Lost sleep and mixed blessings

So, my week continues to suffer, as I've been going on less than two hours a day of sleep for since Sunday. Work however goes very well. On the political front, both Guiliani and Edwards have dropped out of the race, and I got my first robocall from the Ron Paul campaign.

Bleg

Have any of my readers used Microsoft Office Accounting? As the company ramps up I'd like to get off my current system, but I've heard nothing about any accounting packages lately.

Also, does anyone have any recommendations about the SubVersion file management system?

Monday night rapid fire

• A photographer in Seattle wins a lawsuit against police for eighty thousand. His offense? Taking pictures of police doing public work in a public place. I think law enforcement is heading for a meltdown that will leave everyone worse off, which will be the topic of a much longer post as soon as I get time.
• David Friedman with more on the Ron Paul affair, it's a good examination of self selection and rhetoric.
• David Friedman again with one of the best blog posts I've seen on religion in quite a while.
  

When irony meets the homeless

One of the more annoying things about my fun new area is the increased encounters with the urban outdoorsmen of our community. I was making a late night caffeine run for one my increasingly frequent all-nighters and I came across some guy bumming for money outside the grocery store. He did the usual story, then closed with "I need money for food."

Naturally he was eating a bag of Cheeto's at the time, which actually dovetails nicely with my more famous moment involving orange snacks and grocery stores, which you can hear if you see me play at any music venue...

The bookcases come into being

Now all that remains is the finishing, and the mounting to the wall...

It's huge,


It comes up to withing 4 inches of the ceiling


I did most of the construction in the house...


It gets a bit dusty...

More Hoffer

I figure I'll make up for my light blogging by posting some of my favorite Hoffer quotes, still the most insightful thinker of the 20th century, along with Mencken. I was trying to remember the first quote below (from his classic, The True Believer) when I was thinking about the current immigration kerfluffle, I figured I would repost them all for posterity.

It is easier to hate an enemy with much good in him than one who is all bad. We cannot hate those we despise. The Japanese had an advantage over us in that they admired us more than we admired them. They could hate us more fervently than we could hate them. The Americans are poor haters in international affairs because of their innate feeling of superiority over all foreigners. An American's hatred for a fellow American (for Hoover or Roosevelt) is far more virulent than any antipathy he can work up against foreigners. It is of interest that the backward South shows more xenophobia than the rest of the country. Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.

The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
It is not love of self but hatred of self which is at the root of the troubles that afflict our world.

The history of this country was made largely by people who wanted to be left alone. Those who could not thrive when left to themselves never felt at ease in America.

We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact: indeed, it is by our readiness to die that we try to prove the factualness of our opinion.

It was the craving to be a one and only people which impelled the ancient Hebrews to invent a one and only God whose one and only people they were to be.

When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.

When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need for something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives.

Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom." It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength.

Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.

When people are free to do as we please, they usually imitate each other.

Whenever we proclaim the uniqueness of a religion, a truth, a leader, a nation, a race, a part or a holy cause, we are also proclaiming our own uniqueness.

The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.

Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.... It is thus with most of us: we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.

The ratio between supervisory and producing personnel is always highest where the intellectuals are in power. In a Communist country it takes half the population to supervise the other half.

Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.

The Savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.

Commitment becomes hysterical when those who have nothing to give advocate generosity, and those who have nothing to give up preach renunciation.

I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind.


The chief difference between me and others is that I have plenty of time — not only because I am without a multitude of responsibilities and without daily tasks, which demand attention: But also because I am basically without ambition. Neither the present nor the future has claims on me.

How terribly hard and almost impossible it is to tell the truth. More than anything else, the artist in us prevents us from telling aught as it really happened. We deal with the truth as the cook deals with meat and vegetables.

Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation.

Take man's most fantastic invention — God. Man invents God in the image of his longings, in the image of what he wants to be, then proceeds to imitate that image, vie with it, and strive to overcome it.

The ability to get along without an exceptional leader is the mark of social vigor.

Quote of the afternoon

"Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves."

Eric Hoffer

Quick links while compiling

• A good NYT profile of Michael Yon
• The Reason-Ron Paul smackdown
  

That's it for now. Work has still been crazy...

Quote of the moment

"Values aren't taught, they're caused."

Rick Arndt

Life in the age of table saws

Current finger count: 10

After much delay, my vaunted "Secret society" style bookshelves begin today.

And on yet another note, it's snowing in Atlanta again - if this keeps up, everyone should expect some cool photography as the city panics and wrecks their cars.

Snow!

It's snowing in Atlanta, for the first time in three years. This is so cool. It's very light, but I predict the Atlanta snow panic will start in about fifteen minutes...

Gadzooks I've been busy

Sorry for the light blogging, it's been crazy lately.

An amusing Ron Paul profile

By Tucker Carlson of all people. He's periodically interesting, and I like him for no other reason than for saying to Paul Krugman (after he predicted yet another recession due to some conspiracy theory) "You see, that's why it's so hard to take you seriously". He also broke the Bush 43 -Karla Fay Tucker execution story.

