Yup, I'm a barbarian

Wow, one whole week since I last posted. Definitely slipping and the honeymoon is wearing off. Of course it could be because I've been so busy around here and by the time I get home, I'm too exhausted to write much. My next excuse will be taxes.

On NPR this morning, they were discussing the federal government and its “fence” that it is building along the Rio Grande as part of keeping out illegal aliens. I want to be clear that I have no opinion on the ultimate issue of how many aliens we need to keep out or what to do with the ones who are here. As far as I am concerned Amnesty is liberal socio-political organization. However, one of the items in the story was about the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a couple of weeks. But first a stab at the federal government.

Apparently the government issued some sort of mailing to property owners along its proposed fence line asking them to sign the paper authorizing the feds to enter the property. Some owners are fighting this in court. The federally crafted authorization basically give the property owner $100.00 in exchange for giving the federal government unlimited access for six months. This amount is also in lieu of any damages caused by the Feds during that time period. The judge has apparently stated that the Feds could stand to work on their negotiating skills, but admitted that the government has the right to enter and seize land at need. For the non-lawyers out there, that is called eminent domain. This is what allows the government to condemn houses to make new roads and things like that, but ED has a catch. You see, the constitution says the government can’t take property without due process and just compensation. We’re going to digress into that second one.

I’ve seen the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) at work in condemnation actions you see. And the problem is that they can’t read and think like a business, not a division of a government that is to serve the people. If they could read, they would realize that their mandate is to offer a FAIR price for the land they seize. Somehow, they read the word fair and translate it as LOWEST POSSIBLE LOWBALL PRICE WE CAN GET AWAY WITH. Those of you with a fine sense of distinction might realize there is ever so slight a difference in those two definitions. Personally, I think this stems from the corporate culture in to government that rewards lowest cost without looking at how it was achieved. You see, some peon thinks he looks better if he spends less and he thinks he spends less by screwing the taxpayers whose land is being condemned. Further, usually by the time the bill comes for all the delay and legal fees associated with the lawsuits as the taxpayers refuse to bend over for Uncle Sam, the peon who threw out the absurdly lowball offers is promoted or long gone from being their to get hit by the spatter. Hell, maybe the cost comes out of the legal budget, not his project budget and he can excuse himself by saying that if the DOT lawyers had done better, they’d have gotten away with screwing the taxpayers more. The point is that I’ve seen eminent domain abused by the government so much that good, rural, government-backing farmers practically became anarchs. Oh an in almost all of those cases, MoDOT condemned, the property owner said see you in court, the court appointed a commission (three citizens with sufficient experience to determine the value of what the government wanted to take), MoDOT rejected the commission’s decision forcing a trial, and the jury came back with an award close to that of the commission and vastly more than MoDOT had been offering. All this took over a year to do of course. So, how much money did MoDOT save? Not a damn bit, but they did make it hard to pass their next tax levy.

Anyway, I have no problem, having seen MoDOT in action believing that the Feds would act exactly the same or worse. I COMPLETELY understand why a property owner would not want to give the Feds a blanket right to do whatever to their property for the next six months in exchange for $100. The government has a right to build the thing if it wants to, but it has a corresponding obligation to treat its citizens fairly. I hope the judge in this case says the Feds can do their surveying but absolutely hammers them on the amount they have to pay. It’s a damn shame the petty little bureaucrat who came up with this offer can’t be made to be personally accountable for the excess cost.

SOOOOO, back on Deep Space Nine, NPR was asking opinions of local residents about the fence generally. Some were voicing environmental concerns or were being offered as ultra cute sound bytes. Aside from wondering why anyone would think to sound byte some of these people (It’s like walking into a kindergarten and asking them for detailed information on how to rebuild a steering column.), one person’s comment struck me as particularly inane.

She said something along the lines of: While I, you know, agree with putting the Fence up to keep out like illegal aliens out, you know, I think it is such a like totally barbaric way to do it. In the like modern world we must totally have something, you know, like better than that.

