The new attack on Obama: LOL

OK, I'm not fond of Obama, but this latest one is hilarious.


http://www.truth-out.org/sai-v-obama-et-al-hawaiis-legal-case-against-united-states65850


In short, Hawaii's not actually part of the US.


Seriously?


It may shock some people (particularly the Left), but ultimately, there's NOTHING behind the existence of (as far as I'm willing to spend the time thinking about exceptions) any modern state except consensus. There's no document that says "hey, here's the borders Germany's entitled to", or "here's the limits of China" - except insofar as such boundaries were IMPOSED by outside actors strong enough to enforce their limits, and conformed to by the state itself out of a broader sense of what's in its interests.

Look, country A conquers country B. Or, in the case of Hawaii, country B has an "indigneous" (hahahahaha) group 'seize power' and then cede themselves to country A. There's no title, no property document that says "A owns country B" now. If there is, there's ALWAYS some way to impugn it.

There is no such thing as international law. None. What we call international LAW are simply norms of behavior where states have agreed to cooperate in ways that MIMIC the actions of law across borders, but the simple fact is that there is no supra-national organization that has the ability to enforce anything - it's all voluntary.

Everything in the relationships of states - whether they are currently sovereign, independent states, or subject formerly sovereign states such as Hawaii, Scotland, the Navaho, or Bavaria - has to do with POWER. In many cases, the initial absorption of the subject state is a simple question of military force. Ultimately the absorbed state can either stay rebellious, or reconciles itself with its subject status. Eventually (2 generations? 3?) control becomes the norm, and no longer needs to be actively mandated. 

Note that in such cases, absorption is not always resisted nor even always negative. States too follow enlightened self-interest. Often the subject can or does rationalize the advantages of being a smaller part of a larger state as a more secure, economically advantageous situation. Independence as a theory is nice, but in practical terms geopolitics is a world red in tooth and claw, and the small or young are often the first preyed upon.


My point is, what happened, happened. Queen Liliuokalani's protests and American concessions notwithstanding, if the US took down the Hawaiian flag and raised their own flag, the fact that it stands uncontested in practical terms makes it reality. Objecting to the legal formalities (the Congressional act of annexation can't have been legal, according to Dr. Sai, because US laws don't apply internationally) doesn't make the ownership of Hawaii any less real. That just makes it arguably an act of conquest instead of legality. Big deal.

The Grotian view of international norms, and legal bases for actions, has been demonstrably false for CENTURIES. Countries conform to norms that they agree with, and ignore ones that they don't, and won't agree unless compelled. Thus any sort of legal basis for the annexation of territory will ALWAYS be contestable later by some hedge-lawyer because SOMEONE will always object, and always have some rationalized basis for their objections...and unless & until that person has an army available to change the current reality, they will remain as irrelevant as ever.

The second point is that as a scholar, Dr. Sai's intellectual credibility is doubtful:
1) he contends that he "...step(s) aside from politics and power and look at Hawaii not through an ethnic or cultural lens, but through the rule of law..." - bull****. Dr. Sai is Hawaiian. To suggest that he's not taking his stance for ethnic (& political) reasons is complete nonsense. Whether his primary motivation is Hawaiian independence, or against Obama, and one goal simply dovetails conveniently with the other, his denial is disingenuous. This isn't to say that his point is de facto wrong, but to obviously perjure himself immediately doesn't add to the value of his conclusions.
2) anyone that is trying to make an academic or legal point and then likens himself to Morpheus in The Matrix isn't really doing anything to incline the rest of us take him seriously.

MN GOP are stupid.

http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/eve...cle/id/185541/


"The Minnesota GOP is punishing two former governors and a former U.S. senator for backing the Independence Party candidate in the governor’s race, according to Minnesota Public Radio.

MPR reports that delegates to the party’s state central committee meeting voted 59-55 Saturday to bar 18 Republicans from party activities for two years, including the 2012 Republican National Convention."

I hate my state. The majority of the people in MN are either card-carrying communists, bleeding hearts, or white-guilt limousine liberals. The Republicans have gone from a centrist party to a cabal of right-wing zealots whose entire political platform starts and ends with abortion.

I can understand the party's anger with Carlson.  I thought he was a decent governor who was a little too socially liberal for me but a great administrator and conciliator, particularly when faced with MN's traditional Democratic perma-lock on the house and senate. Unfortunately, he seems to have some sort of personal baggage over Pawlenty, and (seemingly and mistakenly) blamed him for the rightward swing of the GOP.

