Whoever wins we lose

Yeah, I know, I stole the idea but I did a better job.

Crappy Movie / Crappy Election / Happy Halloween

Update: My first notion for this idea was when I was at the theater to see a movie and spotted the poster. I turned to my friend, Jack Devine, and said "Sounds like the election". He laughed.

I hadn't thought of doing my own photoshop until I saw someone elses on the web. That's why I said, "I stole the idea". That is, I hadn't thought of actually placing Bush and Kerry in the photo. The other guy just put them in the poster but I had the idea of making them into the monsters from the movie. So this is not totally unoriginal.

Funny thing is that with the mask on Bush looks like my dad.

Help me not vote Bush

I'm scheduling an intervention at lunch Monday with several co-workers to talk me out of voting for Bush.

Ladys and Gentlemen,

You are all against Bush therefore I am calling on you to help me in a self-intervention session. Unfortunately, I am on the edge of voting for Bush. Thea says she votes whatever way I want. So it's a two'fer.

I would actually be violating big 'L' liberarian principles to vote for him. Unfortunately, I am a little 'l' libertarian. To be fair to you I will think about what I would need to be convinced of and let you know. In other words I will think of my weaknesses and see if you cannot come up with something. If I cannot then I will let you know. I am already convinced that
a) I couldn't convince you to vote for Bush
b) I don't want to.

Any mention of the UN, France, Germany, Russia, or China in a good light on this will turn me against you immediately. I think they all wish to see us defeated. Yes, France is not our true friend. I found out they didn’t even pay for the statue of liberty either, bastards. Plus only helped us once against England when they thought we had them licked. Meantime got us involved in all their messes like WWI, WWII, Vietnam, etc. When we need them they stab us in the back. Besides they have nothing to support us with in terms of troops and neither does Germany. They should be paying us back taxes for having our troops over there all this time.

I already know that there is absolutely no way you can convince me to vote for Kerry.
1) He is carrying the state anyway
2) I do not trust him
3) He reminds me of an idiot kid I knew
4) I think he was a traitor to the country. Not merely for being a protestor but a Jane Fonda style one. I thnk it is not unreasonable stretch that they are both guilty of the very stringent requirements of the Constitution. That is saying alot. I don't care if Kerry fought "for us" so did Benedict Arnold, and a lot better I might add. I think the political climate got them off.

I am afraid of Kerrys stated plan for Iran: His strategy for Iran is:
1) Give them Nukes. By that I mean he plans to give them nuclear fuel and nuclear techonology. The same thing Clinton did for the North Koreans.
2) He plans to work "diplomatically with the French, Germans, etc. to contain Iran.
3) When his plan doesn't work he plans to use sanctions.

Let me restate this Kerry plan.
He plans to start with a country that has:
1) An enourmous population
2) Lots of Oil and thus something to trade for whatever they like to avoid any sanctions (unlike say Cuba).
3) History of western intevention and thus hatred for the west.
4) A Islamofacist regime which is totally out of touch with the secular world of reason.
5) Hates Israel and our support of them.
6) A country that has cooperated with and funds terrorists
7) A country that has specifically cooperated with terrorist that believe (as they do)
a) They can live in a nuclear wasteland by the evil western world could not
b) If they die there is a chance they will not to go heaven even if they are good muslims
c) If they die killing infidels they have a guarenteed pass into an afterlife with 72 virgins

He plans to give them the capability to produce Nuclear Weapons in record time (see N. Korea)When the inevitable happens and they say "We are your equals" Kerry plans to introduce sanctions upon them. But let me spell that out.
a) We stop the flow of goods. Their economy suffers.
b) People start dying.
c) We rightfully get blamed.
d) Their neighbors having the correct incentives to violate the sanctions will do so
i) We are only helping victims.
ii) We can make loads of moneyThe final result being what? A friendly peaceful Iran? No, a belligerent superpower who's population has been turned from moderate pro US to extreme anti-US. One likely to secretly pass nuke to terrorist.

Then we have a choice.
a) Unilaterally lift the sanctions
b) Add more sanctions till Iran intiates War
c) Immediate War

None of this really scares me personally except the nukes + Islamofacists bit. Also the fact that many other countries have stopped their socialist ways means that the Oil producing countries can turn to them as trading partners. We will certainly have the riled if we do the same to Iran we did to Iraq via sanctions.

Read The evil of sanctions

We have been in several wars that were sanction and trade based:
WWII vs. Japan
Iraq
American Civil War
As they say "On borders where bread doesn't flow, troops soon will".

I conceed the following:
US started Afghan war between USSR and Afghan rebels.
US money did find it way indirectly to Osama.
US topples, manipulates, etc. governments world wide.