I admit I inserted the “likes” and the “you knows” as editorial commentary, but the gist of her comment can still be derived from the passage. In response, I have to ask 1) does she really understand the meaning of the word barbaric? 2) I translate this to mean, I’m in favor of the idea, but it is suddenly inconveniencing me and thus, I think we need to find a better (meaning different in a way that I don’t have to deal with) way to accomplish this goal. 3) Fences are like soooo yesterday! I’ll elaborate on that last one a bit.

Assuming by “barbaric,” she meant old-fashioned or primitive, one has to question why that would make it less effective or desirable. I suppose we could task permanent satellite coverage over the entire boarder to watch for illegal aliens, or fly regular recon drones over the boarder, or mount special sensors in the dirt to detect footsteps, but those would likely cost quite a bit more. Hell, we could put landmines along the entire boarder, which while undoubtedly more modern, probably actually qualifies as barbaric. Getting more into Big Brother and Science Fiction, maybe she thinks we should electronically ear tag all the foreigners so we can track their movements or maybe just erect some sort of invisible sonic fence to keep them from coming across the line. Fences, although an ancient technology, are an effective and fairly cost efficient one.

If someone is going to criticize the project because it is using a fence which is barbaric because it is so old-fashioned, I hope that someone is driving around in a hovercraft to avoid using the equally ancient, and thus barbaric, technology of the wheel.

Women ruling the world

So I heard on NPR that Deedee someone or another who used to be in the Clinton administration wrote a book titled something like, “Why Women Should Rule the World.” NPR insists it is not Hillary propaganda.

I should note, I’m hostile to the premise that any particular gender is immune to the throes of ideologic passion and I have no idea what the empirical basis of this book is, so I’m speaking out my ass to some extent. But you need to know I expected not to like this book.

Apparently, Deedee observed that regardless of background, the women of the senate crossed party lines and personal differences to try to work together. By implication, men don’t. She also noted, she’s not saying that the decisions or beliefs would be any more or any less vehemently held. That’s the part I found interesting.

I can accept, theoretically, that men and women have different decision making and social operating methods. Maybe women tend to be consensus builders by wiring more so then men. The implications of that are… interesting.

So why then do men rise more often to the leader position? Well, Deedee noted that women in business decided to pursue other alternatives because the leadership positions are often given to more assertive and aggressive males.

My thought would be that this implies another interesting thing. Do we, as Westerners, if not as human beings, view leaders as aggressively assertive over consensus building? Thus it is not a preference towards males, but towards that leadership style. It may even be hard-wired into the human beast. And wouldn’t that be an interesting thing. That means the “problem” (if it is actually a problem) is in the style, not the gender.

It would also then imply that the women who tend to rise to leadership positions are often the ones who more or less adopt some amount of the masculine aggressively assertive style. In other words, if women ruled the world it would be by adopting an aggressively assertive leadership style. And if the women were using that style and that style is what causes the “problems,” then the result would be no different if women ruled the world.

It is an interesting thing to play with in your head though. If the world’s decisions were made by folks who were more consensus minded rather than directive minded.

Another day, another trite reply

Remember when I wrote various congressmen about using pre-paid cash cards for tax refunds?

I got Obama's reply today; he's been busy. Here it is. After you get done reading this ad copy, ask yourself what this had to do with anything I wrote about?

****

Dear Daniel:

Thank you for taking the time to inform me of your concerns. I take seriously the thousands of letters, e-mails, and calls I receive daily from Illinois constituents like you, and I value your ideas and opinions. Please accept my apology for the delayed response.

I am gratified by the opportunity that the people of Illinois have given me to work on the serious and challenging issues affecting our country’s future. In the first few months of this year, the United States Senate has considered – or will soon consider – important legislation relating to the President’s warrantless surveillance program, consumer protection, energy dependence, and the FY 2009 federal budget.

For my part, I am convinced there are three challenges we must face immediately for the sake of the nation and the world: global warming and our dependence on foreign oil; the challenge globalization poses to our economy and working families; and extracting ourselves from Iraq while assuming once more our leadership role in the world.

