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10:41 am: Why is Israel laying claim to an Arab home in Jaffa?
This sums-up much of what is wrong with Israel right now, and why the USA must stop turning a blind eye to the Israeli government's abuses, stop accepting lip service from the Israeli negotiators, and tell the Jewish interests in the US to piss off if they don't like Israel being cut-off from foreign aid.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1129744.html

It's not okay for a purportedly civilized nation to behave like that. Even Israelis make note of this injustice (note that this story is NOT on Al Jazeera, but on Haaretz), but their government is on a twisted ethnic-cleansing crusade. They might not have the gas chambers and creamatoria, but dispossessing people of property that's been in their families for decades, running in the bulldozers, and re-settling their land is as despicable as what the Nazis did to the Jews a mere generation before European Jews invaded the area they considered to be their ancestral home and formed the state of Israel-- and began doing similar things to the Arabs as the Nazis had done to them.

I'm really discouraged. The Israeli government is two-faced, they talk peace process to placate America while they continue this type of bad behavior. They promise to halt their ethnic cleansing of Arabs and stop all new settlement activity, and then approve a new settlement expansion the following day. I want to think of the state of Israel as a beacon of light in a region that knows mostly ethnic violence and repression, but their government isn't any different. It doesn't matter whether you kill people and take their land or just take their land and send them to a refugee camp. The end result is exactly the same.

09:41 am: Signs ,signs, everywhere a sign
I was just looking up the address for a local hardware store that I could have a log jack that I can order online shipped to. Some shrill bitch left an angry, ranting review on the store on the Google location info page for the store. She had bought two of those stupid "slow down!" signs to put along her street, and wanted to return one of them 3 WEEKS LATER because her neighbor had purchased a sign too. The owner refused to give her a refund so she was whining about how that's ILLEGAL. Too bad that kind of stupid is able (and obviously more than willing) to breed. No, no it's not. For all the store owner knows, you used it for nearly a month before getting around to returning it, and isn't even under obligation to accept a return even one second after the sale is final. Most will, but a return after 21 days is really pushing it. Most stores that aren't megahuge don't accept returns after 14 days.

But I digress. I hate those stupid signs. They're as moronic as those "Baby on Board" window things that people had in the 80s. Most of the time, those BoB window signs were used by people who seemed to be under the mistaken impression that having such a sign was a free pass for distracted and reckless driving, or rude driving. Because you know, only evil scum would flip-off or honk some asshole who has a BABY ON BOARD. Please.

In the mountains where I live, people generally don't go for those dumb suburban pre-made signs to demand people slow down, they make their own. Some try to make them witty, which is usually the best approach. But a couple weeks ago, someone set out a really passive-aggressive one (in addition to a more typical SLOW DOWN, ablah blah blah CHILDREN" one they'd erected a few months ago when they moved in) that said something like "SLOW DOWN! LOOK AT WHAT COMES OF YOUR SPEEDING!!!" and it had an arrow that might've pointed to something. I have no idea what it was really about, it pointed in the direction of their driveway and all I saw there was a crappy box trailer that had some damage. Oh, maybe they parked it in the road instead of in their driveway and were obstructing traffic without ample warning ahead of the curve and someone grazed it and damaged the skin on the side. Not the fault of traffic if that was the case, and it probably wasn't speeding. It's idiotic to block a lane of traffic one a two-lane road without setting out proper warning devices.

For the most part, unless it's a witty sign, I ignore the homemade signs. The majority of the ones up here are placed along main roads with posted speed limits of 30 or 35 MPH. The speed limit was what it was when people moved in. They are being unreasonable to expect traffic to go really slow around their houses because they made the decision to raise their kids next to a busy road. For fuck's sake, if you're a parent and visions of your children being run over by traffic like in Pet Sematary are dancing through your head, it's probably because that "competent parenting" instinct is kicking-in. You're recognizing danger. The good choice is to realize you made a mistake by buying a home on a major road and relocate. The poor decision is to expect everyone else to accommodate your stupidity.