Facts I have checked in detail:
US did not supply Iraq with WMD - this is a lie.
Literally 99% of weapons to Iraq were supplied by French, Germans, Russians, Chinese.
Swift Vets are telling the truth and have misspoken on minor issues their position.
1) Kerry is medal fisher - So what.
2) Kerry is of normal bravery and is not a committer of atrocities.
3) Kerry lied in front of the Senate stating that American army was intentionally commiting atrocities.
4) Kerry met with highest level N. Vietnamese and Viet Cong representatives in Paris and activily negotiated their position in the US. while an officer in the Navy.
5) Kerry did not understand what free fire zones meant
6) Kerry did on one occassion destroy livestock and burn hooches. War crime? SBVT say no.
7) Kerry was at a VVAW meeting where assasinating Senators was voted upon. He voted no but did not report this, nor did he resign as spokesperson of the group till one year later.
8) Kerry misreported events in reports in order to gain medals. - Serious and true.
9) Kerrys group accidenally killed family and he reported it as dead VCs.

There was not one single important fact in Farenheit 9/11 & Michael Moore hates the USA and Americans as stated by his own mouth.

The French, Germans, Chinese and USSR were all taking bribes from Saddam via Oil for food program.

I believe:
Kerry has alienated our 'true' friends, those allies who went in to Iraq with us.
Bush our fake ones.
Kerry is a super fake (No one crawls on the ground hunting deer).
Gulf War should have been completed.
We should not have gone in with so large a group of countries and we could have finished the job. Instead we went into a state of total war on Iraq as stated in the evil of sanctions.

Stupid, really stupid.

Regards,
Brian

Osama bin pushing my buttons

I'm trying to find reasons not to vote for Bush, really I am, but Osama being a fan of Michael Moore is just not helping.

"It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the country (Bush) would
leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone ... because
he thought listening to a child discussing her goats was more important," bin
Laden said, referring to Bush's visit to a school when the attack occurred.

Richard Dawkins butts in: Ketchup-Mustard Wars, The Prequel

Dawkins got my goat. I know this is a wacky entry ... but I don't have time to bother editing to make consistent rational point now. Those links really got me going ... he might have well called Americans racists idiots and I am not sure he didn't. I may come back and change this because it is just so sloppy.

Looking at this Operation Clark County fiasco I came to the realization that my hero, Richard Dawkins, as much as he claims to admire the USA * , does not understand Americans. The idea of foreigners trying to influence our election was obviously a trap set by the minions of Karl Rove. He fell right into it.

As part of this operation, Dawkins gives his opinion of Bush in an open letter. He does so in a way that no red blooded American could stand for. He comes squarely down on the side of the Ketchup-digger Kerry against the purported Mustard-digger Bush. How could Dawkins not know that the politics of the middle east, something as twisted as a pretzel, requires that Americans put mustard on it. Even Brits know this. Ketchup just doesn't go. Especially when the tomato used is suspect of rot from within and the bottle that delivers it contains cracks. The issues involved are so convoluted I would need write a book, perhaps several. Since that isn't going to happen the best I can do is put this open letter on my list to address in detail later.

Yet another open letter by Dawkins at the Guardian under the title "Who are the real appeasers" shows not only a lack of understanding of Americans but a misunderstanding of the mentality of particular Brits, like Winston Churchill.

"George Bush is said to admire Churchill, but the comparison is vain. Bush's
zig-zagging around the US on September 11 2001 has been defended, somewhat
lamely, against the obvious charges of cowardice and panic. Well, maybe. But can
you imagine Churchill doing it?

Turn it round. Who is the petulant bully, the 'bloodthirsty guttersnipe' today?"

Dr Dawkins, please, comparing our president to Hilter is not the way to win over Americans.

Churchill may have called Hitler a "bloodthirsy guttersnipe" to a large degree this is like the pot calling the kettle black. Bush would put them both to shame if it came to a question of ethics. I'm speaking here about Winston Churchills gustorial preferences while sitting on muffets and talking with spiders, that's right Mustard (Gas) on Kurds and whey.

That Churchill committed war crimes—planned them, aided and abetted them, and defended them—is beyond doubt. Churchill was the prime subverter through two world wars of the rules of warfare that had evolved in the West over centuries.
At the Quebec conference, Roosevelt and Churchill adopted the Morgenthau Plan, which if implemented would have killed tens of millions of Germans, giving the Germans a terrifying picture of what "unconditional surrender" would mean in practice. Churchill was convinced of the plans benefits, as it "would save Britain from bankruptcy by eliminating a dangerous competitor." That the Morgenthau Plan was analogous to Hitler's post-conquest plans for western Russia and the Ukraine was lost on Churchill, who according to Morgenthau, drafted the wording of the scheme.
Churchill even brainstormed dropping tens of thousands of anthrax "super bombs" on the civilian population of Germany, and ordered detailed planning for a chemical attack on six major cities, estimating that millions would die immediately "by inhalation," with millions more succumbing later.
But Churchill's greatest war crimes involved the terror bombing of German cities that killed 600,000 civilians and left some 800,000 injured. Arthur Harris ("Bomber Harris"), the head of Bomber Command, stated "In Bomber Command we have always worked on the assumption that bombing anything in Germany is better than bombing nothing."
Churchill brazenly lied to the House of Commons and the public, claiming that only military and industrial installations were targeted. In fact, the aim was to kill as many civilians as possible. Hence the application of "carpet" bombing in an attempt to terrorize the Germans into surrendering.
Professor Raico described the effect of Churchillian statesmanship: "The campaign of murder from the air leveled Germany. A thousand-year-old urban culture was annihilated, as great cities, famed in the annals of science and art, were reduced to heaps of smoldering ruins. . . ." No wonder that, learning of this, a civilized European man like Joseph Schumpeter, at Harvard, was driven to telling "anyone who would listen" "that Churchill and Roosevelt were destroying more than Genghis Khan."

