and with just a towel. The kids tried to make a circle around the cold children to cut the wind down and share warmth but it wasn't enough to prevent painful frostbite. The only good news is that there won't be any amputation.

The school says that it's reviewing policy with the fire marshals  and will follow their recommendations. How about this for a recommendation "don't be a moron and endanger the kids for a fire alarm. If it's too cold, get the kids inside another building or a vehicle."

HT: Instapundit

Flipping on War

There's some airbrushing going on regarding fellow travellers and communists all over the Internet. A common case is with the members of the folk singer group the Almanac Singers, especially prominent members Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger. 
A lot of people flipped their opinions on war when their country was attacked in WW II. The Almanac Singers flipped when the USSR was attacked. Before that happened the Almanac Singers recorded their debut album, Songs for John Doe. Here's the full song list. I've listened to it all. It's quite educational and filled with savage attacks on Roosevelt from the left.

Ballad of October 16th

Billy Boy

'C' for Conscription

Liza Jane

Plow Under (The only one I couldn't find on YouTube)

The Strange Death of John Doe

Washington Breakdown

With the attack on the USSR, the group flipped their politics and wrote pro-war songs. It's hard to find the album as most copies were destroyed when it became politically inconvenient. 

The Almanac Singers flip due to an attack on a foreign nation instead of an attack on the US did not sit well and the group soon disbanded. An honest pacifist was fine in pre WW II America but politicking in song to the Soviet's tune didn't sit well with most. 

Advertising a Tax on Stupid

I've seen a few bitcoin ponzi schemes advertised before but I've never seen something as brazen as this. "We want to be clear: This is a Ponzi Scheme - This means that the returns on your investments come from other investors."

Sometimes freedom is the freedom to be a scummy jerk who cons people into investing in a ponzi scheme and convincing them to carry the con forward so they're one of the few lucky winners instead of the many unlucky losers.

Sick NY Times Icicle Cartoon

So the NY Times got Ed Driscoll going with this image

It's standard othering, let's kill our political enemies with a preprepared can't you take a joke fallback. Stuff like this has been on the left-wing propaganda menu for a long time in progressively more mainstream and influential outlets. It's almost a yawner that libs are being desensitized to political violence. 

It was another section that puzzled me how it got past the PC police at the NY Times, playing nasty tricks on your pet for your personal amusement. 

Why is this funny? What did the dog do to deserve being mocked by its owner? What was PETA's reaction? 

Update: It got weird and meta in Driscoll's comments suggesting that it was a clueless Commerce Department that was being mocked for attacking low priority tasks rather than concentrating on the economy. So we've got that going for us. The libs aren't going to come stab us until keynesianism works to create a roaring economy. We're safe. 

Calibrating Revenge

So my wife got ripped off by a Dunkin Donuts in Schererville, IN for a croissant sandwich. They directed her off to the side and said wait for it and then never delivered.

Her time and annoyance at being made to sit there for no reason and then be treated like an attempted thief when she went in looking for her sandwich far exceeds the money lost on the sandwich. So what's the right amount of umbrage to take when you're pretty good at doing internet searches and have the resources to blow this far out of proportion? Is a small bit of impotent protest enough?

Proportionate strikes for the value of the sandwich or even adding in the time value, humiliation, and the time I personally had to invest to let her blow off steam is simply not enough to realistically induce a change in behavior.

So what is socially appropriate? What's the right thing to do?

Suspending the Debt Ceiling Matters

The act of maxing out a card and responding to that by opening up a new card is a warning sign that you're going deep into credit trouble. It's a warning sign that helps some people back away from the cliff of personal bankruptcy and turn things around. That's the sort of safeguard the US has had with its debt ceiling limits running in parallel to the appropriations process. Until March 15, 2015 that debt limit safeguard is gone.

Until March 15 of next year, there is no process of getting a new credit card. Our present one is declared unlimited. The only constraint is on each individual purchase, and two thirds of our current spending doesn't even go through that process, being major item autopays like Medicare and Social Security that go up and down without act of Congress.

We've given a drunk the keys to a self-stocking bar for a year and expect, what? Sobriety is not a likely result. What are we thinking?

HT: Patterico

Chicago's got police car problems

It's the same old shell game. In NYC the Wagner administration started shorting road infrastructure maintenance in the 1940s. 30 years of holding off just a bit too long on painting, rust removal, and parts replacements and the West Side Highway comes down in 1973. An unforeseen accident said all the pols with their hands in the road maintenance budget

Today, we move to Chicago and we find that the police are suffering from unforeseen problems with their car fleet. Stretch out maintenance cycles, reduce parts budgets, purchase even a little bit based on the clout of the contractor and this is what you get. It's as predictable as a highway collapse and just as untraceable by the time the disaster unfolds.