Oh, and also-- Streets are for cars and buses, not for bikes, or balls, or toys. Sidewalks, yards, and playgrounds are the places for girls and boys. o/~ Accidents do happen...but accidents waiting to happen because younger kids are playing ball in an unfenced yard adjoining a busy through street are parental NEGLIGENCE. Just sayin'. There's enough clutter along the roads. These self-appointed traffic safety "helpers" should realize that safety starts with the things they can control (where their kids play and their homebuying decisions), and beyond that, tough crap. If someone is driving too fast and gets into a wreck, that's their responsibility, not yours. The speed limits are posted. And for people who just want everyone on the road to slow down because it kicks up dust, stupid you for buying a home along a busy dirt road. I'm not going to slow down simply because you don't like dusting. It's not like dust around a dusty road is all that shocking.

Today's rant is brought to you by the Foundation for Personal Responsibility.

08:20 pm: Semper ubi, sub ubi
So, in a Slashdot thread today that I was participating in, there was a bit of grammar policing regarding the word "data". I turned one such post into a quick and shallow Latin etymology tutorial.

On a parallel thread, someone demanded a definitive English statement that "data" can only be plural, because we all speak English.

To that, a smartass replied in Latin.

I replied to that comment in Latin as well: Lusisti satis, which would translate as "Well played".

To that, an Anon Coward replied: Semper ubi, sub ubi?

I replied in turn, "Only if you don't prefer to go commando."

Ahh, it's good to see some fine Latin humor. I think it might be easy to deduce what the AC had said based on my reply, but since Latin humor is often dorky and obscure, it requires explanation, which naturally ruins the joke, but such is the life of a Latin student. Semper ubi, sub ubi is utter nonsense in Latin, but is phonetic wordplay in English: Always where under where.

Of course, no post on Slashdot is complete without a Monty Python reference, and someone quoted the "Romanes Eunt Domus" scene from Life of Brian a short way down from my etymology tutorial.

11:52 am: Chrome and Hot Leather
This is a movie. A comically terrible biker gang/army guys/revenge movie made in the early 70s from the look of it. I just watched it on Hulu. It cost an hour and a half of my time to watch, and I'm not sure it was worth the price of admission.

Key points:

• Marvin Gaye co-stars (this is the only redeeming feature of the film).
  
• "Army-issue" camouflage pimp neck scarves
  
• An ad hoc biker gang riding bright orange Kawasaki trials bikes
  
• Tagline (according to IMDb): Don't muck around with a Green Beret's Mama! He'll take his chopper and ram it down your throat! Ummmm, okay...
  

Okay, there was one other redeeming feature in the film besides Marvin Gaye. It's the scene at 2 minutes into this clip:



****
Setting: Bikers crowd around "Mich" as their leader confronts him. Silence descends on the bar except for the pinball game's bells, being played by one of the bikers.

Gang leader; Hey man! What're you doing, following us?
(Pause while the game continues to make cheery ringing and flipper sounds)
Gang Leader: Gabriel!
Gabriel: Yeah?
Gang Leader: Gabriel, can't you see we're menacing someone?
Gabriel: Oh, oh I'm sorry.
(Gabriel walks over and flicks out his knife)
Gabriel: How's this?
****

I'm not sure if that was supposed to be funny. I doubt all the bad dialog and bad acting was supposed to be funny, but it is nonetheless. Except when it's just stupid, but even when it appears that it's supposed to be tough, it's still just silly.

07:30 am: EAting their own
I came across a rather interesting link in yesterday's Google News Spotlight.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30481512/wall_streets_naked_swindle

It explains a bit more about why Patrick Byrne (Overstock.com's CEO) has been so opposed to the practice of naked short selling for so long. I understood the principle of naked short selling (basically, selling something you don't actually own but not delivering it immediately, counting on it losing value very quickly, then purchasing it at the lower value just in time to deliver it to your buyer). What I had no idea of was just how corrupt Wall Street was, how it basically encouraged fraud, and how all the financial regulators in Washington turned a blind eye to it...and even facilitated the destruction of the two major investment banks to fail during the crisis for the profits of the others.

I swear, these people must be on crack and they should all be lynched and their possessions looted, including the people running the SEC who were supposed to be overseeing this stuff. What the revelation amounts to is that the naked short selling would proceed as I described above, BUT, if the broker the naked short seller listed as the owner of the shares s/he was selling didn't have the shares, an "IOU" would be placed on the books at the clearinghouse. And nobody ever had to resolve those IOUs. Multiple people wound up owning stocks as a result. One of the tings that's gotten Byrne so worked up is that at times, his company had a substantial percentage more stock in "circulation" than it had actually issued, all thanks to the bizarre IOU system, as did many other companies. This devalued the stock, of course, and also made it more unstable on the "prone to lose value" side.

