C = Pdc * F * G * A10 * S * Dn * Ra * A

Where:
C = total number of candidates
P_dc = total population of DC metro area
F = ratio of females
G = ratio of college graduates
A₁₀ = ratio of those within a ten-year age range of myself
S = ratio of single
D_n = ratio of nondating
R_a = ratio of atheists/agnostics/nonreligious
A = ratio of those I find attractive

Note that I am assuming (quite incorrectly, I might add), that each of these terms are completely unrelated; i.e., that F does not differ based on the metro area in question, or that G doesn’t vary according to F. I have done this to make the research for this type of equation much easier on my end, and also so that readers can determine an analogue of this equation for their own hometown.

Of course, this equation doe not even take into account basic chemistry-type stuff, or whether or not I’d even get along with them at all. Every additional variable makes C drop even more, which is disconcerting when you take into account how small C starts out at.

(Of course, there is one variable that is actually additive, since it would be placed instead of another variable, rather than appended to the end of this product. As an adherent to polyamorous philosophy, I might replace S and D_n with P, the ratio of polys in the total group. This number, however, is significantly smaller than what I have listed in the equation above, so we will ignore it for the purposes of this journal entry.)

With the help of Google and the all-powerful internet, I have found the following data:
P_dc = 1 million
F = 50%
G = 27% (2003 report on 2000 census)
A₁₀ = 10% (2000 census)
S = 31% [unmarried] * 52% [percent of unmarried that also do not cohabitate] = 16% (2008 report from uscensus)
D_n = ? (can’t find this information)
R_a = 16% (2007 religious ladscape survey; interestingly, the US census does not gather religious data)
A = ? (I will need to think for a while before getting this number)

With these values, we can determine C:

C = 1 million * 50% * 27% * 10% * 16% * 16% * Dn * A
  = 345 * Dn * A

That’s less than three hundred forty-five people. Significantly less, in fact. If I put D_n at 50% and A at anything remotely reasonable, like 25%, the number drops precipitously to just 43 people. Even if I stretched things out a bit and put A at 75% instead, it’s still only 130 people. In all of the Washington Metropolitan area.

And this is just to determine the potential pool of people from whom I could even consider seriously dating. Can you imagine trying to find one of 43 people in a population of 1 million residents? That’s .0043% of the population. Talk about a needle in a haystack. The odds of even finding one from that potential pool by chance is astronomically low.

I never realized I was quite this picky. /c:

With apologies to David Kestenbaum, who gave me the idea to do this on This American Life. To find better statistics for your own area, I recommend ask.census.gov.

A few years back, I tried an experiment where I went without food of any kind for as long as I possibly could. I wanted to test myself, to see if I could stand with greats like Gandhi, who went for three weeks without food at age 70. (I wasn’t even counting those IRA guys who went for twice as long—that’s just insane.) In the end, I lasted for fifteen days, consuming only water and Dr Pepper the entire time. Ironically, I broke down shortly after volunteering in a soup kitchen, eating a small bag of McDonald’s fries.

Thankfully, starvation of this kind is rare in the developed countries of the world. In the United States of America, for example, very extremely few people actually suffer from malnutrition so extreme that it endangers their life. It does still happen, of course—just ask Dr. Mariana Chilton, one of the friends I made at Share Our Strength’s Conference of Leaders last year. She works with extremely underdeveloped children every single day.

But of far greater concern for a country like the United States is the fact that hunger is still so prevalent. No one is surprised when I say that few Americans die from starvation, but almost everyone I speak with is genuinely surprised to find out that 1 out of 6 children in the United States are at risk of hunger. 12.4 million children (just in the States) are at risk of going 24 hours or longer without food. And they’re not doing it for kicks, like I did.

The situation appears even more grave than this if you think about it for a while. In many families, the expense of food is enough to cause family members to go without food much more often than you think. The 12.4 million children statistic is only applicable when there is so little food that not only do adults go without, but children as well. Just think of how many more families are out there that aren’t quite at the level where the children go without, but still have to cope with adults going without food on a regular basis.

The fact that this situation exists in a developed country like this is just sickening. There really is no reason for our wealth inequity to be so extreme that this sort of thing has to ever happen. It boggles the mind how our civilization can somehow be okay with this.

That’s why I have pledged myself end hunger. I am going to do what it takes to bring real action and get this issue resolved. But I’m not just choosing to do this because the need is great. I’m also doing it because this goal is entirely achievable. We can end hunger. It is absolutely possible that, with properly applied techniques, we can completely end hunger in the United States within ten years.

I don’t say this because I am so patriotic that I care more about Americans than others. No, my real intention is to complete a goal that is actually achievable, yet sounds so impressive that it will cause others to look at the result and say to themselves: look, the USA has completely eradicated hunger within its borders in just ten years; why can’t we do the same? I am hoping for a sort of domino effect, where the eradication of hunger in our country will mean ALL developed countries will then solve their hunger problems, and then the inequity with developing countries will cause all those efforts to do the same with the rest of world’s population as well.

I know it sounds backwards; helping those best off before those who are worst off seems almost criminal when you first consider it. But this is a question of tactics. Throwing $500 million at ending worldwide hunger will save many lives, but not much more than that. Spending that same $500 million in the USA will literally eradicate hunger in the US, or at least in a significant portion of it. That will then cause momentum that will carry on to save many others—just think of how many more people would give to end hunger if someone actually showed good results. It is imperative that we have a win in our column that is as big as eradicating hunger in America; the fact of doing so may very well allow us to raise another $500 million.

This is why I’m asking all my readers to sign their name and pledge to end hunger, either by donating to a hunger organization like Share Our Strength, volunteering at a local food bank, or even just spreading the word. It doesn’t take much to make a difference.

So please, everyone go to the PledgeToEndHunger.com and sign your name. For every person that puts their name there, Tyson Foods will donate enough food to feed 140 children. Just by putting down your name. That’s all. Everyone who reads this can do that much, can’t they? Plus, if you can get enough members of your local community to sign the pledge as well, then Tyson Foods will send your state an additional truck filled with food. So go sign the pledge.

By the way, the reason it was McDonald’s fries that did me in was more due to the fact that one of my methods for ensuring I didn’t eat was to travel without cash on me in any way. I ate those fries mainly because I found a dollar bill on the ground that day, and the presence of cash in my pocket was enough to make me miss out on the three week mark that Gandhi set for me. Oh, well.

Although I have posted a few youtube videos previously for work related reasons, this is the first time I’m posting a video that I shot, spliced, and edited all on my own. Unfortunately, this means the result is actually fairly corny, but it’s the best I could do for my first time.

Music used is:

• What Planet is This? - The Seatbelts
• Ask DNA - The Seatbelts
  Edit: Tank! - The Seatbelts (thx for pointing this out, Matt)
• Misato Theme - Shiro Sagisu

Please feel free to laugh at my first try at video editing. I’m sure I’ll improve in the future.

Twitter is one of my favorite web apps, right up there with IM and e-mail.  I use Twitter for everything from work to news to trivia to play and beyond.  But if you’re new to Twitter, you might need a little direction on which people are good to follow.  Hence this list.

(Please keep in mind that Twitter is best consumed only when all the content you subscribe to is interesting to you.  Don’t just follow everybody.  Limit who you follow to under 100 at maximum; I recommend under ten for those who are getting started.  A good number to follow is forty or so, once you’re into it.)

The following list is of people that I personally follow, simply due to their interestingness.  As I’m not a big fan of celebrities nor up-to-the-minute weather updates, neither of those are listed here.  Your tastes may differ quite drastically from mine, so take these suggestions with an appropriate grain of salt.  Also note that my very favorite twitterers are bolded as appropriate.

Skepticism

• @jref - The James Randi Educational Foundation’s official feed, run by president Phil Plait (@BadAstronomer). Skeptic news and the like. More organizational presidents should run their organization’s twitter feed, in my opinion.
• @donttrythis - Adam Savage from the Mythbusters. Excellent public voice in the skeptic community. One of my favorite feeds to follow.
• @BadAstronomer - Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy Columnist at Discover Magazine, President of the James Randi Educational Foundation, and all-around cool skeptic, has one of my favorite feeds on twitter.
• @pennjillette - Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit fame) uses twitter mainly to update his facebook status. In fact, I doubt he ever checks his @ replies at all. But even though it’s less interaction and more voyeurism, I still can’t keep from following his behind-the-scenes bullshit tweets.

Politics

• @joebiden - Our VP’s feed is empty now that he holds the second highest office in our nation’s government, but I’m still subscribed to it just in case a policy change allows him to do a personal tweet every once in a while, as Governor @Schwarzenegger occasionally does.
• @BarackObama - Our President last tweeted on January 19, the day before the inauguration. Or, rather, his unnamed assistant did so. But I’m still blindly following the account, just in case.
• @KarlRove - Yes, it’s _that_ Karl Rove. And yes, he actually does twitter on it himself about 50% of the time. Of course, the other 50% is done by someone he hired for PR, but you take what you can get. I find it interesting just to hear what he’s up to half the time nowadays.
• @algore - Al Gore uses his twitter account just as another press release outlet, but since he only does so once a month or so, I don’t mind being privy to whatever he’s shilling this time. Often, it’s quite interesting stuff.

Celebrities

• @jimmyfallon - I don’t watch Late Night because I only watch tv through bittorrent these days, but his time at SNL was quite entertaining for me. Not my favorite feed to follow, but definitely good enough to make this list. (His show’s feed is at @LateNightJimmy.)
• @BrentSpiner - He’s a bit too snarky for me to really be into what he says, and his lack of emoticons mean that I don’t always get when he’s being sarcastic until well after the fact, but it’s entertaining to watch anyway. Plus, how could I not follow Data?
• @levarburton - The longtime host of Reading Rainbow has exactly the kind of twitter feed that I can get into. Levar is really into technology, and loves to interact with the twitter community. This makes him a great personality on Twitter for any geek to follow.
• @wilw - Wil Wheaton’s antics are worth watching, if you’re into the kinds of things he’s into (i.e. ultimate nerdom).
• @hodgman - This surprisingly unfunny comedian’s attempts at humor make me laugh just because it’s so not funny. It’s hard to explain unless you know who I’m talking about.
• @mileskahn - Miles Kahn is one of the editors over at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. His tweets about segments he works on are always an entertaining backseat look at the set.

News

• @BreakingNewsOn - If you want news as it happens, this is the twitter feed to follow. These guys break stories BEFORE the tv news outlets do. The only way to get more current than this is to either watch the global twitter stream live as it’s tweeted or turn on c-span. A minor drawback to this cutting edge news is that they have to issue retractions at a rate of about once a week. It’s worth it, in my opinion.
• @democracy_now - Democracy NOW! is my favorite news source, and their twitter feed is a good way for me to keep up with what’s going on behind the scenes. Every time they visit DC, I always go out to see them.
• @CDCEmergency - The Centers for Disease Control’s emergency twitter feed generally posts pretty inane stuff. But when emergencies happen (and you know they will), this is one twitter feed you’ll be glad you subscribed to.

Technology

• @cwilso - Chris Wilson is an engineer over at Microsoft that works on the Internet Explorer browser. He has some fairly interesting things to say from time to time.
• @LeoLaporte, @kevinrose, @sarahlane, @martinsargent, @patricknorton - I used to LOVE watching The Screen Savers on TechTV. Besides listening to This Week in Tech and Diggnation via podcast each week, I also subscribe to their twitter feeds as a guilt pleasure. We’re all allowed to have one. (Or two.)
• @mattcutts - Matt Cutts of Google is on Twitter. If you know who he is, then be sure to follow him. If you don’t know who he is, then you’re probably better off ignoring this particular tweeter.

Science

• @MarsRovers - Spirit and Oppy aren’t doing too well anymore, but their sporadic news feed still gives great information. Account run by @VeronicaMcG.
• @MarsPhoenix - Mars news at the speed of twitter. Awesomeness entailed.
• @MarsScienceLab - It’s still being built, but I have high hopes for this guy. Follow if you’re at all interested in science.
• @nsf - The National Science Foundation doesn’t yet ‘get’ how Twitter is useful, but I’m holding out hope that this feed will become extraordinarily awesome in the future. It has such potential, and one day an exceedingly awesome intern will take it over and make it kick ass.

Washington, DC Specific Twitter Feeds

• @dcalerts - Local DC emergency news.  Useful for those of us inside the beltway of our nation’s capital.
• @wmata - The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority runs the local metro (our subway/public transportation).  Seeing as how the metro is my primary mode of transportation, this feed is always very useful to me.
• @SmithsonianIMAX - Their feed keeps me up-to-date on what films are being shown at DC’s local IMAX theater.  This week it’s The Dark Knight.  You can’t tell me that isn’t crazy awesome.
• @amhistorymuseum - These guys do a great job of letting the public know what’s going on at the American History Smithsonian without being too press-releasey.
• @nmnh - The National Museum of Natural History Smithsonian does just as great a job.  I wonder if the people behind these Smithsonian twitter accounts get together and compare notes or something?
• @smithsonian - This is how twitter should be handled by any organization.  Whoever is behind this account is freaking awesome. Somehow this twitter feed stays on message even while posting exceedingly retweetable tweets.  I am suitably impressed.

Niche Tweets

• @dailymtg - From the daily Magic column over at magicthegathering.com.  If you’re into Magic, you’ll enjoy their very topical content.
• @librarythingtim - Runs LibraryThing, one of my favorite social media sites.
• @galcon - My second favorite iphone game.  I subscribe just to keep up with updates.
• @fieldrunners - My favortite iphone game.  I also subscribe just to keep up with updates.

Random

• @dailyhistory - A daily dose of history.  Cool for trivia buffs.
• @ComicTwit - Bad jokes (mostly puns) tweeted at random parts of the day.  Funnier than @hodgman.

Non-Profit

• @ShareStrength - Share Our Strength is the national nonprofit I work for.  Our mission is to end child hunger, which is no small feat.  My colleague and fellow web guy, Jeff Wiedner, runs this account.  I tweet here around once a week or so, when I have something to add.

Personal (Friends & Family)

• @EricHerboso - This is me.  I tweet about pretty much anything and everything that interests me.  If you’re reading this blog entry, then you probably should follow me, as I talk about the same kinds of stuff there as I do here, but far more often (and in only 140 characters, to boot!)
• @tigreroar - My dad, a realtor in the DC metro area.  Has first page google search result for “short sale option” (without quotes), which makes him quite prominent in his field, and makes me way too proud of my SEO skillz.
• @Mr_Blithe - One of my good friends from college.  He’s teaching English to high school students in Japan.  Crazy, yet awesome.
• @joe_sos - He’s the sysadmin over at @ShareStrength, where I work.  I guess that makes him a work buddy.  Weird that I have those.
• @mendoek - Another good friend from college.  Med student with a brain that somehow is able to stand being friends with normal people.  I envy his openness.
• @Gibeath - One of my oldest friends, and one of the smartest persons I know.  And that’s saying quite a lot.

People I Don’t Follow

• congresstweets.org - A list of your local congressmen with twitter accounts.
• cdc.gov/socialmedia - The Centers for Disease Control runs many social media accounts to help keep everyone informed and up to date in the event of an emergency.
• celebritytweet.com - Be warned that not every twitter account is actually run by the person who claims to.  @THE_REAL_SHAQ updates his status directly, while @BritneySpears hired someone to take care of her twitter account fulltime.
• porn stars who twitter - Yes, even porn stars are on Twitter.  But be warned: their lives are just as boring as everyone else’s.

I hope you enjoy the good follows above.  If you have any suggestions on who you might think I’d like to follow, please don’t hesitate to leave me a note.  If I like it, I might even add it to the list.  (c;

As a final note, for those who are interested, I use TweetDeck on my mac at home and TwitterFon on my iphone to keep up with all these tweets.  I recommend both quite highly.

Happy tweeting! (And don’t forget to follow @EricHerboso!)

Through talking to others over the years, I’ve learned that what I think of as my “conscience” is very different from the ordinary person’s conscience. While it is true that I do feel badly about certain things from time to time, they are almost never the same things that others continue to maintain that I should feel badly about.

Sometimes, when I am feeling particularly down, I look back on events from my past that I honestly regret:

• the fact that I borrowed money rather than earned money while in college
• the ignorant moment when I used the word “irregardless” in front of P in a non-ironic manner
• the continued purchases of video games that I could instead pirate & send the proceeds to needy families in Ethiopia

But other things, things that I intellectually realize are horrible in the extreme, are items that I feel almost nothing about at all. It is as though these events, while real, have no guilt component embedded in them, unlike the events listed in the earlier bulleted list. Still, though I feel no guilt, intellectually I understand that they are negative to some degree or another, and thus I take care to ensure that they never happen again. But no matter how many measures I take, one fact remains: I do not feel bad about having done them.

Some of these items include:

• losing control of my temper and destroying a dorm window w/ my bare hand, leaving others to pay the bill
• making fun of a fellow classmate nehind her back (longtime readers will remember her as Total Recall) just because I felt she was not a particularly ‘deep’ individual
• being physically violent with others in a most cruel and continual way during my first few formative relationships

But there is another class of items I do not feel bad about: things that, for one reason or another, I feel justified in not feeling badly about. Like looking at breasts, for instance. As I explained in detail in my feminist blog entry a few weeks back, I do not consider the looking at breasts to be a negative thing, despite the fact that I consider myself a fully fledged feminist. While some may believe that breast-gazing is equivalent to objectifying the generic female person, I disagree halfway: I think it objectifies only the female form, and so long as the gazer respects the person within that form, then no harm is done by looking. (Unless the recipient doesn’t wish to be looked at, in which case surreptitious gazing is a borderline case.)

But there are other items as well, including:

• looking at breasts, as aforementioned
• telling the truth in my public blog entries, even if they include another person
• claiming that I’ve been vegetarian for six years, even though I recently ate meat on purpose in a fit of depression (I justify this lie by being honest on this blog (and twitter) concerning it)
• not talking to nor particularly caring to get to know people who are, after all, my family by blood
• thinking God and religion in general is a plague on mankind that should be strictly controlled by atheistic forces
• not having nor desiring any contact w/ at least one genetic child of mine

The above list is just a sample of the many things I continue to do to this day, even while others I talk to continue to insist that it would feel wrong to them. Hearteningly, everyone seems to agree with me on one or two items, yet disagree on others–yet everyone seems to think different things are right. I should mention that I have what I think are rather good reasons for each of the above: many recently popular books have been written on how religion ruins society, for example, and the only real argument for me to pay special attention to those related to me by blood is because they share genetic material with me, and that’s got to be the lamest excuse ever. But even with these well thought out explanations, very few people have agreed with me on all points.

To tell the truth, this diversity of opinion makes me happy. Personally, I think engineering is exceedingly boring when compared to theoretical physics, but I fully understand that engineers are needed for physicists to work their magic. It’s a good thing that different people have different things they like. Yet I still appreciate beyond measure the rare individual who shares my thoughts on these issues. For it is only with those such people that I can ever fully let my guard down and participate openly, as equals.

And that is an experience that I will always treasure.

Installing Facebook Connect, on the other hand, has been an immense pain.  Every step I took in getting it to work has been a step lined in tears of sweat.  Everything that could possibly go wrong has in fact gone wrong, and it was the most irritating install ever.  Horrifyingly, on my second attempt, I even followed an inane video entitled “Add Facebook Connect to your blog in 8 minutes!“.  And while following their directions were not hard, it took more like 45 minutes, and at the end of it, it didn’t work at all.  Which is severely fucked up, since the video was literally posted only three days earlier.  (The sticking point was their usage of uid=’loggedinuser’ — it turns out that ‘loggedinuser’ cannot be called by uid through xfbml.  Which makes the entire video pointless.)

I also tried a custom installation by modifying some code I found at a spanish-only site.  It was a terrible mess by the time I got through with it, and has since been removed completely.  (I don’t speak spanish.)

But today, during my lunch hour at work (okay, I used 1.75 hours), I finally got facebook connect to work on my WordPress install.  And it’s all thanks to some helpful code supplied by Adam Hupp.  You can see a partial documentation of it on the facebook developer’s wiki.  (I’ve already edited a few bits in the Q&A session and plan on fleshing out the article a bit more later on to clarify some of the more complicated parts used to customize how facebook connects to wordpress.)