Anyway, here is the article. Some choice quotes

The crowds at Ron Paul rallies aren't coming to be entertained. Stylistically, a Paul speech is about as colorful as a tax return. He is the only politician I've ever seen who doesn't draw energy from the audience; his tone is as flat at the conclusion as it was at the beginning. There are no jokes. There's no warm-up, no shout-out to local luminaries in the room, no inspiring vignettes about ordinary Americans doing their best in the face of this or that bad thing. In fact, there are virtually none of the usual political clichés in a Paul speech. Children may be our future, but Ron Paul isn't admitting it in public.

For some people, libertarianism is the philosophical justification for a zany personal life. Paul, by contrast, describes his hobbies as gardening (roses and organic tomatoes) and "riding my bicycle." He has never had a cigarette. He doesn't swear. He limits his drinking to an occasional glass of wine and goes to church regularly. He has been married to the same woman for 50 years. Three of their five children are physicians.
...
Ron Paul is deeply square, and every bit as deeply committed to your right not to be.

Self Portrait at the Dawn of Man

Two random shots from my little Canon

Sunday morning links

Sorry for the light blogging work, getting the condo ready for sale is taking up quite some time. Here are some links for everyone

• From the Agitator - Sheriff: SWAT Team Necessary Because Man Is a "Self-Proclaimed Constitutionalist"
• I'm feeling a strong urge to install this in my library
• This is interesting (new alt energy that could conceivably work)
  
• Why must the media not do their homework on plug in hybrids? If you're getting some some of the energy from gasoline, and some from the power grid, then miles per gallon is a bad measure of energy efficiency. Nonetheless, check out this CNN piece. FYI - CalCars has been doing this for years.
• Top Giuliani staffers go without pay, a lame thing to do.
  

Thoughts on the primaries and the Democrats

I was thinking about the New Hampshire primary while running an errand today, and it occurred to me that the party of diversity had one candidate that was fighting for change, one that was working for change, and another that was being the change.

Just as I thought that a homeless man came up and offered to work for change. I guess he's a Clinton fan. And the primaries aren't for another month!

Quick New Hampshire predictions

They're not very earth shattering, but...

Democrats

1. Obama
2. Clinton (a close second)
3. Edwards (a distant third)
   

Republicans

1. McCain
2. Huckabee
3. Romney
4. Paul (somewhere over ten percent, but not much)
5. Thompson
6. Giuliani (happily low in the standings)
   

Evolution, Ron Paul, etc

I was going to write a post about the evolution vs creationism debate, specifically about this post, but why? Granted, a lot of people really do care about their side of the debate, but what they really like doing is nagging other people about a matter with no consequences at all. What makes it more interesting is that no one denies the basic theory (adaptation, survival of the fittest, etc) but the origins of life are in question.

The religious impulse is strong in a high percentage of people, whether they believe in a higher power or not.

Who would have thought it?

Unmentioned by the commentariat thus far is that the primaries (so far anyway) concern only domestic politics. Who would have predicted that four years, or even four months ago? This is the best proof of the the surge being seen as working I suppose.

Sunday rapid fire

• Living in three centuries - amazing photography
• Public defender suspended for using n-word - while quoting someone no less! Inoffensive language has become the new way to show social piety.
• A profile of David Simon, author of two of my favorite books, and creator of one of my favorite television shows. The Wire starts tonight.
• The evolution debate is strange. Ron Paul says he doesn't believe in some version of it, and an army of commenters jumps in to criticize. For something as trivial as the evolution-Creationism debate (trivial in the sense that being wrong does not affect the outcome) the level of vigor and venom is surprising. It would be interesting to know if belief in evolution was proportional in someway to having children.
  

Wyoming

Here's a little known fact, Wyoming is holding it's caucus on Saturday.

Iowa picks based on gut feeling

Democrats -

1. Clinton
2. Obama
3. Edwards

Republican -

1. Huckabee (by a margin that will surprise everyone)
2. Romney
3. Paul - maybe wishful thinking, but all of this money and energy has to translate into something.

Clinton and Huckabee are hardly my preferred choices, but neither of them are Edwards or Giuliani, who (I think) would do America irreparable damage.

Quote of the morning

Via Megan

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald,

Quote of the morning

Via Megan

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald,

Quote of the moment

I was perusing Marginal Revolution (about vouchers) and came across this comment

In other words, even if a child’s chance of going to the state university is not increased by his new school, the kid’s chance of ending up in the state penitentiary is radically decreased. This consideration might not be of primary concern to many who support vouchers, but to those who live in the ghetto, it is of PRIMARY concern. Schools, more than anything, breed gangs. Like the projects of old, when you are FORCED to a geographical location, you make gang recruiting easier - and your kids chances of entering the prison system that much greater.

I saw a lecture by Nobel Laureate James Buchanan many years ago and before he veered off into pure math he said that there were three types of social organization, which he dubbed (something like this anyway), the closed circle, the open circle, and the broken circle. The closed circle is a prison, the open is free association, specifically where members have the right to exit and the right to exile rouge members and the broken circle, which is no association at all.

The Buchanan point came to mind...

Happy New Year and all that

I'm not feeling it this year.

On another note, work on the Batcave has begun. I do believe it will be a multi-year project.