A naked short seller did this, basically putting Bear Stearns out of its misery, just hours after a meeting that Bernanke had with all the major investment banks except Bear Stearns. Gee, I wonder what was discussed at the meeting. Someone was clearing betting on Bear to die, made sure that came to happen, and the government overseers helped seal the deal.

05:19 pm: Cost of Living
I'd really, really like to slap the fool who coined this term.

Not only is it NOT ANY SUCH THING, but it's a euphemism designed to deceive.

My cost of living didn't increase at all this year. Or any year I've been alive, on average. The only thing that has changed is that the US Dollar is today worth at least 25% less than it did when I was born, if not more like 50% less.

It's obvious that this is actually just a cost of monetary inflation if one looks at commodities such as precious metals. If one was to convert ounces of an uncommon metal to dollars in the 1970s, and see what you could buy with that amount of money back then, it would be roughly equivalent to what you could buy with the money that that same amount of metal would be worth today.

Basically, the US screwed-up its currency management and decided to completely float its currency rather than fix backing it, because it was believed that trust in the greenback meant that it didn't need to be backed by a gold reserve. The problem, though, is that the government decided to take advantage of the floating currency and profit at the expense of its citizens and everyone else who holds US currency. They just decided it was perfectly acceptable if the currency's value decays by around 1% every year.

What this means for people who are saving money is that to not lose value in their savings, they have to make at least 1% per year. That's not a problem with many CDs, but most regular savings accounts don't pay that much. The trade-off is for people to either have ready access to their money and lose some of it to decay every year, or to just not have ready access to it for a prolonged period of time.

I'm a bit nonplussed that I didn't get a cost of inflation adjustment this year because the economy is in the crapper so the labor index calculated the "cost of living" as remaining the same. No, what happened was that the prices of consumer goods fell in response to a fall in demand due to the crappy economy. That doesn't mean that there is no inflation. Failing to adjust for actual inflation is going to give the economy a sharp kick in the ribs just as it's trying to climb to its feet again. Inflation is still there, as soon as demand and supply start getting to more normalized levels, prices will leave a lot of consumers feeling the hurt and knock the demand right back down.

Also high on my annoyance list are Fee Simple Deeds, but that's another bit of truth that's been swept under the rug and replaced with the euphemistic concept of so-called "property ownership" as it exists in the USA. Which is "not really at all".

10:11 pm: Il Silenzio


I can hardly think of a more incredible time & place than Italy during the 60s. My dad was there as an officer in the USAF (and single!). He experienced so many things and took so many amazing photos. He hasn't ever said a thing about any more prurient adventures there, and I'm not sure I want to bring that up.

He toured Italy and the rest of Europe. He skied the Alps. He passed through Checkpoint Charlie and visited East Berlin. He bought a Mercedes 230SL convertible from the factory. He learned a little Italian and experienced some of the local culture. He brought several records he'd purchased back home with him. This is one of the ones I heard a lot growing up. Another was the Italian version of "Forget Domani", as seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntbdIbleElE. I like it much better than the crappy English version. :)

07:30 pm: The family that reads together...
I was just listening to Ira Glass' This American Life, in which his regular guest storyteller, David Sedaris, narrated a typically hilarious story about a book, since this show had people relating stories about books that had influenced their lives.

The story in question is one titled Next of Kin that is in David's book Naked. In it, he details how he found a book in the woods. It happened to be hardcore literary pornography. He described it as being full of incest and promiscuity with half the people in the fictional town, including a sea captain and a door-to-door knife salesman.

( A brief summary of David's tale, and a similar one from my youth... )
Part of me now wants to retrieve that book and read it again, if it still happens to be in that wall. I wonder if it would be more enlightening now that I've had my share of such experienced and wouldn't be dazzled by all the "forbidden" knowledge.

07:22 pm: Rough ride
Today, after a moderately annoying day at work, I made a bit of a spontaneous decisions to just turn off the paved road a bit soon on my way home.

I rode the F650 most of the way up Moffat Road, which is an abandoned rail road grade that's been a jeep trail for decades...many decades. About 75 years, in fact-- it was abandoned when the Moffat Tunnel under the Continental Divide was completed in the 1930s. Moffat Road went over the Divide.

This little trip was the roughest and most technical I've made on a motorcycle; I ride dirt roads all the time, this particular road is very rocky, has potholes everywhere, and the occasional very large puddle in some depressions or washes. I rode until the sun was setting and the mud in the road was giving-way to snow.