Anyway, thanks to Adam Hupp, it’s now a pretty seamless installation procedure.  Just follow the directions at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php?title=WP-FBConnect if you want to add it to your own wordpress installation and you’ll see what I mean.

So please try out the new system.  If you’re already logged in on my blog, log yourself out and come back to this page.  You should see a ‘log in with facebook’ button right above the comment section.  You can log in that way, or, alternatively, if you’re already logged in to facebook, you should see a box in the top right of your screen that asks you if you want to log in with facebook.  Either login method should get you set up, and then all you have to do is enter in a comment and it should connect directly to your facebook account.

However, there a few caveats.

First, it breaks in IE.  After numerous investigations, I’ve come to find out that this is an issue on facebook’s end, and not an issue with the code I currently have on my site.  Facebook connect does not currently work in IE no matter how you try to make it work.  I think this is an xfbml issue, though I may be wrong.

Second, it’s fussy in firefox.  It doesn’t seem to like the way the code is being executed.  Sometimes it works right away, and sometimes it logs meout unexpectedly for no apparent reason.  I can’t seem to find the error here, even though I’ve combed through everything.  If you’re using firefox, and it won’t let you login, try refreshing the page.  It should work then.

These browser issues aside, it works perfectly in Chrome / Safari.  So if you really want to see it work seamlessly, I suggest opening this page in one of those browsers.  I know that’s a terrible way of getting code to work, but it’ll have to do for now.  I’ll let someone else do the legwork on figuring out what’s causing the firefox issue and get it fixed as soon as I see the corrected code posted online.

Anyway, please leave a comment and help me test to see if this works.  Oh, and let me know what browser you used to post the comment with, too.

Be well.

Footage courtesy Democracy Now.  It should be noted that Noam Chomsky did endorse Obama before the elections, saying: “I would suggest not voting for McCain which means voting for Obama. … There is nothing wrong with picking the lesser of two evils.”

However, he only advocated doing this in swing states.  The Real News reports him saying: “While it’s true that the two parties are essentially like factions of one party - the party of business - the differences do matter to ordinary people.”

As most of you know, I work as the webmaster of Share Our Strength, a national organization dedicated to ending child hunger. When I first joined, I did not know nearly as much about the issue as I do now. What I’ve learned has astonished me.

Poverty is complex; solving hunger is easy. We already know what works, and we already have the tools in place to ensure no child in America has to go hungry again. The only thing we lack is money.

Let me repeat that for emphasis. The ONLY thing we lack is money.

Change.org is accepting submissions of ideas on how we can change America and will be submitting ten of them to then President Barack Obama on inauguration day. I want the #1 issue that he sees to be ending child hunger in America.

To do this, all I need is for you to go to change.org and vote on this issue. With enough votes, we can ensue that first thing President Obama sees is a plan to end child hunger in America in less than a decade.

This issue is big enough to make a difference, yet small enough to be doable RIGHT NOW. With one in six American children at risk of hunger, it is abominable that we could conceivably justify spending money elsewhere. We already have proven scalable solutions to ending domestic child hunger. Let me repeat: WE ALREADY HAVE PROVEN SCALABLE SOLUTIONS TO ENDING DOMESTIC CHILD HUNGER. All we lack is funding. All we lack is legislative will.

Please go to change.org and vote on this issue, and please send this message to all of your friends. If we do this, we really and truly can eliminate child hunger in America within ten years. Within ten years!

It’s time to do this, America. Let’s end child hunger in our country once and for all. Yes, we can.

Feminism is a tough subject for me to discuss, if only because I generally hang out with a lot of feminist friends who hold distinctly different ideals than I on the topic.

This is not to say that I am anti-feminist, nor is it to imply that my friends are anti-feminist. On the contrary, both my friends and I are staunch believers in the equality of the sexes, and we would both call ourselves true adherents to the cause of feminism.

But there is one issue in which we differ, and that is the topic of my entry today.

The word “mankind”, when used in most ordinary conversation, is a terribly sexist word to use. This is not because the speaker is generally anti-female, nor because the speaker intends any particular injustice to womankind in general. Instead it is because the perpetuation of a term which implicitly recognizes the male to be superior can easily influence others into subconsciously believing that the speaker feels men to be more important. As dumb as it at first sounds, it has been repeatedly proven that the human mind works in such a way so that this feminist interpretation of the word “mankind” is in fact well justified.

However, this is not to say that every usage of the term “mankind” is inherently incorrect. So long as the speaker recognized the general anti-feminist nature of the word, they may then choose to use the word anyway for stylistic reasons. After all, the full effect of a single usage of the word “mankind” is extraordinarily low for gender equality purposes, and should the writer specifically need to use “mankind” for alliterative or syllabilistic purposes, then they very well may be justified. All that is necessary is that, other things being equal, one should use an alternative word such as “humankind”. But if literary or rhetoric purposes instead call for the less preferred term, then so be it. Such usage is NOT sexist, because another priority (good writing) took precedence.

But this general form of argumentation, it turns out, can be applied to more than just word choices. It also applies, in a slightly modified form, to the viewing of breasts.

In general, when one person looks at another person solely as a sexual object, it is considered an example of sexism. There are many reasons for this, the most obvious of which is that bisexuality is still not very well understood in today’s society. But the main reason becomes clear once we take a specific example: consider a straight male ogling a woman’s breasts, and further consider that if that man were instead looking at another male, he would not be ogling at all.

But though this very well may be a good example of sexism, it is most assuredly not a good example to look at when trying to determine why it is sexism. After all, sexism is NOT the treating of a woman differently than a man, but instead the treating of a woman differently than a man in identical relevant circumstances.

It is true that when a guy looks at a girl and considers them as nothing more than a sexual object, the guy in question is being utterly sexist. But (I would contend) that when a guy looks at a girl and sees them as nothing more than a sexual object, it unclear as to whether or not he is being sexist.

This is a complicated point to grasp, so I’ll explain.

It is difficult to deny that if you have a man who distinctly loves and truly respects a woman, then he cannot also appreciate her breasts. Obviously, in any instance that he looks at the breasts of the woman he loves, he is NOT being sexist.

There are two general arguments for why this is so. The first argument is that her breasts are not the only thing he sees. This is the traditional argument that most feminists will take. The reason why it is not sexist is because, in addition to seeing those breasts as a sexual object, he also sees her as an intellectual and psychological being: he sees many different facets of her. This, most feminists claim, is what makes it nonsexist.

I do not hold with this argument. My reason is that if that were the case, then in order for something to be nonsexist, one would have to see ALL the facets of the perceived person. In our example above, if the guy missed any one facet of his love’s personality, then he would not be seeing her in her full capacity. And this is what most feminists seem to be saying he would need in order for his ogling to not be sexist.

(The reader might be tempted to claim I am employing a slippery slope fallacy. But in fact there is no appropriate point at which one may claim to know another person except at the extreme of fully knowing them. Using a relative alternative, such as “know them better than any other person save myself”, cannot work because, for each individual, this threshold would be qualitatively different. And using a qualitative alternative, such as “know them well enough to be able to predict with 90% accuracy their position on a random question” does not have relevance with regard to their breast-ogling. Through reading this blog, you may be able to achieve the latter, yet this would not be relevant in your viewing me as a mere sexual object.)

Now obviously (unless you’re mystical or something) two people cannot ever know 100% of another person. No matter how much you are in love, nor how big a groupie you are, nor how extreme a fanboy you may be, you just can’t understand every facet of another person’s personality. It’s not physically possible. And this is why the second argument appeals to me far more.

The second argument why the man who ogles his love’s breasts is not sexist is not because he also thinks of her in other ways (although this is obviously a positive thing), but instead because he is aware of the fact that it would be wrong to treat a person as though they are less than what they are.

The guy doesn’t necessarily know all the facets of the girl. (After all, he can’t.) But he IS aware of the fact that IF he treated her as nothing more than a sexual object, then that would be degrading. By ‘degrading’, I mean a particular type of pain. It’s a peculiar type of pain: a psychological pain. But it is a pain nonetheless. This pain is what I mean when I say ‘degradation’.

The reason why this guy is not being sexist is not because he loves her, nor because he knows other facets of her being (although these are both certainly positive things), but rather because he recognizes that he cannot ACT solely on the basis of treating her like a pair of breasts. If he did, then he would be inflicting pain on her. And this is just as wrong ethically speaking as if he hit her physically.

This is where the distinction between “considering” her solely as a sexual object and “seeing” her solely as a sexual object comes into play. If he considers her solely as a sexual object, then he risks degrading her, and this is as wrong as throwing a punch at her, regardless of whether or not it connects. But if he considers her as more than a sexual object, then it doesn’t matter if he sees her solely as a sexual object. This is because he would not ever act upon her only as a sexual object, so long as he realized that she was more than just that.

(This being said, it is important to realize that while seeing someone solely as a sexual object is NOT sexist in the main sense, it still remains sexist should those who perceive this behavior interpret it in a sexist way. Even in a situation where the man and woman are both in agreement that no sexism is present, it still may be possible for undesirable sexist effects to exist if a third party notices the behavior and interprets it as additional incentive for them to behave sexist in the future.)

One interesting aspect of this observation is that since it is no longer necessary for one to know other facets of a human being, that means that is now possible in this view for a guy to see a girl for the first time, notice her breasts to the exclusion of all else, and yet STILL not be sexist.

This is important because a lot of feminists would not agree with this statement. While I agree that (by far) most guys who look at breasts to the exclusion of all other aspects of a woman’s personality are indeed sexist, I nevertheless maintain that some few of them may in fact be nonsexist. In fact, this is why I will unhesitatingly call myself a complete and utter feminist and yet when I see a pair of nice breasts, I have neither compunction against nor dissonance with enjoying them solely for their sake.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Ah, the crisply fresh feeling of starting a new blog. It is like the coming of a new year—somehow, everything before that first entry is set firmly in a past that hardly seems to count, while everything from the first entry on becomes important. Extremely important, even.

Having said this, I should probably mention that I don’t have anything in particular that I feel I need to get past. Life is good for me at the moment, and everything seems to be quite in order. Yet despite this, that peculiar first-entry-feeling still has me excited and ready to begin anew. And that, I think, is a good thing.

Of more interest to my audience, I think, are a couple of items I noticed while watching Jonathan Simon’s presentation. First off, he’s using Firefox, not Chrome. Shame on you, Jonathan. You’d think the Google Webmaster Team wouldn’t have bailed on Chrome already.

But perhaps more importantly, your IP address is showing.

Next time, I suggest you utilize the option to show the slideshow through the webinar system rather than allowing everyone to gaze at your desktop. (And yes, that’s his open menu there, not mine. Apparently he’s a fan of adblock, among other things.)

I was asked why, when increasing the Pixels/Inch (ppi) in photoshop, a photo became bigger.

If you stop and think about it for a minute, this is a really good question. DPI (dots per inch) is used quite often in print circles; it literally refers to how many individual dots are printed per inch. With a DPI, more dots are squeezed into each inch, and the picture is therefore sharper; with a low DPI, there is more space in between each dot, and the picture is therefore of a less quality.

So when you increase the PPI (which one might assume is the same as DPI, except with pixels), you should be increasing the quality of the picture by making the dimensions smaller, right?

Wrong. If you try this for yourself in Photoshop, you’ll find that the photo increases in size when you increase the PPI, thereby decreasing the quality—which is exactly the opposite of what you might at first expect.

It takes a bit of extra thought to understand what the logic is behind this. The key to comprehending this paradox is that while printed materials can vary the spacing between dots, computer screens cannot vary the spacing between pixels. So if you vary the PPI, you are increasing or decreasing the number of pixels in your image, not increasing or decreasing the space between the dots as with DPI.

So what does this mean? In a nutshell, this means that when you increase the PPI of an image, what happens is Photoshop adds in additional pixels, horrendously ruining the quality of the photo while simultaneously making the pixel dimensions increase.

The moral of the story: DPI≠PPI! If you’re a print person who is just getting into web stuff, don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because DPI count and quality are proportional that must mean that PPI count and quality are also proportional—on the contrary, they are inversely proportional!

And the figuring of this out is how I avoided looking like a fool in front of my non-tech-savvy coworkers. I hope this blog entry will help you to also not look like a fool. (But if it doesn’t, it sure as hell isn’t my fault.)

As many of you probably already know, my day job is as the webmaster of strength.org, a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring that no child should ever have to grow up hungry. Well, one of our initiatives, the Great American Dine Out, is going on right now all across the country. Simply by going out to eat at one of the four thousand participating restaurants this week (through Sunday, 28 Sept), you can help end child hunger.

So today I went out to eat at the M Street Bar & Grill with three of my coworkers. It was great. If you’re ever in DC, I heartily recommend that you stop by. I’ve even added it to my custom google map of great places to eat in DC (for vegetarians).

But I of course realize that most of you aren’t in DC, and perhaps even fewer are vegetarians. So instead, I want to give you guys links so you can find out which restaurants in your area are participating in the Great American Dine Out. So click on the major metropolitan area you live in to see a list, or type in your zip code here to find participating restaurants near you. And eat out every day this week—remember, it’s for the kids!

• Washington D.C. Area
• Los Angeles / Orange County
• San Francisco Bay Area
• New York / Tri-State Area
• Boston / New England
• Atlanta / Georgia
• Philadelphia / New Jersey - South
• Chicago / Illinois
• Denver / Colorado
• Seattle / Washington
• Minneapolis - St. Paul
• Portland / Oregon

My lawn is small. Too small to bother with, really. But the grass was getting long, and weeds were taking over, and Rosina asked me to cut it. So I did.

The lawn mower is a simple machine, powered not by gas but by gears alone. Yet as I plow through the yard, the blades turn swiftly — far more swift than I imagined possible.

I am oblivious to the world as I mow. A song rages through my head and thoughts on the Large Hadron Collider consume my attention. So it is with surprise when I notice a rabbit jumping away from my feet, mere centimeters from where I had just cut down the grass.

That rabbit could have died, I thought. It almost died by my hand. The thought was sobering. I immediately stopped mowing. The song in my mind stopped playing. The LHC took a back seat to the close call I had just made.

That’s when I noticed the rabbit’s mate.

She lay behind me, almost invisible in the grasses. I had hurt her. I had damaged her. Not with my blades, but by rolling over her with the wheel of my lawn-mower.

For a split moment, I thought of how lucky she was to have missed my blades. But then I realized it was worse than I’d imagined. One of her eyes was red. She was bleeding internally.

My heart stopped, just as the rabbit vainly tried to jump away, with the entire left side of her body fully paralyzed. She pushed herself in circles, again and again, as I watched helplessly. This is my fault, I told myself.

Through carelessness, I had caused such unnecessary pain and suffering. Through pointless singing and idle physics wonderings that I’ve no business to think of while handling such dangerous blades.

She was dying, but slowly. Ever so slowly. Blood started seeping from one ear, though the blood in her eye lay locked behind the cornea. I had to kill her now. I had to, to end the suffering.

Rosina directed me to the only instrument of death in the house: a small shovel. I took it.

Carefully, I carried the poor rabbit to the woods beside the house. There, in the shelter of trees, I apologized for the seventh time to the rabbit before me. And I raised the shovel, ready to strike. I wanted to do it one blow.

But I could not even attempt it.

I stood there, shovel in hand, yet could not strike. I could not bear to kill her.

Softly, I returned to Rosina, and asked if she could do it. I asked if she could deal the blow that the poor rabbit needed so dearly. But Rosina, true to form, insisted that she could not. It was up to me. It was up to me, or else the rabbit would die a horrible death of slow agony.

So I returned to the rabbit, knowing I would blog this immediately afterward. Knowing that if I so chose, I could bring my camera to take a picture. But I did not. I could not.

Instead, I cut off her head, then crushed her skull.

)c’:

But perhaps nothing I’ve done thus far is quite as noticeable as getting a link from Fleshbot, a fairly popular porn site with a pagerank of 7. (Even the nonprofit I work as a webmaster for (Share Our Strength) only has a pagerank of 6.) As of now, I’m linked from their front page, which is actually pretty cool. (Although the anchored keyword they linked with is pretty lame.)

Of course, it’s the search engine spiders’ view of the link that’s important to me, so it doesn’t even matter that no one who reads fleshbot will bother clicking through.

Which makes me wonder: Has anybody from fleshbot actually clicked through? If so, please post a comment. In the meantime, I’ll update later with stats on how many referrals one can get from a porn site.

Oh, and also, I think the images fleshbot used were very poor. Here are two better ones I found with a quick google search:

Thanks to KNX News Radio and Progressive Alaska for the photos.

6:04 AM

After loading boxes of books into the car, we are finally ready to go. I hold my green laptop bag in my arms and rub the sleep from my eyes as she drives me to the train station.

6:09 AM

As Rosina drops me off, the train is just arriving. I wish her well on her upcoming day at the high school and pull out Anthem while I walk to the train.

6:55 AM

The train pulls into Union Station, as I write in my physical journal about the book I’d just read.

7:09 AM

Breakfast at Au Bon Pain is purchased.

7:20 AM

I walk into my building at work. No one else will arrive for at least an hour and a half. Most will not arrive until 9:30 AM.

8:30 AM

I close google reader and start planning my day of work.

8:31 AM

I pull up facebook scrabble.

8:54 AM

I restart planning my day of work.

8:55 AM

I pull up blogger.com to start writing this entry.

Hi. (c: I’m Eric Herboso, a 25 year old math/philosophy major at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama. This last part is important because academics really is my ’schtick’; I plan on becoming a professor of mathematics one day, even though I really consider philosophy to be a more worthwhile subject to study.

I love to think. Considering things is my second favorite thing to do–and arguing about things is my first. Just about every idea I’ve so far encountered in my life has seemed interesting to think and argue about, but I’ve spent a great deal of more time on some things than others.

And that may explain why I’m an extreme skeptic. (Excessive argument does seem to have that general effect upon people.) I’m agnostic, with no preference toward platonic ideals except that I would wish it were so, and no preference toward nihlism except via Ockham’s Razor. And to be honest, I think Ockham’s razor is quite a bit more blunt than most scientists are willing to admit.

Despite this, I am vegetarian with aspirations of veganism and serious thoughts on fructarianism. I am fervently pacifist, even to my own detriment. And I am constantly discouraged by the evils of the world around me. Don’t ask me to explain how this paragraph jibes with the preceding one unless you want to get into a huge discussion. /c:

I suppose I should also point out my specific academic interests, since it is so important to me. I’m really into metamathematical systems, such as mathematical logic or axiomatic set theory. I’m in love with philosophy–specifically in analytics, confirmation holism, and skepticism. (Keep in mind that I don’t necessarily adhere to such ideals, but nevertheless find them interesting and worthwhile to think about.)

Politically, I lean radically to the left, even by European standards. I am economically and politically liberal, with ideals more toward a Tolstoy-style anarcho-syndicalism/anarcho-socialism than anything else. If you don’t know what that is, please feel free to ask–and if you do know what that is, please don’t think I’m too much of a nutcase. (Ahem.) Despite my political leanings, I’m still surprisingly quite interested in Leo Strauss, Niccolo Machiavelli, Plato, Aristotle, and even Ayn Rand, for goodness’ sake! After all, just because I love to read their arguments doesn’t mean I agree with them. (c;

Anyway, that’s me. There’s still other stuff to say, I suppose, but it’s more conducive to list-making than an open-ended essay such as this. Nevertheless, I must also point out that I am an avid reader. Please keep in mind that when you read my list of authors and books below, you will not be exposed to half of the books I find interesting. I read about three books a week, except when I get burned out, and then I’ll go without reading for a month.

I also simply adore writing. I keep a blog up at livejournal.com/users/EricJHerboso and I update it fairly regularly. (At least I try to.)

I play games a lot, by the way. I have this passion for video games that really isn’t justified at all; my favorite is an rpg series named Lunar, translated into English by Working Designs. I simpy love their translation. It reminds me of Douglas Hofstadter.

That reminds me: I’m really interested in languages. Unfortunately, I’m also really bad at them. I know English better than most, but I always envied those geniuses who could just pick up language after language, seemingly with no problem at all. My first second language is ancient Greek; I’m able to read textbook Greek now, but stumbling through Greek Loeb Classic Library editions takes me absolutely _forever_. .:sigh:. My next challenge will be to tackle German; this is because I’m extremely into philosophy, especially the Greeks and the Germans, for different reasons.