Blacklist like a pro

Anil Dash gives 21st century lessons on how to construct a blacklist and feel morally superior while doing so. For extra credit, he adds gamification for that extra frisson of chic. This guy's good.

Update: Not to do with Anil personally, but I just followed up on the tribal emotions that come out when treating left wing blacklists regardless of whether you condemn them.

Update II: In comments on his gamification blog post, Anil makes an appearance and says he's likely to be more even-handed going forward because "I've just changed my habits overall". That's likely going to be as direct a response as I'm going to get so no, probably not a purposeful blacklist. But he did a great job of it accidentally.

Update III: Anil engages! Apparently I'm looking silly. I'm trying to do a solo entrepreneur deal on the subject of government oversight. Silly is the least of my worries. Our exchange is in the tribal emotions post (link above).

Even the NY Times Gets a Clue

The theory is that the free market imposes discipline and increases the responsiveness of organizations to failure so that corrections happen faster and there's less waste overall in the long run. It's kind of nice seeing that process work out even in a bastion of left wingery as infamous as the New York Times.

Reporters in The New York Times newsroom deeply resent the paper's editorial page, and the dissent has “reached the boiling point,” the New York Observer reports Tuesday.

It's not an ideological dispute, the Observer says, but rather the sense that the paper's editorials and columns are boring, ineffectual, poorly written and poorly read. The story was based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Times staffers, mostly on condition of anonymity out of fear of editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal.

Read the whole thing.

HT: Instapundit

Watching Al Jazeera

My father and I watched Al Jazeera America for the first time today. It was a pretty effective bit of brainwashing whose subject was cartoon journalism but whose purpose was all about promoting emotion over thought, emotion over reason. During a commercial break they advertised an upcoming show on immigration. It offended the both of us but, as is usual in our case, for different reasons.

My father saw one more rerun of the nasty propaganda machine he had to suffer under in communist Romania. He knew the truth because he had known witnesses. The witnesses told simple stories that revealed simple truths. The Soviets, for 20 years on the Nistru river would shoot attempted border crossers in the water and the Romanians would collect the bodies and the wounded as they drifted into Romanian territory. Later, they started shooting them before they got to the river as they hardened the border. My father's witnesses were Romanian border guards who, in peacetime, had to pick up the dead and wounded at a pace fit for a small war.

In those days, a Soviet border guard would get a bonus and 20 days vacation for shooting a would be crosser. If they were in need of funds or a break in routine, they would sometimes threaten a local peasant with death if they didn't walk into the no-go zone. The guard would then proceed to shoot them and collect.

It's not a story you hear too often. I knew at least one of those men as a child. He never mentioned this story to me, though he told me others.

Usually I don't pass on the really brutal stories but today I've overloaded on Soviet apologists claiming moral superiority. We do not have the moral filters to weed out these evil degenerates for mass murder as we do for their Nazi cousins. It's a shame that we don't.

The dead weep.

My son learns about the downside of international trade

This morning my son got the bad news, further delays on shipping his printer, this time because it's run into the logistical craziness that is Chinese new year, a fifteen day celebration that this year starts on January 31st and runs 15 days. He won't get his printer until March though the vendors are holding out hope that it'll be late February.

This sort of thing is just one of the many fun problems you run into dealing with international trade. The China price looks really good on paper but actually dealing with them teaches you that the price on paper isn't the only China price you're going to pay. I suspect that he won't be doing business with these people again and will be looking warily at any foreign trade until he's got a great deal more in reserves to fix things if they are delayed.

Just got a new phone

I've just entered my two week bliss period where I've gotten a new phone or other piece of tech and am enjoying the increased productivity but my internal scheduler hasn't upgraded my expectations on what I can do in a day yet so... productivity bliss.

This time it's the iPhone 5s so I expect to take this personal blog a bit more multimedia in future.

89k Governments Document project

Just put up the first draft of an index to a writing project that has been bouncing around in my head for some time, the 89k Governments page. The purpose of the project is to write and refine what it is I'm trying to get done with Citizen Intelligence. It's time to organize and structure these thoughts as I start to seek people to come on board and turn Citizen Intelligence from a one man effort to something that has enough manpower to have a real impact on US governance and the relationship between the people and their public servants.

3D printed screwdriver

Apple decided that they were going to create a pain point discouraging its customers from changing their own batteries by using five pointed screws that require a special pentalobe screwdriver for its macbook air and iphones. This isn't their first 'security screw' try. They vastly enlarged the market for torx drivers in previous product cycles and now that too many have those drivers in their toolkit, they've moved on.

Only one thing is going to stop this annoyance, I believe. A simple process that will take a photo of a screw with whatever head on one end and spit out a screwdriver to open up that screw on the other. Once 3D printers routinely, quickly, and easily defeat these screws, maybe we can get beyond the idea of sealed units that manufacturers make hard to open on purpose.