Because of this personal issue with Pawlenty, Carlson has let himself be used by the Left in this state starting with MPR as their 'cat's paw' Republican, trotting him out to publicly criticize just about everything Pawlenty has done.  That's sad, but the humiliation of playing such an obvious role is its own punishment.

But Quie? Really? I met the guy right after his governorship and he always seemed to be a warm, likable person as well as centrist politically.  In MN to win the governorship you COULDN'T be far-right wing.  This is a blue state, sorry, but that's a fact.

The GOP nationally has always been a minority party, and thus has always been a little better at marching together even if we disagree on minor issues...we've simply had to, to be successful at all. This repudiation of a couple of Republican icons in the state is just stupid, and shows how disconnected the MN GOP is.

I've regretted my vote for Ventura for years, and I'm generally a "party" voter, but this act by the GOP has made me accept that I need to seriously consider the next IP candidate regardless of winnability.  Nice job, morons.

There Will Be Blood - a review

160 minutes of overacting, overdirecting, set appropriately to a distracting overbearing score.  Reviewed here in an appropriately wordy style.

Part of it is that I guess I’m simply not a fan of Daniel Day-Lewis; I first enjoyed his portrayal of Natty Bumpo immensely.  Since then I’ve watched him in Gangs of New York, My Left Foot, Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Age of Innocence…and in every one I’ve practically winced through his performance.  There are some great actors who play roles effortlessly, slipping into roles without us ‘noticing’ that they’re an actor.  DDL is precisely the opposite – he is clearly working so terrifically hard to ‘be’ whoever he’s playing, and it seems that we’re meant to notice.  It’s the acting equivalent to deliberately coloring outside the lines so we can see what neat crayons he’s using.  Perhaps it’s a self-conscious theatricality that plays better on a stage & footlights, but somehow he’s managed to overact even larger-than-life, bombastic roles like The Butcher in GoNY, or this character Daniel Plainview in TWBB.

In TWBB the first problem is that it’s derived from an Upton Sinclair story, Oil!, so we expect that we’re going to see a sermon on the evils of capitalism.  Ironically, this turns out to be one of the lesser ills, as the director used only the basic setting and (according to IMDB) about 150 pages of the novel as source material – the rest is made from whole cloth.  I’ll therefore actually reserve judgment on Sinclair’s contribution to this until I actually read the story myself.

The film starts very promising; roughly the first 10 minutes of the movie are entirely without dialogue, and tell a solid, interesting prologue over the span of a decade before the first words flow.  Unfortunately, the first words are jarring: despite the character’s origins in Fon-du-Lac, WI, DDL allegedly chose the director John Huston as his vocal model.  Odd, as Huston was from Nevada and his cadences were utterly non-Midwestern.  More importantly, he had a characteristic method of speaking that was both pretentious and artificial; it was precise, over enunciated, and almost as if he was always reading a script for transcription.   If you’ve never heard it, you might instead remember Bugs Bunny’s line from Space Jam “I’m a Shakespearean Actor!” – pretty much the same delivery.  It could be that DDL was going precisely for this, some sort of grand huckster-showman delivery with a fourth-wall wink to the audience that everyone else in the movie seems to be “buying it”, something that simply doesn’t work on film.

At first I thought this was an actual biography; characters drift in and out, growing or losing importance based on seeming externalities to the story that are never explained.  It may be an effort at realism.  Unfortunately what can be forgiven in a portrayal of reality (which necessarily must be somewhere bounded to fit into a retelling) ends up just being chaos on the screen.  Who  are these people?  Is he important?  Wait, where did he come from?  Certainly we care nothing for this parade of shadows that voice a few lines and then depart.  His adoptive son, HW, is potentially a meaningful character – Plainview adopts him after one of his early workers is killed, leaving the boy an orphan.  In the book, he’s apparently adopted for his usefulness - dragged along much as a showpiece, a hood-ornament displaying Plainview’s “family” nature.  This isn’t successfully brought into the film; he’s shadowing behind Lewis, trailing along mostly ignored but then occasionally the object of real (apparent) affection.  Why?  Does he really love the boy?  Like Plainview’s occasional bursts of violence and temper, these are seemingly inserted randomly, apparently meant to give the characters some “depth”.  Unfortunately, complexity without consistency – allowing the audience to build a semblance of logic behind it – just comes off as incoherence. 