I did get a good bit of practice riding over that sort of terrain, including a good bit of standing on the pegs. I wasn't exactly blazing up the road, but I was definitely much faster on the bike than when driving up that way. Overall, it was a good break and I've been wanting to take a motorcycle up that road since last year.

Hopefully this won't be the last trip I'm able to make this year before the snow flies again and stays. I'd like to make it all the way to the Needle's Eye this year.

04:20 pm: There is no absolute truth.
I think what I've learned is that nothing that is observed by human senses and interpreted and stored by the human brain can contain absolute truth. It will always be colored by perception and agenda.

The background on this post and my previous is that yesterday, I was looking through a good free ebook "lending" repository at truly-free.org (the "Burgomeister's Library"). The main index was down at the time, so I was unable to search for the non-fiction book I wanted. The only index that worked was the Burgomeister's favorite picks. So I went through that list. There were a few picks in the eclectic collection that jabbed at me: what was a guy who seemed like a heavy-reading intellectual doing with Holocaust-denial shit? But in the same collection as Auschwitz Lies were what appeared to be other works supporting the prevailing views on the Holocaust as well. So I decided I would just read this book and see what was it contained.

Much of the first half of this book is written by a forensic chemist, Germar Rudolf. It seems the main bone of contention as far as he is concerned is whether the underground morgues at Auschwitz were simply morgues, or whether they were used as gas chambers. He's a "Holocaust Denier" simply because he says, "Hey, wait a minute, was this really what happened?" when faced with a scenario that seems a bit beyond the realm of what he understands of plausibility. He does not deny the Nazis killed millions of prisoners. He does denounce the Nazi atrocities. I think it's small-minded of the mainstream Holocaust propagandists to label everyone who doesn't agree with their version of events a "denier". Mr. Rudolf does seem to make some compelling points and the ability to discuss the subject rationally, without invoking ad-hominem attacks against his detractors. It's unfortunate the same can't be said about them, where the main arguments I've read to counter Mr. Rudolf's hypotheses are highly irrational, demand that he prove a negative, and use many unnecessary pejorative rants that have no place in a scientific debate.

I think the conclusion I've reached is that everyone is stretching the truth the way they want and they're all wrong on opposite ends of a large scale. I don't believe it minimizes the magnitude of wrongness of what the Nazis did to civilians and POWs even if one is to consider practical limitations or forensic evidence that might place the magnitude of the genocide smaller or reduce the factor of deliberateness in the Nazis' actions. To me, it is just as wrong to incarcerate 160,000 political prisoners based on their party affiliations or race and have them die of starvation, fatigue, or disease in forced labor camps as it is to mass-euthanize/murder them in gas chambers. Perhaps it is even more wrong to cause them to suffer with indifference.

My other, more general conclusion, is that people who obsess on these things really need to find another hobby. It's tantamount to debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin when the debate rages around eyewitness testimony (which is notoriously unreliable and prone to massive exaggeration) and the ruins of demolished buildings. I think the only truth to be had here is that both sides are wrong and fail to grasp simple common-sense reality.

The Holocaust happened. It was terrible. It was maybe not as terrible as some think, but it was terrible enough that it is still unfathomable. We oughtn't to allow ourselves to be distracted by the minutiae of past events that nobody can possibly conclusively prove or disprove.

I firmly believe it is wrong to incarcerate anyone for believing in a lie. Almost the entirety of the Earth's population necessarily has deluded themselves into believing in one lie or another; all religions and histories can't be correct when the contradict with such frequency. All these sacred, absolute truths promote nothing other than absolute evil, the same exact variety of evil the Nazis perpetrated, when they promote the use of violence or other suppression against intellectual discussion and advocate for the imprisonment and/or execution of those who fail to believe in the alleged "truth". I think a more just punishment, if people like Mr. Rudolf are distorting the truth or failing in their forensic analysis, is to be exposed as liars or incompetents. Discreditation is a far more powerful force. Suppression just makes martyrs of people who would otherwise be shamed and forced to the fringes.

Lastly, I read more about the Nazi concentration camps in the past two days than the sum total I had previously read. I think people like Mr. Rudolf bring attention to the issue, cause people to discuss it and read about it, and that is ultimately the good that comes from their efforts. That's a nice thing about not trying to manipulate the truth by persecuting people you believe are liars. Get everything out into the open and talk about it, and it spreads knowledge for all. Try to suppress dissent, and it just looks like you're the liar and have something to hide.