But I digress. I meant to tell you of my love for games. My favorite two-player game is definitely shogi, which seems kind of like Western chess when you first look at it, but really is far more complex and interesting. I also enjoy go and chess, by the way. And scrabble. I love scrabble. And Diplomacy and Axis & Allies and Heroscape and Magic: The Gathering and–well, I actually think it’s in my best interests to stop before I delve too much further into such aspects of my personality.

I also watch a lot of anime (and manga), though I must admit that most of what I’ve seen is quite subpar. So far, I’ve been introduced to around twenty complete anime series, and I only really enjoyed five of them. But isn’t that how it always is, no matter what medium one is speaking of? My favorite is Kino’s Journey, followed closely by Escaflowne, for a very different reason. I generally enjoy shojo anime, so long as it’s not too ‘out there’, and there’s a bit of shonen that I like as well.

And a few additional list-type items should probably be mentioned: I like to just observe people, watching them go about their lives from a safe distance. I’m a bit introverted, so I never really speak to anyone on anything resembling a personal level, but I make up for it by having intense conversations (and arguments) with myself, and imagining the people I see around me as actual people who knew whom I was as a real person. (I often feel a bit akin to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, for different reasons.) Not everyone recognizes that I am introverted though, as I deal with it in an odd way at times: by acting as though I were extroverted. But it’s just an act. I’m president of my college’s Philosophy Club, an officer of the English Club, a writer/editor for the school’s literary magazine (The Motley) and school newspaper (The SpringHillian), and pretty much the only serious pure mathematics student on campus (it’s a small university).

Oh, and one last thing: I have this really bad habit of hypocritically straying from my own ideals from time to time. It’s not healthy, and I’m never happy with myself when I do it, but it does happen, and I figure I should be up front about that, since I’m nowhere near perfect in what I am, do, or say. .:sigh:.

Grabbing rss content to post on your own page is perfectly permissible, both legally and ethically. Firstly, because when you grab a feed, you are not only linking to them, but also driving visitors to their site, but, more importantly, because by publishing an rss feed, they are inviting users to use that content. (People can even monetize their feeds by using Google Adsense for Feeds.)

But what if you find regularly updated content that doesn’t use a feed?

I recently found a site that had data that I wanted to pull, but no RSS feed existed of the content I wanted. The webpage is American Towns, and it shows regularly updated local events content for a specific city. (The content in particular that I am interested in is “Local Events”, on the left.)

So, after a bit of thought, I did a quick google search and found Feedity.com. In less than five minutes, I had created an RSS feed that takes JUST the info I want from the American Towns site.

Feedity allows you to define the opening and closing tags of anything yo want turned into RSS; in this case, I chose <div class="event"> to begin each RSS link, and </a> to end it. This allows me to get just what I want in the feed I’m creating: the event name with a hyperlink to more info on the event.

From there, feedity did the rest, and I had an RSS feed ready to go.

Had I been making the feed for my private use, I would not feel s weird about it, but since I was creating this feed for the purpose of making dynamic content on one of my sites, I realized that perhaps this kind of feed was not quite as ethical as feeds that are put out by the content owner. After all, the feed I am pulling here was not intended to be pulled by the content owner. Even though I am linking to their site while pulling the events list American Towns publishes, at no point did I get even an implicit nod concerning the usage of this data on my own site. I was, in a way, just framing their content without their permission.

Because of this moral quandary, I decided not to go through with using feedity in this way. But now that I am aware that the possibility exists of taking content straight from other sources like this, it occurs to me that one could mass produce sites that could be automatically generated from ANY site, just using completely customized RSS from feedity. Each site would literally take less than thirty minutes to create, once the general design was chosen. Pop a few adsense fields on the page, and tailor it to a specific audience who would find the info useful, and profit inevitably results. Hell, I’ve done testing on this site where I go for multiple months without posting a single blog entry, and I STILL take in a few dollars each month from adsense. Yet what I’m describing through feedity is upwardly scalable in terms of the number of sites, and requires absolutely no upkeep to maintain.

In short, Feedity makes it possible to easily create completely unethical sites that can consistently generate income in the aggregate without maintenance. This makes me almost want to mark my link to them as nofollow, but since most users of feedity probably use the feeds for their personal use rather than for website creation, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, I use feedity to keep track of my thirteen year old sister’s fan website, TwilifyMe.com, and that’s a lifesaver all in itself.

Also, in case you’re interested, I did NOT get paid to write this entry.

I’m always terrible at self-descriptions. Every time I try to make a comment on myself, I have flashbacks of Gödelian self-reference. But I suppose I might as well try.

Hi. (c: I’m Eric Herboso, a math geek/philosophy nerd with a heavy ethical bent. I graduated from Spring Hill College in early 2007, and plan on attending grad school at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland in late 2007. I’m one of those people that loves college so much that the concept of leaving college is completely out of the question. If I have it my way, I will be working in a college environment for the rest of my life. (Probably as a math professor, though I personally consider philosophy to be a more worthwhile subject to study.)

I love to think. It isn’t often that you can find me not considering something or other. Pretty much the only time I’m not actively trying to understand one concept or another is when I’m meditating (this happens once or twice a month), zoning out during a reflex game (like Mario or Desktop Tower Defense), or having sex (I guess you could include masturbation, too.).

I’m a skeptic, strictly agnostic in the philosophical sense (I’m what you would call atheist in the practical religious sense), and pacifist. I have a vested interest in morality in general and meta-ethics in particular.

As a skeptic, I have no preference toward platonic ideals except that I would wish it were so, and no preference toward nihilism except via Ockham’s Razor. And to be honest, I think Ockham’s razor is quite a bit more blunt than most scientists are willing to admit. (Philosophy of science is a hobby of mine.)

I am also vegetarian with aspirations of veganism for ethical reasons. I try to be healthy as well, but it is a difficult process, as I am addicted to caffeine products and have so far been completely unsuccessful in abandoning cheese.

Also, I’m severely introverted. I never really speak to anyone on anything resembling a personal level (mostly because it’s exceedingly difficult to find persons who are worthwhile investments in terms of my personal time, but I make up for it by having intense conversations (and arguments) with myself, and imagining the people I see around me as actual people who know who I am as a real person. (Don’t try to understand that last sentence too carefully; it’s not quite as important as it might at first seem.) Interestingly, not everyone recognizes that I am introverted, as I often deal with it in an odd way: by acting as though I were extroverted.

On to my interests….

My academic interests are mostly philosophical; in mathematics, I only have fun with metamathematical systems–straight computation bores me, and proof creation, though admirable, gives me headaches. I prefer to deal with talking about methods of proof than to actually do proofs. The distinction here is a fine one, and it sometimes is a concept that people I meet haven’t thought of before. If you’re at all interested, I highly suggest you ask me; it makes for a great discussion topic (that is, if you’re a nerd like me).

My political interests are extremely liberal; I have ideals more toward a Tolstoy-style anarcho-syndicalism than anything else. If you don’t know what that is, please feel free to ask–and if you do know what that is, please don’t think I’m too much of a nutcase. Ahem. Despite my political leanings, I’m still surprisingly quite interested in Leo Strauss, Niccolo Machiavelli, Plato, Aristotle, and even Ayn Rand! After all, just because I love to read their arguments doesn’t mean I agree with them. (c;

My physical interests are much more limited than most. I don’t enjoy many sports, though I occasionally play defense in soccer, and I’m the equivalent of a black belt in tae kwon do and karate. For the record, I’m horrible at soccer, but I’m good enough in martial arts to have actually taught at a dojo for a while. Granted, it was my uncle’s dojo, but that still counts, doesn’t it?

My musical interests are very diverse. I’m a percussionist, having played in numerous jazz bands (though never for profit), and I taught drums at a middle school band class for a year. Today, I mostly just listen, though I keep a pair of drumsticks handy ‘just in case’. Favorite genres include big band, celtic, and classical, though I also enjoy many other styles on a regular basis. I love going to sleep each night to the sound of a favorite musical phrase and the light hum of a fan.

Beyond that, you should know that I’m a heavy reader/writer, and I not only write in one journal or another on a daily basis, but I also read around three books a week, except when I get burned out, and then I’ll go without reading for a month.

And lastly, (but certainly not leastly,) I am an avid gamer. I adore the game of Go, though I am not very good at it. I also enjoy Diplomacy and Shogi, as well as video games such as Starcraft and Desktop Tower Defense. I also play Magic: the Gathering. Obviously, I enjoy a great deal more games than just this, but these are some of the highlights. A more fleshed out list can be found at <a href=”http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vZW4ud2lraXBlZGlhLm9yZy93aWtpL1VzZXI6RXJpY19IZXJib3NvL01lZGlh“>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eric_Herboso/Media</a>.

If you really want to know more about whom I am, I must highly recommend that you take a look at my journal, at <a href=”http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vZXJpY2poZXJib3NvLmxpdmVqb3VybmFsLmNvbQ==“>ericjherboso.livejournal.com</a>. Happy reading. (c;

I’d like to meet…

Someone who is intelligent enough to actually think on a regular basis, and like it. Someone who cares about the world, even if they don’t think there is any good reason to. Someone who actually enjoys learning new things, and is always trying to improve themselves, by whatever method they see fit. Someone who at least attempts to enjoy life, even if all they keep getting is more and more depressed. Someone who likes to talk and discuss and read and argue and think and be.

In other words, someone who hasn’t already clicked off of this webpage in disgust. If you’ve read this far, then it’s pretty likely that you’re the kind of person I’d like to meet.

By the way, although I would love to meet any new people who fit this criteria, please note that I am not interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with anyone other than my love, of whom I have (thankfully) already found. So please, if the only reason you have for contacting me is to go out with me, then save yourself the trouble and just don’t contact me at all. But if you have a true interest in connecting with another person, I would love to hear from you. After all, that would make you part of a very elite group, and you’d be a rare friend for me to find indeed.

Interests

I’m most interested in metamathematics, analytic philosophy, practical ethics, beautiful literature, and films that make me cry.

If you’re interested in seeing a complete list of my favorite media, please visit <a href=”http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vZW4ud2lraXBlZGlhLm9yZy93aWtpL1VzZXI6RXJpY19IZXJib3NvL01lZGlh“>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eric_Herboso/Media</a>.

Music

My music tastes are quite broad in comparison to my other interests, as you may have noticed from my personal internet radio station at the top of this page (last.fm). I enjoy J. S. Bach, Glen Miller, Duke Ellington, Neutral Milk Hotel, Peter Schickele, Dresden Dolls, Nobuo Uematsu, Yasunori Mitsuda, Yoko Kanno, the pillows, Jared Hudson, and many more. If you’re really interested, you can check out my personal internet radio station at <a href=”http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3Lmxhc3QuZm0vdXNlci9FcmljSGVyYm9zbw==“>www.last.fm/user/EricHerboso</a>, or just hit the grey ‘play’ button above.

Movies

Favorite movies include anything by Charlie Kaufman, Serenity, Amelie, The Princess Bride, and every Miyazaki film ever made.

Television

I enjoy Cowboy Bebop, Vision of Escaflowne, Neon Genesis Evangelion, FLCL, and Kino’s Journey. Occasionally, you’ll also find me watching the Sorkin seasons of The West Wing, MythBusters, Daria, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, or even listening to Schickele Mix. Oh, and I can’t go without mentioning Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. I used to say that I never watched tv, unless I was playing a video game or a dvd. Now I can no longer say that, thanks to Firefly and Battlestar Galactica almost single-handedly.

Books

Favorite authors include Howard Zinn, Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter, and Noam Chomsky in nonfiction, and T. S. Eliot, J. D. Salinger, Orson Scott Card, J. K. Rowling, Nick Hornby, Plato, and Ayn Rand in fiction. Note that just because I like a writer does not mean I endorse the author. (That means you, Card. Asshole.)

Heroes

“Heroes are like shadows. The closer you get, the smaller they appear.“

When I was young, I had a hero. But then I met him, and found out whom he really was. I no longer have heroes.

The closest thing I have to a hero is perhaps Bertrand Russell, followed closely by Peter Singer. If you don’t know who they are, a quick google or wikipedia search will suffice. But I doubt anyone cares enough to learn.

A common argument against consequentialist ethics is the empirical fact that most persons seem to place more weight on the consideration of interests of those they know than on those they don’t. While not fatal, it is true that most consequentialists tend to regard as a fundamental premise the idea that all persons deserving of consideration should receive equal consideration; thus when one points out that, in practice, most persons choose to regard the consideration of interests for friends and family as of higher importance than the consideration of interests for strangers or others outside their sphere of knowledge, the dedicated consequentialist usually has to retort by maintaining that ‘true ethics is not decided by popular vote’, or that it is merely a biological and psychological necessity that humans can only intensely relate with ~150 other persons, but that this should not have anything to do with how one should act.

However, I believe that a different counterargument can be raised: that the consequentialist position may in fact _necessitate_ that a person give extra weight to the consideration of interests of those they know more closely. While this new argument relies on a few extreme conditions that cannot yet be verified scientifically, I nevertheless believe that it will soon become clear to the reader that if these conditions are allowed as premises, then this new way of looking at consequentialist ethics will be hard to dispute by resorting to weighted consideration of interest arguments.

While not all consequentialist ethics are the same, generally they all agree that in order to decide on which set of consequences is preferable, we must have a way to measure those consequences against one another. Usually this is done using units of some type; for ease of understanding, I will use ‘good’ units in this argument, where those consequences that have a higher cardinality of ‘good’ units are strictly preferable to those consequences that have a lesser cardinality of ‘good’ units. My reason for using mathematical terminology here will soon become plain. (A higher cardinality set means merely that there is ‘more of’ that set in relation to another.) I am avoiding the ordinary usage of the word ‘maximize’ here for two reasons: first, that there may be multiple realizations of a maximized result, and second, that there may be no maximally realized result. Again, this will become clear momentarily.

Traditionally, consequentialist ideas have been described in terms that only work with a finite number of possible consequences. For example, we may consider whether to do X or Y, where X has consequence X1, and Y has consequence Y1. Solving this conundrum consists only in comparing the cardinality of ‘good’ units in X1 and Y1 and determining which is greater; hence we would then choose to do the action associated with that consequence. Of course, reality is much more complicated; not only is it nearly always extremely difficult to predict consequences accurately, but the number of possible actions one may take is limited mostly by one’s imagination. Nevertheless, the basic idea remains: were we able to predict the future and compare cardinalities of all possible consequences, then we would be able to choose which actions had the highest cardinality (in a finite set, at least one and as many as all may have the highest cardinality). In this finite instance, it makes sense to speak of ‘maximizing’ the cardinality.

But it is possible that the total set of actions one may take is not finite in number, but infinite to some degree. In this case, ‘maximizing’ may no longer make sense at all, since there might always be some action which produces a higher cardinality consequence than any individual action you choose. In other words, in the special case where there are an infinite number of possible actions, it may be true that there is no ‘best’ choice, just as there is no ‘highest’ number.

(It should be noted that it is possible to have a highest (single or tied) cardinality even when the number of possible actions are infinite, but it is no longer necessary as it is when the number of actions available are finite.)

But even more alarming is when you consider the possibility that the cardinality of ‘good’ units in total is infinite. If the total sum of ‘good’ units is infinite, then choosing a consequence where unjust genocide occurs (normally a net negative) or choosing a consequence where world peace comes about (normally a net positive) makes no difference at all! For if the total cardinality of ‘good’ is infinite, then subtracting or adding ANY finite amount, no matter how large (or even any _infinite_ amount!), makes no difference to the total amount of ‘good’ in the world. Mathematically, the cardinality remains unchanged.

(Before continuing this argument, I would like to address the issue of whether or not an infinite number of possible actions is possible in principle. If units in space are infinitely divisible, then obviously an infinite number of possible actions arises as a consequence. But that space is infinitely divisible is not clear; quantum physics, at least, seems to suggest that at some minimal distance, further subdivision is not possible (or at least that further subdivision does not alter observable causation). But this is not the only way that an infinite number of choices need be present. You may also have an infinite amount of space, a concept that cutting edge physics seems to think is much more plausible, whether in the form of a multiverse interpretation of quantum theory, or an infinitely expanding universe that procreates through new ‘big bang’s. But even if you find both of these types of infinity hard to swallow, there is also the idea that time may continue on indefinitely–even pre-Einsteinian physicists were ready and willing to believe in a steady state universe of infinite duration, and I believe most people would admit this kind of infinity into the universe even if they dismissed the other forms.

In the case of infinitely divisible partitions of matter, the first half of the above argument, relating to the irrationality of a maximal ‘good’ consequence, is most relevant; but the second half, regarding the concept of an infinite amount of ‘good’ is not possible when that universe is finite in both extent and duration. However, in the case of an infinitely large or infinitely durable universe, there may only be a finite number of possible actions one can take, but the total ‘good’ in universal terms may very well be infinite in extent, so the second half of the above argument applies perfectly well, while the first half of the argument does not seem to apply. Please note that for the rest of this essay, I will concentrate only on infinite extent/duration universes.)

Assuming some possibilty of extent/duration infinity in the universe, and further assuming that the total cardinality of ‘good’ units in the universe is infinte in amount (this is possible, I hurry to note, even if ‘good’ is scarce in the universe, just as primes are scarce among integers even while they are both infinite in extent), then consequentialism seems to fall apart completely. For no longer does the addition of any amount of good or ill make any difference in the total ‘good’; even if you chose an action which made the universe infinitely worse off, consequentialist ethics would not be able to warn you against that choice (because infinity minus infinity is still infinity). But this seemingly insurmountable objection can be avoided in two different ways.

First, there is the psychological defense: As stated earlier, humans, for biological reasons, are capable of keeping only ~150 other persons in their world view at one time. While this makes no difference to what ethical prescriptions may be, it does mean that we are incapable of seeing the infinite extent of ‘good’ all at once. We instead see portions of the ‘good’ and can then see quantifiable results by adding to that finite amount through consequentialistically decided acts. While not affecting the total ‘good’, we are increasing the amount of ‘good’ in a given area, making it more dense in the region of our surroundings. While I am not making the argument that this means we should pay attention to the region of our surroundings while ignoring everything else, it does explain why in practice most persons act this way. It is rational for us to expect the average consequentialist to feel like she is making a difference by acting locally even while ignoring more pressing issues halfway around the world. As oxymoronic as this previously sounded, the concept of an infinite amount of ‘good’ makes it possible for someone to be regionally minded and rationally consequentialist at the same time.

Second, there is the mathematical defense, which is not descriptive like the psychological defense, but is rather purely prescriptive: When cardinalities are equal, we should choose that class of action which, when universally applied, has the consequence of possibly bringing about the densest amount of ‘good’. This overly complex statement requires clarification.

If you were asked to choose a random integer (assuming we both understand the meaning of ‘random’ when used in this sense), the probability of your chosen integer being a prime number is effectively zero (assuming we both understand ‘zero probability’ to mean what it means when used in this sense). This is because the non-primes so overwhelm the primes on the higher end of the scale. But you’d have a fully 50% chance of your random integer being an even number. This is what is meant by ‘density’ here. The evens are far more dense among integers than primes are. This is true even while all three categories, integers, primes, and evens, all have the same cardinality. (While irrationals crowd out rationals among reals just as much density-wise as evens crowd primes among integers, the irrationals form a different cardinality altogether, and so do not serve as a good example here.)

So if there is an infinte amount of ‘good’, then while any given action will not be able to change the cardinality of ‘good’, there may be _classes_ of actions which, when always applied, can modify the density of that ‘good’.

Classes of action make no difference in terms of cardinality: If I choose the action that brings about world peace, the cardinality of ‘good’ may not change, even if we chose that action based on a rule that said we should always bring about world peace when possible. In other words, even if world peace came about everywhere, at all times, the cardinality would not change. In this sense, talking about classes of actions does not help. (Infinity plus infinity is still just infinity.)

But in terms of density, classes of actions can bring about huge differences. Using that same example, if world peace came about everywhere, at all times, then, depending on the relation between constant world peace with other possible actions, that class of action of always bringing about world peace may increase the density of ‘good’ even while leaving the cardinality the same. Thus, we would want to take that class of action, knowing that if it is always followed, then the density of ‘good’ may increase.