The actor (Paul Dano) who had apparently already been shot in early scenes as Paul Sunday (whose revelation to Plainview about oil on his family’s property really is the initial dramatic incident of the film), was allowed to also play the “other brother” Eli Sunday, the director rationalizing that they happened to be identical twins.  Ironically, this spins the audience a hint of subtle dramatic promise – when Plainview, having bought the information after a tense negotiation with Paul, goes surreptitiously to inspect the property under the guise of quail hunting, he meets Eli.  To all appearances, it’s the same young man that sold him the information, yet Eli acts as if he’s never met Plainview before?  Was Paul a false name?  Is Paul/Eli playing some sort of double game against his father, the property owner?  Regrettably, we eventually figure out that it’s not drama; it’s confusion and director laziness.  No, Eli the religiously-obsessed stay-at-home son who is takes the role of the community antithesis to Plainview (never quite so clearly delineated as such, either) just HAPPENS to be the identical twin to the opportunistic and canny Paul, who never shows up again in the film.

Part of it is the character of Daniel Plainview – Sinclair is writing very much as an anti-Rand (aynti-Rand?) highlighting the deliberate isolation and loneliness of the wealth- and power-obsessed.  Unfortunately, while showing how Plainview travels alone through life the director is too successful –he’s cut off from the audience too.  We simply don’t care what happens to him.  He neither kicks the dog to make a proper villain, nor demonstrates any character development that might make him an anti-hero.   Like John Galt he starts out as a 2d caricature of obsession, stays a 2d character of obsession, and ends a 2d character of obsession.  

Finally, not least – I had to make some mention of the horrible scoring.  The best movie scores enhance the picture, building drama at dramatic scenes, suspense at suspenseful scenes, etc.  Bad scores make you notice the emotional manipulation by ham-handed and overloud themes that blatantly attempt to coerce you into feeling a way that the film fails to.  The worst score, I discovered with TWBB, would be one that is so repeatedly ham-handed and overloud that not only are you not moved, but they blare into oversaturation and annoyance.   I can’t recall another movie in recent memory that caused me to reach for the ½ mute button for minutes on end, to wait until some apparently dialogue made it worth bringing up the sound again.

I rarely do this, but I confess I stopped watching after an hour and a half, with more than an hour left in the picture.   I freely admit that I may have missed some great last-reel payoff that caused the entire film to dramatically coalesce into some great work of art that justified the entire experience.  I submit that I doubt it – I disbelieve that a director could make the bulk of a movie so painful and boring without hinting at some signs of brilliance that would suggest a smooth resolution.  If they were there, I certainly missed them.  Boy, did I miss them.

I wish the future was closer...

I feel like a bit of a Pollyanna posting this, but...it's something I keep coming back to:


No president recently (Obama, Bush, Clinton) nor either party in Congress has really been willing to put their money where their mouths are as far as space exploration.

I'd contend that in terms of benefit to humanity in general, it's a far better use of resources than just about any other giant-government project, particularly wasting our time, money, and lives trying to drag some archaic tribes* into the 21st century, or saving people from medical consequences of their life choices.

* a goodly chunk of the south Asian subcontinent, as well as the bulk of Africa)

An intensive focus on materials-science IMO would get us over the hump in terms of the industrial-scale production of tensile-strength material suitable for a space elevator. We're GOOD at solving big engineering questions.

The construction of a station in high orbit (let the stupid, worthless ISS burn to cinders) would be a steppingstone to
a) orbital mining operations that could essentially end any need to lift resources into orbit, and even radically change the availability of raw materials on earth - I'd personally reject any plan to bring an asteroid anywhere toward earth...a one-in-a-billion chance of error would still be several orders of magnitude too risky.
b) nearly perfect security for tech-capable nationstates. The ability to quickly field "brilliant pebbles" that would be in practical terms immune to neutralization in a first strike would ensure that any state with the capability would effectively have a permanent second-strike ability to annihilate any opponent, regardless of what happens on earth. People may hate MAD as a policy, but the fact is, it worked as well as it needed to.
c) exploration and exploitation of the rest of the solar system becomes simple and cheap enough to become the province of business, not just government: nearly inexhaustible energy supplies around the Jovian planets, abundant hydrocarbons, the resources to sustain ourselves once we're out there, are out there.