Global climate change and energy independence require the kind of ambitious, sustained effort by the American people that we summoned to fight World War II and put a man on the moon. The threat is great: scientists tell us that the earth is warming even faster than previously estimated; gas prices are hitting American families hard; and every day we help sustain foreign dictators by purchasing their oil. The transition to an economy in which we use less fossil fuel and generate less carbon will not be easy, but if we are serious and smart we can do it in a way that helps families through the transition that enlists American scientists, entrepreneurs and workers to develop the new technologies the world will need.

I am supporting several Senate bills that provide some answers to our energy problems: they would cap carbon emissions, auction the licenses to emit carbon, and require that our fuel use less carbon. This will generate funds that we can invest in developing and commercializing green technologies and training workers for new high-wage jobs. A bill that I introduced helped end the decades-long stalemate over automobile fuel economy standards and will begin the process of reducing the amount of oil that we import from hostile countries.

These steps are also important in helping us to address a second challenge that we have ignored for too long: American workers increasingly compete in a worldwide workforce. The result has been stagnating wages and shrinking benefits at a time when everyday costs – from child care to college to drug costs to gas prices – have increased.

The most important step we can take to help families in the 21st Century economy is to make affordable, comprehensive health care available to all Americans. It is unacceptable that 47 million Americans are without health insurance and that many more are underinsured – with policies that demand high premiums and out of pocket costs. The strain on our families, our economy and on our federal budget is unsustainable.

Further, we must do more to assist working families and ensure that our economy is generating quality, high-wage jobs that can support a family. These reforms should include addressing our failing pension system, assisting families struggling to balance work and family, providing quality early education, revamping our K-12 education system so that it prepares our children for the global economy, investing in science and technology, and updating our nation’s infrastructure.

To keep jobs at home, we must end tax breaks to corporations that invest overseas and provide incentives to companies that invest at home – something my Patriot Employers Act would do – while putting an end to negotiating trade deals that help special interests but do little to protect US workers or the environment.

All of this must be done in the midst of a weakening economy. I was glad that the Congress acted to provide working families a quick tax cut to stimulate our economy. In addition, I have proposed legislation to combat mortgage fraud and believe we also must pass a credit card bill of rights, protecting families from the numerous unscrupulous practices that have arisen in recent years.

Additionally, we must finally end the war in Iraq. I have put forward a plan that would ensure we are as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. At the same time, we must turn our attention to the real threats we face by finishing the fight against Al Qaeda. We can enlist others to join us if we assume our leadership role in the world by bringing others together to combat the common threats of the 21st century: nuclear weapons and terrorism; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease. We have begun some of this work in the Senate – Senator Richard Lugar and I passed legislation to control loose nuclear and conventional weapons – but there is much more that needs to be done.

Beyond these three challenges, we have to change the way Washington works and break the stranglehold that special interests have held for far too long. This is why I worked with Senator Russ Feingold to enact the most sweeping ethics and lobbying reform legislation since Watergate. It is why I worked with Republican Senator Tom Coburn to pass something called “Google for Government” that would allow all Americans to see how their federal tax dollars are being spent.

But, we must do more to change Washington, and the biggest change will come from other Americans following your lead in communicating with their elected representatives about what they expect of them. If we are to renew our democracy, the process must start with more citizen involvement.

As I have approached these and other issues, I have appreciated the input I have received from Illinoisans like you. While lawmakers and their constituents may hold different perspectives on specific issues, I feel it is particularly important that I hear the views of any Illinois resident who feels strongly about a particular issue.

With that in mind, I appreciate your writing to me. I hope you will stay in touch in the future about other issues of concern to you.

Sincerely,

Barack Obama
United States Senator

Gaming Update

My Setite in the SoStL game is still trying to be a good Harpy and a good Setitie, we’ll see how long that lasts.