You’ll have noticed, I’m sure, that I’ve used the modifier ‘may’ here. This is because I cannot think of a reliable way of demonstrating that a particular class of action will increase the density of ‘good’ when universally applied. Nevertheless, it _may_ increase the density of ‘good’, and that is enough to justify doing so, given that the alternative is to definitely not increase the density of the good at all. In general, if a class of action is equally dispersed among possible actions, then that class will add to the density of ‘good’. If that class of action is diminishing in dispersion among possible actions, then if the rate diverges, it will not add to the density of ‘good’, while if it converges, then it will add to the density of good. As to how you can tell whether or not a class of action is equally dispersed, let alone converges or diverges, I have no idea. (For example, imagine the ‘good’ is 0 mod3, every third integer among integers, making the density 1/3. Choosing a class of action that makes 1 mod3 ‘good’ will then increase the density to 2/3 (even 1 mod27 will increase the density to 1/3 + 1/27). But choosing a class of action that makes primes ‘good’ will add only zero to the original 1/3, and the density will remain the same.)

In practice, choosing a class of action that, when universalized, may increase the density of ‘good’ could take the form of ‘help your neighbor’ or ‘give preference to your family’. In this sense, the consequentialist may rationally give preference to one’s own while ignoring admittedly greater needs of strangers. Helping the strangers may bring about a higher finite amount of ‘good’, but since the cardinality is equal to helping one’s own, this is not a pressing difference. On the other hand, helping strangers may bring about an increase of the density of ‘good’, but it is not clear that it would be a greater increase than helping one’s own instead! Indeed, it seems possible that ‘helping one’s own’ and ‘helping strangers’ may very well increase the density of ‘good’ equally well, and so choosing between these ideals would be totally arbitrary! (Of course, it may turn out that they increase the density by different amounts, in which case consequentialism would demand one choice over the other. But the point is that it remains unclear as to how each choice may affect density, and so you cannot blindly say that helping whomever needs most help will take precedence.)

Thus these are the two arguments, psychological and mathematical, descriptive and prescriptive respectively, that show why a rational consequentialist might weight the consideration of interests of one’s own more highly than that of strangers, if they are faced with the possibility of an infinite universe in extent or duration in which the total good is nonfinite. With this additional reply added to their arsenal, I imagine the consequentialists will have an easier time defending their doctrine against those who argue that friendship comes first.

When she answered the door, I couldn’t help but to think that she wasn’t what I was expecting, even though for the life of me I cannot imagine what it was that I was expecting. She looked to be in her early sixties, in a floral print dress that has long been out of style. Her (assumedly) graying hair was wrapped in a towel, almost as though she was coming from the shower, but she showed no sign of it otherwise, so perhaps it was just a cultural thing.

“Hello, my name’s Eric, though I don’t know why I’m telling you that; we don’t know one another, and since I’m just passing by, it won’t do you any good to know my name.” I was already screwing it up. She gave me a strange look, and I thought for sure she’d shut the door on me if I didn’t get straight to the point. “I’m not selling anything, if that’s what you’re thinking. And I’m not here to spread the word of God or some other notion I may have. I just…” Pausing, I glanced inside her home. It was clean, perhaps too clean, with flowers everywhere.

“I walk past your home nearly every day on the way to the library, or the metro, or for nearly anything else for that matter. And I just wanted to say: every time I pass by your yard, I cannot help but to smile. Your garden is absolutely beautiful.”

She blushes, thanking me in a midwestern accent. She’s clearly not from here. “I don’t know if it your doing, or your husband’s, or just your gardener’s, but the beauty you have in your front yard is simply too much for me to not have stopped by to thank you for it. I cannot relate to you how many times I have passed by in a foul mood and been jerked back to happy thoughts by your azaleas. And that tree–forgive me for not knowing its species–its blossoms bowl me over no matter how heavy a load of books I am carrying back home.”

She responds kindly, in her own way, and in the background I can see that a tall man has come to stand nearby, just out of sight. I see this because he does not notice his shadow falling within my field of vision.

“No, I couldn’t possibly intrude on you this evening”, I reply to her hesitant invitation; then, nodding toward my backp-ack of groceries, I explain: “I am on my way home now, and cannot really take the time to stay for much longer than I already have. Besides, I don’t really want to get to know you.” Her look of puzzlement is plain, and I find myself wondering what look is on the face of the tall man just behind the corner. But I continue my (somewhat rehearsed) speech nonetheless. “I am not a particularly social person. I don’t relate well to very many people. It’s just…” I seem to struggle to get out the words, even though I know in advance what I will basically say. I’ve thought of nothing else these past few days. “Most people speak of inconsequential things to people who do not deserve to be spoken to: they gossip with coworkers or pass along confidentialities to second cousins. But I prefer to say what is deserved to the deserver, regardless of whether or not they happen to work where I do or share my same bloodline. You garden is why I’ve chosen to stop by here today, and it is why I’m saying this to you. But if I get to know you, it will be different. It will degrade this conversation, and when I write of this moment in my journal later tonight, the memory will be marred by the fact that you and I differ strongly on politics, or religion, or perhaps psychology. If I get to know you, then this memory will be of you; I would rather it be of the gardener behind this yard. If I shared a cup of tea with you, I may end up hating the experience, and every time I pass your yard on the way to the metro, I will think of you, when I really just want to appreciate the beauty of your garden. So no, I will not come inside. I wished to only give a compliment and leave; and that is what I will do.”

So I left.

There was so much I didn’t say that I had planned on. I wanted to tell her about how I was not the only one who enjoyed her garden. I wanted to tell her of the many car-goers who passed too quickly by in admiration, and I wanted to tell her of the pedestrians who did not stop because they would think it too silly to stop for, or because they needed to get to the bus stop in a hurry so they could get to their minimum wage job, or maybe because they did not know any English at all. I wanted to tell her that I was their spokesperson. That though I was the one to knock on her door to give this compliment, it was a compliment shared by countless passers-by, who all had brightened days due only to the beauty of her landscaped front yard. But I said none of this.

In fact, I said none of this at all. I planned to. I even stopped in front of her house, and willed myself to walk to her front door. But it was too late. I was tired. There were groceries in my backpack. It was dinnertime, and I didn’t want to be a nuisance. All these and more onbjections came to my head, and so I walked home without saying anything at all. And as I walked home, I imagined the sixty-ish floral clad figure with a towel wrapped around her head. I imagined the shadow of her companion, and the cleanliness of her home. And I know that I will not be saying any of this to her, nor to whomever may actually live there. Because, as uplifting as it may be to that mystery resident, it would just be too mean from my point of view. After all, her garden is despicable.

Oh, it is landscaped and well-groomed. With red flowers surrounded by stones and a row of bushes cut as though they were meant to a enjoy a fully right-angled existence. But seeing it every day makes me sick. Others look at with smiles on their faces–yes, I see these others taking enjoyment from that yard–but it is all too very fake to me. The lawn is cut, the weeds are all pulled, and the sterility makes me long for the sparse woodlands of my youth, path-ridden though they may have been.

No, I won’t ever knock on her door, though I fantasize complimening her on making a yard that is somehow even more devoid of nature than those who have nothing but grass cut to its shortest extent. If I did speak to her, I would be kindly in words, giving a rehearsed speech on behalf of the idiots who actually like the beauty of her yard, but it would all be a lie, because I HATE her yard, and I don’t wish to lie to this complete stranger just so I can fulfill this relentless fantasy of speaking to whomever it is that has such a backwards heart to care enough of plants to bother with gardening so thoroughly yet cares so little to take those same plants and keep them in a sterile, fake, zoo-like environment. (I abhor zoos.)

No, I will instead just write up what I imagine the encounter may have been like, and then start on my new library books. I’m looking forward to Howl’s Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones–the movie was so good, I can’t imagine not enjoying the book. And I wonder how much Miyazaki changed when writing the screenplay.

I will be very disappointed if the book turns out worse than the film. That hasn’t happened to me since Bridges of Madison County, and I fear the day when I meet another book that pales in comparison to the film vesion.

“You mean you don’t want the meat?”

“That’s right. I’m vegetarian.”

“Would you like to get the vegetarian sandwich meal instead?”

“No, I don’t particularly like whole grain bread, nor do I enjoy the particular type of veggie-burger you serve here. I’d really just like the sandwich made the same way you make all #2 sandwiches, except don’t put meat on it, and add extra lettuce and tomatoes.”

“So instead of fries, you want the apple and side-salad, right?”

“No, I’m not a health freak; I’m a vegetarian. There’s a difference. Just make the same kind of meal you would make for any meat-eater, except don’t include the meat. That means I want the same greasy fries you serve to everyone else.”

“Okay.”

–five minutes later–

“Hi, I just ordered a #2 without the meat, but when I got my order, it had meat on it.”

“You want your money back? You already opened it.”

“No, I don’t want my money back. I just want to get what I ordered initially. I was supposed to get a #2 without meat, but with added lettuce and tomatoes, but instead what I was given had meat in it. You did get the extra lettuce and tomatoes thing correct, though.”

“Okay, don’t worry; we’ll get it taken care of.”

–five minutes later–

“Hi, I’m sorry to be such a bother, but the replacement meal you just gave me is on a whole-wheat bun. I wanted a #2.”

“Yeah, with no meat, right?”

“Yes, with no meat. But I didn’t want the vegetarian sandwich–I wanted the #2 sandwich, but with no meat.”

“Okay, we’ll get this fixed for you. Don’t worry.”

–five minutes later–

“Excuse me, but I overheard the troubles you’ve been having getting your order fixed up correctly.”

“Yeah, it’s okay, though. I’m used to it.”

“Well, I just wanted to let you know that they do it on purpose. I’m a regular here, and every day they find someone to pick on and deliberately get their order wrong over and over.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, they think it’s funny as hell. But I’m going to show them. Next time I order, when they get it right, I’ll tell them they got it wrong, and if they get it wrong, I’ll just eat what they give me. It’s the perfect plan, you see.”

“… Yes, that sounds like a good plan. … Uh, thanks for letting me in on it. But I really should finish eating now. I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

“Yes, yes.”

–30 second pause–

“You know, you could start out this perfect plan by giving them back your half finished food and saying they got it wrong again. I mean, I know they got it right this time, but it’ll really get them back if you tell them it’s wrong.”

“Um…, no, … no, thank you. I think you’ll do quite fine by yourself when you order your food tomorrow. After all, if I do that today, it might warn them of your perfect plan for tomorrow, and that wouldn’t be good.”

“You’re right! We can’t let them know about my plan. Hey, you’re a pretty smart guy. Maybe you can come eat here tomorrow with me and we can fool them together–that’ll really get them!”

“I appreciate the offer, but I really do have to go, and I won’t be available tomorrow. Thanks for letting me in on your plan, though. I’ll keep it a secret.”

“Yes, yes, keep it a secret. Don’t tell anybody! If they find out, who knows what could happen! You promise you’ll keep it a secret?”

“I won’t tell anyone but my diary, at least not until after tomorrow.”

“Good.”

Rove pointed out, quite accurately, in my opinion, that it is dishonest for Obama to pledge that he wants to run a different kind of campaign, and yet continues to harp on McCain’s ‘100 years of war’ statement.

It’s really weird to realize that I went out to a speech by Karl Rove, got irritated at the hecklers who called him nasty names because I was trying to follow what Rove was saying, and in the end agreed with him far more than I disagreed with him. Certainly not what I expected.

If the many anti-Rove documentaries I’ve seen tell truthful stories, then Rove is a complete dick. But his speech at George Washington University was actually pretty good, and about three-quarters of what he said actually made a lot of sense to me.

Certainly not what I expected.

Update: Three days later, Obama gave a speech in PA and was asked by a member of the crowd if he thought he was going too far by mischaracterizing McCain’s ‘100 years’ comment for political advantage. Obama staunchly denied this, stating unequivocally that he felt he was being quite fair, and said that he was referring to an exact quote. “We can both go back on youtube to see exactly what he said,” Obama told the questioner. “He was quite clear that he would stay in Iraq for 100 years.” (paraphrased)

Of the remaining candidates, since Nader has no chance in hell, I’m an Obama supporter. But this is just plain wrong. Obama himself said that he would keep troops around similar to what we now do in Germany and Japan, and that is exactly what McCain clarified that he meant in his statement as well. I’ll still vote for Obama, but I’m very disappointed in him for this. .:sigh:.

(I’ll start with a quick summary, and then go into detail for those who want more info.)

A congressman died not long ago, and the service was held this morning at the House. But Republicans interrupted it midstream with political talk, which got Democrats riled up. Then democrats refused to vote on FISA, which got Republicans all riled up, too. So every time anything happened afterward, the republicans retaliated by using the House rules to annoy Democrats as much as possible. Then Democrats retaliate by deciding to authorize a deputizion of a civil force to potentially arrest White House officals, and Republicans are so pissed that they boycott the vote and stampede out.

This all really happened today in the House of Representatives. CSPAN was never this good before.

Okay, so for the 10% of you who want to know more, here’s the rundown.

First, on Congressman Tom Lantos’ service interruption, the details I have are still sketchy. I’ll update this later once I get more info.

Second, on FISA: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expires this weekend. Once it expires, if a new category of target needs to be surveilled, the surveillance of thoe targets has to wait until a new FISA bill is passed. This is not as bad as Bush and other republicans are making it out to be; it’s not like current terrorists will cease to be surveilled, nor is it true that new terrorists will not be able to be surveilled, so long as they are a part of a group we are already aware of–at least for the next year. It really isn’t that big a deal at all, but hearing Bush speak, you’d never realize that. He is saying that because of the House not passing a bill on this, they are putting Americans at risk.

Anyway, the reason the House is not passing the bill is very easy to understand: they don’t want to give the Telecom industry retroactive immunity from the violations of privacy law they perpetrated after 9/11. Bush’s argument is that if they don’t get immunity, then in the future, the Telecoms won’t actively help us out in surveilling terrorists. This is true enough. But it leaves out the fact that if we know of a terrorist that needs to be surveilled, we can always get a court order to force the telecoms to help. Their voluntary help is not necessary, and I for one feel much better living in a world where the telecoms are scared to just volunteer information that they think might interest the gov’t. And no, that doesn’t make me a terrorist.

The second reason the House isn’t passing the bill is because as currently written, the Senate bill cedes authority to the Executive branch that allows them to have surveillance powers beyond what is regulated in FISA. In effect, this would give a blank check (albeit to an account with limited funds) to Bush to trample over even more civil liberties. The House would prefer a FISA bill that has exclusive control over foreign surveillance.

In addition, I should mention that it is not like they just up and said they’re not going to pass FISA. They offered a limited short term extension to the current FISA so they can debate more and come to a consensus later on. The republicans passed on this, trying to force the democrats to pass their version of FISA instead. It would’ve worked, too, since it appears that there are enough votes in the House to actually pass the republican’s version. But democrats siderailed a vote by instead voting on other things.

This whole time, the republicans were doing everything they could to annoy democrats during the proceedings. Someone would say: “I’d like to call for an early adjournment”, and then another republican would second. This forced Pelosi to call a vote on the issue: she would ask all who wanted adjournment to say ‘aye’, and those opposed to say ‘nay’. Nearly everyone would say ‘nay’, of course, since they were in the middle of doing their work for the day–even Republicans didn’t really want to adjourn, since they were trying to get the democrats to hold the FISA vote. So Pelosi would proclaim that the nays have it, and another republican would dispute this obviously correct assessment, and another rep. would second it. Which means that they’d have to take a written vote, one by one, which, by the way, takes at least fifteen minutes in the House. Then after it was clear that the nays were in the majority, they’d go on to the next item on the agenda, and another republican would then call for an early adjournment again, and the whole ordeal would repeat itself. This happened ALL DAY LONG.

Democrats were so angry over this that they then passed a bill that takes the rather extreme step of stipulating that they will deputize a civil force to arrest Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers on the charge of contempt of Congress. (You might recall that during the former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales fiasco a while back, Bolten and Miers cited executive privilege and flatly refused to even show up when the House summoned them to appear.) They did this because the current Attorney General Michael Mukasey announced that he would not prosecute against White House officials who refused to testify in this manner, since they likely did so based on the advice of the former Atty. General.

I should mention that the wording they used described this mechanism as a civil lawsuit which, if the judge ruled in the House’s favor, would allow the judge to compel Bolten and Miers to testify or go to jail. That’s right, you heard correctly: a civil lawsuit that allows jailtime. If this happened, and the Atty. General refused to enforce it, this would require the deputization of a civil force to enforce the judge’s ruling.

The whole idea of this pissed off the republicans so much that instead of voting on it, they all boycotted the vote en masse and just left the House floor. It passed overwhelmingly, of course.

This is why I love living in DC. I live for this kind of thing. Anyway, I’ll update the above with links as I get access to them later in the day. The first draft of this article comes straight from listening to CSPAN radio as the events took place in real time.

And since the writer’s strike is over, I’m expecting big things tonight with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I’ll be very displeased if they don’t cover this story as well as I envision them being able to do.

When you’re done watching, read on. I’ll wait for you.

Okay, finished watching? Good. Now I have a few things to say. But before I start, I want to share the first thing I wrote down when I first watched this:

I’m still trying to think about how a cooperation-based economy would be fundamentally different than a capitalist economy. I’m not entirely sure I followed where he was going with this talk….

Is he saying that we might be able to create a new form of economy where each of us works together in ways that create wealth for us all as opposed to just ourselves? His mention of the ultimatum game seems to be used as evidence to show that even when we lose out in a capitalistic sense, we may have an innate desire to cooperate in such a way that everyone gains fairly in the end. Is he extrapolating this to say that the new economy will be one where a companies might start doing things that help everyone, even when self interest ceases to be a motivating factor, simply because to not be fair is to invite the wrath of a public which expects cooperation no matter what?

Regardless of whether this is what he was in fact thinking, this is where his talk has taken me. The altruistic punisher effect, as he showed it, is quite small. On the large scale, the only thing close to it is a society which bands together via taxes to impose regulations on others. But a HUGE portion of society (I’m talking about you Ron Paul fanatics who visited this blog for the sole reason that this entry came up on google blog search for the “Ron Paul is awesome” quote that I just gave) does not feel that these regulations are a good idea. (Even Ann Coulter has publicly stated that when she listens to Ron Paul speeches, she starts to fall in love with him up until he talks about foreign policy, at which point she says she regains her sanity.) Is it possible that while the altruistic punisher idea works consistently on the small scale, it breaks down at larger scales?

I’m thinking about it, and it certainly makes sense that if the ultimatum game is played with a million dollars, and player A claims $900 000, you’d have to be crazy to turn down the $100k. Yet then he starts to give examples of companies that are starting to go altruistic today. As more and more companies fall into this mold, will it happen that we as a society will come to expect such behavior, and then punish those companies that don’t exhibit it? If so, then companies will HAVE to be cooperative, even if it is to their detriment, since if they don’t, society will make it even further to their detriment.

… To be honest, I’m still really fuzzy on all this. If you ask me again tomorrow, I may hold an entirely different view. But today, as I write this, the idea seems not only plausible, but also the evidence Howard Rheingold gave seems to actually support the idea that we could be moving in that direction as we speak.

What do you think?

The young man was lying in the middle of the street, howling in pain. A skateboard lay upside down on the curb some two meters to the side. Being a philosophy/physics/math person, I never bothered learning anything in the field of biology, so I literally knew nothing to do other than rush to his side. Thankfully, the person I’d seen running away through the window was a companion that was running to get a car to take the guy to a hospital. While doing my best to help steady him, I lifted him into the car after only a few short minutes, and then the two of them drove off.

This marks, I think, my first ‘emergency’-style experience, unless you count the time that Phoe stabbed me with a katana blade. But I was on the receiving end that time, so I don’t think it counts. I hope I did the appropriate thing. I sometimes worry that perhaps I won’t be any good in an emergency, but I think I did okay in this one. Certainly I did better than anyone else in the immediate area, as not a single other person ran out to help the guy, though I did see a couple of people come out as the car was driving away.

Anyway. Back to Dilbert.

Nevertheless, because the US gov’t is also completely fucking insane, they actually fund studies to deal with such issues from time to time (okay, all the time). The one I want to bring to everyone’s attention today was sponsored by the National Institute of Health.

I will quote directly from the abstract:

A group of approximately 2,000 people in Tokyo focused positive intentions toward water samples located inside an electromagnetically shielded room in California. That group was unaware of similar water samples set aside in a different location as controls. Ice crystals formed from both sets of water samples were blindly identified and photographed by an analyst, and the resulting images were blindly assessed for aesthetic appeal by 100 independent judges. Results indicated that crystals from the treated water were given higher scores for aesthetic appeal than those from the control water (P = .001, one-tailed), lending support to the hypothesis.