Ultimately, the dispersal and distribution of humanity across the solar system would provide significant redundancy and survivability of the species in the case of catastrophe on earth. Pick your poison: economic catastrophe, political conflict, geological disaster, heck, a goof with the LHC or even extraterrestrials sick of our 'noise' in the neighborhood pitching a relativistic boulder at earth from light-years away - there's no end to the list of potential world-enders. And as we become more technologically capable, our ability to fsck up our entire planet is growing.

The first step is a BIG one, but once we get up there, I'm pretty sure humanity's natural urges would make the spread automatic.

It seems relevant for the last 50 years....

Americans need to understand that not every country holds the same values. We have to come to some sort of philosophical comprehension of this, and try to set aside the natural native ego involved.  (We have trouble with this.)

(American values) != (everyone else)
in the same sense that
(Western humanism) != (everyone else)

This doesn't mean that American values are BETTER either. (Or WORSE either, Democrats.)

Different.

How does a liberal society cope with other societies that aren't as liberal? We believe that women are equal to men in capability and opportunity. Certain societies don't believe this. Does this mean that the women there are 'oppressed' and should be 'rescued'? Would they even agree? Should we aggressively evangelize our beliefs, because we're 'certain' they're better in an absolute sense? Aside from the fact that other cultures may be JUST as certain of their superiority, how does this jibe with the (current) Western opinion frowning on the actions of 16-19th century colonialist missionaries, who were JUST as certain at the time that they needed to do what they were doing to SAVE the souls of the 'poor little ignorant fuzzy-wuzzies'?

My personal answer to this makes people uncomfortable. What's yours?

Why we should quit searching for alien civilizations.

Hypothesis:

The universe is roughly 15 billion years old.

As I understand it, our solar system is approximately 5 billion years old, and was generated from a molecular cloud that would itself have been created by a previous star exploding, which would have had a lifespan (to be nova-likely) of something under 1 billion years. So VERY roughly speaking, our entire existence cycle is roughly 6 billion years or so.

Even granting that the universe didn't really settle into its current state for the first 5 billion years, that would give the first civilizations - if there are any, and to me it's likely - as much as a 5 billion year head-start on us.

So extant civilizations in the universe would be anywhere from 0 (just reached sentience) to 5 billion years old. Given that on such a scale, we're just on the verge of reaching starflight ourselves, we don't really have to worry about encountering any races YOUNGER than us...they won't be starfaring.

Which means that anyone we meet is going to be anywhere from 0 to 5 BILLION years more advanced.

Look at Earth, and ask yourself what chance a civilization would have against a group only 1000 years more advanced. And then consider the increasing PACE of development - the next 1000 years' tech will be a MUCH greater step than, for example 0 AD to 1000 AD, or 1000 AD-2000 AD.

And then figure out how 'troubling' we'd be to someone 100,000, a million, or a billion years more advanced?

By their scale, really, we'd be insects (minus perhaps the ability to actually annoy). If they want something we have, they'd just take it and probably not even notice our objections.

So no, I'd like to HOPE that they are also ethically advanced, but I wouldn't stake humanity on it. I'd much prefer that they didn't even know we were here (aside from the chance of accidental obliteration due to construction of a hyperspace bypass...), and that we have absolutely nothing they want.

Further, my thought experiment would also suggest that yes, if they DID care to observe us out of some curiosity, we'd have absolutely no clue, even if they were right here. A billion years more advanced? Do ants notice you watching them? I doubt it. Hell, events that we take to be logically-explainable processes like volcanoes could just be the equivalent of the finger of a bored supersentient adolescent.

Bread and Circuses

Bread and Healthcare^H^H^H Circuses:


After Benjamin Franklin signed the Constitution, he was reportedly asked: "Well, doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" To which he replied: "A republic, if you can keep it."

Franklin is also reputed to have said at some other time, "when the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."

Alexander Tyler (1787) re the fall of the Athenian republic
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship."

Robert A Heinlein:
"A perfect democracy, a 'warm body' democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. ... [O]nce a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so..." They'll vote themselves bread and circuses every time "until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader [such as] the barbarians enter Rome."

thanks to jimmysmith.blogspot.com