My Gangrel, in the CiET game, Mirakatsu continues to get more and more short tempered with pointless talk. His beast pounds at its cage and he wants to kill things, but he fights to keep control of it.

Feodor Dracovich, in CiET BC, continues to try to hold his pack together by Will alone. The attendance of that game makes it quite difficult to do so. Honestly, that game has been playing so infrequently that I have to work to find the character every time I go and I never remember what happened the previous game. No continuity of plot for me.

Foxglove and Dashiel are mostly Dormant up in Decatur. In both cases I lost my pack and I don’t feel like finding another one of making another PC. I don’t even know what’s going on in that game at the moment.

Rahymond Rahim, my Milwaukee PC is so dormant that I suspect the Milwaukee staff doesn’t even know he exists. If I ever get to make another Midwinter, I may drag Ray up and show him to Anne Z.

R.K. Heade, my Ashes of Night PC, is doing his Nossy thing and getting ready for the big war in April. Lots of combat work there plus keeping my Masktroika going. Cinda is playing my child, Knox, which is a lot of fun.

And then there is Oliver Markstone/Oliver Wu/Little Wu/Wu/Morning Crane of Mist, my Halfling Paladin/Monk of Yondalla who is called Salona in Rune/Jahr’s D&D World. Say that ten times fast. Never played a monk, so this will be interesting. Currently, I woke up about ten game days ago with my last memory being in a bar over 500 years ago. The great war raging when I last remember ended and all kinds of major things have happened since then. We are on our flying air ship headed towards a city that is built entirely of traps in order to deliver a package to a guy. Of course, we don’t know what’s in the package, only that the guy who gave it to us really wanted to send it on its way. To the North, things are stirring in the land of ancient evil gods and war has broken out to the West. We’ll see what happens in two weeks.

Other than that, I’m getting back into miniature painting. All my Citadel paints dried out though, so I had to go and get new paint. Guy at the Miniature Market recommended Valejo paints so I’m trying them.

My L5R card twitching has died off, mostly because my Wednesdays and Fridays are booked. Sadness. I need more days in my week.

Super dooper ultra mega critical

Remember back a few months how I mocked the BBC for calling the New Hampshire primary “critical?” On All Things Considered last week they had to mock themselves a bit for the same thing; it was mahvelous dahling. The announcer observed that if they had called the New Hampshire primary “critical” back in January, then the (then) upcoming Texas and Ohio primaries would have to be called “super critical.” I wonder what that makes Pennsylvania next week?

Life expectency dropping....

Why don't people think about what they say? It's one thing to say something stupid off the cuff, but I don't see how you can write ad copy that's... ill thought out.

So I'm driving home tonight and I hear an add for the Hilton Frontenac. They wanted people to come there fore their Easter buffet.

They called it a "once in a lifetime opportunity."

Say what? Easter breakfast is a once in a lifetime opportunity?

Ah, Minnesota

I’ve been away from Minnesota for too long; I forgot how stupid the liberals there can be. They have come up with a solution to the mortgage crisis; they are going to put a one year moratorium on mortgage foreclosures. I have a lot of responses to that.

It infringes the freedom to contract which is guaranteed under the constitution and by common law. It is a basic freedom and basic to a free capitalist market. The mortgagor AGREED to the terms and while you can make forward looking legislation, it can’t be retroactive.

I don’t see how it’s fair to the mortgage holder who would not have lent money, or at least not under those terms, had they known they would not be able to foreclose. It is their right and the fact the interest is SECURED by property is what makes the loans happen in the first place and keeps the interest rates low. If you take away the ability to level on the security, the risk to the lender drastically increases and they GET TO CHARGE FOR IT.

I think this is “a taking.” Legally speaking a taking is when the state comes in an commandeers a piece of your property. Think when they condemn land for building a highway. The state has the right to do so, but IT MUST PAY THE PROPERTY OWNER THE FAIR VALUE OF THE PROPERTY TAKEN. Since, if the Minnesota legislature does this thing, the value of a loan made to a Minnesota person will PLUMMET, and that means the State of Minnesota should owe the mortgage holder the difference in value.