For those of you who skipped over the primary source quote because of some delusion that secondary sources are better, what this is saying is that they tested whether or not water crystals looked “more aesthetically appealing” after “positive intentions” were directed at the water prior to freezing, and the result was statistically significant.

I bet Emoto peed his pants when he found out the results were in his favor.

But for those of you who think I am showing this because I want to convince you to the Emotive Water Hypothesis point of view, please stop being an idiot. The point, instead, is to explain why even when a double blind experiment takes place, its results are not necessarily conclusive.

Whenever someone does an experiment, you get a result. If you do the experiment well, you’ll get lots of results, because you’ll do things lots of times under exceedingly similar conditions, and compare them to control conditions. The idea is that if you just do the experiment once, you may get a result which is not ordinary; perhaps because there was some error in the performance of your experiment, or even just because you happened to get a high maximal result or a low minimal result of a range of results that you could have gotten.

By this, what I mean is that if you measure the length of a board only once, you may have accidentally measured incorrectly. Or you may have measured in a specific place which gave the longest possible measure of the board. The only way to really get an accurate measurement is to redo the measuring multiple times. If you get the same result twice in a row, that gives you more confidence in your result. Even better if two separate measurers get the same result. And likely there will be a range of answers–some results will be high, and some low. The ‘real’ measure is somewhere in between. (For you philosophers out there, the existence of a ‘real’ measure is actually disputed itself, but that’s a topic for a future journal entry.)

Anyway, the hope is that by measuring multiple times, you are more likely to not have all the measures be too high, or too low, or consistently mismeasured. This is why, in the NIH experiment with Emoto’s water, you have multiple people on every side of the experiment, all giving results multiple times. They were attempting to make it less likely for all the measures to be consistently incorrect.

But even though you have lots of people working together on measuring and remeasuring, there is still the possibility that everyone will, wholly by chance, consistently measure too long a length. We want this chance to be as small as possible, so we say some results are statistically insignificant, even if they give results higher or lower than expected.

For example, let’s say the length of board is 100 units (u) long. If we do the measurement twenty times, then depending on the method of measurement used, we might expect to get results back of 98u, 101u, and maybe even a 105u. 90% of the time, these are the results we would get back from measuring. So if we got these results back, and the hypothesis was that the board was 100u long, we’d say that these results corroborated the hypothesis. But remember I said that these measurements are of the kind you might expect 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time, you might get twenty measurement results of which ALL are 102u and above. This would be a statistically significant difference. If these were the results, we’d say the hypothesis that the board is 100u long is less likely true than an alternate hypothesis that said it was 105u long. And we’d say this EVEN IF the ‘real’ measurement was just 100u long.

Rearrange the above figures so that instead of just a 90% probability, you instead use a 99.9% standard, and you can see even more extreme distances. .1% of the time, a multiply repeated experiment might result in concluding that a hypothesis of the board being 125u long is corroborated, even if it is only 100u long. This is a rather extreme example, but you get the idea.

The end result is that this NIH study is a lottery winner. It is a true rarity–it gives corroboration to the 125u long hypothesis, even though that hypothesis is wildly incorrect. Over time, if the experiment is repeated again and again, you’d expect the results to get closer to reality. But that would mean the NIH would have to sponsor yet another study on emotive water with American tax dollars.

Now I’m going to go eat a cold slice of pizza as a reward for actually updating this blog.

Update: Here’s a link. The link only mentions the sec of def part; but he said in his speech that he’d appoint him to both simultaneously. As soon as I get a news source to verify, I’ll post another link.

Correction: Apparently I misheard on cspan. Chuck Norris is just going to be secretary of defense. He’s appointing Nature Boy Rick Flair as Head of the Department of Homeland Security. This is still fucking unbelievable, though.

Perhaps even more frightening is the Georgia police that unnecessarily tasered a man four times in 40 seconds killing him. Seeing such unnecessary tasering just makes one’s stomach churn. Especially when you realize it is everywhere, even when someone is just stopped for a speeding ticket.

The issue, of course, is that because it is considered nonlethal, police seem more apt to utilize it in a situation. But with all these recent deaths, one starts to wonder if it really is nonlethal. That’s why the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) in the UK decided to do a study specifically to find out how harmful tasers really are.

Because the cause of death from electric shock generally seems to be a problem with the heart, the researchers focused in on the possibility of cardiac arrhythmia occurring with the use of M26 and X26 commercial tasers. They chose guinea pig hearts to test on, due to the similarity of its electrocardiographic-wave configurations in comparison to human hearts.

The results were surprising for me, though I suppose that’s only because I was unfamiliar with similar findings from the past. The current densities of both devices had to be increased by at least a factor of 60 before erratic heartbeats were seen. In other words, tasers are safe when used properly.

There is apparently a wide safety margin between the intensity of a taser strike and the level at which a human heart would beat irregularly. The research team did, however, warn that “consumption of alcohol or some drugs, or an existing heart condition” might “reduce this safety margin in some individuals”.

“I have many concerns about TASERs, but the induction of a cardiac arrhythmia appears to be less of a problem,” stated Brad Roth, associate professor in the department of physics at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. So it remains to be seen why, exactly, so many taser deaths have occurred recently.

Perhaps it just in misusing them that the problems occur? But even if someone is tased four times in forty seconds, how does that compare to the finding that tasers are sixty times too weak to cause irregular heartbeats? These are very unclear questions, and I certainly don’t have any answers.

What do you guys think?

Update: PhysicsWorld has an article on today’s study, and also I was informed that the UN now considers tasers as torture.

The GAO released a report today that detailed how teams at 19 different airports were able to smuggle bomb parts and liquid explosives right past security to get onto the planes. These bombs were built out of $150 worth of materials commonly available at hardware stores, and a video they showed in session with congress today showed just how powerful such an explosion would be. (I will upload the cspan footage onto youtube shortly and post it here.) I think it was clear to all who watched that the resulting explosion could easily destroy any plane it went off in, although TSA chief Kip Hawley just had to point out that since such an explosion has not been tested inside a plane, “no one really knows” what would happen if it went off in mid-flight. (I guess they’ll have to check Mythbusters for that one.)

While it is clearly troubling that in 19 attempts, 19 successes were had, perhaps it will be even more troubling to realize that when they saw how easy it was to get through, they tried AGAIN, but this time triggered the special screening to see what would happen. They STILL got through in 19 out of 19 tries.

But believe it or not, this is not the worst part.

The worst part is that last year, the GAO did the same exact thing and got the same exact results. There has been no improvement in the intervening year, even though last time, Congress told the TSA to train their people to protect against this threat. TSA chief Hawley insists that “as of right now, our airports are safe. We have fixed the problem”, yet immediately afterward, the GAO official (sorry, but I didn’t catch his name) retorted that “we used the same exact methods we did last year, and had absolutely no problems getting through”, though he admitted he also used new techniques in some cases and additionally smuggled in liquid explosives, which they didn’t do in last year’s exercise.

What this means, in a nutshell, is that we apparently can’t guard against this stuff. This problem was brought to the attention of Homeland Security and its TSA division last year, and were told to at least fix this breach, yet a year later, no progress has been made. It remains obvious, therefore, that no progress can be made, since I refuse to believe that these people actually want security to be so easily broken.

The simple fact, then, is that anytime terrorists want to, they can blow up passenger planes in American airspace. With all that this gov’t has tried to do to limit such threats, nothing has worked. The fact that we haven’t had a major terrorist attack recently, I then conclude, is not because of hotshots behind the scenes who are taking out the badguys Bond-style, but rather because the would-be terrorists simply haven’t yet had the willpower to see such plans through. If they did, then numerous planes would already have been destroyed.

Or do you think I’m being too harsh? What do you guys think?

Update: Summary of the GAO report is available at their website. Also, apparently CNN did a short piece on this as well.

We need to stand up and do something. Mike Gravel needs exposure, and he needs it NOW. What is most astonishing to me about Gravel’s lack of progress in the polls is that whenever a blind poll is put out, where people must choose the issues they care about, rather than the candidates behind those issues, Mike Gravel consistently comes out on top, followed closely by Dennis Kucinich and Al Gore. I’ll repeat that for those who are just scanning through this paragraph: Mike Gravel LEADS the polls whenever issues are chosen rather than faces. Not only is Mike Gravel the best candidate for President, but the US public seems to know it, too!

Furthermore, if we just let Mike Gravel fade away after what NBC did to him, then what does that say about us as a people? Corporate media cannot be allowed to dictate who can and who can’t be our next President! If we let GE throw Gravel out of the race without a vote, Ron Paul will be next! And Kucinich right after that. It’s not right–the whole point of having a vote is for people to vote! We MUST allow the people to have their say, rather than to let big media continue to dictate to us who can and who can’t be our next President!

There are two easy things that YOU can do to help stop corporate media from pushing us around. The first is to make sure NBC’s attempt to throw out Gravel is unsuccessful.

Whether you like Mike Gavel or not is beside the point. What matters is that we DO NOT LET GE WIN. Gravel must be allowed to stay in this race until it comes to a vote; if, at that time, the people decide not to go with him, then so be it. But it must come to a vote!

To accomplish this, Mike Gravel must get the exposure he needs to force the next huge media conglomerate that they must allow him in the debate. So here’s what I need all of you who are reading this to do right now.

Go to Democracy NOW! and request Mike Gravel as a guest on their show. Democracy NOW! doesn’t have the audience base that NBC does, but the people who watch Democracy NOW! are committed to helping good causes. If we can get Mike Gravel on that show, that could mean a huge increase in volunteer effort! Please, go to Democracy NOW! now!

Second, we must actively engage the public. We need to tap into the mainstream, and get people talking about why GE would do such a thing to Mike Gravel. I have an idea for this, and it involves Stephen Colbert and Ron Paul. But I still need to work out the kinks before I propose it… I’ll have a proposal up on this blog by tomorrow.

In the meantime, if you care anything at all about keeping this country free, then go to Democracy NOW! now to help get Mike Gravel on their show!

Update: By request, I am posting the blind poll that shows Gravel on top. Another recent blind poll put Al Gore on top, but in that one, Gravel, Kucinich, and all republicans were not included. Ron Paul has so far not won any blind polls, though he consistently does well in nonblind straw polls.

There’s something about this Ron Paul guy.

And I’m not just talking about the fact that he is currently third in raising funds. I’m not just talking about the fact that he wins straw polls left and right, often by a huge margin. (81% in my home state of Alabama (2nd place was 5%), and 28% in my current state of Maryland (2nd place was 24%), to name just two examples).

I guess what I’m talking about is the fact that his message seems to resonate with so many people.

Let me say up front that I am a Mike Gravel supporter. But I want to give an honest rundown of Ron Paul, so that everyone can see what I see whenever I hear about him, which seems to happen more and more often lately.

The one thing that shines through about Ron Paul is his sincerity. He has very strong opinions, and his votes on the hill never deviate from them. One thing that he is very strong about is his absolute refusal to vote on any measure that he believes the constitution does not authorize the congress to oversee, even if he is in fact in favor of hatever that measure is trying to address. The man is a constitutionalist, through and through, and he has stood up against special interests and lobbyists of all kinds throughout his tenure. In fact, it is so well known that he remains true to his core beliefs that few lobbyists even bothered to try with him, at least up until his presidential campaign got up to speed.

Many times, looking at congressional voting records is difficult, as there are almost always extenuating circumstances with different bills. But not so with Ron Paul; his voting record is clean as the driven snow.

He has NEVER:

• voted to raise taxes
• voted for a budget that wasn’t balanced
• voted to raise congressional pay
• voted for a bill that he believed was contrary to the constution, including any and all bills restricting gun ownership of any kind, and any bill that would have granted the executive power additional powers

• In addition, he voted against the Patriot Act.
• He voted against regulating the internet.
• He voted against the Iraq war.

Furthermore, he refuses to accept anything more than a minimal salary; he does not participate in the congressional pension plan, and he returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the US treasury every year.

Furthermore, he is one of the most active congressmen I’ve ever seen. When compared to any other single member of congress, he has introduced the most pieces of legislation, though to be honest, not many are able to get through, due to his unwillingness to work ‘behind the scenes’ and participate in quid pro quo policies.

In short, Ron Paul is honest, decent, and truthfully believes in his convictions. It is rare to see such a person running for President. It is even rarer to see them actually starting to do really well, as Dr. Paul is.

His foriegn policy is very similar to Mike Gravel’s. He wants to pull our troops out, not just from Iraq, but from most everywhere else, too. To quote Mike Gravel on a point that Ron Paul agreed with: “Policing the world is just their way of enforcing our American empire.”

Ron Paul’s ideas on free trade are quite confusing. He is libertarian, yet… Ron Paul believes that free trade deals and world governmental trade organizations like ICC, NAFTA, GATT, WTO, and CAFTA are bad for our nation. To quote Dr. Paul: “We must withdraw from any organizations and trade deals that infringe upon the freedom and independence of the United States of America.”

Ron Paul also strongly believes in privacy, even though he does not agree that constitution has a privacy clause in it. He’s against a national ID card, against the use of a social security number in the private sector (he wants it to be gov’t only), against letting medical insurance companies see your medical info, against the current US law that notifies the US gov’t wheneveryou deposit $10k or more into a bank, etc.

He is also strongly against birthright citizenship. “As long as illegal immigrants know their children born here will be citizens, the incentive to enter the U.S. illegally will remain strong.” And Dr. Paul believes that removing incentives is the only way to properly enforce laws.

He is for what he calls ‘health freedom’, which he describes is your ability to take care ofyour health the way you best see fit. This includes a move against the FDA, possibly to the point of shutting them down, and an opposition of any bill that would require US citizens to be immunized from any disease, such as the recent HR 5005 that authorized the forced vaccination of American citizens against small pox.

He is very strongly pro-life, as he was a practicing medical doctor for many years, and delivered many babies himself.

He is even more stringently against taxation, wanting to minimize taxes to the extreme. He wants to abolish the IRS and replace it with NOTHING. He points out that the loss of income tax will bring our national income level to about where it was in 2000. He thinks that cutting spending to that level shouldn’t be that difficult. He also wants to start backing every dollar with something physical, so that the US gov’t has to stop taking loans out by printing more money. He is an extreme fiscal conservative.

He wants to eliminate social security for all younger people, and yet still pay out top dollar to those depending on it, as well as actually increasing what they receive, because he believes that all taxes on social security income should be immediately repealed. This would be paid for by reducing the military.

I could go on and on. But you get the idea. His issues are pretty straightforward, and he believes in them all fairly strongly.

There are a number of things that I disagree with. But the weird part is… If he were president, most of this stuff he’d never be able to implement. And the stuff that he would be able to implement is stuff I basically agree with.

So, in a weird way, I almost wouldn’t mind if he were president.

Please don’t get me wrong; I support Mike Gravel. And I think removing the FDA is just as ludicrous as his consistent voting record to allow citizens to legally handle submachine guns. But I have to hand to it to him that at least he’s consistent. And when you think about it, only congress has the authority to deal with gun legislation. Only congress has the authority to deal with birthright citizenship. Only congress has the authority to back the dollar. And since Ron Paul is so sincere, I cannot imagine that he would use the executive branch to subvert his own ideals in order to bring those policies into place. No, if he were president, these insane ideas that I wholeheartedly think are stupid would never come into play at all.

On the other hand, everything that I do agree with is stuff that he would then have authority to start realizing: foreign policy, trade agreements, int’l organizations, etc. The only thing, in fact, that he would have power over that I don’t immediately like is the possibility of his appointing new supreme court justices. But Ron Paul seems so honest… I can’t imagine him appointing anyone that wasn’t a strict conservative constitutionalist. And those types of people would never repeal earlier decisions by their own court without overriding need, and so they would not vote to overturn Roe v Wade, for example.

So with Mike Gravel getting beaten back left and right, and with Dennis Kucinich saying incredibly stupid things like “I saw a UFO” on live national television, I’m really starting to think hard about Ron Paul.

And I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet.

.:sigh:. Look: I’m for Mike Gravel, and I back him 95%. But if he doesn’t make it, the only choice I have left is Dennis Kucinich. So it really irks me that he’s so idiotic as to say something like this during the democratic presidential debate.

Why can’t truly intelligent people ever make it in US politics? Why is it that of all the contenders that are left (if Gravel’s run is over), the last person I feel capable of voting for is someone who claims to have seen a UFO?

I really want to move to another country. )c:

If you plan to watch tonight’s debate, then you should also watch Gravel’s webcast! If we let GE and its subsidiary, NBC, dictate who is and who is not allowed to become president, then it is not Mike Gravel that loses out, but all of democracy itself! How can we claim to have a free society when this kind of thing occurs, and no one acts to stop it? Why are we not revolting in the streets right now, as they would be doing in any respectable developing country? We cannot–we dare not allow the giant news corporations to dictate to us who is allowed airtime on these presidential debates! If we want to call ourselves free, then we must push for freedom!

Watch the debate live tonight, at Gravel2008.us! (6pm pst/9pm est)

Update: Now that the debate is over, here’s the video of the event. Be aware that the audio was messed up in the first two minutes, but it quickly clears up.

.

Well, now one of Gravel’s supporters (who is apparently also a Ron Paul supporter) has decided to stand up and put his money where his mouth is. Gregory Chase, multi-millionaire, sent this letter to five executives at NBC, DNC chairman Howard Dean, the President of Drexel University, and also published it as an advertisement in four newspapers.  Here is an excerpt:

If it would help get Senator Gravel back into the debate, I offer to purchase $1 million of advertising from NBC, or simply pay NBC $1 million in exchange for the service of allowing Senator Gravel to participate in your debate.

But he doesn’t stop there. He also posted this youtube video, where he personally offers $25,000 to whomever produces the Gravel youtube video with the most views through the end of the year.

Furthermore, Mr. Chase has personally purchased advertising space for every day from now until the end of the year in the three major New Hampshire newspapers: the Monitor, the Manchester Union Leader and the Nashua Telegraph.

Stay tuned for additional updates as this story moves forward.

Update: Jon Kraus interviewed Gregory Chase, and Bryan Bissell reported it on his blog.

Second Update: From Jon Kraus’s interview:

Chase said that he had spoken with an election lawyer who advised him to make dependent expenditures on behalf of Gravel, where his name would have to be attached to any advertisements he made, along with a notation that it was not involved with the campaign. Furthermore, Chase mentioned that he has never met Gravel, and for that matter has never been to a political rally in New Hampshire.

Kraus also mentioned that Gregory Chase is also a supporter of Ron Paul in the interview. I amended the copy above to reflect this.

Furthermore, they enacted these new requirements at the very last moment, so as to ensure that Gravel could not possibly meet the requirements on time. This isn’t right; it’s a clear example of a giant news media corporation deciding on their own who should hear which candidates. If General Electric (who owns NBC) were doing this to Ron Paul, then you can be sure the internet hordes would flock to his support. But it is just as wrong for this to be happening to Mike Gravel, so I hope that all of you reading this will sign the petition to include Mike Gravel in this debate!
[ http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/letgravelspeakoct30 ]

If you really feel strongly about this, then you should also flood the e-mail of execs at NBC that are behind this fiasco. You can send any upset mail to [ chuck.todd@nbcuni.com, viewerservices@msnbc.com, directors@corporate.ge.com, ombudsperson@corporate.ge.com, jeff.zucker@nbcuni.com, lynn.calpeter@nbcuni.com, steve.capus@nbcuni.com ]. You should also e-mail the DNC to let them know how you feel about this outrage: [ http://www.democrats.org/page/s/contact ].

For the record, the new arbitrary requirements NBC decided to enforce are:

• Campaign in Iowa/New Hampshire at least 4 times
• Polling at at least 5%
• Raise $1 Million

Although NBC claims he has not met all three new requirements, in fact Gravel HAS campaigned well over 14 times in those states since he declared his candidacy in April ‘06, and a recent CNN poll puts him tied with Biden, Kucinich, and Dodd.

In fact, the only criterion he has not yet met is the $1 million raised; but Gravel is proud of the fact that he doesn’t accept money from special interests. In Mike Gravel’s own words: “The reason why Senator Hillary Clinton seems to have a fundraising scandal every month is because money has corrupted our democracy. By stifling my voice on the basis of fundraising dollars, NBC is reinforcing the power of money over our national political discussion and our freedom.”

