Congrats, Gov'na

You may have heard that Utah Governor Huntsman has been chosen by Obama to be the new ambassador to China.

I have little time and several thoughts.

First of all, I don't know a lot about Huntsman, but I've heard he's not a bad guy, and a pretty good governor. He might be a little left of where I consider myself to be, but I digress. He's also Mormon, which, naturally, I find palatable.

There are also rumors aplenty that he was set to be the strongest GOP (Grand Old Party, or Republican) candidate for the 2012 presidential run.

Anyway, read this article first. It backs up my first impression, which was that Obama picked him to knock out one of his most dangerous opponents when it comes time to run for reelection. It also makes him look bipartisan--you see, conservatives are supposed to now say, "Oh goody, our dear President has picked one of us for an important position." I'm not buying that angle. But you can decide for yourself...

...after you read this article as well. Some really good thoughts on all this. Regardless of what conclusion you reach about any of it, it's an extremely important development, both politically and internationally.

Do the right thing, Coloradians

I've decided that I like Ryan Frazier. You should watch this video.

BUT FIRST: Several disclaimers. The two hosts are incredibly, obnoxiously annoying. You also have to sit through a 15-30 second commercial. The interview (i.e. the reason I'm asking you to watch this video) doesn't start until about a third of the way through.

OK. Now watch.

Please People Our Planet

This is a very good article. Here is an excerpt that should motivate you to do so:

Population alarmists have long enjoyed the freedom to project their fears onto whatever cause is uppermost in the progressive mind. Then it was war. Today it is the environment, which, we are told, human beings are ruining. This will be shown to have been as false as the earlier warnings, but not before our environmental scares have done much harm to a fragile economy (at the rate things are going with Obama). All previous scares were based on faulty premises, and the latest one, based on “science,” will be no different.

Oh, and an important note about this blog. I'm still debating whether to schedule unpublished posts to be published on Sundays to keep the ball rolling. If you don't see a post on Sunday, it's because I didn't. I typically don't do much of anything online on Sundays anyway. Just an FYI.

The Price of Health Care

You've heard about Universal Health Care. If you're clever, you want it but worry that it cannot be reasonable done. If you're not, you think one of two things:

A: The only reason we don't have it is because the evil capitalists that run the country prevent the government from doing its job and giving it to us.

B: Universal Health Care is just another word for socialism, and the evil liberals are trying to force the country to swallow something it doesn't want.

Them's the extremes.

The real issue is that the way health care runs right now, there are a lot (a LOT) of people that don't have much of a hope of affording it. And insurance companies have raped the system to the point that even people who are paying for coverage get nailed to the wall on a regular basis. We're in a bad way. Not as bad as most other countries, but we're America, and we're justifiably unhappy with the way things are. (If we're not, it's only because we're ignorant and sheltered.)

Democrats with good intentions (which is most of them) are obsessed with the idea of governmental control of the whole health care system. This is due to the mistaken notion that the government is there to solve everybody's problems, but that's another discussion.

So why not? Couldn't the government just take over and make sure sick people get taken care of? It's a nice thought. The permanent obstacle to that idealistic fix is that the government, bless its little heart, CAN NOT AFFORD IT. In a perfect world, we'd all take care of each other, which is what socialized medicine is. But even assuming we live in the kind of world where socialized health care is a viable solution (sadly, we really, really don't), we STILL can't afford it.

But not being able to afford things has long since stopped preventing people from buying things. When the government decides to spend, who pays for it? Taxpayers? Yeah, but we can only fork over so much before we stop being able to feed ourselves. Thankfully, the bureaucratic administration in charge of taxing us still recognizes this inconvenient detail. So then who else? Let's call it the national credit card. Debt pays for it. Sound counter intuitive? It is. It only works because someone, somewhere, sometime, will have to pay for it. And if we've learned anything about debt it's that it grows. It's immovable and all-powerful, and if it grows large enough, it starts destroying things close to it.

Anyway. Read this. It's written by someone who's clever, and it sheds some light on some very important obscurities. These are things we all should know.

Strange Loops

This is a post I wrote two months ago and, it appears, failed to publish. Please delight in the following:

I've been reading (little by very little) Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. It's about...hm. How do I summarize? Well, I've been telling people that it's about the nature and source of sentient intelligence, but I'm not sure how useful that summary is. It'll have to do, I guess. Doug's core argument is that intelligence and/or self-awareness is caused by something called "strange loops," and he goes into extensive detail explaining what he means by that.

Escher, for the uninitiated, was an artist that drew things like neverending staircases, waterfalls that feed themselves, "evolutionary" fractals, and hands that draw themselves out of paper. Gödel was the mathematician that, during his time, broke the brains of all the other mathematicians by sort of inventing the mode of thinking that is necessary to understand "strange loops." And then Bach was possibly the most profoundly brilliant musician ever, and somehow his music directly or indirectly illustrates almost all the principles that Doug feels like talking about.

So I've been reading this book, and then today see this xkcd comic:


There should be a little blurb of text that comes up if you leave your mouse over the image, but if it fails to do so, this is what it says: "If you actually do this, what really happens is Douglas Hofstadter appears and talks to you for eight hours about strange loops." I laughed out loud.

Jon's Gonna Hate Nancy, Too

Nancy Pelosi is a terrible person. Now, I'm not a Democrat, and I'm not a huge fan of the Democratic Party, but even if I was, I would be embarrassed and ashamed of this woman. She's a colossal discredit to the entire Party, and her position as the Speaker of the House of Representatives instills in me a great sense of pity for the House.

On the other hand, I very much like Jon Stewart. He's one of the few remaining liberal comics who's willing to dish out ridicule upon anyone who deserves it, regardless of their political persuasion. He's even laid a couple on Obama, which is essentially sacrilege these days.

And here he is again, proving that humor still matters more than partisan purity--especially on a comedy show. Kudos, Jon.

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Hot: Global Warming

Partisan politics is a perilous environment for actual facts. They tend not to be useful on their own. Anyone using them to push an agenda will not be able to help but massage them a bit to increase their value. I suppose facts, in politics, are like ore. They have to be refined, then sometimes mixed with other things, in order to effectively enter the market of propaganda.

And if the ore can't be refined or altered sufficiently to pay the bills, it's tossed out. So it is with the anti-science debate of Global Warming, which more resembles a popularized religion than a serious scientific issue. Are you a convert? You'd better be--the skeptics are not in favor just about anywhere anymore. It's a rough life for non-believers.

So is our globe warming? Probably. This issue, unfortunately, has been eclipsed by a unilateral condemnation of the perceived culprit: carbon, which also happens to be our most important element. The assumed wisdom is now (and has been for decades) that increased carbon emissions have led and are leading to Global Warming, which will, if left unchecked, surely freeze us to death, burn us to death, dry us out or drown us, depending on which fate seems most terrifying to the public on any given year.

Because carbon has been so successfully made the scapegoat for all our ills, our beloved government has finally gotten itself on the fast track to breaking the economy's spine by, well, outlawing it. How? Everyone is gonna get charged for doing anything that emits carbon. I'm only surprised that we haven't yet been told how many breaths we ought to be taking each minute. Because shoot, if seven billion people are breathing excessively, what is all that extra CO2 doing to our poor atmosphere? I quake.

Anyway, here's an incredibly, incredibly important article to read by a guy who knows a LOT more than pretty much anyone else engaged in this feverish conversation. You are sure to find it deeply enlightening. I don't know how else to emphasize how very much I hope you take the time to read it.