If I were the banks of the United States, upon passage of this act, I would immediately suspend making ANY loans in Minnesota backed by mortgaged security. Period. The market there is clearly too risky because the crazy government might decide to screw me. All OTHER loans I made in Minnesota would have their interest rates doubled to cover my risk of loss if the State decided to meddle with them as well.

Suspending foreclosure does not stop the problem. The mortgage is just security for an existing debt and the debt can be sued upon without foreclosing on the mortgage. Were I the bank, I would simply sue on the overdue note and then, when I get my judgment, execute on the home anyway, and the car, and the bank accounts, and the personal property, etc. Further, because this costs more to do, I get to recover my costs from the executions which means in the end the home owner ended up losing more than they would have had I foreclosed.

The goal of this brainchild is to introduce stability into the home loan crisis. (I knew we should not have called it a crisis, because you have to take drastic steps to fix a crisis. If we called it a tragedy or a scandal, we wouldn’t have the linguistic baggage to deal with.) Somehow the State of Minnesota misses the fact that the crisis was caused because with all the foreclosures, the banks did not know how to evaluate the value of their bundled mortgages. I fail to see how introducing an inability to foreclose on those non-paying mortgages will do anything other than introduce EVEN MORE UNCERTAINTY into the banks valuation calculations.

Finally, if Minnesota does this, I can a huge wave of foreclosures being filed a year and a day later which will swamp the system AND all those homeowners will probably be in a bigger hole than when they started. This “crisis” will not end until those homes can be readily sold for a value that represents at least breaking even for the home owners. That requires the old inflated housing market to return and won’t happen soon. Until then, someone gets to take a bath on this and all the Minnesota solution does is put the entire loss on the bank instead of spreading it out.

It would make just as much sense to allow people to draw on IRAs, pensions, and Social Security benefits to make up their house payments. It would not solve the problem for the couple who has to move and has discovered that they can’t sell the house for the amount of the debt they have on it, but neither does the Minnesota plan. Likewise, it is robbing Peter to pay Paul by worsening the Social Security situation in the future and making it even more unlikely that these folks will be able to live on their Social Security payments. However, it would stabilize the situation by keeping people from being foreclosed without introducing more uncertainty into the bank’s value calculations. It’s a better, or at least a legal, solution than the Minnesota plan, but I’m still not advocating for it.

Gary Gygax 1939(?)-2008

Yesterday Gary Gygax died. Gary was one of two creators of Dungeons & Dragons or D&D to those of us who do that sort of geeky thing. It felt a lot like when Gene Roddenberry died back in the mid 1990's. It hits closer to home than when a famous athlete or actor dies for some reason, maybe because science fiction and RPG's are more a part of who I am than baseball is. I dunno, it's weird.

Gygax was 69.

I have a couple of responses to that. First, that is only a year older than my Dad who just had his birthday yesterday. My Dad's not old and people his age have no business dying.

Second, the creator of the game that got me into all of this, that I was playing and painting miniatures for when I was 12, was my Dad's age. That rather changes the perspective on things. It would be like having your Dad be a rock star. Intellectually, I know that there are, in fact, rock stars who are Dad's age or older. Jagger isn't a spring chicken anymore. Still, I don't think of rock stars or gamers as being... in their late middle age.

To add a little levity to this otherwise dark topic...

Carbondale craziness

I went to a Pepsi vending machine in the SIUC student center. Soda $0.75 and I put in a dollar and pressed the button for Pepsi. The machine gives me a Diet Coke and $0.50. I hock that off on someone and try again, feeding in another dollar and hitting the button for a Coke (Don’t ask me what a Pepsi machine has a Coke selection). I got my Coke… and a quarter, a dime, and a PENNY. WTF? It was like the machine was apologizing to me (and it doesn’t even take pennies).

If only I could win the Lottery

Apple has new Macbooks out. Wish I could afford one; they look pretty sweet.