Furthermore, it is quite clear why NBC is doing this to Gravel. GE, who owns NBC, is one of the world’s leading military contractors. They hold over $2 Billion in military contracts right now. If it weren’t for Gravel bringing up the vote to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization in the last debate, no one would have even been aware of the gravity of such an event occurring in our Senate.

We NEED Mike Gravel. That’s why I urge you all to sign this petition, whether you plan to vote for Gravel or not.

[ http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/letgravelspeakoct30 ]

Update: The money restriction was just solved! Apparently, a Gravel supporter with a lot of cash on hand decided to pay $1,000,000 if NBC would just let Gravel speak a the debate!

The event started with the President of Columbia University “introducing” Ahmadinejad–but what started as a simple introduction turned into a speech all by itself. Columbia President Lee Bolinger remarks included this amazing initial salvo:

“Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator….”

Bolinger then listed item after item pointedly asking President Ahmadinejad about policies such as his statement two years ago that the Holocaust did not happen, and whether he was using nuclear threats to hide the fact that he was an incompetent president of his people. He said that either Pres. Ahmadinejad was “brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated”. He claimed that Iran is the leading country in executing minors, and asked very pointedly why women, members of the Baha’i faith, homosexuals, and academics have all become targets of prosecution in Iran.

Bolinger’s ‘introduction’ lasted thirty minutes. During this time, President Ahmadinejad patiently waited for his chance to speak.

Finally, Pres. Ahmadinejad took the podium. He started, as most Muslims of his type do, by reciting verses from the Koran, which really turned me off, but you really have to put up with such cultural eccentricities, I suppose, if you ever want to mount a successful dialogue.

Then he finally started, thanking God for his chance to speak to an academic audience. His initial words I am copying here from the Associated Press reports that came out, instead of by memory:

“At the outset, I want to complain a bit about the person who read this political statement against me. In Iran, tradition requires that when we invite a person to be a speaker, we actually respect our students and the professors by allowing them to make their own judgment and we don’t think it’s necessary before the speech is even given to come in with a series of claims and to attempt to provide a vaccination of sorts to our faculty and students. I think the text read by the dear gentleman here, more than addressing me, was an insult to information and the knowledge of the audience here, present here. In a university environment we must allow people to speak their mind, to allow everyone to talk so that the truth is eventually revealed by all.”

The audience bursted into applause at this point. I don’t usually applaud unless I really appreciate a point, but I have to admit that I ended up clapping, too.

Pres. Ahmadinejad then went on to mention that he would indeed answer Pres. Bolinger’s questions, but that first he had much to say. He added that many of Bolinger’s facts were incorrect, and that they were in some parts exaggerations and in other outright lies.

Then Ahmadinejad went into that mode of speech that I so came to despise back at Spring Hill College: logic combined with religious crap. Think apologist-style, for you catholics out there. Something about science is illumination, god loves illumination, therefore god loves science; also science isn’t just experiments and hypotheses, but also divine truth as told by the prophets; science is a light source by which we may see the reality of knowledge, but we must not ignore knowledge which remains occluded by shadow; but science’s light is best used by scientists, and “some world powers” that choose to use science against humanity are wrong to do so; etc., ad nauseum. I expect this was his written speech, prepared well in advance. It sucked big time.

But afterward, and before he moved on to taking questions from the audience, he decided to respond to Bolinger’s earlier attacks in his ‘introduction’. This is where it got good.

First, he responded to the holocaust denial accusation.

He said that two years ago, he raised two questions, both of which he feels are valid questions, and should be asked. Yet instead of getting answers, he instead has been ridiculed by the press and insulted by Bolinger concerning his asking of these questions.

I will quote him directly, again copied straight from AP, so that you can see what he said for yourself:

“You know that my main job is as a university instructor. Right now, as president of Iran, I still continue teaching graduate and Ph.D.-level courses on a weekly basis. My students are working with me in scientific fields. I believe that I am an academic myself, so I speak to you from an academic point of view. And I raise two questions. But instead of a response, I got a wave of insults and allegations against me. And regretfully, they came mostly from groups who claimed most to believe in the freedom of speech and of information.

“You know quite well that Palestine is an old wound –- as old as 60 years. For 60 years, these people are displaced. For 60 years, they are being killed. For 60 years, on a daily basis there’s conflict and terror, for 60 years, innocent women and children are destroyed and killed by helicopters and airplanes that rake the houses over their heads. Children in schools are being tortured, for 60 years, the slogan of expansionism, from the Nile to the Euphrates, has been chanted.

“Given that the Holocaust is a present reality of our time, a history that occurred, why is there not sufficient research that can approach the topic from different perspectives?”

His ‘two questions’ are these:

• Why is there no further research on the Holocaust? Why is there only one perspective shown in every historical narrative of the Holocaust?
• Even if everything traditionally said historically about the holocaust is true, why do the Palestinians have to pay for atrocities the Axis powers committed?

He did not mention the Iraq invasion in this part of his speech, but the implication was clear: Just as Al Qaeda attacked the United States, and we took it out on Iraqis, the Germans attacked the Jews, and in retaliation, the West decided to kick out the Palestinians so that the Jews could have their own state.

“We need to still question whether the Palestinian people should be paying for it or not. After all, it happened in Europe. The Palestinian people had no role in it. Why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price for an event they had nothing to do with?

“They had no role to play in World War II. They were living with the Jewish and Christian communities in peace at the time. They didn’t have any problems. Today, too, Jews, Christians and Muslims live in brotherhood in many parts of the world. Why is it that Palestinians should pay a price -– innocent Palestinians -– for five million people to remain displaced and refugees abroad, for 60 years? Is this not a crime? Is asking about these crimes a crime in itself? Why should an academic like myself face insults for asking questions like this?”

He went further than this, noting that those few Western academics who try to research the holocaust from an alternate perspective are not only ridiculed, but jailed for doing so. Personally, I can think of no such example offhand. but I hesitate to flatly deny this accusation of his, especially since I have seen reports of holocaust deniers being thrown off faculties and the like in the past. Of course, if I was a University President, I’d probably throw out Holocaust deniers, too, for fear that they were incompetent. But maybe I’d be wrong to do so automatically.

Pres. Ahmadinejad then concluded quickly, under duress, noting that he had much more to say, but that Bolinger had spoken just as long as he had, and stolen the time available for Ahmadinejad to talk. He mentioned the nuclear issue, stating that Iran has been a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for years, and that the organization’s bylaws allow all members to use nuclear energy freely–and he pointed out that IAEA inspectors have repeatedly shown that Iran is following correct protocols, and it is only “two or three world powers” who keep objecting to Iran’s development of uranium. (Amusingly, the interpreter found it particularly difficult to say “IAEA” correctly, and this problem was compounded by Ahmadinejad’s repeated use of the term.)

He mentioned that yes, other countries have offered to give Iran uranium rather than let Iran develop it themselves, but Ahmadinejad demurred, stating:

“Why do we need the fuel from you? [meaning 'why should we have to get fuel from you?'] You’ve not even given us spare aircraft parts that we do need for civilian aircraft, under the name of embargo and sanctions under the pretext that we are against human rights and freedom. We want the right to self-determination, to be independent.”

He said that he does not trust the Western nations to give him fuel; Iran needs to develop this capability by herself. He then cited contractors from America, France, Germany and Canada that promised to help Iran benefit from nuclear energy, and pointed out that “unilaterally each and every one of them canceled their contracts with us as a result of which the Iranian people had to pay the heavy cost in billions of dollars.”

At this point, the moderator (not Bolinger) stopped Ahmadinejad, stating time restraints, and the question/answer section was started.

Question one:

Do you, or your country, call for the destruction of Israel?

(This question is in relation to previous statements of his for the past few months that give that effect.)

Ahmadinejad danced around the question, stating that he had no problem with Jews, that he liked Jews just as he liked every other nation. He pointed out that many Jews live peacefully in Iran, and that they even get a special status in the Parliament, where they get more representatives than the Iranian constitution technically requires them to have. But it was apparent that Ahmadinejad drew a sharp distinction between Jews and Israel. “Palestinians should be free to choose their own destiny. Let them decide what should happen there.”

The moderator was not satisfied with this answer, and responded back quickly: “I think most of the members of our audience would prefer a real answer to this question. It can be answered with a single word: yes or no?”

Ahmadinejad’s consternation was clear. He responded by saying that “you have asked the question, but you do not like the answer.” He claimed that what was important was that Palestinians should choose for themselves what happens in their lands. For sixty years, the Palestinians have lived in exile. “Let them–all of them, jewish palestinians, muslim palestinians, all of them–pass a free referendum. “Let the people of Palestine freely chose what they want for their future.”

Question two:

Why does Iran sponsor terrorism?

(This question is in regard to Gen. Betrayus’ testimony earlier last week that claimed that terrorist attacks in Iraq had grown to a level that could only indicate that Iran was sending weapons and training.)

Ahmadinejad’s reaction to this question was strong. “Iranians hate terrorism.” He denied sponsoring terrorism, and then accused the United States of being the true sponsors of terrorism. “The groups your country sponsors in Iraq right now–these are the same groups that killed members of my parliament. They are terrorists many times over, and the United States actively supports them today.” He went on, reminding the audience that Saddam Hussein was also sponsored by the United States, and pointed out: “We need to address the root causes of terrorism and eradicate those root causes.” He then said that where he is from, in the middle east, “It is clear which powers incite terrorists, support them, fund them.”

“Our nation, the Iranian nation, through history, has always extended a hand of friendship to other nations. We’re a cultured nation. We don’t need to resort to terrorism. We’ve been victims of terrorism ourselves. It’s regrettable that people who argued they are fighting terrorism — instead of supporting the Iranian nation — are supporting the terrorists and then turn the finger at us. This is most regrettable.”

The next few questions dealt with women in Iran, and more Holocaust stuff. Unfortunately, the questions and responses on the Holocaust stuff was very similar to what I quote earlier, so I won’t go back into it. But on women, Ahmadinejad was very defensive, stating that “when a woman is born to a family, they are ten times as blessed”, and gave many specifics about women in high positions of authority in Iran. He even made a jab at the United States’ low voter participation rate, mentioning that in Iran, “we are a free people, and we all vote, 80-90%, and half of these are women. Women in Iran are free, with true freedoms.”

Question five:

Why are so many people put to death in Iran? Women, academics, homosexuals?

Ahmadinejad answered by pointing out that Iran puts people to death the same way the United States does. When a criminal kills people, Iran makes an example of them. He went on and on in this vein.

But then the moderator interrupted, saying: “The question is not about criminals, but about homosexuals and women. Why do you put homosexuals and women to death?”

Ahmadinejad paused, took a breath, and then stated:

In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that like in your country. [audience laughs] In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you that we have this.

That was probably my favorite quote of the afternoon.

He then went on about women again. I won’t repeat his restatements.

The next question was about what he would have said if he had been allowed to visit ground zero at the world trade center, to which he claimed confusion as to why people would think it disrespectful for him to pay his respects for the lives that were lost on Sept. 11.

And he was asked again about nuclear weapons. I won’t go over most of his rehashing, but he added at the end:

“If you have created the fifth generation of atomic bombs and tested them already, what position are you in to question the peaceful purposes of others who want nuclear power? We don’t believe in nuclear weapons, period. It goes against the whole grain of humanity. Leaders–politicians who are interested in nuclear weapons are backward–they are retarded.”

That was a great jab at Bush, by the way, what with our recent nuclear bomb developments.

And finally, after thanking his audience, he extended an invitation to the Univeristy faculty and students to come to Iran whenever they wanted, and they could speak at any University they chose. Plus, he added: “When you come, we will treat you with respect.”

It was a very interesting experience.

I suppose I should introduce myself, since this is my first entry. I always have problems with self-description ( I get flashbacks of Gödelian-self reference), but I suppose I can quote a short essay I wrote back in 2005. It does the job fairly well, I think.

At heart, I am a philosophy person with a pronounced bent toward mathematics and logic in general. Yet I possess a strong sense of right and wrong that is not justified, but only felt. It is this moral sense that predominately guides how I live my life.

I also have a strong passion for writing. It is only through the written word that I am fully able to best express myself; due to a slight speech impediment and an infamous knack for forgetting suitable synonyms unless I am seated w/ a pen in my hand, I will never be much of a speaker, however well I may write speeches.

Despite these quirks, I remain a hopeless romantic–a lover of love itself–constantly looking forward to the day when my hopelessness will be disproved by counterexample.

I am vegetarian, with aspirations toward veganism; I am a fervent pacifist, with ideals far from what is practical in today’s world; I am socially liberal, with leanings toward a Tolstoy-style anarcho-socialism; I am a determined skepticist, a strict agnostic, and a beleaguered instrumentalist; I am argumentative, painfully outspoken, and dreadfully afraid that my subconsciousness is but temporarily hiding a closet capitalist nature, fully bent on rugged individualism and the justice of the capable serving above and without the worthless.

I am Eric Herboso. I am me, and no other. I am.

And with that out of the way, I’m looking forward to a productive blog full of experiences and thoughts, rants and teachings. I hope you’ll join me for the ride.

Disclaimer: This entry will likely be mercilessly edited in the future. Rather than keeping this entry as a record of my current thoughts, I intend to use this space specifically for more current, up-to-date information.

You know, it’s always really tough to describe oneself. Sure, you can list your interests, and maybe even give a few anecdotal accounts of you living your life. But to really get at the core of whom a person is requires something more. You must put forth a worldview that truly reflects one’s inner thoughts. A manifesto that clarifies one’s intentions. This LiveJournal entry will attempt to do just that.

But first, I must start with the basics.

My name is Eric Jonathan Herboso, although I regularly go just by Eric Herboso online. At one point in my past, I used my middle initial more often (this explains my LJ username), but no longer. I also have a number of pseudonyms that I no longer actively use; these include Garacan, MG377, and Martican Garamonde. In some places, I also go by a separate pseudonym which I will not disclose here.

I am twenty-five years old. I was born on 1 July, 1981, within five minutes of the exact middle of the year, in Mobile, Alabama, USA. I have lived most of my life in Alabama, though I have also lived for long stretches in Fort Collins, Colorado, and Germantown, Maryland. I will be moving to Annapolis, Maryland, very soon for college.

I am a lifelong student; I realized pretty early on that I love academia, and I never want to leave college. So after I get my degrees, I will be staying in college indefinitely as a teacher and student. Currently, I am finishing up my bachelor’s degree in pure mathematics at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, and I will be starting at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, in September to study philosophy at a great books school. Afterward, I plan to receive my doctorate in mathematical philosophy.

to be finished later

You know, it’s always really tough to describe oneself. Sure, you can list your interests, and maybe even give a few anecdotal accounts of you living your life. But to really get at the core of whom a person is requires something more. You must put forth a worldview that truly reflects one’s inner thoughts. A manifesto that clarifies one’s intentions. This LiveJournal entry will attempt to do just that.

But first, I must start with the basics.

My name is Eric Jonathan Herboso, although I regularly go just by Eric Herboso online. At one point in my past, I used my middle initial more often (this explains my LJ username), but no longer. I also have a number of pseudonyms that I no longer actively use; these include Garacan, MG377, and Martican Garamonde. In some places, I also go by a separate pseudonym which I will not disclose here.

I am twenty-five years old. I was born on 1 July, 1981, within five minutes of the exact middle of the year, in Mobile, Alabama, USA. I have lived most of my life in Alabama, though I have also lived for long stretches in Fort Collins, Colorado, and Germantown, Maryland. I will be moving to Annapolis, Maryland, very soon for college.

I am a lifelong student; I realized pretty early on that I love academia, and I never want to leave college. So after I get my degrees, I will be staying in college indefinitely as a teacher and student. Currently, I am finishing up my bachelor’s degree in pure mathematics at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, and I will be starting at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, in September to study philosophy at a great books school. Afterward, I plan to receive my doctorate in mathematical philosophy.

Writing this column does mean a great deal to me. It is, in my mind, a place where I may write about things that make people feel. And so I am quite glad to be back — as odd as it may seem, writing these articles makes things seem more normal, even if they really aren’t.

I have an article already written–it was finished before Katrina hit, actually–but I will wait until next week before posting it. It just doesn’t seem appropriate, given that in every one of my classes, at least one person has lost their homes, or one of their family members’ lives. For those of you who know of no one on the Gulf Coast, allow me to let you know that this hurricane has severely affected a great deal of people in very negative ways. But despite this, life goes on, and tragedy will pass in time.

Until next week, when I will present an argument in favor of infanticide, may you all live on, and enjoy life.

Be well.

Odd how life keeps continuing, despite what may happen at any individual point. Never would I have guessed how my life would end up had one taken the time to ask me about my thoughts of the future way back when I was still in grade school. Life is such a difficult thing to anticipate.

I’m taking a creative nonfiction class this semester at college, so I apologize if that style of writing starts to creep into this “weekly” column. Somehow I feel my writing has no real direction… I say I want to inform an audience in a readable way, yet none of my articles come close to doing that. Honestly, I just don’t know about myself. My writing is terrible, though obviously from my word choices and stylistic attitudes, it is at least clear that I am a moderately competent reader. It’s quite sad really. Having decided to start Panangelium.tk and subsequently bringing together a couple of writers that I have always felt are far superior to me in style, I am saddened by the fact that my own irresponsibility has caused my writing here to not only come out sporadically, but in such a very poor manner that sometimes I am too ashamed to even send it in to the editor that I myself appointed. It’s really a quite depressing thought.

I think what I lack most is not a sense of rigor, though of course I am severely lacking in that respect, but instead I write without passion. Even when I truly care about a topic, I do not insert my feelings into the text, and in place of readable essays, I produce harsh-sounding stutter-inducing crap that looks like it was written for the front page of some backwater high school newspaper.

Life continues.

Stuff keeps happening to me. In the past, it was always a matter of my constantly hurting others, all the way up until I started college some three years ago. Even then, my overly violent nature could still occasionally be seen, as evidenced by one of my college friends, who pissed me off so badly one day in freshman year that I literally punched through a window. Believe me when I say that it isn’t as easy as it looks in movies.

But in the past three years, it has not so much been the usual story of my life in which I hurt everyone who has ever dared to become close to me (even P, on multiple occasions, for which I feel especially terrible), but rather it is I who have been hurt, time and time again. Sometimes by the jocular voices of friends, and other times by the cruel stares of strangers. I realize it shouldn’t hurt, and honestly, I am the one who is intentionally causing such events to occur, but nonetheless I am bound by the feelings that lie deep inside of me, feelings that I never let through to the surface except very occasionally, like with Mary or Jennifer or Stephanie or…Robin.

I do not (nor should not) expect you, the reader to understand any of what I am saying. This is not a personal journal, though it is a memoir of my ideas, and this is not the place for heart-felt confessions, though this is where I wish to reach out and touch my readers as closely as I can. In the end, I am but a man: stupid, rash, and utterly naïve. And as such, you, the reader I so desperately wish to speak to, will likely have no desire (nor even the slightest inclination) to read what few words I write here. Nonetheless, I write.

Life.

I write because I live. In living, I must communicate; but it is so rare that I find the ability to get across my feelings or ideas, and it is even less often that I am able to get across both of them. So I write. I write so that maybe, just maybe, my words might reach the eyes of a few. Likely I will never meet those few. In fact, I doubt to ever even know those few. But I write anyway.

I write because I hurt. Have you ever hurt so much? So much that something had to be done, yet there was nothing to be done? For me, it meant I had to break down and talk to Jennifer in Delaware. It meant I had to hold back my tears in Florida, even though Mary did all she could to make me feel comfortable enough to talk to her. It meant that here, in Alabama, I am pursuing thoughts, ideas, and patterns of life that I have not had glimpses of for literally years.

I write because I want to be a writer. Not that I will ever become one. But what a life it would be…. This website engulfs me—it tears me apart on the inside—just because it gives me space to write how I feel, to reach out to an audience that likely does not even read my scant words, to slump awkwardly, unable to cope with the idea that my words are falling into the endless gulf of the internet, never to be read by any other soul.