07:17 am: Absolute Truth
There are a few sacred truths. Everyone surely encounters one of these sooner or later. They're the ones that are so incredibly true that nobody, and I mean --nobody-- is even permitted to question or doubt them. There are dire consequences for doing so, everything from being labeled a heretic, a conspiracy theorist, a liar, a bigot, or the like, and other penalties go all the way up to and include eternal damnation. It doesn't matter if these truths may not hold up to scrutiny, they're so true that scrutiny is not permitted. They are sacred.

In some circles, an example of such a truth would be that God created the Earth. Or that the Earth revolves around the sun. In other circles, it's that life evolved on Earth. Or that there is an environmental process that is leading to global climate change.

I scoff at such things. I believe there is no real truth that cannot take-on all comers. There is no lie so big that it can even approach the truth or a sufficiently objective fact without being destroyed by the light of truth. There are no real truths that need to be protected by enforced ignorance. There are no real truths that need to be protected by fear or death. There are no real truths that need to be protected by lies. Any truth that cannot stand alone, unvarnished, and shine brightly for any objective skeptic to see for exactly what it is is not truth.

I don't need to defend evolutionary biology or global climate change theories with lies or demand that they not be questioned because they're so obvious. As I am informed in my theories and most rivals, I don't fear being questioned. I see questioning as the way to polish the truth a bight more so it shines brighter. It's never a bad thing to discredit a lie even when it prima facia supports what one believes in.

One of the sacred, absolute truths that I've taken for granted my entire life has come under assault. This is a weird feeling, to be sure. I see this sacred truth coming under assault by forensic chemistry. I don't think this will affect me personally, and if it does, it probably won't be in a good way, especially since it's hard to keep quiet on such things. What a crappy, crappy situation where the continued belief in an absolute truth would affect me none (it has no direct bearing on my life if I don't question) and ignorance would be beneficial. I thought I would be reading rambling, crazy trash that would solidify my belief, but instead, my eyes were opened and the foundations of this belief were rocked.

I would almost say I should've stuck to reading classic fiction, but of course hiding from criticism is not my way. it's not the right way.

05:18 pm: Pentacostal lunacy
Here's a pretty good article on the guy who went berserk and killed a handful of people who were part of Evangelical/Pentacostal/Fundamentalist Christian organizations-- his mother's church (where Ted Haggard was a minister before he was defrocked in a gay sex scandal) and a Christian cult center in Arvada where they train young people to become acolytes and proselytizers.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090921/blumenthal

The basics: Young man is raised in isolation from the rest of society in a controlling household-- he is home-schooled, his parents won't allow him to listen or read or watch anything that is secular. His parents won't let him socialize with anyone outside of their Christian cult of the New Life Church and other Evangelical groups. Even when man becomes an adult, his parents allow him the choice of two places to continue his education, a fundamentalist religious college that prides itself in its control of every aspect of the students' lives (Oral Roberts University) or a crazy missionary/brainwashing organization (the Youth with a Mission).

When he returns home after being dismissed from the latter, which he had hoped was a chance to escape, his mother started having a minister over to search her son's room, confiscate any secular influences, and counsel him. She continued to search his room daily for secular influences.

The total of all this control caused the young man to break. He began to loathe his mother. He began to despise the church even moreso. He spiraled into a destructive, psychotic rage that culminated in him killing as many Christians in the two organizations as he could (not many since the New Life Church had armed members who wounded him almost immediately when he stormed the church) and killing himself.

I can certainly sympathize with his point of view. My folks weren't quite as crazy on religion, but as they were raising me, they bought into the Focus on the Family control bullshit a bit. They tried homeschooling, but I tended to be incorrigible. They tried Christian private schools. It still stunted my social and academic growth a bit. But the primary result, which I hope is for the best, is that I could not fathom the need for control if the religion was as good as everyone claimed, I started questioning, I refused to give in to authority, and I escaped completely.

09:45 pm: "The Pole"
"The Pole" is apparently the chosen name of the radio station that has taken over the frequency 101.5 FM in Denver. It plays, wait for it...

...Stripper music.

Some of the stuff they played in the past few minutes:

Prince: "Little Red Corvette". Yeah, totally stripper music.