Bureaucracy at Age 4

NPR ran a piece last week about a special school/program of educating children. The researchers noted that in old style play (read pre-1980) the children would get together and design their play time such as you be the mommy, I'll be the daddy, and Jake will be the dog. Then the children would have to role-play those things which means they would have to follow the "rules" for mommy behavior if they were the mommy and so forth. This apparently teaches then "Executive Function" which helps them regulate their behaviors as they grow up (such as not punching out Tom's lights when he runs off with your ipod). Sounds good so far right? The Researchers further noted that the more modern childhood experience is lacking in a lot of these so called Executive Function learning play since kids spend their time watching TV or playing video games. They wanted to create a school program to fill in the blank. Still sounds okay, right?

So this school does things like requiring the children to fill out play play forms where they have to describe the play activity, draw it, and so forth before they can. That's right, at age 7 we are teaching them/enforcing bureaucracy! They interviewed a teacher who said that when she first came into a second grade class that had been following this program she was astonished at how well behaved they children were. She then explained that they weren't acting like normal second graders, but instead were working and talking quietly in groups.

I don't know about you, but this gives me Orwellian flashbacks. Or maybe Huxley. Hell, even the movie Demolition Man. Maybe The Dead Poets' Society is a better example. Either way this seems kind of scary and ominous to me. the problem is that class performance also goes up and that is a good thing. Usually. But I'm not sure about the cost here. Do we want children to be trained from early years to be bureaucrats and robots?

I should also note that other activities seemed less ominous such as a game similar to Freeze except you didn't just freeze when the music stopped but you had to assume a specific pose shown on a card displayed by the teacher.

Motorola makes shit for phones

So I heard last week or maybe the week before that Motorola was experienced a sharp drop in the sales of their products. They had some corporate doubletalk statement about it saying they were going to evaluate the market and adjust or some such. I know why.

When I last endured purchasing a cell phone, I needed two things, bluetooth and vibration ability. At the time Cingular only offered that in the Motorola RazrV3 so guess what I got. I was switching out a of a Nokia and figured that one was as good as the other. Was I ever wrong.

Since the day I got it, the Motorola has been a piece of shit. The battery compartment is not well sized and the battery knocks around inside meaning it occasionally just turns itself off. But that is not the really annoying part to me. It also apparently does not have a tight enough slot for the SIM chip because it randomly sends me the message to "Insert SIM." Mind you, I haven't taken the SIM out. So I have to open up the phone, take out the battery, slide the SIM up and down, re-boot the phone and hope it doesn't happen again for a few days. And, just to frost the cake, when it goes into "Insert SIM," the battery goes into hyperactive seek for signal mode and drains like a flushed toilet. So by the time I realize my phone is screwed up and fix it, I have no battery left.

I'm writing this for several reasons. First, I want to warn everyone away from Motorola generally and Razrs specifically. Second, maybe someone from Motorola will read it and it will do some good. Stranger things have happened. Meanwhile, I will sit with glee, wondering if my phone is working, and relish the fact that maybe Motorola is getting some comeuppance for making it in the first place.

Next time though, I'll probably get an iphone.

A good dig?

As you might have guessed, it has been a busy few days for me. Tomorrow they are expecting 6-10 inches of snow.

Anyway, NPR today had their normal candidate watching report what with tomorrow being an election day and all. I got disgusted enough at it to shut it off and here's why: They started with the Hillary report and the embedded reporter began by observing that there had been empty seats at the Hillary rally he was reporting about (which might just be newsworthy), but he quickly transitioned to saying reporting about how the crowd cheered when Clinton "got in a good dig at Obama." They then began to play the sound bite of the "good dig" at which point I shut off the radio.

Excuse me? Political reporting has sunk to talking about the good digs candidates take at each other? What is this? Politics a la Rikki Lake? Or when you are trying to compare two democrats who have damn little to say different from each other on policy, you feel the need to further trivialize their contest because you can't find anything else to report on?

Come on NPR, I expect better of you.