I write because some things are worthy of attention, even if I am not the one to ever get across such concepts. Fiction is great—really, it is—but my heart is simply no longer in it. I cannot deal with it. I can barely read it. I am hooked on reality. On finding out what is real. Like me. Like these very words, or, to be more precise, like these concepts that these words are attempting to signify. This is reality. This is me, whether you like it or not. I may not be a writer, but writer or not, I am still real. I am me.

I write because I am me. I am a writer. I am alive. I am hurt. I am worthy of attention. I am real.

“I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love.”

And life goes on.

I may be just enough of a masochist

to try it out on the side as well.

If ever there were a more morose, pitiably pedantic, and terribly trite joke of a job than writing weekly articles for no pay, then please let me know about it. I may be just enough of a masochist to try it out on the side as well.

Yet somehow this weekly column bit is teaching me a lot about what is and is not acceptable in writing to a general audience. In the two and a half months that Panangelium.tk has been online, I feel that I have progressed toward making my writing more accessible, interesting, and perhaps fun for the general reader. Though most who read my articles do not leave comments on the site (a situation I heartily regret), I do get e-mails occasionaly from some readers who perhaps feel obligated to read my stuff (i.e., friends and family), and from their incomparably comstructive criticism (which by the way outweighs praise by a factor of three to one), I think I have finally found how to adapt to an audience much more diverse than I’ve catered to in the past (as can easily be seen from a cursory glance at my LiveJournal). Now all I need is to learn to be more responsible with my deadlines and to (for the love of god) condense my writing (whilst getting rid of unnecessary paranthetical statements) to make it more palatable to the random viewer (of which, by the way, there are literally hundreds — three hundred unique visitors since the site’s conception in June 2005 — though it may not look it due to the sparse traffic in the commentspace, literally dozens of random visitors in nine different countries [including Singapore, UK, Taiwan, New Zealand, Dominican Republic, and others] in twelve different time zones arrive each week to read one or another of our columnist’s weekly articles, and about half of these readers are repeat visitors; admittedly, thats not too impressive when compared to most webzines out there today, but for a two-and-a-half month old site that has only content as its selling point, I’d like to think that it’s particularly impressive).

As a weekly columnist, I am often given suggestions for future topic to write on in those letters that friends and family sometimes send me. Strangely, though, all of the subjects recommended to me seem nearly the same: Iraq, animal cruelty, Bush, Wal-Mart, Rove, etc. And though each of them does indeed deserve an article of their own, especially in a column such as this one, I simply cannot do justice to such lofty topics while I am still coming to terms with what it means to write in a weekly column to a very generalized (and multicultural) audience.

I’m telling you all thee things because this week, I have chosen a different topic: the topic of writing this column. Today’s article is a metaarticle, where I am writing of the very fact of writing the article itself. I feel that such a topic is indeed worth of attention, not because I am full of myself, nor even of my job (having readers in nine countries isn’t quite so impressive when you realize most of them come once, and never return to read another article again), but because I feel that all individuals are worth of attention; and quite frankly, I feel much more qualifed to write on what it’s like to write than to take on the topics suggested to me by friends and family.

   

Writing [Panangelium.tk] articles

has been especially hard for me….

Writing these articles has been especially hard for me, because I have had to learn to adapt to a general audience, whereas before my targeted audience was a very small chunk of what I write to now. Add to this that the last two and a half months have been some of the most turbulent in my life (see my LiveJournal for details), and one can easily see how keeping up with the demands of a non-paying job such as this one has taken quite a toll on me.

But, of course, I do not expect you to feel sorry for me. I just want you to know what it’s like to write these articles. And man, let me tell you: it’s fucking depressing.

   

I just want you to know what it’s like
to write these articles….
[I]t’s fucking depressing.

Not only do I have to research the terrible atrocities that I write about, but I also have to look for new topics as well, and when one is physically trying to get more information about the sad state of the world, one finds out some very disturbing things. I have read more essays and reports on how horrible things are going in this world in the past two and a half months than I have in the preceding twenty-four years. Life, I have come to find out, sucks.

But I deal with it. I mean, what else is there to do, really? I have a big heart, larger than most people realize, and I truly feel the plight of others whenever they are in trouble. Reading Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky and Peter Singer and William Blum, among others, serves to sadden me a great deal — but it also gives me the chance to feel alive. It seems like before I spent so much time researching these things, I lived in a fake world, devoid of the concept of good and evil. Yet now, I feel like there is a purpose to life. Not just for me, but for all people.

And that’s why writing these weekly articles is so enjoyable to me, even after all that I’ve said above. As morose, pedantic, and trite as this job is, I feel that it is a worthwhile experience, just because I may be able to share what I’ve learned to a broader audience, one by one. Starting on September first, Panangelium.tk will be enjoying an advertising campaign aimed at recruiting an order of magnitude more readers. In preparation for this, expect Panangelium.tk to undergo a few changes in how the site looks, as well as the introduction of a guest column, where each week, we’ll begin to present articles from you, our loyal readers. If you think you might be interested in writing an article to be posted on Panangelium.tk, please e-mail me directly at Garacan@gmail.com.

Until next week when I bring up something significantly more depressing, be well.

So, in the spirit of Peter Singer (Famine, Affluence, and Morality), I present the following highly uncontroversial premises. First, I will start by saying that (1) suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. And second, I will assume that (2) if it is within our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it. Before I begin my argument, I will take a closer look at each premise to see what kind of audience would agree with them, and whether or not you, as a reader, would be one of those selected few.

Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.
I know more than a few people who would challenge this position, myself included. But if we define the moral sentence “X is bad” as “X is something that I wish everyone considered bad”, then I think that everyone I know, no matter how attached to moral relativism they may be (nor how evil they think themselves), will accept this initial premise.

If it is within our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.
This premise is a little more challenging to get the maximum number of people to accept it, yet I still think that the vast majority of my readers will find themselves thinking it correct. When I say “without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance”, what is meant is without causing anything else comparably bad to occur, or doing anything that is wrong in itself, or failing to promote some moral good that is comparable in significance to the bad thing that we can prevent. In other words, this premise only requires us to prevent what is bad whenever we can do so without sacrificing anything that is comparably morally important. Allow me to quote an example of this principle from Singer: “If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.”

I think that just from what I have said so far, a large number of you have already accepted this second premise. But if you have, then you may want to consider the following, to see if you accepted too hastily. The reason I say this is because this principle does not take into account the distance between the actor and the actee. It also does not take into account whether or not others might not be following the same principle. Yet I wish that I could convince you all to accept this principle without additional qualifications, because I do not think that distance or agreement with others is particularly relevant from a moral standpoint.

Distance should not matter. If a person is near us, then maybe that makes it more likely for us to help him, but it does not make it more important for us to help him, morally speaking. If we want to be impartial, and consider all equally, then we cannot discriminate against someone merely because he is far away from us.

I imagine some of you might argue: “But we are in a better position to judge what needs to be done to help a person near us, and also to give him the necessary assistance. Therefore, there is ample reason to consider first those that are near to us.” Perhaps this may have once been a justification, but today instant communication and swift transportation have changed the situation. Today, expert observers and supervisors sent out by famine relief organizations or permanently stationed in famine-prone areas, can direct our aid in foreign countries almost as effectively as we could get it to someone on our own block. Therefore this particular objection is not sound.

Agreement with others on this premise should also not matter. The principle makes no distinction between cases in which I am the only person who could possibly do anything and cases in which I am just one among millions in the same position. If we consider the good to be good, then it does not matter if everyone around us is doing bad, we should still do good.

Some of you might argue: “If everyone in circumstances like mine gave $10 to charity, there would be enough to provide food, shelter, and medical care for the starving masses; there is no reason why I should give more than anyone else in the same circumstances as I am; therefore I have no obligation to give more than $10.” The premises as stated are true enough; but the conclusion was incorrectly stated. What should have been said is that “If everyone in circumstances like mine gave $10 to charity, then I have no obligation to give more than $10.” This is a completely true statement, but seeing as how not everybody in circumstances like yours gives $10 to charity, the objection is moot. In reality, it is more or less certain that not everyone in circumstances like yours will give $10. So there will not be enough to provide the needed food, shelter, and medical care. Therefore by giving more than $10 (up to the point of marginal utility, at which by giving more you would cause yourself and your dependents as much suffering as you would prevent from the starving masses), you will prevent more suffering than you would if you gave just $10.

To paraphrase from Singer: If there are a hundred people around that same shallow pond, and none of them are doing anything to save the child, that does not mean that it is okay for you to not help.

And for those Christians out there, allow me to quote from St. Thomas Aquinas himself [Summa Theologica, II-II, Question 66, Article 7]:

Now, according to the natural order instituted by divine providence, material goods are provided for the satisfaction of human needs. Therefore the division and appropriation of property, which proceeds from human law, must not hinder the satisfaction of man’s necessity from such goods. Equally, whatever a man has in superabundance is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance. So Ambrosius says, and it is also to be found in the Decretum Gratiani: “The bread which you withhold belongs to the hungry; the clothing you shut away, to the naked; and the money you bury in the earth is the redemption and freedom of the penniless.” 

By now, I would hope that the vast majority of my readers would agree that these two premises are acceptable. And as a result, I’m sure they already see what this means for them. But just to illustrate, I will continue by giving a few cases from Peter Unger’s Living High and Letting De: Our Illusion of Innocence.

For many years to come, Bob enjoys
owning his Bugatti and the financial
security it represents.

Bob is close to retirement. He has invested most of his savings in a very rare and valuable old car, a Bugatti, which he has not been able to insure. The Bugatti is his pride and joy. In addition to the pleasure he gets from driving and caring for his car, Bob knows that its rising market value means that he will always be able to sell it and live comfortably after retirement. One day when Bob is out for a drive, he parks the Bugatti near the end of a railway siding and goes for a walk up the track. As he does so, he sees that a runaway train, with no one aboard,
is running down the railway track. Looking farther down the track, he sees the small figure of a child very likely to be killed by the runaway train. He can’t stop the train and the child is too far away to warn of the danger, but he can throw a switch that will divert the train down the siding where his Bugatti is parked. Then nobody will be killed—but the train will destroy his Bugatti. Thinking of his joy in owning the car and the financial security it represents, Bob decides not to throw the switch. The child is killed. For many years to come, Bob enjoys owning his Bugatti and the financial security it represents.

Did Bob make an immoral choice? I am certain that most of you will say that he did. Yet consider the following:

In your mailbox there is something from UNICEF. After reading it through, you correctly believe that, unless you soon send in check for $100, then, instead of each living many more years, over thirty more children will die soon. But, you throw the material in the trash basket, including the convenient return envelope provided. You send nothing, and, instead of living many years, over thirty more children soon die than would have had you sent in the requested $100.

Honestly, is there any difference between these two examples? Perhaps some of you might argue: “But Bob is the only one who can save the child on the tracks, whereas there are hundreds of millions of people who can give $100 to UNICEF.” This is true enough, but does it make any real difference?

Suppose that there were more owners of priceless vintage cars—Carol, Dave, Emma, Fred and so on, down to Ziggy—all in exactly the same situation as Bob, with their own siding and their own switch, all sacrificing the child in order to preserve their own cherished car. Would that make it all right for Bob to do the same? To answer this question affirmatively is to endorse follow-the-crowd ethics—the kind of ethics that led many Germans to look away when the Nazi atrocities were being committed. We do not excuse them because others were behaving no better.

All it takes is $100 to save the
lives of thirty starving children.

After reflecting upon this for a moment, in the spirit of both Unger and Singer, I would like to provide a link to Unicef [800.367.5437] and Oxfam [800.693.2687] in the hopes that those of you with a hundred dollars to spare will take the time to donate the hundred dollars you would have spent on unnecessary clothing, video games, restaurants, or metro D.C. trips so that the money can be put to the much more excellent use of saving the lives of thirty starving children.
They will most certainly die unless you donate $100 right now. I’m absolutely serious about this. This is not charity—it is duty. And yet I am certain that only a very small percentage of my readers will actually take the time to donate that hundred dollars. And that deeply saddens me.

But regardless of how each of you reacts, I hope that all of you readers will have lots to think about, and I hope that you will forward a link to Panangelium.tk to all of your friends and family, so that they might also get a chance to think on the points that I’ve brought up in this week’s article.

Until next time, be well.

One of my friends recently went through a breakup that on the surface did not seem bad at all; their relationship ended positively, cooperatively, expectedly, and without undue complication. But reading his journal entries makes me realize how much pain he is going through regardless. And that scares me.

It seems that no matter what we do,
we can never quite get away with living
without shit.

It scares me because I suddenly realize that even an intelligent, well-rounded intellectual who goes through a breakup that is expected, mutual, and ending with a nod to continued close friendship can feel completely and utterly shitty as a result of it. Whereas I thought at first that it was just my past life that was shitty, I suddenly came to the realization that living as a human being in this crazy world of ours is very nearly a sufficient condition for experiencing shittiness at some point or another. It seems that no matter what we do, we can never quite get away with living without shit.

But just because we can’t avoid the fact of nature that shit happens all around us doesn’t mean we can’t have a perfectly wonderful life. Shit happens, but who says it has to be a bad thing?

Apparently, Sweden does.

For years, the Swedes have been the leaders in sewage treatment. In the ’60s, a strong economy and a huge environmental lobby angry at the degradation of Sweden’s beautiful lakes and rivers made the country the first in the world to apply large scale advanced sewage treatment to urban areas. Their lead was soon followed by most industrialized nations, leading to the extensive sewage treatment facilities often seen today. But after only a few years, it soon became obvious that something was wrong. The more treatment that the sewage underwent, the worse the resulting sludge became. For thousands of years, the use of solid and liquid waste as fertilizer was the norm; but after Sweden started treating sewage, those farmers that used it found unexplained damage to crops, both above ground and in their root systems. Shortly afterward, Sweden banned the use of sludge on agricultural land.

As time wore on, other methods for disposing of sewage sludge were tried: ocean dumping, incineration, and landfilling. But ocean dumping was soon outlawed for the damage it did to the ecosystem, and incineration proved to simply foul up the air. Landfilling was the only viable alternative, and even then no one would accept the waste until a thinktank came up with the idea of renaming sewage sludge as ‘biosolids’, so as to make the concept seem ‘greener’. It was unexplicable; for tens of thousands of years, the disposal of solid waste has simply been a non-issue, but after the introduction of advanced sewage treatmemnt facilities, it seemed that there was no efficient way to get rid of it all.

The problem, Sweden found out, is that of heavy metals found in sludge. The introduction of industrial chemicals found in waste products made what used to be perfectly good fertilizer into extremely toxic sludge. In October 1999, Sweden banned completely the dumping of sludge with concentrations of heavy metals beyond a certain level. But even that was not enough, as much of the populace has absolutely refused to dump sludge even if it was within the tolerance of legal levels.

But if it seems worrisome that Sweden is having such a huge problem with their sludge, then it would be beneficial to take a look at the levels of heavt minerals considered acceptable by one other country: the United States of America.

As can be clearly seen, the levels of tolerance for heavy minerals in the United States is well above that of Sweden, even though the Swedes are actively worried that their sludge is still too dangerous, and the American populace seems perfectly fine with their situation.

Something about this seems a little bit fucked up.

Whereas Sweden and most other countries determine their tolerance levels based on what heavy minerals are in the environment prior to sludge dumping, the United States justifies its much higher tolerance levels of heavy minerals on how each minerals performs in a risk assessment to determine what levels are acceptable. But knowledge of toxicity and environmental interactions of sludge-borne pollutants is wildly incomplete. Because of this, risk assessments can come up with very different results.

For example, both the Netherlands and the United States used the risk assessment approach, yet came up with extremely dif
ferent standards. (See table above.) This is due mostly to the fact that the U.S. assessed the risk of maximum levels that humans showed resistance to over a five year period, whereas the Netherlands measured the risk of maximum levels that humans felt absolutely no adverse effects from over a fifteen year period. Also, the Netherlands measured the negative impact on important ecological life in the area of sludge-dumping, wheres the only ecological effect taken into consideration by the U.S. is the copper toxicity effect on earthworms.

European countries actively denounce the U.S.’ improper standard for tolerable levels. The Report of the Independent Scientific Committee, published by an independent scientific committee in the United Kingdom, wrote in Review of the rules for sewage sludge application to agricultural land: Soil fertility aspects of potentially toxic elements (United Kingdom Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forests and Department of the Environment, MAFF Publications: London, 1993) that caution is entirely appropriate in determining sewage sludge standards, even when the evidence is still partly inconclusive, “particularly because heavy metals, unlike many other pollutants, cannot degrade [and] are retained in soils virtually indefinitely…. As a result, there is little opportunity for natural recovery from the consequences of any error in judgment.” As an example of what the committee went on to recommend, the upper tolerance level of zinc in sludged soils was demanded to be reduced to a maximum of 200 mg/kg — a standard that the U.K. immediately adopted. The recommendation came as a shock to most European countries, though, who had already set a limit of 100-150 mg/kg for zinc. The comparable U.S. standard for zinc in soils is 1400 mg/kg.

But what makes the U.S. standards so apalling is not so much their far more lenient tolerance levels for toxicity; rather, it is the continual decision to ignore results in scientific findings which go against the levels that the U.S. has already determined.

In the case of Rhizobium, non-U.S. studies show that two species (one smbiotic with clover and the other with peas and beans) are adversely affected by high zinc concentrations in soil — although the soybean symbionts are not (Plant and Soil Science, 1999). Says Dr. McGrath in the study, “Not only does Rhizobium have a major impact on agriculture, but it is also a sentinel species, demonstrating that the heavy metals in sludge are potentially damaging to the soil ecology.”

Strangely, similar studies done in the United States found completely contradictory results. The EPA published A Guide to the Biosolids Risk Assessment for the EPA Part 503 Rule (EPA/8332/B-93-005; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Wastewater Manangement, U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1995) which found no adverse effects on nitrogen fixation for plants other than clover. Faced with these conflicting results, the United States EPA did not opt for caution. Instead, the agency simply did not accept experiments that showed an adverse effect on Rhizobium. Further, the National Academy of Sciences (an American institution) endorsed the EPA’s findings. The NAS review considered the European evidence, but decided it was inconclusive.

Y’know, when I first read about this, it really scared the shit out of me. I mean, I’ve personally already reached far beyond the point where I think politicians are in the game to truly do what’s best for society. But for some reason, I always held scientists to a higher standard. Yet the fact that the EPA would issue such a blatantly immature report simply astounds me to no end. It’s really scary, when you think about it.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are ways to help the situation, even on an individual level. Like composting toilets.

The composting toilet is the answer to the problem
that has plagued us since the Roman era.

The composting toilet is the answer to the problem that has plagued us since the Roman era. It is a sanitation system that keeps toxic and human wastes separate, prevents pollution, and returns the nutrients from human waste to the soil as a fertilizer. It is safe, ecologically friendly, inexpensive, and best of all, not the least bit smelly.

In a composting toilet, human waste drops away instead of just sitting in a bowl of water, stinking up the room. Composting toilets never smell, nor fill up. Within three years, the feces turns into the best grade humus fertilizer that one can buy, via bacteria, fungi, worms and other micro and macro-organisms. Within days, the urine does the same thing, and with only a nitrification process needed to turn it into an odorless, stable, nitrogen-rich fertilizer that can easily be sold if the owner does not wish to use it himself.

Composting toilets are inexpensive mostly because they do not really have to do anything in order to work. It isn’t complicated systems that kill pathogens in the tank, but rather just lots of time. In general, pathogens require their host to survive. But even those that would survive are unable in the highly competitive environment of the tank. They simply cannot compete with the composting organisms that live in the tank.

Shit happens. But it doesn’t have to be a negative thing, unless you force yourself into looking at it as such. That’s the real lesson to learn from all of this. Maybe we can’t trust scientists. Maybe our sewage will sicken or kill most of our children. But even if we sometimes feel bogged down in shit, we shouldn’t feel as though life were just out to get us. Because shit isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Yeah, maybe my past life really has been shit. But I don’t care. I like where I am today, and I feel that I received valuable life experience from all the shit I was forced to go through. If you cannot yet say the same, then perhaps maybe it is time that you started.

In the meantime, enjoy your week, and, as always, be well.

That’s right; believe it or not, this scene is what the majority of prisons in Finland are like.

Thirty years ago, Finland became the first country to completely reverse its policy on handling citizens that broke the law. From its long-standing tradition of harsh punishment aimed at deterring crime dating to when Finland was still an apellate of the former Soviet Union, the people of Finland decided to switch tactics and follow one of the most liberal philosophies of justice in the world today.