Toto: "Rosanna". Not really stripper music.

Phil Collins: "Sussudio". Totally not stripper music.

Aerosmith: "Dream on". You must be kidding?

I'm starting to think this is a silly publicity stunt, the website seems to be a farce too.

http://1015thepole.com/

Update: It seems that this was a joke played by the indie station that occupied the frequency until weeks ago. They apparently did this for several days before another idiotic talk radio station took the frequency over.

08:48 pm: Neti pots...
I decided I might as well try nasal sinus irrigation, I've been meaning to for a while, and expect that to come in real handy when I start putting up hay in a month or so. There's so much dust (and green dust that that), to avoid irritation and stuff, it would be good to just flush all that out. I wear a painter's mask, which keeps most of it out, but a little gets by when I take of the mask even briefly.

I made a ghetto neti pot out of a mustard bottle, I wanted to try it out and see if it was something that I'd care to do again before buying a proper neti pot. I made a light saline solution, no idea how close it was to physiological saline, but the concentration seemed close enough.

Basically, you tilt your head to one side, pour the solution from a container into the upper nostril, and the solution flows all the way through your sinuses and out the other nostril. I think that's what dissuades most folks, remembering just how uncomfortable it was to inhale even a little pool water or whatever.

It actually worked surprisingly well. The worst part of getting water up one's nose is often that discomfort when something harsh hits the airway right at the back of the sinuses and throat, but I could barely even feel it because the solution was pretty much right-on. It not only didn't feel uncomfortable, it actually felt prety good and my sinuses are extremely clear. I think I'll definitely spring for a decent quality neti pot now. I should've tried that a bit sooner, I think.

10:49 pm: Mortality
There was a wreck in Boulder Canyon Tuesday morning. A dump truck driver lost his brakes because he entered the narrows too fast, he lost control, and ran the truck into a hillside. He apparently had no driver's license, much less a class B CDL, seems he just didn't know how to drive in the mountains.

It rolled over. He died at the scene.

He was working on the parking lot construction project at one of the sites I work at. I didn't actually meet him. I did see the truck idling outside minutes before it left, I recognized the wreckage from the news stories. It's really a weird feeling to know you saw another human being just minutes before his life ended suddenly and unexpectedly. Sure, it was still a stranger, I didn't meet him, but just making eye contact with him & exchanging a quick smile makes him a less anonymous stranger than most of the fatalities in the news.

07:37 pm: Motorcycles and horses.
I got another motorcycle a few months back, reasoning that reliability was a desirable trait, even though I love my vintage Triumph bike. After shopping around for a little while, I wound-up finding a decent price on a 2002 BMW F650GS with a Pelican Case based luggage system.

Being a taller and heavier bike, it has definitely taught me a few more things about riding, and I'm pretty comfortable with it now, having put nearly 3k miles on it. I still notice new things as I try to improve my technique with every ride, and I've noticed a few things that are remarkably similar to horseback riding, despite them being rather different modes of transportation (though both near the top of the "dangerous conveyance" category).

The primary thing is that I've found that the ideal riding posture for this particular bike largely fits the horsemanship axiom:

"Your head and your heart keep boldly up,
Your hands and your heels, keep down.
Your legs keep close to your horse's sides,
And your elbows close to your own."

Well, except that it's a motorcycle and not a horse.

From a more technical perspective, cornering a motorcycle is similar to navigating a turn on horseback. In a way, the motorcycle *does* have a "lead", just like a horse. For those not familiar with the term, when a horse is running (canter or gallop), one foreleg always extends slightly farther forward of the other. This is the lead, and it should be the leg that is to the inside of the turn. While I suppose that seems counter-intuitive (as the outside of a turn radius has farther to travel, right?), the motorcycle is exactly the same way-- turning the wheel opposite the direction of the curve allows the bike to lean smoothly into the curve, with the rear wheel trailing slightly inside, and I think horses must do much the same thing in terms of a lean. Horses on the correct lead will also turn their heads to the outside of a turn, and motorcycles also wind-up in that position as the wheel is turned to the outside as well. When I started riding into curves on the bike as I did on horseback and distributed my weight accordingly (shifting weight to the ass-bone to the inside of the curve, while leaning in that direction, and also twisting my body slightly towards the outside of the curve), I found that my cornering became significantly more stable.