With Churchills love for mass bombing of civilians I am only too pleased that Bush as ignorant as Dawkins in this regard. The left own actions as "human shields" show that even they are confident that Bush would not specifically target civilians. Churchill couldn't fit in Bush's ethic boots.

The Dawkins other article praising Americans titled "On the Eve of War" requires a full fisking also but I don't have time for it today. I am afraid my hero, Dawkins, has fallen into the deep dark pit of liberal propaganda and media bias. I want to dig him out but don't see how without getting some dirt on him.

*I'm not joking, the sentence, "By almost any measure of civilized attainment, from Nobel Prize-counts on down, the United States leads the world by miles. ", is buried in that fiskworthy article somewhere.

More to come...

Newly discovered "Hobbit sapiens" counts against big brain model

When I was in high school, a science teacher had tried to explain human intelligence and consciousness as arising merely out of the sheer quantity of neurons in the brain. I was never satisfied with this answer and thought instead that there had to be some structure of (or to) the brain that was special in humans. I also believed that this structure was probably an evolved characteristic.

In reading about the recently discovered "Hobbit sapiens" at CNN a sentence caught my attention.

Flores Man was hardly formidable. His grapefruit-sized brain was about a quarter the size of the brain of our species, Homo sapiens. It is closer in size with the brains of transitional prehuman species in Africa more than 3 million years ago.

Yet evidence suggests Flores Man made stone tools, lit fires and
organized group hunts for meat.

On that last sentence my mind immediately exclaimed "They have small brains yet had enough awareness to make tools, fire, and hunt in groups. Certainly these are activities that mark both intelligence and consciousness"! I think this is because I was primed by watching a video over at Robert Wrights web site that I stumbled upon during my research for the last post. One of the videos mentioned this big brain model, perhaps it was Steven Pinker, who is against it for other reasons.

Of course this whole line of reasoning depends on where one draws the line for consciousness and how one thinks about it. The same can be said for intelligence. My own beliefs about the nature of consciousness are a little too complicated to get into tonight so I'll leave it till another day.

I'll leave you with a couple questions. Is your dog conscious or not? If consciousness evolved then do you believe there to be a sharp dividing line? Put another way was the first conscious child born of nonconscious parents?

Fake Update (I'm pretending I have readers to entertain myself):

For you sticklers out there who got upset with me using the term Hobbit sapiens, please notice the scare quotes. The correct Linnaean naming style would Homo hobbitus. I was just having fun and was afraid that if I made it too correct sounding I might lead someone astray. Besides Hobbit sapiens sounds like the title of a book Fuzzy Sapiens which is one of my son Wesley's favorite books. The correct taxonomic name is Homo floresiensis.

BTW ... my hobbit name is Todo Gamwich of the Bree Gamwiches.

Dopplegangers

Recently the subject of transexuals came up in a conversation. I remembered that someone had once convinced me that the lead Bond Girl in "For Your Eyes Only" was a transexual. Her name was Carol Bouquet. My comment at the time was that if she was a transexual then I was sold on the operation. Well it turns out that there was another Carol in the movie that was the actual transexual. Her name was Carol Cossy.

I tend to get actors and actresses confused so when I relayed this story I thought the 007 actress was Sean Young.


Carol Bouqet/Sean Young

You can see that I might confuse the two.

In another conversation I mixed up Bill Pullman and Alec Balwin.


Bilec Pullwin/All Baldman

Again an honest mistake.

Maybe it's me but I swear this next guy serves in the cafeteria at my job.


William Devane

Welcome to my blog

Thought I'd start my own blog today. My interests are evolution, science, politics, nature, gardening, philosophy, economics, and ethics. I have a naturalistic outlook on life. I've spent a long time trying to figure out how the world works and thought I'd share my worldview with others who might be interested. Recognizing that no one would pay me for my opinion I figured a blog was the way to go.

The rules I'm going to follow are that I will only modify published posts for spelling, typos, and grammar. If for any reason a post cannot remain on the blog "as is" with regard to content then I will remove all the content and explain why the post was altered.