In 1975, Finland passed its Sentences Enforcement Act, which stated in part that “the enforcement of sentence must be organized so that the sentence is only loss of liberty“, and that “punishment shall be enforced so that it…promotes a prisoner’s place in society.” In addition, the Act stated that the conditions in prison must be similar to conditions in the rest of society. This dramatic turnaround changed Finland from one of the harshest to one of the most lenient of punitive systems.

But for the Finns, lightening the punishment of being in prison was not enough. They wanted to reduce their prison population dramatically.

So laws were enforced regulating how long offenders could spend in jail. Prisoners may be considered for parole after just fourteen days, and even those who violate parole and return to prison are eligble again after one month. And all first-time offenders are released after serving just half their sentences, with the rest let out after two-thirds.

But even more amazing is their policy of using fines in lieu of prison time. The vast majority of crimes which in the United States would result in a mandatory prison sentence are instead dealt with through a complex fine system which is based upon the offender’s income.

In 2002, Anssa Vanjoki was forced to pay a fine of $165,000 — for a speeding ticket. That’s right; a speeding ticket. Doing 74 km/h (46mph) in a 50 km/h (31mph) zone doesn’t seem like anything much — after all, it’s only 15 mph over the speed limit. But because Vanjoki is the multi-millionaire Vice President of the Nokia corporation, his fine was scaled to a sum that most would find outrageous. Yet the philosophy behind such scaled fines is one of equity; if a fine is imposed as a penalty, then the penalty should be equal under all who break the law. And whereas a $100 ticket might be a stiff penalty for someone of low income, for a multi-millionaire like Vanjoki, the only way to give a similar penalty is to increase the fine proportionally.

Some critics might think that all of this is nice in theory, but how does this kind of punishment affect the level of crime?

Before Finland’s change, the state of the Finland law enforcement and prison system was similar to the St. Petersburg region in Russia. Their populations were similar, their law enforcement systems were simlar, they had similar crime rates, and their prison sentences were about the same. But today, whereas St. Petersburg employs 72,000 police officers, Finland gets by with only 8,500. Russian criminals are more likely to be punished with prison time, and their sentences are consistently far longer. Yet today Finland is much more safe: the murder rate in Russia is ten times that of Finland.

After thirty years of reform, crime rates are down. Repeat offenders are down, even for violent and sexual crimes. Finland’s turnaround stance to rehabilitation rather than punishment worked, and the people of Finland are now blessed with one of the lowest rates of crime in the world.

(But please don’t think Finland is by any means perfect in its dealings with criminals. Finland has compulsory service of citizens in its army, and has a habit of putting its own citizens in prison if they have conscientous objections to military work and are unwilling to work with any part of the Finnish armed services.)

It would be nice if other countries were to follow the Finns’ example. But unfortunately, despite the mounting evidence that lighter punishment and a focus on rehabilitation actually helps to reduce crime, governments (and the people under them) have remained skeptical of such overly scientific theories.

To the Chinese, a common-sense approach of Striking Hard seems to obviously be much more effective, even though no scientific studies agree with the system.

Today, China kills more people than all other countries combined. The death penalty is imposed for murder, bank robbery, and even political corruption. There is no room for appeals; most executions come within days of the verdict.

The Chinese government calls this policy “Strike Hard”. The philosophy is one of instilling fear — those convicted are paraded in the streets before they are shot. And strangely, independent surveys continue to find that a large pecentage of the Chinese population actually supports these practices — some reports find the approval rating of Strike Hard to be as much as 97%. But, if anything, crime has merely risen since the adoption of the Strike Hard policy.

Yet China is not alone in such practices. The United States has a history of severe punishment, which although psychological instead of physical, still ranks with many of China’s unscientific policies.

The philosophy of justice in the United States is one of locking up criminals and forgetting about them. It is a long-standing policy that has much support from the American people. This philosophy is most easily illustrated in the case of supermax prisons.

Pelican Bay is a supermax is prison on the coast of California. Inmates at Pelican Bay are kept locked in solitary cells for twenty-three hours a day. By law, they are required to receive one hour a day of exercise, but this is done indoors with only a chin-up bar and a track for running, and as always, the prisoner is left alone there. Prisoners never receive eye contact with each other. The only time they have human company is when they are searched for weapons.

Prisoners at Pelican Bay may not participate in work or in furthering education. TV and radios are prohibited. Books are allowed, but only if someone sends them a book — no libraries are available. Showers are limited to ten minutes three times a week. There are no windows. The lights are left on 24 hours a day.

Misbehaving inmates are sometimes put into ’strip cells’, with temperatures left at fifty degrees and only boxer shorts to wear, with no bedding; but if they’re really unlucky, they are chained spread-eagle and naked to concrete beds.

Inmates regularly go mad in these prisons.

It should be noted that crime in the United States has continually risen for as long as data has been collected, and at a faster rate than every other industrialized nation except China.

But supermax institutions, as horrible as they may be, do not have much force when spoken of, because we are so very used to the idea. More apalling might be the case of the self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America”.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Phoenix, Arizona, has some pretty old-fashioned ideas of punishment. The jails he runs are specifically designed to break inmates through psychological torture — but this is not a supermax, where only overly violent offenders are sent; this is the regular, everyday jail that the least offender in Phoenix is sent to when convicted.

Convicts work in chain gangs on the main streets of town, and sleep in tents despite the desert conditions. Recordings of Frank Sinatra are played twenty-four hours a day, and meals are served cold twice a day, consisting of bologna sandwiches day in and day out. Inmates are forced to wear pink underwear, and misbehaving inmates have to don pink handcuffs, too. Yet the cost of running Arpaio’s jails are tremendous, costing millions in taxpayer money on settlements in court for overly severe conditions. And the crime rate has risen dramatically since the institution of Arpaio’s tough jail policies.

But, to be fair to those who think such tough rules should follow the common-sense idea of lowering crime rates, it is possible that Phoenix’s rising crime is more due to Arpaio’s mismanagement of law-enforcement funds; recently, he spent massive taxpayer money on a publicity stunt rounding up prostitutes while twelve unsolved execution-style murders in the county remained unworked on the books.

But nothing said so far is quite so impressive as Japan. Japan has by far the lowest imprisonment rate in the developed world, and the lowest crime rate. The rate of armed robberies is a hundredth of the US rate.

The secret is that Japan uses shame as an alternative to jail, much like Finland uses fines. In Japan, for most crimes, one can get out of jail sentence by publicly apologizing to the offended, the offended’s family, and the offender’s own family. Communities are regularly visited by the local police, with at least two visits to each household twice a year — not for inspections, but just as a reminder of how important law and order is in the Japanese community.

But when a prisoner does go to prison, conditions are harsh. Short, but harsh. The average sentence is only two years, even including violent crimes; but imprisonment includes such penalties as sitting for a week on one’s knees for misbehaving. Leather belts and manacles are common, and inmates are marched for hours in parades around the city, forced to show their face to the society that they wronged.

I will leave you with words of wisdom from one of the most intelligent moral philosopher mathematicians that I know (in short, the closest thing to a hero that I have):

When a man is suffering from an infectious disease, he is a danger to the community, and it is necessary to restrict his liberty of movement. But no one associates any idea of guilt with such a situation. On the contrary, he is an object of commiseration to his friends. Such steps as science recommends are taken to cure him of his disease, and he submits as a rule without reluctance to the curtailment of liberty involved meanwhile. The same method in spirit ought to be shown in the treatment of what is called ‘crime’.
- Bertrand Russell

Join me next week as I explore the wonderful world of shit. Yes, you heard me right: shit.

Be well.

Human happiness, as it is intuitively understood, is the individual state that all humans aspire to, regardless of their views on life. Plato argued that individual human happiness comes only with leading the good life, which he described as being part of a well-functioning (i.e., happy) society. Aquinas argued that this good life came about only through being pat of the most perfect well-functioning society: the kingdom of god. Rand argued that the good life comes only from living ’separately’ from society, focusing on the individual as the largest unit capable of human happiness. Aristotle said the good life has nothing to do with it; the only way to truly be happy is to philosophize with friends. But in all these vastly differing opinions, one constant remains: achieving human happiness is always considered as one of the most lofty of goals.

The most likely reason for placing such emphasis on hedonism is that it is the only measureable moral entity that we may observe. Some, like Kant, have seemingly argued against human happiness as the most important of issues; but a more sophisticated view of human happiness soon reveals that even categorical imperatives that apply even when against the desires of the individual go against them are in actuality hypothetical imperatives in disguise: if you agree to follow my normative views, then you will do such and such, even if you do not desire to do so. In effect, the categorical imperatives that I believe in are in reality the same as the hedonistic values that I follow most closely. All morality, in fact, can be understood as nothing more than hedonism, albeit sometimes a sophisticated form of hedonism that takes into account more than just one’s present state of happiness.

I’ve used a lot of loaded philosophical terms so far, but even though I need them in order to be completely specific with my words, please understand that it is certainly not neccessary to consult a dictionary of philosophy in order to know what I am talking about. Essentially, human happiness is a concept that we may all talk about, and, indeed, that we all should discuss.

What is human happiness? Clearly, it is what pleases us. But the word ‘pleasing’ is not exact enough to capture the true meaning of human happiness. True happiness arises from many different sources; not just the pleasures of the flesh, but also of the mind. Aristotle counted receiving respect from one’s peers and even personal attractiveness in the eyes of others as qualities that contribute to human happiness. Maybe not all of us achieve happiness in the same way; personally, I do not think I could truly be happy without sexual gratification, for example. But others might disagree. Some might be perfectly happy as social outcasts, or even in being complete morons. But regardless of how we each achieve happiness, the achieving of it is certainly one of the foremost issues that we may each have to deal with.

In the past few years, I’ve undergone a complete reversal in my personality and outlook on life. Activism has slowly grown to become an important part of my life, and spreading my own emotive views on normative judgments has become something of a personal quest. It is, in effect, my method of achieving human happines. Nevertheless, I have retained my strict philosophical viewpoint in dealing with such issues, and as such have been forced to reconcile with the fact that there is no particular reason why my personal brand of morality should apply to any other.

Retaining a responsible philosophical attitude while trying to get others to agree with my own moral beliefs is hard on my psyche, and ultimately damaging to my own happiness. But I cannot pretend that I know best when others could just as easily know better. Ultimately, my happiness would only be undermined if I were to ignore the philosophical examination that I by now am so used to participating in.

In the end, we’re all hedonists. We have to be; there is no other moral-like property that we can observe. I personally believe that humans can never be happy unless nonhuman animals are justly treated. As much as I may wish this to be a categorical imperative, in the end, it is merely how I feel. And I must recognize the same for others.

How another feels life should be (the culmination of which would be their own personal happiness high point) is no better nor worse than my own, at least as far as can be observed. Whether it is Bush further entangling the federal government, big business, and the Christian right; or Plato sacrificing the wants and desires of the philosopher king for the good of the republic; or even the small business owner taking advantage of each employee, client, and supplier because the capitalistic system allows him no better alternative to succeed, the moral views (and thus the personal human happiness) of every being is no more nor less likely to be better nor worse of any other.

Human happiness is a laudable subject. But there is no way of determining which person’s views on human happpiness we should follow, not even our own. But the one thing we do know is that in the end, it all is nothing more than hedonism. So if you ever find yourself in a situation where you are unsure of what to do, try to do what would be best for you. In the end, that is all we can do.

Until next week, where I will discuss the role of punishment in society, I bid you all adieu. Be well.

It is in this spirit that my column is dedicated. Not because I wish to impose my own normative claims upon the world at large, but because what is most worthy of attention in this world of ours is to take stock of reality itself, which we all too often gloss over; and morality is by far the most important of all glossed-over ideas. After all, addressing moral issues, even if it is just in determining whether or not normative claims exist, is the pre-eminent ideal that comes before all else, even the concept of god. As Plato so astutely pointed out, if one places god above morality, then whatever god happens to consider good would be okay. Since we would not follow a god whose morality differs wildly from our own, then we must consider morality to be even above god.

The thing about morality, however, is that (assuming a sufficient level of sophistication) no matter how hard one tries, no one can ever change what you may or may not consider moral, unless they do so with social brainwashing (such as school, parenting, or the like). Certainly, I in particular cannot affect (or effect, for that matter) your normative standards merely by employng argument. Indeed, it takes something considerably more theistic in nature in order to manage another’s views on ethics.

Nevertheless, by starting with the preconceptions and prejudices on morality one already has, along with an ideal of logical consistency, I can use ‘mere’ argument to force one into a logical contradiction that may only be resolved by ‘working out’ one’s own moral system, and perhaps realizing that what they believed all along means something that they had never fully comprehended it to mean at all.

Effecting change in this manner is not an ability that only I possess. We all have the capacity to argue out of a logical inconsistency, and improve one’s vantage point of morality in the process. In fact, if normative standards do exist, then it is of paramount importance that we educate both ourselves and others to the existence of such a moral standard — so not only do we all have this capacity for introspection, but it is right and just for us to employ that ability at every opportunity.

In future editions of this column, I will be showing much of what is worthy of attention, yet goes unnoticed by so many. I will be taking stock of reality itself, and showing how the reality of the world you and I live in does not always jibe with the moral standard each of us claims to possess.

In the meantime, may we all look closer to our prime beliefs, and act accordingly each day that we live our lives.

Be well.

Go

Diplomacy

Zelda: Oracle of Ages

Seasons

Calvin & Hobbes

Neon Genesis Evangelion

NSA

The funny thing is: I can’t get Quine out of my head. I am amazed at science, and astounded by the innovations arising from mere theory and speculation. Yet again and again, I can’t possibly believe any of it is reality. I feel like… like some right-wing psycho-nut is trying to “meet me halfway” by arguing for God using Pascal’s wager. “Even if you’re atheist,” he proclaims, “surely this argument will convince you to believe in God!” And it is as though they truly believe this argument is persuasive, and that no refutation is possible. And no matter how many times I explain that the argument is bullshit, they keep ranting: “But you can be atheist and this argument will still convince you to believe in God!”
The weird thing is that they’re right. If I were atheist, the argument would convince me, for I would have a history of belief through evidence (namely belief in the nonexistence of God). But I am not atheist. I am a strict agnostic. More so than even Huxley himself, for even he believed in science. ::sigh::
Damn myself. I cannot control my mind. It thinks of its own accord. I cannot get Quine out of my head!
Do you realize: I am an aspiring vegan?! WTF? I mean, it is like it comes totally out of left field! I have no justification for any of my beliefs. Why, then, would I act other than hedonistically? Were I a psychologist, I would theorize that I prefer living according to the code I set for myself above that of living according to what would make me happiest. And if the reader thinks for a moment, I’m sure they’d agree with this assessment. Except: I am not speaking of some foreign entity; I’m talking about myself! And I would know if that is what I was doing, and I can assure you: It is NOT what I am doing!
I adore the taste of meat. Why, then, should I be a vegetarian, let alone aspire to a vegan lifestyle? Am I mad? Veganism is not the norm. Monogamy is a norm; avoiding pedophilia is a norm; wearing clothing is a norm. These are understandable practices, even if their basic tenets are disagreeable, merely because adhering to them is a norm, and will help one’s outward stance in society. But veganism is NOT the norm.
Why deny myself meat, which I desire, when there is no social benefit from it being the norm? It can’t be because I think it wrong to eat meat that was killed expressly for that purpose. If that were the case, then it would imply the existence of a belief. But I hold no belief. For a long while, my only belief was in Robin. But now…
I must be mad. An image of Rinoa/Ultimecia pops up, and for a moment, I shudder. Squall versus Griever is without a doubt the most heart-wrenching battle I’ve ever played through. Never before had a battle scene evoke tears so readily. What a terrible situation to be in. And I fear: Will I, too, go nearly as mad?
Quine just won’t go away. Yet I wish to be vegan. It makes no sense.
My sister asked me: “Where’s Robin, Eric? I thought she was coming to visit for Christmas.”
A rooster crows. The sun is coming up. It is foggy out. The other night, as I traveled along country roads without a single light in sight, the fog became so think that I had to slow to fifteen miles per hour in a forty-five mile per hour zone. I literally could not see the road in front of me. Vision was limited to only the hood of my car, the yellow line directly below and to my left outside the driver’s side window, and the reflection of my headlights upon the dense fog ahead of me. Though trees lined both sides of the road, I could not see them at all. I would have stopped to wait out the fog, but the road was hilly, and when I was in the valleys, the fog was thin enough to just barely make out the road ahead up until the rising of the next hill. Only once before had I been so afraid for my life, and on that previous occasion, a semi narrowly missed hitting me at a speed difference of at least forty miles per hour, and it passed so close that had my arm been outside my car window, the track would have torn it off. (I always felt guilty afterwards, for the close call was my fault entirely, and though no harm came to me, the semi’s quick reaction in avoiding me resulted in it spinning out of control for some half mile, hitting the solid median on the interstate some three or four times before coming to a stop a full mile ahead of me. Despite this, I did not stop to help, but instead drove away in the dead of night. I would like to think that had the cab been thrown on its side, I would have stopped — but as it only spun out, and the cab & trailer remained upright (though facing the wrong way on a divided interstate thoroughfare), I suppose I will never know. … I was distraught that day as well.)
And to think: all this only days after the time I spent talking to Matt about Ginger. ::sigh:: I feel the distinct impression that my mind is not totally functioning correctly.
My stepfather is a hunting man. He loves to go out and shoot helpless animals. You have no idea as to how tempted I am to accompany him on one of his raids and personally murder innocent lives in the name of fun. I am so serious when I say these words that I think society might be better off if I were placed in a mental institution. I mean, if I were going to be an engineer, or even a physicist, I can understand why society might want me around. I might actually help to improve the world in such a circumstance. But my interests are in pure mathematics and analytic philosophy: the two most obtuse, useless fields that anyone could ever be interested in. What possible use could I ever serve in society, except perhaps to help teach future engineers and physicists? No, my very existence is actually detrimental to society. If ever I eat meat again, it will mean that I have decided my happiness is above that of murdering innocent beings raised solely for the profit inherent in that purpose. If I ever eat meat again, it would be only a small step for me to become a serial killer.
And oh, what a serial killer I would make. I haven’t the physical skills necessary, but I have the patience, brainpower, and capability for careful research that is required if I were to advise another with the requisite physical skills to carry out the most gruesome of murders without fear of detection. How easy it would be if some terrorist organization or revolutionary group were to hire me for such operations. And no lowly targets for me! No, I would not deign to murder a President, for their terms are far too short to be meaningful. Instead, I would target Supreme Court Justices, and create martyrs of heroes in order to instigate real change.
Yet, I am vegetarian, an aspiring vegan, a pacifist — the kind of person who literally cried when Squall faced off against Griever. I am harmless. But not by design.
My mind… It must be missing some necessary chemical that prevents ordinary men from committing the most heinous of acts. I feel no shame. The idea of killing a fellow human is not pure anathema to me. It feels wrong, but it feels wrong by choice. It is not a feeling of wrongness that has always been there, or that would override my everyday conscious decisions. It is a feeling of wrongness by choice. It only feels wrong because I happen to think it is wrong.
Oh, God.
My sanity, for a number of years now, has been sorely tested. First by Gödel, then Nietzsche, and finally Wittgenstein. At each turn, I always took solace in the late night talks with Robin. At every moment, I looked forward to the next time we’d meet in person. How stupid I was to think an actress, musician, and writer as beautiful, intelligent, and talented as she would ever truly fall for someone like me. … I am ugly, talentless, and pedantic. For the past five years, I’ve cared not one whit of how others viewed me, and it shows. I pay no attention to my dress, nor my manners; and my hygiene approaches that of a European. My only virtue is my lack of stupidity. People say that I am smart, but… only a few weeks ago, the lunar eclipse…. … … ::sigh::
At least, by posting this entry, I am preventing myself from totally losing it. I can never murder as I describe herein, even if I should want to, since now the authorities could use this very entry to good effect in any trial I might undergo. In knowing this, I would never place myself in unneccessary danger by such wanton murder. But this does not guarantee my sanity; it merely safeguards others around me, should my sanity leave me (while keeping my self-preservation instinct intact).
Sadly, I have no way of making sure that I do not lose my mind. )c’: God help me.