I guess it's really no surprise that a lot of the horsemen and women I've known over the years also rode motorcycles (they clearly also have a penchant for the more dangerous modes of transportation too, I guess). If I'd ridden more 15+ years ago, I probably would've picked this stuff up and not taken such a long hiatus from riding motorcycles.

I'm rather happy with the F650, too. It's a solid bike, not too big, and gets ludicrous gas mileage-- around 70MPG on average by my calculations, as much as most bikes with less than half as large of an engine displacement. It has plenty of power too, seems to be holding together rather well, and is fairly comfortable to ride. I'm thinking about putting the Triumph back on insurance and tags just in case a friend with a motorcycle endorsement comes over to visit and wants to go for a ride, but honestly don't really think a whole lot about riding that Triumph anymore...it's super fun, but those personality issues it sometimes develops make it less fun in some respects than a bike that just runs, that doesn't leak oil (so I don't even hesitate to park it on sidewalks, which I find extremely amusing for some reason), and all the little safety features and other comforts just make the BMW a much more friendly bike, all in all. I just have to try harder not to look like the Aerostich-BMW rider stereotype, wearing my Aerostich suit on the Triumph didn't seem to cause other riders to assume I'm a snob of some sort, but I have noticed that wearing said suit and riding a BMW does invoke a snob stereotype so a lot of other riders seem to just assume I'm going to pretend they're not even there...but I still like to throw all other riders a salute and feel part of the greater community, and not just like some of the BMW riders who think they're special or somehow better than riders on other brands.

01:02 pm: Out-of-context QotD:
"Well, that's probably the one where she's in the bathtub covered with tar and marmalade while wearing a birthday hat and crying."

The problem with this particular quote is that the source doesn't completely provide context, either.

09:29 am: Thought of the day...
My cute little kitty has thumbs, but they're not opposable. This is a very good thing.

04:29 pm: Labor and Objectivism
Listening to some interviews that radio talk show host Thom Hartmann had with some Ayn Rand Institute people, I noticed a particular theme kept surfacing. This was that Thom seems rather pro-labor, and sees the Objectivists as being anti-labor. He often cut them off when they tried to explain their views, and I think a lot of them really weren't heading in the right direction either.

Yes, Objectivism does place a lot of value on the people who perform skilled labor, who innovate, and who coordinate others and build corporations. But a true Objectivist must also value labor-- if there are many captains and no rowers in the galley, nothing happens and the captains' presence is worthless. Labor is the motive force that creates value, and the only inherent value in management is how they coordinate the division of labor to make production efficient.

( Cut, wherein I discuss things in more detail, including how Labor Unions are fully supported by Objectivist principles, just not labor unions the way they currently exist in the USA...and other stuff. )

In summary, management that results in an efficient division of labor produces value that is above the sum of its parts. Without such management, labor will return to its baseline, which is a situation involving homesteading and trade-skills, where each individual has to labor simply to sustain himself, where income is likely to be unpredictable, where people wind up working inefficiently because they basically have to do things that are not their strengths because they have to wear all the hats for their sole proprietorship. But that doesn't mean that management should then get all high-and-mighty and abuse labor, or that the labor has to live up to its stereotype of being all brawn and no brains. Labor still has to assess its realistic value and be ready to withhold its contribution until it is appropriated recognized and compensated. This is the Capitalist and Objectivist way!

And yes, despite understanding her philosophy a bit, I finally read one of Rand's books, and as one might guess, it was The Fountainhead. I'm currently 3/4 of the way through. For the most compelling argument as to how Rand viewed labor, one has only to look at Howard Roark, the protagonist...who is unwilling to enter into any contract with any potential employer, if it means selling-out himself or his ideals. Even if it means he can't make the rent. I will also note that he also essentially goes on a strike, preferring to work in manual labor, well below his talents, rather than sell himself short. That the peope from the Ayn Rand Institute fail to counter Thom Hartmann's implied characterizations that Objectivism is anti-union and anti-labor is rather disappointing, because it's a key part of the discussion.

05:43 pm: Objectivism
I stayed up way too late last night, chatting with friends on Ventrilo, and drinking. The topic hit video games, and Bioshock being one of my favorite games, I mentioned it and its take on objectivism. That's apparently a bad word to many, since somehow modern day objectivists apparently espouse crap not unlike neoconservative foolishness. I would maintain that it's not Ayn Rand who is wrong-- just as Jesus Christ's followers don't seem to get it (and actually often contradict his philosophies directly in their deeds), many neocons and people who consider themselves to be objectivists are also probably idiots who are either twisting the philosophy around or just utterly fail to understand it. The idiotic behavior that landed us in the current economic crisis was actually anti-objectivism, and I'd like to explain why I see it as such.

Objectivism, as explored in Atlas Shrugged, is a philosophy that focuses on the rational self-interest of producers in a society. These are laborers, inventors, industrialists, anyone who creates something of value. It holds that the producers must reap sufficient rewards for their efforts, but they are opposed by two other groups of individuals who strive to deprive them of the fruits of their labors.

One of those groups is Moochers. The moochers are the people in society who produce nothing of value, but they demand the benefits of what has been produced by others. Most superficially, they are welfare queens, but those obvious moochers are not alone.

The other group that causes problems for producers are Looters. The Looters are part of the power structure who seek to regulate and tax the producers; they see success and are in the position to take a share of it. Sometimes they declare that they must confiscate and take over the endeavors of the producers, as in socialist societies, because such successes cause disparities between the socioeconomic status of the citizens. More often than not, however, they conspire with the Moochers. How that works is that the Moochers help install the Looters into power, and then the Looters take from the Producers and give to the Moochers in sort of a quid pro quo arrangement. It's rather along the lines of how Voltaire described the relationship of government to religion; the government grants protection to the religion, while the religion validates the government.

Now, the question is, which group do the Wall Street Banks, investment brokers, futures traders, sub-prime lenders, and so forth fit into this philosophy? Are all the laws from the 1930-40s that were supposed to regulate the banking industry which the Neocons in Washington, D.C. gutted or rescinded hobbling Producers, and the Neocons, following the wise teachings of Ayn Rand simply removing those shackes of oppression so the producers could truly thrive?

In a word, NO!

There is little of real value produced by Wall Street. They are not Producers at all; they make fortunes by fabricating money by assigning arbitrary values to fragments of ownership in companies or commodities. These fragments theoretically do have a value, but Wall Street is about various tactics of speculating and inflating the value of those fragments. In short, they are in the business of building fortunes without producing anything of value themselves, they mostly parasitize the value of products (think back to this time last year, when the value of crude oil was driven up to around $100/barrel more than it is today, far more than it was really worth). Now which of the groups that Objectivism recognizes resembles that? Oh, and may I also highlight the way the US government has rushed to the banks' rescue, flooding them with tax dollars, because they are Too Big To Fail (tm)? I think that should make it rather obvious which group the Wall Street traders and banks belong to.

They are Moochers. They fabricated fortunes that were built on nothing of value and were nothing short of fraudulent, their scheme failed, and they demanded that the government save them...which it has done, by fulfilling the role of the Looter, taking more and more tax money that was primarily gained from the people who produced things of value or facilitated the process of doing so.

That's right, the suggestion that somehow the way Wall Street and the government behaved was driven by their desire to further the freedom of Objectivism is actually the exact opposite! In fact, applied commercial Objectivism involves barter systems; printed money and credit are merely means of diluting the value of what has been produced, since it is not anchored in any meaningful way to a standard that guarantees tangible value.

And what is happening? The producers of value in US society are still allowing the parasitization to continue. Until the people somehow force our government to allow the investors to fail, which may devastate our fabricated, inflated economy, we continue to remain willing victims. It's not too bad yet, but it could get worse. The premise in Atlas Shrugged (which I really need to actually read more than a synopsis of) is that things are so bad in its fictional future that producers start being robbed of nearly all benefits of their work. As a result of that deprivation, the Producers decided to leave the society of Moochers and Looters who held them in contempt and confiscated the fruits of their labors. They moved to an isolated, hidden settlement where they built a society of Produers that was sort of a free-for-all that allowed them to create value unburdened by regulation and socialist plundering. Of course, Bioshock explores the situation where the selfishness is utterly unchecked and taken too far, to the point pure capitalist society self-destructs into lawlessness and rule of greed. There is a balance that needs to occur. The US government in the 1930s was not so much a Looter as it is now. It let the banks fail. It then attempted to protect the Moochers from themselves by imposing regulations. Failure to return to that and allow the market to determine the REAL value of what is produced hurts nobody but the Producers. But we will continue to be fleeced, because the conspiracy is actually being rather successful at convincing everyone it's necessary to take their money to "save the economy" and that it's only right that they suffer for the misbehavior of the Mooches. It must stop.